Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination

by Ghislaine Kenyon

  Blake thinks the first Najork book is the better one, perhaps for being the first, and he loves it not only because of what he calls the ‘strong visual clues’ that Hoban gave him – famously the description of Tom’s maiden aunt, Miss Fidget Wonkham Strong, who ‘wore an iron hat and took no nonsense from anyone’, but also at a more conceptual level: he savours Hoban’s description of Tom, a boy who loved ‘fooling around’. Fooling around gave Blake many visual opportunities but, in the story, it also happens to be a metaphor for Blake’s personal theory of education, which is central to almost everything he does. ‘Fooling around’ here means experimentation: how can you best cling on to this wooden bridge so that you can fish out the things you’ve (deliberately) dropped into the river? What’s inside this barrel? – find out by getting into it yourself. What can you make with two cigar bands and a paper-clip? It’s about the power of self-directed learning, the kind you feel Blake knows about because he’s done it himself. It’s the opposite of learning ‘pages 64 to 75 of the Nautical Almanac’ as the aunt makes Tom do (and which, of course, he can also manage). Blake also says about this first collaboration that when his editor, Tom Maschler, gave him the text to read, ‘it immediately felt like a book I was meant to illustrate . . . In picture-books, Russ had the organization of language that told you he was a poet.’ But, in a rare example of having to ‘audition’ for an author, Blake had to wait for Hoban to choose his set of roughs over those of other possible illustrators before being allowed to start on this desirable project.

  Hoban was very keen to do a follow-up to the first Najork, not least because, as he said to Blake, ‘now I know what the characters look like’. Dahl, by way of contrast, often had quite a strong visual sense of the people he created, and described them, although he did not always know how they would work as illustrations: famously he and Blake together rethought what the BFG would look like, and Dahl even sent Blake a sandal of the kind he imagined the BFG would wear.

  Blake also illustrated the very last book of any kind that Hoban wrote, in the year he died and when he was already very ill and could barely see. Rosie’s Magic Horse is a slightly curious story, perhaps not Hoban’s surest and most imaginative text, but Blake’s response to the request to illustrate it is entirely typical. The two met at the publishers and, according to Jake Wilson, a mutual friend: ‘You can see that Blake really wanted to do it and I remember he said that he . . . let everything else go . . . and put all his effort into those pictures’.

  Education is also the link between Blake and John Yeoman, who wrote the first book for Blake to illustrate, A Drink of Water and Other Stories (1960), and the two have since collaborated on some 30 works – at one period they were producing a book a year. Yeoman, who later became Head of English at the Lycée Français in London, is an old friend of Blake’s. In fact they went to the same grammar school, although not in the same year, and they both went on to read English at Downing College, Cambridge. Blake acknowledges that in their early children’s book collaborations, he learned from Yeoman: ‘He is very good at writing in pictures.’ And Yeoman describes how their first published book came about:

  Quentin wanted a book to illustrate and he just asked me to write one.

  I quite liked the idea of writing; that is, I couldn’t have written a novel at that time, so if I were going to write, it would have to be something short, and for children, because I was beginning teaching. I was doing teaching practice in a primary school . . . and using some folk tales which were almost certainly Russian, so a couple of the tales at least from A Drink of Water are Russian . . . I wrote the stories, it was as simple as that. I had no view of the book, although I’d chosen stories which lent themselves to illustration.

  Yeoman was probably being modest here because he goes on to describe a book which was truly a joint effort: ‘Actually though, they were things I would like to draw . . . I was drawing all the time, scribbling . . . some of the books I drew before I handed them to him. For The House that Jack Built, he’s got my roughs that he traced!’ And Blake says that Snuff (1973) was very much Yeoman’s text although not acknowledged.

  But it was a give-and-take partnership too, Yeoman also admits:

  With The Wild Washerwomen . . . the first draft I gave him was sprawling and it had a sort of subplot . . . which he took his scissors to, and the result was much improved . . . it was probably that I had the Washerwomen idea and then I thought of other things which could happen, which made it want more narrative, which it didn’t . . .

