Love Letters in the Sand

Before my grandmother died in 1976, she left instructions that my father burn all her correspondence with my grandfather. So when we found their love letters in an old trunk in the basement, my father duly consigned its contents to the flames.
     Both of my grandparents Ward had spent their childhoods haunted by scandal: my grandfather's father had embezzled millions of dollars as a financier on Wall Street: so many that the family is somewhat affronted that the sort of pyramid fraud Ferdinand Ward refined has been named after a piker like Ponzi. By rights, it should be known as a Ferd.
     Before he was sent to Sing Sing in 1885, my great grandfather had put large dents in several fortunes, and utterly ruined former President Ulysses S. Grant, whose son he had finagled into becoming his partner. It is to Ferdinand Ward that we owe Grant's military memoirs, which he wrote in an effort to dig himself out of debt.
    My grandmother was the daughter of Daniel Otis Eshbaugh, the President of New England Loan and Trust, who apparently committed his company to a disastrous investment. Temperamentally ill suited to the rough and tumble of turn-of-the-century commerce, he could not bring himself to face his Board of Directors and jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry.
     Our family has fled from commerce ever since. But my brother Geoff has long been at work on a book about Ferdinand and his father, an almost equally odious Presbyterian minister, and I have always been fascinated by the mysteries of my ancestry. Geoff is an historian and I an erstwhile one, and we generally deplore the instinct among families to jettison their ancestors' correspondence. Researching various books, each of us has followed the trail of a cache of 19th century correspondence, only to be told by the latest heir to some family's archives that it was destroyed or discarded.


My father-in-law was a pathologist, and, upon meeting my father for the first time, handed him his monograph about his research into coccidioidomicosis, a disease peculiar to California's Central Valley. My father, who was not a man of science, duly opened the monograph and read the following passage: "The practice by laboratories of pouring pus down drains is to be deplored." 
     My father was at a momentary loss for words. But my father-in-law's point was that this was a great waste of pus: of material others could put to use in their research. I guess Geoff and I feel the same way about the ancestral record, no matter how rancid it may be, and recall the disposal of our grandparents' correspondence with grief.
     Recently my mother has begun to go through her correspondence with my late father, who, like his mother, left orders that it all be destroyed. Reading it, however, has brought my father back to life for her, restoring him from the difficult and confused old man he was when he died, to the dapper, brilliant, loving young man she married.
     My belief is that we all have a right to destroy any of our inanimate possessions, and keep private whatever intimacies we deem unsuitable for children. But not necessarily from the grave. 
      My father's instinct was always to clam up, to not make any sort of fuss or display that anyone might construe as egocentricity. When his children volunteered to write something for his mother's memorial service, his first response was, "I don't want to turn this into some kind of Ward family dog-and-pony show." But in the end we prevailed, and he loved what we had to say about his mother. Though his objections were sincerely felt, it was not always clear that they were sincerely meant, for whenever we overruled him he seemed glad we did.
     I come from an unusually happy family. My grandparents not only loved each other but enjoyed each other's company, as did my parents, as do my siblings and my mother's grandchildren and their spouses. It's really quite a family, and owes a lot to the standard my father and mother set.
     It seems to me that some future generation might like to understand the source of such felicity, to learn from my parents' love letters that such happiness was not accidental, but took nurturing, respect, wit, persistence, fidelity, patience, and a lot of coaxing into the light. 
     So with all due respect to my father, I have urged my mother not to yield to his extravagant reticence but to grant my parents' descendants admission to their courtship.

But I did it for you

I have been married now, and to the same woman, for two thirds of my life. But then "the same woman" is a phrase that rebounds somewhat, for the woman I married is not by any means the same woman I am currently married to, nor am I the same man she married, and therein hangs a tale, perhaps for another time. 
     They may call it wedlock, but it's not gridlock. Stasis is not something you can expect from marriage any more than you can expect it from life, which is why we call it married life, I suppose. No matter how much we might want to sustain a particularly happy moment in our marriage -- "Oh, Darling, why can't it be like this forever?" -- it can't be like this forever, and that's just the way things are. 
     Now that may sound grim, but it isn't meant to. Because I am a better man than I used to be: grayer, shakier, deafer, more forgetful and more disabused, certainly; nevertheless I do occasionally have a game changing insight that keeps the ball moving down the field. 


