I began Michael Kammen’s biography of Gilbert Seldes after breakfast. Before breakfast, I’d read my morning newspaper, the Montreal Gazette, a sober broadsheet which has just started a weekly rock-video column —and nothing as humdrum and utilitarian as reviews of new rock videos, but rather a provocative and ongoing debate on issues arising and trends discernible therefrom. The connection between Seldes and The Gazette’s latest signing is made explicit in Kammen’s cumbersome title: The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States. Perhaps we would have got here one way or another, but it’s still doubtful whether, without Seldes’s pioneering efforts, twenty-three-year-old female college graduates could have expected (or would have wanted) to make a living commenting on the intellectual themes arising from rock videos.

Sorry, I should have said “music videos.” Until fairly recently, “Music” in respectable journals used to mean fellows like Mozart and Beethoven. In The Gazette’s and most other arts pages now, “Music” means The Dead Presidents and Niggaz With Attitude, and Wolfgang and Ludwig have been reclassified as the specialist sub-genre “Classical Music.” Before Seldes was born (1893), a distinguished music critic was someone who had studied sonata form and soprano passagio. Since Seldes’s death (1970), a distinguished music critic has been someone who has studied the social significance of rap lyrics and the postmodern attitudinal irony of grunge haircuts, and can tell you which recording studio Tupac’s producer was shot dead outside of.

Seldes would, probably, have disclaimed credit for such a legacy, and it has certainly not brought him fame: I’m sure The Gazette’s lady video opinion-former has never heard of him—as far as I can tell, she doesn’t seem to have heard of anything before 1981, which is perhaps not such a disadvantage in her new post. But this, too, is part of Seldes’s bequest. Before the Great War, criticism was vertical: that’s to say, critics specialized and pontificated on literature or music or fine art in terms of the traditions from which they arose. Seldes’s generation made criticism horizontal, inventing the concept of the “cultural critic”— the fellow who, today, roams the cultural landscape and is capable of discussing Quentin Tarantino in terms of the Cranberries’ new album or the season finale of “Friends” in terms of the seminal Mountain Dew commercial. That would have depressed Seldes. A Harvard man, he served as managing editor of The Dial, and, in 1922, introduced America to “The Wasteland.” His most influential book—indeed, his professional epiphany—was a collection of essays from 1924 arguing the merits of vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, comic strips, musical comedy, and slapstick movies, and its title, The Seven Lively Arts, became a kind of brand leader for Seldes, serving in one variation or the other as the label for his columns in Esquire and Park East and his talks on WNEW. But the book which followed Lively Arts, The Stammering Century (1928), was devoted to his second great enthusiasm, “the necessity of historical knowledge and perspective.” In the rush to embrace one of his obsessions, we have trampled the other into oblivion. Nobody should expect a user of pop music to put too high a premium on “perspective”: only a fool would stand around at the senior prom and say, Well, yeah, it’s okay, but it doesn’t have the harmonic invention of Stephen Foster, so, if you don’t mind, I’ll sit this one out. But, if we are to argue the merits of the song as art, we should be able to—and we don’t.

“Perspective” is such a debased concept in cultural commentary that the editors of The New York Times Magazine, in a special issue celebrating their centenary, didn’t seem to notice that they’d actually produced a celebration only of the last forty years. As for “historical knowledge,” that crops up only in the most bogus way. I once interviewed Bob Fosse about his films and choreography, and, at some point, I mentioned something about the influence of commedia dell’arte. “Congratulations,” said Fosse, looking at his watch. “You held out twenty-three minutes. Most of the fancy interviewers get to commedia dell’arte within the first ten.” It was years later that I discovered it was Seldes who first hit upon commedia dell’arte as the all-purpose historical precedent: over his long career, he applied the term to Chaplin and the Keystone Kops, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin, vaudeville and silent movies, and TV sitcoms. To be fair, Seldes also adapted a famous commedia piece—Carlo Gozzi’s The Love of Three Oranges—for the Harvard Dramatic Club in 1926. But, for the most part, he was pioneering what became the standard approach in pop-culture criticism: the need to find an intellectual safety net for what regular folks just do without thinking.

