Delmore Schwartz
MASTERPIECES AS CARTOONS
Recently I have been trying hard to watch television and read
comic books. I do not know whether this is an effort to keep in touch
with the rest of the American population or an attempt to win the
esteem and keep up with my brother-in-law, aged twelve, who regards
me as a hideous highbrow and thinks that I am probably a defrocked
high school English teacher. The effort is, at any rate, one which permits
me moments of self-congratulation. I feel that no one can say that I
have not tried my best to keep open the lines of communication between
myself and others, and to share the intellectual interests of the entire
community.
The bottom of the pit has been reached, I think, in the cartoon
books which are called
Classics Illustrated,
a series of picture-and-text
versions of the masterpieces of literature. Seventy-eight of them have
been published, but so far I have only been able to obtain six of them,
and they have been so exciting and fascinating and distracting that I
have only been able to read three of them with any care: Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment,
Shakespeare's
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
and
Gulliver's Travels.
The intentions of the publishers and the editors of
these illustrated classics are either good, or they feel guilty, or perhaps
both, since at the end of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
there is a strik–
ing and entirely capitalized sentence: "NOW THAT YOU HAVE
READ THE CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED EDITION, DON'T
MISS THE ADDED ENJOYMENT OF READING THE ORIG–
INAL, OBTAINABLE AT YOUR SCHOOL OR PUBLIC LI–
BRARY." Notice how it is assumed that the reader has not read the
original version of these works and it is taken for granted that he will
not buy, he will only borrow, the original version from school or the
public library. An interesting and significant fact to discover would be:
just how many readers who first encounter Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or
Jonathan Swift in their comic strip garb are moved by this encounter
to read the original. It would take a good detective or a good pollster
to find out. When one feels optimistic, it seems possible that some
quality of the masterpiece may bring some readers to the original; but
