The Day The Middlebrow Died

Many of those on the Right have given up on the New York Times, discarding it as a rag sustaining blinkered and elite liberal opinion.  So it is.  It is also one of the best newspapers in the world featuring some of the best writers.  Reading past the news and comment sections, both of which are admittedly noxious, we reach the travel, arts and books sections.  The pitfalls are many, even here, but when the Times is good it is the best, surpassed only by the New Criterion and the TLS, smaller and less frequent publications.  Case in point, two book reviews - though the first is listed as an essay - published this weekend.  The first review is on a book of photographs, the less pretentious will call it a coffee table book, on the year 1958 and the second the latest work of Nixon bashing, an admittedly perennial weed in modern publishing. 

In her essay 1958: The War of the Intellectuals, Rachel Donadio begins by cataloging that year's cultural landmarks: 

Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Dr. Seuss’ “Yertle the Turtle” to “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, that year’s Nobel laureate in literature; the first American edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”; Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”; John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Affluent Society”; Philip Roth’s story “Goodbye, Columbus”; and Jack Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums” — not to mention Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Harold Pinter’s “Birthday Party,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil.”

Yet despite this remarkable output, 1958 was a year of cultural crisis among America's intellectual elites, as Donadio notes:

It’s hard to generalize about any historical moment, but in the intellectual journals of the era, some central themes emerge: a debate over the merits of the Beat movement, and the attempt by some influential critics to preserve the quickly dissolving distinctions among highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow culture that had previously held sway.

Middlebrow was once a common term of derision among the cognoscenti, applied to that group of middle class readers and writers who sought after a patina of high culture and prestige.  A creature born sometime in the late Victorian era, emerging out of a mass culture that had long ago attained functional literacy and wanted to participate in the world of high culture, he was personified by that once venerated institution of middlebrow sensibility, the Book of the Month Club.  While the company still exists and has its own website, its cultural authority, dictating what hundreds of thousands of Americans read, faded in the 1970s, just as mass above-functional literacy began its great secular decline.  The middlebrow was synonymous with derivative works of art and literature, instant classics that were easily digestible by those without, or very little, post-secondary education.  As this WIki gloss on Virginia Woolf noted:

“We highbrows read what we like and do what we like and praise what we like.” A lowbrow is similarly devoted towards a singular interest, as a person “of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life,” and are therefore equivalently worthy of reverence as they, too, are living for what they intrinsically know as valuable. Middlebrows are instead “betwixt and between” which Woolf classifies as “in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.” Their value system rewards quick gains through literature already designated as ‘classic’ or ‘great,’ never of their own choosing, because “to buy living art requires living taste.”

While Woolf emphasizes the second handedness of the middlebrows other commentators of the period, such as Russell Lynes, somewhat praised their aspirational qualities.  They do want to know better, they just don't know how - accepting canned opinions and attitudes for genuine insights  The middlebrow phenomenon extended beyond contemporary literature and reached deep into the Western Canon as well.  Britannica, itself a middlebrow symbol, produced in 1952 the first edition of its Great Books of the Western World, a 54 volume compendium of western thought.  Of the hundreds of thousands of sets sold its unlikely many were ever read, only dipped into from time to time for high school essays.  They were bought by parents seeking to give their children the ne plus ultra of upper class cache, a liberal education.  The pikers of the middle class might be engineers or accountants, but a truly educated man, even at mid-century, should have a smattering of Latin and speak knowingly about Aristotle and Sophocles.  That this knowledge, however vital to maintain our society and way of life, was of little value on the modern job market, did nothing to diminish its intrinsic value to the middlebrows.  Its very ornamentality made it attractive. 

The middlebrow phenomenon rested on three assumptions: 1) that there was a Western Canon 2) that it was of central value to Western Civilization and should be studied 3) that its legacy was guarded by the intellectual classes, to whom the middlebrow deferred.  During the social convulsions of the 1960s each of these assumptions was challenged and then rejected, first by the intellectuals and then by the middlebrows themselves.  The popularity of Freud, himself another middlebrow symbol, in the early years of the 20th century signaled the Western's elite revolt against the rational.  The belief that man was indeed a rational being came under attack by Freud and a host of other thinkers.  If man was ultimately driven by irrational urges, then reason was impotent or limited in its efficacy. 

