Cartoons and the Pious Mind

October 17, 2011 By Max Lindenman 3 Comments

James Thurber claimed that he first gained a sense of the surreal from hearing the cliches of his neighbors and family in Columbus, Ohio. In the world of his childish mind, men left town under actual clouds, and women existed who were literally all ears. Hearing about Mrs. Huston, who was all cut up when her daughter died, threw him into a panic: “I could see the doctors too vividly, as they set upon Mrs. Huston with their knives, and I could hear them. ‘Now, Mrs. Huston, are we going to get up on the table like a good girl, or will we have to be put there?’”

Well, for better or worse, I grew up in a world where nobody knew his neighbors; my relatives lived too far away for me to hear very regularly. But that didn’t mean that my imagination went undernourished, because I did have cartoons. They promised a world very different from the visible one, but not completely out of sync with the world of religion. One Walter Lantz Productions short borrows heavily from Genesis (and a little from Dante): Andy Panda, advised by the devil, steals some apples and dreams he is in hell, being force-fed the things until he bursts. Nobody who has seen a coyote recover from the impact for a falling anvil can disbelieve in the Resurrection totally.

This priming should explain my initial understanding of the Crucifixion, about which I learned from my father when I was six. Being Jewish, he was possibly the less reliable parent to consult on the subject of Jesus, but it wasn’t Jesus I was asking about. We were driving — he had the wheel — along the Garden State Parkway one Sunday afternoon, past one of those cemeteries that looked to have more permanent residents than Newark. I asked why so many of the headstones were shaped like crosses; he answered, “Because Jesus Christ died on the Cross.” I demanded details, and he delivered.

The story as I constructed it went something like this: Jesus, apparently something of an underdog, got in deep with a pilot named Pontius, who I pictured as a Lindberghian figure in goggles, jodhpurs and flowing scarf. Pontius the Pilot chased Jesus all over Judea — I could imagine the dust trails billowing behind them. Finding a cross growing in the middle of the desert, Jesus clambered up in hope of escape. Exactly what happened next I couldn’t quite make out. I guessed Pilot got Him down — and did Him in — with an axe or a armful of red sticks marked TNT.

Fortunately, cartoons and the cartoonish imagination are elastic, capable of absorbing any data and making it serviceable by the smallest of distortions. If you ever meet my mother, she will show you a drawing I made for Easter when I was seven. Since it shows Jesus expiring on the Cross, nailed on properly, his side gouged in the right spot, it looks like the result of proper catechesis — in artistic conventions, as well as in religion. Well, look again: coming from Jesus’ mouth is a speech balloon enclosing the words “OH, BROTHER.” I’m pretty sure this Jesus wasn’t addressing St. John the Beloved; instead, he was using the words in the sense of “Oy, vey!” or “Ma, che palle!” – that is, in the same way Boo-Boo Bear or Fred Flintstone would have used them.

I am quite sure Chesterton was on board. He preferred his art as bizarre and fanciful as he could make it — especially where animals were the subjects. In “A Piece of Chalk,” he writes of tramping out to the down with a sheet of brown paper and a handful of colored chalks. Rather than record nature, he improves on it:

When a cow came slouching by me in the field, a mere artist might have drawn it; but I always went wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the beasts.

Chesterton died in 1936. A year later, Daffy Duck debuted onscreen. A year after that, audiences first laid eyes on Happy Rabbit, Bugs Bunny’s immediate forebear. From here, the timing looks as tragic as Voltaire’s death before the Revolution.

From the very beginning, Chesterton showed signs of geeky fanboydom. At school, he seemed to wander about in a daze, tripping over his own huge feet — when none of his classmates was sticking out a foot to trip him. Sometimes in adulthood, mesmerized by the lights in train stations, he would forget where he was and where he was supposed to be going. At times, he seems to appreciate Christianity because it favors the outsized and grotesque over the mundane and conventional.

This is especially apparent in his life of St. Francis of Assisi. In words, he sketches a cartoon, a religious Robin Hood — a figure too inspired, too charitable, too chivalrous and brave for anyone to keep up with. If Chesterton took his Francis a little more seriously, he might have turned him into a superhero in the early DC Comics mold; but Chesterton can’t help dwelling — and fondly — on the absurdities in Francis’ life. He calls the episode where Francis returns from the Sultan’s camp with neither converts nor the martyr’s palm “a tragedy comedy called The Man Who Could Not Get Killed.” Am I the only one who remembers when Popeye and Bluto tried to top each other in harming themselves, hoping to serve sculptress Olive Oyl as a mode for a statue called “Pooped”?

