Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination

by Ghislaine Kenyon

  Like other masters of comic art he can discomfort us pleasurably and amuse us painfully.6

  The French edition is introduced by the well-known French novelist Daniel Pennac, who ‘reads in’ to these images to find meaning, and when he does he glimpses the big universals of Blake’s art. I put the original first before my translation because the French is so good:

  Les oiseaux de Quentin Blake parlant pour chaqu’un de nous, il ne faut pas frustrer le lecteur de sa propre interpretation. Le ‘lecteur’ . . . Oui, décidément, ces dessins se lisent. Le trait de Blake est une écriture. Une écriture qui saisit le temps. Quelques traits de plume . . . l’encre, la couleur et l’eau se dissolvent dans la fibre du papier . . . ce sont les traces éffrangées que nous laissons dans la mémoire de Quentin Blake, tout autant que nous sommes, et que sa rêverie recompose. Nos jeux, nos apprentissages, nos appétits, nos tracas, notre insouciance, nos vanités, notre énergie, nos lassitudes, nos premiers moments et nos derniers mètres, nos bruyants petits bonheurs et nos regrets muets, tout y est, vraiment, jusqu’à notre poésie, car l’homme sait être un oiseau poétique quand il pédale sur la grève où rêvasse dans le brouillard des marais . . . Oui à regarder de près, Quentin Blake dessine moins des individus que ce qui fait de nous des individus.7

  (Since Quentin Blake’s birds speak for every one of us, I will not frustrate the reader from making his own interpretations of them. I say ‘reader’ . . . because these drawings are clearly to be read. Blake’s lines are handwriting. A handwriting that seizes hold of time . . . A few pen-strokes, some ink, and paint dissolve into the fibre of the paper . . . we leave frayed traces in Quentin Blake’s memory, just as we are, and in his musings he recreates them. Our games, our lessons, our appetites, fears and insouciance, our vanities, our energy, our weariness, our first moments and our last steps, our noisy little pleasures, our silent regrets, everything is there, truly, even our poetry, because a man can be a poetic bird pedalling along the shore or dreaming in the marshy mists . . . Yes, when you look closely, it is not so much individuals that Quentin Blake draws, but what makes us all individuals . . .) The queue of French writers and illustrators who want to pay tribute is long and includes François Place, prize-winning children’s author and illustrator, who recently stood in for Blake at the Montreuil Children’s Book Fair, and wrote to him afterwards, in a rhetorical outburst of admiration:

  I think you prefer unpredictable and capricious whirlwinds to the rather abrupt laws of gravity enacted by Isaac Newton. If an apple falls on your head you’d prefer to crunch it with your teeth or with the end of your pencil. Under your pen each small bit of fence, each little balcony, or the humblest of suburban gardens becomes a paradise overrun with wild greenery . . . your characters are borne along on a gentle folly; they are always touching, always moving, and even the baddies who parade their evil characters so joyously, belong to the good side of life. I hope I’ve been able to convey the admiration I have for the freedom of your line, for the mischief and sharpness in your well-meaning eye. There are few who have such force and elegance.

  Whenever I feel a prisoner of my well-behaved line, of my rather too plodding concern for detail, I open a Quentin Blake, in the way that one might open a window to air a room and to take in a great gulp of air. And I keep the books safely in my library, for my grandchildren, if any come along.

  (Je crois que tu prefers les tourbillons de vent imprévisibles et capricieux aux lois de la gravitation un peu trop abruptes édictées par Isaac Newton. Si une pomme te tombe sur la tête tu préféreras la croquer à pleines dents ou du bout du crayon. La moindre palisade, le plus petit balcon, le plus humble jardin de banlieue deviennent sous ta plume, des paradis envahis d’herbes folles . . . Une folie douce emporte la plupart de tes personnages, toujours touchants, toujours émouvants, et meme les méchants, qui étalent leur sale caractère avec jubilation, sont du bon coté de la vie . . . j’espère que j’ai pu faire passer l’admiration que j’ai pour la liberté de ton trait, pour la malice et l’acuité de ton observation bienveillante. Il y en a peu de cette force et de cette elegance.

