E. SIMMS CAMPBELL

THE ARTIST FOR LANGSTON HUGHES AND ARNA BONTEMP'S children's novel Popo and Fifina was the Jackie Robinson of commercial art and cartooning, E. Simms Campbell (1906-1971). Campbell had already had a successful career in advertising in Saint Louis, Missouri before moving to New York City, and he was only twenty-five when he did the illustrations for the Hughes/Bontemps book. By then, he'd broken into the New York magazine cover and cartoon markets, and was just two years away from his biggest break, as the cover artist and later art editor of the newly founded Esquire magazine, where his watercolors of beautiful women set the tone of the magazine from the beginning. Later, he brought those women to newspapers all over the country as the first African-American with a nationally syndicated comic, Cuties his daily one panel gag cartoon.

As such a prominent cartoonist, information on Campbell abounds on the internet. A good capsule biography is available on Answers.com, and a wide selection of his work, including the Impressions of Haiti I posted yesterday, can be found on the American Art Archives. So, in hope of presenting something new here I offer direct quotes from a profile done by none other than Arna Bontemps in 1945. The art comes from a collection of Campbell's cartoons Cuties in Arms (1942), from The New Yorker (where he appeared regularly throughout the thirties), and from Southern Road, a book of poems by Sterling A. Brown published in 1932 and illustrated in the same manner as Popo and Fifina.

IT WAS AT HIS WESTCHESTER HOME IN NEW YORK, fourteen years after their collaboration on Popo and Fifina, that Arna Bontemps sat down with Campbell to do a profile of the black artist for the book We Have Tomorrow. The book profiles twelve African-Americans who, as Bontemps says in the introduction "are doing what was never done by Negro Americans before; they are working in fields which for a long time seemed closed to members of their race. They are doing what couldn't be done--until they did it. They are working as Americans, not as Negroes, and they are making a success of it." The title We Have Tomorrow comes, appropriately, from a Langston Hughes poem, Youth.

"My work is a lot like ditch-digging. The only difference is that when you're digging ditches, you're outside and enjoy the fresh air. I do my sweating right over there [in his home studio]--often at night, under those intense blue lights. Ten hours, twenty hours, sometimes thirty hours at a stretch...When it's time for bills to be paid, you don't play around. You get funny and you get funny quick."

"This month the going has been harder than usual. King Features, for whom I do the syndicated daily drawings called "Cuties," usually want me to keep six weeks ahead with my material, but that's the old plan now. With the war going on, they are asking for seventeen weeks in advance. That means I must work up enough ideas for the additional weeks, get them approved, do the drawings, and then keep even from then on. All that in addition to my regular work for the magazines and the advertising concerns."

"Don't let it get you dizzy. Just say I do about five hundred drawings of all kinds a year--not counting the ones that go into the wastebasket."

On his diverse book collection: "An artist must know something about everything.  Styles, furniture, culture, language, mass psychology, and all things of current interest."

On the question of high versus low art: "I prefer cartooning. You see, I like jokes, and it's hard to put a joke into an oil painting. Have you ever noticed how quiet people are in art galleries? Well, I don't think that's what pictures should do to you. They should make you want to laugh, talk, shout, anything but hang your head. I worked at the sort of thing you have in mind, back in the Chicago and St. Louis days, and exhibited such drawings as "The Wake" and "Levee Luncheon," both of which got their share of attention, but even then the thing about them that critics mentioned was their humor."

On finding his calling: "I seem to have had my eye on the magazines from the start. At Englewood [High School} it was The 'E.' At the university of Chicago, the Phoenix. The several other little magazine around Chicago. Nothing much came of these efforts, however, so after the Art Institute I went back to St. Louis to look for work. The next thing I knew I was wating table on a dining car. It was a let-down, of course, but it was the making of me in this field."

"Yes, seriously. Up to then my work had been shallow, but I learned from my fellow waiters how close man can be to his fellow men. After this discovery my character began to develop and I began to paint and draw people as they really looked. Oh, i could always draw, but I was a failute as an artist till I became a successful dining-car waiter."

