introduction to modernism, middlebrow and the literary canon

8/11/2019 Introduction to Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon

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INTRODUCTION: GOOD TASTE IN READING

Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon examines the evolution o cul-

tural categories in early- to mid-twentieth-century America through the study othe Modern Library, a cheap reprint series created in New York in 1917. Whilethe Modern Library has been described as a series o highbrow works that gradu-ally became more commercial, I show that it had always published a wide rangeo texts modernist texts by James Joyce, Virginia Wool and Gertrude Stein, butalso detective ction, scientic essays, and novels that we now see as middlebrow.My central argument is that the diversity o the Modern Library exemplies theexibility o cultural categories in the interwar period a exibility that was lostin the 1940s and 1950s when critics called or the separation between high andlow cultural orms. I see the Modern Library as an inuential tastemaker that

participated in the denition o the literary canon, and contributed to the popu-larization o diffi cult writers such as Joyce, Wool and Stein.

When Albert Boni and Horace Liveright created the Modern Library seriesduring the First World War, classics generally meant out-o-copyright worksreprinted in cheap collections. Recent literary works were ofen too expensiveor most working-class and lower-middle-class readers. For instance, when E.P. Dutton published Samuel Butlers Te Way of All Fleshin 1910, it was pricedat $1.50. Workers in printing industries, who were on average more skilled andbetter paid than other workers, would have had to work ve hours to earn thissum.1Ironically, or those workers who manuactured books, contemporary lit-erature remained a luxury good. When Te Way of All Fleshwas reprinted inthe Modern Library in 1917, it was priced at 60 cents putting it within thereach o skilled workers and clerks.2As an affordable series o modern classics,

the Modern Library widened the market or modern literature. By modern lit-erature, I mean works that dealt with the social and economic transormationso the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For a reader in 1917, Oscar

Wilde was a modern and so was H. G. Wells. Both writers appeared in the rstlist o the Modern Library, along with Butler, Hardy, Maupassant, Dostoyevskyand others. Everymans Library, one o the Modern Librarys major competitors,

would wait until 1930 to include Wildes writings. In short, the Modern Library


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2 Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon

was the rst American uniorm series to sell a broadly dened literary modern-ism to a large audience.

Te Modern Library had two main competitive advantages over the London-based Everymans Library : it specialized in recent literary works and it was printedin the United States. I one popular Modern Library title were out o stock, thebookseller would not have to wait long until the next delivery. As Jay Sattereldhas shown, the identity o the Modern Library was rooted in New York City. 3Beore creating the series with Liveright, Boni had opened a bookstore in Green-

wich Village, which became a amiliar place or bohemians. Bennett Cer andDonald Kloper, who bought the Modern Library in 1925 and ounded RandomHouse two years later, were both born in New York and educated at ColumbiaUniversity. Like Liveright and Boni, Cer and Kloper belonged to a new gen-eration o Jewish publishers who did not hesitate to publish controversial textsrejected by the more traditional publishing houses.4Te owners o the ModernLibrary strove to create an image o elegant modernity or their brand. In theinterwar period, the Modern Library combined an aura o New York glamour andintellectual sophistication with a very affordable price. Te colophon designed byLucian Bernhard showed a leaping torchbearer, which symbolized the modernspirit o the series. Te list included French, German, Italian, Irish, Russian, Nor-

wegian, Swedish, along with British and American writers.By the late 1920s, the Modern Library had become a leader in book produc-

tion. None o its competitors offered the same mix o affordability, distinction

and modernity, along with an extensive distribution network. As Sattereldpoints out, a Grosset & Dunlap reprint was simply an inexpensive version o theoriginal title, while the Modern Library was designed to be something more,an entity beyond the original work, as an integral part o a recognizable series

with its own established reputation or excellence.5Te Knop Pocket Booksseries was well produced and cheap, but lacked both the Modern Librarys dis-tribution system and advertising budget.6 And Everymans Library was simplynot modern enough to threaten the Modern Librarys unique positioning. InMarch 1928, an advertisement inPublishers Weeklycelebrated the expansion othe series: 497,127 sales in 1927 a gain o 107,532 over 1926. At the bottomo the page, the Modern Librarys ambition or 1928 appeared in capital letters:OWARDS OUR MILLION-A-YEAR GOAL.7Te Modern Library thus

combined a distinguished list with a erce determination to seize commercialopportunities and increase its market share.

Although Cer and Kloper marketed their series as a sophisticated NewYork product, they also developed an extensive distribution network acrossthe country. In 1929, or instance, bookshops in Albuquerque, New Mexico,reported Modern Library sales o $256.26 an important amount or a city thathad ewer than 50,000 inhabitants according to the 1930 US census.8While the


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Introduction 3

Modern Library was sold in smaller cities across the country as well as in largeurban centres, most o the American book trade remained concentrated in majorcities on the East Coast. In his 1931 survey o the book industry, Orion HowardCheney, a retired New York City banker, strongly criticized the overconcentra-tion and inadequacy o the distribution system. Over 33,000,000 people were

without access to an adequate book outlet, Cheney observed.9Some publish-ers hoped to tap into this neglected market. In the late 1920s and early 1930s,reprint series such as Blue Ribbon Books, the Star Dollar series, and the SunDial Library all distributed cheap books through drugstores and news-standsin Americas rural and semi-rural areas. Te owners o the Modern Library werereluctant to make a similar push, in part because selling their books in drug-stores risked damaging the distinguished image o their series. James Crowder,

who handled the Midwest distribution o the series, told Cer that the ModernLibrary is very essentially a big town series.10For Crowder, the Modern Libraryappealed to a more rened readership than the other reprint series. Tis viewinuenced the distribution, but also the advertising strategy o the series. Forexample, Kloper reused to advertise in a mass-market magazine such as the

