BOOKS
Punch Drunk
By BERNARD LEVIN WHAT is art, growled Samuel Butler, that it should have a sake? So we might ask, faced with Mr. R. G. G. Price's A History of Punch*: what is Punch that it should have a history? There is no doubt what the publishers think it is, for they make so bold as to give their opinion in the first sentence of the blurb : 'For 116 years Punch has kept its position as the world's leading humorous magazine.' The publishers, however, are wrong : compared to the New Yorker or Simplicissimus, not to speak of the back page of Le Canard Enchaing, it is, and always• has been, second-rate, laggard and nerveless.
Cuctillus non facit monachuin; but there is no reason to suppose that Mr. Price seriously dis- sents from his publishers' opinion. His book was not commissioned by the proprietors, Messrs. Bradbury and Agnew, and is not a 'house bio- graphy; but Mr. Price is one of the most regular of today's contributors to Punch, and would be more (or less) than human if he were to adopt the view, which seems to me as plain as the nose on Mr. Punch's face, that the paper is awful, that with only the briefest of interregna it has always been awful, and that whether you think Mr. Muggeridge has been its saviour or its destroyer Tuesday's news that he is to leave does not make it any the less (or more) certain that it will go on being awful. Yet here is Mr. Price with a solid, scholarly Work of nearly 400 pages (and protesting never- theless that he has had to leave out a great deal of its history), and there, sixty-two years ago, was H. M. Spielmann with an even bigger history of the paper, and there, in the Managing Director's office, is an Agnew, just as there was in the last century. Its survival is as great a mystery as the survival of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, With which it has more in common than a ten- dency to sing flat; yet it has survived, and not merely survived but actually, in recent years, in- creased its circulation.
Nor, at any rate on the surface, is its survival to be accounted for by an obstinate refusal to change or adapt itself to new conditions, new tastes or new jokes. Although when we look a little deeper we can see that Punch has in fact Changed little over the years—I almost wrote cen- turies, the thing is insidious—the superficial differ- ences between the Punch that could attack the monarchy in terms not merely violent but intelli- gent (it objected to Victoria's lack of interest in the arts) and the Punch in which the terrible Bernard Partridge flourished (Mr. Price's apolo- gia for Partridge is warm but unconvincing) are considerable. The paper, in fact, has rolled with the punches (that one must be almost good * A HISTORY OF PUNCH. By R. G. G. Price. (Collins, 30s.) enough for Punch), and has displayed, over the years, a remarkable facility for sniffing the wind and galloping off in a new direction whenever the wind has changed. True, it has never dreamed of galloping off before the wind has changed; Punch's attitude has always been second-hand. Indeed, herein lies the clue to its survival; if it had been one step ahead or two steps behind, it would have died, but to be one short step behind was the formula which enabled it to survive.
Well, it has survived. But here we are, discus- sing not its survival but a book about it. Would anybody think of writing a book about the Strand Magazine or John o' London's, if they were still with us? Did anybody think of writing a book about them when they were?
Ask Punch, ask Mr. Price what is so special about this paper, and the answer you will get is that Punch is a National Institution. (The capital letters are Mr. Price's.) It speaks, we shall be told, for something real and durable in the British character, just as Pont's famous series mocked at that character. In so far as British public opinion —not the rapid, volatile turnover of election- times or fashions or favourite entertainers, but the granite bed in which character is set—has changed, Punch has changed too. Thus, confident that whatever the looking-glass of his newspaper, or the Zeppelins, or hunger-marches, or Hitler might show him, the reader of Punch has always been able to rest confidently in the knowledge that every Wednesday, rain and shine, he would be presented not only with a selection of his and his father's favourite jokes but with a mirror in which he could admire a reflection of his own virtues, with an occasional reference to one or two of his more venial sins (Punch has always been very hot about those who leave litter behind them, especially the picnicking classes) to enable him, with a mild tut-tut, akin to that given by a man in front of a roaring fire as the snowy gale beats against the well-shuttered windows, to go on admiring that reflection.
Punch has indeed changed with the times. But the times with which it has changed have always, alas, been out of joint. Decade in and decade out, Punch has appealed to everything uncivilised in its readers' characters, to the most unthinking, stale part of their minds, to every silly, tired generalisation, every nasty, smug prejudice. Foreigners, individually and collectively, modern women and modern art, delicacy, quietism, national modesty, subtlety, humane and lasting values—these are the things that, first under the influence of Tenniel (perhaps the worst single influence Punch has ever had) and in later years under the full, frightful sway of Owen Seaman, for whom not even the kindly Mr. Price can find anything good to say, Punch nagged away at, ever more shrilly and—happily—ever more in- effectively. (Punch, after all, has never really frightened the nasty French, or Germans, or pacifists, or Socialists; they have gone their nasty way in bland unconcern at the rage they were provoking in the breast of what Mr. Timothy Shy christened 'the National Merrie-Morrie.') It is not simply a question of politics, for the paper has been radical and firmly Liberal in its time : it is a matter of attitudes. That is why the emphasis has sometimes been on the cartoons and some- times on the letterpress, and why, when some time after the end of the First World War even Punch saw that the worst excesses of jingoism would no longer pay, the nastiness gave way to a wishy- washy, middle-class narrowness of mind, of silly, empty uselessness, until, as Mr. Price says, the paper 'did arouse a frenzied and deadly loyalty among bores, the naive and the prematurely old.'
All of which is not to say that fine work has not been done in Punch. Artists like May, Keene and Leech and writers like Grossrnith (The Diary of a Nobody is probably the best thing that has ever appeared in its pages, and the editor of the time managed to miss the point of it) have done work for Punch that has forced itself out of the volumes and into an enduring life of its own. But the tone of Punch, from the time the early radi- calism faded until the moment when the Great Anarch hove upon the scene in 1953, has been something that I hope the historians of 2057 will not lean too heavily upon.
It was Mr. Muggeridge who changed all that. Though the paper today is as unreadable as ever, and though the wishy-washy attitudes are begin- ning to creep back into, this time, the cartoons (Brockbank is probably Punch's biggest present disaster), it is at any rate civilised. The civilisation of Punch was Mr. Muggeridge's achievement; he made it into a home fit for Mr. Wodehouse to write in, a paper where the mind and the spirit were not simply there for the deriding. Punch, today, is often foolish, usually wrong, and almost always boring; but it is never nasty, and for banishing the nastiness the credit must go to Mr. Muggeridge. Will it return now he is gone?
Somehow, as one closes Mr. Price's en- tertaining, useful, honest volume, one hears more than the thud of the cover; one hears a distant bell tolling. And if there is anything in the belief that Punch mirrors something deep in the charac- ters of the nation that has read it for 116 years, send not to ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls, Mr. Punch, for thee.
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