"You meet all kinds in a diner, you know. Some are dainty, some finicky, some calm and patient, some nervous, some are just would-be slave drivers. Between meals I spent my time making caricatures of the passengers as well as of the other waiters and the steward. Before long I had quite a collection of these sketches, and when I got back in St. Louis I started showing them around to the various studios."

"Most of the places turned me down. You know how it is when you are looking for work. But J. P. Sauerwein, manager of the Triad Studios in the Arcade Building, liked the stuff and hired me. I became one of eight artists on the staff there."

On moving to New York City: "I had plenty of chances to regret it during those first months in the big city. I didn't catch on right away, by any means. I wore out a lot of shoe leather before I found a job. Even then it was nothing to get excited about. The salary was just one-eight of what I'd been getting in St. Louis. But it was a job and I had to hold it until i could do better. In the meantime Mr. Sauwerwein sent me a wire offering an increase over my former pay if I'd come back to the Triad Studios, but it was too late. I'd burned my bridges and I didn't want to be licked by a little place called New York City."

"My break came when I ran into Ed Graham. there aren't many fellows like Ed. He and I had worked on the Phoenix at the same time back at the University of Chicago. Well, Ed Graham had come on to New York ahead of me, and he had already broken into the humorous magazines and made a name for himself. He had his knocks, but he was over the hump. He knew the editors, and they knew him. I should him some of myd rawings and gags and right off the bat he said, 'I'll take you around. This is stuff is good.'"

"There you have it. C. D. Russell, creater of "Pete the Tramp," became my friend, too. Before long I was selling cartoons to a dozen magazines and newspapers. I sold ideas to other artists, and I sold gags alone, sometimes as many as fifty a week. I enrolled at the Art Student's League for further study with George Grosz, the exiled German satirist, perhaps the greatest drafstman in the field, and received a pat on the back from James Mongomery Flagg. In 1936 the Hearst newspapers conducted their $1000 competition for what was called the cartoon best depicting "the tax grabber." The contest was open to all American artists, so I decided to give it a try. I made nearly a thousand sketches before I got one that pleasd me. Finally, on friday the thirteenth, I finished one that seemed to express what I had in mind. It was just one of ten thousand entries, but it turned out to be the lucky one."

"The principle on which I work is to find out what the other fellow needs, then try to supply it. Something like that was in my mind when I drew that Thanksgiving turkey for Beltach's Butcher Shop [his first sale as an artist made at age eleven], and it is worth remembering. This field isn't hard from a race standpoint, but it is a very, very tough field for anybody to break into and stay in."

THE OTHER ELEVEN PEOPLE Arna Bontemps profiled in We Have Tomorrow are Mildred E. Blount, Horace R. Cayton, Beatrice Johnson Trammell, Dean Dixon, Sylvestre C. Watkins, Douglas Watson, Emmett M. May, Hazel Scott, Algernon P. Henry, James E. LuValle, Benjamin Davis, Jr.

I include one last cartoon from the New Yorker by way of comparison to the print I posted yesterday of Popo at the drum ceremony.

And because I can't bear not to include them, the last two prints from Southern Road.

Coming Soon: Langston Hughes's First Book of Negroes.

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.

LANGSTON HUGHES AND ARNA BONTEMPS: POPO AND FIFINA

IN 1902, two almost brothers unrelated by blood and unknown to each other were born eight and a half months apart. James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri on February 1, the son of two parents of mixed race whose own parents were of mixed race. Arnaud "Arna" Wendell Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana on October 13 to a black middle class family. By grade school Hughes was living in Lincoln, Illinois and Bontemps was living in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California. And by 1924, both men had found their way to Harlem, New York City, both with the ambition to become great poets, and both to become central members of the Harlem Renaissance.