  Quand je me sens prisonnier de mon trait si sage, de mon souci de detail un peu trop besogneux, j’ouvre un Quentin Blake, comme on ouvre la fenetre pour aérer la pièce et prendre un grand bol d’air. Et je les garde précieusement dans la bibliothèque pour mes petits enfants, si’ m’en vient.)

  Joann Sfar, the multitalented creator who compared the prospect of meeting Blake to that of meeting Father Christmas, peppers his extraordinary visual diary, Caravan,8 with references to Blake’s art and descriptions of their meetings:

  The text here roughly translates as:

  Quentin Blake has the graceful gestures of Charlie Chaplin. Once I had to be photographed and the journalist complained that I wasn’t smiling or looking in the right direction. I told him that there was nothing to look at over there. So Quentin Blake put himself in the nothing to look at place and he began to dance so that I would look where they were telling me to look and so that I would smile. I’m not joking: he danced with the grace of Charlie Chaplin.

  Draughtsman = actor

  Draughtsman = dancer

  Draughtsman = better than mime

  And here is the photo of this remarkable event.9 Actually it’s not remarkable – it’s a completely characteristic Blakean pose, which he takes up, always unexpectedly, often on the other side of the road, for the delight of his good friends and sometimes to the surprise of other pedestrians.

  Finally, two pieces by Russell Hoban. The first is the whole of the (short) introduction to an extraordinary publication Blake brought out in 1999, published in a small edition of 200 by the Camberwell Press. Woman with a Book: Twenty Drawings by Quentin Blake is not easy to pick up or handle. Measuring a substantial 47 × 66 cm, the fleeting watercolour drawings are printed on beautiful Rivoli white paper, and the text summons the kind of inventive, right-brain response that Hoban is justly famed for.

  Wrapped attention, also unwrapped

  Orpheus with his lute made trees

  And the mountain-tops that freeze,

  Bow themselves when he did sing . . .

  (Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, III.i.3)

  Quentin Blake, another sort of Orpheus, does it with a line; wandering here and there with it coiled loosely over his shoulder, he flings it with nonchalant accuracy at what catches his eye. Whatever and whoever has been captured by that line enters the multitudinous gallery of high-spirited girls, boys, men, women, animals, houses and trees that walk, run, jump, dance, prowl, gallop, stand and grow with the joie de vivre given them by this Orpheus-mad-about-drawing.

  What makes his images so memorable is a matter of mind: how often, waiting at the corner of a railway station, have we sighted the face of an expected friend or lover, only to find that we were mistaken; anticipating the arrival of the one awaited, we see the familiar face and figure because the mind is full of the idea of that person. Artists who, like Quentin Blake, draw from memory and imagination have always made use of this phenomenon: Breughel, Tiepolo, Goya, Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec, Grosz, and many others, have in common an eye for the gesture that stays in the eye, the shape of the action that tells the story, the visual hyperbole that imprints itself on the memory. The gesture contains the idea of the one who gestures; the leap becomes the leaper; the dance the dancer; the reading the reader.

  How were the drawings in this book done? There’s not a whole lot to it: all you need is some good cold-pressed watercolour paper, a few tubes of watercolour for your greys, two or three brushes, some water and a little magic. The magic consists in using your brushes in such a way that the white paper under your lines and washes assumes substance, takes on roundness and form; then the paper reasserts itself and the substance is gone, only to come and go again, flickering continually: magic.

  All of the women in these drawings are involved in books: they’re about to read, they’re reading, or they’ve been reading; and bear in mind that
there were no models – these females have all come out of Quentin Blake’s head. ‘What about this?’ I asked him. ‘What is it with these wrapped and less-wrapped women and their books?’

