The Snarkiest Critic on the Goddamn Planet

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As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using them, so Time [magazine] gives us something to do with our minds when we aren’t thinking.

This was the verdict of the critic Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982), a writer unlikely — in his own time as in ours — to have been accused very often of not thinking. Editor of Partisan Review, founder of Politics magazine, staff writer at The New Yorker, and contributor to everything from Esquire to The New York Review of Books, Macdonald was famous in his day; as feared as any cultural critic is ever likely to be.

The remark in question comes from “The Triumph of the Fact,” one of ten pieces collected in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, which was published by NYRB Classics in 2011, compiled by the editor John Summers, and introducedby the New Yorker writer Louis Menand. The very existence of such an anthology is a clear enough sign that there are still some, including and especially those who move in the same professional circles as he did, who think that Macdonald ought to be famous even today, in the twenty-first century. Whether or not you agree with them will probably depend on how much you enjoy remarks like the one quoted above.

That remark, to be fair, is not the strongest example of the critical writing in the book. Nor, however, is it the weakest: though Macdonald was certainly capable of being more thoughtful and analytical than he is here, he was also capable of being even snarkier — and, indeed, was famous for it. On the evidence of almost all of the essays in this book, and a few others dotted about in other anthologies and on the internet, Macdonald was the kind of critic who thrived on the negative; who found it difficult to give unqualified praise to any writer who hadn’t been dead for a century or more; and who took an all-too-evident and almost adolescent thrill in being insulting.

He is being insulting here, clearly, though that is only one of the reasons that the remark seems so characteristic. There are others, too. It is also characteristic in being thoroughly snobbish, and in being (therefore) implicitly self-congratulating: it congratulates Macdonald himself — so superior to those dismal commoners reading Time! — but it also congratulates at least some of his readers. It is characteristic, too, in that it gets thoroughly heated up about a topic which, in the end, is not of much importance, and it is characteristic in that it comes — like the majority of such remarks in this book — in the context of a series of broad, evidence-free generalizations about Declining Standards. Its tone, furthermore — again, like the majority of such remarks — is denunciatory, and the thing being denounced is, unsurprisingly, a popular thing: popular like Elvis Presley (“this instinctive, this built-in vulgar touch”), like Erle Stanley Gardiner (“it is impossible to find any personal note in [his] output”), like The New York Times (“staid”, “solemn”, its wit “unprecedented”), or like Tom Wolfe (“[unlikely to] be read with pleasure, or at all, years from now, and perhaps even next year.”).

Finally, the first remark, like all of those in the above sentence, is characteristic for one other reason, too: namely, that it is rather exaggerated, and poorly written, I think, for that reason. It might seem to make sense at first — and would, no doubt, if you quoted it at a cocktail party — but it doesn’t really; though it has the right shape to be witty, it isn’t much more than a sneer; it convinces nobody of anything, and isn’t intended to; it is written, on the contrary, for people who already agree with it.

It is also, obviously, just one sentence, though it isn’t difficult, rereading the essays here, to compile a list of similar remarks to which all of those comments could equally well apply:

His prose style varies between the incompetent and the non-existent… [sic]It is simply impossible to imagine [him] afflicted with anything as individual as a neurosis.I don’t know which is the more surprising, after twenty years, the virtuosity of the style or its lack of emotional resonance today.[It] is a familiar kind of best seller, a pedestrian job, an artifact rather than a work of art…[It] approaches the impenetrable—indeed often achieves it…

And so on . . . Each of these lines, with or without context, is a sneer in the same way as the line I began with. Each has that witty-ish shape and each that weary snobbery; and any one of them is more or less interchangeable with any other, so that it is hard not to suspect that they were all written long before the writer found targets at which to hurl them. It is also hard not to suspect, in each case, that the writer is enjoying being insulting, and it is this impression, above all, which tells us that we are really reading hatchet jobs.