Literary Digest. Modern Library books are o a different caliber than both Starand Blue Ribbon, or any o the other successul advertising stunts in the Digest,Kloper wrote. He preerred advertising in newspapers such as the New Yorkimesto target the actual book-reader o literary merit.11

Te Modern Librarys sophisticated image, its cosmopolitanism and its

emphasis on high modernism and other diffi cult works have led Jay Sattereldto describe the series as a highbrow product sold to a large audience: the seriesoffered a orm o culture that combined highbrow ideals with lowbrow com-mercial sense.12According to Sattereld,

once established in Te Modern Library o the Worlds Best Books a book promisedboth to stimulate and amuse; skillul marketing, careul selection, and close attentionto packaging contrived to suggest that it was no longer highbrow literature onlyor the intellectual elite, but quality literature sure to please a substantial audience.13

Sattereld rightly insists on Cer s and Klopers business acumen and on theirsuccessul transormation o the Modern Library into a brand. Like the Book-o-the-Month Club, whose early advertisements ocused on the name o the club

itsel rather than on individual authors and titles,14

Modern Library advertise-ments ostered brand-name recognition.15Customers were invited to trust that allbooks included in the Modern Library were classics, and thereore worth reading.However, Sattereld pays little attention to the ways classics were manufacturedin the Modern Library. He seems to take or granted that the series publishedquality modernist works during its rst feen or twenty years o existence, beorelosing its editorial ocus.16Similarly, Gordon Neavill argues that in the 1930s, the


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Modern Library started to publish lesser works such as Pearl Bucks Te GoodEarth, Edna Ferbers Show Boat and Dorothy Caneld Fishers Te DeepeningStream, which gave the Modern Library a more middlebrow appeal than it hadhad beore.17Here, middlebrow is used in a derogatory sense to describe com-mercially oriented works o average, rather than notable, quality.

In act, the Modern Library had always published a broad selection o texts.For example, the 1919 list includedBest Ghost Stories(number 73 in the series),alongside MaupassantsLove and Other Stories(number 72) and DowsonsPoems& Prose(number 74). Tat same year, the Modern Library publishedA Modern

Book of Criticism, which included essays by Arnold Bennett, George BernardShaw, Anatole France and others. Readers were encouraged to see all ModernLibrary books as equally good. You can stand beore a shel o these books, shut

your eyes, and pick the right one every time, declared a blurb rom the ChicagoNewsreproduced in an early advertisement.18In the late 1920s and early 1930s,the Modern Library published Fourteen Great Detective Stories and Joyces A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Steins Tree Livesand Bucks Te GoodEarth. Tese books were produced in a uniorm physical ormat, displayed as acoherent library, and marketed as modern ction o recognized merit.19Adver-tisements drew a parallel between the quality o Modern Library books and thedistinction o their readers: there is no better proo o good taste in reading,than a thorough knowledge o the titles included in this enduring series.20Myobjective is thereore to recover a orgotten moment in the history o modern-

ism the moment when high modernist texts were suffi ciently attractive to bereprinted in a cheap series, but had not yet been dissociated rom lesser works.In his inuential analysis o the antagonism between high culture and mass

culture, Andreas Huyssen has argued that

the discourse o the Great Divide has been dominant primarily in two periods, rst inthe last decades o the 19thcentury and the rst ew years o the 20th, and then againin the two decades or so ollowing World War II.21

erms such as highbrow and lowbrow, which originated in phrenology, thusappeared at the turn o the century to designate radically different human types.Highbrow described intellectual or aesthetic superiority, while lowbrowreerred to someone or something that lacked taste and renement.22When the

story o the Modern Library begins, such terms had not disappeared, but theyhad become more exible. Instead o structuring the cultural landscape in termso hierarchy, American critics imagined a variety o cultural subelds that sharedsimilar characteristics. For example, Dashiell Hammetts Te Maltese Falcon

was ofen compared to the work o Ernest Hemingway and other modernistwriters. As we will see in Chapter 4, a much more elitist conception o cultureprevailed in Britain, where the term middlebrow appeared in the 1920s. Te


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Introduction 5

B.B.C. claim to have discovered a new type, the middlebrow, declared thesatirical magazine Punch, It consists o people who are hoping that some daythey will get used to the stuff they ought to like.23Middlebrow, in its originalsense, described someone with high intellectual or aesthetic aspirations, but wholacked the cultural capital necessary to understand high art.

