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A Case of Melancholia
An appreciation of the artist and New Yorker cartoonist Ralph Barton.

This cartoon, which appeared in The New Yorker in April, 1926, and in several subsequent cartoon anthologies, haunts me. As an adolescent cartoon buff, I didn’t think it terribly funny—just oddly intense, with something malevolent in the rendering of the ashman’s simian limbs, drooping gargoylish head, fangs, pop eyes, and crazily lolling tongue. As a grown man, who has suffered some nights of noisy trash collection in the city of New York, I better appreciate its harsh truth, and the artful way the exaggerated perspective sets off the cacophonous reverberation of those distant hurled cans. The receding walls and the darkened windows, as uniform as prison windows, eat up the viewer.

Ralph Barton’s drawings, like his signature, have a squared-off quality, a frame of high intention that suggests an aspiration beyond the momentary smile most cartoons are content to induce. A cartoon traditionally aims to give all its information at a glance; it is a kind of calligraphy, which reduces marginal details to the most cursory scribble. But in Barton the background presses toward the foreground with an insistence found in Oriental art, and again in Cubism. He undertook for The New Yorker a series called “The 1930’s” when the beginning of that decade seemed no more than a hungover extension of the nineteen-twenties. In “Weekend Guests,” published in August, 1930, an extraordinary formality poses the bold triangle of main figures and foreshortens the two sunk in the sofa into separate body parts—legs, hands, and heads suspended in queasy malaise and surrounded by the geometrical jiggle of the lozenges of the tiles, the squares and ovals of the Sunday rotogravure, the ribs and ripples of the gentleman’s country outfit, the overlapping rings of transparency in the lady’s glass. Beyond the triangle, in stark and sickening sunlight, three smaller figures slouch doggedly in pursuit of a good outdoor time. The dazed, breeze-teased suffocation of a country weekend—the Sunday stuffy-sofa feeling—finds reinforced expression in the tight-knit stasis of the drawing, its crammed elegance. Barton’s pen lines are like wires that are all connected; his drawings give off a peculiar hum, a menace absent from the tidy lines of similar draftsmen, like Josef Capek, Nicolas Bentley, Rea Irvin, and Gluyas Williams.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Barton was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in August of 1891. His father, Abraham Pool Barton, was a Missouri farm boy, the eldest son in a family of eleven, who put himself through college and law school; in his fifties he gave up his law practice to follow full time his secondary career as the publisher of a weekly metaphysical journal called The Life and as a lecturer on his philosophy of religion and healing. His published books include “The ABC of Truth, being Twenty-six Basic Lessons in the Science of Life,”“The Bible and Eternal Punishment, Proving from the Original Languages that the Bible does not Teach the Doctrine,” and “Why Are We Here, or the Meaning and Purpose of This Incarnation.” He and his wife were close friends and Kansas City neighbors of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Fillmore, the founders of the Unity Christianity movement. Mrs. Barton, née Catherine Josephine Wigginton, was a locally well-known portrait painter and a partner in her husband’s religious enterprises; she herself published books expressing her beliefs, with such titles as “The Mother of the Living” and “The Interlude.” Remarkably, she gave birth to Ralph, the youngest of her four children, when she was forty-four, and lived to the age of eighty-eight, surviving all her children but one. In interviews, she claimed that there had been an artist in her family for seven generations, and that since she had found art supplies, including paper, scarce in her girlhood she “made it one of her chief duties to see that her son was plentifully supplied with such things.” His mother’s studio was Ralph’s main art school, though after attending the city’s Central High School he briefly studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He did drawings for both the major Kansas City newspapers, the Journal-Post and the Star, and a member of the Star’s Art Department recalled of Barton, “He never could draw in the correct proportions, and he afterward capitalized on this.” It is true, Barton’s fine freedom of composition and line depends on a sure sense of when to abandon perspective and anatomy and when to adhere to them.

