SCARIFYING SCARFE

Books

Gerald Scarfe, Britain's demon draftsman, sharpens his pen in a new book

IAN JACK

Here is a date for the calendars of West Coast opera enthusiasts, rubberneckers of British royalty, and other social riffraff.

In Los Angeles in the fall Her Majesty the Queen and Her other Majesty the Queen Mother will appear for a short season in the English National Opera's proI duction of Offenbach's comic piece Orpheus in the Underworld. The Queen will play Diana the Huntress. Her mother will be Juno. Or rather (a shame about this "or rather," but there we are), two English singers will play these roles in clothes and manners inspired by the monarch and her aged parent.

This is a new embellishment to an old production (Houston and Detroit saw it in 1986) that is continually revised by its English director, David Pountney, to insert new jokes and contemporary pertinence. But the fact that these jokes work owes just as much to Gerald Scarfe, who designed the sets and the costumes. Today such lese-majeste in England seems no more than mild irreverence, almost a whimsy. Once, and not so long ago, it would have led to scandal, social ostracism, and quite possibly imprisonment in the Tower. Since the early 1960s the boundaries of English humor have expanded into the most sacred of territories. Again, much of the credit must go to Gerald Scarfe.

For the past quarter of a century Scarfe has been the nation's demon draftsman, the artist who has transmuted national and global politics into a kind of terrible bestiary. The savage range of his work can be seen in an anthology, Scarfe by Scarfe (distributed in the U.S. this spring by David and Charles, North Pomfret, Vermont), which includes set designs, film work, sculpture, as well as an autobiographical essay. But in Britain he is still best known for his weekly cartoon in The Sunday Times, though "cartoon" in the "Peanuts" sense is too narrow and kind a word to properly contain the force which drives Scarfe's pen. His jokes are almost always visual—he is a poor-to-middling verbal gagster—and sometimes very cruel. He intends to shock; and however passe that aim might seem, the fact is that he can still manage to do so. His caricatures invent new forms for the human frame and, by distortion, stretch their personalities almost beyond recognition. But never quite. Ronald Reagan as a revolver is still Ronald Reagan, while Mrs. Thatcher (down, girl, down) convinces as a dog.

Too crude politically? I mean, all very clever, quite an achievement of draftsmanship and so forth, but so what ? Then study the detail, which always repays attention. Here is the dog Thatcher (a prize bitch, in fact) squatting on a stand at a dog show; but what is that little mound beneath her? Eeek, it's a dog turd shaped in the face of her old rival, the Conservative leader she displaced, Ted Heath. And here is Mrs. Thatcher (as a woman this time) kneeling naked before a muscular Rambo Reagan; but what's that pink blob doing poised next to the only limp part of the presidential anatomy? Jeez, it's her tongue, which appears to be licking the presidential penis.

English art has a distinguished history of social satire, and Scarfe is often mentioned in the same lineage as Gillray, Hogarth, and Rowlandson. But the spirit of his work belongs not so much to the eighteenth-century pleasure garden, where Vice met Folly in a powdered wig, as to an altogether darker epoch: medieval millenarianism, the Black Death, memento mori. In Scarfe's folio the late twentieth century becomes the new Middle Ages. Farting, belching, and preening themselves, the Seven Deadly Sins join hands with jangling skeletons for the terminal jig.

Or so it seems to me. Scarfe, as usual. denies such grave influences. He says his childhood hero was Walt Disney. Later he admired the gentle English comedies of Ronald Searle in Punch magazine. He'd never looked at a print by Gillray or Hogarth until critics began to talk of them as Scarfe's artistic ancestors. He complains of "a severe lack of education." He says that quite honestly his style came from "absolutely nowhere." It is a mysterious development, like the anger and revulsion inside him which sustain it.

"Dear Mr Scarfe," a reader of The Sunday Times once wrote to him, "for years your ugly and horrific caricatures have disturbed me.... Today I can contain myself no longer. I cannot send you a drawing to upset you. But I can tell you how sorry I feel for you. I can simply tear up the paper, but you have to live with your warped images for ever. Poor you."

Once, after he had drawn Mick Jagger, a letter signed by 114 schoolgirls arrived. They were less pious. "Dear Mr Scarfe: For what you have done to our Mick we are going to get you and cut your balls off."

Scarfe refers to such letters affectionately. He has grown used to other people's distant view of him as a monster, and to the slight disappointment that strangers feel when they actually meet him. Such an equable and diffident kind of fellow! Such good manners! Such a pretty wife! Can this be the man who drew Princess Margaret as a warthog, who gave the late and revered Harold Macmillan the tits of a tart, who showed Nixon wiping his posterior with the Stars and Stripes? One supposes it must be, though he might just as easily work behind the candied-fruit counter at Fortnum & Mason.

