Just So

When I was a girl, my parents had around the house a book called Cartoon Cavalcade, which was as you would think a collection of cartoons. Here’s a pretty good, if technical, description of the book from Crooked Timber. Looks like it was published in 1943, two years before I was born.

It’s an anthology of American cartoons from the 1880’s to the 1940’s: 450 pages worth, plus editorial matter from the early 40’s, providing a historically interesting perspective on all this history.

You can see how some of this content might puzzle a child, however precocious. And for some reason I was a child who didn’t ask many questions (see below). I think that may have been because sometimes the answers just added to the puzzle. Certainly I was not in danger of having my nose stretched (see below). But I did have two older brothers who would rather tease than eat.

Anyway, I spent many and many an hour browsing through the Cartoon Cavalcade, trying to figure out the joke in old cartoons about Lenin and Stalin and the evils of the bloated railroad Trusts.

There were a number of what I suppose you’d call dumb flapper jokes. One showed a sleek young man and a sleek young woman with Art Deco profiles. He asks her, “Do you like Kipling?” She answers, “I don’t know, I’ve never kippled.”

Obviously I’d never Kippled either and I didn’t discover the meaning of that cartoon until I hit college and learned to treat Kipling with contempt for his White Man’s Burden. Rightly so.

But then a decade or two after that I had children of my own and discovered the Just So Stories and my estimation of Kipling spung around again. These stories were favorite bedtime fare at our house for years.

Nothing is ever as black and white as a political cartoon, I guess.

Do I like Kipling? The answer is yes and no.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

He was born on this day in 1865.

Here is a short poem from the end of “The Elephant’s Child,” “who was full of ’satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions.”

I Keep six honest serving-men:
(They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Where and When
And How and Why and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine till five.
For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,
For they are hungry men:
But different folk have different views:
I know a person small–
She keeps ten million serving-men,
Who get no rest at all!
She sends ‘em abroad on her own affairs,
From the second she opens her eyes–
One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys!

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