Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow by Russell Lynes

REPRINT: 1949 Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow by Russell Lynes When Editor Russell Lynes published his light-hearted analysis in the February 1949 Harper's, Harry S. Truman had just been elected President in his own right, Gerald Ford was a freshman in Congress, and the median U.S. family income was $3,107. At the top of the best-seller list were Lloyd Douglas's religious novel, The Big Fisherman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe. Television was still a novelty. Tongue in cheek, Lynes sought to gauge the social significance of "taste" in the postwar era. He gave Americans a shorthand way of classifying themselves according to cultural consumption, and "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow" remains part of the language. 'Apparently, I touched a nerve," Lynes wrote later, "and that is precisely what I meant to do." Life, the 1949 king of the visual media, quickly rebroadcast Lynes's assessment, adding a pictorial chart. We present in 1976 a slightly condensed version of the Harper's article and the April 11, 1949 Life socio-diagram. Lynes adds a postscript; he suggests that competitive American taste, however changed in many outward aspects, has left the rules of the game much as they were in 1949. The old structure of the upper class, commentators, the thinkers of global the middle class, and the lower class thoughts who, we assume for lack of is on the wane. It isn't wealth or another faith, know better than any- family that makes prestige these one else how we should cope with days. It's high thinking. what we call with new resonance Our heroes now are not the Carne- "our national destiny." What we gies or the Morgans but the intellec- want are oracles, and the best sub- tuals-the atomic scientists, the stitutes we can find are the intellec- cultural historians, the writers, the tuals. Einstein makes headlines as Reprinted by permission of RLL:sell Lynes, 0 1949 by Russell Lynes. The Wilson Quarterly/Autumn 1976 146 REPRINT: LYNES Millikan never did. Toynbee's popu- is a highbrow?" he said. "A highbrow larity is to be reckoned with as is a man who has found something Spengler's never was. Even Calvert more interesting than women." whiskey has selected as Man of Dis- Presumably at some time in every tinction [for its ads] more artists, man's life there are things he finds architects, writers, and commen- more interesting than women; alco- tators than it has industrialists or hol, for example, or the World Series. financiers. What we are headed for is Mr. Wallace has only partially de- a sort of social structure in which fined the highbrow. Brander the highbrows are the elite, the Matthews came closer when he said middlebrows are the bourgeoisie, that "a highbrow is a person edu- and the lowbrows are hoi polloi. cated beyond his intelligence," and For the time being this is perhaps A. P. Herbert came closest of all largely an urban phenomenon, and when he wrote that "a highbrow is the true middlebrow may readily be the kind of person who looks at a mistaken in the small community sausage and thinks of Picasso." for a genuine highbrow. But the pat- It is this association of culture tern is emerging with increasing with every aspect of daily life, from clarity, and the new distinctions do the design of his razor to the shape not seem to be based either on of the bottle that holds his sleeping money or on breeding. It is true that pills, that distinguishes the high- most highbrows are in the ill-paid brow from the middlebrow or the professions, notably the academic, lowbrow. Spiritually and intellectu- and that most middlebrows are at ally, the highbrow inhabits a pre- least reasonably well off. Only the cinct well up the slopes of Parnas- lowbrows can be found in about sus, and his view of the cultural equal percentages at all financial scene is from above. His vision pin- levels. points certain lakes and quarries There may be a time, of course, upon which his special affections are when the highbrows will be paid in concentrated-a perturbed lake accordance with their own estimate called Rilke or a deserted quarry of their worth, but that is not likely called Kierkegaard-but he believes to happen in any form of society in that he sees them, as he sees the which creature comforts are in functional design of his razor, always greater demand than intellectual up- in relation to the broader cultural lift. Like poets they will have to be scene. There is a certain air of content mostly with prestige. omniscience about the highbrow, While this social shift is still in its though that air is in many cases the early stages, let us assume a rather thin variety encountered on the tops lofty position, examine the principal of high mountains from which