Neil Postman would have no patience for any of this. In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Entertainment, the NYU professor warned that television, which could not sustain truly rational discourse, was turning Americans into a nation of highly entertained but unthinking slobs. By his lights, Tom and Jerry, Bugs and Woody, had corrupted me early, wrecking my worth to the Republic long before I’d reached voting age.

Speaking generally on politics, Postman might have been overstating his case. Did rational discourse sway the nation in favor of Andrew Jackson? But on my cognition and my experience of Christianity, he might have a point. In the Catholic intellectual tradition, I’m told, faith and reason reinforce one another — swell. If those two have such a mutually supportive relationship, I’m happy for them and wish them the best. But when I brag on the reason part, I must sound like a man bragging on some local team he follows only through the box scores. When I thought I might be called to join the Dominicans, I found a copy of Summa Theologica online and started reading — the better, I figured, to get hip to the jive. After dragging my eyes through two summae, tops, I loaded Skype and called the Friars Minor.

The phone rang 14 times before the assistant to the vocations director picked up the phone. I’ll bet anything he’d been watching Fritz the Cat.

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Pretty As A Picture

September 28, 2011 By Max Lindenman 12 Comments


During my last miserable year of grad school, I found occasion to court the woman who had, in my last year as an undergrad, taught the German class I took as an elective. Though she’d lived most of her life in the Valley, she looked the part of Biergarten waitress, at least judging by how beer advertisements depict such people. Blonde, with a complexion Russians call “blood and milk, she was also slightly zaftig. To switch countries once again, if you can picture Blair from Facts of Life, say, in the third or fourth season, you’ve about got her.

Paying effective compliments requires a sense of timing. I forget exactly when I decided the right time had come — probably toward the end of our first date. But the compliment I can remember: I told her, “You look like Renoir’s ‘Nymph of the Sands.’” She can’t have known what painting I had in mind, since its actual title, as I later learned, is “Blonde Bather.” But because she sensed it was a good thing, or possibly because she was sick to death of being compared to Blair from Facts of Life, the flattering comparison did what it was supposed to do.

Searching great works of art for resemblance to actual people is probably a terrible way to approach them, but it’s a habit I got into right about at that time. I blame Carol Gerten, whose Fine Arts Site had gone up a year earlier. Housing thousands of paintings by artists from Edwin Austin Abbey to Francisco de Zubaran, it seems calculated to feed any addiction.

Like most unhealthy habits, the game of who-does-this-painting-look-like is fun. People who look like paintings rarely look like paintings of people like themselves. Small wonder, since so many artists have taken their subjects from the Bible or Greek mythology. Thus, a grad school colleague, whom I do not remember to have been a particularly talented dancer, shows up on canvas as Georges Regnault’s Salome.

An historian I used to know bears an almost freakish resemblance to Carvaggio’s Judith. It has to be said, though, that the historian, despite a general bookishness, was extraordinarily comfortable with blood and death. While excavating the family crypt of one of her subjects, she spent some minutes reverently cradling a tibia that had fallen to the floor from a burst casket. The beheader of Holofernes would have approved.

A Facebook friend of mine is a dead ringer for Jane Morris, which , thanks to the yeoman’s service Jane rendered Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, also makes her a dead ringer for Guinevere and Proserpina. In actual fact, she’s a Wisconsin native, a mother of three, and a Southern Baptist. Prosaic though her background might sound, this background sets her quite a few notches above young Jane, who was born to a stableman. Perhaps my imagination suffers from some gross defect, but I find I like people better once I’ve seen them transfigured.

Sometimes seeing the transfiguration leads to a deeper kind of seeing. My Russian professor was a man in his early seventies who’d served 20 years in the U.S. Navy. He drilled us, literally, in the rules of the language, making us stand to attention as we declined nouns of varying gender and number, along with their accompanying adjectives.

It worked; Russian grammar has become a matter of muscle memory — a kind of Manual of Arms for the tongue and brain. To this day, I remember that the instrumental of dver’, or door, is dver’yu; and the instrumental of dveri, or doors, dveryami. But at the time, good grief, he drove me nuts. He had a cutting wit, and gave himself license to dress up his lectures with a running commentary on the state of the world, which was always bad and getting worse. It was all I could do to restrain myself from kicking him right in the genitive case.

