Dear Dead Days: A Family Album
1959
Charles Addams
The characters created by Charles Addams, popular culture’s First Gothic Family, continue to attract appreciative audiences as they stalk from one medium to another and are exhumed over and over via new interpretations, like Tim Burton’s Wednesday.
Addams’ cartoon compilations continue to sell briskly, but there’s one Addams book that is so different and so out of tune with the current times that it's rarely promoted with the others -- though a copy can easily be purchased.
From the front fly leaf:
Dear Dead Days is Charles Addams’ outrageous assault on nostalgia. No one could have killed it more effectively – or more hilariously.
. . . and the rear:
Charles Addams
The members of the ravishing family on the jacket of this book are as familiar and beloved in our day as Elsie Dinsmore was in hers. Tiny bat Their creator was born some forty odd years ago in the innocent town of Westfield, New Jersey. He attended Colgate University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Grand Central School of Art in New York City. To the best of our knowledge, he had a happy childhood.
Over the past twenty-seven years, Charles Addams’ name has become a household word – at least in the households that lay claim to a sense of humor.Most of his work has appeared in The New Yorker and much of it is available to posterity in best-selling collections: Homebodies, Monster Rally, Addams and Evil, and Drawn and Quartered.
Now, in DEAR DEAD DAYS, Mr. Addams lets us share his delight in some of his sources of inspiration. They may give you pause.
Elsie was the star of a children’s series that would have died a respectful death had not the evangelical population reissued her in the 1990s. Plantations. Controlling patriarchs. Lots of weeping and character improvement.
Yes, he apparently did. Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life by Linda H. Davis is an entertaining and informative read about Addams' path to his successful career as one of the top cartoonists/artists of The New Yorker; the milieu of the creative community of the place and time (did you know he served with a young Stan Lee in the Army's WWII film division?); and his energetic love life. The guy got around, for sure, with many socialite beauties of the time and place. Quite the Gomez Addams, but not as monogamous. And his lady friend(s) du jour always had a touch of Morticia about them; he admits to falling for her as soon as he'd first sketched her.
According to Linda H. Davis, Addam's biographer, Addams was at the height of his popularity when he agreed to edit a "treasury of the macabre" for his publisher Putnam, accepting a $1500 advance and being assigned two assistants to help with the material for it -- much of which came from his own collection. Davis notes that Dear Dead Days "never found its audience" and earned only $5000 in royalties. William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker and Addams' chief employer, thought it tasteless and wouldn't carry an advertisement for it.
I don’t know whether Addams conceived the idea for book or whether it was suggested by an agent or editor. His take on nostalgia was predictably different from everyone else’s; the premise of the book is that he is looking back to images that inspired him as a cartoonist of the humorous macabre, but he's also looking at the Dear Old Days as a reminder that they weren't one long romp in fields of asphodel. A number of the images are of the type that most people would not usually see back before the rise of the internet, being too strange or unsettling for any outlet but the tabloids. Some are at the worst, offensive, and at the best, not the kind of thing that would meet with wide approval, e.g. the photograph of a baby with a pistol in its arms, the gun barrel in its mouth (I’ve also seen that gag in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, "Easter Yeggs"; it’s not a visual joke that’s aged well, to say the least).
Nostalgia's selective view of the past tends to keep the upsides of the simpler life without reminders of exactly what that entails in terms of inconvenient specifics like work, safety, and health. Dear Dead Days is a reminder of those missing elements.
The book is divided into sections, each with a title page bearing an Addams cartoon, followed by a series of illustrations, photographs, and advertisements.
Growing Up
The images here range from oddly amusing (the little girl in a cart being pulled by an alligator, very Wednesday) to extremely uncomfortable renderings of abnormalities.
And there’s this one, which as a Victorianist I immediately associated with the slums of 19th century London, where gentlemen often went hunting for poor children and young girls as sexual prey. Even without that direct context, I cannot imagine why Addams thought this was amusing in any context. Times change, as do perspectives.
There's also an early version of implanting microchips, in the form of indelible ink butt tattoos,
. . . and assorted joys of childhood: hanging the landlord in effigy, and the fascination of flat cats.
Killing Time
Amusements in this section range from firing guns out of a New York City window at passing trains, to rail and car accidents, to the killing of Tops the elephant, sentenced to death by electrocution as a spectacle for the crime of killing two of her handlers and one young man who thought it would be funny to put a lit cigarette in her mouth.
Around the House
A collection of drawings and photos of very Addams-Family-looking mansions, bizarre interiors, and photos like this one of a bathing machine, in which swimmers changed into their bathing costumes and were rolled down to the sea.
Rx
Photos and images of early human trepanning, various “cures” and “The knife with which Jan Doot, Dutch locksmith, cut out his own bladderstones” and ”Several varieties of plankton found in juice expressed from the lungs in cases of drowning.” And this evidence of the efficacy of drinking a Liver Invigorator
Notions and Novelties
Strange inventions; torture and murder or suicide devices, and “two baby chairs so complicated that patent office officials have never been able to understand their workings."
And a dimple producer.
Remains to be Seen
Lots of dead people; a premature burial device that involves a flag that rises not unlike a mailbox signalling the need for pick up.
Various mortician tools and coffin transport; a device to electroplate a small child’s body; an illustration of body snatching in New York City.
Fiends and Relations
Human and animal oddities, ranging from the real (Eng and Chang, the original "Siamese Twins," did you know a relative of theirs ran for state office in Florida, and a great candidate indeed) to trick photography (Anne Belle Grey as a "two-headed" girl); what appears to be the corpse of a very tall man, encased in a block of ice apparently for railroad travel.
Dear Dead Days is a curated look at the past from a mid-20th-century view, reflecting the mind of an unusual artist who came out of the womb drawing and early on discovered a predilection for the strange and unusual. As a snapshot of these two points in time, viewed from the current day, it's a good reminder of how life and culture, including taste, changes.
Addams never regretted the project he was initially reluctant to take on. According to Davis, he "remained somewhat baffled by criticism of the book: "I think that probably it was maybe a little ahead of its time."
