Wry and Neat
Kelly, Walt
Wry and Neat Straight Herblock. Simon and Schuster. 224 pp: $5.95. Reviewed by Walt Kelly While it may be distressing to look back, it always helps to tell us where we are going. Herbert Block...
...His caricatures of McCarthy, Nixon, the Elite of the Klan, the Bomb Bum, and the Birchy people betray the fact that Herblock does not like any of them to a certain degree...
...He also drew against him, which is easier...
...Goldwater, and he is only up to shout through a staff door, trying to find out what he said yesterday so that he can explain it tomorrow...
...It was evident that if the hospitalization had improved Mr...
...Kennedy was what he saw in the man, which is what a cartoon portrait is supposed to be, and it must be admitted that his slightly ami drawings are better than his pro...
...But he was among the first to sight the target...
...His Bomb Bum appears again...
...Herblock says the departure, even temporarily, of a particular popular clown does not leave him lonely...
...Nixon is earned, and, in Her-block's opinion, deserved...
...The droop in the pendulum of Mr...
...One of his first scalpel jobs was in 1961, when Herblock had a character resembling Goldwater saying to a distressed mother and three ill-clad, frightened children: "If you had any initiative, you'd go out and inherit a department store...
...This is undoubtedly Herbert Block's best book...
...He is a cartoonist throwback to the days when a number of giants would draw nothing with tongue in cheek or elsewhere...
...But he did do the one thing that is practically impossible to do with complete honesty...
...A final insult was hospital confinement about as long as the gestation period of an elephant...
...They ramble a bit...
...The only Republican left on his feet on the last page is Mr...
...Evident in this book is Herblock's growing ability at caricature...
...He digresses from discussing the four-year pass of the former Vice President to describing the fact that many sympathetic people try to commiserate with him on the loss of such a truly wooden figurehead...
...His work on the then Senator from the arid state aroused the righteous indignation of Birchites and other in-line thinkers...
...For a nice fellow, Herblock can draw some pretty frightening Hallowe'en masks...
...He has wrapped these around 456 funny, powerful, outspoken cartoons stretching in bulk from 1960 until the days just before the Republican rout during the unpleasantness of last autumn...
...However, his cartoons through this stretch of his book emphasize that a national budget is balanced at the expense of an unbalanced social system —a social system, he makes clear, in which unemployment increases in direct ratio to the amount of money a government would put aside for a rainy day...
...The pained grimace on the many faces of Mr...
...He points out that there is never a shortage of juicy targets nor of characters for his lively waxworks, and he proves it by being angrier about tomorrow than he is sad about yesterday...
...Herbert Block of The Washington Post and the world, is a man who can look the past in the eye and the future in the teeth...
...the cartoonist was released from his own confinement to aid in the delivery of the stillborn Republican campaign of 1960...
...During the six years away from writing books, Herblock was sick enough to be deprived of cigarettes, staying up late, singing, drawing more than five times a week, and other worthwhile sports...
...It is not probable that his work alone kept the country from stampeding into Goldwater's arms...
...As the recent campaign progressed Herblock gleefully fastened on a target he had earlier sighted, Senator Barry Goldwater...
...Kennedy on a pedestal reserved for gods...
...He arrives not on little cat-feet but bursts in upon our startled fogginess like a thunderstorm...
...Herblock never explains yesterday in the terms of tomorrow...
...The words are not confined to enlargements of the anger he has put into his cartoons...
...He is not one of those who before or since the assassination put Mr...
...There is much to admire, much to make you laugh, and much to make you mad all over again before the book ends...
...The Balanced Budget is something that Block refuses to discuss thoroughly, believing that a book, like a bar, is "no place to talk about religion...
...The reader is more likely to believe a negative truth than a positive one...
...With his usual prophetic sense Herblock was an accessory before the fact...
...Nixon's political probables did not leave Mr...
...While his detractors are worrying about his left, he is smiting them with his straight right...
...After a six year leave from the bookshelves, Herblock is back with 37,000 words of rapier and bludgeon-work...
...he was able to draw for the man, the candidate, and the President...
...He feeds off the countryside, an amiable forager, as one summit of an idea gives him a view of another, and he charges off to worry the grass of a greener field of thought...
...Block's caricature of Mr...
...Block's state of health it had done nothing to improve his temper...
...Today he guesses pretty well what boobs we will be tomorrow on the record of what we have already been...
...Goldwater...
...It winds up, because of the necessary time lag that book production exacts, not with the Republicans defeated in the election, but enroute to their debacle...
...Block in need of a whipping boy...
...In this Herblock- had help, notably from Mr...
...Rather, he works the other way around...
Vol. 29 • February 1965 • No. 3