England still expects a modicum of eccentricity in its artists, some token of old Bohemia such as a wayward sex life, hard drinking, acute financial mismanagement. Even David Hockney has yellow hair. But Scarfe is lean and handsome, and he leads a rather handsome life. His wife, the actress Jane Asher, epitomizes the ideal of pale English beauty. They have three pretty children and a fine six-story house overlooking the Thames in Chelsea, with a domestic couple in the basement and a secretary in the library. While Mr. Scarfe scratches away in the attic, Mrs. Scarfe composes books in the kitchen about new and amusing ways to entertain the undertens. In the last century they would have had Whistler, Thomas Carlyle, and the Rossettis as neighbors. Today they have to make do with J. Paul Getty Jr., Bob Geldof, and an Arab princess or two. Chelsea's intellectual life may have fallen down the graph, but certainly not its property values. Whatever else, Scarfe's sustained attack on the rich and powerful has not made him poor.

Can this be the man who drew Princess Margaret as a warthog?

To be fair, Scarfe would be the first to acknowledge the large contradiction between his charming public persona and the cruelties he commits to paper. It amuses him to try to fathom it, which he does in his book and in a film made by himself about himself for the BBC (a dangerous venture: Scarfe says that one critic described the film as "a guy with designer stubble driving around in a BMW and asking people why he was a genius"). The answer he arrived at was the asthma that blighted his childhood. Breathless, he spent long stretches alone in his bedroom or among the sick in the hospital. The Second World War was banging away at the time, and Scarfe's father, a Royal Air Force officer, moved his family around England from base to base. Scarfe went to several different schools and sometimes, when the gasping and sweating were bad, to no schools at all. But he drew constantly and gave shows for himself with a puppet theater. The world as he depicted it was a grim and unpredictable place; explosions tore coal mines apart, ships were torpedoed at sea, volcanoes erupted. "I don't know what's the matter with you, Scarfe," said a teacher. "Why are you always drawing disasters?"

He left school at sixteen, unqualified to enter university or for any conventional career. Eventually he went to work for an uncle who ran a commercial-art studio, where he learned to draw objects for advertisements; he was reproducing marmalade pots, rather beautifully, long before Warhol became famous for his soup cans. But it seemed to him that he was engaged in the production of trivial lies: "I made flat pieces of flannel look like deep fluffy blankets, sad pieces of rag like crisp linen tea towels.... I couldn't stand it. I felt the whole point of being an artist was to use my craft to tell what I saw as the truth." For Scarfe, the truth that lay closest to home was human anatomy. Lacking formal art training, which might have taught him the beauty of the Greek physique, he began to study medical textbooks and to copy anatomical drawings. That led him to an examination of the body and its contents, and a fascination with both which has never left him. Soon he was using this knowledge to make crude but vivid social comments in Punch and, as the sixties advanced, in a fortnightly lampoon called Private Eye.

It was the new age of English satire, and the body, like other English taboos, was up for grabs. Private Eye, then a fresh and pungent voice in British journalism, took Scarfe to its bosom and encouraged him to push his drawings as far as they would go, and then farther. Scarfe says in his book: "The bottled-up feelings of my frustrated bed-ridden childhood found the perfect vehicle." He lashed out wildly in all directions. He discovered that he could "draw who I liked and what I liked, warts, nipples and pubic hair. I had not known that I wanted to draw these things but I had a great feeling of childish release when I did, like shouting 'bum' at the vicar's tea-party." The drawing that made his reputation was of Harold Macmillan, whose great stage-Edwardian career as prime minister was coming to an end in the shambles of the Profumo scandal. A famous photograph of the time showed Christine Keeler, the prostitute at the center of the case, posing suggestively on a chair. Scarfe simply drew Macmillan in the same pose, buttock-naked and cross-legged, but added ample breasts. He was amazed at the amount of attention it attracted. "It was then I sort of discovered myself." John Berger, The Observer's art critic, who puts Scarfe alongside Goya and George Grosz as "that very rare thing, a natural satirical draughtsman," resigned when his newspaper refused to print a Scarfe drawing (called "Vanity," it showed a naked woman with a head of worms, and organs, or possibly ordure, falling from a man's slit belly). Fame swiftly followed. Scarfe became what is now known pejoratively as a "sixties Figure" and began, "rather stupidly," he says, to feel important. He thought that political caricatures, each more savage than the last, might help rob the powerful of power and change the world.

In 1967, Time magazine asked Scarfe to do a cover of the Beatles, and then flew him over to the U.S. to do more: John Kenneth Galbraith, Rowan and Martin, et al. For a time he was the magazine's "pet anarchist."

