‘Mr Pont, may I introduce you to Miss Austen?’
There is something infinitely touching about a creative artist who dies young, not before displaying sure evidence of a glorious gift but without having time to set up the arching parabola of developing genius. One thinks of that magic group at the beginning of the 19th century — Keats, coughing his heart out in Rome; Shelley, drowned in his crazy yacht off the stormy Ligurian shore; Girtin, about whom Turner said ‘If Tom had lived, I should have starved’; Bonnington, whose watercolours (said Delacroix) ‘shone like jewels’; and the grim and mysterious Géricault, who adored English horses ‘and the fierce Amazons who ride them’. Later there was that elongated, emaciated, evanescent, etiolated, elegant skeleton Aubrey Beardsley, whose tapering hands looked as if they were carved in Arctic alabaster and whose nose was a major work of art in itself.
‘Whom the gods love die young.’ This saying by Plautus scarcely applies today, when everyone seems to live for ever — unless of course God is tiring of the human race, which would not surprise me. Nuns used to tell me, when I was a child of five, that people might die young because God wanted them by his side. I didn’t believe it then and don’t now, sharing the view of Charles Lamb, who wrote so movingly, in prose and verse, of untimely death, that such tragedies demonstrate to us the awful fragility of life and teach us to value each precious moment.
I have been thinking of the case of Graham Laidler (1908-40), the outstanding comic star of Punch in the 1930s, signing his wonderful half-page cartoons ‘Pont’. When I was eight or nine, and trying to imitate the strongly idiosyncratic and stylish line of Fougasse, my father drew my attention to Pont: ‘This fellow is much better and you can learn more from him. Look at how cleverly he draws faces and how much information he conveys in a single little line, especially in the eyes and mouth.’ It was, is, true. There is a drawing Pont published in Punch on 11 September 1940, just after the Nazis, having lost the Battle of Britain, had switched to bombing cities. A clubman lies reading his paper in a deep armchair. Immediately behind him a bomb, having crashed through the ceiling, has made an enormous hole on its way to the basement, and a curious crowd has gathered to peer into the depths. Into this surreal scene, a club servant has entered, to apprise the member of his peril. He answers: ‘I’m perfectly well aware of that,’ and his lips, nose and eyebrows, all rendered exactly in eight tiny lines, convey an impression of disdain, contempt and superiority, combined with self-satisfaction, obstinacy and a kind of unreasonable courage.
The original of this odd work of art, and many others, are to be seen at the Cartoon Gallery in Little Russell Street, a delightful place not well enough known to those who relish the arts. This display of Pont’s work is well served by a magnificent catalogue, which reproduces all the drawings on display, and more, with an admirable accuracy and polish, so that none of the crucial details are lost. Pont was a man who, superficially, the gods appeared to love. He was an only son of a well-off family in Newcastle-on-Tyne, his father running a successful painting and decorating business. He grew up tall and exceptionally good-looking, and on a horse was a commanding figure. His talents as a draughtsman and a coiner of jokes appear to have evolved naturally and effortlessly and with a sparkling flourish, so that the ideas tumbled out ceaselessly, though Pont like all professional humorists had a terror of running out of them. He must have seemed an amazing figure of grace and skill when he first walked into the grey Punch offices in Bouverie Street. Alas, he was not what he seemed, this handsome paragon. Even as a child he had suffered from a tubercular kidney. Much of his life was spent, like the girls from the Chalet School, in the high, dry air of the Tyrol. He seemed always, if faintly, under sentence of death, though its execution was delayed until the second winter of the war when polio carried him off. Today medical science would have saved him for a ripe old age.
As it was, he completed over 400 cartoons and a host of smaller drawings and sketches, virtually all of high quality and many deserving close study. His series on the British character are the most famous and made him a celebrity even while he still lived: more than a celebrity, indeed — somebody much loved and treasured. The amount of skill that went into his work is phenomenal. One drawing shows a working-class couple in their kitchen with their eight children playing uproariously, the ceiling hung high with drying clothes, the wife reading the gossip column: ‘I see the ShippleyMelvilles are staying in their villa at Juan-lesPins.’ To which the husband, who has his cap on but removes his pipe to speak, replies: ‘Funny! I thought it was Cannes.’ The organisation of this complex drawing is high art. So too is the beautiful design of a Tube in the rush hour in the British Character series, entitled Patience in Adversity. The intertwining of the squashed figures, and the counterpoint of resignation, stoicism and irritation on their faces, took some doing. I also recommend close inspection of another item in the British Character series, showing a big dinner party and entitled Absence of the Gift of Conversation. This tells 12 admirable little stories.
Pont’s work embraces the world of art deco in England, the world of the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, the Dorchester in Park Lane, Philip Sassoon at Port Lympne, Evelyn Waugh in Metroland, Graham Greene in the British tropics, the Sitwells and Walton, Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men and Noël Coward’s Blythe Spirit. It is true that Pont seems fixed on the upper or rather upper-middle classes, the people who in those days still dressed for dinner and wore white ties to go out, still employed those useful figures in telling a cartoon story, the butler, the valet and the ladies’ maid. But of course doing men in tails is more fun to draw, and makes a point more emphatic. The little foreigner in The British Character: Importance of Not Being an Alien is made more isolated by being placed in a circle of white-tied gents two foot taller than he is. But Pont can do the cocktail party rig too, as in The Importance of Not Being an Intellectual, where the ferocious X Trapnell figure is inspiring genuine fear in the ladies with fox-furs and little hats, and the men in Leslie and Roberts double-breasted suits.
Some of the best drawings on display came from his trip to America. He does New Yorkers striding down Fifth Avenue with extraordinary subtlety and truth. There is a little rear view of a bell-boy trotting down a hotel corridor with armfuls of luggage, as good as Rembrandt at his best. I missed my favourite, though, set in a Highland glen, The British Character: Inability To Understand Machinery. An Englishman, kneeling down beside a broken-down car, raises his arms to heaven in despair, while a sympathetic half-circle of immense long-haired cattle gather round. We become very fond of Pont cartoons, which are pure humour without malice or nastiness or crudity of any kind, until they seem like a personal possession. I can only compare him to Jane Austen in his ability to twine his spirit round our hearts. What fun for him to live in her age, or she in his — and meet to compare notes, and share laughter. The British Character: Anxiety to Find Husbands for Unmarried Daughters. What a Pont cartoon that would make!
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