Middlebrow: For and Against

Abstract

Clement Greenberg's fulminations on the commercial 'ersatz culture' of the urban proletariat and petty bourgeoisie in Avant-Garde and Kitsch, that 'debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture', were directed not just against the official art of the totalitarian regimes and Hollywood films, but also against the arts of the American Popular Front as his passing reference to Steinbeck indicates. In this respect (as in others), Greenberg's essay rehearses wellestablished themes in Partisan Review of the late thirties, which had already criticized Marc Blitzstein's 'proletarian opera' The Cradle Will Rock and Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre, and damned The Grapes of Wrath with the faintest of praise. Lionel Trilling, commenting on the 'literary nationalism' of the Popular Front in the same issue, observed that for the most part it was 'the calculated policy of a party line', and that it could not be 'anything but vulgar and, in the end, downright chauvinistic'. The novelist James Farrell had made the same equation between 'Popular Frontism', nationalism, and 'vulgarity' the issue before. A somewhat later contributor to Partisan Review, Irving Howe, would argue in the history of the American Communist Party he co-authored with Lewis Coser that it was 'precisely through its vulgarity' that the Popular Front managed to secure an influence 'on the stage, in Hollywood, and in radio . . . Like modern advertising, with which it had deep spiritual affinities, the Popular Front outlook aimed at indiscriminate saturation of the audience rather than intellectual quality'.' The interpretation of Popular Front culture developed by the Partisan Reviewers in the factional battles of the thirties left, effectively became the common sense of post-war cultural history. Howe and Coser's conclusions were even reaffirmed by New Left scholars such as Warren Susman, who attacked Popular Front Americanism for the harm it had done American socialism through its 'absurd vision of the American past', 'peculiar notion of American society in the present', and 'ludicrous attitude toward American culture in general'.2 It is only in recent years that left-wing literary scholars such as Barbara Foley, Paula Rabinowitz, and Alan Wald have begun to question this type of judgement through a more sustained and sympathetic analysis of the Proletarian Literature of the period. Now along comes Michael Denning, with a 556 page study which makes by far the most sweeping and ambitious attempt to re-evaluate the culture of the Red Decade to date.3 Like other scholars who have pursued this goal, Denning eschews the category of Stalinism, so central to the world view of Partisan Review. Indeed, in his account of thirties culture the Communist Party plays a fairly marginal role. This is because for him the Popular Front is only one phase of a process which he calls 'the labouring of American culture', and whose institutions and products he prefers to denominate 'the Cultural Front'. For Denning, this process is not to be understood as the effect of a sequence of political directives issuing ultimately from Moscow, but rather as the cultural expression of a much broader social and political movement intrinsically linked to the class consciousness of the new