Battle of the Brows Transcript

Caroline: On the evening of 17th October 1932, the novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley appeared on BBC radio and launched the latest and loudest attack in a cultural war that had been simmering through much of the 1920s. His talk was titled "To A Highbrow", and in it he argued against the idea that popular, widely-enjoyed literature was ultimately inferior to more complex, challenging work read by a small handful of connoisseurs. Worse, this highbrow elite made the mistake of disdaining books because they were popular, as if the good opinion of the masses alone could ruin a text. Modernists like Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf, he hinted, were especially guilty of promoting this doctrine of literary snootiness.

The following week, another writer — the diarist Harold Nicolson, who was a part of the very modernist set that Priestley deplored — was given the right of reply in a talk he titled "To a Low-Brow". Both essays were eventually published in the press and over the next few years, writers and critics lined up behind their respective barricades to fight it out. Other terms emerged: Priestley urged people to instead become "broadbrows" with wide and eclectic taste, while Virginia Woolf claimed that a far worse fate than being a high or low brow was to be a "middlebrow", forever trapped in the doldrums between the two extremes of culture.

This argument raged right as the golden age of detective fiction was reaching the peak of its popularity during the interwar years, and the humble whodunnit found itself pulled into the fray, too. To an extent, this debate continues to this day, as we still grapple with what constitutes "good" writing and where we should give our precious and finite attention. Almost a century later, it is still worth asking these same questions. Can mystery fiction be a great art form, practised at the top by our best and brightest writers, or is it merely disposable, mass-produced, cheap entertainment, incapable of depth or longevity?

Welcome to the battle of the brows.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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It's the late 1920s and the brows are joined in battle, highbrow versus lowbrow versus middlebrow. Barbs are traded in reviews, essays, diaries and letters. But what do these terms even mean? It's not so easy to be precise about it. These are words that fall into that murky zone of "I'll know it when I see it", rather than being susceptible to precise definitions.

All three can be both adjective and noun: something can be "highbrow" or "lowbrow", but also so can someone — a person who generally espouses that particular taste. You could even add "ism" to the end and make it into a movement, as Aldous Huxley did when he wrote in 1931 that "the snobbery of culture has now to wrestle with an organised and active low-browism".

It's worth bearing in mind that all efforts to define these terms have their origin in cultural anxiety: in a fear of change, of rising literacy rates, of new technology that spread ideas more widely. These are words from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which carry with them the anxieties of that era. In general, "highbrow" is associated with rarefied, intellectually challenging or experimental work, while lowbrow is resolutely approachable and populist.

That's not all these words mean, though. They are derived from some of the darkest and most harmful ideas of this period in time.

Subhadra: Highbrow and lowbrow come from phrenology which is a discredited science. Some people would call it a pseudoscience. I choose not to because in the doings of it in the 19th century, it was done by scientists, it was spoken by scientists and it actually laid the groundwork for a loss in modern neuroscience. So it is pseudo in as much as it's nonsense. It turns out you can't tell anything about a person's character, intelligence or morals by looking at the lumps and bumps and the shape of their head. But for a quite short but influential period in the middle of the 19th century phrenology was a really influential idea. It turns up a lot in literature and it kind of shaped, for want of a better word, this notion that you can tell everything you need to know about a person by looking at them.

What phrenology was really interested in was things like intelligence, and that is where highbrow and lowbrow come from. So if you were a highbrow person, it meant you had a massive forehead that you could put lots of spectacles on because you had such huge brains and that meant that you were so clever. And if you were lowbrow, or if you were furrow brow of pronounced brow ridge, like that kind of neanderthal brow ridge that suggested small brains and sort of cudgel like features and cudgel like thinking.

Caroline: This is Subhadra Das, a writer and historian who specialises in science, particularly the history of scientific racism and eugenics. While Priestley himself was, if anything, an opponent of the ideas that lie behind these words, he still used them freely — an indication of just how entrenched these notions were in the language and politics of the 1930s. The implications of associating the word "brow" with levels of intellectual ability couldn't be plainer.

Subhadra: The phenology bit is the skull mapping. People might be familiar, I think you can even buy them at John Lewis, the beautiful porcelain heads with maps of character on them so that you could take that home and then run your fingers of your own skull to see whether you are particularly amative, or whether you would be a good parent or whether you are very self-centred, you can map that for yourself.

Caroline: This entire branch of quote "science" has some truly grim practices at its heart.