In 1910, at the age of nineteen, already married to his high-school sweetheart and already a father, Barton moved to New York City. He rose to prominence via the monosyllabic trio of old humor magazines, Puck, Judge, and Life, not to mention Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, and Vanity Fair, which in 1924 described him as “the best known and most widely followed of our caricaturists.” In this peak period he was paid as much as fifteen hundred dollars for a drawing. He was short, dapper, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, with elegant manners. He loved the theatre and was an ardent Francophile, having first travelled to Paris in 1915, to study art and to report the war in pictures for Puck. Friends nicknamed him the Commuter, for his frequent sojourns abroad. In 1927, the French government made him a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the poet Paul Claudel presenting the decoration. Also in 1927, The New Yorker ran a page and a half on Barton, under the title “Through the Magnifying Glass.” The fact-crammed piece, by Charles G. Shaw, emphasizes the transatlantic dandy’s clothes:

His haberdashery comes from Charvet’s, Place Vendôme, and embraces a varied assortment of colored striped shirts, with drawers and collars of the same material to match each shirt, white silk undershirts, beige silk pajamas (emblazoned with white frogs), and white, watered-silk suspenders. Each of his pairs of trousers has its own pair of suspenders. . . . In Paris he carries a walking stick; in New York a sword cane. . . . In lieu of a scarfpin, a scarab seal ring encircles his cravat, and when indoors he is partial to Chinese slippers. . . . Chanel No. 22 is his customary perfume. His favored dressing gown is of a gallant jade hue.

Barton’s highly specific tastes in champagne, wine, cigarettes, drawing pen, paper, and ink are also confided. We learn that he is remarkably tidy in person and, in his work, rapid but tardy, and we are told that he loathes mathematics, cannot drive, is sick of jazz, “rarely touches gin or whiskey but is extremely fond of Château Yquem,” and “has been in love ninety-two times in all and remembers each of the girls’ names.” What’s more, he has never voted, served on a jury, or contributed to charity. Though “in temperament he is definitely Latin,” this exquisite “creature of the cosmopolis” may be one-sixteenth Cherokee, if we can credit “a scandalous legend to the effect that his great-great-grandmother was a beautiful Cherokee maid.”

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker, exactly sixty-four years ago, Barton figured as one of its advisory editors and as a prominent contributor, providing not only theatrical caricatures but tart and droll short reviews as captions. But Barton’s frequent long stays in France interrupted the flow of his contributions. Surprisingly, Barton did only one cover for the magazine. Ross, a man of many nervous reactions, was made uneasy by what he felt was a macabre streak in Barton’s work, and Barton, though a personal friend, was not his favorite artist—Peter Arno was—or anything like as central to the young magazine’s workings and look as Rea Irvin. Ross preferred to sponsor fresh talents rather than to further reputations already established, and in the second half of the twenties Barton was riding high. In addition to doing copious magazine work, he had designed a theatre curtain—a panorama of caricatures—for the revue “Chauve-Souris,” and he saw another panoramic drawing of celebrities made into a dress print. In 1925, he illustrated Anita Loos’s best-selling novel “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and in 1928 its sequel, “But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.”

Barton married four times, and fathered two daughters—Natalie by his first wife, Marie Jennings, and Diana by his second wife, Anne Minnerly. His third wife, the actress Carlotta Monterey, became Eugene O’Neill’s third wife, and Barton’s fourth wife was Germaine Tailleferre, the well-known French composer—a member, with Poulenc and Milhaud, of Les Six.

A month after his fourth divorce was final, and a few days after Carlotta returned from Europe with O’Neill, Barton committed suicide, three months short of his fortieth birthday. Around midnight on May 19, 1931, in his apartment, a penthouse at 419 East Fifty-seventh Street, he typed out a long note, which he titled “OBIT” in red ink; placed it and a shorter note to the maid on a table; laid on his bed a copy of Gray’s “Anatomy” open to its illustrations of the human heart; got into bed, in silk pajamas; pulled the covers up to his chin; and, while holding a cigarette in his left hand, shot himself through the right temple.