At twenty-two, Hughes was already an acclaimed poet in the black community for his poems in The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Bontemps had had poems published in The Crisis just that year. The two men looked so much alike that they were often mistaken for one another. (A quick look at their photographs on Wikipedia--Hughes, Bontemps--shows that clearly.) And when they met they had an instant affinity to each other. Hughes left Harlem for Washington D.C. days after they met, but Bontemps came and visited him in D.C., as Hughes would later visit Bontemps in the early thirties in Huntsville, Alabama where Bontemps had a teaching position at a college there. They corresponded frequently, a correspondence that would eventually reach over 2,500 letters by the time of Hughes's death.

It was at that Alabama visit in 1931 that Hughes and Bontemps initiated their first collaboration and the only one to be published in their lifetimes, a children's novel, Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti. By then, Hughes had published three books of poetry and a book of fiction, and Bontemps had published a novel, but neither of them had yet written for children.

POPO AND FIFINA IS IN MANY WAYS A TRAVEL BOOK IN NOVEL FORM. The New York Times called it just that, and it has a lot in common with Hughes's later children's book The First Book of the West Indies (to be discussed in a future post). The story follows a brother and a sister (with more focus on the brother) as they move with their family from a small inland village to the larger town of Cape Haiti.

When they arrive in town, we are treated to a child's view of Cape Haiti. There are so many people! Men with parrots on their shoulders. Women with baskets on their heads. Children hawking candy. And the ocean! So much water.

Popo and Fifina's mother sets about making their new home while their father secures a position as a fisherman on one of the many fishing boats that go out each day. The children do their best to be helpful in any way they can, Fifina assisting her mother in making beds on the floor while Popo finds kindling for their fire.

Each detail is meant to expose an American audience to the dusty existence that is Haiti. Popo lives naked. A penny for candy is too much. The women wash with reeds, soap too expensive. The children must work. Even with these details of poverty, the family is never depicted as anything but happy, their lives full.

In order for Hughes and Bontemps to show village life as well as town life, after several weeks the children return to their home village with their mother. There, life is a large family, the taste of mangoes fresh off trees, and the nighttime ritual of drums.

Back in Cape Haiti, Popo's parents announce that it is time for the eight-year-old to get a job. He is fortunate enough to be granted an apprentice position in an uncle's woodworking business. Popo devotes himself to the craft, working with diligence and without pause on the first job given him, the carving of a tray, which he decorates with a sailboat, a promising show at a career.

Still the children's lives are not all work. Their father builds them a kite, which they fly on the beach. And the book ends with a family trip out to a lighthouse that is a joyous release even as it begins to rain.

LANGSTON HUGHES HAD LIVED IN HAITI for three months in the middle of 1931, where he made an effort to befriend members of all classes, taking copious notes and gaining access to aspects of Haitian culture usually closed to foreigners (such as the drum ritual depicted in the novel). He had come back outraged at the nation's poverty, and especially by the existence of an American marine base of questionable legality. (The treaty that allowed the marines occupation was never ratified by Congress.) Despite this impression, Hughes and Bontemps managed to quell their left leaning politics to make an endearing children's book, which was both a critical and commercial success, staying in print for over twenty years.

PERHAPS THE MOST ARRESTING FEATURE of Popo and Fifina are the spectacular woodblock prints made by E. Simms Campbell. Campbell was the first African-American artist to get work from a national magazine--Esquire where he designed their mascot--and the first African-American to have a nationally syndicated comic strip. Tomorrow, I will post excerpts from an Arna Bontemps essay on Campbell from We Have Tomorrow, a book on prominent African-Americans, as well as other examples of Campbell's work. Here, however, I want to include by way of comparison an image from Campbell's own Impressions of Haiti in a 1936 issue of Esquire.

To see all of E. Simms Campbell's illustrations for Popo and Fifina, see my Flickr set here.

Background material on Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps comes from Volume One of Arnold Rampersad's definitive biography The Life of Langston Hughes, and from Rampersad's introduction and afterward to a 1993 Oxford University Press edition of Popo and Fifina, which is now also out of print.

Tomorrow: E. Simms Campbell.

UPDATE: A friend informs me that Oxford University Press currently has a paperback edition of Popo and Fifina in print and available on Amazon. I encourage everyone to buy a copy.

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.