Remembering my pal of pals Edward Koren, whose second art was friendship
For many Americans, the festive, convivial spirit that this season seems to expect of us only emphasizes our shortcomings. As a result, the holidays can become the season of emotional frailty and ensuing melancholy, regression, backbiting, and self-loathing. It was in people falling to the occasion that the Vermont cartoonist Edward Koren, who died in April, located common feeling — discontents that he eased with gentle humor. There was civic generosity embedded in a Koren drawing such that his millions of readers felt seen, and with that, there among them was community.
Koren was my close friend for decades, and I have been missing him more in recent weeks, at this end of a disquieting year. I’m far from alone. In an era when the nation is so especially conflicted, so especially in search of comity, it’s hard not to have Koren here anymore to unify us in shared anxiety. A dog asks its owner, “Am I doing something wrong? You don’t say ‘Good dog’ to me anymore.” A heartfelt man stands beseeching a woman seated upon a couch: “I know you want me to be someone else — but someone else is not me.”
Community, in all its intricate mysteries and elusive misunderstandings, was Koren’s ongoing subject, one he engaged with, via pencil and ink, by inventing a populace of distinctively furry, snout-forward men, women, and beasts. Meanwhile, in his own daily small-town Vermont life, Koren was the very picture of the engaged citizen, the image of how to live in relation to others during times good and troubled.
Koren’s youth was suburban and urban, mostly in New York City, followed by the 40 bucolic years he spent in a white farmhouse along a dirt road in Brookfield, Vt. (pop. 1,200). The Green Mountain State is a “You’re not from around here” place, where it takes three generations of residence before someone is no longer a “Flatlander.” New Yorkers typically require four generations. Koren’s path of assimilation was to marry the extremes. The 1,100 covers, cartoons, and other work he published in The New Yorker suggested to his friend the writer Calvin Trillin that “He drew people with Vermont addresses and Upper West Side sensibilities.”
In a world of infinite drawings, one glance told you this cartoon was a Koren. His very first for The New Yorker, a man with writer’s block seated at his desk wearing a Shakespeare sweatshirt, established an approach that meshed the urbane with the rumpled and grandiose aspiration with a sparrow’s vulnerability.
It would take a while before Koren emerged as a hair and nose man. Among his artistic heroes were such pens-of-the-people as 19th-century France’s Honoré Daumier and George Herriman, the creator of Krazy
Kat. As a craftsman, Koren, too, was a populist. He had a particular genius for crosshatching, the intersecting strokes that in parallel accumulation convey shadow and light — a community of independent lines. Another lifelong inspiration was Pieter Brueghel the Elder, whose seminal innovation was to take as his primary subject regular folks at work and at play, with particular attention to their foibles as a subject worthy of the artist’s attention.
Scrutinizing himself, Koren would proclaim, “I’m a nasty man and I’m a scold!” A cartoonist is essentially a sit-down comic who says, “Get it?” Koren made mockery of pretensions, fads and vanities, the fitness-crazed, the relentlessly plugged in, health nuts and cads, the hapless in search of self-help, and the helplessly un-self-aware. His art is forever indebted to summer people, cats, and marital discord. Koren was a well-read skewerer, and if his best one-liners ended up affixed by magnets to more refrigerator doors than perhaps any other man’s in history, these cartoons were grounded in a literary sensibility. He savored writers from far and near, including
Mark Twain, from whom Koren borrowed his lifeguiding caption: “The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow.”
Koren’s own way of living made him a cartoonist’s dream. Workaholic late studio nights were fueled by hot coffee and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five records. Yet even as he brewed another pot, day after day, year after year, Koren would wonder at his “sudden” inability to “get a good night’s sleep.”
He was an all-weather compulsive outdoor exerciser who loved gear, considered duct tape the universal remedy, and was the kind of man who, whether for socks or used cars, always had a brand and a guy. Cars enraptured him. He was a Volvo loyalist, until that was replaced by a devotion to Saabs that finally gave way to the automotive panacea, the Volkswagen GTI. His happiest condition was to relish, his most distinctive facial feature was his eyebrows — two independent lines aquiver in the expectation of something new to raise them. When the world instead offered only dullness, he might sip a little Scotch.
His brand was The Famous Grouse, which, his son Ben noticed, was also, in inspiration-dry moments, who Koren became. Then might arrive sweet relief, and off to the studio he’d hurry to draw a child at the breakfast table taking in Dad while informing Mom: “The forecast for today is grumpy.”
Koren’s second art was friendship. He tended to see the best in others, affirming what they most liked and valued in themselves. To be his good friend was to receive drawings saluting birthdays, weddings, births, anniversaries, publications, and other happy events.
Correspondence carried exultations of address like “PAL OF PALS.” In his presence, it was easy to believe you were his only friend. He lived for updates and enthused about children and your projects. Those others he found churlish, self-involved, and self-important, he forgave because jerkiness interested him. Friends (like this one) who besieged him with cartoon ideas were thanked, and those who resubmitted (also guilty) became “My Idea Man.” If, however, you persisted long enough with “So, Ed! There’s a man crouched on a platter in the middle of a set Thanksgiving table, and his wife is explaining to the first-arriving guest, ‘George wanted to see things from the turkey’s point of view,’” he might well rough it out and send it in. But, observed Koren’s friend the writer, editor, and Idea Man Roger Angell, “Nobody else’s ideas were ever accepted!”
As for Dec. 25, the day was not called Christmas but “a happy gathering in honor of Santa Claus.” A favored Koren word was “cahoots”; a favored phrase “shared delight.” He lived for the telephone, left minutes-long voice messages that said “Let’s be in touch at length,” and, once on the line, he so hated to be off that, like Tsuruko in Junichiro Tanizaki’s “The Makioka Sisters,” at “the point of hanging up, [he] would begin all over again.”
Across Vermont, Koren supported any organization he approved of by designing — gratis — a surfeit of posters, invitations, tote bags, food labels, mugs, and Tshirts. He was pro-community and antiestablishment, and people Koren deemed deficient were referred to with Marxian dismissal as “the lumpen.” His own short, wiry frame and mustache he offered for 35 years of service to the Brookfield Volunteer Fire Department. Dinners with friends and family might be interrupted by the summons of the radio dispatch, and off Captain Koren would go, just another local guy running toward the flames. In the aftermath of a wreck out on the highway, the loaded truck would await Koren, still talking, offering comfort to people in their worst life moments, him hating to leave.
His recent memorial service was, in its way, a perfect Thanksgiving, with people from all over Vermont filling a building on Main Street. His former fire chief delivered a eulogy, and then abruptly into the quiet hall came the crackling voice of the department dispatcher calling in with: “We’ll take it from here, Ed.”