Commentary In American Life

6. Commentary and the Common Culture

6Commentary and the Common Culture Terry Teachout N early two decades after I started writing for Commentary, I can still remember how excited I was to see my name on the cover of that notoriously hard-to-crack magazine for the first time. I remember no less vividly what it felt like to read Commentary, long before it occurred to me that I might possibly write for it someday. Though I’d only visited Manhattan once, midway through sophomore year in college , I was already so curious about the New York intellectuals that I read everything by them that I could find in the library—meaning, above all, Commentary. I didn’t wish merely to know what they thought, however, though that was obviously what mattered most. I also wanted to know what they were like, so I consulted their various memoirs, and the one that made the strongest impression on me was Norman Podhoretz’s Making It.1 I suspect that a great many people of my generation who now write for Commentary read Making It when they were young, and that it made much the same impression on them that it did on me, being at once challenging and a bit unnerving, like gazing at a mountain you intended to climb someday. For my part, I saw Making It as an instruction 127 128 Commentary and the Common Culture manual, a how-to guide for budding young public intellectuals, and I read it with the closest possible attention. I was particularly struck by a scene in which Clement Greenberg, then one of the magazine’s editors, told Podhoretz that Commentary was “a middlebrow magazine .” This remark puzzled Podhoretz as much as it did me: “I was bewildered by this application of the term to so intellectually stylish, so (to me) obviously highbrow a phenomenon,”2 he wrote. But in later years, he figured out what Greenberg had meant: Unlike the indubitably highbrow Partisan Review, which was addressed exclusively to the family [of New York intellectuals] and to anyone else who had read enough to be able to eavesdrop on conversations in the allusive language the family habitually used, Commentary was edited by [Eliot] Cohen with his eye on a more diverse and more far-flung audience. Or, to put the point in a slightly different context, whereas Partisan Review might be said to have been a magazine for “producers” of ideas, Commentary was a magazine for “consumers.”3 Perhaps not surprisingly, I didn’t understand that distinction, and nobody bothered to set me straight when I started writing for Commentary in 1985. Today, though, it is central to the way I write for Commentary. Among other things, I now see that even though he never intended it as such, Greenberg was actually paying the magazine a compliment when he called it “middlebrow.” In the very best sense of that much-misused word, that’s exactly what Commentary was—and is. I grew up in the Age of the Middlebrow, that earnest, self-improving fellow who watched prime-time television documentaries and read the Book of the Month. I was born in a small Midwestern town in 1956, the year Dwight Eisenhower was reelected by a landslide, and as far back as I can remember, I was eager to learn what was going on beyond the city limits of my hometown, out in the great world of art and culture. Even though I lived hundreds of miles from the nearest museum, and I didn’t see my first live performance of a ballet until I went off to college, I already knew a little something about people like Jackson Pollock and Jerome Robbins, thanks entirely to such house organs of middlebrow aspiration as Life magazine and The Ed Sullivan Show, and what little I knew made me want to know more. Intellectuals of the Partisan Review stripe were for the most part Terry Teachout 129 deeply suspicious of middlebrows, having beheld the effects of Popular Front Stalinism on American art; they feared, not unreasonably, that any broaching of the dam separating high art from popular culture would lead inexorably to the watering down of the former by the latter. Such views, however, were only possible in a city where high art was on tap twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In my town, it came on television or in the mailbox, and I was...