At the New Yorker, as elsewhere, he felt he did nothing remarkable. He just drew the world as he saw it, striving for a new idea every day
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskIn cityscapes—the tall grey buildings and mansard roofs of Paris, the massed skyscrapers of New York—the proportions were the same. Here the human ants often moved in crowds, through the rainy streets, into opulent concert halls, towards political rallies, usually in the same direction. Yet in the city, too, they broke away and became solitary among the enormous towers. On a flat roof, a little girl jumped a skipping rope.
In default of greatness, his little figures did whatever they could. In the midst of one of his exuberant forests, a couple with a caravan laid out a garden and mowed a lawn. A middle-aged woman in a housecoat polished the railway tracks that ran past her cottage. One plump, balding husband, home from work, serenaded his wife with a cello; another, rising from the supper table, took a bow in the sunlight that streamed through the window.
That world was old-fashioned, more interesting than the modern one. On his rural roads there were no cars. Women stayed around the house; men put on hats and went to work, or sat in neighbourhood bistros, among the half-net curtains and bentwood chairs, talking politics and football. His cartoon-novel, “Monsieur Lambert”, was set entirely there. He did not care to update himself. Nor would he do satire or mockery, only humour of the sort that friends and colleagues indulged in.