The cultural elite are almost always (publically-subsidised) massive snobs

“It was all so appallingly middle-brow and suburban: the most damning of all adjectives in British cultural circles.”

“…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.” Virginia Woolfe

I remember the first time I heard the word ‘middlebrow’. I was in my early twenties and used to ride the bus across South London to my friend Rick’s house (yes, actual house he owned all by himself) in Putney. Rick worked for the Royal Society of Chemistry’s publishing arm editing its trade magazines (as well as producing Hull University Wargames Society’s magazine ‘Aardvark’). I forget why we were talking about books but Rick observed that, while his non-fiction taste was for detailed, academic history, his taste in fiction was decidedly middlebrow.

At the time I thought little of this idea, choosing to read the things I wanted to read and carrying on with my passion for ignoring most of the literature that we’re told is canonical. I did try to read some Jane Austen once but found it incredibly hard work and, frankly, rather dull. A while ago I wrote about how I hate English literature (at least as presented to us by the cognoscenti):

“My chip is with English literature. Not the books themselves – although if I’m honest, I have tried and failed to read those books beloved of English teachers. I’ve set out to read a Jane Austen novel or two, I’ve struggled through a few chapters of assorted Brontë sisters writing and I’ve banged my head against D H Lawrence. All without success – I can find no joy or pleasure from such reading.

Nor do I find more recent writings any better – I waded my way through ‘Midnight’s Children’ although to this day I’m not entirely sure why I ploughed on through the indulgent, impenetrable prose as it gave me no satisfaction. And I could go on – every now and again one sets oneself to read one of these books so praised by the cognoscenti. And the result is inevitable disappointment.”

I’m guessing this is what those cognoscenti, the top culture vultures, mean by middlebrow. A sort of sneeringly dismissive attitude to folk like me who aren’t prepared to invest in the great literature that those cultural mavens say is the only worthwhile writing. And I am certain that the same outlook applies to music, theatre and the visual arts. Pierre Bourdeau, French sociologist and ‘public intellectual’ (or massive snob to you and me) defined the middlebrow in that uniquely patronising manner only the academic elite can manage:

“...listeners who favour middlebrow works are ill at ease with the aesthetic disposition demanded by more legitimate repertory.”

Consider yourself told. We like the classical pops (preferably in bite sized chunks) as that most middlebrow of radio stations, Classic FM, has shown since it started in 1992. And we like accessible adaptations of classic literature a whole lot more than we like the literature itself. When we read a book for pleasure we prefer to pick from a genre that floats our boat - thrillers, detective stories, science fiction, high fantasy, romance and historical fiction. When I worked in a library the romance section consisted of two narrow bookshelves at the end of the long alphabetised rows of fiction works. But many of the novels from that section never made it back to the shelf as the canny ladies who borrowed the romance novels hovered over the little shelf on wheels where the newly returned books were placed before they were returned to their proper place on the shelves. I am often reminded too of science fiction writer, Neal Stephenson's experience at a literary conference:

“I went to a writers' conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we'd exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me "And where do you teach?" just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another "And which distro do you use?"

I was taken aback. "I don't teach anywhere," I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. "Then what do you do?"

"I'm...a writer," I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.

"Yes, but what do you do?"

I couldn't think of how to answer the question---I'd already answered it!

"You can't make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?" she tried.

"From...being a writer," I stammered.”

Stephenson went on to describe how, following his talk to the conference, he was questioned in detail about aspects of his books. Not by the usual crowd at such conferences but by people, mostly young men, who had come to the place simply to hear Stephenson. Other speakers were asked grand questions about literature or politics whereas Stephenson got queried about what character x in book y said to character z and isn’t that wrong because of what character x did in chapter seven.

Alwyn Turner, a cultural and political historian, wrote recently on the Unherd platform about how, apparently, Margaret Thatcher lost her ‘culture war’. It will, I’m sure come as a surprise for many to discover that, apparently, Thatcher conducted a culture war but Turner assures us that she did. Two things about the article, however, stand out. The first is the sneering dismissal of Thatcher by high culture’s grandees:

“She was, said Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen’s Music, a “stupid mindless Philistine”. Even the former Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt, a friend and devotee, who liked to think of himself as an eminently civilised man, concluded sadly: “She has no taste.”

