The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  Macdonald was true only to himself. He sounded ever so conservative when he found a kind word for William F. Buckley Jr., whose fearless brief against their alma mater, God and Man at Yale, must have brought back memories, though Macdonald had less sympathy for the new conservative magazine Buckley founded, National Review, and for Buckley’s defense of Senator McCarthy, whom Macdonald had the boldness to call in print a “pathological liar.”

  Among the anticommunists, however, of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Macdonald stood out for being insufficiently pro-American. And among the anti-anticommunists, including his new wife, Gloria, an apologetic liberal with no radical background, he seemed a cantankerous red-baiter. A protracted negotiation to work for Encounter magazine, the storied intellectual journal co-edited by the English critic Stephen Spender and the former Commentary hand Irving Kristol, which was secretly being funded by the U.S. State Department, ended without an offer of regular employment. The magazine’s Cold War raison d’être was to promote American ideals in postwar Europe, a mission for which Macdonald, politically undisciplined and never so happy as when he was telling someone off, had always been an odd recruit.5

  It nevertheless brought him to London for an extended stay, where he found much to admire. “Today,” he would write, “the best English is written and spoken in London”—an appropriate sentiment for a man who had once said of Henry James, “No writer I can think of at the moment is so blandly, easily, triumphantly sure of his mastery of language.”6

  Quintessentially American writing received low marks. Mark Twain he discounted as a folk writer who relied too much on spoken idiomatic English and lacked the will to defy the “terrible American pressure to conform.” Months after Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, Macdonald savagely parodied the author’s “primitive syntax,” calling it the prose equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s “drip and dribble” method, showing also Macdonald’s low opinion of abstract expressionism.7

  Now and then, Macdonald tended to his masterpiece, “Masscult and Midcult,” developing ideas he had first broached with “A Theory of Popular Culture” in Politics. It evolved into his most ambitious essay—though never a book in its own right. Despite some flirtation with Jason Epstein at Doubleday about placing it between hard covers, Macdonald remained able to boast that he had never written a book “in cold blood.”8 It was finally published in 1960 in, appropriately enough, Partisan Review.

  The essay was a great and varied rant against the American faith in progress, against consumerism, and finally against the elevation of the common man from his feudal preliterate state. It was both—unlikely as this sounds—Marxist and aristocratic. It saw great dialectical forces at work in the unfolding of history, and sniffed disdainfully at the results.

  For two centuries, Macdonald argued, since before the Industrial Revolution, culture has been increasingly split between the high and the low. With the rise of the masses came the rise of culture for the masses, or masscult, which “is not just unsuccessful art. It is non-art. It is even anti-art.”

  Like kitsch, masscult was “easy to assimilate.” Gone were the idiosyncratic feelings and thoughts of the individual artist. Gone were the standards of great older works of art. “Those who consume masscult might as well be eating ice-cream sodas, while those who fabricate it are no more expressing themselves than are the ‘stylists’ who design the latest atrocity from Detroit.”

  Masscult not only corrupted the individual artist, it corrupted the individual. Mass man had mass morality, the morality of “a crowd that will commit atrocities that very few of its members would commit as individuals.” Macdonald cited David Reisman’s pioneering work on the “lonely crowd” but actually reserved some of his harshest comments for sociologists, who accept “statistical majority as the great Reality.” These cynics were the intellectual equivalents of those publishers and Hollywood executives whom Macdonald called the Lords of Masscult. They are “willing to take seriously any idiocy if it is held by many people.”

  Masscult was the cultural analog to the very worst movements of the twentieth century. “Nazism and Soviet Communism . . . show us how far things can go in politics, as Masscult does in art.” But masscult was democratic, so democratic it destroyed the ability “to discriminate against or between anything or anybody.” Its rise could be traced to the growth in literacy in the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson’s day, when the number of books published annually suddenly quadrupled. In the dawn of widespread literacy, the prelude to popular education, and the beginning of what historians now call the culture of print, the seeds of our cultural demise were sown.

  “Midcult” was masscult with a fig leaf, covering its essential vulgarity by paying homage to high culture and sometimes trading on the discoveries of the avant-garde. Midcult was the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. “Midcult is the Book-of-the-Month Club, which since 1926 has been supplying its members with reading matter of which the best that can be said is that it could be worse.” Midcult was Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder, which compared with Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, was, well, “kitsch,” according to Macdonald.

  Today social critics are more likely to talk of middlebrow culture from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s as a triumph. Short stories were published in popular magazines. Novels were regularly deemed major cultural events. Senator Benton soon voiced the objections of many, complaining that television was a vast wasteland, but in the meantime his sales force at Encyclopaedia Britannica established actual book clubs for Great Books subscribers to discuss and argue about Plato and Locke. James Parton’s American Heritage magazine, under the editorship of Bruce Catton, popularized American history.

