The Making of Middlebrow Culture

by Joan Shelley Rubin

The proliferation of book clubs, reading groups, "outline" volumes, and new forms of book reviewing in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the tastes and pastimes of millions of Americans. Joan Rubin here provides the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the rise of American middlebrow culture, and the values encompassed by it.
Rubin centers her discussion on five important expressions of the middlebrow: the founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club; the beginnings of "great books" programs; the creation of the New York Herald Tribune 's book-review section; the popularity of such works as Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy ; and the emergence of literary radio programs. She also investigates the lives and expectations of the individuals who shaped these middlebrow institutions--such figures as Stuart Pratt Sherman, Irita Van Doren, Henry Seidel Canby, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, John Erskine, William Lyon Phelps, Alexander Woollcott, and Clifton Fadiman.
Moreover, as she pursues the significance of these cultural intermediaries who connected elites and the masses by interpreting ideas to the public, Rubin forces a reconsideration of the boundary between high culture and popular sensibility.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Books About Books

416 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1992

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

You might subtitle this book "how the American book industry tried to get the middle and lower classes to buy and read books in the first four decades of the 20th century." Though, honestly, that makes it sound a lot more interesting than it is. Rubin takes a largely biographical approach to her topic, and most of her subjects are rather obscure (especially as they recede in the mists of time): Stuart Pratt Sherman, Irita Van Doren, John Erskine, Will Durant, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, William Lyon Phelps, Alexander Woollcott. Do you care that John Erkskine's mother discouraged his musical ambitions, leaving him subtly embittered toward all women? That's the level of "deep in the weeds" that Rubin goes to. In the chapter on the Book of the Month Club one might hope that some of the actual books the club chose would be discussed, to give us a better idea of what precisely was middlebrow about them, but Rubin disdains that tactic, choosing instead to examine each member of the book selection committee in great detail.

I did enjoy learning about an exchange on the radio quiz program Information, Please!, hosted by Clifton Fadiman. When the guest panelist journalist John Gunther correctly answered a question about the shah of Persia, Fadiman asked, "Are you shah, Mr. Gunther?" Gunther replied, "Sultanly."

I wouldn't recommend this unless you are desperately, fanatically, or academically interested in the intellectual and cultural history of early to mid-century America.

[Ray LaManna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a thorough scholarly review of the major cultural changes in the areas of books and reading from the 1920s to the 1980s. Probably a little bit too complete for most readers.

[Bill FromPA · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the end of the book, the final section of Chapter 6, “The Decline of Attention”, that should really be designated an epilogue, there occurs a definition of the type of figures Rubin has documented in this book; a self-definition, actually, from Clifton Fadiman:

Calling himself a “middleman” of “thought and opinion,” Fadiman remarked, “I have been a kind of pitchman-professor, selling ideas, often other men’s, at marked-down figures, which are easier to pay than the full price of complete intellectual concentration.” His “mental brokerage business,” unabashedly tied to consumption in both metaphor and reality, was a strategy, Fadiman thought, for preserving literacy and respect for intellect among the “intermediate class” that was “in danger of becoming the Forgotten Public.”

Rubin makes much of the “middle-ness” of the figures she discusses, seeing them as torn between a detached academic life and active engagement with capitalist society. She most often frames this as a conflict between the “genteel” and self-expression, terms which, for me, do more to becloud than clarify her argument; another favored opposition is between “character” and “personality”, though, again, the usefulness of these terms is compromised by the fact that her subjects sometimes use them in ways very different than Rubin.

Her definition of these oppositions are elaborated in her lengthy biography of Stuart Sherman in Chapter 2, devoted to the function of book reviewing in shaping middlebrow tastes and attitudes. There otherwise appears to be little reason for her to spend so much time on Sherman, who is nominally featured in this section as the first editor of the New York Herald-Tribune’s Books supplement, a post he held for less than 2 years before his early death. By Rubin’s own account, his assistant and successor, Irita Van Doren (who receives a much briefer, but adequate, biographic sketch) , seems a more influential figure in this context, even during Sherman’s brief tenure, and especially so since she subsequently held the post for over three decades.

Rubin covers two broad aspects of middlebrow culture:

• The promotion of contemporary fiction that can be seen as “literature” but is not modernist: novels that would provide readers at a high school reading level with no difficulty in comprehension. Her subjects facilitate this promotion through book reviews aimed at readers of newspapers and magazines and by direct sales through businesses like the Book-of-the-Month Club. In both these cases, her subjects act a “middle” or dual role: alternately or even simultaneously experts choosing books of quality and “average” readers recommending enjoyable and informative books to an audience of (almost) peers.

