My Best Girls

A room full of Helen Hokinson's Best Girls

The New Yorker is famous not only for its literary articles but perhaps even more so for its cartoons. Cartoons featuring dogs, drinkers, befuddled husbands, corporate bigwigs, doctors, lawyers, and most likely, Indian chiefs.

In reading Joseph Mitchell's My Ears Are Bent, a collection of newspaper profiles of the well-known and not-so-well-known denizens of New York City, I learned that one of the most popular cartoonists for the magazine from the mid-1920s through 1940s was Helen Hokinson. 

I had not heard of Ms. Hokinson but when I looked online I recognized her work. Her cartoons featured older well-to-do women who were concerned with fashion, the beauty parlor, women's clubs, pets, and gardens. 

I didn't realize that in those years there were any female cartoonists contributing to the magazine. How wrong I was. According to one web site, Ms. Hokinson contributed more than 1800 cartoons to the publication and her work was featured 68 times on its cover.

Ms. Hokinson was born in 1893 in Illinois, attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, and moved to New York City to pursue a career in fashion design. She began drawing cartoons - for a few months she did a comic strip for a New York tabloid - and someone suggested she take some of her drawings to the newly formed New Yorker magazine and her career was born.

Here is what Mr. Mitchell had to say about her characters:

The funniest people in the republic to Helen E. Hokinson....are the middle-aged ladies who live in exclusive Westchester towns, in the Oranges or in the Gramercy Square neighborhoods  and whose more or less empty lives revolve in a dignified fashion around the garden or culture club, the beauty shop and the detective story.

These are women who have charge accounts, plenty of leisure, poodle dogs, chauffeurs, a box at the opera and the right to sit in Gramercy Park. They have regular appointments with hairdressers, and the hard cash some of them spend in beauty shops would wreck a bank.

Their husbands are executives and brokers. They are on the boards of private charities, and there are a flock of Madame Presidents among them.

"I don't like people to get the idea I am bitter about them," Hokinson said.  "I just think they're funny. I seldom draw the vicious type. The ones who are unconsciously funny are the ones I like."

There are six books of Ms. Hokinson's collections of cartoons and used editions are available on-line. Perhaps her favorite was My Best Girls published in 1941.

Ms. Hokinson was killed in 1949 in a mid-air airplane collision at Washington National Airport. 

My Ears Are Bent

I do love reading American newspaper and magazine writers of the years between the wars. The prose is almost always concise, clear, and colorful. I am talking of those such as E.B. White, James Thurber and Janet Flanner of The New Yorker. 

I have now discovered another: Joseph Mitchell. Mitchell was a reporter and feature writer for New York City's The World, The Herald Tribune, and The World-Telegram. In 1929, when he was twenty-one, he came to New York from North Carolina and ended up interviewing the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and George Bernard Shaw and he covered the Lindbergh kidnapping trial.

But the people he really enjoyed chatting with were the boys in the barrooms, the ladies of the burlesque stage, the prizefighter hopefuls of the gymnasiums, and the street preachers of Harlem. Eventually he too went to work for The New Yorker and showed up daily at the office until he died of cancer in 1996. He was 87.

All this leads me to Mr. Mitchell's collection of early newspaper stories with the ever-wonderful title: My Ears Are Bent. These feature stories were first published in book form in 1938 and brought back into print in 2001. I bought my copy at a recent used book sale and the writing is terrific.

Here is a fine example of summer in the city:

The plentiful inhabitants of the lower East Side sit on the shady side of their disheveled streets and make no unessential motions.

No breezes stir. Even the gestures of the sidewalk peddlers are half-hearted. Food is cheaper on stoop stands and pushcarts in the afternoon, and now the women are going home from market -- going home to their hot little kitchens. Every one carries a bulging market sack -- a brown-paper sack filled with frayed vegetables.

The string of a market sack clutched in each wrinkled hand, an old wife walks slowly up Eldridge Street. Here she stops and passes a few words concerning the hot weather with another old one. Here she stops and argues for a moment with a peddler of jams.

Don't you think the phases disheveled streets and frayed vegetables perfectly capture the spirit of the scene?

Fortunately for me, Mr. Mitchell has another collection of stories that he wrote for The New Yorker titled Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories. It was published in 1992 and contains all his writings from four other collections. A treasure, I am sure.

Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair?

My Grand Southern Literary Tour traveling companion Rose and I managed to go to two fairs today. The first was the State Fair where we looked at quilts, cakes, watercolors and photographs, painted china, sculptures, and decorated Christmas trees until out knees and feet gave out.

Over lunch, somehow one of us mentioned the book fair held this weekend at an historic home here and off we went. Much more dangerous than riding a roller coaster on the midway.

I ran into two fellows that I had worked with in an independent bookstore in the '90s. A couple of years ago and after a good fight, that bookstore went the way of so many, but these guys were still in the business. One has always had a used book and out-of-print concern going and the other buys remainders. They were helping out at this book fair and it was great to see them again.

I have been to the public library's twice-a-year book sale many times. It has gotten very big and tiresome. Too many tables, piles, boxes, and people. Today's sale was quite manageable and of course within the hour I walked out with a stack.

Here is the haul:
One Man's Meat by E.B. White which replaces my paperback edition and is #8 on my List of 10. It is inscribed to: Ruth Ferguson Smythe - For Christmas 1944 - From Fred. I hope she enjoyed it.

The Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb and a copy of Tales of Shakespeare by Charles and his sister Mary Lamb. I had just written about them here. It seemed fortuitous that these two books were for sale.

Another hardback to replace my paperback copy of The Art of the Personal Essay edited by Phillip Lopate. This is a very thick book, some 777 pages, and very difficult to read in paperback form. I actually recognize the inventory sticker; this book came from my former bookstore. Yikes. The date: 1994.

Two others are new to me: My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell and The Writer Observed by Harvey Breit.

Mitchell was a newspaper man in New York City from 1929 until 1938 when he went to work for The New Yorker.  This is a collection of feature stories and articles from his newspaper days. They were originally published in book form in 1938. My very clean, crisp edition was published in 2001 and contains the original stories and some additional ones as well. Just my cup of tea.

Breit was on the editorial staff of The New York Times Book Review. His book is a collection of 60 of his weekly "Talks With -----" columns. It was published in 1956. Here are interviews with T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, Dylan Thomas, Christopher Morley, and Angela Thirkell. There are also interviews with many I have written about on Belle, Book, and Candle: Hemingway, Faulkner, Thurber, Robert Penn Warren, and Aldous Huxley.

Treasures all.

I guess I know what I will be doing this weekend.