  Not all progress was lost on Macdonald. He mentioned that since World War II a great number of classic works and scholarly books had come out in paperback. And the number of American symphony orchestras had doubled in the last decade, while art house movie theaters had grown exponentially. Postwar affluence was also underwriting new support for artists and scholars, some of which Macdonald had enjoyed: grants, prizes, lecture fees, junkets, fellowships, and teaching gigs. But the sale and institutionalization of culture was part of the problem.

  “We have, in short, become skilled at consuming High Culture when it has been stamped ‘prime quality’ by the proper authorities, but we lack the kind of sophisticated audience that supported the achievements of the classic avant-garde, an audience that can appreciate and discriminate on its own.”9 But such an audience, familiar with the great tradition while suspicious of its resellers, and able to discriminate the good from the bad (and the great from the merely good) in the newest art and literature, could, of course, only be very small even in the best of times. One might even describe it as an audience of one, resembling no person so much as Dwight Macdonald, or perhaps not even him. While speaking solemnly of the avant-garde, he disliked Pollock and preferred his modernism several decades old, from Rimbaud to Picasso and James Joyce, all of whom he mentions in the essay along with T. S. Eliot, whose poetry, to his own later embarrassment, Dwight Macdonald had once discounted.10

  Chapter 30

  “Words are not simply the casual containers and carriers of thoughts and feeling, but their incarnation,” wrote Jacques Barzun in 1959 in The House of Intellect, another book attacking pompous, pseudoscientific language. The Columbia University professor had recently been on the cover of Time magazine, in which he was quoted lamenting the decline of grammar in America’s schools. In his book he named names: President Eisenhower, Igor Stravinsky, and the New Critics were all cited for one rhetorical failing or another. But his true enemy was the typical young professor with nothing new to say but all of it embedded in jargon. And there was the rub. The scholar’s manner of abusing the language, more than the verbal tics of a military man or a musical composer, truly exposed the anti-intellectualism in our civilization’s “house of intellect.”

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p; Beginning in the nineteenth century, according to Barzun, science began to “wage war against philosophy and theology.” Science won. And the search for new facts arose as the most important of intellectual activities. Discovery became the main criterion of merit, and where no handy statistic or laboratory result could be brandished to justify one’s worth, “a special language, marked by abstraction and heroic detachment,” was employed.

  Artists began to speak a kind of solemn nonsense, and even a square like President Eisenhower refused to use work when talking about a Russian colleague. Instead, he said, “Marshal Zhukov and I operated together very closely.” Stravinsky, praising his own composition, would not call it beautiful and leave it at that. He said (in Barzun’s translation), “It is extremely thoroughly worked out.” And the New Critics, following the path blazed by I. A. Richards and others, taught fellow professors and students to turn reading and interpretation into method. Literary symbols were organized into systems, and meaning became this ridiculously complicated and convoluted thing. In the pretensions of the nonscientist, the power and the prestige of science were written.1

  Barzun especially disliked how this affected the common language. Taxi drivers, instead of putting gas in their cars, spoke of “the filling-up process.” Phrases like “as far as” and “in terms of” inflated simple utterances. Actors and actions vanished in a phrase smoke of processes, operations, programs, and so on.

  Pedantry inverted standards across professions and society, creating a new order in which to speak clearly and neatly is to appear a snob and “the users of pretentious mouth-filling phrases esteem themselves the friends of democratic light and simplicity.” Learned conversation became impossible, as did conversation between the pseudoscientist and those who spoke older jargons, such as the sailor and farmer.

  Modern linguists bore “a grave responsibility” for this terrible state of affairs, especially the man who said, “There can never be in grammar an error that is both very bad and very common.” Charles Carpenter Fries, said Barzun, had “engineered the demise of grammar in the American schools.”

  In some classrooms, Barzun had noted, students used what was called the General Form. This book, over a thousand pages long, had been developed during World War II by linguists to expedite the learning of foreign languages, but it was now being employed by native-English students to study their own language. It bypassed the Latinate categories of the old grammar—noun, verb, et cetera—and in their place required pupils to learn four parts of speech, fifteen function words, and nineteen classes of forms.

  “And when we ask,” wrote Barzun, “on what body of English speech this ‘experimental’ grammar was based, the answer is that it was derived from three thousand letters written to the United States War Department after 1918 and dealing with the single theme of pension money.”

  Fries and other linguists, said Barzun, did not think intelligently about what their carefully collected facts indicated ought to be done in the schools. And what science left blank they filled in with politics. “As scientists they maintained that the speech of any group is good speech for that group; as democrats and progressives they maintained that the child should not be made to feel inferior (or superior) by changing his speech.” Their motives were philanthropic and liberal, not strictly pedagogical.

  To gauge the extent of this disaster, one needed only to scan the 1952 report English Language Arts produced by the National Council of Teachers of English. “The volume is one long demonstration of the authors’ unfitness to tell anybody anything about English.” It optimistically posited that “change in language is not corruption but improvement,” especially in English, where change is always “in the direction of simplification and clarification.”2 To Barzun, this last bit was instantly ridiculous. Pretentious academic jargon and the way it blighted the air and fouled the printed page clearly demonstrated this could not be true.