His death was front-page news in the Times of May 21st. The headline “RALPH BARTON ENDS HIS LIFE WITH PISTOL” got equal billing with “CIVIL WAR IN CHINA IS STARTING NORTH.” The Times told how his maid, Mary Jefferson, had observed his black mood when he returned to the apartment on May 19th. She said to him, “You’re not going to do anything foolish? If you are, I’m going to stay here.” The story continues, “The artist laughed and said it was safe for her to go.” She found his body when she came back to the penthouse around ten the next morning; the note to her accompanied thirty-five dollars as pay and apologized for its not being more. A curious crowd gathered outside the apartment building, but only his brother, Homer, a New York actor, and, in the afternoon, the artist Neysa McMein were admitted. Homer said to reporters, “It was a matter of impulse, I am sure, for Ralph was very impulsive. . . . Ralph did not consider his action, I know, because he was looking forward to the summer in the apartment. He had brought in some new flower boxes to decorate it.” Barton’s mother, reached in Kansas City, said, “I can’t believe Ralph shot himself. There must be something about that we do not know.” His sister Ethel said, “Ralph was such a gentle spirited person that it seems impossible that he should have had a gun in his apartment.”

The assistant medical examiner, Raymond B. Miles, took the open Gray’s “Anatomy” to indicate that Barton had contemplated shooting himself through the heart, and had decided against it. The police released the text of the “OBIT” that Barton had composed, and the Times reproduced it in full, singling out for sensationalistic emphasis its pathetic homage to the present Mrs. O’Neill, “my beautiful lost angel, Carlotta, the only woman I ever loved and whom I respect and admire above all the rest of the human race. She is the one person who could have saved me had I been savable. She did her best. No one ever had a more devoted or more understanding wife. I do hope that she will understand what my malady was and forgive me a little.” His note concluded, “I kiss my dear children—and Carlotta,” and it was signed not with his name but with seven “X”s.

The “dear children”—his two daughters—scarcely figure in the skimpy Barton literature. In the newspaper stories following his death, this paragraph from the Kansas City Times (the Star’s morning version) of May 21, 1931, which is ascribed to “The Star’s Leased Wire Service,” offers to flesh out their reality: “When [Barton] and Chaplin went abroad together recently, they called on a 22-year-old girl who could speak to them, shyly and only for a moment, from the cloistered precincts of a French convent. She was Natalie, Barton’s eldest daughter, a young novitiate, who expects soon to take the veil. Another daughter, Diana, 10, is in school in Lausanne, Switzerland. Today after Barton had been found dead, a letter came addressed to him in childish handwriting. On the envelope was a heart, with an arrow, and the legend, ‘I love you.’ That was from Diana.” A somewhat florid posthumous two-part biography in College Humor (February and April, 1932), by Dorothy Giles, tells us that Barton, when he was divorcing his first wife, in 1917 (he sued, she apparently having found comfort with a Kansas City Star artist during Barton’s first French excursion), was awarded custody of Natalie. For a time he and the little dark-haired girl lived in a tiny apartment, in Washington Heights. A friend is quoted as saying, “I don’t believe he was ever as truly happy again as he was just then, when he and Natalie were together.” However, when he and his second wife divorced, in 1922, Barton went to Paris, and Natalie was placed in a Kansas City convent school, run by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Sion. When, in 1929, Natalie announced her decision to become a nun, he took her off with him to tour Europe for a year. Dorothy Giles writes, “He would show her the world and its glories, then let her decide[,] if she would, to give it up. But at the year’s end, with Italy behind them, with London and Paris and Vienna offering their all, her answer was the same—’I want to be a nun.’ And true to his own agnostic’s code of allowing to each mind freedom to decide its own fate, he agreed. With a sardonic smile he drew the check for his daughter’s dowry, in her cloister.” The author then asks, “I wonder if that isn’t really the end of Ralph Barton’s story?”