§

By now, alas, it is for hatchet jobs that Macdonald is most famous. In his own day he was famous for a few other things as well — though none of them, sadly, has really lasted. His lovely anthology Parodies should have lasted, but is (I believe) out of print, as are his edition of Edgar Allan Poe and his translation of Albert Camus. His political writing — a kind of anarcho-syndicalism sitting awkwardly alongside cultural elitism, as though Noam Chomsky had taken to avant-garde art — is mostly of historical interest now, its broad generalizations and internecine squabbles each looking distinctly early twentieth-century. More to the point for the present purposes, his broad cultural critiques (like the one which gives this book its title) have all surely ended up — as even his admirers, like Menand, acknowledge — in the dustbin of history. Yet there is no denying his talent for that hatchet: Menand, in his introduction, reaches for the words “attacks,” “roasting,” “evisceration,” and “disembowelment” (none of which would be out of place in the title of a clickbait YouTube video) when describing how Macdonald reviewed books.

Hatchet jobs are often enjoyable, of course, in their way, and a few of Macdonald’s remain so even now. A great many, however, do not — and that includes some of those which have been celebrated by very clever people. As so often with hatchet jobs — see comparable examples by John Simon and A. A. Gill and Tibor Fischer — it depends on how much you happen to know about whatever it is that is being hatcheted.

Anyone with even a distant understanding of what a dictionary is, for example, will probably wince at Macdonald’s essay “No String Untuned,” whose target is Webster’s Third. Though that essay, again, has been celebrated, it is really not much more than the usual prescriptivist bullshit, dressed up in High Standards. A kind of masterclass in combining mandarin condescension (“a trend towards permissiveness . . . debasing our language”) with near-complete ignorance, it is likely to be enjoyed only by that subsection of intellectuals still unable to tell the difference between a dictionary and a style guide.

Likewise, those for whom the Bible is primarily a work of English literature might enjoy “Updating the Bible,” his essay attacking the Received Standard Version (the “sort of journalistic writing the American masses are now accustomed to”) and praising the “wild”, “poetic”, “passionate” King James Version. If, on the other hand, you don’t think of the Bible in that way, you might react as I did: by reflecting on the fact that both translations, including the beautiful one, still exist in 2026; that the former hasn’t destroyed the latter; and that the latter has gone on and will go on, no matter how many attempts are made to give ordinary churchgoers Scripture that they can understand.

This is the rub: Macdonald did not (in the relevant sense) know much about the Bible (“I can only assume that where the R.S.V. differs in meaning from K.J.V., the translation has been improved . . .”), and he didn’t know much about dictionaries: he describes Webster’s Third, for example, as an attempt to be “definitive,” which is virtually a contradiction in terms.

Neither fact, of course, stopped him writing about both those subjects. Like too many super-negative critics (see those other hatcheters mentioned above), Macdonald was fond of writing furiously about subjects he knew almost nothing about — and, just like the rest of us, there were a lot of subjects of which that could be said. He understood little, for instance, about popular culture (for him the movies seemed, with the exception of Citizen Kane, to have peaked with D. W. Griffith), though, again, that didn’t stop him from writing about it. The title essay in this book mentions “such current ephemera” — in 1960 — as rock and roll, “proper” Hollywood films, Norman Rockwell, and Victorian Gothic architecture. At the same time, he knew almost nothing about science, and indeed was stubbornly proud of that fact —

I know little about the physical sciences and am not curious to know more . . . they don’t appeal to my kind of mind and feelings . . .

— just as he knew little about philosophy other than what the hated masses did not know about it:

. . . above all the law is our substitute for philosophy, which makes us almost as nervous as emotion does.

As for his aforementioned politics, a kindly observer in the twenty-first century might describe his opinions as dated, though a century ago a less kindly one (a certain Leon Trotsky) remarked that, though everyone has the right to be stupid, Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.

The one thing Macdonald did know about was literature, and that is the reason that the only pieces or passages in this book which still read well are those which are, explicitly, about literature, rather than things adjacent to literature. His piece on James Agee, for example, is the best in the book, next to his reassessment of Hemingway, which is probably still capable of entertaining (or rankling) readers today:

Hemingway was no more a philosopher than Byron was; in fact, he was considerably less of one. A feeling that loyalty and bravery are the cardinal virtues and that physical action is the basis of the good life — even when reinforced with the kind of nihilism most of us get over by the age of twenty — these don’t add up to a philosophy.

This is as negative as anything else, true, but to my mind at least it is also well-put. Yet even readers, like me, who are less susceptible to the charms of Hemingway will probably raise their eyebrows, as I did, at some of the other snark on display: is it really fair, for instance, to say that “Hemingway was adolescent all his life,” or that he was “a short-story writer and not a novelist,” or that he “strikes one as not particularly intelligent?”