  This book was published in 1979 and Yeoman’s words suggest that, by then, Blake already had a sense of what made a good children’s book text, although he had only written a very few himself at the time (Patrick Jack and Nancy Angelo Snuff and the three Lester books). Blake does however say that, after Snuff, he had run out of ideas of ‘how to do story’; what helped him to find a different modus operandi was illustrating a Dr Seuss book, Great Day for Up. Dr Seuss was the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel and Great Day for Up was the only text he wrote as Dr Seuss that he handed over to another illustrator. He did in fact get as far as doing as the roughs, and he did keep an eye on what Blake was doing, even though he only asked him to alter the position of a giraffe’s neck. Blake thinks that the reason Seuss allowed someone else to do this job may have been that he ‘chickened out of what he wrote for himself’ – the last spread reads:

  Up! Up! Up! Great day for UP!

  Wake every person, pig and pup, till EVERYONE on earth is up!

  The prospect of drawing everyone on earth may have been daunting but Blake found a way – his little figures in perpetual motion seem to double their number on the page . . . Whatever the reason, the resulting book has the unfettered joy of young children about it, with its upbeat rhyming scheme and Blake’s illustrations, which echo this spirit so exactly.

  Up, whales!

  Up, snails!

  Up rooster!

  Hen!

  Up!

  Girls and women!

  Boys and men!

  Writing

  Blake says that illustrating this book gave him ‘permission’ to make something similar. He understood that a book for very young children could work just as well (better even) without much narrative, but with simple inventive rhyme and illustrations, which introduced one new idea to a spread. Mister Magnolia (1980, and for which Blake won the Kate Greenaway Prize in 1981) was the first outcome of this. Interestingly, this minimal text (some 160 words) actually started life as a counting book, but became even simpler and more effective when this element became implicit and the narrative took precedence. It is a perfect example of how Blake’s ideas, both visual and written, are always so expertly and beautifully reduced to their essentials. In this spread, the almost neutral words ‘He gives rides to his friends when he goes for a scoot’ give rise to a magical autumn scene, with the giant scooter rounding a bend at great speed (the little boy tightly clasping Magnolia’s leg) – and the surprise and delight that the reader feels is echoed and affirmed by the astonished expressions on the rabbits’, cows’ and dog’s faces, and by the old man agreeably jolted from his rest on the bank.

  It is important that the texts that Blake writes for himself do not come about through knowledge of how other children’s texts work (rather as his drawing style was not influenced by that of other children’s illustrators). Like Dr Seuss/Geisel, he never had children himself (Geisel famously said: ‘you have ’em; I’ll entertain them.’). He didn’t really know what it was like for an adult to sit with a picture-book and a four-year-old who delights in words, especially the odd and unfamiliar word, who simultaneously and with wondrous focus scours the images for the strange, the funny, the delightful as well as the safe and reassuring. He doesn’t remember reading many children’s books as a child, and didn’t as an adult, until he began to illustrate them. Instead, certainly by the time he was writing The Story of the Dancing Frog, or The Green Ship or The Five of Us, he is more likely to have learned the an
atomy of good storytelling from reading Shakespeare, Simenon, Dickens and Cyrano as from Bemelmans, Milne or Lewis Carroll. Although it is difficult to isolate words from images when they are conceived so closely together, it is possible to appreciate the text of The Green Ship, even without its poetic illustrations.

  The story is simple – the narrator’s recollection of a childhood summer holiday with his sister: one day in a neighbouring garden they discover an assembly of trees, which appear curiously like a green ship. Its owner Mrs Tredegar (whose husband, we gather later, had been a captain who was lost at sea) takes the children on an extraordinary make-believe sea-voyage. We join them at the height of a dramatic storm:

  The swaying of the lantern and the rain rushing against the windows made it seem as though we were truly at sea. And the storm seemed to go on forever.