My latest involves a longstanding pattern of our marriage that has occasionally sent us to our respective corners, bloodied, bruised and breathless after a verbal round of recriminations. 
     Here's what rings the bell. Debbie goes off somewhere on business, and I take the opportunity her absence presents of taking on some grandiose household project: tearing down a wall, building shelves, replacing the porch posts with columns, installing a hammock, clearing out a dying hedge -- you name it; I'm handy. 
     Now, I love to do this stuff. Nothing cheers me like slapping something together to delight Debbie on her return. The problem is that she is rarely delighted, or in any case, rarely delighted to a degree I deem commensurate to the wonderful thing I've just done for her. So I either sulk about this -- and I'm very good at sulking -- or I let her have it. "You don't appreciate all the things I do for you. And because you don't appreciate all the things I do for you, I am reduced to having to beg for your appreciation, and it's humiliating."
     But the last time around I prefaced all this with, "Now, I love doing this stuff, but -- " and then launched into my usual whine, to which she protested that she had thanked me, that she did say she liked the new raised bed I built for her. So what did I want her to do? Get down on her knees and throw up?
     I hesitate to reckon how many times we've had this argument, but something about my preface this time -- "I love doing this stuff" -- nagged at me afterward, and suddenly it occurred to me that as a matter of fact I don't do these things for Debbie. I do them for myself. I do them for the pleasure of doing them. 
     A little more thanks from her would be nice, sure, but not absolutely necessary if I simply absolve her of the expectation of tears of gratitude and whoops of appreciation I reflexively whip up as I go about my business. 
     I realize that I have done a version of this all my life: volunteering to be the go-to guy in family crises, making myself indispensable, and then resenting the hell out of everyone else for being insufficiently grateful, and for not stepping in more, when in fact I have left no room for them to step.
     I am much more likely to forget an insight than to have one, so I hurried over to Debbie with this one. From now on, I told her, I would not set us both up for another round or two of recrimination. She looked doubtful, but I meant it. Henceforward I will desist from pushing my own inner resentment button and stop setting her up for a fall. 
     I just hope she appreciates it. 

Nizamuddin Dhargah

The New York Times reports that quietly, even furtively, the American government has begun making what it calls "overtures" to the Moslem world. It seems to me that overtures are supposed to be at least audible to the naked ear, nevertheless it's about time we did something to recognize that it's Moslems that are the primary victims of Islamicist terror, not us.  
     I have been scanning and sorting through the photographs I took between 1966 and 1971, among them images of a complex of Moslem shrines in  New Delhi, India called Nizamuddin's Dhargah. When I lived in New Delhi, it was one of my regular destinations. With its walls and warrens and labyrinthian alleyways, the Medieval complex had been a refuge for New Delhi's Moslem population during the riots that attended the partitioning of the Subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and it remained a haven whenever communal tensions in the city approached the breaking point. Here lay the tombs not only of the 13th century saint Nizamuddin Auliya but the musician and poet Amir Khusrow; Jehanara, the sister of the Moghul Shah Jehan; and the great 19th century poet Ghalib.  

     It is said that as a young man Nizamuddin had to struggle hard to be humble because he had so little to be humble about. He was by all accounts brilliant, handsome, charismatic. Chased from Bokhara by Mongols, he and his parents did not find refuge until they reached the Doab, the fertile triangle that lies between the Jumna and the Ganga, where his father promptly passed away. He and his mother lived in abject poverty, but Nizamuddin was so brilliant that local sages gave him a “turban of scholarship” while he was still a child. By the time he made his way to Sultanate Delhi in the mid 13th century, his mother had died as well, and he was rescued from starvation by the greatest Moslem scholar of his day. 

     At first, Nizamuddin had entertained ambitions of becoming a magistrate, but as he immersed himself in the Koran, he resolved he would renounce the world and live the rest of his life as a penitent. His teacher, however, was a Chisti Sufi who persuaded his pupil that true humility lay not in abstruse scholarship and self abnegation but in defending the oppressed and doing good works. Refusing  to attach himself to the ruling nobles of his day, Nizamuddin established a monastery about a kilometer from where he now lies buried, to which he welcomed people of all faiths. He stood up to the nobles who tried to seduce him into their service, kept company with the poor, and tempered Sufi doctrine with generosity and practicality. Much like Gandhi, he was a very Indian sort of saint, and a bur in the side of the powers-that-were, and it is no wonder that in the precincts of his dargah he is still believed to be a living presence.