  ‘Well,’ he said,

  you’ll remember that I had an exhibition of paintings and drawings, nothing to do with illustration work, in 1993. They were done with a very broad technique and nonnaturalistic colour, but one could still see that they were nudes. As a tactic to get myself going again after that show, I decided that, for a change, the nudes should be wrapped up. I think I had some undefined notion that their being more or less wrapped corresponded somehow to areas of privacy or introspection – but that may have just been a fantasy. At any rate the drawings of the wrappings – shirts, dressing gowns, blankets and so on – seemed to call for a more descriptive technique, which took me a step or two backwards towards illustration.

  At the same time I discovered that the women were reading . . .

  I interrupt him here to say that this remark, questionably candid though it may sound, is significant: when Quentin draws a leaper, a dancer or a reader, he discovers that person leaping, dancing or reading. First he sees the action, then he finds whoever is in it. But why – I mean really – reading? He can draw anything at all out of his head, so why reading? And why more wrapped than unwrapped?

  I know, from other drawings of his that I’ve seen, that Quentin Blake is respectful of the mystery of the female. Even in his jolliest illustrations he does not take liberties with his girls and women but keeps to the decencies of his own comic conventions and inventions. His non-comic women, his nudes, are approached with wonder – Eleusis is never very far from those nudes. I think that Quentin didn’t feel altogether free to draw his bookish women all uncovered – he seems here to be asking their permission to imagine them in their privacy.

  But, as he was saying:

  I discovered that the women were reading, that their attention was elsewhere, that they were no longer conscious of being turned into art-objects. (In life classes, years ago, I always thought that the rest-period was more interesting than the pose. They were also becoming more like individuals, reacting differently to their reading, or perhaps the way they read is indicative of some other situation they’re in.

  Each of these women undeniably has a life of her own apart from what Quentin has observed, but for me that other life has been absorbed by the reading, and the drawings have arranged themselves in a narrative sequence. Quentin says he had nothing like that in mind and cannot now remember the order in which he did the drawings, but anyone looking at them is bound to find one suggesting itself.

  Is it possible to think of reading as a sexual act? Reading requires the surrender of the reader to the book; the idea of a naked woman reading a book therefore has certain reverberations for those for whom this sort of thing reverberates. Under their blankets, dressing gowns, etc, these women are naked. Wrapping leads to unwrapping. There’s a lot to think about here.

  In Plate 1 the woman is completely wrapped, her body entirely hidden; only her head, the mind part of it, is exposed as she thinks about the books that lie before her. She’s looking at them both contemplatively and critically. Will she or won’t she be receptive to one of them?

  In Plate 2 she’s made a choice and, in a show of willingness to meet the book more than halfway, opens herself to the written word. This, however, is not a commitment. Will she proceed to the next stage?

  Yes! In Plate 3 we see the classic tented-bum position in which the reader, on knees and elbows before the book, has draped herself in such a way as to contain the literary emanations for maximum absorption.

  In Plate 4 the woman, partly turning her back to us, looks down at the book that lies open on the floor between her naked legs. The physical gesture is earthy, almost a birth-giving position frontal to the book.

  In Plate 5 the woman’s legs are fully exposed and the book has moved in close to receive her concentrated attention. The chiaroscuro makes one compact unit of woman and book, as solid and self-contained as a Tanagra figure; the intimacy is physical, intellectual and aesthetic.

  In Plate 6, the intellectual aspect is uppermost as the woman, prone to acquiescence, yet she maintains some objectivity as she reads.

  In Plate 7 she’s completely at ease and feeling increasingly book-friendly.

  In Plate 8 she has quite settled into her reading but reminds herself that she’s naked under the blanket.

  In Plate 9 the reader is again prone but only partly covered by the shirt that she’s flung over herself. She has definitely committed herself to a relationship with the book.

  In Plate 10 the woman lies on her back, one leg raised and crossed over the other in a good-friends-in-bed position.

  In Plate 11 the book would seem to reach parts not reached by it before.

  In Plate 12 our reader is more or less in the position in which Danae received Jupiter as a shower of gold. Definitely an 18 certificate for this one.

  Plate 13 finds our reader altogether unwrapped and raptly re-reading.

  Plate 14 shows us, I think, how it was for her: cold feet perhaps but warm elsewhere.

  In Plate 15 we see the reader remembering what has gone before.

