This Old Man

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by Roger Angell


  Charles Addams was another bravura captioneer. His outlandish dramas were often served up with innocuous lines that clarified and darkened the situation, both at the same time: “It’s the children, darling—back from camp” (each of them inside his or her own portable kennel), for instance, and “Oh, speak up, George! Stop mumbling!” Was I the only person, I wonder, to notice that George must have got himself out from inside that bulging python later on, only to be carried away, in another drawing, by a giant bird, whose burdened shadow wings past the wife—“George! George! Drop the keys!”—and across a beach as the creature departs overhead? I have been thinking about Addams’s “Congratulations! It’s a baby” for sixty years now, because my mother gave me the drawing—for Christmas, I think—while I was still in my teens. I have since handed it along to my own son, and he now tells me that it is out on loan to some gallery or other, with the label “From the collection of John Henry Angell.” In the drawing, a young nurse has just popped her head out of the maternity ward to give the happy news to the brand-new dad: an ancient, egg-shaped gent who has lifted one frail hand in surprise.

  “Visiting hours are over, Mrs. Glenborn.” (Credit 11.2)

  Cartoons in this magazine—most of them, at least—reward the noticer, and part of the pleasure for me with a George Price was always to go over it again, after that first dazzled look, and take in the mechanics: the framework of the hospital bed, under the sheet; the perfect empty glass on the table, with the perfect straw inside; Mrs. Glenhorn’s chin and mole and hat; and the line of the middle fold on the back of the nurse’s uniform, which ends, like all Price’s lines, in a point. He worked in wire and steel, I sometimes like to think, and then drew the sculpture onto the page.

  —

  ADDAMS (TO GO BACK a step) is a good place to convene the gallery talk proposing that the best cartoons are captionless: brilliance of idea and skill of execution will carry the day, as with a Raphael or a Cézanne—or with thirty-six hundred–odd New Yorker covers. How about those unexplained Addams ski tracks that flow unconcernedly around and past the mid-slope pine? Or his similarly silent police lineup of sullen goldilocked little suspects arrayed under the kliegs as they are studied by three bears?

  I take no stand here. Whatever works, whatever warms me, whatever makes me laugh is the drawing for me. Contemporary artists for the magazine take obdurate pride in writing their own captions, scorning the collaborative efforts of the past, when an editor or a writer—sometimes it was White, sometimes Gibbs or Peter De Vries—came up with the line that ran under a drawing. (I respect this moral stance, but I have to confess that I don’t quite get it. Should there have been only one Gershwin? Would Richard Rodgers’s songs sound better if he’d barred the door against Lorenz Hart?) Captions seem to come naturally with certain artists. Charles Saxon’s suburbanites, as I recall, sometimes even turned up with ribbons of text underneath, adding to a murmurous satire. His wide-bottomed, no-longer-quite-young Fairfield County denizens, in Bermuda shorts and bankerish socks, were ridiculous but easy to love. They were sweet, and you laughed at that—but not for the reasons that made you prize an Addams. I never felt the need to work out a code or a theory of pleasure about any of this, I mean, or to weigh jokes on some seismic scale. By good fortune, I’ve been a consumer but never an editor of New Yorker art.

  I know readers who are forever complaining about the art: it isn’t as funny as it used to be, it’s bourgeois, it’s repetitive, it’s childish, it isn’t seriously funny. They want our art to be higher—a Steinberg or a Daumier every week, or nothing at all. A contributor friend of mine once announced that there should be no more cartoons in the magazine. “That time is over,” she said firmly. I nodded sadly, pretending to agree, and remembered the moment when Woody Allen told me that he wouldn’t be writing many more comic pieces for us. “Being funny isn’t for grownups,” he said. (He has relented a little, I notice, in his movies.) I think there will always be days when I don’t trust in laughter, either, and weeks when I despair that we have succumbed here to the kind of humor that Philip Hamburger calls “post-funny,” or that we’re not funny at all. Then I open the next issue and find a Leo Cullum dog happily showing his dog wife the architect’s model of their new doghouse, and I relax. It’s always been this way. “There have been good weeks” was the best that E. B. White could offer in his introduction to the first New Yorker album, back in 1929.

  The same cartoon situations keep coming up—dog jokes and psychiatrist jokes, witch recipes and board conferences, dinner parties and desert islands, golf and space aliens, and a lot more, over and over. Another skiing cartoon? Another skiing cartoon without a caption? What could be better than Frank Modell’s turtlenecked downhiller, with his broken leg up on a hassock, who is being visited by his dog—a dog bringing a single slipper? Because Frank is lighthearted, he’s made it clear that the dog is more upset about the accident than the dolt in the chair. The dog’s gaze catches ours, and we want to turn back the page and discover the moment all over again.