   

Some places have been hallowed for so long that even an irreligious young man like myself could feel the reverberations from the hordes of pilgrims who for six centuries had found their way here from the farthest reaches of the Moslem world. I felt as though I had found a refuge there too, and made friends over time with the local mullahs who permitted me to photograph the beggars as they sought out spots of sunlight in the sandstone alleys; the water carrier as he made his rounds through the adjacent cemetery, slaking the thirst of the dead with water he dribbled from a goatskin sack; the scholars studying their texts on the cold stone tombs; the women come to confer with astrologers and sages; the singers performing Qawwali in their lovely hoarse voices before Khusro's tomb; and the penitents with their beads reciting the 99 names of God: Allah the Merciful; Allah the Protector; Allah the Provider; Allah the Just; Allah the All Forgiving. This is the Islam -- generous, humble, open-hearted -- that stuck with me.

     I don't know whether Radical Islam has infected the residents of Nizamuddin Complex. I like to think that the saint's devotees would be immune to it. But what I think is misunderstood about Islamicist terrorists is that ultimately they are not directing their fire at the West. Even the attack on the World Trade Center was, to them, merely collateral damage. Their real targets are the kind of moderate and ecumenical Moslems whom I encountered at Nizamuddin Complex and the Islamic scholars who befriended my father at Aligarh University in the 1950s. 
     The terrorists hope that in our fear and outrage we will turn against all Moslems, and thereby compel them to join the ranks of the extremists. Radical Islam does not care a whit about Western unbelievers. Their intention is to force us to set fire to our end of the bridge that moderate Moslems have been trying to traverse between East and West, Old World and New. 

     That Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet but Christianity does not show Muhammad the same respect will always divide the two religions. But then, that's what religions generally do, isn't it? Divide? It's only when religion is entirely separated from nationalism, and people like Nizamuddin, Buddha, Gandhi, and the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas show a way to reconcile their own faiths with not just tolerance but true acceptance and respect for individual creeds that religion even begins to make any sense to me. 

Fartacus

I am happy to report that this season's last episode of Starz TV's Spartacus: Blood and Sand is over. My fascination with the Romans, which is of a piece with my fascination with the Mafia, the Romanovs, and the British Empire, kept me captive to what may well be the worst dialogue in the history of historical teledramas, and that's really saying something. In fact, to find writing this awful, you have to go back to before there ever was such a genre: back to The Robe, perhaps, or Samson & Delilah, or one of Cecil B. DeMille's tumescent epics.  


There were times when the script's syntax became so mangled that I wondered if the series had been written by a dyslexic local anchorperson. But no, it turns out it was the work of a committee headed by one of the show's producers, Stephen S. DeKnight, the very same Stephen S. DeNight who gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And who better to capture the power and the glory of the great slave rebellion of 73 BC? 


DeKnight wrote the first and last episode, but left his mark on all the others. I offer some examples of his dialogue: all delivered within the first fifteen minutes of the season's final episode. 


Here's Spartacus's master Lentulus Batiatus introducing a woman whose husband couldn't make it to the party, but would have his remarks "delivered by pleasing tongue of trusted wife." Then we go to "Two Days Ago," when Spartacus is told that some of the boys won't be joining the rebellion. "Lisus and the others refuse to grab cock without Crixus calming their balls." "How can you bring him to cause," asks another, "if you cannot break words with him?" "Being champion yet affords privilege," Spartacus assures him. When Batiatus declares he is getting out of the gladiator business, his black slave, Doctore, standing in for Woody Strode from the Kirk Douglas version, wants to know if he "would see your family's heritage a thing of memory?" "I had thought to make announcement at a celebration," Batiatus replies, and tells him he intends to free Doctore, who takes the news gravely. "I had thought the news to please," complains Batiatus, but Doctore replies that he has "heard rumor: one that has vexed sleep." "The rumor is true," concedes Batiatus, "yet absent reasoning." His wife doesn't appreciate his good news either, but explains that "joy is restrained to lend clear mind to celebration." Arranging a duel between Spartacus and Crixus, Batiatus's wife insists "we must insure Spartacus victorious." Spartacus is perplexed by the venue and asks Batiatus,  "How will our guests have view?" After Spartacus insists that Crixus be given a chance to prepare for their duel, Batiatus exclaims, "Haha! You truly have fucking mind for this!" Doctore meets with Crixus and urges him to "delay talk of freedom until there are ears that would welcome the sound." When Spartacus compares his murdered wife to the sun, "never to rise again," his new squeeze replies, "Heavy thing to be denied its warmth." 


