Seaman was persuaded to resign with the greatest difficulty in 1932. My father then had to see the paper through the end of the slump and the rise of the dictators, which Punch most consistently opposed. The management talked him into staying on through the Second World War (he had been seriously wounded in the first one), during which the circulation reached two hundred thousand copies, the highest in its history. He had also, from a professional point of view, to face something that Seaman had regarded with horror, the challenge of the crazy man in the form of American (or, as it was usually called, New Yorker) humour. The idea of this, fortunately, didn’t at all distress my father, who, quietly correct though he seemed, had always been attracted by the point where poetry and humour meet and forget, for the moment, their responsibilities. 21 July 1937 was the significant date when Punch printed the ‘hippopotamus’ joke. Two hippopotamuses are basking side by side in the river; one of them says, ‘I keep thinking it’s Tuesday.’ Impossible now to convey how deeply the readership was divided as to whether this was funny or could ever have been meant to be funny. And if it was funny, still it was surely not British.
In 1953 the management brought in Malcolm Muggeridge as editor. He was expected to overhaul everything completely, to find new writers and new social and political material, and (for the first time in more than a hundred years) to introduce jokes that hinted, at least, at sex. All these things he did, but after only four years he lost, not his nerve, but his interest in reforming the paper and in what, to him, was the agonizing business of making the British public laugh. I don’t think that anything would be gained by following the courageous struggles of the editors that came after him. Historians are never agreed about the point of no return.
To me, Punch means the old Fleet Street, which has itself disappeared, with the paper lorries manoeuvring down narrow lanes to the printing presses, and the Law Courts and the Houses of Parliament within shouting distance. When the newspapers migrated and the art of printing was transformed I still believed that Punch would survive. But I was quite wrong, Punch is dead. At the end of the marionette play, which you can still see on the beach or at the fairground, Punch, having got the better of his wife, his baby, his dog, his doctor, and the crocodile, succumbs to the hangman and the undertaker, but—if the text is followed out to the sardonic end—comes back to life in time to collect the audience’s money. But for the once loved and feared old weekly there is no hope of resurrection. Although for several years there hadn’t been much in it worth reading, I still feel very much poorer for the loss.
New Criterion, 1992
Evoe’s Choice
Foreword to In My Old Days, a selection of poems by Penelope Fitzgerald’s father, E. V. Knox (‘Evoe’), privately printed by his widow in 1972
This selection of poems was made by Evoe himself in 1969. It covers nearly fifty years of his life—from 1909 to 1956—and he gave it the characteristically wry title of In My Old Days.
The majority of the poems appeared week by week in Punch, finished as it seemed miraculously just in time for the deadline—often while he was shaving—on whatever subject was interesting at the moment. In this way they form a kind of rueful commentary on English history through two world wars, though he himself would never have called them this. They were designed to amuse and touch the readers, and they did both. But every art is based on a craft. Evoe was a professional poet. If he had not known how to write verse he would not have written it. In his ear were the rhythms of Latin poetry. His children took it for granted that when their pets died and had to be buried in the back garden he would produce for them—even for a badger—a Latin epigraph composed on the spur of the moment. In this selection, ‘Embattled London’ is written in Virgilian hexameters simply because they were appropriate. But the rhythms of English are even more difficult, because they are less law-abiding, than Latin. Evoe had great respect for the nineteenth-century masters, Calverley and Hood, but he set a standard which was distinctively his own. All his poems need to be read aloud. Only then do you notice—to take a single example—how skilfully he introduces the strange wildflower names into ‘A Meadow Wreath,’ until the poem, winding on to its sad conclusion, is like a wreath itself.
Light verse is a product of civilization, for it is a sign of being civilized to be able to treat serious things gracefully. The concern can be felt, however, beneath the surface. These poems range from the daily sufferings of the commuter and the humane man in a world apparently run by maniacs, to the deep faith Evoe felt in his own country (‘Fiat Justitia’). Of the parodies (although Robert H. Ross in his Georgian Revolt (1967) has called him ‘the most persistent and masterful parodist of the Georgians’) Evoe did not want to reprint much. He has kept ‘String, in Lieu of’ (A. E. Housman), ‘Crooked Paths’ (John Masefield), and ‘My Own Old Garden’ (Walter de la Mare), all of them affectionate tributes rather than satires.
Just as his light verse is based on strong-mindedness, so his kindness was based on courage, and what always goes with true courage, reticence. To be thanked was for Evoe a dreadful experience. He was often unwilling even to be acknowledged. But something of what he was like can be guessed, even by those who never knew him, from the poems of In My Old Days.
Kipper’s Line
There must have been hundreds of people who called Ernest Shepard Kipper, or Kip. I used to think that the name was a variant of Skipper and had something to do with his boat, Grey Owl, which (though he had sold her by that time) went over with the little ships to Dunkirk. But he explained that he had been given it much earlier, in student days, when his friends considered him ‘a giddy kipper.’ It sounds late Victorian, and Kipper, although he had the gift of making the best of every day as it came, alas, to the end, was a late Victorian, most certainly in his professional life.
