The Art of Lunacy

> In one drawing a wife, who is calmly drinking a highball, says to her husband who has just been swallowed by a python: "Oh, speak up, George! Stop mumbling!"

> In another drawing a wife is lounging on a chaise longue in her boudoir. She has mounted a shotgun on the tops of two chairs, run a cord from the trigger to the door so that whoever opens the door will shoot himself. Says the wife: "It's not locked, Honey."

Readers of The New Yorker, where these mordant bits of whimsy first appeared, know Artist Charles Addams as a tireless illustrator of the now commonplace question: Is the world going insane? (see cut). He cares not who makes a civilization's laws so long as he can draw its neuroses. Last week Artist Addams' screwy drawings were collected for the first time in book form (Drawn and Quartered; Random House; $2.50).

Addams, whom Publisher Bennett Cerf describes as "the gentlest and the kindliest old schizophrene," and for whose work Boris Karloff (who contributes a foreword) has a "whole-souled admiration," is not preoccupied only with married life. From the specialized madnesses of the bedroom and boudoir it is only a stroke of the Addams' hand to universal madness. Drawn and Quartered includes his drawings of and that haunting simile of the mind's disintegration: ski tracks divided by a large tree.

Many of these drawings need no captions. Their effect on Addams-addicts is as reassuring as the effect on the weird witch of the monstrous Karloff-like creature who brings in her breakfast in one of Addams' best-known drawings. "On, it's only you!" she says, glancing at him sidewise. "For a moment you gave me quite a start."

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