Hawanna cigar” and sighing for Ignatz; the smoke screen he produced hid
him from view when Ignatz passed, and before the Mice could turn back,
Krazy had handed over the cigar to Offisa Pupp and departed, saying
“Looking at ‘Offisa Pupp’ smoke himself up like a chimly is werra werra
intrisking, but it is more wital that I find ‘Ignatz’”--wherefore
Ignatz, thinking the smoke screen a ruse, hurls his brick, blacks the
officer’s eye, and is promptly chased by the limb of the law. Up to
this point you have the usual technique of the comic strip, as old
as Shakespeare. But note the final picture of Krazy beholding the
pursuit, himself disconsolate, unbricked, alone, muttering: “Ah, there
him is--playing tag with ‘Offisa Pupp’--just like the boom compenions
wot they is.” It is this touch of irony and pity which transforms
all of Herriman’s work, which relates it, for all that the material
is preposterous, to something profoundly true and moving. It isn’t
possible to retell these pictures; but that is the only way, until
they are collected and published, that I can give the impression of
Herriman’s gentle irony, of his understanding of tragedy, of the
_sancta simplicitas_, the innocent loveliness in the heart of a
creature more like Pan than any other creation of our time.
Given the general theme, the variations are innumerable, the ingenuity
never flags. I use haphazard examples from 1918 to 1923, for though the
Kat has changed somewhat since the days when he was even occasionally
feline, the essence is the same. Like Charlot, he was always living in
a world of his own, and subjecting the commonplaces of actual life
to the test of his higher logic. Does Ignatz say that “the bird is
on the wing,” Krazy suspects an error and after a careful scrutiny
of bird life says that “from rissint obserwation I should say that
the wing is on the bird.” Or Ignatz observes that Don Kiyote is still
running. Wrong, says the magnificent Kat: “he is either still or either
running, but not both still and both running.” Ignatz passes with a bag
containing, he says, bird-seed. “Not that I doubt your word, Ignatz,”
says Krazy, “but could I give a look?” And he is astonished to find
that it is bird-seed, after all, for he had all the time been thinking
that birds grew from eggs. It is Ignatz who is impressed by a falling
star; for Krazy “them that don’t fall” are the miracle. I recommend
Krazy to Mr Chesterton, who, in his best moments, will understand.
His mind is occupied with eternal oddities, with simple things to
which his nature leaves him unreconciled. See him entering a bank and
loftily writing a check for thirty million dollars. “You haven’t that
much money in the bank,” says the cashier. “I know it,” replies Krazy;
“have you?” There is a drastic simplicity about Krazy’s movements; he
is childlike, regarding with grave eyes the efforts of older people to
be solemn, to pretend that things are what they seem; and like children
he frightens us because none of our pretensions escapes him. A king to
him is a “royal cootie.” “Golla,” says he, “I always had a ida they
was grend, and megnifishint, and wondafil, and mejestic ... but my
goodniss! It ain’t so.” He should be given to the _enfant terrible_ of
Hans Andersen who knew the truth about kings.
He is, of course, blinded by love. Wandering alone in springtime, he
suffers the sight of all things pairing off; the solitude of a lonesome
pine worries him and when he finds a second lonesome pine he comes in
the dead of night and transplants one to the side of the other, “so
that in due course, Nature has her way.” But there are moments when
the fierce pang of an unrequited passion dies down. “In these blissfil
hours my soul will know no strife,” he confides to Mr Bum Bill Bee,
who, while the conversation goes on, catches sight of Ignatz with a
brick, flies off, stings Ignatz from the field, and returns to hear:
“In my Kosmis there will be no feeva of discord ... all my immotions
will function in hominy and kind feelings.” Or we see him at peace with
Ignatz himself. He has bought a pair of spectacles, and seeing that
Ignatz has none, cuts them in two, so that each may have a monocle. He
is gentle, and gentlemanly, and dear; and these divagations of his are
among his loveliest moments; for when irony plays about him he is as
helpless--as we are.
[Illustration:
(_Copyright by The Star Company_)
FRAGMENT FROM THE KRAZY KAT OF THE DOOR. By George Herriman.
(The original, of which this reproduces only the central
episodes, is in colour. Cf. text, page 244.)
