"Damn Everything but the Circus": Popular Art in the Twenties and him

"Damn Everything but the Circus": Popular Art in the Twenties and him MARJORIE SMELSTOR, S.C. • IT IS POPULAR ... BUT IS IT ART? This query was one of the key questions for the aesthetic critics of the 1920s when they pondered the significance of the emerging "pop art" of the period. How "artistic" are the comic strips, the burlesque, the movies, the circus? How does one compare Charlie Chaplin~s "art" with John Barrymore's? How can "Yes, We Have No Bananas" be as "aesthetic" as an aria from Madame Butterfly? These kinds of questions posed a problem of artistic evaluation for the critics of the time and, consequently, resulted in an underlying tension between the "lively" and the "great" arts. One artist of the period who addressed himself to these questions and whose creations reflected this tension was e.e. cummings. Involved in and sensitive to the contemporary art world, cummings revealed in his works his intense immersion in the popular culture of the day and, at the same time, his reliance upon the contributions of the major arts. This double influence is seen most especially in the experimental drama, him, a play first produced in 1928. To appreciate the significance of this drama, however, one must first consider two other ideas: the nature of the tension between the lively and the great arts, and cummings' attitudes toward this tension as seen in his earlier prose works. In the first place, a study of the popular culture of the twenties suggests that many of the major critics sought to dichotomize the lively and the great arts. On the one hand, devotees of the lively arts praised the contemporaneity , the spontaneity, the vitality of the newly-evolVing cultural scene. On the other hand, the preservers of the artistic status quo pointed to the rich tradition of profound and serious art which had survived the test of time because of its creative perfection. In this dichotomizing process, however, 43 44 MARJORIE SMELSTOR, S.C. two misconceptions appear to have ~een present, and both misconceptions led to a deprecatory evaluation of the lively arts. Gilbert Seldes describes these misappraisals in his book, The Seven Lively Arts, published in 1924. In the first case, according to Seldes, artistic critics often failed to distinguish between first and second-rate art as well as between bogus and genuine art. As Seldes explains, they often made aesthetic judgments which compared representatives of the lively arts and "either second-rate instances of the major arts or first-rate examples of the peculiarly disagreeable thing for which I find no other name than the bogus." 1 This misconception might be seen in this sort of comparative evaluation: That Al Iolson is more interesting to the intelligent mind than John Barrymore and Fanny Brice than Ethel; That Ring Lardner and Mr Dooley in their best work are more entertaining and more important than James B. Cabel and Joseph Hergesheimer in their best; That the daily comic strip of George Herriman (Krazy Kat) is easily the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America to-day; That Florenz Ziegfield is a better producer than David Belasco; That one film by Mack Sennett or Charlie Chaplin is worth the entire oeuvre of Cecil de Mille; That Alexander's Ragtime Band and I Love a Piano are musically and emotionally sounder pieces of work than Indian Love Lyrics and The Rosary; That the circus can be and often is more artistic than the Metropolitan Opera House in New York; That Irene Castle is worth all the pseudo-classic dancing ever seen on the American stage; and That the civic masque is not perceptibly superior to the Elks' Parade in Atlantic City.2 Furthermore, Seldes points out the fact that "the existence of the bogus is not a serious threat against the great arts, for they have an obstinate vitality and in the end - but only in the end - they prevail. It is the lively arts which are continually jeopardized by the bogus...."3 The misinterpretation of the bogus for the genuine, therefore, often clouded the argument between the great and lively art decision so that the basic issues...