A Miscellany (Revised)
Page 31
From the catalogue of a onemanshow at the American British Art Center, N.Y.C., May 1949.
FOREWORD TO AN EXHIBIT: IV
“We are living in a time of plague” said Fritz Wittels; when I mentioned something called an atomic era “so, like the story-tellers of the Decameron, we must find salvation in ourselves.”
Many unregenerate years ago, before everybody was a little better than everybody else, New York City boasted a phenomenon entitled The Society of Independent Artists; whose yearly exhibitions opened with near riots—partly on account of the fantastic number of exhibitors (for membership fees were moderate) but chiefly because (since no jury existed) an “Independent show” was sure to comprise every not imaginable variety of artfulness and artlessness; plus occasionally a work (or play) of art.
I was wrestling some peculiarly jovial mob of sightseers at possibly the least orthodox of all Independent “openings,” when out of nowhere the sculptor Lachaise gently materialized. “Hello Cumming” his serene voice (addressing me, as always, in the singular) sang above chaos “have you see one litel cat?” I shook my head. He beckoned—and shoulder to shoulder we gradually corkscrewed through several huge rooms; crammed with eccentricities of inspiration and teeming with miscalled humanity. Eventually we paused. He pointed. And I found myself face to face with a small canvas depicting a kitten.
During that distant epoch, pictures which couldn’t be labelled either “academic” or “experimental” were usually pronounced “naive.” But the healthily spontaneous little painting opposite me transcended classification. Bombarded by chromatic atrocities ranging all the way from lifeless nonrepresentationality to deathful anecdotalism, it remained completely and charmingly itself.
“Dis ting” Lachaise reverently affirmed (in the course of what remotely resembled a lull) “is paint with love.”
From the catalogue of a onemanshow at the University of Rochester, May 1957.
IS SOMETHING WRONG?
“Is something wrong with America’s socalled creative artists? Why don’t our poets and painters and composers and so forth glorify the war effort? Are they Good Americans or are they not?”
First: are they Good Americans. . . .
when I was a boy, Good Americans were—believe it or don’t—adoring the Japanese and loathing the Russians; now, Good Americans are adoring the Russians and loathing the Japanese. Furthermore (in case you were born yesterday) yesterday Good Americans were adoring the Finns; today Good Americans are either loathing the Finns or completely forgetting that Finland exists. Not even the fact that twice during my lifetime Good Americans have succeeded in disliking the Germans can convince me that any human being (such as an artist) is a Good American.
Second: why don’t they glorify. . . .
when you confuse art with propaganda, you confuse an act of God with something which can be turned on and off like the hot water faucet. If “God” means nothing to you (or less than nothing) I’ll cheerfully substitute one of your own favourite words, “freedom.” You confuse freedom—the only freedom—with absolute tyranny. Let me, incidentally, opine that absolute tyranny is what most of you are really after; that your socalled ideal isn’t America at all and never was America at all: that you’ll never be satisfied until what Father Abraham called “a new nation, conceived in liberty” becomes just another subhuman superstate (like the “great freedom-loving democracy” of Comrade Stalin) where an artist—or any other human being—either does as he’s told or turns into fertilizer.
Third: is something wrong. . . .
all over a socalled world, hundreds of millions of servile and insolent inhuman unbeings are busily rolling and unrolling in the enlightenment of propaganda. So what? There are still a few erect human beings in the socalled world. Proudly and humbly, I say to these human beings:
“O my fellow citizens, many an honest man believes a lie. Though you are as honest as the day, fear and hate the liar. Fear and hate him when he should be feared and hated: now. Fear and hate him where he should be feared and hated: in yourselves.
“Do not hate and fear the artist in yourselves, my fellow citizens. Honour him and love him. Love him truly—do not try to possess him. Trust him as nobly as you trust tomorrow.
“Only the artist in yourselves is more truthful than the night.”
From Harper’s Magazine, April 1945; also The War Poets (New York: The John Day Company, 1945).
A FOREWORD TO KRAZY
Twenty years ago, a celebration happened—the celebration of Krazy Kat by Gilbert Seldes. It happened in a book called The Seven Lively Arts; and it happened so wisely, so lovingly, so joyously, that recelebrating Krazy would be like teaching penguins to fly. Penguins (as a lot of people don’t realize) do fly—not through the sea of the sky but through the sky of the sea—and my present ambition is merely, with our celebrated friend’s assistance, to show how their flying affects every non-penguin.
What concerns me fundamentally is a meteoric burlesk melodrama, born of the immemorial adage love will find a way. This frank frenzy (encouraged by a strictly irrational landscape in perpetual metamorphosis) generates three protagonists and a plot. Two of the protagonists are easily recognized as a cynical brick-throwing mouse and a sentimental policeman-dog. The third protagonist—whose ambiguous gender doesn’t disguise the good news that here comes our heroine—may be described as a humbly poetic, gently clownlike, supremely innocent and illimitably affectionate creature (slightly resembling a child’s drawing of a cat, but gifted with the secret grace and obvious clumsiness of a penguin on terra firma) who is never so happy as when egoist-mouse, thwarting altruist-dog, hits her in the head with a brick. Dog hates mouse and worships “cat,” mouse despises “cat” and hates dog, “cat” hates no one and loves mouse.
Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp are opposite sides of the same coin. Is Offissa Pupp kind? Only in so far as Ignatz Mouse is cruel. If you’re a twofisted, spineless progressive (a mighty fashionable stance nowadays) Offissa Pupp, who forcefully asserts the will of socalled society, becomes a cosmic angel; while Ignatz Mouse, who forcefully defies society’s socalled will by asserting his authentic own, becomes a demon of anarchy and a fiend of chaos. But if—whisper it—you’re a 100% hidebound reactionary, the foot’s in the other shoe. Ignatz Mouse then stands forth as a hero, pluckily struggling to keep the flag of free will flying; while Offissa Pupp assumes the monstrous mien of a Goliath, satanically bullying a tiny but indomitable David. Well, let’s flip the coin—so: and lo! Offissa Pupp comes up. That makes Ignatz Mouse “tails.” Now we have a hero whose heart has gone to his head and a villain whose head has gone to his heart.
This hero and this villain no more understand Krazy Kat than the mythical denizens of a twodimensional realm understand some threedimensional intruder. The world of Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse is a knowledgeable power-world, in terms of which our unknowledgeable heroine is powerlessness personified. The sensical law of this world is might makes right; the nonsensical law of our heroine is love conquers all. To put the oak in the acorn: Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp (each completely convinced that his own particular brand of might makes right) are simple-minded—Krazy isn’t—therefore, to Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse, Krazy is. But if both our hero and our villain don’t and can’t understand our heroine, each of them can and each of them does misunderstand her differently. To our softheaded altruist, she is the adorably helpless incarnation of saintliness. To our hardhearted egoist, she is the puzzlingly indestructible embodiment of idiocy. The benevolent overdog sees her as an inspired weakling. The malevolent undermouse views her as a born target. Meanwhile Krazy Kat, through this double misunderstanding, fulfills her joyous destiny.
Let’s make no mistake about Krazy. A lot of people “love” because, and a lot of people “love” although, and a few individuals love. Love is something illimitable; and a lot of people spend their limited lives trying to prevent anything illimitable from happening to them. Krazy, however, is not a lot of
people. Krazy is herself. Krazy is illimitable—she loves. She loves in the only way anyone can love: illimitably. She isn’t morbid and she isn’t longsuffering; she doesn’t “love” someone because he hurts her and she doesn’t “love” someone although he hurts her. She doesn’t, moreover, “love” someone who hurts her. Quite the contrary: she loves someone who gives her unmitigated joy. How? By always trying his limited worst to make her unlove him, and always failing—not that our heroine is insensitive (for a more sensitive heroine never existed) but that our villain’s every effort to limit her love with his unlove ends by a transforming of his limitation into her illimitability. If you’re going to pity anyone, the last anyone to pity is our loving heroine, Krazy Kat. You might better pity that doggedly idolatrous imbecile, our hero; who policemanfully strives to protect his idol from catastrophic desecration at the paws of our iconoclastic villain—never suspecting that this very desecration becomes, through our transcending heroine, a consecration; and that this consecration reveals the ultimate meaning of existence. But the person to really pity (if really pity you must) is Ignatz. Poor villain! All his malevolence turns to beneficence at contact with Krazy’s head. By profaning the temple of altruism, alias law and order, he worships (entirely against his will) at the shrine of love.
I repeat: let’s make no mistake about Krazy. Her helplessness, as we have just seen, is merely sensical—nonsensically she’s a triumphant, not to say invincible, phenomenon. As for this invincible phenomenon’s supposed idiocy, it doesn’t even begin to fool nonsensical you and me. Life, to a lot of people, means either the triumph of mind over matter or the triumph of matter over mind; but you and I aren’t a lot of people. We understand that, just as there is something—love—infinitely more significant than brute force, there is something—wisdom—infinitely more significant than mental prowess. A remarkably developed intelligence impresses us about as much as a sixteen-inch bicep. If we know anything, we know that a lot of people can learn knowledge (which is the same thing as unlearning ignorance) but that none can learn wisdom. Wisdom, like love, is a spiritual gift. And Krazy happens to be extra ordinarily gifted. She has not only the gift of love, but the gift of wisdom as well. Her unknowledgeable wisdom blossoms in almost every episode of our meteoric burlesk melodrama; the supreme blossom, perhaps, being a tribute to Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse—who (as she observes) are playing a little game together. Right! The game they’re playing, willy-nilly, is the exciting democratic game of cat loves mouse; the game which a lot of highly moral people all over the socalled world consider uncivilized. I refer (of course) to those red-brown-and-blackshirted Puritans who want us all to scrap democracy and adopt their modernized version of follow the leader—a strictly ultraprogressive and superbenevolent affair which begins with the liquidation of Ignatz Mouse by Offissa Pupp. But (objects Krazy, in her innocent democratic way) Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp are having fun. Right again! And—from the Puritan point of view—nothing could be worse. Fun, to Puritans, is something wicked: an invention of The Devil Himself. That’s why all these superbenevolent collectivists are so hyperspinelessly keen on having us play their ultraprogressive game. The first superbenevolent rule of their ultraprogressive game is thou shalt not play.