]
To put such a character into music was a fine thought, but Mr
Carpenter must have known that he was foredoomed to failure. It
was a notable effort, for no other of our composers had seen the
possibilities; most, I fear, did not care to “lower themselves”
by the association. Mr Carpenter caught much of the fantasy; it was
exactly right for him to make the opening a parody--The Afternoon Nap
of a Faun. The “Class A Fit,” the Katnip Blues were also good. (There
exists a Sunday Krazy of this very scene--it is 1919, I think, and
shows hundreds of Krazy Kats in a wild abandoned revel in the Katnip
field--a rout, a bacchanale, a satyr-dance, an erotic festival, with
our own Krazy playing the viola in the corner, and Ignatz, who has
been drinking, going to sign the pledge.) Mr Carpenter almost missed
one essential thing: the ecstasy of Krazy when the brick arrives at
the end; certainly, as Mr Bolm danced it one felt only the triumph
of Ignatz, one did not feel the grand leaping up of Krazy’s heart,
the fulfilment of desire, as the brick fell upon him. The irony was
missing. And it was a mistake for Bolm to try it, since it isn’t
Russian ballet Krazy requires; it is American dance. One man, one man
only can do it right, and I publicly appeal to him to absent him from
felicity awhile, and though he do it but once, though but a small
number of people may see it, to pay tribute to his one compeer in
America, to the one creation equalling his own--I mean, of course,
Charlie Chaplin. He has been urged to do many things hostile to his
nature; here is one thing he is destined to do. Until then the ballet
ought to have Johnny and Ray Dooley for its creators. And I hope that
Mr Carpenter hasn’t driven other composers off the subject. There is
enough there for Irving Berlin and Deems Taylor to take up. Why don’t
they? The music it requires is a jazzed tenderness--as Mr Carpenter
knew. In their various ways Berlin and Taylor could accomplish it.
They may not be able to write profoundly in the private idiom of Krazy.
I have preserved his spelling and the quotations have given some sense
of his style. The accent is partly Dickens and partly Yiddish--and
the rest is not to be identified, for it is Krazy. It was odd that in
_Vanity Fair’s_ notorious “rankings,” Krazy tied with Doctor Johnson,
to whom he owes much of his vocabulary. There is a real sense of the
colour of words and a high imagination in such passages as “the echoing
cliffs of Kaibito” and “on the north side of ‘wild-cat peak’ the ‘snow
squaws’ shake their winter blankets and bring forth a chill which rides
the wind with goad and spur, hurling with an icy hand rime, and frost
upon a dreamy land musing in the lap of Spring”; and there is the
rhythm of wonder and excitement in “Ooy, ‘Ignatz’ it’s awfil; he’s got
his legs cut off above his elbows, and he’s wearing shoes, and he’s
standing on top of the water.”
Nor, even with Mr Herriman’s help, will a ballet get quite the sense of
his shifting backgrounds. He is alone in his freedom of movement; in
his large pictures and small, the scene changes at will--it is actually
our one work in the expressionistic mode. While Krazy and Ignatz talk
they move from mountain to sea; or a tree stunted and flattened with
odd ornaments of spots or design, grows suddenly long and thin; or
a house changes into a church. The trees in this enchanted mesa are
almost always set in flower pots with Coptic and Egyptian designs in
the foliage as often as on the pot. There are adobe walls, fantastic
cactus plants, strange fungus and growths. And they _compose designs_.
For whether he be a primitive or an expressionist, Herriman is an
artist; his works are built up; there is a definite relation between
his theme and his structure, and between his lines, masses, and his
page. His masterpieces in colour show a new delight, for he is as naïve
and as assured with colour as with line or black and white. The little
figure of Krazy built around the navel, is amazingly adaptable, and
Herriman economically makes him express all the emotions with a turn of
the hand, a bending of that extraordinary starched bow he wears round
the neck, or with a twist of his tail.
And he has had much to express for he has suffered much. I return to
the vast enterprises of the Sunday pictures. There is one constructed
entirely on the bias. Ignatz orders Krazy to push a huge rock off
its base, then to follow it downhill. Down they go, crashing through
houses, uprooting trees, tearing tunnels through mountains, the bowlder
first, Krazy so intently after that he nearly crashes into it when it
stops. He toils painfully back uphill. “Did it gather any moss?” asks
Ignatz. “No.” “That’s what I thought.” “L’il fillossiffa,” comments
Krazy, “always he seeks the truth, and always he finds it.” There is
the great day in which Krazy hears a lecture on the ectoplasm, how “it
soars out into the limitless ether, to roam willy-nilly, unleashed,
unfettered, and unbound” which becomes for him: “Just imegine having
your ‘ectospasm’ running around, William and Nilliam, among the
unlimitliss etha--golla, it’s imbillivibil--” until a toy balloon,
which looks like Ignatz precipitates a heroic gesture and a tragedy.
