My Ears Are Bent (24 page)

The point is that he was impressed by “the grace and the decency and the customs of the civilization of the South,” and he used what he read about that civilization as a basis of comparison when he observed his contemporaries. It was, of course, an unjust comparison. However, he found his contemporaries lacking.

The piercing lithographs of Daumier, then, and an interest in the Civil War, and the fact that he grew up when reputations of hundreds of idols were being deflated, caused Arno to look upon what was once considered “a sweet old lady” and decide she was a “fat-faced old mama, who grunts when she sits down,” and to look upon a snorting general, with a few score pounds of badges pinned to his coat, as a comic figure. That is his own analysis.

Now thirty-three, Arno has seen his draftsmanship and outlook influence most of his contemporaries in the field of the humorous drawing. He is by no means satisfied with his work. He quit drawing the Whoops Sisters, a pair of raucous, uninhibited
ladies he originated in 1926, because he was afraid the customers were beginning to find them hackneyed. Lately he purchased a candid camera, a device found valuable by other cartoonists. He develops his own films, does his own enlargements.

“I think of my drawing as reporting,” he said, “and I think I’m approaching a truer and sounder style of reporting. I like the people in my drawings to have the startled looks on their faces you sometimes see in the flashlight photo. I take a lot of candid shots and use them as memos. I take them under theater marquees, in night clubs, on Fifth Avenue late in the afternoon and places like that. I get a lot of tips from them.

“I take photographs when I am on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, or in the Bahamas, and I have done some posed stuff under studio lights. I’ve also got some pretty good pictures in airplanes.

“I think I am changing as an artist, but I can’t explain how. More and more I’m getting to keep regular hours. I’ve led a pretty quiet life the last year or so. However, a cartoonist can’t sit in his hole. I have to get around at night to new places to see strange-looking people. I’m sure I’ve never used any one person for a character. I’ll see maybe twenty or thirty persons of one type and I’ll get a little something I can use from all of them.

“I don’t like to draw young people. I don’t think they’re funny. Most humorous situations to me involve older people. There is some salt in what they do or say. Young people lack experience, and what they say is more pathetic to me than funny. It’s the old bird sitting in a club window day in and day out that I like to draw, or types of white-mustached colonels, or the rather timid husband of the beautiful wife, the little man with drooping mustaches and childlike eyes.

“I like to work late at night. Of course, I sometimes work during the day, but I like to get in here after dinner, when things have quieted down and I can concentrate. Or sometimes I come up here to my studio after a show, around midnight, and I’ll get lost in my work and stay here at the drawing board until five or six in the morning. Sometimes I drink coffee to keep going. I don’t do so much drinking any more, and I wish the legend of me as a hell-raiser would die.”

Arno is a prolific cartoonist. He has turned out five books of cartoons. He said The New Yorker gets first refusal on his cartoons and he is under contract to deliver a minimum of forty drawings a year. He does advertising drawings, working directly for agencies, and he does a two-page feature once a month for College Humor. He does a stack of rough sketches
for magazines and finishes them after the editors have made their selections. He said that 80 percent of the gags are his own, but he uses ideas he gets from editors, or ideas that come in the mail.

He has no interest in political cartoons; he is too little interested in politicians to find them funny. Someone connected with the Democratic Campaign Committee asked for and was refused permission to use one of his drawings, a picture of some typical Arno citizens with the gag-line “Let’s go to the Trans-Lux and hiss Roosevelt.” He didn’t register because he didn’t want particularly to vote for Roosevelt and he considered Landon “a pathetic little puppet.”

However, he was pleased when Heywood Broun called him “the most effective proletarian artist now functioning in America.” Mr. Broun decided, “The Daily Worker is fond of using the prefix ‘Mr. Full-belly’ when it mentions the various industrial leaders whom it hates. Arno does the same thing rather more concisely with a curved line.”

He is proud that his formal education as an artist was exceedingly limited. “Oh, I went to the Yale Art School for a month and walked out in disgust,” he said. “Then I went to the Art Students’ League for a month and walked out. My teachers were just as disgusted. They tried to iron out of me the very thing
that means something in my work. I painted some conventional still lifes just to show them what I could do up at Yale.

