Backward!
Benny Green
Drawn from Memory Ernest H. Shepard (Penguin 50p)
The death of Ernest Shepard reminds me of a tiny but deeply revealing incident concerning his reputation. One morning in September 1958 1 opened the Observer and read an angry attack on Shepard by Geoffrey Grigson which had a comically deflating effect on my spirits. I should explain that I had joined the Observer only a few weeks before, and was still so elated by the achievement that it had never occurred to me that everything in its arts pages might not be the last word in wisdom, compassion and, even more priceless, commonsense. Indeed, so abject was I in the face of the experience and erudition which I took to reside in that newspaper's every contributor that there was no subject, apart from the one they had hired me to write about, jazz, regarding Which I was not ready to debase myself before the papal infallibility of superior minds. But then I saw Grigson's article on Shepard, and perceived that there was not 00e subject but two about which I was better qualified to speak than some, and that this second area of erudition concerned those working classes whose presence is conspicuous only by its complete absence from Shepard's work. When Shepard died last week, the Times obituary paraphrased Grigson's attack, Which indicates, I suppose, that it has
acquired some notoriety since he first unleashed it. The obituary quoted Grigson's description of Shepard's drawing as 'splendidly insipid', and went on to say that Grigson had condemned 'the world of A. A. Milne and Pooh, a world of nannies and nurseries, of good families who lived in the right squares, of children whose daddies knew about trout, mayfly and expensive rods, their mamas about trugs and delphiniums, the world of Us and the Other Peopte'. What interested me at the time about the assault was its air of orthodoxy, of being the received intellectual opinion of the period.
But the masses of the Milne-Pooh era hardly knew what intellectuals were talking about when they belaboured the likes of Shepard for having had the effrontery to view the infant world from the sanctity of private bedrooms. Just as the Old Etonian Orwell unwittingly insulted every son of toil by implying, in those silly-wise monuments of misguided virtue, the Billy Bunter and Bertie Wooster essays, that the masses are feeble-minded enough to be swept away by light fiction, so Grigson makes the mistake of assuming that those without fishing rods will be envious of their betters. On the contrary, the working classes in my inexhaustible experience of them never saw much wrong with privilege. What always troubled them was how privilege was doled out.
As to the world which Shepard depicts in his sketches, it is at least a real world of which he had intimate, first-hand knowledge. His very charming volume of autobiography, much more accomplished, incidentally, than anything A. A. Milne ever wrote, is proof, if proof were needed, that when Shepard drew his cosy, well-fed world with its apple cheeks and its plenitude of toys and chocolate, he was merely doing what moralists never tire of advising us to do, which is to tell it the way it was. They were literally a family group, these mild, middle-class romancers; Shepard, whose daughter married an editor of Punch, drew the famous illustrations for The Wind in the Willows, whose author's epitaph was composed by a cousin who one day published a book called The Prisoner of Zenda.
Meanwhile, what of the proles exposed to Shepard's fiendish propaganda ? Well, we were not so addle-brained that Orwell, Grigson and company need have bothered their heads about us. We extracted from Frank Richards, and Wodehouse, and Milne and many others, what was relevant, that is to say, what seemed to us to be true to nature, and we slung out the rest with the callousness of honest schoolboys. Shepard's people we rejected as cissies; I blush to this day to think of the foul parodies we sang of 'Christopher Robin is saying his prayers' and 'They're Changing the Guard at Buckingham Palace'. I never met anyone resembling Christopher Robin, but I have seen the likeness of Toad residing on several arts sub-committees, and there have been countless Eeyores who composed fourth leaders for the most elevated publications.
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