And there is the greatest of all, the epic, the Odyssean wanderings of
the door:
Krazy beholds a dormouse, a little mouse with a huge door. It impresses
him as being terrible that “a mice so small, so dellikit” should carry
around a door so heavy with weight. (At this point their Odyssey
begins; they use the door to cross a chasm.) “A door is so useless
without a house is hitched to it.” (It changes into a raft and they go
down stream.) “It has no ikkinomikil value.” (They dine off the door.)
“It lecks the werra werra essentials of helpfilniss.” (It shelters them
from a hailstorm.) “Historically it is all wrong and misleading.” (It
fends the lightning.) “As a thing of beauty it fails in every rispeck.”
(It shelters them from the sun and while Krazy goes on to deliver a
lecture: “You never see Mr Steve Door, or Mr Torra Door, or Mr Kuspa
Door doing it, do you?” and “Can you imagine my li’l friends Ignatz
Mice boddering himself with a door?”) his li’l friend Ignatz has
appeared with the brick; unseen by Krazy he hurls it; it is intercepted
by the door, rebounds, and strikes Ignatz down. Krazy continues his
adwice until the dormouse sheers off, and then Krazy sits down to
“concentrate his mind on Ignatz and wonda where he is at.”
[Illustration:
(_Courtesy of the artist and the_ New York American)
KRAZY KAT. By George Herriman
]
Such is our Krazy. Such is the work which America can pride itself on
having produced, and can hastily set about to appreciate. It is rich
with something we have too little of--fantasy. It is wise with pitying
irony; it has delicacy, sensitiveness, and an unearthly beauty. The
strange, unnerving, distorted trees, the language inhuman, un-animal,
the events so logical, so wild, are all magic carpets and faery
foam--all charged with unreality. Through them wanders Krazy, the most
tender and the most foolish of creatures, a gentle monster of our new
mythology.
_The Damned Effrontery
of the Two-a-Day_
THE DAMNED EFFRONTERY OF THE TWO-A-DAY
The narrator of the following episode is Mr Percy Hammond of the New
York _Tribune_; the stars are Montgomery and Stone; the Mr Mansfield
is Richard himself again, the actor who played _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_
better than Thomas E. Shea did:
“As the stars appeared in the last act in evening dress, Mr Mansfield
turned to me and with venomous indignation said, ‘That is damned
effrontery!’ It seemed to be Mr Mansfield’s belief that mere dancers
had no right to wear the vestments of refined society.”
To me that is a very funny story and the humour of it has nothing to do
with upon what meat has this our Cæsar fed that he is grown so great.
The eminence of Mansfield and the worthlessness of Montgomery and Stone
may be assumed; the recrudescence of the mediæval attitude toward
strolling players, even if it be in the mind of another player, is also
conceivable; snobbism is always conceivable and often interesting.
The story is funny because it so perfectly illustrates the genteel
tradition in America. (I am rather freely applying Mr Santayana’s
phrase, without any effort to do it justice.) Montgomery and Stone were
in revue or extravaganza, and were therefore outcast; they didn’t count
as Art. Whereas Mr Mansfield played Shakespeare and high-school girls
went to see him, and so he was Art. The application to vaudeville
is immediate, because vaudeville is considered on Broadway as the
grave of artistic reputations. An actor of established prestige _may_
venture into vaudeville; he usually makes his audience feel exactly
how far he has condescended to appear before them and accept, even if
he doesn’t earn, a salary three times as great as usual; but the actor
in the middle distance very well knows that if he goes into vaudeville
he is digging his own grave, because there is a stigma attached to
the two-a-day. Vaudeville players, in short, are not entitled to “the
vestments of refined society.” About every ten years the corrupt desire
to be refined takes hold of vaudeville itself; but it dies out quickly
and vaudeville remains simple and good.