Most of us like the pop songs and movies and comic strips of our generation, and the ones that mean most do so usually for non-artistic reasons: it’s the film we saw on our first date, the song we danced to at our wedding. Irving Berlin’s daughter, who was a childhood pal of Seldes’s son, once mentioned to me that the Seldes parents never sent their kids to dancing lessons. But, if he disdained the traditional functions of pop culture, Seldes was no different from anybody else in his tastes: in the Twenties, he liked Al Jolson and Fanny Brice and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip; in the Sixties, he had less (if anything) to say about Bob Dylan or Lenny Bruce or The Incredible Hulk. I would have liked to have known his thoughts, in 1970, on what had become of his “lively arts,” but Kammen doesn’t tell us. I would have quite liked to have known what film he saw on his first date or the song he danced to at his wedding, but Kammen doesn’t tell us that either: indeed, the death of Seldes’s wife rates no more than an asterisked footnote on page 317, which, even for a critical biography, seems a touch austere. (Seldes disliked the manner in which radio commercials intruded on the news, and objected to hearing of the passing of Lady Astor thus: “A great lady died today. More on that after this message”; Kammen’s footnoted brush-off is, I think, the academic equivalent.)

For the last few years, there’s been an increasing trickle of think-pieces by today’s graying baby-boom rockers either bemoaning the wretchedness of today’s pop music or expressing perplexity at the way the kids seem to find Hendrix and Dylan and the Stones as boring as the infant rock critics once found Perry Como and Guy Lombardo. But, as a prototype pop-culture warrior, Seldes’s own enthusiasms are instructive: they are mainly generational. No matter how persuasive his analysis, Fanny Brice as Baby Snooks would not seem funny if NBC ran it instead of “Seinfeld” this week. Kammen himself quotes hardly any of Seldes’s insights into individual practitioners, an unspoken recognition of a forlorn truth: some of his favorites have endured (the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart) while many others (Joe Cook, Mutt and Jeff) have not, but, in either category, their fate owes little to Seldes. Moreover, the best evidence of Seldes’s irrelevance to their fate is his own biographer, for, after immersing himself in his subject’s entire oeuvre, Kammen has emerged with not the slightest interest in any of Seldes’s passions: “Throughout the war, Seldes prepared the program notes, usually for jazz concerts,” he writes, the war in question being the one that began in 1939. “He wrote with special appreciation and pride for performers like Bix Beiderbecke.” Bix died in 1931. It wasn’t quite the transformation Seldes had in mind, but Kammen’s approach leaves you in no doubt: today, cultural criticism is about the criticism rather than the culture.

Kammen doesn’t quote it here, but there is a fine essay Seldes wrote for Theatre Magazine in 1924, prompted by the reunion on Broadway of Bolton, Wodehouse, and Kern, which gets to the nub of the matter: “It is a pity that you cannot explain or justify delight. Conversation would be so much more amicable if you could. As it is, the friend of your heart or the wife of your bosom, who seems to agree with you on every significant thing in the world, suddenly announces that she cannot abide the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and the dead silence that follows indicates that divorce is rapidly setting in.” Pop culture exists to delight us, and that is the only justification it needs. If it fails to delight, no amount of justification or explanation will commend it to us. It’s worth noting that, for all the pressure on the public from an ever proliferating army of Zeitgeistmeisters, popular taste seems to have evolved hardly at all: at the end of the century, the biggest-selling pop records (Whitney Houston’s devotional ballad, “I Will Always Love You”), the bestselling airport novels (The Bridges of Madison County), the highest-grossing motion pictures (Sleepless in Seattle) differ only in the details from their turn-of-the-century predecessors, from “After the Ball” or The Merry Widow or the novels of Gene Stratton-Porter. Left to its own devices, the public prefers much the same sentimental romantic fantasy in substantially the same forms as it always has. Each week, the editors of the Arts and Leisure supplements pose the question: What’s new? And the truthful answer is: nothing.

