Gilbert Seldes
Gilbert Vivian Seldes was an American writer and cultural critic. Seldes served as the editor and drama critic of the seminal modernist magazine The Dial and hosted the NBC television program The Subject is Jazz. He also wrote for other magazines and newspapers like Vanity Fair and the Saturday Evening Post. He was most interested in American popular culture and cultural history. He wrote and adapted for Broadway, including Lysistrata and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1930s. Later, he made films, wrote radio scripts and became the first director of television for CBS News and the founding dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
He spent his career analyzing popular culture in America, advocating cultural democracy, and subsequently, calling for public criticism of the media. Near the end of his life, he quipped, "I've been carrying on a lover's quarrel with the popular arts for years... It's been fun. Nothing like them."
Childhood and early life
Gilbert Seldes was born on January 3, 1893, in Alliance, New Jersey, and attended a small elementary school in the 300-home farm community. Both Gilbert's parents were Russian Jewish immigrants, and his mother, Anna Saphro, died in 1896 when he and his older brother, famed war correspondent and journalist George Seldes, were still young. Gilbert's father, George Sergius Seldes, a strongly opinionated and radically philosophical man, affected every aspect of his young sons' lives. The elder George pushed his sons to "read books that you will reread—and that you will never outgrow," and refused to force religion upon children who were "too young to understand it," instilling a free-thinking attitude within his sons.Seldes attended Philadelphia's Central High School and then enrolled in Harvard, concentrating on English Studies and graduating in 1914. During this time, he was a self-confessed 'cultural elitist'. It was here that Seldes met and befriended both Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson, Jr. along with E.E. Cummings, Winslow Wilson, Harold Stearns, and John Dos Passos. Upon graduation Seldes joined his brother as a war journalist from 1916 to 1917, eventually being promoted to sergeant. George Santayana's and William James' ideas also influenced him greatly during this time.
Personal life and family
Seldes had a fling with the American journalist Jane Anderson from early 1918 to late 1919. They eventually drifted apart, and he married Alice Wadhams Hall, an upper-class Episcopalian, in Paris in 1924. The actress Marian Seldes was their daughter; their son is literary agent Timothy Seldes. He was the younger brother of legendary liberal journalist George Seldes.Ideas
On popular culture
Seldes' belief in the democratization of culture characterized his career. In the 1920s, he rejected conventional understandings of jazz, film, comics, vaudeville and Broadway as banal, immoral and aesthetically questionable. He did not limit art to its 'high-culture' normative of European forms like opera, ballet and classical music. He also did not believe that culture was inherently ordered, or that it demanded rigorous training to create and understand.Instead, Seldes advocated a democratic aesthetic culture. He sought only to distinguish well-executed art from that which was not. He found 'excellence, mediocrity at all levels' and detested 'trash' of both the high- and low-class nature. Furthermore, he insisted that the dichotomy between the high and low brow was fundamentally complex. This distinction stemmed from class assumptions rather than a judgement of art's intrinsic value –
The lively arts are created and admired chiefly by the class known as lowbrows, are patronised and, to an extent enjoyed, by the highbrows; and are treated as impostors and as contemptible vulgarism by the middle class, those who invariably are ill at ease in the presence of great art until it has been approved by authority.
Unlike his contemporaries, therefore, he evaluated popular culture, introducing new sources like jazz, comics, film, television and radio to criticism. He praised them for their honesty, humour, and the technical skills of their performers. An anti-intellectual, he was also convinced that art, particularly popular entertainment, should avoid being overly cerebral and didactic. Subsequently, he staunchly opposed critics who recommended radio as a tool for formal education in the 1930s, saying, "no lessons, thank you, and no, damn you, no lectures".
Moreover, Seldes believed that intellectuals would discern a distinctive American culture if they abandoned their assumption that only European trappings conferred cultural legitimacy. To him, America already possessed its own heterogeneous, democratic and dynamic cultural heritage. In The Seven Lively Arts, Seldes stated that the language and rhythms of jazz reflected a distinct, home-grown American identity. America had found its 'characteristic expression' and had arrived 'at a point of creative intensity' through popular culture. He, therefore, advocated that American intellectuals not be ashamed of jazz, but reaffirm and support it instead.