the categories with their subdivisions view is extensive but the details are and splinter groups, and see where lost. we ourselves are likely to fetch up in You cannot tell a man that he is a the new order. lowbrow any more than you can tell a woman that her clothes are in bad The Highbrows taste. But a highbrow does not mind The highbrows come first. Edgar being called a highbrow. He has Wallace, who was certainly not a worked hard, read widely, traveled highbrow himself, was asked by a far, and listened attentively in order newspaper reporter in Hollywood to satisfy his curiosity and establish some years ago to define one. "What his squatter's rights in this little The Wilson Quarterly/Autumn 1976 147 REPRINT: LYNES Joseph Russell Lynes, Jr. was born in Great Barrington, Mass. in 1910, graduated from Yale ('32), and, after a book publishing stint, became principal of the ShipleySchool in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He helped run Army Service Forces training for civilians in World War 11, and then went to Harper's, where he became managing editor (1947-67). His books in- clude Snobs (1950), Tastemakers (1954). A Surfeit of Honey (1957), The Art-Makers of Nineteenth Century America (1970), Good Old Mod- ern (1973). corner of intellectualism. And he Our intellectual marines, does not care who knows it. This is Landing in Little Magazines, true of both kinds of highbrows- Capture a trend. the militant, or crusader, type and the passive, or dilettante, type. These This gravitation of the highbrows types in general live happily to- to the universities is fairly recent. gether; the militant highbrow carries In the Twenties, when the little the torch of culture, the passive magazines were devoted to publish- highbrow reads by its light. ing experimental writing rather than criticism of exhumed experi- "Intellectual Marines" mental writing, the highbrows The carrier of the torch makes a flocked to Paris, New York, and profession of being a highbrow and Chicago. The transatlantic review, lives by his calling. He is most fre- transition, and the Little Review, of quently found in university and col- the lower-case era of literature, were lege towns, a member of the liberal- all published in Paris; BROOM was arts faculty, teaching languages (an- published in New York; Poetry was cient or modern), the fine arts, or (and still is) published in Chicago. literature. His spare time is often The principal little magazines now, devoted to editing a magazine which with the exception of Partisan Re- is read mainly by other highbrows, view, a New York product but written ambitious undergraduates, and the mostly by academics, are published editors of middlebrow publications in the colleges-the Kenyon Review, in search of talent. When he writes the Sewanee Review, the Virginia for the magazine himself (or for an- Quarterly, and so on-and their other "little" magazine) it is usually flavor reflects this. criticism of criticism of criticism. But this does not mean that high- He leaves the writing of fiction brows do not prefer the centers in and poetry to others more bent on which cultural activities are the most creation than on what has been varied and active, and these are still created. For the highbrow is pri- London, Paris, New York, and, more marily a critic and not an artist- recently, Rome. Especially in the fine a taster, not a cook. He is often arts, the highbrow has a chance to more interested in where the arts make a living in the metropolis have been and where they are going where museums are centered and than in the objects themselves. He is where art is bought and sold as well devoted to the proposition that the as created. This is also true of com- arts must be pigeonholed and that mercial publishing, in which many their trends should be plotted, or as highbrows find suitable, if not con- W. H. Auden puts it- genial, refuge. The Wilson Quarterly/Autumn 1976 148 REPRINT: LYNES But no matter where they may ness he is certain. The result is pre- make their homes, all highbrows live cisely what you would expect: the in a world which they believe is in- highbrows believe in, and would habited almost entirely by philistines establish, an intellectual elite, "a -those who through viciousness or fluid body of intellectuals . whose smugness or the worship of material- accepted role in society is to per- ism gnaw away at the foundations of petuate traditional ideas and values culture. And the highbrow sees as and to create new ones." Such an his real enemy the middlebrow, elite would like to see the middle- whom he regards as a pretentious brow eliminated, for it regards him and frivolous man or woman who as the undesirable element in our, uses culture to satisfy social or busi- and anybody else's, culture.

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