§

The Hemingway piece has survived, I think, because it isn’t — quite — an outright hatchet job. Most of the other pieces have not survived because they are. The only exception in this book — an outright hatchet job which has undeniably survived — is Macdonald’s most famous, “By Cozzens Possessed”, his review of (or against) James Gould Cozzens’s bestselling novel By Love Possessed.True, in order to see that review’s virtues you do, yet again, have to wade through the silly insults —

It is Literature or it is nothing. Unfortunately none of the reviewers has seriously considered the second alternative.

—but if you do so you will find that Macdonald can provide evidence, in this case if in few others, for the conclusion he has reached.

. . . what sensitive or even merely competent novelist would write a phrase like ‘the ridiculous impracticalness of his aspirations’?

At the same time, it is hard to truly like “By Cozzens Possessed”; what fleeting pleasures it gives — appropriately enough, given Macdonald’s sentiments about Time — seem comparable in a way to the pleasures of cigarette-smoking. Like cigarettes, hatchet jobs give a nasty pleasure in and of themselves, in spite of the coughing: but we all know, whether we indulge in them or not, that they are bad for us.

We also know, notwithstanding said pleasure, that a hatchet job has merit if and only if it is written in defense of something valuable, just as a cigarette gives true pleasure only in a particular context (such as, say, in a bedroom). The Cozzens review is defending something valuable, and so is still of interest. The same can hardly be said for the essays about the Bible or the dictionary: the former, after all, defends a work of literature which is not in any sense under attack; the latter appeals, over and over again, to that non-existent “authority” that declares certain language usage “illit.”

Equally, the same cannot be said for the title essay, “Masscult and Midcult,” which is so dated now as to be practically unreadable: nobody not cravenly attached to an aristocratic idea of high culture will take its thesis seriously today. “For about two centuries,” Macdonald writes:

Western culture has in fact been two cultures: the traditional kind—let us call it High Culture—that is chronicled in the textbooks, and a novel kind that is manufactured for the market. This latter may be called Mass Culture, or better Masscult, since it really isn’t culture at all. Masscult is a parody of High Culture.

So it begins, and so it goes on — for about 25,000 words. Despite Macdonald’s assertions to the contrary, the essay is an attack, mostly, on popular things because they are popular. Like “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg’s legendary essay written under Macdonald’s editorship, it is also the product of a sort of Orthodox Marxism: the sort that, roughly speaking, would claim that the masses are indoctrinated into liking everything that the masses like, with the exception of those things that the critic himself also likes. This is the reason he is able to take those things which are both popular and good (such as the work of Poe and Dickens, which would seem to contradict his thesis) and brush them aside as so many exceptions proving the rule.

The kindest interpretation of all of this is that it is only an intellectual’s panicky attempt to pretend that the subjective is objective, and to make a play for Sociological Significance by employing vaguely phrenological jargon — Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow — that, in the end, are only euphemisms for good, bad, and mediocre. The unkinder interpretation, probably just as true, is that the essay is a yelp of snobbery. Macdonald, notwithstanding his politics, is mostly bemoaning the fact that High Culture is no longer available only to an elite: that it is distributed in a form available for the masses, as in the back pages of Life magazine where (as he complains for reasons never made entirely clear) ordinary readers can look at reproductions of Renoir.

Masscult, he says in various ways over and over again, is “non-art”; it is “anti-art.” “Those who consume Masscult might as well be eating ice-cream sodas…” It “really isn’t culture at all” (no true Scotsman!), and nor does it have even “the theoretical possibility of being good”. Nor, for that matter, does “the tepid ooze of Midcult”, examples of which, he says, include H. G. Wells, Thornton Wilder, and The Old Man and the Sea. They try to resemble High Culture and fail; they think they can storm the Tower, but its guardians, like Macdonald, must forever strive to keep them out:

let the few who care about good writing, painting, music, architecture, philosophy, etc. have their High Culture, and don’t fuzz up the distinction with Midcult.

