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The Reserved Mastery of Gluyas Williams
by Rick Marschall
Williams is a fairly common
surname, in comics and cartoon history no less than in other areas of life. An
immediate detour before this week’s “journey” – about the name Williams. I
cannot help think of the Bob McDill song “Good Old Boy Like Me” (HERE) with the line Those
William Boys, they still mean a lot me: Hank and Tennessee. The fact that
it was recorded by Don Williams made it resonate even more.
So the name Williams, or
any other name, is not magic, except what the magicians do with it. In cartoon history
we have by coincidence three of the greatest exponents of single-panels and
social commentary, rough contemporaries – J R Williams, Gaar William and Gluyas
Williams.
Today we will visit Gluyas…
as I was privileged to do in real life. His drawings are iconic in several
ways. The full-page drawings and double-page strip sequences for Life in
the 1920s and The New Yorker beginning in the 1930s, are masterpieces.
His illustrations of humorous fiction represent his times and especially the
“Little Man” school of humor; it is impossible to read, or think of, the great
work of Robert Benchley without being reminded of Gluyas William drawings.
He illustrated short humor
pieces and books by Corey Ford, Edward Streeter (Father Of the Bride), and
others. From the 1930s to the 1950s he drew daily panels for my old friend John
Wheeler’s Bell Syndicate. His work was twice anthologized in his lifetime, and
in recent years the cottage-industry producer of reprints, portfolios, and
frameable prints, Rosebud Archives, issued several volumes (HERE) of Williams’ work – Short Stories; People
of Note; The Wide Open Spaces; And So to Bed; and others. My Rosebud
partner Jon Barli is working on two more series – the reprints of all of the
Gluyas Williams newspaper panels; and thematic compilations of the Williams
character Fred Perley, harried suburbanite.
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| And So To Bed book cover |
Gluyas Williams was
preceded in the cartooning field by his sister Kate Carew (pen name) who was a
popular cartoonist and caricaturist. For a while her celebrity interviews and
caricatures in the New York World were promoted on huge New York City
buses and billboards. Gluyas attended Harvard; studied art at the famed Académie
Colarossi in Paris; and became art editor of the children’s magazine Youth’s
Companion.
His path first crossed
Robert Benchley’s when he edited the humor magazine Harvard Lampoon in
college. He was editing words, and Benchley was an aspiring cartoonist; and
Williams’ suggestion that they trade avocations changed history. (At
least our favorite corners of history, right?)
He was slow to join The
New Yorker, a magazine with which he frequently is associated. Actually –
largely forgotten by posterity – in the 1920s many cartoonists and writers initially
contributed to TNY out of friendship or sympathy with founder Harold
Ross; and in any event and in many ways his magazine was a carbon-copy of Life.
Benchley, Sherwood, Dorothy Parker, Gluyas Williams, Held’s flappers, S J
Perelman: these and other prominent mirth-makers were slow to join Ross’
weekly.
Williams vouchsafed a story
to me about an early submission to Ross, who suggested a multi-panel strip
about a demolition team arriving at the wrong house. He suggested a woman in
the bathtub among funny bits. Williams told me he sent the suggestions back to
Ross with the personal note that he found humor in understatement, not
slapstick or bawdy gags. He told me he wished he still had the response from
Ross, who said that the exchange revised his entire view of humor! This might
have been the genesis of the urbane humor for which The New Yorker
became famous.
Such an anecdote told by
almost anyone else might have had a whiff of hyperbole or self-aggrandizement.
Not so with Gluyas Williams. In person, he was as modest and reserved as any member
of his cast of thousands.
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“The distinguishing aspect of suburban life is the commuter.” |
He was so reserved that
when Brian Walker and Chuck Green produced a National Cartoonists Society album
in 1980, they listed him as “deceased.”
He fulfilled the sad
designation in 1982. And by the way, he was born in San Francisco in 1888. In
other housekeeping, and a matter of curiosity among cartoon fans, his Christian
name was pronounced GLUE-yas: his mother’s maiden name.
His reserved nature and
eventual obscurity was confirmed at our first meeting, and many subsequent
visits. He was always gracious to me and, more than that, a cordial and
frequent correspondent. His letters, to his last days, were written in a
patient cursive. He loved talking about his career – again, never bragging –
the people he met, student days in Paris, his approach to drawing.
Throughout most of his life
he lived in and around Boston. When I first met him he lived in a nursing home
in one of the Newton-towns of suburban Boston… not for himself, but to be close
to his wife who had grown infirm. The only chat I ever recorded was on an
afternoon when building repairs were being done at the old house-turned-nursing
home; so it is punctuated with hammering and power saws.
There might be readers who
do not know the work of Gluyas Williams. To describe it – and him – I will
steal from myself, and articles I did for Cartoonist PROfiles and my old
Nemo magazine. Also, R C Harvey quoted me in a Comic Journal piece:
Gluyas Williams did more with less than
practically any cartoonist in history. His masterful panel drawings are genre
studies, more often than not crowded with figures, and frequently confusion is
the mood. No: confusion is the subject; urbanity is the mood....
All of Williams’ characters somewhat
nervously floated through the Twentieth century, slightly intimidated by
technology and more than a little suspicious of the traps and trappings of
modern life that awaited, ready to attack, around every corner.
Perfect were his evocations of
personality types and the upper-middle-class milieux that he delineated. But
Gluyas Williams’s most stunning accomplishments were as a draftsman. Here was
an artist in total command of his media—every pen line is in place, nothing
superfluous, yet everything so marvelously expressive.
Here is the doing-more-with-less ideal,
aspired to by many cartoonists, in its finest incarnation.... The stark economy
in a Williams cartoon came nowhere close to sterility: rather the scenes were
vibrant and bursting with personality. Every figure is doing something—and
doing something so expressively that you feel a part of the scene. Added to
these gifts were Williams’ awesome sense of design, perspective, and
composition.
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| Cover of Rosebud anthology, The Wide-Open Spaces – The Gluyas Williams Panoramas |
Choosing and understanding
your subjects is always an exquisite discipline whose first rule is to remain
modest (there is that word again) and who determine not to wander off looking
for new artistic worlds to conquer. Gluyas Williams declined to employ
slapstick; to work in other media than pen-and-ink; to accept assignments of
rural or urban humor, historical themes, or foreign subjects.
He was at home in America’s
suburbs at a time of their rise across the landscape. His goal was not to break
into the metropolis, but to be welcome in the suburban neighborhoods of
picnics, kids’ baseball games, and social teas.
The final testament to
Gluyas William’s mastery of all he chose to survey is his original artwork. I
have many pieces, including ones he inscribed to me (like one of his most
famous, And So Bed, delineating the myriad diversions of a boy at
bedtime) and they are wonders to behold.
Williams was, no surprise,
a consummate craftsman. Working on drawing paper of almost porcelain-type
surfaces, his pencil lines are sometimes discernible. But they are not the gaggle
of sketch-lines that many cartoonists – many superb cartoonists – employed. No,
they are virtually as simple and precise as the trademark Williams ink-lines
that filled his compositions. And… never a correction. I have never seen a
Gluyas Williams original with a paste-over, white-out, or correction.
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| Gluyas Williams, 1975 |
… besides: who could
correct anything in such a cartoonist – from capturing the essence of
everyday moments, to creating characters who lived, to depicting it all so
perfectly?
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