Heavy, indeed. Not even poor Jay Silverheels as Tonto had to speak lines that bad. The effect of such dialogue is numbing, or, as DeKnight might put it, "Such words benumb brain of men." It's like listening to a dormitory full of not very advanced ESL students argue politics in their adopted tongue. For some reason, DeKnight decided that since the Romans did not employ definite articles, he should leave them out of his English dialogue as well. If the translators of Tacitus, Ovid, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius and the like had only thought of this, they could have posted their work on Twitter. And Shakespeare could have shaved half an hour off Julius Caesar. "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend ears." 


There's a whole lot else wrong with Spartacus, and it may seem strange that I fixate on the dialogue instead of attacking the show's exploitation of the ease with which obscure actresses, including one of the producers' wives, will agree to take off their shirts; or the delectatious way it depicts all those beheadings and skewerings, floggings and flayings, and buckets and gouts and geysers of blood. But there is something truly insidious about bad dialogue when it is harnessed to a vehicle like Spartacus, which, not for better but for worse, is as compellingly gruesome a spectacle as anything the Roman's devised for their own squalid amusement: a marvel of special effects and gladiatorial gymnastics. Awaiting the next slashing swordstroke, the next jab of a trident, the next heaving assignation, viewers and maybe even the cast may cease to even notice how terribly written the damn thing is. 


Andy Whitfield is a charismatic lead, and the producers have attempted to ground the series in what little we know about the rebellion. But unlike the Kirk Douglas version, with Stanley Kubrick's sly direction and Dalton Trumbo's stirring populist script, Spartacus's tele-rebellion strikes a blow not for freedom but for nookie. Maybe it's a question of elective surgery, but the frequent sex scenes had a, well, numbing sameness about them (or the few I actually sat through. When I was a dismal teenager, I used to thumb through books for the "good parts," but here I did the opposite, hitting the fast forward button at the first drop of a toga. "Right," I kept telling the screen, "I get it. They screwed. They also probably went to the john. Get on with it.") 


Every episode opened with one of those basso profundo warnings about the scenes of "sensuality, brutality and language that some viewers may find objectionable," although I think law enforcement should monitor very closely any viewer who does not. The announcer goes on to explain that the "intensity" of Spartacus: Blood and Sand is intended "to suggest an authentic representation of the period:" presumably a period when pecs were square, nipples were in flower, and people suffered from such high blood pressure that the merest pinprick produced fountains of gore. 


At the close of the last sanguinary episode, Spartacus and his escaped comrades, each bespattered with Roman blood, set forth from Batiatus's collegium gladiatorium, presumably headed for a gym in the Castro. I wish well they whose brave heart and mighty hand do battle with ripped abs for honor and glory of . . . 


Oh, the hell with it.

The Bidet

Last year I spent four months noisily remodeling our house: so noisily that I felt I owed it to our neighbors to show them the results. One result was that we acquired something my wife had been hankering after for some decades: namely, a bidet. And apart from the walk-in closet, it was the hit of the open house: an object of many an ooh and ah from the women of the neighborhood.


I don't really understand what the fuss is all about. As far as I can tell there isn't anything you can do with a bidet that you can't do with a shower, a sink, a tub, or a garden hose. 


But I have my own curious history with the contraption. I first encountered one in Paris en route to the States on our first home leave from India. I was about ten at the time, and I remember checking out our bathroom and asking my mother what the extra bowl was for. "Oh, that?" she replied hastily. "That's just something French women need."


As a consequence of all those boyhood hoppings around the globe,  I have always tended to arrive at premature conclusions. "They seem a happy, contented people," I am wont to declare as I first step onto foreign soil. My wife and children try to call me on this, but jumping to conclusions is about all the jumping I'm fit for these days. And admitting the truth, which is that half the time I don't know where I am or who I'm with, is conversationally dead-ended. That and something my daughter calls M.A.S., or Male Answering Syndrome,  has condemned me to spend my life presiding over my own private kangaroo court. 


I sensed from the way my mother bustled around the hotel room afterward that she was not going to tell me anything more about the mysterious fauceted bowl in the bathroom. So I was left to my own devices. I had not yet entirely worked out in my own mind the Facts of Life, which seemed to me too incredible to be factual. "They put what where?" my friends and I would ask one another, and then shake our heads with doubt and disgust. 


I knew from the way my father and older brother ogled the young women seated at cafés along the Champs-Élysées, that French women were different, somehow. They did not resemble the American memsahibs of my acquaintance, who had modeled themselves after such bovine icons of Hollywood domesticity as June Allyson and Rosemary Clooney. French women were elegant, racy, slinky, held themselves with a certain sensuous hauteur. They sipped wine, walked in heels, double-crossed their legs when they sat, pouted adorably when they spoke. 