This horrified the critics of The Dial, the magazine for which Seldes was managing editor. They derided him as pretentious and vulgar on many occasions. In response, Seldes was especially critical of American expatriates and critics who favored European art media and scorned American popular culture. He called them the "debunkers" and argued that European culture was not worthy of veneration. It had "foisted on us feeble ideas, questionable taste, quackeries and crazes".
More importantly, he also objected to these expatriates' and critics' assertion that America had insufficient historical experience to inspire artistic creativity. From the 1930s, he became convinced that an historical understanding of America was fundamental to its self-identification. He, therefore, moved from art criticism to writing history to prove that America had a cultural past. This led to books like The Stammering Century and Mainland. By the 1930s, Seldes' writings took on heavier tones of American exceptionalism, which increased with the advent of World War II.
During the Great Depression, Seldes' belief that entertainment existed purely for its own sake evolved. He called for theatre to reflect the harsh realities of American life–
I do not mean that all the plays ought to be concerned with the farmers' strike in Iowa and the bread lines in New York, although I do not see why at least a few of the plays do not deal with these subjects. It is possible to be aware of what has happened in these three years and make your awareness felt even in light comedy.
The Years of the Locust, his searing eyewitness account of the street-level devastations wrought by the Great Depression, reflects this concern. He grew more critical of serious plays, advocating light-hearted content that confronted and assuaged the struggles of everyday life. Ever the cultural populist, he maintained that American art should benefit American citizens.
Seldes' interests diversified to film from the late 1920s. Unlike critics like H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan who scorned films as vulgar, Seldes believed that film could be a tool for American historical education. He wrote, directed, produced and hosted a range of historical documentaries. This is America was his debut effort. Among film artists, Seldes praised Charlie Chaplin in particular; in 1924, he spoke of Chaplin as one of America's two great artists of the time, the other one being Krazy Kat cartoonist George Herriman.
From the outset, he was convinced that film's essential feature was also a defining American trait. This was its ability to capture "movement, and that happen to be the one dominant characteristic of all American history". He, therefore, believed that film was vital to America's cultural identity.
Alongside film's proliferation, Seldes promulgated the democratization of cultural criticism. He proposed that critical opinion needed to support film's reach to a mass audience, and applauded the rise of film criticism from the 1920s. For all of film's merits, however, Seldes also accurately predicted and lamented literary culture's decline in the 1930s as a result of film and television.
On mass culture
From the 1930s, Seldes was wary of the transformation of popular culture to mass culture, which television and radio facilitated. He was concerned that the popular arts had lost their dynamism as 'passive observation' had, by then, replaced 'active participation' in the arts. Furthermore, he worried that American tastes were becoming uniform and undiscriminating. This concern increased in the 1950s, as he saw that the arts were monopolized, homogenized, and of poor standard. In the second edition of The Seven Lively Arts, he wrote, "we are being engulfed in a mass-produced mediocrity".Media responsibility was also a pertinent issue to Seldes, as he believed that entertainment corporations' control and commercialization of the arts eroded the value of popular culture. He blamed media corporations for broadcasting content that he thought pandered to the lowest common denominator. He considered soap operas and TV dramas "corrupting influences". To Seldes, TV detrimentally narrowed the interests of the public, when, instead –
the public be given every opportunity to find its own level of taste by having access to the best as well as to the mean – which in this case, is far from golden.
Moreover, he also rued how television's accessibility made entertainment seem like a 'right', rather than a reward to be earned.
Still, he remained optimistic and wished that the public would criticize the media. This was Seldes' enduring ideal – for American cultural criticism's democratization. The historian Michael Kammen considers Seldes the forerunner of the cultural studies for his research into the social impact, political implications and educational potential of cultural mediums. He also declared that he did not find sex as entertaining as virtue, honesty, realism, humor and technical skill in performance. He perceived its growing usage in entertainment as a reflection of a decline of the media.
In early 1946, Seldes wrote an essay in Esquire magazine, where he criticized what he perceived to be the prevailing radio humor of the time. According to Seldes, most comedians on the airwaves based their humor almost solely on various insults, which he found tiresome. His essay led to an invitation on The Jack Benny Program to defend his stance, which he accepted. He appeared on Benny's radio program on February 24, 1946. Despite his objections to radio comedy, Seldes did enjoy appearing on the show, and recalled that Benny's writers "accomplished the miracle of making me seem very funny indeed".