§

Evidently, letting literary intellectuals give a definition of culture is like letting billionaires decide how much tax they ought to pay. The results are similar: for all his radicalism, all that Macdonald does, in “Masscult and Midcult”, is try to establish (or re-establish) a cultural hierarchy, and for no obvious reason other than to put himself, and those like him, at the top of it. There is no sense anywhere that the hated Masscult and Midcult slop has any value to it, or that it could have value even in principle; nor is there any sense that the goal of the writer is to help improve these things via criticism; the goal, as in the hatchet jobs, is destruction — and destruction, in the end, of entirely arbitrary targets. That is Macdonald’s great weakness, and that is his essay’s great weakness: though he does a lot of pontificating about the creation of the masses and capitalism and the like, really what he calls Masscult and Midcult are just his personal tastes, elevated to the status of a cod-philosophy. Mass and Mid culture are simply the results of widespread literacy and technological advances, i.e. the fact that the “masses” can actually access art, including via such hated conduits as Time magazine. Except insofar as they are products of those things, Masscult and Midcult do not exist: they are phantoms of his imagination.

There were people, no doubt, who realized this even in 1960, and nowadays, when nobody can seriously deny the value of “mass” culture, or uphold any notion that it can straightforwardly be distinguished from high culture, it is hard to imagine anyone not realizing that: again, even Menand concludes that this “summa of the New York highbrow’s contempt for bourgeois culture” has not aged well.

One of Christopher Hitchens’s wiser remarks is that intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilized man. Macdonald struck that pose almost all the time: even when he writes about something as trivial as book covers — in his essay “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club” — he manages to make himself sound like the last bastion of the highbrows, fortified against the barbarians. “It bothers me,” he says, “to see Tristram Shandy dressed up as Summa Theologica” . . . but, really, who in the world cares? It is like those people today who would complain about seeing passages from great literature posted on Instagram, waiting for the likes. There are any number of good reasons for disliking Instagram, and indeed for yearning for its destruction, but that isn’t one of them; the fact that people can disseminate literature more easily, and the fact that even ordinary people with little education can find it, if they wish, just isn’t the problem — as indeed it wasn’t in 1960.

If Macdonald’s writing is admired at all nowadays it is probably admired most by those who do think such a thing is the problem — the people, in other words, who would like to strike the same pose as he did, either because they inhabit the same milieu, or because they would like to. Some truly great book-chatters of the last fifty years (Gore Vidal, Clive James, Martin Amis) have occasionally done the same thing, though they, at least some of the time, get away with it — in part because they are all also practitioners. Vidal, after all, also wrote Julian; James also wrote Unreliable Memoirs;Amis also wrote London Fields. Dwight Macdonald wrote snarky book reviews.

Why any except a few of those reviews should still be in print in the third decade of the twenty-first century is, again, a good question, and it could be that it is only, as it were, the pleasures of the cigarette. Perhaps, though, there is something else at work, something to do with fashion and with class. Macdonald knew the right people while he was alive, and perhaps he knows the right people even now, after death. In that regard, the book’s subtitle is a clue: Against the American Grain — a phrase he himself used for the title of a book in 1962. For we react to that phrase (do we not?) in the same way as we react to the words Democratic Republic in the name of a nation, i.e. by assuming that the exact opposite is the case. There are any number of writers, like Macdonald, who tell themselves they are against the grain — the sort of writers for whom the phrase “the herd of independent minds” was invented — but that is usually a sign that they are ruled, in every word that they write, by the opinions of their set. On the evidence of these essays, Macdonald certainly was. It is significant that the hatchet job of Cozzens’s novel is in fact not only a review of Cozzens’s novel, but also a review of other reviewers: including those “provincial reviewers” (i.e. those not in New York) who liked the book. That much turns out to be true, in effect, of “Masscult and Midcult” too, and indeed of many of the other pieces: what they amount to is in-fighting within Macdonald’s circle — a circle which, as everyone who does not inhabit it knows very well, is insular to an almost parodic extent.

In the end, being insular usually comes from a lack of imagination and empathy: the sort of lack that can lead to easy binaries of high and low, to not seeing the value hidden away in popular things, and to snobbery and prejudice. And, really, all of those things, as Amis himself once observed, are just different ways of being clichéd. Given how much of a bully Macdonald seems in these pieces, that fact seems not only apt, but rather satisfying. It is hard not to take another dark pleasure, as I smoke my own cigarette and write my own hatchet job against hatchet jobs, in the fact that Macdonald’s snobbish cultural commentary has ended up, in 2026, as little more than one big cliché.