This world offers a child many sites for passionate involvement: the keyboard of a piano, for instance, or the workings of an automobile engine. By my teens, I had friends who were clever in one or the other realm; one boy, years before we got our drivers’ licenses, could identify the make of car—cars were overwhelmingly of Detroit manufacture then—at a glance from a block or more away. He loved cars, and love breeds knowledge. I was able to identify all the cartoonists as they appeared in a magazine, which I rapidly leafed through upside down while my audience—usually an audience of one, and soon bored—confirmed me right side up. Like trees for an arborist, cartoons have personalities whose recognition the informed mind attains before any conscious sorting out of traits, just as we spot a known face, or even a certain swing of the body, at a distance that blurs all details.
I loved cartoons—almost any cartoon that met a modest standard of professional crispness—and studied them as if my salvation lay somewhere in their particularities of shading and penmanship. V. T. Hamlin, for instance, who drew the syndicated strip “Alley Oop,” had a deliberate, gridlike style of cross-hatching that, mixed with the peculiar inverted proportions of his cavemen’s legs and arms, signalled a special solidity in the progress of his dinosaur-studded panels. Hamlin, like Alex Raymond of “Flash Gordon” and Harold Foster of “Prince Valiant” and Milton Caniff of “Terry and the Pirates” and then “Steve Canyon,” seemed to be operating well within his artistic capacities, as opposed to Chester Gould of “Dick Tracy” and Harold Gray of “Little Orphan Annie,” who I felt were drawing at the very limit of their skills, with a cozy, wooden consistency; Gould, in his doubts that he had made this or that detail clear, would sometimes enclose an enlargement within a sharply outlined balloon, with an arrow and a label saying “2-Way Wrist Radio” or “Secret Compartment for Cyanide.” Fontaine Fox of “Toonerville Folks” and Percy Crosby of “Skippy,” on the other hand, worked with a certain inky looseness, a touch of impatience in their confident pen lines. This inky ease attained opulence in Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner,” the lines of which experienced a voluptuous thickening when limning the curves of Daisy Mae or Moonbeam McSwine. Capp and Caniff and Will Eisner, who drew the bloody, vertiginous “Spirit” comic books, were virtuosos; closer to a child’s heart, and containing the essence of cartoon reality, were the strips of finite artistic means, like “Mutt and Jeff” and “Bringing Up Father” (Jiggs and Maggie)—holdovers from an earlier, vaudevillian era—and adventure strips whose implausibility was framed in an earnest stiffness of execution, such as “The Phantom” and “Mandrake the Magician.” Strikingly minimal, in that pre-“Peanuts” era, was Crockett Johnson’s “Barnaby,” whose characters appeared in invariable profile and whose talk balloons were lettered not by hand but by mechanical typesetting. In my love of cartoons I sent away to cartoonists, care of their syndicates, begging for a free original strip; surprisingly many of them obliged. My sample “Barnaby” strip slowly shed, over the years, its glued-on lettering.
At a certain votive stage, I cut out favorite strips and made little long cardboard books of them, held together with those nail-like brass fasteners whose flat stem splits open, it always occurred to me, like a loose-jointed dancer’s legs. In my passionate doting I cut cartoons out of magazines and pasted them in large scrapbooks, agonizing over which to choose when two were back to back—my first brush with editorial judgment. And of course I copied, copied onto paper and onto slick white cardboard, trying to master each quirk of these miniature universes. Li’l Abner’s hair was always seen with the parting toward the viewer, and Mickey Mouse’s circular ears were never seen on edge, and Downwind, in Zack Mosley’s “Smilin’ Jack,” was always shown with face averted, and Smokey Stover, in Bill Holman’s “Krazy Kat”-ish slapstick, kept saying “Foo” apropos of nothing and drove vehicles that were endlessly shedding their nuts and bolts. God—the heat, the quest, the bliss of it—was in the details. The way the letters of pow! or shazam! overlapped, the qualities of the clouds that indicated explosions or thoughts, the whirling Saturns and stars that accompanied a blow to the head, the variations played upon the talk balloon, that two-dimensional irruption into the panel’s three-dimensional space, invisible to its inhabitants and yet critical to their intercourse—all this had to be studied, imitated, absorbed. The studying occurred mostly on the floor, my head lifted up on my elbows but not very high. When I drew, too, my nose had to be close to the paper, though I was not generally nearsighted. But the entering in required close examination, as though I were physically worming my way into those panels, those lines fat and slender, those energetic zigzags, those shading dots I learned to call Benday.
