And it was not only in the teaching context that Blake found a voice: as Kitson says, early on ‘in meetings with Robin Darwin (then RCA Rector) and Brian Robb (Head of Illustration) he never opened his mouth . . . but then at a later date when I was a tutor with him he was brilliant at meetings, never florid, but very much to the point and Brian and Darwin would look at Quentin expectantly for an answer . . .’
By the time he became Head of Department in 1978, this ability to lead people through confident and strong argument was becoming evident: Kitson describes a departmental meeting which took place during the turbulent period of Jocelyn Steven’s Rectorship of the RCA, when a proposed restructuring had made the staff anxious and the atmosphere poisonous. Blake had been asked to stand in as Professor of Graphic Design and had to handle all of this:
It was a very contentious moment when a lot of the staff were worried about their jobs and feeling insecure and I remember, as a colleague, one moment when we were waiting in the corridor for a meeting and people were ‘stabbing each other in the back’. Quentin led this meeting and at no point was there any room for grumbling, because he took it forwards, through interest in the work at hand . . . The whole thing was on his shoulders, and he just rose above it, and it’s interesting that this very, very shy person became the person that people turned towards, to settle (the difficult) issues. He created an atmosphere in which disagreement seemed inappropriate.
Today, in any gathering outside his close circle, or in meetings, Blake is often the last person to speak. It seems to me now, having observed him in many such situations, that this is not because he is reluctant to say something, or to say anything, or to appear too prominent; it is rather that he listens with attention to what others have to say. When he does speak, it is after having taken everything into account: he speaks only when something can be added to the picture. When he does, though, his quiet and un-emphatic responses are always acute; he doesn’t flannel, and the room always heeds him.
When he talks to crowds, however, when he is performing on a stage, another Blake emerges: someone who always appears confident and who speaks with knowledge of his audiences as well as of his subject. Whether in a solo talk about his work, a ‘drawing talk’ where he uses a visualizer and talks a little while drawing, or in interviews or speeches on behalf of other people, he has developed an engaging but low-key and inclusive style which immediately puts audiences at their ease. He knows that there is no ready-made speech which will be right for every one of the great range of national and international audiences he addresses, from the French bankers at the auction, to 400 five- to eleven-year-olds in a Berlin primary school, to the university lecturers and specialists at an F. R. Leavis conference in Cambridge, to the police and young gang members at a community project in Harrow Police Station – his addresses are always about and for the audience as well as himself.
He knows that self-teasing or irony can be a bridge to audiences, as we saw in the speech at the French Ambassador’s residence. In 2013, in the vast lecture hall at Anglia Ruskin College in Cambridge, where Blake was addressing several hundred enthusiastic and star-struck illustration students, he started: ‘Well, I’ve just been signing a lot of books and I’ve probably lost my voice, and all my energy too.’ But at the recent launch (October 2014) of The Five of Us, Blake’s children’s book with an underlying theme of disability, he replied to the Tate Publishing Director’s superlative-strewn description of him with the words: ‘I agree with all of that.’
In his public talks Blake is also a great acknowledger of the role of others in his own success, something that artists working in the collaborative art forms such as theatre, film or opera are used to doing, but which is much more rare with visual artists. And this attitude is reflected in Blake’s use of language: he so often avoids the first person singular, preferring the plural ‘we’, the inclusive ‘you’ or the distancing ‘one’; he almost implies that there is more than one person standing at the light-box in the studio. In the talks he gives, there is also always a stronger focus on the matter-in-hand than on himself; if it’s about drawing it will be the what, the why and the how of drawing, rather than any element of autobiography.
Blake is also aware that audiences come to these events with expectations – after all, to many he is not just the face behind his illustrations, but an emblem: a person whose work triggers and embodies important childhood memories: when images such as these appear, large, on a screen in a darkened room, audience-members are carried back directly to early reading experiences, where pictures were such a key part of the enjoyment and understanding of the text. To parents in the audience, who may also be grandparents now, Blake’s talks about his work evoke intimate and precious moments of sharing a book with a child. When adults and children read Blake’s works together, the experience is so powerful because, as with all great children’s literature, the works so clearly appeal to the child in all of us rather than to children in particular.
Often, readers come up to Blake after these talks, or at book signings, of which he has now done many hundreds – ‘It’s not the hand that gets tired,’ he says, ‘but the smile.’ Readers come up to the signing table and beam at him: ‘You illustrated my childhood!’ they say, unaware of how many others in the queue bring him the same message. To such people it is as if Blake has been addressing them personally since they first read his illustrated books.
The symbolic value of Blake’s public appearances to this fellowship of readers with a shared affection for his images and words cannot be underestimated. I think Blake has taken this fact on board relatively recently; it is delightful and still surprising to him and it may be another reason that he approaches these occasions with such a generous spirit.
