Gilbert Seldes
Gilbert Vivian Seldes (/ˈsɛldəs/;[1] January 3, 1893 – September 29, 1970) 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 (1958). 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."[2]
Childhood and early life[edit]
Gilbert Seldes was born on January 3, 1893, in Alliance, New Jersey, and attended a small elementary school in the 300-home farm community.[3] 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.[3] 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.[4]
Seldes attended Philadelphia's Central High School and then enrolled in Harvard, concentrating on English Studies and graduating in 1914.[5] 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.[6] Upon graduation Seldes joined his brother as a war journalist from 1916 to 1917, eventually being promoted to sergeant.[7] George Santayana's and William James' ideas also influenced him greatly during this time.[8]
Personal life and family[edit]
Seldes had a fling with the American journalist Jane Anderson from early 1918 to late 1919.[9] 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.[10] He was the younger brother of legendary liberal journalist George Seldes.
Ideas[edit]
On popular culture[edit]
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.[11] 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.[12]
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 –
Career[edit]
Editor, writer and cultural critic[edit]
Following his graduation from Harvard University in 1914, Seldes left for London as the Philadelphia Evening Ledger's correspondent during World War I. He covered the social conditions in England. He also wrote for the Boston Evening Transcript, The Forum and New Statesman in London.[40]
After the end of the war, Seldes returned to America and became Collier Weekly's associate editor. Seldes would become second associate editor for The Dial in 1920, often contributing how own pieces to the periodical under the pseudonyms Vivian Shaw or Sebastien Cauliflower.[41] His long, glowing 1922 review in The Nation of Ulysses by James Joyce helped the book become known in the United States (although it would remain banned there until 1933).[42] Seldes' tenure as editor of The Dial included the publication of the famous November 1922 issue featuring T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Together, they took The Dial on a modernist track, as opposed to other magazines like Van Wyck Brooks' The Freeman and Henry Luce's TIME.[43] During this time, he worked with other intellectuals like Marianne Moore and Sophia Wittenberg (who later became Lewis Mumford's wife), who recounted him as an excellent colleague –
Professional relationships[edit]
Seldes was always a "non-joiner", refusing to join H. L. Mencken's "smart set" or the Algonquin Round Table.[59]
Seldes had a strained relationship with Ernest Hemingway, who despised Seldes despite his frequent praise for Hemingway's work.
Seldes was a champion of Krazy Kat cartoonist George Herriman, and the two maintained a friendly relationship. Herriman referenced Seldes' work in his strips, and Seldes commissioned Herriman to draw his family's Christmas cards in 1922.[60]
Edward Murrow and Seldes similarly had a tense professional relationship, as a result of their disagreement over Murrow's portrayal of Senator Joseph McCarthy on Murrow's show, See It Now (March 9, 1954). Seldes consistently advocated fair and responsible reporting, and criticized Murrow's intention to disprove McCarthy's credibility.[61] He also regularly panned F. Scott Fitzgerald's work, save for his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, which he praised in the August 1925 issue of The Dial. Even so, Seldes and Fitzgerald remained good friends throughout their careers.[62]