He was very highly trained, entering Heatherley’s (which figures in Thackeray’s The Newcomes) at the age of sixteen and winning a scholarship to the Academy Schools a year later, in 1897. He was preparing, if luck went his way, to be a full-dress, gold-framed, twice-yearly Academy exhibitor (his Followers, painted in 1904, was sold to the Durban Art Gallery), but when it became clear that he was a draughtsman rather than a painter he was quite happy to settle, as Tenniel and Charles Keene had done before him, for illustrations and cartoons.
He worked hard and methodically, kept pretty well everything in case it might be useful later, and did all his preliminary sketches from life. There are innumerable notes of people, clothes, animals and weather, sometimes no more than a passing shadow, or the effect of the wind on a hat brim.
Shepard collectors have nearly eighty years’ work to consider. There are working notebooks, roughs and finished drawings for the weeklies, illustrations for a hundred or so books, ranging from a romantic novel called Smouldering Fires to Pepys and Boswell’s Life of Johnson (the grey wig Kipper used for Dr Johnson is still in the family dressing-up box), jokes and Second World War cartoons for Punch, travel sketches, English landscapes in oil and watercolour. It was part of his calm professionalism that he knew what he could and couldn’t do. He never found it easy to get a likeness, even (or perhaps particularly) in 1945 when he became senior cartoonist of Punch. Nor could he manage the sheer indignation that gives political satire its weight, or the ruthless lines that he admired in Charles Keene and Phil May. What was more, there were some books which he felt couldn’t be illustrated; he refused to try Peter Pan, for instance, just as Charlie Chaplin refused to act in it.
Kipper’s speciality is the clear line based on his knowledge of how things, including the human body, work or how light falls, and above all of movement and relaxation. Once he had found his own distinctive style he was able to let his figures blow across the page, and in or out of it, with a kind of graceful and airy determination. When he was over eighty he still had the instinct for stir and movement. You can recognize it in one of his last original drawings, a study of his brother Cyril as a young man cutting long grass with a fag-hook. The
braces are only just sketched in, but you can see how they take the strain.
Kipper himself was amiable, cheerful, hospitable, surprised at his own eventual fame, thought of, I suppose, as an ‘easy’ man but not at all easy to fathom. His mild light blue eyes gave away very little. He had had to suffer at least some of life’s hardest trials. His mother died when he was ten. Between 1915 and 1918 he served as a gunner officer and was awarded the MC, but his much-loved brother was killed during the first offensive on the Somme. After the war, when his children were born and he was beginning to be successful, his wife went into hospital for a minor operation and died of it. During the Second World War his only son, Graham, went down with his ship. Kipper, I think, never said much about these things, and indeed when he called on me after a loss of my own—a miscarriage—he handed me a bunch of flowers without a word.
My brother, Rawle Knox, who wrote the definitive biography, The Work of E. H. Shepard, thought that Kipper never changed, ‘until, perhaps, he grew too old to care very much; and if he ceased to care at the end, that was only because he was unable to work, and work—art—had meant more than anything else in life.’
Kipper would cheerfully have admitted that all his work rose in value because of Christopher Robin and because of Pooh. His relationship with A. A. Milne was an unemotional, pipe-smoking, astoundingly successful collaboration, which began in 1924 between two men who never really got to know each other. But which of the two was really responsible for the immortality of Piglet, Pooh, and all the rest of them? Malcolm Muggeridge thought that Milne was not a childlike man in any way but liked children, and wrote about them from the outside as an approving adult, which was why adults were so fond of the books. Children only pretended to like Pooh in order to ingratiate themselves with the grown-ups. Here he was getting close to Winnie-the-Complex. Kipper, on the other hand, was certainly not either childish or childlike, but he had a certain transparency or luminosity of the memory which made him able to distinguish faultlessly between the inner life of children, animals and toys.
When Milne was asked to dramatize The Wind in the Willows as Toad of Toad Hall, he complained about Kenneth Grahame’s lack of logic. The river animals have to be thought of, he said, as sometimes human, sometimes not, sometimes walking on four legs, sometimes on two. But this no more worried Kipper than it had Beatrix Potter. He was able, too, as she had been, to indicate space and freedom, open air and fresh water, in a very small space, so that although his illustrations to The Wind in the Willows were in competition with Arthur Rackham’s (which have a much better sense of the element of ancient fear in the book), they were a much greater success from the first with the readers. Grahame himself approved of them, and they have lately undergone another translation into Alan Bennett’s current production for the National Theatre.
Ultimately, of course, like every artist of every century who gets it right, Kipper relied on certain moments of inspiration. He drew Winnie-the-Pooh, for example, from his son Graham’s Growler, but the great improvement was in the placing of the eye, much lower down and further back than in any teddy bear before him, and certainly much lower than Growler’s. The new position suggests little intelligence, but boundless loyalty and sweet temper. In this way the hard-working draughtsman becomes a mythmaker.
