The Brooklyn Daily Eagle from Brooklyn, New York • Page 94

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1929 1133 ENT to JAIL fot EALISM By Hannah Stein When John Vassos Wanted to Illustrate "Ballad of Reading Qaol," He Had Himself Put in Prison I ill i fJr fcx- r- -v wiiMMi itSiiiiii illustrations on "Salome" lay on an editorial desk the publishers were communicating with bookshops over the country to find out what possibilities a gift edition of "Salome" would have with the Vassos sketches. At the artist's end there was so little hope that when he opened a letter one morning and read that his work had been accepted the shock was so great he nearly collapsed. And when the book, finally came out nearly three years ago, the publishers were so overwhelmed by its success that they commissioned him to study Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" and see what he could do with it. "I took hold of the job with much apprehension," he said. "To give a point of view on a man or woman in and out of love is one thing; one passes through such stages oneself.

But to interpret the A DARK, slender little boy with wistful brown eyes walked up to bis father with a manly stride and said something like this: "Dad, I'm too grown up for- toys. Take me to live ai a hospital where I shall learn what it means to suffer when people are in pain." Of course, it sounded quite different in his native tongue. John John Vassos was the little boy's name was in Constantinople at the time, wearing colorful pantaloons and a hat that looked like a miniature liberty bell. Mamma Vassos was alarmed. She suddenly realized that she had permitted her child to be entirely too much alone and introspective.

His strange request led her to see that John didnt crave the companionship of other children, and that he spent most of his spare hours after school dreaming out in the garden about the insoluble problems of life. It occurred to her that maybe he was too shy. to make friends. So one day when John least expected it, she prepared a feast of delicacies and invited over one of the nicest little boys in town. But John was furious.

Be resented his mother's matchmaking skill. And to register his protest he gav his guest such a beating that the innocent little fellow needed a change of clotnes before he could go home. After that incident, Papa and Mamma Vassos concluded that John was "different," and the only way to handle him was to let him have his own way. Well, then, if his ambition at the age of nine was to live at a hospital. Papa Vassos exercised his authority as a director by requesting of the superintendent that he permit his son to live with him.

And to let him see the worst, if he wished. Maybe John had the calling of a great surgeon, and he already had a burning desire. Or maybe he went after strange things because of a philosophic trend of mind. Mamma Vassos came from Mt. Olympus.

And maybe the fusion of Turkey and Greece produced a philosopher in the new generation. Years later John Vassos discovered that all action in this world marked time to a certain rhythm, and that the best way he could express himself was through the medium of art. He was in America then, having been brought over on an English trawler after a mishap on the water during the World War. Well, if there was poetry in his soul, he followed the footsteps of other poets to Greenwich Village. He was poor in those days, and radical.

And to earn enough for a cheap apartment and a frugal meal, he used to draw butcher posters for twenty-five cents. Friends who knew him then say that he was pessimistic in those days. He was in his early twenties when he uused to sit around and deliver dissertations on Nietzsche. Nietzsche was his guide and his prophet; anything the philosopher ever said was gospel to him. He couldn't see any other point of view but his own.

Yet his friends were indulgent with him because they liked him in spite of all he said. There was a girl in the Village in those days who agreed with everything he said about Nietzsche. "Ruth Carriere was a stylist by profession and a brilliant girl who could hold her own in a good, stiff debate. So that whether she actually agreed with Vassos one will never know, because those are things women never tell. He admired her tremendously.

He proposed asd six years ago Ruth and John were married. Spurred on by his new responsibility, John Vassos began to think seriously of a definite type' of art he ought to pursue. He remembered that as a child he used to take his pencil and draw strange figures to express the inhibition of a phobia which had nothing to do with bodily fear. Because, from the moment he was old enough to think, the mystery of life and death hung over him like a cloud until he was strangely fascinated by the young -and old and beautiful and ugly men and women and children he watched daily at the hospital who would feel one moment and then feel no more. One day about five years ago Vassos picked up a copy of Oscar Wilde's "Salome," and he thought he saw in it the characters he had been creating and accumulating on the shelf.

That gave him an idea. He would draw definite people. When he finished a half dozen illustrations he packed them neatly away among the others, and then went out to earn a little money on butcher posters. His reputation as a "meat" artist had spread so far and wide, that he already had enough work on hand to employ help. But the more his business flourished the more cordially he disliked it One day, prompted by the perfectly natural impulse to show off, Vassos cleared the shelf and showed some of the sketches to a friend.