Te term ollowed different trajectories in the UK and in the USA, and I useit in this book to reer to a position in the literary eld between high and lowcultures. As Catherine Keyser puts it, the term middlebrow reerred perhapsmore clearly to mass-market venues and middle-class audiences than to ormalcharacteristics o literary style.24Keyser gives the examples o Vanity Fairand the

New Yorkeras American middlebrow enterprises, magazines that popularized theinnovations o literary and artistic modernism even as they promoted bourgeoisstatus and consumer pleasure.25 Likewise, the Modern Library can be seen as amiddlebrow institution that sold modern literary texts to a large audience. While

Joan Shelley Rubin and Janice Radway have dened the middlebrow in the USAas an autonomous cultural sphere hostile to literary experiments, my study showsthat middlebrow producers played an ambiguous role, trying to explain diffi cultliterature to their middle-class audiences while also developing an identity o theirown by engaging with the mass market and the new celebrity culture. O course,middlebrow is always a problematic term, not only because o its instability, butalso because o the pejorative connotation attached to it, amously exemplied by

Wool s essay Middlebrow collected in Te Death of the Moth. Yet, it is perhaps

the best way to describe institutions that, in rysh raviss words, offered to medi-ate literary culture or modern audiences in need o guidance.26

Afer the Second World War, the role o guidance o the Modern Librarybecame increasingly contested. Many scholars and critics saw the series as amass-market enterprise that ailed to make any distinction between high cultureand mass culture. In the work o Dwight Macdonald and others, mass culture

was manuactured by a small elite o cultural producers and sold to the masses,in an effort to control and manipulate them. Unlike popular culture, createdby the people or their own consumption, mass culture circulated rom top tobottom and catered to the lowest level denominator. For post-war critics, it wasessential to preserve high culture rom the contamination o these debased cul-tural products. Te inuence o New Criticism led to a conception o literary

modernism as a diffi cult movement accessible only to a handul o proessionallytrained (male) critics, as opposed to a eminized mass culture. Literary modern-ism became associated with the experimental prose and poetry o . S. Eliot,Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis (emale writers such as Virginia

Wool and Gertrude Stein were rarely mentioned). Te New Critics not onlydened literary modernism as an object o study, they also developed a method-ology that ocused on the text itsel rather than the social and historical context.


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In a 1951 essay published in the Kenyon Review, Cleanth Brooks distinguishedbetween the ormalist criticism practised by New Critics and the more amateur,and more human criticism, which is ourishing in the class room presidedover by the college lecturer o inectious enthusiasm, in the gossipy Book-o-the-Month Club bulletins, and in the columns o the Saturday Review of Literature.27Like other New Critics, Brooks saw criticism and its object o study, literarymodernism, as radically hostile to mass culture and its institutions.

In the past twenty years, however, literary critics have paid more attention tothe relationship between modernist texts and the marketplace.28In his inuen-tialInstitutions of Modernism(1998), Lawrence Rainey has presented the littlemagazine and the limited edition as key institutions that mediated the diffusiono literary modernism. Te main ocus o his research has been on the

development o a particular set o institutions which were essential to modernist pro-duction the little reviews, the deluxe editions, a corpus o patron-collectors andinvestors, and specic groups o smaller publishers such as Alred Knop, HoraceLiveright, and Ben Huebsch.29

Raineys analysis o small-scale institutions that targeted a tiny audience o con-noisseurs was ollowed by important works on little magazines (Morrisson,Churchill and McKible, Brooker and Tacker) and on small presses such as theHogarth Press (Southworth, Willson-Gordon). However, larger-scale insti-tutions such as trade publishers and commercial magazines have been largely

under-studied. One reason or this neglect is that these commercial institutionsdid not specialize in what we now call modernism. For example, Vanity Fairpublished Gertrude Steins poems, alongside a wide range o textual and visualmaterials, including gossip and pictures o celebrities.30Tis mix o high andlow cultural orms has ofen perplexed the ew scholars o modernism who have

paid attention to these institutions. Catherine urner and Jay Sattereld havethus described Random House and the Modern Library series as publishingenterprises that brought modernist works to the mainstream, but modernismis taken as a sel-evident category restricted to canonical writers such as Joyce,

Wool and Stein. At the time when Random House and the Modern Librarypublished those writers, however, the canon o modernist writings had not yetbeen xed, and these publishing enterprises also brought out many works that we

now see as middle- to lowbrow. It is thereore important to recover the culturalcontext in which modernism rst appeared, beore the post-war establishmento a rigid hierarchy between the high and the low.

In addition to modernist and middlebrow studies, I draw on book historyand print culture studies, which can be dened as the history o the creation, dis-semination and reception o printed texts. In particular, there has been a renewalo interest in uniorm series o classics and their role in shaping the literary canon(Rose, Hammond, Friskney, Spiers, Howsam). As John Guillory notes, the use


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Introduction 7

o the term canon in literary studies is relatively recent. Until the 1970s, it wasstill possible to discuss what we call canon ormation exclusively by reerenceto the word classic.31In their analyses o Everymans Library and the Oxord

Worlds Classics series, Jonathan Rose and Mary Hammond point to the com-mercial interests that underlined the selection o texts in uniorm series. Teclassic was never a xed category: certain texts were included because they werecheap to produce and sold in large quantities, not because they were greaterthan others. Te whole economy o the publishers series depended on copy-right laws. For example, Everymans Library was created at the time when thecopyrights o the Great Victorians were expiring.32Tis conception o the liter-ary canon as an ever-evolving phenomenon originates in the canon wars o the1980s and 1990s. While Matthew Arnold amously viewed the canon as thebest that has been thought and said, Jane ompkins and others have describedliterary reputation as a historical construction dependent on the social, politicaland commercial interests o the time.33As Lawrence Schwartz argues, in everyera, there are many excellent writers who never achieve widespread recognition,

while there are also writers who achieve some measure o literary success in oneperiod but nd themselves set aside in another.34 Likewise, I see the literarycanon as a historically constructed entity, shaped by institutions such as univer-sity departments and trade publishers.

o understand the position o the Modern Library in the American literaryeld, it is important to address the question o taste and cultural categories in the

early twentieth century. What did terms such as highbrow and lowbrow meanin the rst hal o the century? Was the Modern Library similar to the Book-o-the-Month Club and other middlebrow institutions described by Joan ShelleyRubin and Janice Radway? How could the Modern Library be marketed as bothcheap and distinguished?