It is in one of the stages of simple goodness now, and I propose to
discuss it without reference to a possibly more noble past. I am well
acquainted with the other method, which was founded, I believe, by
Arthur Symons, and beautifully practised by him. To him we owe the
peculiarly attractive attitude of sentimental reminiscence which,
invented or borrowed by him, has become classic. It leads to excellent
prose at times, and by showing that there was a golden age even in
vaudeville sometimes creates the suspicion that vaudeville itself
need not be all brass. But the attitude is unsatisfactory because
it invokes, in dealing with the most immediate of the minor arts,
more than a share of the pathos of distance. Vaudeville is brightly
coloured, zestful, with sharp outlines; and the classic attitude
softens and blurs. It is required of you to name and describe the acts
and numbers of a better day; one _must_ say “music-hall” or be slain
in the passages of the Jordan; in America a reference to the _commedia
dell’arte_ is, as scientists say, indicated. Yet the time must come
when it is possible to say, “Vaudeville is. Surely it could never
have been worse than this--or for that matter, never better. Let us
regard it as it is.” The moment must come in the history of general
culture when vaudeville can be taken without comparisons. That is,
it happens, the only way I can take it, for in my youth I saw little
of it and cared less. I recall a skit called _Change Your Act or Go
Back to the Woods_; there were Fours and among them were Cohans; there
was, I remember, The Man Who Made the Shah of Persia Laugh; once I
saw an artist in pantomime. Yet I am not moved to beat my breast and
begin _Einst in meinen Jugendjahren_. Nothing I have heard leads me
to believe that there were better days in vaudeville than those which
open benignant and wide over Joe Cook and Fanny Brice and the Six Brown
Brothers, over the two Briants and Van and Schenck and the four Marxes
and the Rath Brothers and the team of Williams and Wolfus; over Duffy
and Sweeney and Johnny Dooley and Harry Watson, Jr., as Young Kid
Battling Dugan, and Messrs Moss and Frye, who ask how high is up.
I shall arrive in a moment at the question of refined vaudeville, a
thing I dislike intensely; there is another sort of refinement in
vaudeville which demands respect. It is the refinement of technique.
It seems to me that the unerring taste of Fanny Brice’s impersonations
is at least partly due to, and has been achieved through, the purely
technical mastery she has developed; I am sure that the vaudeville
stage makes such demands upon its artists that they are compelled to
perfect everything. They have to do whatever they do swiftly, neatly,
without lost motion; they must touch and leap aside; they dare not
hold an audience more than a few minutes, at least not with the same
stunt; they have to establish an immediate contact, set a current in
motion, and exploit it to the last possible degree in the shortest
space of time. They have to be always “in the picture,” for though the
vaudeville stage seems to give them endless freedom and innumerable
opportunities, it holds them to strict account; it permits no fumbling,
and there are no reparable errors. The materials they use are trivial,
yes; but the treatment must be accurate to a hair’s breadth; the wine
they serve is light, it must fill the goblet to the very brim, and not
a drop must spill over. There is no great second act to redeem a false
entrance; no grand climacteric to make up for even a moment’s dulness.
The whole of the material must be subsumed in the whole of the
presentation, every page has to be _written_, every scene _rendered_,
every square inch of the canvas must be _painted_, not daubed with
paint. It is, of course, obvious, that the responsibility in this case
is exactly that of the major arts. It is at least tenable that in this
case, as in the major arts, the responsibilities are fulfilled.
And nothing could be more illuminating than the moments in vaudeville
when the tricky and the bogus appear. I face here willingly the protest
of intelligent men and women who have gone to vaudeville to see or
hear one turn and have sat through some of the dreariest æsthetic
dancing,[20] have heard the most painfully polite vocalism, have
witnessed “drama.” If vaudeville requires half of what I have said, how
do these things get in and get by? Largely as a concession to debased
public taste. Note well that all the culture elements in vaudeville,
the dull and base and truly vulgar ones, are importations. The dance
appropriate to the vaudeville stage is the stunt dance; its proper
music is ragtime or jazz; the playlet which belongs to it (witness
the success of _A Slice of Life_) is burlesque. Yet like every other
popular art in America, vaudeville is required, by the tradition of
gentility, to be cultural; and its dull defenders often make it their
boast that it does give culture to the masses (the same sort of thing
is heard in connexion with the music played at moving-picture houses)
because among its native acts appear _tableaux vivants_ out of Landseer
or because a legitimate actor brings to the common herd scraps and
snatches of _Les Misérables_. The process continues, regrettably, and
extends to the spoiling of good vaudeville material. It isn’t a loss
of anything precious, except time which could be filled by something
better, when Mr Lou Tellegen struts about on the variety stage; it is
a defamation of something good in the major line and equally a loss of
moments when the _“Affairs of” Anatol_ are inexpertly and tastelessly
produced “for vaudeville.” But what shall we say of such a real
disaster as the return of Miss Ethel Levey to vaudeville, still so rich
in attraction that she plays four weeks at the Palace in New York,
wholly spoiled for variety because she has had a triumph abroad and has
become a “great actress” or is it “an _artiste_”? There was in Miss
Levey something roughly elemental, something common and pure; whatever
she did had broadness and sharpness both. Corrupted by her success
abroad, she returns still magnificent, the voice still throbbing,
the form heavy but dominant--yet no longer vaudeville. She has the
grandeur of a star and appears in full stage with a grand piano and
silk-shaded lamps and draperies and sings _All by Myself_ with shocking
bad sentimental _acting_, and gets all she can out of _Love’s Old
Sweet Song_ before the touch of her old spirit protests--and recites
a dramatic monologue entitled _Destiny!_ Now and again flashes of
burlesque reveal her ancient flavour; but it is an axiom in vaudeville
that you can’t be good in it if you are too good for it.
