With a career spanning the period from the Jazz Age to the
Information Age, critic Gilbert Seldes provides a sizable canvas,
but it's still a stretch to see it as reflecting all the
multitudinous changes in modern American culture. With this amiable
but sometimes stultifying biography, Kammen plunges into cultural
aesthetics as part of his ongoing study of American history (Mystic
Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American
Culture, 1991, etc.). In revisiting the period from the Jazz Age's
exuberant prelude to the American century up to the the
intersection of TV, radio, and movies in the 1950s, Kammen uses
Seldes's rousing journalism and bis two chief achievements, the
books The Seven Lively Arts and The Great Audience, to illuminate
the changing American zeitgeist. In the former book, Seldes's
ebullient championing of Charlie Chaplin, George Herriman, Al
Jolson, and Ring Lardner offered a different brand of aesthetics
than that of the genteel, post-Puritan school of Van Wyck Brooks
and Lewis Mumford. Kammen also contrasts Seldes's tastes with the
more famous coeval critics of the period: the antipopulist
boob-bashing of H.L. Mencken, the snobbery of George Jean Nathan,
and the elitist idiosyncrasies of Edmund Wilson. "Certainly no
snob," Kammen writes, "Seldes the man and critic was a cultural
democrat." While he grew alarmed about the quality of the
entertainment being provided by the mass media after WW II, "he
nonetheless hated to succor those archly elitist critics who were
absolutely negative about anything and everything middlebrow or
popular." Kammen makes the middle-of-the-road Seldes into a
middleman of cultural criticism, but he remains too weak a figure
to support the ambitious scope of Kammen's cultural criticism.
(Kirkus Reviews)
He was a friend of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, e.e. cummings, John
Dos Passos, Irving Berlin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald--and the enemy
of Ezra Pound, H.L. Mencken, and Ernest Hemingway. He was so
influential a critic that Edmund Wilson declared that he had played
a leading role in the "liquidation of genteel culture in America."
Yet today many students of American culture would not recognize his
name. He was Gilbert Seldes, and in this brilliant biographical
study, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen recreates a
singularly American life of letters. Equally important, Kammen uses
Seldes's life as a lens through which to bring into sharp focus the
dramatic shifts in American culture that occurred in the
half-century after World War I.
Born in 1893, Seldes saw in his lifetime an astonishing series of
innovations in popular and mass culture: silent films and talkies,
the phonograph and the radio, the coming of television, and the
proliferation of journalism aimed at mainstream America in such
venues as Vanity Fair, The SaturdayEvening Post, and Esquire. (His
monthly column in Esquire was called "The Lively Arts.") Seldes was
more than a witness to these changes, however; he was the leading
champion of popular culture in his time, and a skilled practitioner
as well. Kammen, the first scholar to enjoy access to Seldes's
unpublished papers, illuminates his immense influence as the
earliest cultural critic to insist that the lively
arts--vaudeville, musical revues, film, jazz, and the
comics--should be taken just as seriously as grand opera, the
legitimate theatre, and other manifestations of high culture.
As he traces Seldes's remarkable evolution from an acknowledged
aesthete and highbrow to a cultural democrat with a passion for the
popular arts, Kammen recaptures the critic's prescience, wit, and
generosity for a newly expanded audience. We witness Seldes's
triumphs and travails as managing editor of The Dial, the most
influential literary magazine of its time, and read of New York's
endlessly feuding publications and literary rivalries. Kammen
offers wonderfully detailed accounts of The Dial's introduction of
"The Wasteland" in its November 1922 issue; Seldes's review of
Ulysses for TheNation, one of the first (if not the very first) to
appear in the U.S.; and the complete story of the writing,
publication, and critical reception of The Seven Lively Arts,
Seldes's most influential book. And Kammen also covers Seldes's
astonishingly versatile later career as a freelance writer (on
every conceivable subject), historian, novelist, playwright,
filmmaker, radio scriptwriter, the first program director for CBS
Television, and the founding dean of the Annenberg School of
Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.
One of popular culture's earliest and most eloquent champions,
Seldes was nonetheless publicly worried as early as 1937 that the
popularity of radio, film, and television would mean the demise of
the "private art of reading." By 1957 he was warning that "with the
shift of all entertainment into the area of big business, we are
being engulfed into a mass-produced mediocrity." At a time when
many thoughtful Americans despair of popular culture, The Lively
Arts revisits the opening salvos in the ongoing debate over
"democratization" versus "dumbing down" of the arts. It offers a
penetrating and timely analysis of Gilbert Seldes's pioneering
conviction that the popular and the great arts must not only
co-exist but enrich one another if we are to realize the innovation
and intensity of American culture at its best.
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