For the historian Lawrence Levine, the great divide between highbrow andlowbrow appeared in America in the last decades o the nineteenth century.Earlier in the century, Americans shared a public culture less hierarchically organ-ized, less ragmented into relatively rigid adjectival boxes than their descendants

were to experience later.35Art orms such as Shakespearean drama, symphonicmusic, opera and the ne arts were simultaneously popular and elite.36 In the1880s and 1890s, however, things started to change. Appalled by the behav-

iour o newly arrived immigrants and working classes in public spaces (theatres,music halls, opera houses, museums, parks, airs, and the like), the elite estab-lished rules and systems o taste that preserved their own cultural predilections.Cultural orms that had previously been shared moved rom entertainment toerudition, rom the property o Everyman to the possession o a more elitecircle.37In other words, the establishment used cultural categories to enorce lawand order, isolating disorderly lowbrows rom law-abiding citizens.


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Levines vision o a late-nineteenth-century sacralization o culture38 hasbeen extremely inuential, but it has also been criticized or its populism high-brow bad, lowbrow good, in Jonathan Freedmans phrase.39Following Freedman,I argue that a middle ground between high and low art orms and attitudes toculture started to appear in the USA in the 1880s and early 1890s. As Freedmansuggests, the middlebrow emerged with the rise o new proessional/managerialclasses in both England and America and with the concomitant rise o a cultureincreasingly attuned to the ethos o consumption.40For the doctors, lawyers,businessmen and other members o the new elite, participation in the emergentconsumer society was not enough. Tese proessional/managerial classes soughtincreasingly to legitimize themselves by invoking the authority o taste, aesthet-ics, and culture.41Te turn o the century thus saw the emergence o cultural

producers who specialized in explaining high art to aspiring middle classes.Among these new producers were publishing houses, which brought out

guidebooks to sel-improvement. For example, in 1898, Doubleday & McClurepublishedHow to Study Shakespeare, a handbook aimed at the growing numbero reading clubs. Te author o the introduction mentioned one club in Bostonmade up o clergymen, teachers (including college proessors), lawyers, editors,and other cultivated people.42How to Study Shakespearegave advice to those

who were anxious to appear cultivated and at ease within the social environ-ment o the reading club. Owning editions o Shakespeare was not enough; thenew members o the elite needed to master the ways to speak about Shakespeare

and to read the plays aloud. Te introduction thus describes the transormationo a wealthy man, rom philistine (he has many editions o Shakespeare in hislibrary, which he never reads) to sophisticated art lover.43With time, effort anda guidebook, anybody could learn how to show taste and culture, and to reachsocial success. In Freedmans phrase, this recalibration o social position throughthe experience o culture was absolutely central to the new middlebrow ethos.44

Although the term middlebrow did not appear until the 1920s, Freedmansituates the great era o the cultural how-to kit in the 1890s. 45In Teory of the

LeisureClass(rst published in 1899 and reprinted in the Modern Library in1934), Torstein Veblen amously suggested that, or the upper classes and thoseaspiring to belong to the elite, conspicuous leisure and consumption served toattain and maintain social status. Veblen insisted on the importance o educa-

tion in taste and discrimination: Closely related to the requirement that thegentleman must consume reely and o the right kind o goods, there is therequirement that he must know how to consume them in a seemly manner.46In a context where lower groups could appropriate existing positional goods,knowledge became essential: knowledge o desirable products, their social andcultural value, and how to use them appropriately. As Mike Featherstone puts it,the increasing supply o symbolic goods posed a challenge or aspiring groups,


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Introduction 9

engaged in a struggle to convey the appropriate signals through their consump-tion activities. Hence, the demand grew or cultural intermediaries dedicatedto giving advice on the choice o marker goods and provid[ing] the necessaryinterpretations on their use.47

