Dwight Macdonald entered my world as a film critic, but I was delighted to discover he was a critic of the larger scene at the time. This collection of essays expresses that the idea of "American Culture" did exist, but it was a subset of the larger world of European culture, and should be measured by the same international standards. His particular mindset was "One should not say that X was a pretty good idea for an American", but measure it against the best idea or music or drama known and set it in its place in the larger frame. Yes, Herman Wouk should be set in the scales against, say Alexandre Dumas, why not. Also he was a good man at a wisecrack. The essays are still readable and had a future in the reprint world. ( )

Macdonald writes that “our traditional culture has been under increasing pressure from mass culture” for two centuries, and “Masscult” is winning. He doesn’t think you can “raise the level of our culture in general.” He’s for making a clear class distinction, where an intellectual elite has its High Culture and everyone else has Masscult.
Of Twain, Macdonald says The Mysterious Stranger is the only “sustained flight” Twain managed; Huckleberry Finn would have managed it except for the last hundred pages. Reviewing Ellman’s biography of Joyce, he says Joyce was a “specialist,” essentially uninterested in contemporary writers, art, travel, or politics. He praises Agee but finds his masterpiece, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men uneven. His piece on Hemingway parodies that writer’s style: “he always worked close to the bull in his writing. In more senses than one señor….After 1930, he just didn’t have it any more.” He thinks Hemingway’s contribution is “as a stylistic innovator” and he compares Hemingway’s “extreme mannerism” to Jackson Pollock’s break with conventional painting.
This section about writers who more or less bear out Macdonald’s thesis about the attack of mass culture on high culture is followed by a section titled “Pretenders,” which has three reviews of books he didn’t like. The first is James Gould Cozzens’ By Love Possessed. The second is a 1956 book by Colin Wilson titled The Outsider, that talks about people both historical and fictional who have felt themselves outsiders. The third is about Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society, 1780-1950. All of these books have had critical success that puzzles Macdonald. Macdonald dislikes Williams’s cultural materialism, since it is a socialist version of the approach to culture Macdonald rejects in the first essay in this book, “Masscult & Midcult.”
The last two sections (“Betrayals” and “Examinations”) are the real meat of Macdonald’s book: here he goes into detail about the triumph of mass culture over high culture in the specific forums of dictionary-making, Bible translation, and do-it-yourself education in the form of the Great Books series and how-to books. About the Great Books, Macdonald points out that the editors, Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins, don’t seem to be aware that there are questions and problems about such a selection. It’s easy enough with Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Plutarch, Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, but then it gets difficult. Whole works or selections? And then the scientific treatises, which Macdonald thinks are impenetrable, with no sort of apparatus and a predilection for whole works. The selection, though, he thinks is the best part of the Great Books. Translations seem to have gone for the public domain ones, turning verse into prose, often several centuries old. The index volumes Adler calls the Syntopicon get nothing but contempt from Macdonald. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which came out in 1952, Macdonald says has many problems, the chief being “a competitor that has been in the field for over three centuries and has been fatal to all contenders up to now”—the King James Version. Macdonald thinks the RSV has departed from KJV “in ways that seem to be legitimate, and many, many more in ways that do not.” His main complaint is that “RSV is a prose Bible, while KJV is a poetic one.”
An important part of the book is Macdonald’s contemptuous review of Webster’s Third International Dictionary (1961). Macdonald does not like the idea that language is determined by usage—that is, how most people are using the language at a given time. He thinks it is the business of dictionary makers and teachers to put on the brakes to language change, to enforce standards of correctness even as the words they police are disappearing or morphing into other meanings. These are functions that the second edition of Webster’s International in 1934 happily embraced and that had been part of dictionary-making since Johnson, according to Macdonald. The change came about, in Macdonald’s view, because of the increasing power and authority of Structural Linguistics, which has become dominant in language study since the second edition was published.
About how-to books Macdonald wants to make it an American phenomenon, though he is forced to admit we have always had them, from Ovid’s Art of Love to Benjamin Franklin’s homely advice. He is inclined to respect the practical ones that really tell you how to do something. He has good words for Spock’s baby and child care and Gesell’s book about child development. He despises the philosophical ones (“how to be a good person…here the howto reaches its nadir”). ( )