Barton and Carlotta, a former Miss California, were married from 1923 to 1926—the third marriage for her as well as for him. They were renowned for their parties. Barbara and Arthur Gelb’s biography of Eugene O’Neill quotes the photographer Nickolas Muray as saying: “Ralph and Carlotta used to give very lavish parties. I remember one party when Jimmy Walker was present. Another time they had a professional wrestling match staged in their living room. And at one party Charlie Chaplin, who was an intimate friend of Ralph’s . . . arrived and took over. He did double-talk in half a dozen languages. . . . He played a number of instruments—violin, trombone, clarinet, piano, among others. There was an apparently inexhaustible supply of food and liquor, always elegantly served.” And Ilka Chase remembered, “I used to love to go there, because they had wonderful books and pictures and delicious little dinners; but they dined at half past six even when Carlotta wasn’t playing, and I never could understand why. It had something to do with their temperaments, I imagine; their temperaments were prominent, and everybody relaxed when they got a divorce.” In their divorce action, Carlotta charged Barton, an incorrigible philanderer, with “misconduct at the Hotel des Artistes, 1 West Sixty-seventh Street.”

His posthumous homage to Carlotta was a considerable embarrassment to the O’Neills, and may have been meant to be so. Carl Van Vechten lunched with them on May 20th and later told an interviewer, “[Carlotta] couldn’t understand why he’d dragged her into it. Barton, she insisted, hadn’t loved her in years.” In a statement to the press, she claimed that she had not seen or heard from her ex-husband “since her divorce from him more than five years ago.” Van Vechten’s reminiscence elaborates: “Personally, I thought it a clear case of ego, of his wanting all possible attention at his death. He resented her marrying someone more famous than himself and wanted to upset them. I knew Ralph intimately, I’d seen him only a short time before. He was heavily in debt, he’d lived beyond his means for years, he’d seen and done everything, and saw no point in going on. Don’t forget, too, that the Great Depression was on—people weren’t in the mood for his sophisticated art. The market for his stuff had shrunk, and he could see only lean times ahead, so he decided to go out in a splash of publicity.”

The times, however, couldn’t have been impossibly lean for an artist enjoying the friendship and patronage of Harold Ross, whose magazine was prospering amid the slump. Ross in a letter to Barton in France urged him to return: “You have got to conform to a certain extent and you had better do it here, regaining your old supremacy. Here you will be supreme again.” Barton sometimes appeared twice in a single issue, and had created several running departments for himself—”The Inquiring Reporter,”“Heroes of the Week,”“The Graphic Section.”The New Yorker scrapbooks show a flurry of Barton contributions in the weeks before his death, including a “Graphic Section” containing a small, prophetic cameo of a man beyond cheering up. In addition to the arrival of the O’Neills, Barton had recently been embarrassed by reports of his having been jilted by Ruth Kresge, a five-and-dime heiress; a few days after the O’Neills docked, she embarked for Europe with her fiancé, “Rufus Clark Caulkins, onetime Princeton football player.” Undoubtedly, Barton, who less than two years earlier had protested in an interview, “I have too much money. . . . An artist ought to be prohibited from earning as much as I do,” lost heavily in the stock-market crash. But his “OBIT” attempted a psychological self-diagnosis, blaming depression rather than the Depression:

Any sane doctor knows that the reasons for suicide are invariably psychopathological and the true suicide type manufactures his own difficulties. I have had few real difficulties. I have had, on the contrary, an exceptionally glamorous life, as life goes; and I have had more than my share of affection and appreciation.
The most charming, intelligent and important people I have known have liked me, and the list of my enemies is very flattering to me. I have always had excellent health, but since my early childhood I have suffered from a melancholia, which in the last five years has begun to show definite symptoms of manic-depressive insanity.
It has prevented my getting anything like the full value out of my talent, and the past three years has made work a torture to do at all. It has made it impossible for me to enjoy the simple pleasures of life. I have run from wife to wife, from house to house and from country to country in a ridiculous effort to escape from myself. . . .
No one thing is responsible for this and no one person—except myself. If the gossips insist on something more definite and thrilling as a reason, let them choose my pending appointment with the dentist or the fact that I happened to be painfully short of cash at the moment. . . . After all, one has to choose a moment; and the air is always full of reasons at any given moment. I did it because I am fed up with inventing devices for getting through twenty-four hours a day and with bridging over a few months periodically with some beautiful interest, such as a new gal who annoyed me to the point where I forgot my own troubles.