  (Credit 11.3)

  The flair and charm of these remarkable artists—dozens of them, down the years—lend a dash of style to us readers, in turn, as we grow familiar with their stuff. Almost without our noticing it, their tones and views can intersect with something of our own, and confer a momentary élan or a rubbed-off, lighter view of the familiar: perhaps only a child or a grandchild of ours sneaking a look at herself in the mirror—a little girl straight out of Steig. Sometimes when I’m out in New York, I’ll watch a couple across the room talking, or see some parents and children together, and recognize a pattern there, an angular grace, that comes only from Robert Weber. Pure Booth, we think, catching sight of dogs and auto parts lying about outside a grungy roadside garage, or, perhaps later that same evening, at dinner with mid-Vermont friends, feel a furry Koren glow falling around us from the candlelight and the sweaters and the irony. This frilly woman walking toward me in the sunshine has a Victoria Roberts smirk, while a bunched-together, rushing pack of teen-agers in their blown-up windbreakers and enormous jeans has the dash and swirl of a Lee Lorenz drawing. Avenues and corners and mounted cops and sunsets can turn into Steinbergs without warning; dustballs and desserts and furniture wiggle to a Roz Chast beat; and the smallest moment, the most ordinary sort of enterprise, can surprise us with a flashback. Sometimes in August, cranking up my ancient Deere lawnmower, I’m tugging at Arnie Levin’s flyaway model. If only!

  (Credit 11.4)

  (Credit 11.5)

  I CAN’T REMEMBER THE last ten years of New Yorker cartoons, and perhaps not even the last ten weeks’ worth, but the magazine’s art and artists still surround me. Ever since I first came to work here, in 1956, the artists have been clustering in on Tuesday morning, carrying their latest drawings and roughs to show to the art editor, and cheering me up with their engaging gloomy smiles. Many have become friends of mine, and have then been roped into gifts or collaborations. Jim Stevenson’s elegant watercolor of a batter turning away as he heads for the plate became the cover for my first baseball book (the painting hangs before me, here on my office wall), and Koren’s animal nine has taken the field on a different diamond for the jacket of a book of casuals. (Ed may be the only artist who can draw a West Side monster.) The only baseball card I’ve had framed is Roz Chast’s depiction of Dwayne Cudahee’s 1934 season with the Akron Acers (he went hitless in two hundred and eighty-six at-bats), and, not far away, I can study Bruce McCall’s baseball moonscape—the moon as a beat-up batting-practice fly ball. Saul Steinberg illustrated some of my baseball pieces, and so did David Levine; luckily for me, both were fans of the game. Back in the early fifties, Steinberg became so enamored of baseball that he took road trips with the Milwaukee Braves; when he had to follow them by television, he would put on a full Braves uniform and cap before he settled down in front of the set. Artists aren’t like the rest of us.

  The men and women in that Tuesday-morning artists’ circle are devoting their li
ves to the daunting proposition that they can go on being fresh and funny, week after week, and that, in spite of rejections and changes in the magazine’s style and price and size, The New Yorker isn’t going to let them down. They know we can’t do it without them. Almost everybody can write—or so it is claimed, by the thousands of submissions—and many of us can learn to edit, but only artists can draw. Theirs is the vernacular that keeps us young and lowdown and not too full of ourselves—and funny on the good weeks.

  Onward and Upward with the Arts, December, 1997

  PAST MASTERS: MARK TWAIN / JOHN HERSEY / HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

  HUCKLEBERRY FINN

  In my boyhood summers, we lived in a Dutch-fieldstone house a dozen yards from the western shore of the Hudson, and the river’s damp sounds and smells, its wide white expanse of glassy or wind-mottled water, its brackish tides, its ceaseless movement, and its night lappings impinged on my young consciousness unawares. Twenty miles up from the Battery, I waded in the Hudson, swam in it, fished in it (for eels and tommycod and blue crabs), skipped stones on it, shot fireworks over it, and all day dozily studied its upstream and downstream traffic. Catboats, rowboats, and runabouts appeared and went away, while, over in the eastern channel, river freighters and sluggish tugs with low processions of barges made passage with banner-streaming vessels from the great white fleet of the Hudson River Day Line. Way off, along the New York Central’s water-level route, trains silently drew and redrew the straight line of the farther bank.

  I must have been eleven or twelve when I first encountered “Huckleberry Finn,” but from the moment Huck and Jim took to the river—their river, the Mississippi—I was overtaken with a thrilling proprietary excitement, because, of course, Mark Twain had it right: this was what a great wide-water, north–south stream was like, and here was how it felt to pass time on its banks. For the first time, literature had confirmed for me a patch of life that I recognized from my own experience.

  In the book, Twain appears to give little attention to scenery, but his river-prospect interludes preserve the clarity and unhurried gazings of an empty-sky morning passed within the sound of moving water:

  A little smoke couldn’t be noticed, now, so we would take some fish off of the lines, and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by lazy off to sleep…. Next you’d see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they’re most always doing it on a raft, you’d see the ax flash, and come down—you don’t hear nothing; you see that ax go up again, and by the time it’s above the man’s head, then you hear the k’chunk!—it had took all that time to come over the water.

