My Ears Are Bent (25 page)

After leaving the Academy he found that cartoons were what he wanted to draw all the time and he has concentrated on cartoons, although he is a good watercolor artist and one of his watercolors, “The Protest”—a study of a husband and wife—now hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

“I had to break away from the things I learned at the Academy,” he said. “You develop nothing but bad habits in places like that. I had a good time there. We played football in the backyard during lunch hours and we used to hang out in an ice-cream parlor near the school and talk about art.

“The people were nice there, but I had to break away from the training I got. I imagine most cartoonists who went to formal art schools had the same experience. I am satisfied to do humorous drawings. I think the cartoon is a worthy art.”

Many of Mr. Steig’s cartoons and cover designs, particularly those of wide-eyed city kids, are based on memories of his experiences in the streets and in vacant-lot baseball and football fields of upper Manhattan, where he was born, and the Bronx, to which he moved when he was a child. Many of the kids in the Small Fry series probably went to P.S. 53 with him.

His Small Fry drawings are more realistic and reflect a higher regard for children than the glossy, varnished paintings by women in the women’s magazines.

There is the frightened little girl with her tiny hands clasped tightly together who looks through the window at the lightning in the sky; there is the boy who has found a worm in his apple; and there is the puzzled boy who laboriously has taken an alarm clock apart.

Perhaps you remember his drawing of a pleased small boy who has piled four pillows on a couch and is lolling on them while he demolishes a big lollipop. The title is “Sensualist.”

Mr. Steig is an urban cartoonist. All his people live in apartments or tenement flats. When he draws a country cartoon, it is a cartoon about city people on a farm in Connecticut for the summer. He lives at least six months of the year in Connecticut. His Colonial-style house is near the town of Sherman, but he gets his mail at Gaylordsville, his telephone exchange is New Milford, and the train he sometimes uses to get home after his weekly trip to Manhattan stops at Brewster, New York. Consequently, he does not quite know how to tell people where he lives.

He comes from an unusual family. Ten years ago there wasn’t an artist in the family and now there are eight. His father, who came here thirty years ago from Lemberg, a town then in Austria, but now in Poland, was a house-painting contractor until 1932, when illness caused him to retire. Since then he has been painting. He has held one exhibition.

“He paints crowds,” said his son. “Such things as state fairs and band concerts. I don’t think he’s painted a picture that didn’t have at least 100 persons in it.

“My mother, Loura Steig, started painting last February and she is very good. I guess you would call
her a primitive. My wife, Elizabeth Mead, is an artist. She does baroque interiors. My brother Henry is an artist. He is also a writer. Right now he is doing some stories on swing musicians, under the name of Henry Anton. His wife, Mimi Steig, is a genre painter. My other brother, Arthur, writes advertising copy for an agency, but he is also a painter. He is the best artist in the family. His wife, Phyllis Steig, paints people. Sometime soon we are all going to hold an exhibition together.”

Since his marriage last January, Mr. Steig has quit making cartoons satirizing domestic situations. He did not quit, however, because a few months of married life convinced him that his drawings of the bored husband in the overstuffed chair were untrue or unfunny, but for the same reason that Peter Arno quit drawing the Whoops Sisters—he wanted to stop before the public got tired of them.

He likes best to draw pictures of persons engaged in actions which show exactly what kind of humans they are—eating corn on the cob, for example, or sitting around the house after dinner, reading the paper. Some of his best work is in two series of character studies of persons eating and drinking he made for Vanity Fair. There is the buttermilk drinker, a fat-faced man with carefully parted hair; and there is the beer drinker, a stout gentleman with a ragged mustache and a pleased expression.

In his drawing of eaters, he really appears to be enjoying himself. There you see what he calls “the pseudo-correct eater,” a double-chinned lady who holds both little fingers outstretched as she fatuously drinks tea and eats a biscuit; and “the beast,” a gentleman who grasps a huge poppy-seed roll in one hand and a spoon of hot soup in the other.