He produced models in papier-mach6 and everybody was pleased. On a previous trip he had sketched many of the country's great and good, pleasant rather than abusive portraits of Robert Oppenheimer, Stravinsky, Mailer and Miller, Robert Lowell, Aaron Copland. Now he had exhibitions in Manhattan and Chicago. America was very welcoming, perhaps too welcoming; Scarfe would receive commissions from magazines and then somehow never quite manage to deliver the work. "It was a kind of arrogance. I thought that it was all going to happen anyway and I didn't have to try very hard."

Then Time asked for a cover of Nixon and sent Scarfe off on the campaign trail. Nixon (perhaps sensibly) had refused to sit for Scarfe, so Scarfe dogged the presidential candidate's footsteps through North Dakota, Montana, and Nevada. Scarfe records that Nixon would throw him a sweaty smile: "Hi, Gerry! Are your pencils sharp today? Ha, ha!"

They were sharp indeed. When Scarfe got back to New York, he sat in his room in the Algonquin and dipped into his bowls of flour and water until the model of Nixon's head assumed its final, awful shape. Then he carried it proudly down Sixth Avenue to the Time-Life Building, where his editor sat expectantly. Previously Time had enjoyed the Dr. Jekyll aspect of the Scarfe personality; that day they got the Mr. Hyde. The editor was appalled: "Surely you can do something a little less offensive?" Scarfe tried, but Time rejected the second version too. He remembers it as "a slap in the face for me.. .because previously everything I'd done had been a rare old success."

Two years later, in 1970, at the time of his last American exhibition, an appearance on the Johnny Carson show gave him another small insight into the difference between British and American sensibilities. Scarfe said that he often felt ideas bottled up inside him that he needed to force out. It was "a bit like being constipated."

Scarfe intends to shock; and however passe that aim might seem, the fact is that he can still manage to do so.

"Uh-uh," said Carson, "that's a no-no."

Thereafter Scarfe and America drifted apart, though within the increasingly parochial cultural geography of Britain his work expanded in all kinds of ways. At a Private Eye party in 1971 he met Jane Asher—another figure from the sixties pantheon, whose talent as an actress was frequently overshadowed by her larger media role as Paul McCartney's girlfriend. Married, he moved into the rock business himself, making an animated feature film, The Wall, with Pink Floyd and touring with the group. His models became grandiose: great balloons that floated over rock audiences—Reagan as a ten-foot-tall Mickey Mouse, Thatcher as a shining steel warrior perched on the tomb of the unemployed. He has designed playing cards for the Victoria and Albert Museum, film title sequences, and stage sets. More recently he has tackled opera design and by this route resurfaced in odd comers of America: Houston, Detroit, Minneapolis.

A successful life, even if judged only by the many imitators he has spawned and his profound influence on the way Britain sees itself. The immensely popular TV show Spitting Image, which bashes politicians relentlessly, owes a lot to him. And yet a certain ruefulness hangs over Scarfe and others of his generation who nearly thirty years ago made their reputation as iconoclasts. The icons have proved very durable. When Harold Macmillan died a little over a year ago, the nation mourned him, not as the old fraud of Scarfe's youth but as a great and revered statesman. Mrs. Thatcher, whom Scarfe finds "truly, truly dreadful," remains remarkably popular. Scarfe's own paper, The Sunday Times, has shifted so comprehensively to the right under Rupert Murdoch's ownership that Scarfe suspects he is the paper's ' 'token voice of dissent." (Murdoch has another phrase for it. On the week of his takeover, Scarfe produced a cartoon of Reagan. "Poor old Ronnie!" Murdoch is reported to have said. "We must get rid of this pinko artist.")

In other words, liberal England is more on the defensive than ever before, and Scarfe has changed the moral and political climate not one jot. A boy shouts "bum" at the vicarage tea party; in the end, is that all it has amounted to?

Some English critics would say yes. Women, especially, find in Scarfe's drawings a great deal of evidence to support their thesis that many Englishmen never quite manage to grow up. And Scarfe himself admits that there is little coherent radicalism in his politics ("I don't believe in any of it, really"), and that there is justice in the accusation that his work plays too much on the same simple note. On the other hand, he has managed to preserve a genuine anger and outrage; preserved it because he doesn't understand it. The asthma, he admits, amounts to no more than a small grope in paperback psychology.

For this anger, we should be grateful. "My drawings are often a cry against that which I detest, and in showing my dislike I have to draw the dislikeable," says Scarfe in his book. "To horrify people with a drawing of the waste of war I must make a horrific drawing of war, and when I come to draw people, their bodies become vehicles for their emotions—greed, lust, cruelty. It is not that I have a dislike of human flesh; it is that I have a dislike of human frailties, and the flesh becomes a medium for depicting them."

This, he agrees, makes him very simplistic. "But I kind of pride myself in saying simple things. It's very simplistic to say 'Why are we spending all this money on bombs when we should be spending it on food for children?' Stupidly simplistic, naively simplistic. But it is also a very good question."