Lastly, there is a private Blake who is a really fine conversationalist. A man who listens and responds to his interlocutors with a curiosity and interest which is more than polite, but also someone whose own mind is both a great storehouse of commentary and anecdote, and a rapid responder to new situations: from vivid descriptions of an author’s or artist’s style, to acute observations – ‘that baby crying over there is really asking a question to which there is no answer’ – and these all framed by expressions which say as much as the words: a small furrowing of the brow, a tiny lip-curl.
Speaking-reading
Quentin Blake sometimes indulges in an activity that is halfway between public performance and private reading: reading aloud. Here he gives the text a new life off the page, just as Dickens did so successfully in the nineteenth century and as many thousands of authors do at literary festivals and bookshops up and down the country today. The difference, though, is that these authors read and so promote their own words in public, while Blake reads other people’s texts, to an audience of one, in the intimacy of a sitting room. Works by Arnold Bennett, E. F. Benson, Willa Cather, Evelyn Waugh, all reappear animated by Blake’s intelligent reading style. He is so good at it for at least two reasons: first, like Dickens, he has acted, with enjoyment, as we have seen in the chapter on teaching. Second, as we have also seen, drama is incorporated into Blake’s illustration work; his books are ‘stagings’ in which he himself ‘plays all the roles, and directs and produces as well’. Normally when he reads aloud, there is only one listener, but this number was recently multiplied when Puffin books, aware of his interest, invited him to be the reader of their audio-book of Dahl’s Esio Trot.
He did this recording with enthusiasm, delivering it almost in one fluent take. As his one-time Dahl colleague Amanda Conquy says, ‘He really is a frustrated thesp.’
Blake’s talent for reading aloud can be also understood in the light of his education, in which the canon of English (and some international) literature was such a feature. Both at grammar school and especially at Cambridge he benefited from the kind of teaching that focused on style: Leavis’s ‘dating’ classes encouraged him to get inside literary language, to follow its patterns of narrative and dialogue so closely that when he r
eads aloud, it is with great understanding of the way text works. The combination of an actor’s sense of timing with this literary grasp of text is an unbeatable one for anyone lucky enough to hear Blake reading.
As a reader, Blake is a greedy consumer: as he says, ‘I have got into the habit of reading lots of books simultaneously. I get halfway through the first, then become fascinated with a second.’ In his twenties and thirties he read old and new works by authors such as Henry James, Kingsley Amis, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. Victorian literature figures very highly too: although Arnold Bennett was not in the Leavis canon at Cambridge, Blake is a great admirer, and he also goes on reading Dickens, the journalism as well as the novels. ‘An enormous book of Dickens’ was his choice for Desert Island Discs, although he found it hard to choose between that and a volume of poetry by Byron or Alexander Pope. But, as described in the chapter on France, today he is just as likely to be reading a French novel by Simenon or Balzac, in French, naturally. Early in his career as an illustrator Blake’s personal reading choices were also supplemented by the contemporary novels he needed to read, because he was designing their covers; David Lodge’s early works are an example. ‘Illustrators,’ Blake says, ‘are all hybrids of one kind or another and I think that learning to be a reader, knowing something about how writing works, was important to me. It has meant that I’m one of not many illustrators ready to illustrate other people’s work as well as their own.’1
Illustration from Esio Trot
From the 1970s Blake had also been illustrating twentieth-century classics by authors such as Orwell, Waugh and Stella Gibbons for the Folio Society. This publisher produces what Blake calls ‘well-produced reading copies’: editions of the canon of world literature, often with newly commissioned illustrations, they are finely bound, sometimes slip-cased hardbacks; the antithesis of e-books. For Folio, Blake has illustrated works by many diverse authors, but in particular since 1991 he has illustrated some of the great authors of European literature: Cervantes, Victor Hugo, Voltaire and La Fontaine. His illustrations for some of these volumes are perhaps the purest expressions of his identity as a literary artist. For example the seventeenth-century Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyages to the Moon and Sun–a kind of early modern work of science fiction. Unlike most illustrated book commissions, where the author and illustrator are put together by the publisher, in this case the illustrator chose the author with whom he wanted to collaborate, because he admires him so much. In his words:
The one I was most pleased with was a book by Cyrano de Bergerac . . . I think most people only think of Cyrano in relation to that play (of the same name) by Edmond de Rostand which gets made into films and operas and things of that kind. But Cyrano himself wrote three books, or two and a half books . . . one about voyages to the moon, one about voyages to the sun and one about visiting the land of the birds. And I’d read it in a French paperback and it’s full of . . . things to draw. I suggested it to the Folio Society and I was very pleased that they took it on . . . They had a tradition of having about ten pages of illustration in a book, but, I said I wanted to do it because there were a lot of drawings I wanted to do. And they said, ‘We’ll pay you the . . . maximum fee that we pay for a book, but you can do as many drawings as you like.’ So in fact . . . the book has about 100 drawings in and it probably treats Cyrano in a slightly, or very disrespectful way! It’s like a precursor of Gulliver’s Travels and so you get things like the countries the hero goes to by being fired off like a rocket. There are places where the people actually don’t wear any clothes at all or they’re a completely different scale to us, or where they think the hero is a monkey and they put him with other monkeys in the hope that it will breed. And he goes to the land of the birds where he’s going to be tried for the crime of being a human being, of course therefore being beastly to birds most of the time. It’s absolutely full of things to draw.
