A "Resurrected" Self

One of the unexpected blessings of senescence is belated validation. Take the “Daedalus” conference at Tamiment in the Poconos in 1959. My mentor Gilbert Seldes was too busy learning his academic gig at the brand new Annenberg so he coaxed me into taking the “pro” side of the Mass Culture argument. I had just completed my two year Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Penn, creating a two semester course in American Civilization on the Mass Society, first semester on mass communication, second on mass production. I was eager to go “national”. That’s the same conference that ended with the poet Randall Jarrell waggling his beard in my direction and exclaiming,”Mr. Hazard, you’re the man of the future. . .and I’m glad I’m not going to be there.” GULP! I was so beaten down by his contempt (widely shared there, it seemed!) that I didn’t even bother to read the subsequent “Mass Culture” issue of “Daedalus”.

Zip forward fifty years, as I belatedly read Michael Kammen’s thoughtful intellectual biography (1996) of Gilbert Seldes. He (surprisingly) generously praised my work alone and with Gilbert! And alluded to a book I had never even heard of, ”Culture for the Millions? Mass Media in Modern Society” (Beacon,1961), edited by one Norman Jacobs,with a forward by the preeminent Paul Lazarsfeld.(Notice the slyly skeptical question mark, instead of a colon, separating the title and subtitle!) Kammen’s curt footnote (Jacobs, ”Culture for the Millions”, p.7) alerted me to Google that one Norman Jacobs was the director of Tamiment, that cultural oasis in the Poconos. The book itself made Jarrell appear oafish in his unsupported putdown of me. And no less a sage than Lazarsfeld himself gratuitously praised me for being the only conference participant to note that physical phenomena(industrial design, architecture, and urban planning) were an essential aspect of mass culture.

My proposals were simple, but grossly misinterpreted: Identify the best efforts of mass culture and analyze their ambience, to encourage the next generation to emulate such achievement. For example, in my first nationally published article (“Everyman in Saddle Shoes,” Scholastic Teacher, 1954) I had described how I had assigned a Paddy Chayefsky teleplay, “Marty”, and then had my tenth graders at East Lansing High write overnight TV crits. At Tamiment, Norman Podhoretz, the CCNY Trostkyite suddenly morphed NeoCon, sneered that such drivel was “kitchen sink” drama, beneath academic contempt. (I had speculated that such childish rancor that the New York clerisy brought to their analyses of Pop Cult was a viral hangover from their miraculously swift conversions from Far Left to Far Right.)

And as I retrospectively analyzed the composition of the fifteen “certified” Tamiment participants, only two had media experience: Seldes and Frank Stanton, the Ph.D. running CBS. There were only three artists, James Baldwin, Arthur Berger, and Randall Jarrell, hardly a representative jury. The rest were social scientists of one ilk or another, quick to fantasize pseudo-empirical categories (highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow, for example.) Any person could be a multiple mix of these brows, not to neglect the phenomenon that millions were constantly changing their brow levels, even as social science punks were nailing them to their naïve research walls.

And, alas, only one literary critic (if you excluded me!), Stanley Edgar Hyman. He was so good (on me!) that I’m going to quote him for your edification: ”The third ideal of mass culture I take from a letter Patrick D. Hazard wrote to me in 1958 in connection with some remarks I had published about the ironic mode. He wrote: ’Now it seems to me that a great many intellectuals have achieved a viable irony, but I wonder how the great mass who are no longer folk and not yet people can find a footing for their ironic stance. Do any of the following seem to you footholds?’ He then proceeded to list such newer comic performers as Mort Sahl and Jonathan Winters, such older comic performers as Groucho Marx and Fred Allen, and such miscellaneous phenomena as Al Capp, ‘The Threepenny Opera’, and ‘Humbug’ magazine.’ His comment on this list was: ’These things seem to question in one way or another some aspect of flatulence in popular culture, its sentimentality, fake elegance, phony egalitarianism, or it perennial playpen atmosphere.”( Jacobs,p.132.)

Hyman allowed as how he had no answer to my questions but that they suggested a third ideal: ”This is that mass culture throws up its own criticism, in performers of insight, wit, and talent, and in forms of irony and satire, to enable some of the audience to break through it into a broader or deeper set of aesthetic values. Again, I much prefer this sort of evolutionary possibility to types of patronizing enlightenment.” (Op. cit.,133.)

I would add that their class-formulated, snobbish rejection of meliorism is a major cause of such cultural impasses. Still, it takes a deep breath of Faith when our current “aliteracy” has sunk to the level of Rush Limbaugh and Emimem. But the true moral of this fable is not to give up too soon, in this case of premature ejaculation.