Mr. Steig’s mind is inquisitive and he has tried to figure out for his own satisfaction just why people laugh at cartoons. He does not believe that laughter, even that precipitated by a cartoon, is always noble, finding that “quite often there is a certain amount of viciousness in it.”

“I think that laughter over a cartoon or a comic strip is pretty well explained by a man named A. M. Ludovici, who wrote a book called ‘The Secret of Laughter,’” he said. “A lot of cartoonists believe he is right. He calls his idea ‘the theory of superior adaptation.’ The idea is that a thing is funny if it creates in the spectator a feeling of superior adaptation, that for the moment he is a superior person, certainly superior to the man who has been hit over the head with a rolling pin.

“Take for example a man who understands a foreign language. He hears someone trying to say something in this language and he thinks the mispronunciations are exceedingly funny. He feels superior.

“It is easy to laugh at cartoons of kids, because we are certainly better adapted than they are. At the same time kids are delighted at a chance to laugh at a grown-up. The more ridiculous an adult is in a slapstick comic strip, the more they laugh. At the same time kids like pictures of other kids. I’ve seen children laughing at my Small Fry drawings and they undoubtedly felt superior.

“I think that a sense of humor can be carried too far. For example, there are speakers who realize that the only way they can put something over is to tell a lot of anecdotes. Audiences feel that if a speaker isn’t funny he’s no good, and that is bad.

“Enjoyment of a cartoon also involves what Freud calls release of psychic tension. We are all inhibited and a piece of humor breaks down these inhibitions. A nonsense drawing releases one momentarily from the burden of serious thinking.”

Mr. Steig believes the cartoonist is an important citizen in periods when the world is afflicted with depressions and the growing-pains concomitant with changes in the social order. People are bewildered by the times and they turn to cartoons, just as they turn to moving pictures and jazz music, for a release, for an opportunity to laugh and feel superior.

He is glad that cartoonists have quit depending on he-said and she-said jokes, but he believes that the
dependence on gag-lines likely will become as bore-some. He believes that a drawing which can take any one of six different gag-lines likely will be a bad humorous drawing, and he looks forward to a period when most cartoons will have no titles or gags beneath them at all. Unlike many cartoonists, he writes his own captions.

He is a prolific cartoonist, and he works with no soul-heaving. He works with pen and ink, with wash, with charcoal and with watercolors. He does cover designs in gouache, which is more opaque than the usual watercolors. For amusement he works on his thirty-acre farm, pruning apple trees or working about in his flower garden. Also for amusement, he carves figures out of wood cut from fruit trees.

“I’ve been carving wood for about a year and I find a lot of pleasure in it,” he said. “We cut down some fruit trees out here and I use the wood from them. Fruit-tree wood is not soft, but it carves easily.

“Next year we are going to have a vegetable garden, and I think I’ll get some goats. Most of my people are pretty definitely New York people, but I can draw them as well out here in Connecticut as I can in Manhattan, and we are thinking of living out here the whole year, rather than just for six months.”

He comes to town every Tuesday with a bundle of drawings. His work appears most regularly in The
NewYorker, although he does illustrations for articles and stories in Collier’s and other magazines. He has published a book, “Man About Town.” He keeps no regular working hours, starting and knocking off when he pleases.

Right now he is turning out cartoons for a gasoline company in addition to his usual work, and on his weekly trip to the city he often comes across drawings of his pasted on Connecticut billboards.

His favorite comic strip is Barney Google, and when asked to name his favorite artists he mentioned Pieter Breughel and Giotto, who is said to have drawn a perfect circle with a single stroke when asked for a sample of his work to show a pope.

Asked to name some cartoonists whose work he respects, he began with James Thurber and named about twenty.

George Bernard Shaw fell today for one of the oldest gags used by the press photographers of the metropolis. From the time they boarded the Empress of Britain in the lower bay at 8 A.M. until an hour after it tied up at 10:30, news, sound and color photographers rushed frantically about the corridors looking for a chance to point their lenses at Shaw.

At 11 o’clock a self-confident cameraman rushed up to Shaw’s stateroom
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on A deck, and began to pound on the door. The startled face of Archibald Henderson appeared.

