DAPPER DON

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Juliette Solas has done all of us a power of good by reproducing this small illustrated collection. Originally brought into the world in the early years of the last century, when it was published by Cardamom House, these poems by Madeleine Corbett, accompanied by the drawings of Pamela Emter, were once the toast of the city’s elites. The original edition ran to only a thousand copies, making it exceedingly rare today, but one specimen found its way into the hands of Solas’s Sunlight imprint, which recognized not only its historical importance but its artistic merits. The reprint is not exactly the same as the original, for the first edition included as an appendix a dialogue between Corbett and Emter in which the two women discussed their beliefs in the importance of art as a moral force. It is a shame that in reproducing this conversation, Solas chose to set it in the same typeface as the rest of the book rather than opt for a photographic facsimile that would preserve not just the text of the talk, but the handwritten notes and doodles added after the fact by the two women. These, considered ephemera in their day, today would rank among the most interesting material in the entire book. Underneath an anecdote of Corbett’s in which she remembered watching her father, a clothing salesman, leave in the morning for work, always with the same piece of advice to his daughter—“Do good things today, my little one”—Emter drew a cartoon devil, and Corbett scribbled a clarification. “He was a good man, and there is no doubt about that. But good men permit themselves to clean forget all the bad things they do.” There is no more than that, but in these two dozen words Corbett deftly anticipates the late-century theory of moral license, in which a self-concept is formed by principled behaviors and preserved despite behaviors to the contrary. In this case, the license concerned a major matter. Corbett’s father, Donald Corbett,  was a notorious figure whose clothier’s business was a front for loansharking, money laundering, and worse. As “Dapper Don,” he served as a contract killer for the Colacurcio family, and today he is linked to no fewer than eight murders in and around the state over a period of twelve years. Corbett suspected her father, at least to some small degree, as poems like “Chambered Rose” and “Powder and Paint” attest, but she rarely addressed the matter publicly. This note offers a tantalizing glimpse of her true feelings, and Emter’s doodle suggests that Corbett may have spoken more freely in private. This was Corbett’s first book, and it was to be her last, as she perished the following year in an automobile accident. Emter, of course, illustrated a number of other famous books, including Reese’s “Clean Clothes” and Wrubel’s “In Volume,” after which she wrote and drew, for forty years, the daily newspaper comic strip “Lulu and Dahlia,” about a carefree young girl, her neurotic Great Dane, and their adventures in a beachfront town.