Among the Unlimitless Etha

In his home near Hollywood last week, the gentlest, most poetic of U.S. popular artists laid down his pen at last. George Herriman, 63, creator of the sovereign comic strip, Krazy Kat, died after a long illness. Hundreds of thousands of readers, who knew the love-daft Kat and his curious companions as well as they knew their own dreams, knew little or nothing of their inventor. But as friends and colleagues talked of this modest little man, as he never on earth would have talked of himself, a figure of almost Franciscan sweetness emerged. "If ever there was a saint on earth," said warmhearted Harry Hershfield (Abie the Agent), "it was George Herriman."

Willie Was Right. Herriman wandered into newspaper cartooning because a fall from a scaffold made house painting too strenuous. He wandered into his greatest comic creations because an office boy named Willie, amused by a casually drawn cat & mouse playing marbles, suggested that Herriman flatly reverse the traditional cat-&-mouse relationship. Once Krazy Kat had made Herriman's fortune (around 1922), he left Manhattan, settled down in the West. For the past 22 years he lived near Hollywood. After his wife's death a decade ago in an automobile accident, he stayed much at home with his daughter Mabel, his dogs, his work.

Herriman believed that animals are superior to human beings. He would never ride a horse. He tried to be a vegetarian, had to give it up when he became too weak. To the end of his life nearly all his ration points for meat went to satisfy the sleek gang of stray dogs and cats he took care of.

Poker and Solitude. He was rather a dandy, in a loud way. His favorite sport was poker. He could be a wonderfully entertaining host. William Randolph Hearst loved him. His own close friends were chiefly comic-strip artists -- Hershfield, Ru dolph Dirks (The Captain and the Kids}, Jim Swinnerton (Little Jimmy), the late TAD Dorgan (Indoor Sports). His best friend was the late H. M. (Beanny) Walker, Our Gang comedies director.

Toward "serious" artists he felt very humble. He used to try painting and, according to Dirks, invariably underestimated his own work. He never got over feeling that his $750-a-week salary was more than he was worth, never got over trying to make each strip a little better than the last.

He loved solitude, would often sit among people for hours without saying a word. The one thing Herriman could always talk about fluently and without shyness was Krazy Kat.

Minor Master. Herriman was crazy about Krazy Kat. In all his years of inti macy with him, he never got tired of the Kat. In Herriman's 30-odd years of work -- always wearing his hat and usually improvising fresh from the pen -- he must have drawn something like 1,500 full-page Kats and 10,000 strips. An amazing number of them are the keenest, dizziest kind of inspiration. Wrote Critic Gilbert Seldes of Herriman's work 20 years ago: "In the second order of the world's art it is superbly first rate -- and a delight!" Delight was Herriman's strongest point in a world where most artists had lost it.

Problem of Evil. For Herriman's creatures, neither animal nor human, the scratchy, tersely subtle drawing, the hog-Elizabethan talk and supralunar world of Krazy Kat were entirely his own -- a new private universe of fantasy, irony, weird characterization, odd beauty. It looks as simple as daylight, this illimitably varied, unchanging little comedy about the noble-souled, loony, amorous Kat who loves to have his bean creased by the brick that malicious Ignatz Mouse loves to throw, while Dogberryish Offisa Pupp, the stolidly distraught embodiment of the Law, tries, and forever fails, to stop the brick. The predicament of the Kat, Ignatz and the Pupp is perhaps the century's wisest, certainly its gayest, fable of the Problem of Evil. Nevertheless, Herriman's comic strip remained simple, popular art whose purpose was to make simple people laugh.

When, some 20 years ago, the intellectuals discovered Herriman, Krazy Kat was compared with Don Quixote and with Pan, Ignatz with Sancho Panza and Lucifer, their creator with Anatole France, the German Expressionists, Charles Dickens. Herriman was praised as draftsman, colorist, creator of magical characters, fantastic inventor, and almost as much--but not perhaps enough--as a writer. In many respects his comic commentary resembles that of Joyce in Finnegans Wake, and Joyce might well have saluted the Herriman line: "Just imegin having your 'ectospasm' running around, William and Nilliam, among the unlimitless etha--golla, it's imbillivibil--"

But Herriman did not hear the cries of high critical approval. He remained effortlessly unpretentious, indestructibly innocent.

Usually, when the creator of a popular comic strip dies--or even before--another man can understudy him. But when George Herriman died, King Features announced no such plan. Herriman left a backlog of Krazy Kat which will keep the strip running till about the middle of June. When that is over, a unique and endearing form of art and humor will have left the world.

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