The Making of Middlebrow Culture.

• Author: Alford, Henry

The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Joan Shelley Rubin. North Carolina, $34.95 hardcover $14.95 paperback. Who has had a greater influence on you-the Emily Bronte heroine Cathy or the cartoon character Cathy? Bertrand Russell or Nipsy Russell? Rimbaud or Rambo? Victorian novelist Mrs. Gaskell or Mrs. Paul?

Which brow is yours: high? middle? upper-middle with an overdeveloped sense of irony about the low? It is increasingly difficult for people to tell: Chief among the repercussions of postmodernism and its tendency to subsume pop culture into the high arts has been the blurring of distinctions between the various gradations of cultural sophistication. In years past, these distinctions were easily made. Critics and historians have categorized American culture of the first half of this century as being either the highbrow output of the modernists, expatriates, and writers for "little magazines," or the lowbrow offerings of the worlds of movies, sports, and amusement parks. Of those few critics who have applied their powers of observation to the period's cultural middle ground-Virginia Woolf, Clement Greenberg, and Dwight Macdonald, among others- most have vilified it as an example of consumerism vanquishing substance. Macdonald, whose 1960 Partisan Review article "Masscult and Midcult" is the best-known critique of middlebrow culture, asserted that "midcult" is more detrimental to society than mass culture: "It pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them."

This quasi-scholarly book, written by an associate professor of American studies and history at the State University of New York at Brockport, is an illuminating and provocative rebuttal to Macdonald and other middlebrow-bashers. Tracing the history and development of five cultural institutions and phenomena that achieved prominence during the twenties, thirties, and forties-the New York Herald Tribune's book-review section; book clubs, including the Book-of-the-Month Club; "great books" programs; outline volumes as exemplified by Will and Axiel Durant's The Story of Civilization; and literary radio programming-Rubin redresses the disregard and oversimplification that she feels have been dealt to interwar efforts to make literature available to a wide reading public.

Essential to Rubin's study is Matthew Arnold's definition of culture as "the best that has been thought and said in the world." As she introduces us to the men and women...