Sunday Telegraph, 1991
YEATS AND HIS CIRCLE
A Bird Tied to a String
John Butler Yeats: Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869—1922, edited by Joseph Hone and abridged, with an introduction, by John McGahern
In 1916, John Butler Yeats wrote to his younger son: ‘Hereafter, when I have become a silent member of the company existing only in memory, it will be pleasant to think that you have written to me many times. So do write.’ What could be more persuasive than this man and his letters?
JBY was descended from Church of Ireland rectors and was intended first for the Church, then for the Bar, but not long after his marriage to Susan Pollexfen, of Sligo, he threw up everything for an artist’s career. Their family grew to two boys, William and Jack, and two girls, known as Lily and Lolly, and they moved in 1868 from Dublin to London, but JBY did not then or ever acquire any kind of business sense. He had inherited property, and there was no reason why he should not have lived on his income, but all was mortgaged and lost. Commissions for portraits he had, but took an obsessively long time to carry them out, and could not bring himself to charge enough for them. Willie maintained himself as a man of letters and Jack as a painter, but for their sisters there was no education and no prospect of marriage, and it was much to their credit that they made some sort of a living from embroidery and fine printing. In 1907, when his last mortgage was paid out, JBY’s tolerant friends raised a subscription to take him to Italy. But he preferred New York, and died there in February 1922, without ever returning to Ireland.
Two selections of his letters were published in his lifetime, then another, more comprehensive, in 1944, edited by Joseph Hone, the biographer of W. B. Yeats. From Hone’s book, John McGahern, the novelist, has made this further selection. JBY, he tells us in his compassionate introduction, ‘was a well-remembered presence in Dublin when I was young, sometimes referred to affectionately as “the old man who ran away from home and made good.”’ In fact, he scarcely did that, but as he himself insisted, ‘affection springs out of memory,’ even memory gone astray. These letters have been selected to show not only what W. B. Yeats’s father was really like, but also the kindly myth that was created around him.
They are written to Lily, his favourite daughter, with a few to Lolly, to Oliver Elton, an old friend who became Professor of English at Liverpool University, to Ruth Hart, the dear daughter of another old friend, only one to Lady Gregory, several to John Quinn, his great American patron, but nearly half of them to WBY himself. After twenty-seven letters, JBY is permanently in New York, more often than not as a lodger of the Petitpas, three Breton sisters who ran (illegally, as it later turned out) a lodging house in West Twentieth Street. Here he continued drinking late and talking and writing, on the grand scale, on the things that mattered to him most—poetry and art. Sometimes he is inconsistent: the world, he says, must learn to reason less and feel more; art and poetry deal with what cannot be expressed in action or in thought, ‘being as inarticulate as the cry of a woman in childbirth.’ On the other hand, the world will not be right till poetry is pronounced to be life itself, our own lives being but shadows and poor imitations. And life means change, death being only one change the more.
McGahern says that ‘many of the son’s central ideas came from the father,’ but there is no real meeting point here with WBY’s vision of cycles of recurrence. JBY, in any case, did not believe—or said he didn’t—in argument, rather that friends and enemies should give voice to their most deeply held opinions, side by side. WBY himself tells us, in his Reveries over Childhood and Youth, that ‘it was only when I began to study psychical research and mystical philosophy that I broke away from my father’s influence.’ But JBY has a largeness of utterance that warms the heart.
Sometimes he listens to the voice of conscience, but rather as if it was something imposed on him from the outside world. ‘A man shackled by impecuniosity is like a bird tied to a string. The bird thinks the string very long, as it sometimes is, and forgets it is there at all, and so flies up to tumble back distractedly.’ With the loan of a few dollars, which meant that he could treat his friends, the distraction passed. ‘I have been an unconscionable burden to you and George [ WBY’s wife] on your comparatively slender resources and I do assure you that I have sleepless nights thinking of it…When you see my magnum opus, I think you will forgive me. I mean it to be ahead of any portraits Quinn may have and to know this will soothe my last moments. “Ripeness is all.”’ This self-portrait was still not finished when he died, in the upstairs room of the Petitpas lodging house. ‘He lived in hope and I think the past hardly existed for him,’ WBY wrote to Lolly. He and his father had disputed
bitterly. But there had once been a barber in Sligo who observed that ‘the Yeatses were always respectable,’ and both father and son drew comfort of a kind from that.
The illustrations are all pencil sketches (with one pen drawing) by JBY himself. Lady Gregory was surely right in saying that these were what he did best, because he had not the chance to get at them and alter them from the first impression.
Times Literary Supplement, 1999
Too Long a Sacrifice
‘Always Your Friend’: The Gonne-Yeats Letters, 1893—1938, edited by Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares
‘An overpowering tumult’ entered W. B. Yeats’s life in 1889 when Maud Gonne, aged twenty-two, first arrived in a cab at his home in Bedford Park. This was in January, even though in The Trembling of the Veil Yeats speaks vaguely of a great heap of apple blossom, which her complexion rivalled. ‘She vexed my father by praise of war,’ and Willie Yeats, bowled over, felt compelled to support her arguments, which vexed his father even more. Later, it was revealed to him that such women come to dislike their own beauty because it is created from the antithetical self and will not allow them to develop their souls in peace.
A House of Air Page 21