Subhadra: What the skull measurers and head measurers were doing, people like Paul Brocker or Samuel Morton who was working in the States, what they were doing was that they were measuring skulls that had been collected from all over the world, often picked up from battlefields, sometimes from people who did not die of natural causes to have those skulls in those collections. And they were creating racial typologies. And so people might be familiar with, again, horrible images from Nazi concentration camps where people are having their skulls measured because Nazi scientists are trying to categorise them according to what they understand these particular racial categories to be. It's all a nonsense, but it did have very, very bleak implications on people's lives.

Caroline: This is unavoidable context to these three terms: highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow. They're not words I would suggest using today, but they are necessary for understanding the cultural clashes of the 1930s.

Of the three, middlebrow is the hardest to pin down, shifting around as it does subjectively in the liminal space between the two, "betwixt and between" as Virginia Woolf put it, having some pretension to higher qualities while really being of limited cultural value. Often, the middlebrow is defined by what it is not, rather than what it is, or is used as a vehicle for a clever little quip or dig, as in the case of this observation from Punch in 1925: "The BBC claim to have discovered a new type, the 'middlebrow'. It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought to like." Funny, biting, yes, but I'm still left wondering. What is it?

I think it's time to ask an expert.

Tom: I think modernism is really the highbrow. T.S. Eliot, was the kind of king of highbrow in some ways. And that lowbrow is really straight genre fiction. I think detective fiction is an interesting case because so many highbrow people liked detective fiction and would make an exception from their hatred of mass culture to allow detective fiction, as it were. But, westerns, romance novels straight down the line thrillers would all be lowbrow. I don't think detective fiction is always in a kind of privileged position.

Caroline: This is Tom Spencer, a detective novelist himself, as well as a literary scholar who specialises in the middlebrow. When thinking about the middlebrow, he says, it's worth understanding the literary context of the interwar years when these debates were first bubbling up, and when detective fiction was taking over everybody's bookshelves.

Tom: It was an attempt to keep the traditional novel form going in a moment where a high culture was really dominated by modernism and the fragmentation of form, the fragmentation of plots, calling into question traditional notions like character and plot and sentence structure and all that kind of thing. Broadly, according to the claim that the world could only be depicted in this kind of fragmentary way. The world was not conducive to being depicted as nice and orderly and having happy endings and this kind of thing. And the middlebrow, I think, was an attempt to keep going that old notion of the novel.

Caroline: The middlebrow's connection to modernism as a foil is confirmed by the staggered timings of the fiercest moments of the battle of the brows on either side of the Atlantic.

Tom: There were really two battles of the brows as it were. In England, there was a battle of the brows in the press in the 1930s. And in America the term really circulated in the late forties and fifties and going into the sixties. And that coincides with, I think modernism was big in England, in that time, in the twenties and thirties and it was big in America in the fifties. So I think that use of the term middlebrow, originally it was very much in dialogue with modernism. You couldn't really think about middlebrow without thinking about modernism.

Caroline: Returning to our friend J.B. Priestley in 1932 for a moment. He didn't mention the great modernist Virginia Woolf by name in his broadcast, although he did make one slyly punning reference to a "wolf". She, however, felt personally attacked by what he had to say, perhaps in part because just four days before he had published a critical review of her essay collection The Second Common Reader that described her writing as being for "terrifically sensitive, cultured, invalidish ladies with private means". Incensed, she penned a letter to the New Statesman magazine arguing that to be a highbrow or a lowbrow was a healthy, natural state, and that there should be no animus between the two. To be middlebrow, though, like Priestley was regrettable in the extreme. She never sent the letter, but instead later worked it up into an essay of its own, in which she did offer her definition of the despised middlebrow:

"The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige."

Ouch. She also describe the middlebrow as "a mixture of geniality and sentiment stuck together with a sticky slime of calves-foot jelly". In her conception, the middlebrow has no great passion either for life or art, and instead contents themselves with a pale simulation that is neither one nor the other. Woolf certainly scored a hit here.

Tom: The critics who wrote about this stuff might have more sympathy for her than they would for a middlebrow reader. There's a line in Dwight McDonald's essay "Masscult and Midcult". He says something like, let the lowbrows have their lowbrow and the highbrows have their highbrow and don't go gumming up the middle with the middlebrow. It's like the middlebrow was the absolute worst. It was okay to like crap and it was okay in some ways and it was okay to like T.S. Eliot, but it was not okay to like this low culture masquerading as high culture, which was his definition of the middlebrow.