  The famous passage—it comes along early in Chapter 19—lies near the center of this most central American novel, and one returns to it each time with refreshed alertness. One might even look at that “sliding by” and then recall how often Twain uses the word or a variant—not just when he is writing about the river but when he is writing about Huck Finn himself. Huck by turns slides out of houses and bedrooms, slips off quiet, slides into a canoe, slips down a ladder, clears out away from his drunken father, and, with his companion, Jim, hurries again to the raft and lets her go a-sliding down the river. Each of these hero-outcasts holds secret hopes of finding a place for himself somewhere in proper, dry-land society, but they are kept on the run by the grownups they encounter—thieves and lynchers, rapscallions and skin-artists and murderers—during their precipitous vertical odyssey. Almost without noticing, they discover that the great sliding river itself is the only constant, their one fixed home.

  “Huckleberry Finn” invites rereading, but I find less sunshine in it each time around. Its cruel and oafish backwater crowds, and the itinerant grotesques who prey upon them, don’t feel all that funny or far away, and the bitter pains of Jim’s condition, on which Twain poured out his irony, are dated more in details than in substance. I notice, too, as I did not before, that Huck and Jim become older in the book, partly as the result of their comical and horrific experiences but really because they are also riding that other stream whose insensible, one-way flow is felt perhaps even by children staring at distant sails and trains on a summer afternoon. In the end, the two run out of river, and so does their story, which becomes less when it must find a way to stop. Time has slid away, and we wish ourselves upstream again, beginning the voyage.

  Sidebar, June, 1995

  HERSEY AND HISTORY

  John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” which famously constituted the entire editorial contents of this magazine’s issue of August 31, 1946, is a work of sustained silence. Its appearance, just over a year after the destruction of the Japanese city in the first atomic attack, offered one of the first detailed accounts of the effects of nuclear warfare on its survivors, in a prose so stripped of mannerism, sentimentality, and even minimal emphasis as to place each reader alone within scenes laid bare of all but pain. The piece tells the stories of six people—two doctors, two women, a Protestant clergyman, and a German Jesuit priest—as they experience the bomb, suffer injuries, and struggle for survival in the nightmarish landscape of ruin and death, and does so with classical restraint. Hersey never attempts to “humanize” these victims but instead allows them to keep their formal titles—Mrs. Nakamura, Dr. Fujii, Father Kleinsorge, and so on—throughout, thus clothing them once again in the privacy and individuality that the war and the bomb have blown away. This was not the way we in America were accustomed to thinking about Japanese citizens, whether seen as the hated enemy or the faceless dead, in the mid-nineteen-forties.

  “Hiroshima” is a short piece, given its concerns, and was read everywhere, one may assume, at a single sitting. Its thirty-one thousand words suffice because they abstain from the smallest judgment or moral positioning, and leave the reader to deal with the consequences and the questions. Nothing in the work has been dramatized, but many individual scenes begin with a simple few words—“Early that day,” “It began to rain,” “Some time later”—that sound like stage directions. Indeed, the meticulous, restrained flow of Hersey’s words, the slow conversations of his handful of characters, and the flattened, burnt-out scenery of the destroyed city contrive to shift the piece from contemporary war reporting to what feels like ancient tragedy. In the same way, the decision to run the piece intact in The New Yorker, with no other text (William Shawn, then the managing editor, conceived the idea and persuaded Harold Ross to go along with it), cleared its setting of familiar and reassuring distractions. What happened at Hiroshima is all that we are allowed to think about.

  It is difficult, in this news-drenched age, to imagine how “Hiroshima” was received in its time. Newspapers everywhere devoted lead editorials to it and reprinted front-page excerpts, while the American Broadcasting Company had the piece read aloud (this was just before the television age), over national radio, across four successive evenings. The article became a book, and the book has sold more than three and a half million copies and remains in print to this day. Its story became a part of our ceaseless thinking about world wars and nuclear holocaust. Neither of these disasters has come to pass in the past fifty years, and that long and unexpected silence, one must conclude, found its beginning in the murmurous eloquence of John Hersey’s report.

  Sidebar, July, 1995

  DISARMED

  Visiting the splendid “Henri Cartier-Bresson in America 1935–1975” show at the Equitable (through November 2nd) brought back for me some brief but still vivid moments spent with the Magnum grand master forty years ago. He was not just the most revered but the most enjoyed member of that celebrated entourage of photographers—Robert Capa, Chim Seymour, and Elliott Erwitt were some of the others—whose work was repeatedly featured in Holiday, where I was a young editor, and whenever he turned up at the office, a diminutive, monkish-looking gent, with smile and Leica at the ready, he was received with complimentary disrespect. “Hank!” cried our art director, Frank Zachary. �
�Hank Carter! Got the snaps, Hank?”

  It was Zachary’s notion that the suave and cosmopolitan C.-B., a Parisian to the core, would respond happily to being treated like an aspiring night-beat news photog with a big-circulation American daily, and even proposed to him that he should go everywhere wearing a porkpie hat with a “Press” placard stuck in the hatband, just like in the movies. “Oh, Franghnk!” Cartier-Bresson protested. He was laughing. “ ‘Got the snaps’—you are…you are exceptionale!” Always, of course, he did have the snaps, and then some, and when we took him out to lunch he would sometimes swiftly lift the Leica, barely pausing in midstride or midsentence, and catch another one—a passing dog or grande dame, a delivery boy across the street with his face at that instant lifted toward the sun—that the rest of us had never noticed.

 

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