[Illustration:
VAUDEVILLE. By Charles Demuth
]
I omit the people who aren’t, simply, good enough; there are
second-rate people in vaudeville as in everything else, and first-rate
people of _its_ second order. The part that is pure, I am convinced, is
rarely matched on our other stages. Certainly not in the legitimate,
nor in the serious artistic playhouse where knowing one’s job perfectly
and doing it simply and unpretentiously are the rarest things in the
world. Revue and musical comedy require and often attain the pitch
of technical accuracy which vaudeville sets as a standard, and these
two forms draw heavily upon vaudeville for material and stars, whom
they incorporate only in so far as the stars are not pure variety
themselves. They are as much entitled to the jazz bands as any other
stage, but to me a jazz band is not essentially variety, although it
has a legitimate place there. That is why I reject Mr Walter Haviland’s
ranking of Ted Lewis as one of the greatest of vaudeville acts, for
the great acts in vaudeville are those which could not be perfectly
appreciated elsewhere. (The æsthetics of the question have been
canvassed in Laokoön, I believe.) Johnny Dooley, who always breaks up
the show in musical comedy, is a real vaudeville player, and Jack
Donahue, who was the sole attraction of another such piece, is always
right, his fumbling for words is inspired, and so is his dancing, and
altogether it is a completely realized act. Among the most popular
of the big-time acts I am left cold by Van and Schenck, who are
perpetually stopping short of perfection; their songs are funny, but
not witty; their music is current, no more; their rendition is always
near enough right to be passed. The Four Marx Brothers do better in
creating their special atmosphere of low comedy; the Six Brown Brothers
are at the very top with their saxophones. It is an independent
act, wholly self-contained, not nearly so appropriate in any other
framework, except possibly a one-ring circus; it is a real variety
turn where a jazz band is only half and half; and in the case of these
performers everything they do is exquisite.
It isn’t possible to describe the acts, nor even to suggest the
distinctive quality of the head-liners. There are inexplicable things
in vaudeville, things no rational explanation can touch, such as the
persistence of sawing a woman in half, or the terrific impact of the
singing of Belle Baker, who destroys you with _Elie! Elie!_ Houdini
is variety as all magicians are and all tricksters--the circus side
of vaudeville, to be sure, and the sensational side. Here belong the
acrobats; I have written elsewhere of the Rath Brothers, who alone
are in the spirit and tone of vaudeville, without any intrusion of the
circus. At the present moment nearly everything in vaudeville which
is best has a touch of parody; not infrequently it burlesques itself.
Herbert Williams, of Williams and Wolfus, exaggerates wholly in the
manner of a clown; his despairing cry for the “spot_li-i-i-ght_,” his
wail of unhappiness, with his appearance, his gesture, his shambling
walk, make him a figure out of the _commedia dell’arte_--one of the few
in vaudeville. Duffy and Sweeney are parodists of their _métier_; their
whole fun is in their elaborate pretense of not caring to amuse the
audience. Harry Watson, Jr., has taken out of burlesque the accentuated
form, the built-up face, the wide and fatuous gesture peculiar to
that type, and in his broken-down prize-fighter has created a real
character with his jumping the rope “fi’ thousand conseggitiv times”
and “tell ’em what I did to Philadelphia Jack O’Brien.” I am dragged
into a catalogue of names, which I want to avoid; but I cannot omit
the macabre Moving-Man’s Dream of the Briants, the rustic studies of
Chic Sale, the elaborate burlesque of melodrama by Charles Withers,
and the exceptional mad magician of Frank Van Hoven. Van Hoven carries
farther than anyone else the appearance of not knowing the audience
is to be amused. He complains in a mutter of the presence of human
beings, individually probably all right, but _en masse_...! He leaves
the stage and passes out of the auditorium, bidding the audience amuse
itself while he’s gone. And his great finale, with a bowl of goldfish,
a handkerchief in a trunk, a table covered with a cloth, an inflated
paper bag, and a revolver shot--at the sound of which exactly nothing
happens, is the last word in destroying the paraphernalia of the
magician and all his works.