Sorry, Lady – This Beach is Private!

Our book today is Sorry, Lady – This Beach is Private!, a 1963 collection of the cartoons and illustrations of James Stevenson, he of New Yorker fame. This volume collects dozens of Stevenson’s now-iconic little gems from his long heyday with the magazine throughout the 1950s and ’60s.

They’re every bit as much of a treat now as they were half a century ago, which is a tribute not only to Stevenson’s sly, often counter-intuitive visual style but also to his way with a zinger. The second is no surprise, given the fact that words were always his abiding passion. In addition to being an artist, Stevenson was also a caption-writer for other artists – the full reach of his deadpan wit in the New Yorker of the time would be difficult to calculate. And he was a prolific writer, producing a string of good novels and one very good one written right around the same time as most of the cartoons collected here were being drawn.

It’s easy to spot that storyteller flair in these pictures. True, many of them are just the kind of throwaway lighthearted visual gag at which the New Yorker has always excelled, but with Stevenson you quite often get much more than that. His cartoons can sneak up on you, with the visual component seeming settled and ordinary while the verbal component subverts; he revels in finding the absurd lurking just below the surface of the ordinary. In a full-page cartoon, two women have perhaps spent too much money on a gaudy antique. “Suddenly I’m scared to go home,” the caption reads, but the genius of the moment derives from how small the women seem compared to the naked, grasping trees looming above them.

All the New Yorker staples are here: tyrannical businessmen, hapless husbands, fatuous partygoers, egomaniacal children. And Stevenson could no more resist the occasional foray into topicality than could any other New Yorker artist (one cartoon shows a group of women peering through the high fence of the White House, explaining, “We’ll settle for him or her or Caroline or the baby!”). But the best bits of this collection are timeless cartoons, or rather cartoons like the one on the book’s cover, where the timeless clashes with the crude present.

And most of all, Stevenson is the illustrator of the great days of the American summer vacation, in the era when middle class families rented houses for the whole summer, loaded the car, and joined the natives at some carefully-chosen beachfront location. The boating, the swimming, the antiquing, the shelling and fishing … all of it crops up repeatedly in this book, sometimes looking very tempting to the 21^st century sensibility conditioned to more stress and less relaxation than the generation Stevenson chronicles here.

The seasonal vacation is the setting for what’s widely considered his most classic creation, the cartoon sequence called “Weekend Guests,” where Stevenson’s novelistic flair is on full display in a flow of scenes depicting some of the trials that arise when summer guests are out of sync with hosts and vice versa. We get both sides of the great divide: the host and hostess looking up the stairs and saying “If they aren’t down by noon, I’m going to go up and pound on the door,” but also the guests, up in their room, trying to be quiet: “Sh-h-h! If they know we’re awake, we’ll have to go and do something.”

Stevenson wrote many books for children as well as the ones he wrote for adults; he mastered through long practice that art of the gentle barb. And decades of great work followed the period enshrined in Sorry, Lady – This Beach is Private! – so far as I know, uncollected. It’s a great deal to look forward to, if any enterprising soul ever manages to create The Complete James Stevenson.