“This may sound like bragging, but they stood behind me and watched me work one day, and one teacher said the thing I turned out was the kind of thing George Luks would have done. Then I did another one in broken colors and they compared it with a Monet. It’s on permanent exhibition at the Yale Art School.”

The cartoonist appeared to be pleased by this recollection. “I showed them what I could do,” he said.

The funniest people in the republic to Helen E. Hokinson, formerly of Mendota, Illinois, and daughter of a salesman for the Moline Plow Company, are the middle-aged ladies who live in exclusive Westchester towns, in the Oranges or in the Gramercy Square neighborhood, and whose more or less empty lives revolve in a dignified fashion around the garden or culture club, the beauty shop and the detective story.

They are women who have charge accounts, plenty of leisure, poodle dogs, chauffeurs, a box at the opera and the right to sit in Gramercy Park. They have regular appointments with hairdressers, and the
hard cash some of them spend in beauty shops would wreck a bank.

Their husbands are executives and brokers. They are on the boards of private charities, and there are a flock of Madame Presidents among them.

Just about all their activities are funny to Miss Hokinson, perhaps the best lady cartoonist in America, who has a sharp eye, a dry sense of humor and plenty of ability with charcoal and wash.

Her work is personal and feminine. She deals almost entirely with females, and she can rip a woman apart, but when she goes to work on a man she merely scratches him. As a matter of fact, Dorothy McKay is about the only one of the women cartoonists whose work does not always show “the woman angle.”

The boudoir and the fitting room in a fashionable shop and the parlor are the scene of most cartoons by Barbara Shermund, Alice Harvey and Mary Petty, Miss Hokinson’s colleagues.

Miss Petty, for example, is typified by a cartoon showing a spectacled dame in an evening gown with a train. The saleswoman beside her says, “I want Miss Moak to look at you, Ma’am. Miss Moak is our trouble-shooter.”

Miss Shermund draws giddy, angular girls. For example, two girls are lounging about in a room, one in pajamas and one in an evening dress. The latter
says, “I told him there are some things I won’t do, and going to a museum is one of them.”

Miss Hokinson goes farther afield for her characters.

“I see my women at the flower show, the dog show and places like that,” she said. “I find them at concerts, trying their best to be moved by the music, because it is so cultured. And I see them at flower shows talking about flowers and giving their Latin names, which amuses me because I have a nice flower garden and I like flowers as well as they do, but I don’t know a single Latin name.

“I don’t like people to get the idea I am bitter about them. I just think they’re funny. I seldom draw the vicious type—they don’t interest me at all. The ones who are unconsciously funny are the ones I like.”

Her cartoons emphasize the frivolous in the clubwoman type. There is her fat hostess in a room full of women who guides another fat lady up to a group and says, “Mrs. Purvis is just back from Spain. She says they’re wearing their skirts
QUITE
short.”

There are the two middle-aged ladies—whether Miss Hokinson’s ladies are “middle-aged” or “elderly” is puzzling—who are coming down the steps from a shabby apartment house. In one window is a sign, “Mrs. Digby, the Spiritualist, Messages.” Both the ladies look vaguely disappointed. One turns to the
other and says, “Someday I’m going to a
five
-dollar medium.”

Many of the situations she satirizes take place in beauty shops or fashionable stores, and a frequent character is the fatuous saleswoman, anxious to make a sale and to impress the customer with her taste. She is the one who says to the clubwoman standing before the looking glass, “If it gives Madame a stomach we can take it out.”

“One time a newspaper man in Boston wrote me a letter and said he rather liked my clubwomen drawings, but that for a long time he didn’t really believe they existed,” said Miss Hokinson. “But he enclosed a clipping from a rotogravure section showing a meeting of clubwomen, and it was exactly like one of my uplift-club cartoons.”

One of her best club-meeting cartoons is one in which Edna St. Vincent Millay is sitting on the platform (it is a good caricature of Miss Millay). One old sister jumps up impulsively and, waving her hand, says, “Madame President, I move we read some of our poems for Miss Millay after she finishes.”