Caroline: A big part of that "gumming up" of the middle has to do with the middlebrow's tendency towards neat narrative arcs and satisfying endings. There's something to be said here for detective fiction's claim to be middlebrow, Tom says. With the possible exception of fairytales, there's no type of story that loves a clean resolution more than a murder mystery.

Tom: I think that it's hard to find a middlebrow novel that doesn't have some sense of closure, neat resolution. Philip Roth wrote an article called "Writing American Fiction" in I think 1961. And he says that the middlebrow is like Matthew Arnold's "On Dover Beach" having a happy ending because the narrator is standing at the window with a woman who understands him, which strikes me as a pretty good definition of the middlebrow.

Caroline: The detective fiction of the interwar years isn't trying to reflect reality. If anything, it's offering an escape from it. It's an experiment in storytelling and entertainment. And this, I think, excludes it from ever being considered highbrow.

Tom: For me, I think it comes down to what you think the role of art is. What used to be the quote unquote highbrow perspective was that the job of art is to tell the truth, to depict the world as truthfully as possible. And then of course where, you get into a situation where is that even possible? Can we even depict anything truthfully, is that a nonsensical notion?

But then that becomes the task of high art, right? To sort of unpick the notion of truthfulness. I think the middlebrow asks its readers to be okay with disavowing their commitment to the truth, right? So that everything doesn't end happily. That if somebody gets murdered, the police might not tie everything up in a bow and justice will be done and the world will be set to rights, but you are still prepared to find pleasure in those kinds of resolutions, those kinds of happy ending.

Caroline: This is what I like about golden age detective fiction a lot of the time. It's also what infuriated a lot of the middlebrow's critics.

Tom: I think that sort of disavowal of the notion of art being truthful and still being able to find pleasure of it is at the heart of people disliking the middlebrow. Especially when the middlebrow purports to be real. That was the big problem with the middlebrow in the early and mid 20th century, that it confuses you. It doesn't hang out its sign saying, I am genre fiction. I am schlock. You don't have to believe in me. It asks you to believe both that the world being portrayed is real and that it isn't at once.

Caroline: Just to confuse the issue, though, detective fiction was not universally condemned by the modernists who argued so ardently against the middlebrow. Shockingly, some of them quite liked it, even.

Tom: There have always been high cultural figures who liked detective fiction. So you're talking about T.S. Eliot, T.S. Eliot wrote favourably about detective fiction. He reviewed detective novels. He gave his play Murder in the Cathedral, kind of Agatha Christie style title.

But there have been other high cultural critics like Edmund Wilson who couldn't stand detective fiction. He wrote an essay in the New Yorker called "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" In which he's just very snooty and snippy about detective fiction and he's launching barbs at these other high cultural critics who have defended detective fiction. It's always had a mixed reception among highbrow folks. That's very much what Edmund Wilson says. He says that people who defend detective fiction are just trying to justify their bad habits.

Caroline: Once again, ouch. Is reading detective fiction simply a bad habit picked up by those who can't be bothered to exert their minds enough to enjoy more complex, experimental literature, yet still want to give off an aura of intelligence? I would argue, no. There are more reasons to read than intellectual improvement or performative posturing.

To engage with the premise of the criticism for a second, though, there is a sense in which detective fiction is formally experimental rather than formulaic, at least some of the time.

Tom: I want to say that maybe unlike romance fiction, detective fiction in the golden age always had a high degree of self-awareness and playfulness about it, generic playfulness. John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man from 1935 has a chapter where the characters all admit that their characters in a novel which seems to be only an extreme example of a kind of self-consciousness that you find in a lot of those golden age novels, where it's all about who can come up with the most ingenious plot. People are always saying things like, oh, this is just like a detective novel in those novels. And I wonder if there's a kind of cerebral-ness about that is not part of the enjoyment in other genre novels like westerns or romance novels.

Caroline: Detective novelists, especially those writing in the 1930s and 1940s, loved to break the fourth wall and bring the reader in on the jokes of their own genre. I don't think that's going to be enough to release it from the prison of the middlebrow, but maybe that's not what we're doing here anyway.

As so many things do, much of this comes back to the aesthetics of the British class system. Here's Subhadra again to explain.