If the Seldes school of cultural criticism has had a negligible impact on popular taste, what then is it for? When Van Wyck Brooks initiated the highbrow/lowbrow debate in various essays beginning in 1915, the various levels of brows under discussion were the public’s: mail-order book companies took up the designations with advertisements demanding to know, “Are we a nation of low-brows?” It’s revealing, though, how quickly these definitions came to apply not to the audience but to the art itself. As the old arguments are thrashed out by Kammen, and brow levels fluctuate from high- to low- to middle- from page to page, I found myself recalling Irving Caesar’s splendid middle-section to his 1926 hit “Crazy Rhythm”:  

When a highbrow
Meets a lowbrow
Walking along Broadway
Soon the highbrow
He got no brow
Ain’t it a shame
And you’re to blame.

There’s the history of American art in eight bars: when high art meets low art, soon the high art ain’t got no art; when Roy Lichtenstein meets a comic book action hero, the comic book isn’t diminished by the encounter, but the “artist” is. “The real problem,” noted Louis Kronenberger at a 1952 Partisan Review symposium, “is how to avoid contamination without avoiding contact.” But, in transforming cultural criticism, Seldes also wound up transforming our cultural vocabulary: what passes for high art now is invariably discussed in terms of its points of contact with pop culture; seduced by those crazy rhythms, the highbrows have become culture’s limbo dancers, ever more desperate to please. Perhaps it was inevitable. At that same symposium, Joseph Frank pointed out that the “European intellectual minority has no sense of guilt at not being part of mass culture.” In a monarchical society, it is undoubtedly easier to maintain a hierarchical culture. And, in an age when policy positions on everything from the gasoline tax to abortion wait until the pollsters have crunched the relevant numbers, it’s difficult to argue why culture should be exempt: in such a world, why shouldn’t the best music or the best book be simply what’s Number One? Why are we surprised that our high culture is, like a soft-cover self-esteem bestseller, spineless?

But, in fact, it’s worse than that. In his book The Great Audience (1951), Seldes suggested that American “folk and popular art” were distinguished by the fact that “both were readily comprehended, romantic, patriotic, conventionally moral.” Does that sound like the kind of popular art you read about in the newspapers? Not at all. Seldes wrote about comedians as comedians, composers as composers. But most of his successors have lacked either the patience or the technical knowledge to do that. In their place, they’ve offered a discussion of pop art in terms of its social relevance—or, more accurately, its anti-social relevance. And, year by year, that practice has spread remorselessly so that it now, in Kronenberger’s apt word, contaminates our understanding of high culture, too. “In a very real sense,” writes Kammen, beginning with a sloppy, meaningless phrase of which he’s inordinately fond, “[Seldes] can properly be regarded as a progenitor of the discipline known today as cultural studies.” But cultural studies is not a discipline, only a modish means of applying the same trite social observations divined from gangsta rap to Shakespeare and Conrad and anything else that takes your fancy. Again and again, in this century’s sorry progress, Irving Caesar has been proved right: the highbrows ain’t got no brows. All the brainiest people in this story—the Ivy League colleges, the leading critics, the arts establishment—reached across to the wilder shores of popular culture and brought back only what was most diseased and rotten. The resilience of the lowbrows, in withstanding our society’s cultural leaders, is remarkable and admirable.

In a very real sense, as Kammen would say, the casualties of the process Seldes set in motion include both the discipline of criticism and American high art itself (admittedly a delicate flower). But the third casualty seems set to be pop culture itself. As the popular arts are studied and analyzed ever more avidly, they wind up chasing each other round in circles. The cult stud of the cultural studies circuit is Quentin Tarantino, whose film Pulp Fiction is endlessly dissected in colleges all over the country. But the film is itself a product of cultural studies: every shot in it, every scene is lifted from some other pop-cultural artifact of the last twenty years. In Vanity Fair, in 1922, Seldes wrote that vaudeville was “the only genre I know which can live by burlesquing itself.” It couldn’t, though. Vaudeville died, as did slapstick, revue, and musical comedy. Today, Quentin and his hordes of Taranteenyboppers can only make movies that look like other movies, pop records that sound like other pop records. Struggling to crawl out from under the incessant bombardment of “cultural studies,” the lively arts aren’t lively anymore.

---

---