A man within minutes of ending his life must be listened to; Barton knew his own mental state. This was not his first suicide attempt. Harold Ross, after Barton’s death, revealed that eight months earlier the artist had poisoned himself and been narrowly revived by friends who found him in his apartment. Two months after this, he accompanied Neysa McMein to Charleston, where he bought the suicide revolver. His tendency toward depression was noticed by many friends, including Chaplin, who earlier in 1931, because of Barton’s low mood, had invited him at the last minute to join his post-”City Lights” jaunt to Europe. Barton’s behavior in London became pathological. According to David Robinson’s biography of Chaplin, “After the first week or so [Barton] could not be persuaded to leave the hotel, but wandered the suite and the public corridors.” He was seen fondling the revolver, and on one occasion “Chaplin was alarmed and irritated to discover that Barton had cut the wires on the electric clocks, for reasons known only to himself.” Chaplin paid for his return passage and gave him twenty-five pounds, since Barton appeared to be without funds. Somewhere in their time together those last months, Chaplin sketched a caricature of Barton; it has a sad redolence absent from Miguel Covarrubias’s caricature and Barton’s own, both of which emphasize the dandy. Barton’s more painterly self-portrait, however, is deeply melancholic. Its elongated face reminded him of El Greco, and he inscribed it “With apologies to Greco/and God/RB.”

His childhood was saturated in religion, of an odd sort. In “The Jazz Age, As Seen Through the Eyes of Ralph Barton, Miguel Covarrubias, and John Held, Jr.,” the catalogue of a show of drawings put on at the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in 1968, Richard Merkin, the organizer, writes of Barton, “From childhood he was on intimate terms with tragedy and with the mechanics of madness. His parents, heartbroken after the death of his young sister, became ‘natural scientists,’ and began their own religion. They published a small magazine and took in patients to be treated. It is certain that this had its effect on young Barton who quickly came to abhor the trappings of sickness and disease.” Kansas City was the milieu of which Hemingway, in the story “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” (describing a young man’s self-castration), wrote, “The dirt blew off the hills that now have been cut down, and Kansas City was very like Constantinople.” The Midwest had a sere spirituality that no amount of acquired atheism and Eastern sophistication could quench. Apologies to God kept coming. Barton’s was an extreme case of what Merkin calls “the exaggerated urbanity of the provincial.” Even New York wasn’t urbane enough for him, and he spent years in Paris, where, in the words of Thomas Craven, “he out-fopped the French at their own game, dressed like something midway between a toreador and an aesthete, and had many imitators among the young caricaturists.” Socially, Barton had chosen to make a splash and run with the rich and the very famous, and that is a hard race for an artist to maintain. Yet the facility, fullness, and delicacy of his work right to the end lead us to decry his suicide, and to scan this work’s lighthearted surface for a clue.