  At some point we must have fallen asleep, because when we awoke we were on the floor of the wheelhouse and the early morning sunlight was shining on us.

  Mrs Tredegar was still at the wheel.

  ‘She came through,’ she said. ‘She came through.’

  Then she turned and looked at us and said: ‘Well, done, crew. The captain would have been proud of you.’

  And then Mrs Tredegar walked out across the grass and with a long trail of ivy tied up the battered ship as if she had come into port at last.

  We still go back and see Mrs Tredegar every year. The Bosun says he’s getting too stiff to climb up and trim the masts and the funnels, and that Mrs Tredegar doesn’t seem to mind.

  And so gradually, year by year, the trees are getting back their old shape; they are becoming ordinary trees and soon there will no longer be any way at all of knowing that they were once the Green Ship.

  This is a model piece of writing in itself: the relief contained in the repetition of ‘she came through’, the minimal use of adjectives, so that those which are there such as ‘battered’ and ‘stiff’ glisten in the text. The length and pace of this flowing sentence: ‘And then Mrs Tredegar walked out across the grass and with a long trail of ivy tied up the battered ship as if she had come into port at last’, which moves from the short factual statement, ‘And then Mrs Tredegar walked out across the grass’ to the second half: ‘with a long trail of ivy tied up the battered ship as if she had come into port at last’, a phrase that is heavy with expressive allusion and emotional depth – we are not quite sure if it is the ship that is being described, or Mrs Tredegar herself, for whom the imaginary storm-battered journey seems to have provided some kind of cathartic closure to the mourning of her lost husband.

  Quite apart from matters of style, the sources for Blake’s own texts (as mentioned elsewhere) are immensely wide and naturally include the literary. A friend reminded Blake that the phrase ‘Good morning my fine-feathered friends’ from the inimitable Cockatoos (1992) actually came from a Thurber cartoon. Blake has no conscious memory of this purloining but it’s another example of how deeply words which mean something to him become embedded.

  Blake the spinner of narrative in his children’s books is also an elegant writer for adults. He has written books about his career3, as well as the introductions to his own exhibition catalogues. He has also written introductions to books by other authors (for example, School Blues by Daniel Pennac) and many press and journal articles. He is an artful and regular letter-writer, as many friends and colleagues can testify; letters which in the past might have been sent as faxes, for immediacy, something which Blake likes. Such letters, in handwriting as expressive as his drawings, are documents to savour: you know how much every word on that heavy cream paper has been considered; unlike his drawings, which Blake says he doesn’t consciously compose (but, he says, ‘his hand and eye do’), each letter really is a composition; and you know that it will be the best kind of letter you could ever hope to receive – words addressed to you, in the situation at hand – and that you will be surprised by an illuminating word or phrase, or even by a drawing, which says the things that the words can’t quite.

  Writing about Blake

  Finally, there is another kind of literary outcome of Blake’s art. In a neat reversal of the way in which good writing can summon great illustration from him, his own drawings have inspired other authors to powerful prose, something that the ‘low-status’4 art of illustration has rarely managed to do. One of Blake’s big life-intentions has been to encourage critics and other writers, as well as museum and gallery curators, to take illustration more seriously: to foster public discourse about it, to find a critical language for it; to acknowledge its place in the history of art, and to show how this most available of art forms can play a vital role in everyone’s visual and emotional education. The following extracts contain both a respect for Blake’s technique and a strong impulse to capture in words the way the drawings work as illustrations to text. In a piece for the Financial Times written to coincide with the opening of the House of Illustration in 2014, the historian Simon Schama describes Blake’s drawings made for the Folio Society edition of Candide (2012):

  Many of the illustrations he has drawn for Voltaire’s Candide fully match the philosopher’s determination to turn hearty chuckle into mirthless cackle. Dr Pangloss, Candide’s tutor, who despite a procession of slaughters and rapes will not be shaken from his optimistic dogma that this is ‘the best of all possible worlds’, gesticulates inanely in Blake’s drawing over the mangled bodies and debris of the Lisbon earthquake, while ignoring his protégé pinned beneath the masonry. A stain of bloody light blooms on the horizon. Another image, a little masterpiece of contemporary art, equally faithful to Voltaire’s mordant verdict on the human comedy, summons Blake’s inner Goya, depicting a victim of the Inquisition’s auto-da-fé swinging from a rope while a trio of canting friars roll their eyes to heaven . . .