Acraft lore existed, of pen nibs, fine brushes, blue pencils, art-gum erasers, whiteout, and Higgins India ink (which came in broad-bottomed bottles that nevertheless could be knocked over, as several indelible stains on my family’s carpets testified). The prestige of cartooning during the Depression and the forties was such that one did not have to travel farther than the variety store and the adjacent camera shop in the center of our small Pennsylvania town to find most of the necessary equipment. Bristol board (two- or three-ply, more flexible and ink-accepting than the slick posterboard children use in school), and a cardboard whose rippled surface would turn Conté crayon into halftones, and scratchboard, whose clayey top layer could be scraped to make white on black—for those one had to travel to the nearby city of Reading, where a number of art-supply stores, some combined with a framer’s shop, offered their wares to the artsy-craftsy crowd. Black-and-white cartoons were reproduced by means of line cuts, which failed to register washes and pencilled shadings. A great deal of technology went into creating the impression of gray; cross-hatching, stippling, and crayon textures could be done by hand, and then there were sheets of Benday in many patterns, to be laid on and selectively cut away. There was even a treated cardboard, Craftint, that, depending on which of two chemicals was brushed on, produced fine stripes or a crosshatch, thus supplying two degrees of halftone. My high-school yearbook, for which I did many illustrations—more than anyone asked for—contains examples of this mechanical hatching, and of most of the other techniques my apprenticeship claimed acquaintance with.
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I drew not for the sake of drawing but to get into metal—to have the work of my hand be turned into zinc cuts and by this means printed. The first cuts made from a drawing of mine—a Christmas card, perhaps, portraying the family dog, or a caricature done for the class-play program—were to me potent objects, a purchase on power. In the alchemical symbology of those gritty decades, and nowhere more so than in the gritty cities of Pennsylvania, metal was power—steel rails, iron beams, lead bullets, great greased knitting machines twittering with a thousand nickel-plated needles. The basement “machine shop,” with a metal lathe, was commonplace in the town, and here and there an adept set up a gun shop in his back-yard garage. The toy tanks and battleships and dive bombers that simulated the distant, headlined war were metal, though of the cheapest “white” sort, which would bend and break in your hands. When you paid a school visit to the city newspaper, the linotypers would place in your palm a still hot lead slug bearing your name backward. When, in high school, I became a summer copyboy for the same newspaper, I saw how the comic strips arrived from the syndicates in the form of bundled paper matrices—a stiff pulpy colorless paper like that used in egg cartons—and how these rough (but legible, the reverse of a reverse) intaglios were filled with hot metal, and the cooled lead rectangles were locked into forms and recast into curved plates, which were bolted onto the rotary cylinders of the presses and thunderously rolled to produce the daily comic pages. A cartoonist partook of this process at the tentative, scratchy, inky outset, and then was swept up and glorified by a massive, ponderous miracle of reproduction. To get a toehold in this metal world—that was my ambition, the height of my hope.
