Callaghan's Symbolic Capital
In his Introduction to the collection of essays by Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural
Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Randal Johnson effectively summarizes the
main tenets of Bourdieu's theories about the ways that the exchange of economic and symbolic capital, artists' reputations, and distinctions between "art" and "popular culture" function in the cultural sphere. He writes:
The field of cultural production is structured, in the broadest sense, by an
opposition between two sub-fields: the field of restricted production and the field of large-scale production. The field of restricted production concerns what we normally think of as 'high' art . . . the stakes of competition between agents are largely symbolic, involving prestige, consecration and artistic celebrity. This, as Bourdieu often writes, is production for producers. Economic profit is normally disavowed (at least by the artists themselves), and the hierarchy of authority is based on different forms of symbolic profit. (15)
According to Bourdieu, symbolic goods such as short stories "are a two-faced reality" in that they possess both a "cultural value" and a "commercial value" (113). For the most part, Bourdieu sees the relationship between a work's cultural value and its economic value as an inverse one. High art is considered non-commercial, and often produced on a small scale, whereas art produced on a larger-scale (mass produced) for the purpose of profit is no longer considered "art," but rather "popular culture." Bourdieu's theories about the exchange of symbolic capital and economic capital in the field of cultural production provide a useful framework for helping us to understand the relationship between Callaghan and The New Yorker.
In the example of Barry Callaghan's The New Yorker Stories, we can see his attempt to profit economically (i.e., to sell books) by association with a magazine with symbolic capital – a reputation for intellectualism – as well as to acquire "consecration" for his father's work through association with canonical modernist authors whose symbolic capital has lasted into the twenty-first century. The power dynamic between Callaghan as seeker of "consecration" and his "cultural bankers" at The New Yorker as wealthy in symbolic capital represents an inversion of the beginning of this relationship, however. In its early days, it was The New Yorker that benefitted from Callaghan's "consecrated" status as a producer of "high art." Over the 1930s and 1940s, as the magazine's reputation grew stronger and Callaghan's own career as a short story writer declined, the shift in this relationship resulted in a shift in Callaghan's work. As his symbolic capital declined and the magazine's increased, Callaghan became more and more likely to alter his work to meet The New Yorker's editorial requests. The requests themselves demonstrate the tension in this relationship between Callaghan's sense of the cosmopolitan and The New Yorker's sense of the local, or more accurately, the parochial.
In her historical survey of the Canadian short story, Nischik points out that "Almost as a matter of course by now, several Canadian writers frequently first publish their short stories in The New Yorker, the foremost international forum for the genre" ("The Canadian Short Story" 1). The New Yorker was not always so closely associated with the short story genre, however. Journalist Harold Ross, who founded the magazine in 1925 primarily as a home for sophisticated humour and local advertisers, had little interest in fiction. As Thomas Kunkel explains in his biography of Ross, the magazine was specifically designed with selling advertising space to high-end New York retailers in mind:
With commercial radio in its infancy . . . magazines represented . . . the only efficient way for major advertisers to reach audiences from coast to coast. For magazine publishers, this combination caused an explosion of prosperity. But to Ross, it presented an obvious opportunity. Why would an upscale New York department store or other retailer want to reach readers in Duluth and Denver? . . . This was what happened when they advertised in national magazines . . .
The magazine he had in mind – glossy, intelligent, and cheeky – could deliver quality New York merchandise to a quality New York audience. (Kunkel 88) Fiction was not a priority for Ross, and was the slowest element of the magazine to develop (Kunkel 305). Callaghan's contributions helped this "formula" to fall into place. It was one of Ross's editors, Angell, who persuaded him to make room for fiction in the magazine, and who solicited writers like Callaghan for "serious" fiction for the first time (Yagoda 53). As Kunkel argues, "it was only in the late Thirties that what would become known as 'the New Yorker short story' was actually starting to turn up in the magazine with any regularity" (Kunkel 308). Although the form of Callaghan's stories did not necessarily inform the form of the "New Yorker short story" as it has come to be
recognized, what he did contribute to the magazine was symbolic capital as a producer of small-scale high art.