Miss Hokinson spends most of the year in a bungalow she calls Columbine Cottage, on Dishpan Creek in Silvermine, Connecticut. It is a section in which many artists have settled. She works in a little frame house which is mostly windows built in the woods at
the edge of a meadow. She can look up from her drawing board and see an overfed horse named Charley grazing on the thick Connecticut grass and switching his tail at the flies. Beside her drawing board she keeps a filing cabinet in which she has laid away hundreds of sketches.

In the files are sketches made on concert programs, on envelopes, on the margins of newspapers, on the insides of paper-match folders.

“People from all over send me ideas for cartoons,” she said. “I give them a commission if I use the idea. There is a lady over in New Jersey who sends me a lot. I’ve never seen her. If she hears a saleswoman say something funny, she sends it to me. I like to get them.”

Miss Hokinson also finds types for her cartoons at church suppers and bingo parties in the community in which she lives.

An old man runs a sawmill across Silvermine River from her bungalow, and she buys church-supper tickets from his wife.

Miss Hokinson’s real name is Haakonson. Her father was Swedish, but he Americanized the name soon after settling in Illinois. She left Mendota to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, planning to be a fashion artist.

“I wanted to earn my living,” she said. “I didn’t
want to go back to Mendota, although it’s a nice place. My mother still lives in Sterling, Illinois, and I go out there every Christmas.”

After studying at the Academy, she stayed in Chicago for two years, doing fashion drawings for Marshall Field’s and other stores. Then she came to New York City; she thinks “it was somewhere around 1922, because I was here a couple of years before The New Yorker started.”

She was a routine fashion artist for several years. At one time in this period she did a comic strip for a tabloid and called it Sylvia in the Big City.

“It was terrible,” she said. “One of the editors came over to me and said, ‘Now, listen. Your audience is composed of the gum-chewers and you got to appeal to them.’ I lasted five or six months, but in that time I saved enough money so I could look around for a while.”

The turning point in her career was the discovery of the theory of dynamic symmetry, which states that there is geometric form to everything—a snowflake, a leaf, the human body—and that the artist should “organize on his drawing surface a series of similar shapes based in symmetrical triangulation, and the picture will grow in conformity with nature’s plan.”

The theory is not generally accepted, but some of
the best artists who ever lived, including George Bellows, believed in it, and it worked out fine for Miss Hokinson.

“I found out about dynamic symmetry in a night class taught by Howard Giles at the Parsons School,” she said. “It changed me entirely. When I am drawing now, sketching a person unawares even, I start with little rough triangular shapes and work out from that.

“It is wonderful for catching the gestures of people or the way they wear their hats or coats.

“Mr. Giles told us to sit in the subway on our way to class and draw people, how they were sitting, in straight lines—no curves at all. I would draw pictures of women with these straight lines and Mr. Giles would look at them and laugh. I was hurt. He said to keep at it.

“One day Garrett Price saw some drawings I made on a deck when I was seeing a friend off. They were just pictures of fat women waving to friends, fluttering their handkerchiefs.

“He said I should take them to The New Yorker, which was then a new magazine. I did, and they took them, and I’ve been drawing for them ever since. At first my cartoons were printed with no captions. Then they began putting captions on them, and after a while I got the knack.

“I prefer no captions on most cartoons. I think it would be just as well if the cartoon told the whole
story. Of course, I’d rather have a caption when it’s something like, ‘If it gives Madame a stomach we can take it out!’”

Not yet thirty, William Steig sold his first cartoon in 1930 and has become in six years one of the most respected humorous artists in the country, celebrated as much for his draftsmanship as for the comedy and social criticism inherent in his pictures of middle-class married life, of humans eating and drinking, of city children. He is perhaps best known for his cartoons of kids, the series of Small Fry cartoons.

He became a successful cartoonist with a minimum of backing and filling. After two years at the College of the City of New York, where he was a water polo star, he decided he wanted to be an artist. He talked the matter over with his father, Joseph Steig, then a house-painting contractor, but now a painter of crowd scenes, and they came to the conclusion it would be wise for him to study at the National Academy of Design.