Vaudeville philosophers: "The Killers." - short story by Ernest Hemingway

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1999 by Ron Berman

In 1924 Seldes, a friend of Wilson's and known to both Fitzgerald and Hemingway, published The Seven Lively Arts. This book gave intellectuals much to think about. Aside from cataloging the great and the good performers, it moved into the heady realms of modernist theory. Wilson thought that the book was chaotic, sometimes out of control, and he was right. But Seldes made some important points for the writers who came after him. He did not originate the argument that Chaplin and other comics belonged with Joyce and Eliot (Eliot himself made that point), but he argued consistently that the "lively" arts belonged with so-called higher forms of visual and textual arts (35-53).(2) He thought that Bert Savoy belonged in the same world as Remy de Gourmont and James Joyce, and in the same sentence with Charles Dickens (187). Most important, at least as far as Hemingway is concerned, was the series of manifestos with which the book subsided. Seldes provided an enormous amount of material to anyone inclined to think that conventional American values - and the writings exemplifying them - were bogus.

Seldes took certain modernist beliefs about the unwinding of respectable culture and restated them in terms of comedy, jazz, and even cartoons. For example, Ring Lardner and Mr. Dooley are "more important than James B. Cabell and Joseph Hergesheimer" (264) because they say more about present attitudes toward the present moment. This may now be self-evident, but even Mencken, full of pieties for the groaning earnestness of realism, resisted such ideas. Seldes thought that Florenz Ziegfeld was better than David Belasco, and that the circus was better than grand opera (264). Edmund Wilson thought the last was an exaggeration, but Hemingway might have found the thought more than casually amusing.

It will be useful to cite the last three of Seldes's principles of art because they seem to reappear persistently in Hemingway's thought:

That there exists a "genteel tradition" about the arts which has prevented any just appreciation of the popular arts, and that these have therefore missed the corrective criticism given to the serious arts, receiving instead only abuse.

That therefore the pretentious intellectual is as much responsible as any one for what is actually absurd and vulgar in the lively arts.

That the simple practitioners and simple admirers of the lively arts being uncorrupted by the bogus preserve a sure instinct for what is artistic in America. (295)

Perhaps the best account is Wilson's long review of 1924 in which he placed Seldes within "America's new orientation" on culture begun by Van Wyck Brooks in 1915. Wilson thought that the Seldes book had identified an important strand of modernism. The "inconsecutive" and even "pointless" comic art of vaudevillians like Joe Cook, Charlie Case, and James J. Morton could be compared to Jean Cocteau and understood as a parallel to Dada. The art of vaudeville was above all an accurate response to the postwar world and "the bewildering confusion of the modern city." The disconnected and often resentful vaudeville script (in some ways a preface to Hemingway) shows the way the world is and the way our "own minds are beginning to work" ("Gilbert Seldes" 162-64, emphasis added).