Pogo, Never Really Gone

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Pogo Never really Gone (continued)

Precisely how it is that a Connecticut Yankee was inspired to do a comic strip set in the Deep South is probably an unfathomable mystery, though it is useful to bear in mind that Southern folklore and popular literature -- in particular the "Uncle Remus" stories of Joel Chandler Harris -- had a heavy influence on Disney, which may have been passed along to Kelly. The language spoken by Pogo et al. is, as Books and Writers quite accurately puts it, a mixture of "Elizabethan English, French, and white and black Southern." Kelly had a keen feeling for language, and he delighted in seeing what he could make it do. Thus for example Howland Owl and Churchy-la-Femme hatch a plot to build "Adam bombs," which involves crossing "a gee -ranium plant an' a li'l baby yew tree," at the end of which, as the wise owl puts it, "you gits a yew-ranium bush!"

That comes from a story -- and story is the right word, for Kelly was a master storyteller -- called "Upon Adom." In the previous tale, "Some Gentlemen of the Fourth Escape," Pogo and Albert propose to go into newspapering, which mainly involves sharpening pencils until a little fellow floats into view using a book as his boat. The sendup that ensues is delicious, as he announces:

"Good afternoon, young man, I'm a bookworm by trade, ready to review a book, run errands or answer the telephone. . . . Take this book I ride on, it's the wrong color . . . and cheap at that. See, it RUNS! Doesn't resist water. . . . Now this page chosen at random is LUMPY with punctuation . . . HARD on the teeth . . . crawling with consonants. . . . UGH! what shoddy material!"

Whereupon the book sinks, leaving the bookworm to speak truth: "Ah, me! Modern literature has no staying power! See, it went down like a STONE ."

In that as in so much else, Kelly's universe occupies a territory that embraces both utter nonsense and utter common sense. In the story titled "My Love Is a Rose / Our Violence Blue, / A Young Man's Fancy / And So Dear Are You," Porky Pine -- prickly, cantankerous, plainspoken and obviously dear to Kelly's heart -- proposes to court Mam'zelle Hepzibah, explaining to the assembled doubters: "How gracefully she steps . . . how dainty her tread . . . yes, her carriage is a thing of beauty," which sets off the following dialogue:

Albert: "Hot dog! If yo' lady friend got a carriage, let's all go for a ride!"

Porky: "I only said, 'Her carriage is a thing of beauty.' I mean she walks well."

Churchy: "Why she walk if she got a carriage ?"

Beauregard: "Gadzooks! Maybe the pony died."

Readers lucky enough to know the nonsense plays of Ring Lardner will find much that's familiar in dialogue such as this, with its lovely mixture of the logical and the illogical. In these early stories, still testing his powers, Kelly clearly delighted in seeing what he could make the language do, and he often left the doing to that immortal troubadour Churchy-la-Femme, who, as Churchy puts it, "recites 'propriate stirrin' poetry," to wit:

I was stirrin' up a stirrup cup

In a stolen sterling stein,

When I chanced upon a ladle

Who was once my Valentine . . .

(Natural this was a ladle I used to spoon with.)

When Christmas nears, Churchy has the 'propriate carol -- "Good King Sourkraut looked out on his feets uneven!" -- and follows it up with the lines that Kelly eventually incorporated in another of his most memorable songs, set to the tune of "Deck the Halls": "Nora's freezin' on the trolley, / Swaller dollar collar-flower alley- GA-ROO ." One can only imagine the pleasure that Kelly, whose photographs suggest nothing so much as impishness, must have gotten out of writing that. It's as inspired as anything in Lewis Carroll, and deserves to be recognized as such.

Kelly was as common-sensically wise as he was funny, as when Porky Pine advises the characteristically overwrought Albert, "Don't take life so serious, son . . . it ain't no how permanent." Later, in a poster for Earth Day 1970, Kelly had Pogo famously observe, "We have met the enemy and he is us," and as the strip aged he was given more and more to somewhat bloated aphorisms. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of Kelly's admirers find the later, more political strips superior to the earlier, more innocent ones, but this probably reflects their own politics more than the strips' actual merits. Though I read "Pogo" assiduously right up to Kelly's unhappily early death in 1973 and often sympathized with the sentiments he expressed as he raked George Wallace, J. Edgar Hoover et al. over his very hot coals, to my taste the early Kelly is best. Since laughter is always the best medicine for whatever ails us, this doctor's prescription in these troubled times is "Pogo" of any vintage, twice in the morning and twice at bedtime.

"Pogo" is out of print, though often available in used-book stores.

Reprinted with permission from The Washington Post.

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