If only the devilish game of democracy were exclusively concerned with such mindful matters as ignorance and knowledge, crime and punishment, cruelty and kindness, collectivists would really have something on the ball. But it so happens that democracy involves the spiritual values of wisdom, love, and joy. Democracy isn’t democracy because or although Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp are fighting a peaceful war. Democracy is democracy in so far as our villain and our hero—by having their fun, by playing their brutal little game—happen (despite their worst and best efforts) to be fulfilling our heroine’s immeasurable destiny. Joy is her destiny: and joy comes through Ignatz—via Offissa Pupp; since it’s our villain’s loathing for law which gives him the strength of ten when he hurls his blissyielding brick. Let’s not forget that. And let’s be perfectly sure about something else. Even if Offissa Pupp should go crazy and start chasing Krazy, and even if Krazy should go crazy and start chasing Ignatz, and even if crazy Krazy should swallow crazy Ignatz and crazy Offissa Pupp should swallow crazy Krazy and it was the millennium—there’d still be the brick. And (having nothing else to swallow) Offissa Pupp would then swallow the brick. Whereupon, as the brick hit Krazy, Krazy would be happy.
Alas for sensical reformers! Never can they realize that penguins do fly; that Krazy’s idiocy and helplessness in terms of a world—any world—are as nothing to the nth power, by comparison with a world’s—any world’s—helplessness and idiocy in terms of Krazy. Yet the truth of truths lies here and nowhere else. Always (no matter what’s real) Krazy is no mere reality. She is a living ideal. She is a spiritual force, inhabiting a merely real world—and the realer a merely real world happens to be, the more this living ideal becomes herself. Hence—needless to add—the brick. Only if, and whenever, that kind reality (cruelly wielded by our heroic villain, Ignatz Mouse, in despite of our villainous hero, Offissa Pupp) smites Krazy—fairly and squarely—does the joyous symbol of Love Fulfilled appear above our triumphantly unknowledgeable heroine. And now do we understand the meaning of democracy? If we don’t, a poet-painter called George Herriman most certainly cannot be blamed. Democracy, he tells us again and again and again, isn’t some ultraprogressive myth of a superbenevolent World As Should Be. The meteoric burlesk melodrama of democracy is a struggle between society (Offissa Pupp) and the individual (Ignatz Mouse) over an ideal (our heroine)—a struggle from which, again and again and again, emerges one stupendous fact; namely, that the ideal of democracy fulfills herself only if, and whenever, society fails to suppress the individual.
Could anything possibly be clearer?
Nothing—unless it’s the kindred fact that our illimitably affectionate Krazy has no connection with the oldfashioned heroine of common or garden melodrama. That prosaically “virtuous” puppet couldn’t bat a decorously “innocent” eyelash without immediately provoking some utterly estimable Mr. Righto to liquidate some perfectly wicked Mr. Wrongo. In her hyperspineless puritanical simplicity, she desired nothing quite so much as an ultraprogressive and superbenevolent substitute for human nature. Democracy’s merciful leading lady, on the other hand, is a fundamentally complex being who demands the whole mystery of life. Krazy Kat—who, with every mangled word and murdered gesture, translates a mangling and murdering world into Peace And Good Will—is the only original and authentic revolutionary protagonist. All blood-and-thunder Worlds As Should Be cannot comprise this immeasureably generous heroine of the strictly unmitigated future.
She has no fear—even of a mouse.
From The Sewanee Review, Spring 1946; also Krazy Kat (New York: Henry Holt, 1946).
WORDS INTO PICTURES (VERBUM ETC.)
Perhaps a few individuals may enjoy my pictures. Possibly a few may enjoy my poems.
And if yes, what could be better?
Equidistant from such wonderful luck—with a distance not reckonable by mere lightyears—are the naying and the yeaing of numberless televisionary unindividuals: movieloving each blinder than radioactive any is deaf.
Were I a critic, should probably add that “academic” (i.e. un-) art resembles every good coin, which it isn’t, in having two sides. One side can be called “photographic realism” or even “naturalism”; the other, “nonrepresentational” or “abstract” sic “painting.” And your stupid wiseguy doing his worst to deny Nature equals your clever fool who did his best to possess Her.
χαîρε
From Art News, May 1949.
JOTTINGS
1
knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination
2
everything near water looks better
3
it takes three to make a child
4
only as long as we can laugh at ourselves are we nobody e
lse
5
the expression of a clown is mostly in his knees
6
private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own
7
don’t stand under whispers
8
brother, that’s not a buck to you: that’s a century to me
9
ends are beginnings with their hats on
10
never put off till today what you can do yesterday
11
a poet is a penguin—his wings are to swim with
12
nothing recedes like progress
13
of course Bacon wrote Shakespeare; but so did everybody else, including (luckily) Shakespeare
14
not that she wasn’t a faithful husband
15
a chain is no weaker than its missing link
16
many parents wouldn’t exist if their children had been a little more careful
17
let rolling stones lie
18