The West, a culture built on a commitment to rational discourse and analysis was, by extension, a fraud, its guardians little better than tenured con-men.  By the 1960s this view was achieving a critical mass in academe and being taught to millions of college freshmen, most of them the first in their families to attend post-secondary schools.  Having been raise in middlebrow homes they arrived at the object of years of scholarly effort, only to be told that it was all a lie. Most adopted some type of Leftist political attitude but unlike the Old Left, that had lead the nation through the Depression, the Second World War and the opening years of the Cold War, the New Left that emerged from the ferment was devoutly anti-Western and Anti-American.  The children of the Middlebrows became enemies of the very culture they were raise to admire and defend, however poorly they might have understood it.  Their parents, horrified by the spectacle of the 1960s and 1970s, and blaming the liberal intellectuals to whom they once deferred to, became increasingly anti-intellectual.  The failure of the liberal elite to anticipate the Vietnam debacle - which they had engineered - the pernicious consequences of the Great Society and the Keynesian side-effect of Stagflation, finished off the liberal intellectual classes prestige among what came to be known as Middle America. 

Politically the middlebrows found a hero in the unlikely figure of Richard M Nixon, who in turn dubbed them the Silent Majority.  In his latest book, Nixonland, Rick Perlstein finds not a hero, but the supreme symbol of the conservative reaction, a master villain playing to a mass psychological disorder.  George F Will attacks Perlstein's criticisms of conservatives: 

In Perlstein’s mental universe, Nixon is a bit like God — not, Lord knows, because of Nixon’s perfect goodness and infinite mercy, but because Nixon is the explanation for everything. Or at least for the rise of the right and the decline of almost everything else. This is a subject Perlstein, a talented man of the left, has addressed before.

In 2001, he published the best book yet on the social ferments that produced Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy. Subtle and conscientious, “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” demonstrated Perlstein’s omnivorous appetite for telling tidbits from the news media, like this one: When Goldwater was campaigning in the 1964 New Hampshire primary, The New York Times ran a photograph with the snide caption “Barry Goldwater, aspirant for the Republican presidential nomination, with the widow of Senator Styles Bridges in East Concord. She holds dog.” Oh, the other person must be the conservative presidential candidate.

In November 1964, surveying the debris of Goldwater’s loss of 44 states, the Times columnist James Reston said Goldwater “has wrecked his party for a long time to come.” The archetypal public intellectual of the day, the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who thought the conservative movement was the manifestation of a psychological disorder, said Goldwater’s candidacy provided conservatives “a kind of vocational therapy, without which they might have to be committed.” Surely “the end of ideology” — as Daniel Bell’s 1960 book was titled — was at hand. As the winner of the 1960 presidential election had assured the country, the liberal consensus was so broad and deep that America’s remaining problems were “technical” and “administrative.”

This consensus was dramatically overturned in the 16 years that elapsed between Goldwater's defeat and Reagan's first presidential victory.  Nixon's 1968 victory, in a tight three-way race, seems to Perlstein, and many liberals a point of inflection, here the great unwashed revolted from liberal tutelage.  That Nixon was a less than inspiring figure for conservatives, does not lessen his cultural importance to either the modern Left or Right.  In his day the name, face and very mannerisms of the 37th President became subject to satire, scorn and pseudo-psychoanalysis, presaging the Bush derangement syndrome seen today.  To the disillusioned middlebrows he was their hero, five o'clock shadow and all.  Watergate disgraced their hero, prompted a reaction - perhaps an act of desperation - toward Carter, until Reagan's emergence. 

The legacy of the revolt of the middlebrows is a politically divided country.  High culture, subverted by the intellectual classes themselves into an endless repeat of Dadaist stunts, was rejected by Middle America.  With that rejection also went their cultural aspirations.  Mass culture, an inherently leveling force, lost any outside ideals that might mitigate its vulgarity, it became a self-referential loop steadily degraded by each successive generation.