I then wanted to do something rather different, to do a very realistic book, a Spanish book . . . called Lazarillo de Tormes2 which is about a boy who is the servant to a tramp. It’s quite a short book and I still think it might be interesting to do, but they came back and said, ‘If we’re going to do a Spanish book, we have to do the big Spanish book.’ So I did do Don Quixote. I read it all . . . it’s a very interesting problem to treat it in two colours and to . . . find those right significant moments. And of course in Don Quixote some of those moments choose themselves; you have to have tilting at windmills and one or two things like that. But . . . there are other moments, which you can find for yourself, paced through the book. Of course a seventeenth-century book is, in a sense, easier to illustrate because there isn’t the thing that gets difficult later on: a lot of contemporary writing, or twentieth-century writing, involves a kind of personal monologue, or a lot of inward thoughts . . .
The last point is interesting because, as a reader, Blake is perhaps less of a fan of this kind of introspective literature anyway. But, he adds, he did read Ulysses twice, and ‘it was better the second time’.
The Folio Society has been a fruitful publishing partner for Blake, and its Production Director Joe Whitlock Blundell sees Blake’s easy familiarity with literature as a considerable advantage to him: he describes the process of commissioning a new work:
We always have an exchange of letters or emails about what the next book is going to be, and it’s clear that Quentin’s appreciation of literature is quite exceptional; illustrators are generally very knowledgeable about literature and very sensitive to it – they’re good at doing close reading of texts – but Quentin has very strong literary knowledge as well as being able to do the literal reading, and his knowledge of French literature for example is really excellent.
Whitlock Blundell also enjoys the collaborative working relationship, and always finds Blake’s views of possible texts illuminating, if very occasionally not to his own taste:
I thought we might do the first few books of Don Juan but he said all the pictorial stuff was there in the text . . . but then he came up with one which was a very odd book indeed, a novel by the eighteenth-century author Robert Paltock called The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man. It was a sort of Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe kind of book – it had flying in it and lots of nudity – it’s very long, and not a good work of literature – even with his name on, it would have been hard to sell . . . I don’t think any of my suggestions have actually been taken up, but some things I suggest do spark something in him and it’s a dialogue.
But Blake’s latest Folio Society venture is to illustrate Apuleius’ Golden Ass, a kind of late-antique fairy-tale. This choice was welcomed by Whitlock Blundell, as was the fact that Blake took such a time to find the right translation: ‘We always have great discussions about the translations – I think he read three different ones for Golden Ass altogether before he found the right one, and that would be unusual; normally we would present an illustrator with a text and say, “This is what we’re doing.”
A close reading and understanding of text is also involved in the question of all the (at the time) living authors whose work Blake has illustrated. As he often says: ‘My main collaboration is not with the author, but the text.’ The extensive list (over a hundred) of furnishers-of-texts includes many of the best writers for children of the last 50 years: Joan Aiken, J. P. Martin (author of the cult Uncle books), Nils-Olof Franzen (who wrote the equally cultish Agaton Sax books), James Reeves, Clement Freud, Dick King-Smith, Dr Seuss, John Yeoman, Michael Rosen, Michael Morpurgo, Russell Hoban, Sylvia Plath, more recently David Walliams and of course most famously Roald Dahl, not to mention authors of the more distant past such as John Masefield and Hilaire Belloc.
The Dahl collaborations have been widely written about by Blake himself and recently by Donald Sturrock in his Dahl biography Storyteller (2010), and they are referred to in other places in this book. But there are two others from the long list of authors who should be singled out here because their texts were influent
ial in Blake’s own early development as both an author and illustrator during the 1970s.
Russell Hoban, the expatriate American author of nearly twenty novels plus many more works for children, also started his career as a freelance illustrator, working for advertising agencies and magazine companies. His edgy novels, which were all written after he moved to London in 1969, have elements of science fiction and magic realism and they have always had a cult following. The works for young children operate in very different spheres, although some do have dark corners: there is the gentle Frances series about a little girl (based on one of his own daughters) who appears in the books as a cute but wilful badger, the strange and powerful Mouse and his Child, and several books, illustrated by Quentin Blake, where the humour is more caricatural and often grittier, including the fantastical The Rain Door (1980), Monster (1979) – a slightly alarming take on the power of drawing – and, perhaps best loved, the two Najork books: How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen (1974) and A Near Thing for Captain Najork (1975).
Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination Page 10