A CARTOONIST LOOKS AT LIFE AND AT WAR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 57, 26 July 1940, Page 18

A CARTOONIST LOOKS AT LIFE AND AT WAR

David Low Discusses His Work

HE days of the Raemaker Cartoons are over. In the last war the men of the Indian ink and the soft pencil drew horrors. Now the public is hardened to horror, and wants its cartoons raising arguments or probing the sense of things. And the days of Britannia and John Bull, La Belle France, the German eagle, and the Russian bear, are over too. Or so it seems to David Low, and where he has led during the last 20 years, others have sooner or later followed. He talks of his work, and his stars, as he seems to regard them, and cartoons in wartime, in an article published in a recent issue of the English pocket "Magazine, "Lilliput." He does not find that this is a war of rival imperialisms, and he says, in fact, that "the British lion, and so on, are absolute junk." The John Bull of Punch he regards as the symbol of "smug, narrow patriotism," and he pays the average Briton the compliment of maintaining that he is not fighting for such things, but against them. No Horror, Either Low does not go in for horror any more than for jingoism. He not only finds that horror does not go down with the modern public, but he decides that it is politically ineffective, It is, after all, he suggests, exactly what the horrorspecialists like best; to be portrayed as beasts of prey. It gives them exactly

the propaganda build-up they want, feeds their vanity, and shows them profitable returns in an awed world. More damaging is the suggestion that they are donkeys, and Low has personal proof of this. "I shall always remember Hitler," he says, "not as the majestic, monstrous myth of the propaganda build-up, but as the sissy who whined to the British Foreign Office about his dignity when I ran him for a while as a comic strip." Low would like a big, dark, scowling man for a war-lord. He finds Mussolini most drawable of all the dictators, although he points out that Benito has to stand high up on a dais to be impressive, for he is short, and that the chin he sticks out so far is really rather fat. Stalin’s Moustache Stalin’s moustache Low likes very much, It dominates the whole landscape, he says, so that Stalin in the cartoons inevitably becomes about seven feet high and broad in proportion. It is all the more disappointing then, to find that in real life he is a "middle-sized, homely, amiable-looking old gent." Hitler ‘does not come up to these specifications, and, as a cartoonist, Low says he will welcome the day when Goebbels purges all his friends and becomes Public Enemy No. 1. Goebbels is good to draw, in good firm lines, Chamberlain he liked, and Halifax too, although he found them both "static, one-pose" men. Lloyd George,

with his many gestures and volatility, Was a joy compared with them. He Likes Churchill Best Best of all the British leaders, Low likes Churchill. Usually they are reluctant to be picturesque, but Churchill, "from his earliest political days, has studied his own caricatures and done his best to live up to them." Daladier’s face was meat for Low, but he was disappointed in the ill-fitting suits the French Prime Minister wore. Apart from a little sadness, Low found that Daladier’s face had the strength and striking characteristics of a Napoleon, but it needed better support from his tailor. Defining what he considers his social duties, Low says he believes part of a cartoonist’s function is to be a clown, which "is as it should be at a time like this." But his clowning is divided from the clowning of the purely humorous artists by an underlying satire which implies a contrast with something better. His is "a highly moral calling, that of deflating the flocks of humbugs, hypocrites, and incompetents that seem always to grow and flourish like the green bay tree in time of war." He draws for a public that can see the joke. "The strength of the British people," he says, "is that it can see the joke and purge itself of bitterness in so doing. That, to me, as a student of psychology of humour, is a test of the greatness of a people."