Paradoxically, the rise o these middlebrow intermediaries in the Americancontext seems to have gone largely unnoticed by contemporaries. Lets take theexample o Charles Eliots Five-Foot Shel o Books, launched in 1909. ProessorEliot was at the end o a distinguished career as Harvard President when he signeda contract with Collier & Son to edit fy volumes marketed as Harvard Classics.As the advertisements proclaimed, the aim o the series was to give a good liberaleducation to any serious reader. With its emphasis on great books, Eliots series

was a orerunner to the Modern Library. One advertisement or the Harvard Clas-sics, kept in the Random House records at Columbia Rare Book & ManuscriptLibrary, promised to solve reading problems and bring success: the ability toget things done, to persuade and convince others, depends very largely upon yourbreadth o mind, upon your power to probe or real causes, and this breadth and

power come rom contact with GREA BOOKS.48Tis advertisement illustrateswhat Richard Wightman Fox and . J. Jackson Lears have called the emergingtherapeutic ethos o sel-realization.49At the turn o the century, advertisementsmoved away rom a simple description o the goods, to the promise that the

product would contribute to the buyers physical, psychic, or social well-being.50Consumers were thus encouraged to buy the Harvard Classics to increase their

condence and social status. Similarly, in 1917, one o the rst advertisementsor Boni & Liverights series proclaimed: Te Modern Library appeals to peoplewho consider good books a necessity, not a luxury.People are judged by the booksthey read (emphasis in the original). Readers were promised that the worlds bestbooks would shape their taste and their personality.51Tese advertisements orthe Harvard Classics and the Modern Library revealed the main characteristics othe new middlebrow ethos: the emphasis on education, the ideal o sel-improve-ment, and the explicit link between culture and social success.

Yet, contemporary critics such as John Jay Chapman denounced the HarvardClassics as a lowbrowenterprise threatening highbrow ideals. In a 1909 letter

published in Science, Chapman wrote: the men who control Harvard to-dayare very little else than business men, running a large department store which

dispenses education to the million.52

He opposed this sordid business to anenlightened vision o education:

For what purpose does a university exist except to be a guide to the people in truescholarship, to be a light and not a alse beacon to the hal-educated, to be a touch-stone and a sae counselor to those who honor learning and who desire to be ledtoward her?53


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For Chapman, education and art belonged to the higher spheres o the mind andhad to be preserved rom the corrupting inuence o business. However, he alsorecognized the emergence o new audiences or culture and art: Tese hordeso well-meaning people, uneducated and yet hungry or education, are apt tobelieve what any clever person tells them.54Chapman, who had graduated romHarvard, ridiculed the nave newcomers who believed Proessor Eliots prom-ise that feen minutes o reading a day suffi ced to become a cultured man. InChapmans words, these people require to be spoon-ed and to be shown thatculture is easy.55Tis kind o argument anticipated the anti-middlebrow rheto-ric o the 1920s described by Janice Radway. But in 1909, the space betweenhigh- and lowbrow had not yet been exposed as a colonizable space.56

Like Chapman, other critics o the early twentieth century described thecultural landscape in terms o high and low. Unlike Chapman, however, somedeplored the rigid separation between these two extremes. In 1911, George San-tayana gave a talk entitled Te Genteel radition in American Philosophy at theUniversity o Caliornia. He provocatively presented America as a divided nation,a young country with an old mentality.57America has shown the dynamism o a

young mind in matters such as invention and industry and social organization.58But in all the higher things o the mind in religion, in literature, in the moralemotions it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails. 59Santayanas talk is struc-tured by antitheses: the sky-scraper (home to the American Will) is opposedto the colonial mansion inhabited by the American Intellect.60 Te masculine

sphere o aggressive enterprise is opposed to the genteel tradition dominatedby the American woman.61Santayanas vision o a gendered cultural landscapewas extremely inuential among those intellectuals who ound American culturebackward and provincial. Te term genteel tradition gave a new way o seeingthe perceived lack in artistic achievements by rooting this ailure in a debasedemale sphere. For Santayana, the problem came rom sentimental highbrow writ-ers, not rom the cultural commoner whose mentality comprised the instincts othe native-born, rough-and-ready younger generation, the wellspring o Americaninventiveness.62In short, Santayana appealed or a regeneration o literature, reli-gion and philosophy by the more dynamic segments o American society.

While Santayana used the metaphors o intergenerational oppositions todescribe American society, Van Wyck Brooks did not share the optimistic view

that the young would eventually regenerate the intellectual sphere. Brooks wastwenty-nine years old in 1915 when his essayAmericas Coming-of-Agewas pub-lished under the Huebsch imprint. He described a nation rigidly divided bytwin values, with the cult o high ideals on the one hand and the acceptanceo catchpenny realities on the other: Between university ethics and businessethics, between American culture and American humor, between Good Gov-ernment and ammany, between academic pedantry and pavement slang, thereis no community, no genial middle ground.63


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Introduction 11

As we have seen, a middle ground between the high and the low had, inact, just started to emerge when Brooks wrote his essay. In 1912, James Loebbrought out the Loeb Classical Library, a series o ancient texts and acing-pageEnglish translations. Kevin Sheets has argued that Loebs effort to popularizethe works o antiquity belonged to the new middlebrow culture.64According toSheets, promoters o middlebrow packaged highbrow culture in ways that madeit accessible and palatable to a middling audience o educated consumers.65Di-cult books could indeed become palatable, as the example o the Little LeatherLibrary shows. In 1916, Harry Scherman, a successul advertising manager, per-suaded the Whitman Candy Company to market a Library Package, uniting alarge box o candy with a small, leather-bound Shakespearean play.66Te LittleLeather Library, which had been conceived by Charles and Albert Boni, eventu-ally sold more than 25 million books through drugstores and mail-order sales.Albert Boni soon sold his investment and went on to create the Modern Library,

while Scherman ounded the Book-o-the-Month Club in 1926. For both men,the Little Leather Library offered an experience o marketing classics to themasses an experience that strengthened their expertise o middlebrow culture.

