Loving butcher
Patrick Skene Catling
Far Out Isn't Far Enough Tomi Ungerer (MethUen £15, £6.95)
Just as even the most grievously afflicted mourner at a funeral may come away from the graveyard with an enhanced sense of the joy of living, Tomi Ungerer, an indignantly idealistic Alsatian cosmopolite, derives immense artistic zest from contem- plation of the cadavers of animals and the rusty metal of broken machines. They evidently stimulate his appreciation of things that work, including himself.
'An awareness of death,' he once said, 'is one of the main wheels of my mechan- ism . . . I am a multiple schizophrenic. But I cherish the absurd, I cultivate my split personalities. My mind is like a vegetable garden.' Fertilised by Diirer, Holbein, Bosch, Brueghel, Goya, Daumier, Saul Steinberg and others, it has produced a profusion of beautiful, original hybrids, and some monstrous ones. But even the monsters are beautiful in their honesty.
There have been 120 other books, for children and adults, to which Ungerer contributed the pictures or the pictures and the words, before this one, which I think is his most intimately self-expressive book yet. Methuen say this is the first full-length text he has written for adults. It is idiosyn- cratically serious and amusing. His playful use of words is enlivened secretly by his trilinguality (German, French, American). Prospective customers should be warned, however, that some of the water colours are suitable only for adults who are as perceptive and tolerant as children. There are paintings which may be difficult for ordinary squeamish adults to stomach. There is bloodshed of a sort that cannot be justified by politics.
Far Out Isn't Far Enough goes far enough for me, but not long enough; I read it at one sitting and wished for more. It is a tantalisingly selective illustrated diary which Ungerer kept from 1974 to 1975, one of the years he spent with his wife, Yvon- ne, on a small farm on the South-West coast of Nova Scotia, before his best- selling German songbook enabled them to move to a larger, more comfortable farm on the comparably remote South-West coast of Ireland. They live there with their three Irish-born children.
Tomi Ungerer pioneered in Nova Scotia in extreme reaction to his experience as a very successful commercial artist and author of children's books in Manhattan. The artificiality of that place and many of its inhabitants eventually repelled him. Rural life in one of Canada's harsh mari- time provinces was reality with a vengeance and with some compensatory illuminations. The Ungerers lived down to basics and up to them.
'My only hobbies,' Tomi wrote at the time 'are my wife and butchering.'
With his wife's brave help, he attacked the task of butchery with practical zeal that transcended pity, and found that there is nothing like killing and slicing up a pig to help an artist understand it, to draw it, and to love it. Ungerer's arduous ordeals in his abattoir improved profoundly his achieve- ments in his studio. Among the many excellent parts of an altogether excellent book, there is a ten-page sequence depict- ing and explaining the process of butcher- ing a pig.
'He was Yvonne's friend,' Ungerer writes of the victim, 'and everybody knows it is easier to kill an enemy than a friend . . . We gave him a green apple to distract him, the equivalent of a Judas' kiss or the last cigarette.' The words and pictures combine to make a vivid and instructive record of hard work with rope and pulley and knife. Ungerer portrays himself and Yvonne as faceless executioners, focusing one's attention upon the face of the doomed pig.
'The will-power used for this perform- ance gave us pride and glory,' Ungerer comments without irony. Near the end of the book, however, after he has served in vain as midperson to a dying ewe and has been compelled to shoot a fox and a wildcat injured in his traps, he permits one a glimpse of the sensibility that was detect- able from the start.
'Even if I do like to brag about my butchering feats,' he admits, 'I was not really cut out for the job. I, who rescue bugs drowning in puddles, and Yvonne, who wouldn't hurt a spider in our house, had been able to overcome our repugnance for killing, but . .
The weather is usually bad in this book (Nova Scotia is often beset by gales, snow and fog), and the Ungerers' generous neighbours, after generations of inbreed- ing, malnutrition and alcoholism, were depressingly callous even to their own suffering. The message is about determina- tion to survive. Ungerer is a connoisseur of defiance of all systems and rules, natural and man-made.
'I suspect that there is some kind of conspiracy in Canada to dump all unsold stocks of paint in Nova Scotia,' he writes. 'You will find discontinued shades of nausea lilac, loo brown, tonsil pink, Miami turquoise and cesspool green . . . There is one house in town ["Gull Harbor"] that is uniformly painted in one shade of olive. Over the entrance hangs a sign:
"You don't like the color of my house, I don't like the colour of yours either." ' It is unsurprising that Ungerer says: 'My favourite colours are black and white. That is why I like gray best.' Even so, the book is brightened by some prettily multi- coloured notes on the local fauna and flora, such as a red-winged blackbird 'with Freudian penis envy', grasping a cattail. Ungerer is forever fortified by his ability to perceive aphrodisiac implications in all things. For him, Nova Scotia was as good as a funeral.
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