Although the magazine as a whole had quickly established a distinguished reputation for itself, The New Yorker's fiction roster was weak in the late 1920s. Callaghan, who had published primarily in the little magazines in Europe such as This
Quarter and transition, and whose work had only just appeared in North America in a
"periodical of general circulation" for the first time in Scribners (Conron, 63-64),
considered himself a "serious" rather than a "commercial" writer. In his Foreword to The
Lost and Found Stories of Morley Callaghan, Barry Callaghan quotes his father, who told
him of the beginning of his career during the Great Depression: "I was the only guy I knew of in America somehow selling my non-commercial stories in the great commercial market and staying alive" (3). Bourdieu likens this ubiquitous "opposition between the 'commercial' and the 'non-commercial'" in cultural spheres to distinctions made "between 'bourgeois' art and 'intellectual' art, between 'traditional' and 'avant-garde' art, or, in Parisian terms, between the 'right bank' and the 'left bank'" (82). Because of his
association with the American modernists living on the left bank of Paris, heconsidered himself a non-commercial, intellectual, or "real" artist, as did The New Yorker.
Following Bourdieu's model, The New Yorker would need to "borro[w] from high art," in this case the work of Callaghan, in order to develop its own reputation as a
publisher of literary fiction (Bourdieu 129). Callaghan benefitted economically from this exchange, and received the kinds of payments associated with commercial magazines that allowed him to support his family with his writing throughout the Great Depression. He also benefitted symbolically from this relationship, however. Aside from fiction, The New
Yorker had already developed a distinguished reputation, and Callaghan's Scribner's
editor, Maxwell Perkins, responded to the author's request for advice about whether or not to publish "An Escapade" with The New Yorker by suggesting that he submit work to the magazine over the higher-paying Cosmopolitan.42 At this point in his career, as the holder of symbolic capital, Callaghan could afford to appear more disinterested in the economics of publication than he could in later years. He chose to publish with the lower- paying New Yorker in exchange for association with its more discerning audience. In a letter responding to the cheque he received for "An Escapade," Callaghan emphasized to Angell that association with the magazine was more important to him than the rate at which he was paid for his work:
Thank you for your letter,and I am very glad that you liked "An Escapade". The check seemed to me to be a reasonable payment;reasonable in that the amount was within twenty five or fifty dollars of what I thought I ought to get from you.I know that you can not pay as much as say"Cosmopolitan", but I am quite satisfied because I beleieve that your magazine reaches a good auadience for me.That is important to me right now. (20 Nov. 1928)
In a 7 November 1928 letter Angell, for her part, emphasized the artistic merit of "An Escapade":
We were more delighted than we can say to receive your story "AN ESCAPADE" which we think is a very distinguished piece of writing and [we] are honored to publish it. A short story of this sort is new sort of material for us and we have
42
Perkins writes: "As for 'The New Yorker' I think it has a very excellent type of circulation from your standpoint and ours, and that you are perfectly right in your opinion. The only value in writing for the Cosmo would be the pecuniary one, and [only] you know how much importance to attach to that" (16 November 1928).
always, more or less, been in a quandary as to whether or not to publish straight fictional material but when anything as good as "Escapade" comes along we are glad to take the plunge into a new field . . . What we hope is that you will want to send us other material even shorter if possible. Do you ever write stories with a New York background? They are even better for us because we are, after all, a local magazine but as you see the Toronto setting did not influence us in this case. The very first Callaghan story that the magazine accepted was set in Toronto. In later submissions, Angell et al. would become less willing to overlook the Toronto setting of Callaghan's stories, and insist upon changes. As Bourdieu explains, "In the field of
cultural production economic profits increase as one moves from the 'autonomous' pole to the 'heteronomous' pole" and "the most heteronomous cultural producers (i.e., those with least symbolic capital) can offer the least reistance [sic] to external demands, of whatever sort" (45 and 41). At this point in Callaghan's career, it was he who bestowed his
symbolic capital upon The New Yorker, and the magazine was not in a position to negotiate with Callaghan in ways that would threaten his literary autonomy. Callaghan's autonomy was preserved because both he and Angell as the pursuer of "serious" fiction were invested in the notion that they were publishing "high art." As the relationship between Callaghan and his editors evolved over time, however, he would not always be able to present himself as so economically disinterested.