• Giving the average citizen access to areas of knowledge that are increasingly the realm of specialists. In literature this access is facilitated by canon-making: most notably the Harvard Classics, "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf of Books" and the Great Books movement, whose origin Rubin credits to John Erskine (though this is questionable because Rubin herself mentions a number of earlier academics who had a similar idea). The marketing of Great Books was left to a student of Erskine, Mortimer J. Adler, and falls mostly outside of Rubin’s somewhat arbitrary cut-off date of 1950 (though the author seems not to regret this: a certain distaste for Adler comes through in her accounts of him). Rubin characterizes Erskine’s approach as

Noting that all books enshrined as “great” were at one time recent publications intended for wide audiences, Erskine urged professors of English to continue to treat them as such.

Access to specialized knowledge was also provided by “outlines” written to explain and summarize fields of knowledge in a way that the average citizen could understand; Rubin’s chief representative of this activity is Will Durant, author and co-author (with his wife Ariel) of The Story of Philosophy and the 11 volume The Story of Civilization.

Rubin does not address middlebrow culture as a compromise between or alternative to “high” culture and “low” or popular culture. Her interest is more in its mediation between academics and the requirements of the marketplace in making their subject matter accessible to a wider audience. In pursuing this theme, she describes and analyzes the advertising used to sell each of the products she examines, seeking to tease out the appeal they held for the public who purchased them.

Rubin, as she admits in her introduction, is ambivalent about the work of her subjects. She shares their concern with providing America with a broad general culture that she sees as essential to it being a “civilization” rather than a profit-oriented confederacy of narrowly focused specialists and workers whose time is split between labor and amusement. On the other hand she recognizes the simplifications and misrepresentations complex and academically controversial subjects suffer at the hands of popularizers who feel the need to smooth out at least the thorniest difficulties presented by their subject matter.

Rubin is generally reticent about her subject’s personal lives, which can lead to someone like me mis-reading some of her accounts. For example, her account of Stuart Sherman’s dissatisfaction with “genteel” values and expressed need to attain “experience” led me to read into it an element of sexual dissatisfaction and longing. Since nothing was mentioned of marriage or affairs, I began to think of Sherman as a “confirmed bachelor” with all that that implies; then, late in the account, his wife is mentioned and, going to Wikipedia, I found that he was in fact married for most of his adult life.

Perhaps the subject who comes across as the most interesting – this sometimes in spite of Rubin’s dry account – is John Erskine, who would make for a livelier subject for an academic Bildungsroman than William Stoner. Erskine briefly achieved something like his common-man academic Utopia in France at the end of WWI when running a kind of school for demobilized American soldiers. In addition to advocating the Great Books approach, Erskine also pursued a different path to popularizing familiarity with the classics in a series of novels, most notably The Private Life of Helen of Troy. Rubin also mentions several marriages and affairs indicating an interesting and perhaps tumultuous personal life.

Rubin’s most engaging chapter is her last, on the way literature was promoted on radio from the 1920s to 1950s. Here her original research is most in evidence and she’s done an excellent job, not only in documenting the existence of various book review and interview shows, but also in giving a feel for their content and style. It’s an explanation of the appeal of these “personalities” to radio audiences that, even after more than half a century, accounts of their programs can still be entertaining.

[Les · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been fascinated with this topic for years and was hoping from Rubin's work to understand better which social and economic factors drove the development of middlebrow culture. Rubin's book primarily focuses on the intellectual underpinnings of the movement (1920-1950) to educate and enlighten a segment of middle class America that desperately wanted to improve its cultural and social standing. The book has fascinating vignettes of the personalities involved in this movement, but I found the in-depth descriptions of each twist and turn of their professional lives to be more than I wanted or needed. Still, a solid view of a now vanished era.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is so replete and exhaustive that I found it to be tedious. I admire the scope of research, but for pleasure reading a similar book entitled, "A Great Idea at the Time" was a much more enjoyable read. Beyond all the biographies, a few powerful themes emerged: the war in upper education between the generalists and the specialists, the way "culture" is acquired -- through education or personality, and the frisson between knowledge and information. In my own lifetime it is hard to imagine a time when personality, knowledge and information are not merged into one cultural package.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A touchstone of book history scholarship.