And secondly that Thatcher was middlebrow and, worst of all, ‘suburban’:

“It was all so appallingly middle-brow and — to use that insult of Miller’s — suburban: the most damning of all adjectives in British cultural circles.”

Since the idea of a suburb first arrived in the first half of the 19th century, the grand literary elite have treated its residents with disdain as people without taste or culture. You don’t get any grander or culturally elite than Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (his picture adorns the top of this essay) and his comment - ‘Your vile suburbs can offer nothing but the dullness of the grave” - captures this mindset perfectly. And suburbia, to that cultural elite, is utterly and irredeemably middlebrow. This, perhaps more than anything else, explains why those charged with planning places and spaces are uncomfortable with suburbs. It isn’t about ‘car-dependency’, Edward Bulwer-Lytton hated suburbs long before even the railways spread their fingers out from London. No, the loathing of suburbia is deeply embedded in our high culture. Suburbia is Terry and June, the Goodes and, oh dear, Mrs Bucket.

This cultural elitism extends to other parts of the world, both disliking the middlebrow and in the idea of suburbia being a threat to decency and civilisation. E. M. Forster’s ‘Howard’s End’ is, as Suzannah Lezzard explored in an essay entitled ‘Why We Hate the Suburbs’, a work where the biggest evil is the gradual encroachment of suburbia into the bucolic world of the grand house. And the book was written before the first world war, long before anything or anyone was ‘car-dependent’. Lezzard reports a conversation with two older female friends who, like her, live on Long Island, New York:

“Soon after my arrival we set out to meet Caroline’s friend Kate for lunch at a restaurant in a nearby village. Kate was about 12 years Caroline’s junior—that is to say, between us in age—and deeply fluent in Berkshire. Somehow suburban development cropped up in the conversation: how awful it was, and why it is that “Americans”—as if Caroline and Kate and I were not American—feel they have to have a freestanding house on a piece of land.

Off they went, the two of them, both with their beautiful old houses and even more soulful gardens, on the emptiness of the suburban dream. All about what a crime the destruction of the countryside was, and not one word about what those houses, those small plots of land, might mean to those who owned them, let alone the fairness of distributing a little to many rather than sticking with a lot for a few.”

So it still is today. Suburban attitudes are dismissed but never defined, they are simply the feeling that if you don’t live either in the heart of the city or else in some rural retreat (many of our cultural elite, of course, enjoy both these things) then you are somehow numbed, preferring Radio 2 and a thriller bought in an airport bookshop to Radio 3 or Radio 6 and that astounding new novel from your friend Amelia. 

Most of us are, if we think about it, middlebrow. This doesn’t mean someone hasn’t read Jane Austen or been to a grand opera but rather that our tastes and preferences are just that, tastes and preferences. We are not Mrs Bucket pretending to like things we dislike just to impress because many of those looking on share our tastes and preferences, at least in finding much of literary fiction, avant garde art and modern jazz incomprehensible. High culture simply doesn’t impinge on our lives and, when we do encounter it (usually courtesy of public funding), it comes over as out-of-touch, patronising and lacking in any charm, wit or attractiveness. Pickling a sheep or not making the bed may, indeed, be art but we look at it and then buy a nice Jack Vettriano print to go on the living room wall. Why? Because that print does have wit and charm.

Alwyn Turner’s article, however, presents something that should concern us. Because arts funding is controlled by the cultural elite (the ones who hate suburbs, sneer at Ronald Reagan for reading Reader’s Digest, and consider most popular culture to be utterly naff), what gets supported is entirely unconnected to popular culture. We are either preserving grand old cultural institutions like the RoyalOpera House and the National Theatre (so long as they reinterpret material to be suitably edgy and political, of course) or else giving money to a circle of radically conformist artists committed to pushing boundaries, challenging neoliberalism and going to each other’s shows while pretending anyone in the wider public is remotely interested.

Meanwhile another part of the cultural elite, this time in architecture and urban design, absorbs this sneering disdain for the middlebrow and seeks to abolish the suburb in favour of, depending on their tastes, six-storey mock-Georgian mansion blocks or 20-storey modernist skyscrapers inspired by Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe. Presumably once we’ve been herded into these dense environments, we’ll transform from being dull and middlebrow, becoming butterflies fluttering around the delights of the elite’s high culture. Somehow I doubt it.