Cartoonists: A Vision of Cosmic Disgust

A sickly smile frozen on her face, her tunic emblazoned with the words “Britain for sale,” Queen Elizabeth sits astride a mangy, straw-filled nag representing the dwindling British Empire. Holding a bloody object aloft with skeletal fingers, his eyes sunk into black sockets, Charles de Gaulle trumpets: “Le bladdeur, c’est moi.” In a prayer ful lotuslike position, a Buddhist appears to be disintegrating in flame and thick black smoke. But that nose, that chin —yes, it is President Lyndon Johnson himself who is ablaze.

With drawings such as these, Gerald Scarfe has earned a reputation as the most savagely satirical political cartoon ist in Britain today. In just 3½ months with the London Daily Mail, he has managed to compile a gallery of unforgettably repulsive portraits. Gathered together in a new book, Gerald Scarfe’s People, his public figures exhibit bodies that are grotesquely distorted. They drip, ooze and melt. Their faces suggest a bundle of worms; their teeth are shaped like tombstones. Unusual physical characteristics — from Lyndon John son’s massive ears to Ian Smith’s droopy eyes — are mercilessly caricatured. Everyone is hideously diseased in Scarfe’s bitter version of the human condition. His is a vision of such cosmic disgust that critics are in the habit of comparing him to Bosch, Goya, George Grosz and an 18th century British cartoonist named James Gillray, whose work was often so repulsive that he could not get anyone to publish it.

Relief from Asthma. A slender, quiet man of 30, who looks anything but ferocious, Scarfe protests that he does not mean to insult anyone with his cartoons. “I like to see how far I can stretch a face and still leave it recognizable,” he says. “I’m captivated by the human figure, although I often find it repulsive.” He insists that he enjoyed a normal upper-middle-class upbringing in London, even though he spent most of his first 19 years bedridden with asthma. During that time—when he started drawing to relieve his frustration—he developed what he calls his “sarcastic outlook on life and an insatiable tendency to exaggerate.”

When he finally recovered from asthma and went to work for an advertising agency, he almost wished that he was back in bed. “This was the worst period I’d ever been through,” he recalls. “I hate required drawing—doing things the way people want me to.” He quit after a year and began to freelance. Despite the fact that he had never received any formal training, his sketches were snapped up fast by almost every newspaper and magazine in London. Working out of an attic filled with spurs from medieval armor, Scarfe today produces a steady stream of subtle sketches and nightmarish “phantasmagoria” as well as cartoons. “Drawing is a painful process,” he says. “I have to get myself in a trance. I just concentrate and eat steaks for several days. That usually gets me through.”

Neither Right nor Left. Some observers feel that as a cartoonist, Scarfe exhibits an almost fatal flaw: they argue that he lacks moral discrimination. “A great talent,” says Punch Editor Bernard Hollowood, “but he’s too much concerned with nostrils, nipples and navels.” Scarfe could reply that his critics are too cocksure of their own politics and resent his lack of dogma. “I try to avoid any political bias in my cartoons,” says Scarfe, who does indeed heap abuse on every shade of opinion. “I’m neither for the right nor for the left. I simply must deride what I consider unjust.”