I suppose there are all kinds of stories about people who first encounter a bidet and employ it for some mistaken purpose. I know one person who assumed it was designed to facilitate the washing of feet, and another who concluded it was intended as a laundry basin. And no doubt others have put it to far more unfortunate uses. 


But all I did back then was think long and hard about it, and to conclude from my mother's hasty reply and what evidence I had thus far assembled, that French women, unique among their species, boasted an extra appendage which had to be kept particularly clean for some reason, and which they could lower at will, like landing gear.


I'm not going to say how long I clung to this conclusion. I just very much hope I was mistaken.

Chanakyapuri

Ever since we Wards returned to the States in 1959, our old house in New Delhi has been the object of periodic family pilgrimages.  A perk of my father's appointment as the Ford Foundation's Educational Consultant to the Union Ministry of Education, it stood in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi's Diplomatic Enclave, on what were then the outskirts of the city. 


Set in a kind of compound with a horseshoe driveway of red quartz, an expanse of parched grass and dusty hedges, and a complex of servants' quarters in back, in its whitewashed stucco glory it looked something like the stacked upper decks of a small ocean liner, with duplexed semicircular verandahs on each end. Behind us stood a dairy, directly across the street lay a large empty lot frequented by snakes, enormous lizards,  and jackals, and a few hundred yards away lay a ribbon of empty boulevards that the Government of India had cleared and paved to make way for rows of prospective embassies.


I first returned to India as a photographer in 1968, and as the beneficiary of my father's rise in the Ford Foundation, I actually had the opportunity of living there again for a few weeks as sole sahib. The house was much as I remembered it, and no fresh refugee from art school ever landed on softer upholstery. Some of our family's old servants -- to our astonishment, eleven had greeted us when we arrived from the South Side of Chicago in 1954 -- were still around, and it had not changed nearly as much as I had. Living there again as a young bachelor evoked some curious sensations for me: nostalgia, certainly, but also a weird sense of abandonment, as if the family had somehow left me behind. Where was my mother when the cook came in to go over his accounts? Where was my father when my driver asked where I wanted to go? Why were my brother and sister's rooms empty? I felt like the young heir to an extinguished dynasty, and when it came time to make way for the next educational consultant, it was almost a relief.


Another ten years passed, and I returned to research a novel. The day after the night I landed, my first stop was the old house, where I hoped to photograph a papaya tree my sister and I had planted. I imagined that it must have achieved the stature of a sequoia. 


By now the Ford Foundation had handed the house over to the Government of India which, in turn, had bestowed it upon the Government of West Bengal to serve as a rest house. As the local caretaker graciously escorted me around, I heard for the first time the whispering of mortality that twenty years later hisses in my ears like tinnitis. The verandahs had been enclosed, the living room divvied up into bureaucratic warrens, and the covered terrace my mother had constructed had collapsed. And as for the papaya tree, all that remained was a rotted stump.


On each of my subsequent trips I vowed not to put myself through that ordeal again, but the four years I lived there had been the happiest of my childhood, and I always surrendered to its gravitational pull. On my next trip five years later I was allowed into the kitchen my mother had overseen with Switzer vigilance. Here she had lectured the servants on germ theory, and her beloved cook Amiya had worked from recipes from her own frayed copy of the Joy of Cooking. 


It was late morning when I stepped through the dining room doorway and into the kitchen's once pristine, white-tiled precincts, and interrupted perhaps fifty large rats in their scramble for crumbs from the morning's preparations. One ran over my foot as I staggered back through the doorway to the verandah, where, years before, our bearer had organized a vigil by servants and neighbors of every imaginable faith to pray for my recovery from encephylitis. That's it, I told myself. Never again.


These revisits began to sap my appetite for Delhi itself, whose population had quadrupled since my boyhood. My old haunts had been subsumed by the bustle of what had turned from a kind of vestigial memorial to British Rule to a major world metropolis choked with motorized traffic. The old republican zeal of the 1950s seemed to me to have succumbed to a corrosive cynicism, and the city's best minds seemed focussed primarily on the best way to make money.


If all this strikes you as the grousing of an old man for the old days, the unseemly and perhaps nostomaniacal whining of an overprivileged chota sahib for all the deferences that devolved upon us in post colonial India, you are not entirely mistaken. Of course the population would grow, and the city with it, and my house would not survive in all its pristine glory. It was not a museum to our brief residence in it, but had turned into something else entirely, as had Delhi, as had much of India. 