Subhadra: I would argue it's no coincidence that the golden age of detective fiction and the golden age of eugenics are at the same time period. By the time notions of highbrow, lowbrow and in point of fact, middlebrow come into the 19th century, those terms are used less to refer to the actual size and shape of people's heads and more to do with what their cultural pursuits are. It becomes a really classed kind of a thing. And then it becomes how we understand it today, which is that highbrow are the very highfalutin rich people type things, like going to the opera or going to the theatre or reading poetry and that kind of thing, versus lowbrow pursuits like sport and reality television. I've got friends who watch that much reality TV that they could write PhDs about it. So it's not really connected to intellect anymore, but that class implication kind of gives the impression that it is.

So there's two sides to it. One is those terms, highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow. Again, in terms of cultural consumption. So where detective fiction, I think sits in the early bit of the 20th century is probably middle to low. You can think about the Duchess of Denver saying that she's very happy that her maid has a library subscription, but a bit disappointed in her choice of reading material. And the fact that Harriet Vane is a detective writer rather than any other kind of novelist puts her in a slightly different position socially.

Caroline: As a prolific and lifelong reader of detective fiction, and someone who has devoted many years now to its study, you might expect me to make the case for it as a high art form. But I'm not going to, because I don't think it is, really. I say this not to diminish the talent or achievement of anyone who writes it. I simply think that its formulaic conditions, genre rules, repetition of setting and trope, emphasis on neat resolution and lack of interest in experimenting with prose situate it somewhere near the top of the lowbrow, or maybe the bottom of the middle. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. Here's Tom again.

Tom: Personally I think detective fiction is pure entertainment. It's entertainment I like a lot and I like to write it. But I think the cleverness is just a game. It's a pleasurable mental exercise.

Raymond Chandler writes in that essay "The Simple Art of Murder", which is about how noir is much more realistic than golden age, and that fits with the modernist argument about we have to depict the world as falling apart and fragmentary, and there's no justice, there's no peace. The depressing mode of noir is suited to that view of the world. I think.

The idea that it's literature's job to tell the truth in that way seems touchingly naive. That we're so media literate, we're so trope literate, we're so exhausted by the dystopian nature of the actual world. I feel like maybe we just want to dissociate and read cosy mysteries instead.

Caroline: What I will do my best to convince you of, though, is that this performative obsession with categorisation doesn't really matter at all. Returning to the definitions of those words for a moment: highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow. If you look them up in the dictionary, every single one carries the qualifier "disparaging" or "derogatory". In addition to their racist and eugenicist overtones, every one of these terms is generally used as a way to put someone else down and ridicule what they enjoy. To me that feels counterproductive and, frankly, mean.

I think the true winner of the battle of the brows is the person who recognises the ridiculousness of the whole debate. There is no such thing, really, as a highbrow or a lowbrow.

Tom: I think in reality people are more complex than critics like to give them credit for. So I think, one can have lowbrow taste in one moment and highbrow taste in another moment. If you're getting on a plane, you might want to read a lowbrow novel, but if you are sitting at home in your armchair, you might want to read, something more challenging. People are not only one kind of consumer.

Caroline: We're all much more nuanced and interesting than these categories make us seem. I like different kinds of art for different occasions and I get different things from them, depending on how I feel or who I am at that moment. I bet you do too.

So, perhaps J.B. Priestley was right all along, all the way back in 1932. I think we can happily dispense with his regrettably brow-based term "broadbrow", but the approach he was advocating for still has plenty to recommend it. Rather than following fashion in either direction — he brilliantly called the supplication to prevalent trends being "hag-ridden by convictions" — he argued for devoting time to developing one's own critical faculties and always thinking independently about art. The person of no fixed brow, he said, "looks at things simply and steadily and asks himself if they have any value". Being cultured is about learning to trust yourself and listen to your own ideas.

At a time when many of the ways in which we encounter culture are controlled not by people but by algorithms, models and the not always ethical use of capital, I can think of no better way to be. Independent of influence, eclectic of taste, and receptive to joy wherever it may be found.

Like Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes. And quite a lot of my multitudes really enjoy reading detective fiction.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.

Many thanks to my guests, Subhadra Das and Tom Spencer. Subhadra's book (Un)Civilised: 10 Lies That Made the West is available wherever you get your books and there's more information about her work at subhadradas.com. Tom's detective novel is The Mystery of the Crooked Man, published by Penguin Random House and available from all good booksellers.

You can find links to everything that we mentioned in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/thebattleofthebrows. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

This episode is part of the Shedunnit Pledge Drive, the annual event where I ask the podcast’s community to help me fund it for another year. If you’d like to be part of that and get access to a whole host of audio goodies, join now at shedunnitshow.com/pledgedrive.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.