His drawings, like Modigliani’s, combine a high pitch of sensuality with a passion for design. The two artists shared a taste for the archaic: Barton once claimed, “The old Greeks taught me. . . . I used to go up to the Metropolitan Museum and spend hours studying the figures and decorations on ancient Greek pottery.” He liked a tight space. His little illustrations for “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” are fitted into narrow, tall rectangles, crammed with truncated detail like lucid keyholes. Where the top of a panel threatens to be empty, as in the picture of “Dr. Froyd,” the artist fills it with satisfyingly animated scallops and fringe buttons. The illustrations for the Boni & Liveright limited edition of Balzac’s “Droll Stories,” however, constitute his masterpiece in this line. Executed during Barton’s marriage to Germaine Tailleferre, they consummate his lifelong Francophilia; he travelled to Touraine for appropriate architectural detail, which overflows the backgrounds. The foregrounds are, thanks to the nature of the tales, more often than not occupied by naked females, and, in sum, these enchanting nudes sing Barton’s hymn to life. The men in the illustrations are often cuckolded or impotent, alienated from vitality and beauty; in one scene of marital discontent the artist has troubled to carve the bedpost with a full depiction of that primal estrangement, the Fall and Expulsion from Eden. In another connubial scene, the behorned husband seems to bay at the moon while bedclothes and bed curtains are possessed by a rhythmic agitation of restlessness and longing. The sleeping woman with her bared breast is alone tranquil; the visual repository of purity, she is exempt from what Max Jacob, in speaking of Modigliani, called “a need for crystalline purity.” Such a need can easily encourage self- destructiveness—for what is purer than death?

Jacob also said of Modigliani that he was “cutting, but as fragile as glass.” The Times obituary, presumably voicing the contemporary verdict, spoke of Barton’s “cynical style of art” and of “a devastating humor and a bitter irony,” and claimed, “His writings were like his drawings—sharp.” Yet Barton’s drawings, these many decades later, do not seem especially cutting. His generalized cartoon figures have something of the lollipop-headed innocence of his contemporary John Held, Jr.,’s flappers and party boys. His caricatures are not indignant, like Daumier’s, or frenzied, like Gerald Scarfe’s; they are decoratively descriptive. In reviewing a book by Covarrubias, Barton wrote, “It is not the caricaturist’s business to be penetrating; it is his job to put down the figure a man cuts before his fellows in his attempt to conceal the writhings of his soul.” Barton had the born caricaturist’s abnormal sensitivity to facial configuration, and a casual expertise at tellingly finding his way among the interlocking bumps and creases of physiognomy. He admired Max Beerbohm, and, though the Englishman’s line is as woolly and limp as the American’s is wiry and crisp, an affinity can be felt in the carefree anatomy and formal balance of their tableaux.

But the calmly subtle inscriptions on Beerbohm’s drawings were beyond Barton, or beyond the audience available to him, and the dandy from Kansas City produced no equivalent of the small but exquisite body of essays and parodies that give Beerbohm a permanent niche in English literature. Among the nonchemical reasons for Barton’s growing unhappiness must have been the failure of his career to develop a significant literary side, though he sporadically exerted himself in that direction. “He sticks out his tongue while working and would rather write than draw,” Charles G. Shaw declared. Barton wrote two books. His “Science in Rhyme Without Reason” (1924) is a spirited exercise in the light-verse mode then fashionable, slight but charmingly illustrated, and showing—perhaps not surprising in a man whose father wrote of “the twenty-six basic lessons in the science of life”—a certain systematic turn of mind: the book has a bibliography and an index, and its contents tackle, in alphabetical order, “Aeronautics,”“Aesthetics,”“Astronomy,”“Bacteriology,” etc. As a poet, Barton can be hasty and metrically unstrict but also nimble. The dedication runs, touchingly in the light of later events:

Please accept these entremets,
Sweet Carlotta Monterey.

“Evolution” lays out with considerable precision such prehistoric developments as

A hydrosphere then did appear,
Which fell to earth as boiling tears,
And, after several million years,
Produced some rather tepid seas

and

In order came the zoophyte;
The Palaeolithic trilobite;
True fishes, crabs amphibian;
Then reptiles in the Permian;
And then the giant dinosaurs,
And next our flying ancestors.

“Natural History,” but for its awkward fourth line, is a perfect little verbal mechanism:

The Cuckoo
Is at its best
In clocks.
Outside of clocks
It stocks
The titlark’s nest
With eggs;
Then begs
Both food and rest.
It thrives;
But drives
The titlark coo-coo.

