The Second-Greatest Stories Ever Told: Middlebrow Epics of 1959 and the Aesthetics of Disavowal

Abstract

The New Yorker Books section of December 12, 1959, largely comprises a long treatment of Richard Ellmann’s monumental biography of James Joyce by Dwight Macdonald (who would, the subsequent year, publish the well-known anti-middlebrow polemic “Masscult and Midcult”). Shortly after the essay on Joyce, comes a tiny anonymous review of James Michener’s smash hit Hawaii, which damns Michener’s novel with the wittily faint praise of which the New Yorker was master: “Mr. Michener makes a definite effort to lend personality to a few of the many people who find a voice in his work”; “[t]he writing is competent.” The review concludes with a note meant to buttress the reviewer’s implication that Hawaii is beneath serious notice, kitsch, middlebrow: the novel is a “Book-of-the-Month Club selection.”¹ By contrast, Macdonald’s article lionizes Joyce as “A Hero of Our Time,” championing his rugged individualism in columns that are, in a serendipitous metaphor for Cold War anxiety over the eclipse of the individual by mass culture, seemingly squeezed thin on both sides by advertisements for the products of large corporations, a cartoon where a firm rings up an employee during his free time to check that he is still thinking about his job, and books on the threat of “the new Super-science.”²