  What this plague on our language did show, however, was the demise of nonscientific ways of thinking. The simple human capacity for passing judgment in intelligible speech, for gathering information and impressions and presenting them sensibly and in the right words, what Barzun called esprit de finesse, had no purchase on the modern mind.

  Barzun was quoted many times in the citation files for Webster’s Third (as under the synonym paragraph at hateful: “ ‘the invidious task of improving other people’s utterance’—J. M. Barzun”), but it was probably not Philip Gove who had been reading him. In 1961, two years after The House of Intellect was published, Gove also looked back to English Language Arts, as he wrote an article for Word Study, a newsletter published by Merriam and circulated by the sales staff to universities, bookstores, government offices, and other important customers.3

  Gove’s subject was the arrival of Webster’s Third. The opening paragraph of his article, “Linguistic Advances and Lexicography,” made clear where his allegiances lay. In the last three decades, “the study of English has been deeply affected by the emergence of linguistics as a science.” The relevance of linguistics was, by now, beyond debate. “Acceptance of the basic tenets of this new science is hardly any longer a matter of opinion.”

  The turning point, according to Gove, came when Leonard Bloomfield published his postulates for a linguistic science, after which his 1933 book, Language, “became the prerequisite and indispensable text.” The key to Bloomfield’s method was “observing precisely what happens when native speakers speak.” It marked a radical break from analyzing the English language in terms of its past by relying on Latin grammar. By now schoolteachers had shown an appreciation for the findings of linguistics, which was good, because it was in the classroom, Gove thought, that a better understanding of “language behavior” should be developed.

  Said Gove: “Five basic concepts set forth in the English Language Arts supply a starting point.” Then he listed them:

  1. Language changes constantly

  2. Change is normal

  3. Spoken language is the language

  4. Correctness rests upon usage

  5. All usage is relative

  The concepts had been endorsed by the National Council of Teachers of English, Gove noted, “but they still come up against the attitude of several generations of American educators who have labored devotedly to teach that there is only one standard which is correct.” Gove compared the belief in one correct linguistic standard to a belief in revelation, in the Ten Commandments specifically. And he quoted the structural linguist W. Nelson Francis on the old notion that “there is some other source and sanction for language.” Gove, of course, had no such faith that there was someone somewhere who knows all there is to know about what’s right and what’s wrong, some “they” who knows the different rules for more than and over or about ending a sentence with a preposition or about using the objective case in the sentence “It is me.”

  For the rest of his article Gove discussed how linguistics had affected lexicography, but he had already understated one important part of his answer: Linguistics had profoundly influenced his own views, the views of America’s most important lexicographer, who may have started out as a Samuel Johnson scholar but sounded like a typical prewar linguist as he criticized the old notions of correctness. Webster’s new system of nonjudgmental usage labels, which Gove did not mention, obviously resulted from this influence. Gove acknowledged that linguistics had altered his understanding of syntax and grammar, but he did not come out and say, “About the only thing I have in common with William Allan Neilson is a job title.”

  In the area of meaning, linguistics had not actually affected lexicography, according to Gove. This was another understatement, since Gove clearly shared in linguistics’ history of ambivalence toward word-defining. Like Bloomfield and Fries, Gove was convinced that even the most familiar of terms—apple (in Bloomfield’s example), chair (in Fries’s), girl (in Gove’s)—proved insuperably complicated in actual use, s
o complicated that a roomful of people could not agree on basic definitions. Gove’s position on the undefinability of words was indistinguishable from that of the linguists. But he wrote here as if little had changed since 1934, which of course was not true. There was an old-fashioned confidence and assertiveness to Webster’s Second that he found suspect, of a piece with its casual editorializing on the loyalty or courage of certain breeds of dog. His suspicion of the Second Edition’s simpler approach to language Philip Gove learned, at least in part, from linguistics, and he had not minded saying so behind closed doors.

  It was fortunate that his intellectual reservations had not crippled him as a professional lexicographer. He had innumerable decisions to make in order to bring this project in on time. That Gove was less forthright now about all that he had learned from linguistics was interesting. It showed Gove, like an actor just starting to find the stage lights and move accordingly, gaining a newfound sense of audience. Now was not the time to talk about how “infinitely complicated” language was, or how only very few people could move within it “comprehendingly.” That would sound scary and not be good for sales.

  Nor did Gove mention that he had overhauled the style of definition-writing for Webster’s Third, though mostly in his own manner and not according to any orthodoxy of linguistics.4 His decision to extend the use of illustrative quotations, however, does seem to have been influenced by linguistics and its emphasis on “language as it is,” but this too he avoided mentioning.

  Instead, Gove discussed the area where linguistics had had its most visible effect on Webster’s Third: pronunciations. And, he said, there was really no difference between the five concepts published in English Language Arts and the principles that guided pronunciation in Webster’s Second. But, like sweat on the brow, the strain required to make this argument showed.