Though no Hilaire Belloc or Arthur Guiterman, Barton plays their game acceptably, somewhat as Chaplin could play the clarinet, the violin, the trombone, and the piano. Barton’s one prose volume, “God’s Country” (1929), constitutes a less happy attempt to turn systematic exposition into jokes—a three-hundred-and-thirty-page facetious revisionist history of the United States from Columbus to Hoover. The Presidents are lampooned as monarchs (Zachary the Rough and Ready, Franklin the Debonair); the Presidency is renamed the Misterhood; fanciful contending parties, such as Uniboodlists and Multiboodlists (an echo of Unity Christianity and its Trinitarian competitors?), are invented; and sexual shenanigans not entirely fanciful are numbered among the Presidential acts. Barton had done his homework, and some bleak historical truths register: “They [the American people] elected Franklin Pierce to the Misterhood because they felt that his absolutely colorless record gave promise that he would not annoy them with the political issues of the day.” Ring Lardner’s flights into nonsense, H. L. Mencken’s mockery of the American booboisie and its sacred myths, and a fashionable left-wing scorn of capitalism stand behind “God’s Country”; but the flippant, bantering tone suitable to capsule theatre notices does not quite do when it is applied to the grave facts of history. Here, for instance, is Barton’s verbal cartoon of Lincoln’s assassination:

On the evening of the 14th of April, 1865, Abraham attended Ford’s Theatre in Washington. When he entered his box, a great burst of applause went up from the house, for the people of his time loved and appreciated him. The Mister was obliged to stand up and take bow after bow. An actor out of work, standing at the back of the house, became blind with jealousy at the sight of a non-Equity man getting such a hand. He entered the box from the rear and shot Abraham dead.
Dead, that is, as far as this mortal coil is concerned. On the morrow, God sent a shaft of pure white light down from on high to Number 576 Tenth Street, N. W., and sucked his immortal soul up to the Public Thing of heaven. There, Abraham joined the company of the saints, for there is nothing that the Almighty admires so much as a man who has served as Mister of the United States during a bloody war.

It makes an uneasy mix: the date and the address are exact, the assassination’s motivation is farcical, and the Almighty’s alleged fondness for bloody Presidents needs to be more earnestly examined. As in the Civil War sketch that accompanies this chapter, real hearts (thanks, perhaps, to Gray’s “Anatomy”) pop disturbingly from papery bodies. A real indignation ineffectively seethes within Barton’s burlesque of American history; a kind of prolonged sneer results, which too rarely provokes either outright laughter or serious thought. “Repellent,”“not much fun,”“rather dull,” and “entirely negligible” were among the epithets of contemporary reviewers. “God’s Country,” published in the year of the stock-market crash, flopped, and Barton never again tried anything so ambitious. His years of not “getting anything like the full value out of my talent” had begun. Yet what a talent it was! Even hobbled by melancholy and spendthrift ways, it outclassed most of the competition. The Times, the day after it reported the suicide, groped to express a sense of loss, adding this to an account of a press conference that O’Neill gave: “In the meanwhile the body of the artist . . . lay in lonely state in one of the small chapels of the Campbell Funeral Church. The city which had once acclaimed his work had apparently forgotten him.”

We do not expect our humorous artists to die young. George Price and William Steig, who first appeared in this magazine during Barton’s last year, are still hard at it, week after week. Ralph Barton’s chucked career hauntingly reverberates. Neysa McMein, herself a dedicated professional, asked him while they were in Charleston together, “Don’t you want to be a great artist? Of course, you are a swell artist now, but don’t you want a great future?” He answered, “No, I think not. I’ve had everything,” and a few days later he bought himself the revolver, having failed to do the job with poison. Six months later, he used it. With his final debonair gesture the creator of the black-hearted ashman appropriated the Stygian glamour of those poets who, despairing of the noise, opt for silence

Full Credit For This Story Goes To: The New Yorker