  In Plate 16 she’s covered again, perhaps asleep, perhaps dreaming.

  In Plate 17, our dreamer, cuddled in the warmth of memory and duvet, dreams on.

  In Plate 18 she has moved out of the dream and into a wintry reality that brings with it a new objectivity.

  In Plate 19 more wrapping-up is needed as well as more sleep. Good reading is known to have that effect.

  Plate 20 brings us up to date and who can be surprised? The book is still with her, so it was clearly not a one-night read. Will she give birth to a book of her own?

  So concludes my journey through this collection of drawings. If my descriptions are questioned I can only reply, in the words of the patient who astonished his psychiatrist by his reading of the Rorschach inkblots, ‘Hey Doc – they’re your pictures!’ (Russell Hoban)

  Hoban was able to see and articulate things that many people who only think of Blake as a cartoonist or a cheerful children’s book illustrator can’t or don’t see. And in this last small but entirely original literary tribute he shows that he understands the skill as well – Hoban wrote this dedication on the title page of Blake’s copy of Riddley Walker (1980). This book is a science-fiction novel, set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. The young narrator, Riddley, speaks a language which, when written down, can seem like a phonetic transliteration of the Kentish dialect. At first, this language appears like text we might find in the social spaces of the internet: impulsive, misspelt commentary about this or that, which some readers might be inclined to dismiss as illiterate rambling. But of course here it is the creation of a sophisticated writer, and full of invention, wit and depth, exactly the qualities that Hoban brings to this dedication, where he applies to Blake a wonderful double meaning for ‘draw’ and where the last sentence is one of the most poetic and acute observations ever made about him.

  Drawing is Blake’s first language but words are always there on the edges, behind, in front, on the margins, close by – as all ‘readers’ of his textless book Clown know, the drawings alone can say more than words but it is with words that we want to respond to them.

  Book cover for Promenade de Quentin Blake au Pays de la Poésie Française

  4 Calling on France

  His name

  To Quentin Blake’s family and old friends, he is Q. Otherwise he is Quentin and really only Roald Dahl called him anything else: ‘Here’s Quent,’ he would say (something Blake can mimic hilariously). But, when in France, which he is very often, Blake also readily answers to the French pronunciation of his name, where the soft, rich vowels at the back of the throat seem somehow closer to his personality than the bright e and i of Quentin in English – in any case, the name Quentin is heard much more often in France than in the UK.

  Blake does not know
why he was given this outlandish first name – it doesn’t feature in any top 100 lists of British boys’ names for the 1930s. Indeed, so unusual was it that, as Blake remembers, on his first day at primary school in Sidcup, his mother felt obliged to suggest to the teacher that if the name Quentin was ‘too difficult’ for staff and fellow pupils, ‘he could be called Paul instead’ – fortunately this did not prove to be necessary.

  But there is a possible reason for the choice: Blake’s parents spent the first 10 years of their married life in northern France and Belgium, where his father had gone to work as a clerk in what was then known as the Imperial War Graves Commission. The couple evidently became fond of their new home, sending their eldest son Kenneth to French schools, learning to speak a kind of French themselves (Blake describes his father’s as ‘with a stiff English pronunciation’ and ‘mainly in infinitives’). According to Blake, they made such good friends within the French community that when, 30 years later, the family made a pilgrimage to the places they had lived in, they were recognized with appreciation by the family of the patronne of a local bar, who immediately pulled out a celebratory bottle of champagne from under the counter.

  Blake himself was not in fact born until after the family returned to the UK in 1932, but he agrees that it is not unlikely that the choice of a French name for their second son, who was probably conceived in France, could have been a kind of tribute to the country that had welcomed them. In any case, the family’s connection with and love for France seems somehow to have imprinted itself on Blake, and he is a truly francophone Francophile. Perhaps even without knowing it, he may have been keen to participate in the chapter of the family story that he missed out on by being born in England. In any case, from early on he seems to have had an engagement with French language and culture and, as we have seen, he often speaks of French films, artists and literature as having been instrumental in the budding and blooming of his own artistry.