In Te Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), Joan Shelley Rubin exploresthe development o a new space between high- and lowbrow in the Americanliterary eld o the rst hal o the twentieth century. Focusing on the biogra-

phies o several middlebrow gures, Rubin traces their common inuences andnotes that Harry Scherman, John Erskine and others perpetuated the genteel

tradition in their conception o literature, while also embracing the marketingtechniques characteristic o the new consumer society. Teir genteel belie inaesthetic training presumed the capacity o all readers, once trained, to graspthe elements o literary style and accorded them a basic right to have their livesenriched in so doing.67Henry Seidel Canby, a Book-o-the-Month Club judgeand ormer academic, thus avoured books that he believed were both readableand inormative. Te novels he was most pleased to have selected included EdnaFerbers Show Boat, Clarence DaysLife with Father, as well as Marjorie KinnanRawlingss Te Yearling.68Tese three books were later included in the ModernLibrary (respectively in 1935, 1944 and 1946). Contrary to the Modern Library,however, the Book-o-the-Month Club eschewed American writers suspect omoral anarchy (Hemingway, Dos Passos) as well as European modernist writers:

there is no Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats, or any o the other exponents o the moderntradition.69Indeed, the Book-o-the-Month Club appealed to the general reader,

who avoured realistic novels and shied away rom ormal experiments and con-troversial subjects. Tese conservative values would later inuence the PeoplesChoice, the book club o the Sears, Roebuck and Co. mail-order catalogue,

which only selected amily-riendly books.70

In contrast, the Modern Librarys imagined readers were students, intellectu-als and businessmen with more adventurous tastes. Te owners o the Modern


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Library played a subtle game: i they published works deemed too experimentalor risqu, some readers would eel shocked and alienated; i, on the other hand,they erred on the side o conservatism, they risked losing the competitive advan-tage that differentiated the series rom Everymans Library and Oxord WorldsClassics. Te Modern Library was thus marketed as the civilized minorityschoice, rather than as the peoples choice.71

While the Modern Library selected many modernist works, the Book-o-the-Month Club treated high modernism as a niche product unsuitable or itsmain audience. Following Rubin, Radway points to the Book-o-the-MonthClubs seeming rejection o the avant-garde: literary modernism is conspicu-ously absent rom the list o books the judges recommended as appropriate to alarge general audience.72However, Radway notes that many books by Faulkner,Stein, Wool and Joyce were included in the list o recommended alternates andrequently marked as titles or people with special tastes.73As Radway puts it,

middlebrow culture constituted itsel implicitly, and sometimes quite explicitly, inopposition to both emerging literary modernism and the avant-garde and to thegrowth o an institutionalized, more thoroughly proessionalized group o literaryspecialists, some employed by highbrow magazines, others in the ast-developing uni-

versity English departments.74

Radway thus rejects the traditional claim that middlebrow culture servilely imi-tates the value and aesthetics o high culture. Instead, it appears as a kind ocounterpractice to the high culture tastes and proclivities that have been mostinsistently legitimated and nurtured in academic English departments.75 Rad-

way suggests that this critique proved particularly effective in the 1920s andcreated a new constellation o tastes, preerences, and desires. 76

Although Radway tends to present middlebrow culture as a separate andautonomous sphere, the presence o Henry Seidel Canby and Dorothy CaneldFisher among the judges o the Book-o-the-Month Club shows that the bound-ary between high- and middlebrow was easily crossable. Canby had earned a PhDin English at Yale University and worked as a university instructor rom 1900 to1916. Fisher, whose ather was a college proessor, received her doctoral degreerom Columbia University in 1904. Both Canby and Fisher then drifed awayrom academia. Canby became the editor o theLiterary Review, a weekly supple-

ment o theNew York Evening Post, and later co-ounded the Saturday Review ofLiterature. Fisher started a career as a writer, and rose to ame with the publicationo Te Brimming Cup (1921). Whereas Canby and Fisher were certainly criticalo the narrow specialization o academic scholarship, their own emphasis on edu-cation and learning made it diffi cult to turn their back entirely on academia. AsRadway recognizes, Fishers position marked her as a emale literary sage whocould mediate between various cultures.77Like Erskine, who implemented a great


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Introduction 13

books curriculum at Columbia University afer the First World War, Canby andFisher used their academic credentials to deend an alternative view o educa-tion, generalist rather than specialized. As Gerald Graff has shown, the conictbetween critics and scholars was a major characteristic o English departmentsbetween and afer the war.78 In other words, there was no homogeneous high-brow/academic sphere against which the middlebrow ethos could develop.

Te Modern Library, which sold modernist texts to the academic market andeagerly embraced the authority o proessional literary specialists, exemplies theoverlaps between high- and middlebrow cultures. Indeed, Modern Library editorsrelied on the authority o academics to increase the aura o their series. Te all1925 catalogue thus presented the Modern Library as an educational institution:Purposeul reading is taking the place o miscellaneous dabbling in literature, andTe Modern Library is being daily recommended by notable educators as a repre-sentative library o modern thought.79Although the Modern Library legitimizeditsel by invoking the authority o taste and culture, it generally reprinted bestsell-ers and stayed away rom books that could only appeal to a ew intellectuals.

In Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity (2009), KarenLeick observes that writers like James Joyce and Virginia Wool were requentlymentioned by popular columnists and were very well-known public gures,even celebrities, in the 1920s and 1930s.80 Similarly, Stein became an Ameri-can celebrity in the 1920s because mainstream periodicals closely ollowed

what was happening in the literary sphere, including the world o little maga-

zines. Te Modern Library editors understood that modern literature, even inits most experimental orms, could appeal to a large audience precisely becausemodernist writers were renowned gures ofen discussed in mainstream media.According to Leick, the celebrity o modernist writers even attracted the atten-tion o book-clubs: Virginia Wool s Flushwas one o the dual selections othe Book-o-the-Month Club in October 1933 and Steins Autobiography of

Alice B. oklaswas the September 1933 selection o the Literary Guild.81

Leick rightly criticizes Radways rigid separation between modernist andmiddlebrow cultures, but she also tends to exaggerate the overlaps between thetwo cultural spheres.Flushand Te Autobiography of Alice B. oklaswere ar lessexperimental than, or instance, o the Lighthouseand Tree Lives. Middlebrowinstitutions mostly avoided works that displayed, in Rita Felskis words, ormally

sel-conscious, experimental, [and] antimimetic eatures.82

While the Book-o-the-Month Club viewed consumers who enjoyed literary modernism as a nichemarket, the Modern Library did not relegate experimental texts to the margins oits list. On the contrary, the Modern Library was marketed as a non-conormistseries o classics, and made timid attempts to publish women (Virginia Wool andKatherine Manseld among others), Blacks (An Anthology of American Negro Lit-erature, with a preace by the Marxist critic V. F. Calverton was published in 1929)


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and non-Western texts. For instance, Some Chinese Ghosts, by the naturalized Japa-nese writer Lacadio Hearn, joined the series in 1927.

Middlebrow writers such as Buck, Ferber and Fisher were also well repre-sented in the Modern Library. As Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith haveshown, these writers were successulandrespected literary gures in the interwar

period. For example, Edna Ferber obtained the Pulitzer Prize or So Bigin 1925.Like other middlebrow writers, Ferber successully made transitions betweenliterature and the burgeoning technologies o magazine publication, book clubs,advertising, radio, and lm, institutions that deliberately targeted middleaudiences or maximum distribution and prot.83Her novel Show Boat, pub-lished in 1926 by Doubleday, was adapted in a Broadway musical, a movie anda weekly radio programme (the Show Boat Hour) beore joining the ModernLibrary in 1935 just in time or the release o a second movie in 1936. JeromeKern, the composer who had written the successul musical, contributed a ore-

word to the Modern Library edition. Moreover, a note on the author o ShowBoat described Ferbers novels as best sellers that we may be proud o : Show

Boat, Cimarronand So Bigpossess genuine literary quality; they are pictures oAmerican lie.84Te editor Belle Becker apparently elt that Modern Libraryreaders needed reassurance on the literary merit o Show Boat a novel thatovertly participated in the mass culture o the 1920s and 1930s. Te note also

presented Ferber as an incarnation o the American dream: born in Kalamazoo,Michigan, and educated in Appleton, Wisconsin, Ferber now lives in a abulous

Park Avenue penthouse, makes abulous sums rom her plays, short stories, andnovels, and is constantly surrounded by all the most abulously clever people inNew York. Te repetition o abulous conveyed the sense o a mythical worldo wealth, success, taste and culture. One could be abulous only in New York, acity associated with modernity, sophistication and creativity.

As a series that commodied this glamorous metropolitan idea, the ModernLibrary occupied a similar position to smart magazines such as Vanity Fairand the

New Yorker. George Douglas has shown that the smart magazines appeal was to some assumed class o sophisticated readers.85As a 1924 prospectus declared,theNew Yorkerwas not edited or the old lady in Dubuque but or persons whohave a metropolitan interest.86Vanity Fairalso sought to appeal to sophisticatedreaders, by publishing a mix o commercial and avant-garde writings. In short,

smart magazine editors and middlebrow writers assumed that audiences couldenjoythe collision o different levels o cultural pleasure. 87Te term New Yorkmiddlebrow88 gives a sense o this ambiguous position between high and lowcultural spheres, and could apply to the smart magazines but also to the ModernLibrary. It reconciles the sophisticated urban image o the Modern Library, its

proclaimed modernity and its cosmopolitanism on the one hand, with the mid-dlebrow cultural pedagogy that is so central to this collection on the other hand.


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Introduction 15

Te Modern Library shared three main characteristics with the smart maga-zines: an emphasis on cultural pedagogy, a collision o different cultural tastes,and a participation in the emerging celebrity culture. First, the Modern Libraryreassured anxious readers that all books published in the series were the worldsbest books. Readers who preerred Ferber to Joyce did not have to eel guilty,as both writers were on the Modern Library list and both were presented asequally good. For those who had little condence in their ability to identiy thebest books, the Modern Library played the role o a benevolent guide, and didnot lose its prestige or applying the word classic to recent bestsellers. In act,the diversity o the Modern Library was seen as the trademark o the series. A1928 review in Calvertons Modern Quarterlydeclared: there is a degree osauciness, a thumbing o noses, in a collection o books that includes titles sodiverse as a detective story by the Baroness Orczy and Walter PatersMarius the

Epicurean.89Te reviewer saw this recklessness as one o the hall marks o theModern Library, a series he described as civilized and indispensable.90 Tisreview, published at the time when the Modern Library had just released Four-teen Great Detective Storiesand A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, showsthat the Modern Librarys diversity was associated with sophisticated eccentric-ity rather than commercial opportunism.

