Outlines
Alastair Forbes
The Times We Live in: The Cartoons of Marc (Cape E2.50) Scene Changes Osbert Lancaster (John Murray £4.50) Woody Alien's Cartoons: Drawn by Stuart Hample (Robson Books E2.95) On the back cover of The Times We Live In handsome Mark Boxer, bat, coiffure and eyebrows all raised dashingly high, has been caught — but only by the photographer — in full flannelled flower at the wicket during one of those England Their England village cricket matches that more often than not pit one transatlantically-owned Sunday paper's team against another's. One sometimes wonders if he did not actually contrive to get himself rusticated from Cambridge University, in order to be able to retain his reputation as its most irresistible undergraduate until his slowly Dorian Graying hairs are brought down at list to the grave. Choirs of Annan's King's College angels (to say nothing of the lamentations of more mature voices from other colleges, including Boxer's own) sang him southward to a capital which he soon succeeded in bending to the undergraduate tastes it still seems to favour. His considerable visual gifts and natural mastery of typographical fashion, however tatty, soon enabled him to trade in his Cambridge notoriety for London fame. While those two rois faineants, Harold I Macmillan and Harold H Wilson, rested on the seventh day, Boxer laboured with his lay-outs to give their neverhad-it-so-good layabout subjects the revised version of the English Sunday and its Matins, Colour Supplements as consumers Collects for the day.
Then, to keep his sanity amidst the Tuesday to Saturday canine cannibalism of Thomson House, he turned back to cartoons, for which he had always had a flair, taking his colleague the late Nick Tomalin, alias Stringalong, as his nearest and dearest victim. Later William Mogg, with rare discernment, offered him a little patch of page, `twixt Leapman's allotment and Levin's ectoplasmic Niagara, and of this he has made regular good use ever since, with George Melly often giving his pen the wink in the most topical directions. He has won a 'Cartoonist of the Year' Award and in Timeless days to come he is likely to pipe thousands of his loyal AB class readers and admirers over the hills and far away from the Gray's Inn Road.
His present selection is far too short, though one Jubilee drawing of a child pointing at a flagstaff flying the Union Jack and exclaiming, 'Look, Mummy, they've copied your old shopping bag!' says almost all about the trivial times Marc has so amusingly recorded for Mogg's Thunderbox.
Certainly none of the reams of copy lately pouring out of Minehead contained anything so savagely awful as the graffiti he put, in 1976, on each side of a lidless lavatory bowl in some sleazy :cottage% 'Norman hates Jeremy' on one and 'Ring FLE 6000' on the other. No wonder Mogg spiked it.
And none of his larger New Statesman cartoons surpasses his grim picture of Tom Driberg, in belted Burberry, skulking out side a similar convenience. Also unprimed, presumably as offending The Times's Editor and his co-religionists, was one of a Mother Superior rebuking a chinless Sister, in her hand a copy of The Times headlined 'Vatican Wealth Debate' with a : 'Nonsense, child; nobody thinks you married Him for his money'.
By now Boxer has risen to a highly-paid consultancy in the new Clapham High Street HQ of George Weidenfeld, which is perhaps why none of the artist's life-like impressions of the Gipsy Baron are included. The only glancing reference to Wilson's Diimmerung allowed is the coalment of a bemedalled, pram-pushing Not land Nanny to her escorting employer as they pass a news-poster proclaiming 141° title for Royal Baby': 'If only they were friends of that Marcia Falkender'. Boxer's range, like his age and exPeLi' ence, is much over-shadowed by those of 3' Osbert Lancaster who must surely P10vide the sole reason for any civilised perscIri, ever to buy or look at the Daily Express.13°` Scene Changes eschews pocket cartooas, and gives us instead a reflective rehash 01 his more serious artistic comments on the decline of the near West and the near East' as well as a traveller's line drawings ace04; panied by a traveller's lines of prose an', verse. The latter are often of undoubtea excellence and wit, as exemplified IV 'Bavarian Afternoon' which contains an agreeable envoi to the last and best of the Sitwell siblings.
But for this long dead Duke's Pre' sumptuous pile Were yet reserved triumphant final years, Bathed in the sunshine of a Sitwell s smile.
Another Lancastrian afternoon I geatlY liked was the Egyptian, with its The call to prayer is in the air The pale-faced tourists stop and stare At mysteries they cannot share followed by a verse that may or may 11°tt refer to the Cairo war work of that 105 fatal of infidels, Barbara Skelton ConnollY' sometime Weidenfeld. Faultless too see,11/ his lines on the wartime Dublin of rnet present Poet Laureate and his Penelope. i!'s the drawing board his pen is perhaps atlc happiest making fun of those horror-e0', cuts in stone, France's municipal memorau; to the fallen poilus of 1914-18. tb., same, long may his pocket cartoons C°P0tinue to appear, if only to keep Boxer all't the Marc. The cartoons of Woody Alien, Arnemadt saddest-sack of a comic genius since sile,t'" Buster Keaton, are drawn by one Stow; Hample who succeeds in accentuating did resemblance already widely remarked upon, to the Fourth Estate's own Otte prominent Four-Eyes, John Gross of tot Times Lit. Supp., who also seems mucli °' the time to be providing the words witll the balloons that emerge from WoodY mouth. You academics! You'll publish anytili4 — just so you can say you've published.' 'That's a bit harsh.' 'It is? Look how this book is padded 140! pages and two entries in the index. Conon'? pp 1-400. More contents. Vols 2-6.' „ And then again: 'My one regret in aside from the fact that I am not wail' Beatty — is that I'm not an amoeba1451.th amoeba just splits and falls in love wititt another amoeba, then they split and fah love and so on, ad infinitum.'
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