His wit had truth in it
John Gross
THE COLLECTED AND RECOLLECTED MARC edited by Mark Amory Fourth Estate, £25 Mark Boxer was a vivid personality in life, and he remains one in death. To recall him is not just to think of him, but to see him and hear him, and you can readily understand why at least two of the contributors to this memorial volume should have found themselves communing with him in their dreams.
The things which made him special were quicksilver qualities — charm, animation, lightness of touch, wit which was mostly of the moment. They aren't qualities easy to convey in print, and merely listing them is liable to arouse the resistance of anyone who didn't know him. But between them the contributors to The Collected Marc manage to give you a fair idea of where his appeal lay; of what it was like to work with him; of his skill as an editor; of his warmth (not without its irritable intermissions) as a friend; of why they miss him so much.
The most valuable piece in the book is undoubtedly the memoir contributed by his sister, Rosemary Sayigh. No one else was in a position to provide such a detailed account of the young Mark — Mark before Marc — and Mrs Sayigh uses her opportu- nity well. The South London suburbs, some distinguished forebears (including Hugh- lings Jackson the neurologist), a father who liked tinkering with machines, a mother lurching leftwards beyond Fabianism, delicate health, declining family fortunes, off to prep school wearing a bright pink cap, the move to the Home Counties, the
herd of pedigree goats that Mother bought while Father was away during the war, the parental bust-up, the dazzling performance as the heroine of St Joan during his last year at Berkhamsted (it dazzled old Shepherd, the Provost of King's, who was in the audience) — after reading Mrs Sayigh you are left with a precise picture of where, as the Americans say, Mark was coming from. You are also left with the feeling that in some ways he didn't come from anywhere at all: from early on he struck her as self-made, self-contained, determined to go his own way.
Admittedly none of this would be of much interest to someone who wasn't interested in Mark already; but then the greater part of The Collected Marc is devot- ed to his drawings, and, in the unlikely event that you hadn't come across them before, they would be enough in them- selves to make you eager to find out more about him.
`Drawings' here means mostly portraits — some 130 of them, each of them scaled up to fit a full folio page. A few of them use props, or resort to the kind of obvious devices you might find in almost any cartoonist. Kissinger extends one hand in greeting while the other clutches a, dagger behind his back; Margaret Thatcher has a note reading 'No Milk Today' attached to one of her nipples; a diminutive Harold Wilson sits dangling his legs on Marcia Falkender's lap, Archie Andrews to her Peter Brough.
Elsewhere the jokes are more sly. You have to look twice before you realise that Richard Ingrams is sitting at a school-desk, or that R. A. Butler's hands have turned into flippers. A drawing of Roy Jenkins making an after-dinner speech depends for its full effect on the contrasting reactions (His and Hers) of the two tiny figures shown listening to him in the background.
Finally, at its best, the wit is wholly absorbed into the portrait. Features, clothes, posture and expression tell the entire story.
John Gross by Marc
That still leaves room for innuendoes and visual puns. The loose end of the belt on Tom Driberg's raincoat points a forlorn moral; the pen-strokes of the Duke of Westminster's well-brushed eyebrows match the pen-strokes of his dinner-jacket's glistening lapels. But beyond a certain point art defies analysis, and it is hard to say exactly why most of the great successes among the portraits work as well as they do — why the Huw Weldon and the Rees- Mogg and the Vonnegut are definitive; why so much seems to be summed up in the veins on Graham Greene's nose or Antho- ny Burgess's swept-forward hair or the ner- vous gesture with which David Niven fingers his tie.
There are other triumphs: a Hockney with a flavour of Hockney about it, an Edward Heath with a flavour of Toulouse- Lautrec. The Noel Annan is a good deal superior to the representation of the same man in the new 20th-century wing at the National Portrait Gallery; so is the A. J. F. Taylor.
But there are also failures. It may seem odd that an artist who was so often dead on-target couldn't have made a better job of Rupert Murdoch or Mitterrand or even Gerald Kaufman; but the truth is that when it came to drawing caricatures from life, Mark was an uneven performer. (Someone like Nicolas Bentley, though less inspired, had a much more consistent success-rate.) You can't even discern any particular pattern in it. He could hit off characters you wouldn't have said he had much feeling for, and fail to deliver with others who seemed just up his street.
It is a pity, in fact, that The Collected Marc (`collected' only in name) should put quite so much emphasis on portraits of real people. For there was another genre in which Mark did equally well, if not better. He was a master of the imaginary portrait. Ask him to draw a clubman, an advertising executive, a barrister, a mascara-ed dowager, an off-the-shoulder Sloane, and his imagination flowered. He once told his sister that his true ambition was to write a novel, and in a sense he succeeded, to the extent of creating a satisfying novelistic world. The characters in his cartoons and illustrations are unmistakably Marc-ish, and at the same time they constantly remind you of people you've come across in real life (though you usually can't quite say who).
Fortunately, The Collected Marc does contain reminders of this side of his work: some pocket cartoons, some extracts from the never-to-be-forgotten Stringalong strip. But I could have done with a good deal more; and among his other achievements would also like to have seen — in colour, why not? — one or two of the brilliant covers he did for the paperback edition of Anthony Powell's Music of Time. So there is still room for an even more collected Marc; but meanwhile this one is something to be grateful for.
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