In addition to this emphasis on diversity and cultural pedagogy, the Mod-ern Library also shared the smart magazines participation in celebrity culture.Cer, who was in charge o the marketing o the series, was himsel ascinated

with celebrity: he was briey married to the Hollywood actress Sylvia Sidneyand his second wie was Ginger Rogerss cousin and a ormer child actress. In theearly 1930s, at the time when the advertising trade press recommended inject-ing motion picture drama into the photographic picture,91the Modern Librarystarted eaturing movie stars in its advertisements. In 1934, or example, anadvertisement showed a photograph o Rosamond Pinchot, amous actress andniece o Governor Pinchot o Pennsylvania. Pinchot, who held a copy o LionFeuchtwangersPowerin her hands, was described as an ardent Modern Libraryan (Figure I.1).92Te juxtaposition o style, beauty and intellect created a strik-ing narrative what Lears has called a able o abundance. Te Modern Library

promised its readers that they could belong to the upper levels o society eveni they could spend no more than 95 cents on a book.


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Figure I.1: Advertisement for the Modern Library,Harpers Magazine,c. 1934, box 37, BC. Reproduced courtesy of Jonathan Cerf.

In the interwar period, then, the Modern Library created a successul brandstory, which offered a robust and strategically innovative route out o the deadzone o being seen as just a commodity.93Te Modern Library established a set-ting and characters or the story: intellectuals, artists and glamorous actresses all

played a role in its branded story country, New York City.94For example, a 1935article in thePalm Beach Postreported that the actress Miriam Hopkins boughta complete set o the 215 Modern Library books and the 22 Giants put outby the company or the library o her new home in Sutton Place. Hopkins wasnot the only one to look or a quick way o building up snooty looking bookshelves: Other purchasers o the ull sets include George Gershwin, Harold

Ross o theNew Yorker, and Gilbert W. Gabriel, the critic.95In the mid-1930s,the Modern Library was associated with Sutton Place, one o the most affl uentenclaves in Manhattan, and with the trendiest intellectuals and artists.

Tis book is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 ocuses on the juxtapositiono novels by H. G. Wells and scientic texts in the series. Te inclusion o Wellss

Ann Veronica and ono-Bungay, alongside collections o essays on Darwiniantheory and other aspects o modern science, highlights the daring positioning


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Introduction 17

o the Modern Library. Unlike other publishers series, the Modern Library didnot hesitate to tackle controversial subjects, including womens emancipation,sexuality, reproduction and eugenics. Chapter 2 argues that the Modern Librarycontributed to Sherwood Andersons entry into the literary canon while he wasstill alive. It looks at the ways in which the Modern Library marketed Wines-burg, OhioandPoor Whiteto a large audience o teachers and students. It alsoexamines the effect o the Modern Library editions on Andersons reputationafer the Second World War. Chapter 3 studies the mix o high modernism anddetective ction in the Modern Library. It takes the example oFourteen Great

Detective Storiesand JoycesA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(both addedin 1928) to show that the Modern Library made no difference between highand low cultural orms. Te act that both books were produced in the sameormat, advertised in the same periodicals and reviewed simultaneously high-lights the exibility o cultural categories in the interwar period. Chapter 4looks at another book included in the Modern Library in 1928, Mrs Dalloway,

which included a special introduction by Wool (the only introduction o thiskind she ever wrote). It shows that, while Wool ofen denounced middlebrowculture, she was also eager to communicate with ordinary readers. A middlebrowinstitution such as the Modern Library allowed her to reach a large audience omiddle-class Americans, who might not have read her books in more expensiveeditions. Unlike Wool, Willa Cather resented the Modern Librarys ocus ondemocratization (achieved through low prices or readers, but also low royalty

rates or authors). As Chapter 5 shows, Cather reused to renew the contractor the Modern Library edition oDeath Comes for the Archbishop, and rejectednearly all subsequent offers to reprint her work. Tis sel-exclusion rom thereprint market made it more diffi cult or instructors to teach and study Cathers

writings, thus contributing to her marginalization in the literary canon. Chapter6 examines the changing reception o Faulkners introduction to the ModernLibrary edition o Sanctuary. It argues that the introduction became controver-sial only in the late 1930s, at the time when critics started to divide high culturerom popular works. Te conclusion ocuses on the post-Second World War

period, in particular on Cer s reusal to reprint poems by Ezra Pound in theModern Library. Te ensuing controversy sheds light on the changing image othe Modern Library among post-war intellectuals: once a revered cultural insti-

tution, the series was now denounced as a debased commercial enterprise.Since the Modern Library published such a diverse list, it is a privileged site

to analyse the evolution o the canon o modern literature in mid-twentieth-cen-tury America. Tis is why I ocus on canonical writers such as Joyce, Wool andFaulkner, writers who risk slipping out o the canon such as Sherwood Ander-son, and genre writers such as Dashiell Hammett. Te Modern Library also

published many texts that have been nearly orgotten (including W. H. Hud-


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introduction to modernism, middlebrow and the literary canon

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