  No saint could produce the universe of visual mischief that is his repertoire. But he doesn’t have it in him to deliver the sting of cruelty. When, at the end of Candide, Pangloss, looking like a decrepit snail, is still droning on about the best possible world and Candide responds, ‘That may very well be but it is time to cultivate our garden,’ the artist has the younger man looking down at the seedling cradled in his hands, while forbearance is traced on his sweet face with a single, perfectly economical stroke of Quentin Blake’s enchanted pen.5

  The bloody hilarity of Candide was rather far away in Blake’s 2012 exhibition of recent work at the Marlborough Gallery in London. Here, instead, were shown sets of etchings and lithographs of what the author and biographer Jenny Uglow described in her introduction to the catalogue as ‘characters in search of a story’, and which Blake calls ‘like illustration pulled inside out’. In many of these in other ways quite disparate sets the underlying themes of making art, comedy and compassion were vividly described by Uglow:

  We can take up the ‘suggestion of story’, but we can’t miss the struggle to make art. Blake’s first independent book, Patrick, showed how art – in that case music – could turn dull monochrome lives into vibrant colour. In the current show, this idea recurs in the pairs of shimmering youth and grizzled age, where the pen and ink scumbles the watercolour like wrinkles on a face. We know that these golden lads all must, ‘like chimney sweepers come to dust’, but for the moment they glow lazily, as resigned models or listeners (where old and young read side by side, you know they are reading different books). By contrast it is the old who are the artists. The women draw intently, the old man plays the violin so fast that his hair stands on end. The consolation of art does not fade.

  Comedy and compassion return here, and in the playful etchings of insects. Following the old tradition of the bee-hive or ant-colony as models of society, Blake invents sociable creatures, their antennae twitching for gossip. Dressed to the nines, they go shopping, brandish parasols and find their many arms useful for multi-tasking. Some care for nervous youngsters and some have seen better days, like the old insect-lady walking home in the sunset with her heavy bag. We share the joke. We
laugh at this not entirely alien world. Like the lonely people, the big healthy girls, and the floating heads, the insects share the elliptical, magical quality of Quentin Blake’s art – as we endow them with stories we leap from the real into a strange, transformative realm.

  The birds which appear in The Life of Birds shown opposite share some of the qualities of those good-humoured insects, but there is another kind of depth here; in form and expression, they are perhaps the closest that Blake ever gets to his hero Honoré Daumier’s lithographs for Le Charivari: the artist’s sidelong glance at a domestic situation, a street-seller, a conversation, a type. Many are humorous (L’en-Cas on the left, Blake says, is based a man he once saw eating like this in a café), but others have a frankly elegiac or dark quality.

  In the English edition, where the pictures are untitled, the late Peter Campbell, journalist and artist, wrote:

  Drawing can do something . . . remarkable, something neither painting nor photography is good at: it can show how funny, sad, silly, and odd the world is. The drawn line is saturated with the character of the draughtsman – it is like handwriting but with several extra dimensions of variability. The artist’s delight and despair become legible. We learn things we knew without knowing, saw without seeing.

  In Blake’s case character and movement are, as it were, his prey – the thing he catches. There is pleasure in the pull and turn of his lines when they are regarded as abstract marks, but they come into their full power when the abstract handwriting begins to register as part of a living creature – a glancing eye; a jumping leg; a tentatively waving arm; an expression. A person appears on the page. Or is it a bird?