"They ought to make an excellent book," the latter said. Vassos didn't know unta months later that while his attitude of a man in the valley of the shadow of death is quite another." He even thought it a bit presumptuous to expect him to know' how it felt when a man killed another and then prepared to pay for the crime with his own life. The only time he had seen death was at the hospital when he was a child. And the nearest he had ever approached it was on the ocean during the World War. when he was about to give up on a raft and die.

The first thing to do. then, was to get acquainted with prisoners. He would have himself committed, he thought, and mingle freely with the condemned. That would be so simple. He would merely declare his intentions of going to jail, and any warden would be glad to have a reputable man mingle with his men.

But ironical as it may be, Vassos couldn't coax a commitment. When he made his application he found the law said that no one shall partake of prison hospitality except the fellow who earned his prison fare. Getting in at Sing Sing, was out of the question. New York was buzzing too freely with the Snyder-Gray sensation at that time, and Warden Lawes made a ruling against all outsiders who desired to come in. So the next thing Vafsos did was to put a new tag on his bag and go down to the coal districts of Pennsylvania.

He was interested, anyway, to see if the miner and the literate were of the same frame of mind when the penalty of death was pronounced to them. When he reached the Alleghenies he didn't go directly to the prison, because that would have been poor salesmanship on his part. What he did was to inquire as secretively as he could, if the jailer frequented a rendezvous. He learned that he came to a coffee house nearly every night after the prisoners went to bed. Good.

It would be easier meeting around a glowing fire on terms of comradeship than at a jail. When the jailer finally came in, Vassos beheld a bulky, illiterate looking fellow with an ugly scar running down one side of his face which told a story of a hysterical prisoner who shot him in the ear in an attempt to escape. The warden and the artist became quite chummy. The warden was Impressed. He had never been face to face with an artist, and the only one he had ever seen was in the movies where he wore a funny velvet jacket and a flowing black tie.

That was the beginning of a series of voluntary incarcerations that stretched over a period of seven months. Vassos traveled over the States and mingled with prisoners of education, and with men ho were too Ignorant to know what they had done. A good many couldnt even see how society had been wronped, and they assured the visitor that they would do it over again if they were confronted with the same conditions under which they committed the crime. John Vassos He was meeting hundreds of prisoners who passed from the stages of hysteria to hope, then to despair, and finally on to dumb resignation. He said that they were like madmen, without exception, when their doom was pronounced.

Vassos said that he had never heard anything as terrible as their lamentations when they found out that they would have to pay the supreme penalty for a single act. "But the clergymen," Vassos said, "brought back their reason. It's amazing how religion can act as an opiate and quiet people down. The priest would keep on dinning eternity into their ears until they braced up completely resigned to their fate. And as Oscar Wilde said in the Ballad: 'Men knelt to pray who never knelt When Vassos completed the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" and collected on the top-notch price, he was stunned by the reception his book received from the American public.

Madness and phantoms and terror and "The Little Tent of Blue Which the Prisoners Call Sky" were so real that they fascinated the reader and stirred the imagination of a child. The only adverse criticism came from some super-sophisticates who prefer that art be less real and more subtle. But Vassos believes that a spade should look like a spade. Now he is looking on with the eagerness of a child to see how his "Contempo" fares since it has been released from the press. Ever since Vassos came to America he has hsd a burning desire to express himself on tne high spots here.

And so when he disposed of the Ballad he sat hi his studio for months sketching the ordinary, prosaic things most of us take for granted. For instance, he sees electricity wriggling like streptococci on the electric chair. Ever since he witnessed an electrocution, he has been disturbed by the American audacity to put one of its most important discoveries to such use. "It's an insult to electricity," he said, "to kill with it." And the whole Idea of the electric chair is so offensive, that to strap a man in so that he cannot prove that he has any manliness left, is a final gesture of humiliation." He would have one follow the noble example of his kinsman, Socrates, who chose his own poison and died like a man. Even the guillotine gives one the poner to place his own head on the block.

But to let one die without any proof that he has any courage left has stirred up his exotic wrath. This book belongs entirely to the Vassos home, text and all. He made the sketches; Ruth, his wife, wrote paragraphs cf narrative. And the most interesting feature about "Contempo" Is that John Vassos put his facile hand at the illustrations first, and when he finished his drawings and saw that they were guod he asked Ruth to tell the story in script..