A1950 issue of the soon defunct magazine Flair contained, in its eccentric format, a booklet about the Harvard Lampoon, including photographs of the young, crew-cut editors, the curious mock-Flemish building, and some sample cartoons. Somewhere in the concatenation of aspirations and inadvertences that got me to Harvard, this story played a crucial part. Early in my freshman year, I carried a batch of my cartoons down to the Lampoon building, there where Mt. Auburn Street meets Bow at an acute angle, an ornate little brick flatiron fronted by a tower with a sort of cartoon face and, on its hat of roof tiles, a much stolen copper ibis. In due course, some of my drawings were printed in the magazine, and I was accepted for membership. The Lampoon, I was too ignorant an outsider to realize, was a social club, with a strong flavor of Boston Brahmanism and alcoholic intake; to me it was a magazine for which I wanted to work. This I was allowed to do, especially as the upperclassmen year by year graduated and the various editorial offices fell to me. Though Harvard did little to attract cartoonists, in fact there were four on the Lampoon in 1950—Fred Gwynne, Lew Gifford, Doug Bunce, and Charlie Robinson—who seemed to me much my betters in skill and sophistication. Fred Gwynne, a multitalented giant who went on to become an actor, best known for “Car 54, Where Are You?” and “The Munsters,” drew with a Renaissance chiaroscuro and mastery of anatomy; Bunce had a fine line, and Gifford, who made his career in television animation, a carefree, flowing brushstroke years ahead of its time. I tried to measure up to their examples, and cartooned abundantly for the Lampoon—over half the art work in some issues was mine—but the budding cartoonist in me, exposed to what I felt were superior talents, suffered a blight; my light verse and supposedly humorous prose felt more viable. By graduation, I had pretty well given up on becoming a cartoonist. It took too many ideas, and one walked in too many footsteps. Writing seemed, in my innocence of it, a relatively untrafficked terrain.
When I think of my brief cartooning heyday, I see myself at my desk in my narrow room on the fifth floor of Lowell House, working late at night under a hot gooseneck lamp. An undergraduate lives in a succession of rooms, and I drew in all of mine, but this atticlike cubbyhole, occupied in my junior year, comes to mind as mon atelier. My nose inches from the garishly illumined bristol board, my lower lip sagging in the intensity of my concentration, a cigarette smoking in an ashtray near my eyes, I am “inking in”—tracing the lightly pencilled lines, trying to imbue them with a graceful freedom while searching out, in this final limning, the contour being described. The nervous glee of drawing is such that I sometimes laugh aloud, alone. I would get so excited by the process, so eager to admire the result, that I frequently smeared the still wet lines with my hand. This would put me in mind of a tip I had read of in my high-school days: a successful cartoonist advised aspirants to the art, “If you’re not sure the ink is dry, rub your sleeve over it.” It had taken some days before I realized that this was a joke, meant ironically.
Or, the precarious inking done, I am warily slicing, with a lethal single-edge Treet razor blade, the boundaries of a patch of Benday, or applying, with an annoyingly gummed-up little brush, whiteout to an errant line or a stray blot. Years before, I had studied my collection of begged comic strips, marvelling at the frequency of whiteout touches. Even professionals err. My soul hovers, five stories up, in the happiness of creation, the rapture of conjuring something out of nothing. All around me, my fellow-students are silent, sleeping or communing with the printed page; only I, in this vicinity, am carving a little window into a universe that, an hour ago, had not been there at all.
I dislike drawing now, since it makes me face the fact that I draw no better, indeed rather worse, than I did when I was twenty-one. Drawing is sacred to me, and I don’t like to see it inferiorly done. A drawing can feel perfect, in a way that prose never does, and a poem rarely. Language is intrinsically approximate, since words mean different things to different people, and there is no material retaining ground for the imagery that words conjure in one brain or another. When I drew, the line was exactly as I made it, just so, down to the tremor of excitement my hand may have communicated to the pen; and thus it was reproduced. Up to the midpoint of my writing career, most strenuously in the poem “Midpoint,” I sometimes tried to bring this visual absoluteness, this two-dimensional quiddity, onto a page of print with some pictorial device. But the attempt was futile, and a disfigurement, really. Only the letters themselves, originally drawn with sticks and styluses and pens, and then cast into metal fonts, whose forms are now reproduced by electronic processes, legitimately touch the printed page with cartoon magic. ♦
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