If my disillusionment extended beyond Delhi, it was only to North India, as I had never been south of Bombay. But this past February, I traveled around South India with my wife's cousin, the sculptor Robert Taplin, who'd been after me to lead him on a tour of Indian temple sculpture. Suddenly I found myself in an India I could discover on its own contemporaneous terms, and by the time I had circled back to spend a few days in Delhi, my affection for India had been so thoroughly restored that I decided to risk another tour of the house, this time with my brother Geoff.  


So off we drove from the house he was renting in Golf Links to our old neighborhood of Chanakyapuri, along streets so changed that we were practically through the gate before I knew where we were. Where we were turned out to be a construction site, for apparently the West Bengal government, having been forbidden by the municipal authority to tear the old house down, had decided simply to subsume the old place in an engulfing structure straight out of a nightmare: a great brick and mortar maw with stairways seemingly leading to nowhere. 


We stumped around the premises for a while, revisiting my old bedroom, and my parents', and Geoff's, and going up to the roof where we once set out a stuffed owl one afternoon and watched as dozens of crows and vultures and kites attacked it. The house next door, once the Japanese consulate, was still in pristine condition. But everything else had changed. The dairy was now an army encampment, and the house on the other side of ours, once the home of our father's boss at the Ford Foundation, was surrounded by walls festooned with barbed wire. Half the kitchen had been entirely and perhaps mercifully closed off, and the construction had overwhelmed what little had survived of the terrace. 

Geoff and I gloomed around the house like ghosts, and we were pretty desolate by the time we got back to his apartment. After a couple of stiff drinks, we promised ourselves we would never go back. But that besieged old place is like a kind of gauge that indisputably measures -- should we sometimes lose track -- the inexorable passage of time. Besides, though there are not yet any rats in our kitchens, the house is probably not doing much worse than Geoff and I. After all, no-one has seen fit to encase us in a protective shell. The Delhi Municipal Authority would have no objection to tearing us down. So I doubt it's a promise we will keep.  

No, not the New Yorker

My godson Giacomo, among others, tells me that text is too hard to read when it's white against black, so I'm now experimenting with black against white. (Takes you back to the Sixties, doesn't it?) And my nephew Nathan suggests that I introduce my cartoons to my blog, or vice versa. 


Four years ago, I drew about a hundred cartoons as I awaited  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Jovanovich and Schuster's verdict on one of my manuscripts. I still don't know what came over me; maybe it was turning 60. But suddenly cartoons were popping up all over the place, and I had to sketch madly to keep up with them.


I had tried cartooning when I was younger, but I was too self conscious to hit on a style. Now a style seemed to derive organically from my incompetence as a draughtsman. In any case, I thought some of them were funny, and I ran them by a bunch of my friends who seemed to like them too. Though you never can tell with friends, they emboldened me to send five or six a week to the New Yorker. That the New Yorker, upon whose doors I had once knocked until my knuckles bled,  had recently published a piece by my son Jake suggested to me that perhaps a new era had dawned and that the doors might at long last creak open for his father as well.


On the other hand, I sensed that the cartoons I was doodling belonged, if they belonged anywhere, to the New Yorker's pre Mankoff period. Robert Mankoff has been cartoon editor for quite a long period, and despite certain dependables like Roz Chwast, his selections have often made me feel either awfully dense or terribly, terribly old. I also knew going in that Mankoff deeply resented dabblers in his profession, especially writers who regarded their backhanded scribbles as irresistible.


When I started writing I used to deal with the vicissitudes of submitting to magazines by displaying my rejection slips on the wall. Esquire's was elegant, and the New Yorker's were encouraging and always courteous, and I proudly amassed such a vast display that when magazines began to accept my submissions I sometimes caught myself sighing disappointedly because I had been counting on another rejection to fill a gap in the exhibit.


It took the sting away then, but not this time around. As I lined Mankoff's rejection slips on the wall over my desk, I found them disspiriting, and since the New Yorker is just about the only decent venue left for cartoons, it wasn't as though I had a backup plan. So in the end I shelved them and put away my drawing pad and went back to work.


But now, as Nathan points out, I have my own venue. So here's the first of my cartoons, this one on the subject of free range chickens, the inexplicable subject of my first post. I seem to be greatly exercised about free range chickens. I mean, what's the deal with free range chickens?