Charles Moore
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The Arab world is well-known for explaining all important events by amazing conspiracy theories — the Jews blew up the World Trade Center, Prince Philip had Diana murdered because she was about to marry a Muslim etc. I am surprised not to have heard in recent days that the attack on Libya is the means by which MI6 and Buckingham Palace have contrived to distract attention from the scandals surrounding the Duke of York. Certainly it seems years, not days, since newspapers were gravely suggesting that Prince Andrew must consider his position and Downing Street was saying that one more bad headline would do him in.
Nicholas Garland has left the Daily Telegraph. He is 75 years old, and has been the cartoonist there (leaving aside a brief midlife-crisis-style relationship with the Independent) since 1966, the year of David Cameron’s birth. He was talent-spotted by the deputy editor, Colin Welch, on the strength of a caricature of Richard Crossman which he published in The Spectator. It is an astonishing fact that Garland was the Telegraph’s first political cartoonist. Until the Sixties, such a thing was considered too racy for a serious paper. Today, almost the opposite is the case. People are so used to visual gags, and newspaper photographs have become so much more enticing than in the past. Animations are all over the internet, and can easily be computer-generated. As a result, political cartoons have come to seem old-fashioned. You can see this in the way many of the cartoonists — though emphatically not Garland — nowadays strain for shock effect, and are never really happy unless they can depict piles of ordure, people sitting on lavatories, right-wing people killing children etc. It is astonishing how bad most of them are. Only Garland, Peter Brookes (see top of page) and the mad but brilliant Steve Bell stand out. The absence of a new generation is sad because the political cartoon can say much more succinctly, amusingly and originally what the rest of us are trying to express in words. It is this economy, this encapsulation, in which the art lies. Garland is in the great tradition of Low and Vicky. As a reader, as his colleague, and eventually as his editor, I learnt more about politics from Garland than I did from a thousand political columns, including my own.
Another of Garland’s claims to fame is that, through the Barry Mackenzie strip in Private Eye, which he and Barry Humphries invented in the 1960s, Edna Everage first reached a wider audience. She had not, at that time, been honoured, and was not a housewife-superstar. She was plain Mrs Everage (the name being the Australian pronunciation of ‘average’), and her only raison d’etre was that she was Barry Mackenzie’s aunt. But perhaps it is fitting that, in the age of female emancipation, her fame eventually outstripped even that of her creators.
Barry Humphries attended the memorial meeting for John Gross at the RIBA last week. Very beautifully, he read out, ‘On the Death of a German philosopher’ by Stevie Smith, which is only four lines long. Then he paused and said, ‘I love Stevie Smith, but I haven’t the slightest idea what that poem means.’ I may have written before that memorial meetings are much better, for celebrating the life of people who were not religious, than memorial services. They contain fewer dissonances, and none of the manner of religion which is so irritating without its matter. So it proved at the meeting for John. There was nothing but secular music, poetry (no prose), and tributes. Martin Amis gave one of these last. He wanted to illustrate John’s verbal refinement, tact and quickness. When he was a young reviewer, he said, he submitted an article to John Gross (then literary editor of the New Statesman), which ended by saying that The Picture of Dorian Gray was more ‘scatological’ than people realised. ‘I don’t think you mean “scatological”,’ said John. ‘Oh, do I mean “eschatological”?’ said Amis. ‘No, I don’t think you do,’ said John. ‘What do I mean then?’ asked Amis. ‘Perhaps you mean “mythopoeic”,’ said John. ‘Yes, that’s exactly want I mean,’ said Amis. The idea of John Gross as the literary Jeeves to Amis’s Bertie Wooster was very pleasing.
Why is April ‘the cruellest month’? Is it only because T.S. Eliot wanted to make play with the opening of The Canterbury Tales? March always seems crueller to me. Last Friday, dripping and grey and cold, made one feel that great nature’s rebirth would never happen. Then, the next morning, it did. Since then, we have eaten lunch outdoors each day, but found our bay tree blighted by frost at night. Everything is rather agonisingly beautiful — new life out of bare ground. Perhaps in Eliot’s time, all this happened in April, and global warming has now brought it forward.
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