(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.”
(Courtesy of the artist and the New York American)
Krazy Kat. By George Herriman