Years later, when I first laid eyes on Anton Graff’s portrait of Frederick the Great, I saw him: the jowls, the haunted (and haunting) blue eyes, the mouth held resolutely firm as if containing a barbed epigram. The likeness explained my old professor to me with a logic my mind had never been able to acquire on its own. During his own hitch in the service, Fritz was known to thrash orderlies with canes, and execute junior officers for writing letters after “Taps.” If anything, my class had gotten off lucky.

So I’m curious: Have you readers ever seen yourselves in a painting? Anyone else?

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MLK and the Politics of Poses

September 1, 2011 By Max Lindenman 7 Comments


Maya Angelou has told the world, through the Washington Post, that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looks “like an arrogant twit,” in his 30-foot high statue that stands on Washington’s National Mall.

Angelou blames the condensed quote at the base — “I was a drum major for peace, justice and righteousness” — but the problems are far more extensive. In life, King generally wore a mild, reflective expression. In marble, he’s scowling like Ozymandias, arms folded across his chest. He could be staring down the Boers carved into the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. Though King’s build did, in fact, run toward stocky, he carried the extra weight well. The artist has padded his subject to the point where he looks like an obese man with a gifted tailor. (In fairness, this effect may simply be the result of having to look up directly into the figure’s waistline.)

No doubt about it — King deserves better from the nation. But before we band together and resolve to drive the scuptor’s own chisel through his frontal lobe, it’s worth reflecting on some of the technical and moral problems involved in capturing human greatness.

Let’s start with the basics — selecting a pose is hard. It won’t do to show a subject just standing there, hands at his sides. That would look like a mug shot, at best. When the subject is a person of great historical significance, suggesting dynamism is even more important. You don’t want future generations thinking, “Geez, what a stiff he must have been!”

The best artists have always used small touches to hint at great capacity for action. Michelangelo’s David is cocking his knee ever so slightly and raising his hand to his shoulder. He looks languid, but he could, plausibly, snap into action at a moment’s notice and hurl a rock through somebody’s skull. Any lacrosse coach would weep with joy to sign him. If the sculptor borrowed his subject from the Jews, he took his technique from the Greeks and Romans. The same mixture of grace and power informs the statue of Caesar Augustus that now stands in the Vatican.

But that formula has not served all artists, or all subjects, equally well. When it came to immortalizing great leaders, baroque-era European artists tended to sacrifice motion for stateliness — a word, remember, which means “standing still.” When the subject was a ruler, stillness had political significance. As continental kings solidified their power with the help of standing armies and bureaucracies, they began to see themselves as hubs of frenzied activity, but not participants in it. Louis XIV was the Sun King around whom lesser bodies danced attendance. Like Paulie in Goodfellas, he might have moved slowly, but that was because he didn’t have to move for anyone.

To make subjects look grand without looking boring, artists developed a new series of conventions. They stuck people on horseback, as Velazquez did Phillip IV of Spain, or twisted them into three-quarters view, placing hand regally on hip, as Rigaud did Louis XIV. But the problem with these poses is, they look horribly dated; their cultural and political baggage weighs them down. It’s hard to look at Callet’s portrait of Louis XVI — where the king is raising his arm, arching his eyebrows and flaring his nostrils imperiously — and not think, “Smug bastard. How ya feel now?”

These traditions can’t help but bedevil American artists who want to do justice to their heroes. We’re a democratic nation so roi-soleil poses are out. Greco-Roman poses lose some of their power on men who wear a lot of clothes, as most of our worthies, with the exception of Ben Franklin, have tended to do. Washington’s easy — as a former general, he naturally belongs on a horse. Teddy Roosevelt was ham enough to make any posture plausible. Daniel Chester French’s decision to depict Lincoln sitting down was a brilliant stroke. Not only did French deal tactfully with Honest Abe’s bizarre proportions, he managed to make him look somber enough that nobody, not even the bitterest Southern populist, could resent him for being enthroned.

King admits of no such obvious approaches. None of the stock poses really works for him. He was a clergyman and peace activist, not a general; a King, not a king. You couldn’t get away with sticking him on horseback, not even if you were trying to evoke the Montgomery bus boycott.

In hindsight, a biblical theme would seem to have been appropriate. But which one? Sorry, but Jesus is out. Moses, who first went to the mountaintop, would have been a good choice, but without a staff or a pair of tablets, what makes Moses, Moses? (Horns would be a bad idea here.) Probably, the thing would have been to depict King with chin and eyes upraised, looking hopeful but pensive as he scans far horizons for a glimpse of the Promised Land. His firsts could be balled, but only in determination — not to slug anyone.

What we’ve got is bad, but it could have been worse. Given the quote, we should feel relieved to note King’s not twirling a baton.

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