Profiles: The Adult World of Shel Silverstein

Today Shel Silverstein is almost exclusively remembered as an author of playful, subversive, and spectacularly successful children's books. Books like The Giving Tree and A Light In The Attic have become hardwired into the subconscious of youths of several generations, and for good reason. Silverstein's whimsically twisted children's tales never pander to children or discount their intelligence: it's difficult to imagine a child born in the last few decades that isn't familiar with the swirling imagination and instantly recognizable creaking and bending drawing style of his children's books. Silverstein, however, deserves to be remembered for much more than his children's literature.
A Man Named Shel.
Written by M. Anthony.
Upon his death in 1999, he left behind a substantial body of work spread across a wide variety of mediums, work informed by his own skewed primal energy and unwillingness to bend in his vision of the wonderfully absurd, and at times wistful and tragic, existence of humanity. From cartoons to poetry, in songwriting, playwriting, and even painting, Silverstein did it all. It's no coincidence that Shel was considered a Renaissance man by many of those who knew him best, including the svengali of all manliness himself, Hugh Hefner.



Silverstein was born on the South Side of Chicago in 1933, the grandson of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and endured a lonely childhood. In a rare formal interview, given in 1974, Silverstein discusses his adolescence:



"When I was a kid—12, 14, around there—I would much rather have been a good baseball player or a hit with the girls. But I couldn't play ball, I couldn't dance. Luckily, the girls didn't want me; not much I could do about that. So, I started to draw and to write. I was also lucky that I didn't have anybody to copy, be impressed by. I had developed my own style..."



Silverstein continued his stylistic development during his time in the U.S. Army in the 1950s, serving in Korea and Japan during the Korean War as cartoonist for the Pacific military newspaper, The Stars and Stripes. During this time he gained his first fame with his subtly subversive and satirical takes on Army life, and established the pattern he would follow throughout his life, of restlessness and constant travel, unwilling to allow himself to stagnate in one place. After his discharge from the Army, Shel wasted little time in establishing his professional and personal reputation as a talented cartoonist and man of the world, beginning his association with Playboy Magazine in 1957.



His series of travel cartoons for Playboy from 1957 to 1969 (Collected as Shel Around The World, published in 2007) rank among the very best in 20th century humor for their hilarious and idiosyncratic insights into cultural interplay, in particular cultural isolation and the hunt for sex, helping to solidify Playboy's ground-breaking status as the hippest magazine of the mid-20th century. Hefner, himself an aspiring cartoonist before founding Playboy and editor of the magazine's early cartoons, immediately recognized the brilliance of Shel's brutally honest frames, and convinced Silverstein to embark on a series of cartoon dispatches created during his international travels beginning in Japan in 1957. In a stroke of brilliance, Hefner persuaded a reluctant Silverstein to include himself in his cartoons; this autobiographical dimension lends the cartoons an authentic immediacy, and is interesting because it is the last and only time Silverstein used himself directly in his work. During this time Shel also published adult humor books under the pseudonym Uncle Shelby (Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book in 1961 and Uncle Shelby's Zoo in 1964), satirizing in form and style children's instructional books, delivering strictly adult humor in vignettes urging 'children' to take candy from strangers and report their father's infidelities to their mothers.



In addition to bringing Silverstein a substantial amount of fame, his association with Playboy placed him at the public forefront of the sexual revolution that enveloped America in the 1950s and 1960s, seeking to liberate women from the vestiges of stifling Victorian attitudes towards sex that were still widespread in America during the postwar era. This was no put-on or mere opportunism for Silverstein, however. Responding only to the primal urges that drove him, Shel in the late 1950s and 1960s lived the life of an international bachelor, traveling around the globe and bedding (or at least trying his hardest: see Shel Around The World's amazing photographs of Shel in action at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago) as many women as possible in the pursuit of life. Do not mistake Shel for a chauvinistic playboy; his pursuit of women, as is clear in the many of his Playboy cartoons that deal with the subjects of women and sex, was very clearly a two-way interaction. Silverstein truly treated women as equal partners in sexual pursuit: he made no promises, but never expected any of the women he was involved with, and is in this manner that his role in sexual revolution should be considered. Silverstein was far from being a reformed misogynist assuming the opportunistic attitude of the enlightened man in order to get laid.



Shel branched out to different media, recording his first record in 1959, the manic romp Hairy Jazz. His growing interest in country music led to sporadic relocations to Nashville throughout the 1960s, where Shel developed a reputation the only bald and bearded Chicago Jew in town, and as a brilliant composer and performer of biting, crazed outlaw country songs. Johnny Cash owes the defining moment of the defining performance of his career to Shel, his rendition of Silverstein's "A Boy Named Sue" during his Folsom Prison concert in 1969, and other Silverstein compositions became hits for Loretta Lynn, Bobby Bare, Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, and Emmylou Harris, among others. It is in his songwriting and recorded performances that Silverstein allowed himself to fully explore the darker regions of human psychology, and gave himself his freest reign in indulging in the manic energy that lies slightly submerged beneath the surface of his work in other mediums. A glance at the titles of his songs says as much: "Polly In A Porny", "I Got Stoned and I Missed It", and "Don't Give A Dose To The One You Love The Most" give an idea of the truly unhinged quality of Silverstein's songs. Undoubtedly the parents of the millions of children whose bookshelves are lined with Shel would cringe at knowing that the man from whose mind sprung work so beloved by their children (and by them for that matter) produced songs concerning such taboo subjects.



Silverstein continued recording music through the 1970s and 1980s, in addition to scoring films and writing poetry, screenplays, and one-act plays. He was nominated for an Oscar for his score of the film Postcards From The Edge in 1987, and co-wrote the screenplay to the film Things Change with David Mamet in 1988, a film set in the world of the Chicago Mafia. His one-act plays are tightly packaged vignettes that focus on darker aspects of the human psyche, for example, "Smile", where shadowy underworld types capture and seek revenge on the man who coined the phrase "have a nice day". Among his later adult-oriented writing, however, The Devil and Billy Markham deserves particular mention as the most forceful and perhaps the best expression of the nature of Shel Silverstein. Originally appearing as a six-part epic poem in Playboy Magazine in 1979, and adapted for the stage as a one-act play in New York in 1989 (in conjunction with Mamet's Bobby Gould In Hell), The Devil And Billy Markham presents the failed blues man and drifter Billy Markham's gamble with the Devil in a seedy Nashville bar. After accepting, and losing, the Devil's challenge of a dice game and forfeiting his soul, Billy Markham strolls out of the bar arm in arm with the Devil:


"But I really must say 'fore we go our way that I really do like your style.
Of all the fools I've played and beat, you're the first one who lost with a smile."



And, so, sometimes we must lose and walk with the Devil, and we must smile: Silverstein's unrivaled imagination and unique vision of humanity in all it's humorously absurd, beautiful, dark, and powerful glory. He lived and created according to the only philosophy he thought possible and desirable for the artist: in a straightforward and utterly unapologetic manner. Silverstein did not apologize for his whirlwind personality or frank sexuality, he did not compromise himself and his art for the sake of any ego other than his own. There was nothing dishonest about him. He was Shel Silverstein, he did what he thought Shel Silverstein ought to do in the way he thought Shel Silverstein ought to do it. And in a time when artists are often embarrassingly self-aware and sensitive to cultural pressure, Silverstein and his work emerge as a welcome and sorely needed beacon of freedom in existence and self-expression.