Books: Enemy of Ooze

AGAINST THE AMERICAN GRAIN (427 pp.) — Dwight Macdonald — Random House ($6.50).

Dwight Macdonald is a genial tilter at windmills, and in his time he has bowled over more than his share. If occasionally a blade clouts him on the back of the noggin, he is undeterred. He barrels on, filling the conversational air with friendly bellowings and snorts even when he has not formed words ready to his tongue. He can keep an interrupter at bay just by an elongated stammer, disarm the most savage attacker with a high, snuffling whinny, and it sometimes takes the cold light of morning to tell where he went wrong. But he remains one of the truly freewheeling minds of the times, a genuine enfant terrible of letters who frequently is the first to point out that the emperor has no clothes, a totally committed opinionator who scorns to protect his rear and is somehow disarming because of his very gusto.

In Against the American Grain, a collection of essays written over the last ten years, Macdonald argues that American standards are threatened in a new and peculiar way. In times gone by, highbrow culture was clearly distinguished from lowbrow; today the two have been blurred by what Macdonald calls "Midcult." "In Masscult," he writes, "the trick is plain: to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways; it pretends to respect the standards of high culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them."

Presbyopia Solemnizations. Midcult authors, writes Macdonald, exploit the discoveries of avant-garde authors. Thus, their works have an apparent profundity when they are only pretentious. Macdonald's favorite Midcult writers include Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, JP. Marquand, Archibald MacLeish, and even Ernest Hemingway, or at least much of his writing. His prize examples of Midcult are James Gould Cozzens' novel By Love Possessed, with its convoluted prose and jawbreaking Latinisms like "solemnization" and "presbyopic," and Thornton Wilder's Our Town, with its fuzzy philosophizing: "There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being." Writes Macdonald: "This is an eleven-word summary, in form and content, of Midcult. I agree with everything Mr. Wilder says, but I will fight to the death his right to say it this way."

Midcult, Macdonald believes, is spreading like a "tepid ooze" through American culture. It showed up in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, in which the vivid language of the King James version was pruned away to make easier reading—a feat comparable to "taking apart Westminster Abbey to make Disneyland out of the fragments." Similarly, the Third Edition of Webster's International Dictionary discarded the label "erroneous" for misuse of a word, sanctions any incorrect usage as long as it is common. It calls like, for example, a synonym for as, citing as authority Art Linkletter on a TV program. Writes Macdonald: "It is felt that it is snobbish to insist on making discriminations—the very word has acquired a Jim Crow flavor."