“I’m appealing to your sense of fair play,” shouted the cameraman. “A little while ago three men got a shot at Shaw when he came up for breakfast. Now the rest of us are lost if he doesn’t give us a break. Ask him to stand in the door for a moment. Appeal
to his sense of fair play. Tell him we’re appealing to his sense of fair play.”

Mr. Henderson withdrew his startled face. In a moment Mr. Shaw looked out. His nose was sunburned. He rubbed it with a handkerchief on which he had rubbed medicine. He wore a green tie.

“Now, what’s the matter out here?” he demanded.

Thirty photographers began to shout at once.

“My God,” said Shaw. He walked out into the corridor.

“Wait a minute,” he said, facing thirty cameras. “I’ll go up on the sun deck.”

The cameramen filled elevators, choked stairways. On the sun deck they hung to awning frames, shinnied up on ventilators.

On the deck Mr. Shaw stood against the railing and crossed his arms. A contact man for a sound-film company rushed up and asked him to wave his hand and say, “Hello boobs!”

“We thought that would be the kind of picture you would approve of,” he said.

“How do you know what I approve of?” said Shaw. “I wish you’d throw all those cameras overboard. That’s what I’d approve of,” he said.

A cameraman began rolling. “Please turn this way, Mr. Shaw. Oh, Mr. Shaw! Oh, Mr. Shaw! For God’s sake, tell the old fool to turn this way.”

Mr. Shaw walked over to him and shook him by the shoulders. Red-faced, he shook the cameraman loose from his camera and a handful of plates. The crowd shouted, yelled, laughed. The other photographers busily exposed their plates.

Mr. Shaw had definite ideas on how he should pose for the movie cameras. The cameramen wanted a rail shot. Mr. Shaw insisted on a background of ventilator shafts. He would emerge from behind one and stroll toward the cameras.

His idea won, though before he could carry out the plan, he had to take a few more orders from the still cameramen. Finally, he got behind a ventilator. He straightened his tie and collar and stuck his hands in his pockets.

A cameraman shouted, “Now, Mr. Shaw is ready!” He was wrong, for Mr. Shaw said, “No, Mr. Shaw is not ready.” “No, Mr. Shaw is not ready,” the cameraman shouted.

He was wrong again. “Now I am ready,” said Mr. Shaw, and out he came walking straight toward the cameras and looking very stern.

When he got near the cameras, he looked up and smiled broadly.

“I welcome you to America,” said Archibald Henderson for the third time, shaking Mr. Shaw’s hand for the benefit of the newsreel men.

“I am tired of being welcomed to America,” said
Shaw. Abruptly, he turned his back on the battery and rushed for a stairway. The crowd, remembering his altercation with the photographer, cleared the way.

“No, I shall not say a word to newspapermen until tomorrow morning,” said Shaw. “Don’t you people understand English?”

George Bernard Shaw sat in the smoking-room of the Empress of Britain at her pier today and kept his promise to talk freely to reporters after spending hours yesterday in efforts to evade them.

“Fire away, gentlemen,” he said. “Occasionally you write ill-natured stories about things I haven’t said. But fire away.”

He was asked first about the reputed insult he offered Miss Helen Keller.

SHAW:
The reporter who wrote the story should have been shot. All I told her was she could hear and speak and see much better than her countrymen.

Miss Keller wrote the story herself for The New York Times.

REPORTER:
Would you be interested in a congress of the literary great to suppress war?

SHAW:
Why should they suppress war? War is just
a method of killing people. There are a great many people who ought to be killed.

REPORTER:
Do you think the English people ought to be killed?

Mr. Shaw declined to answer, gesturing as if he considered the question silly.

REPORTER:
How about the Irish people?

SHAW:
Yes, almost all the Irish should be killed.

Mr. Shaw said in his address last night at the Metropolitan Opera House that the real purpose of the American newspapers was to conceal the truth. He was asked to amplify.

SHAW:
That’s exactly what I mean. The newspapers get into the hands of big money, and whenever you write a story that is unfavorable to big money they do not waste time letting you know it.