Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination

by Ghislaine Kenyon

  Schools

  Blake’s engagement with schools in France has been something that means a great deal to him. During the 1980s and 90s Blake criss-crossed France on such missions. He would turn up in Marseilles, Metz, Orléans, Bourg-en-Bresse or Limoges, and make his way across the grey-surfaced playground with its regulation plane or chestnut tree to the primary school entrance. Inside he would talk about his books to the children and teachers, perhaps also draw for them. Blake found this experience to be a particularly organic way of discovering France and the French, for here he was calling in on adults and children in their normal working environment. Sometimes he would be put up in the homes of teachers or families and he remembers the charm of a teenage girl returning from a holiday in the US, having learned to say ‘awesome’ in the most perfect American accent. To such things could be added the pleasurable feeling that, even though the people he was visiting were all unknown to him, they, on the other hand, knew a lot about him and appreciated his work, so there was already a kind of established and warm rapport. So efficiently did his reputation precede him that when he recently visited a school in Aytré, in the Charente-Maritime, wearing a pair of beige shoes instead of his habitual white ones, a disappointed teacher exclaimed: ‘Mais Monsieur Blake, où sont les chaussures blanches?’ (But Mr Blake, where are the white shoes?)

  Language

  The Gallimard adventure was in the end to have an even more profound impact on Blake’s life and work. Blake began to realize that his spoken French was, in his opinion at least, still too schoolboy for the communications he needed to have with the Gallimard editorial and production teams as well as in more outward-facing situations such the Montreuil Book Fair. He decided to take conversation lessons, which he took seriously, and which therefore had results. He also then embarked on a journey through French literature: by today (2014) he has perhaps read even more widely in French than in English, somehow being more interested in contemporary French literature than its English counterpart. Christine Baker once said: ‘Quentin has read more books in French than many French people.’ He listens to French radio and watches as much French TV as he does British, and he is prepared to use his now excellent French to address audiences of hundreds in lecture theatres, or thousands on the radio or television, on the many occasions he has been asked to do so. Listening to him speaking French today, the language is delivered, as it is in English (though with the speech a shade slower), with the same deliberation without excessive underlining; it is flowing like his drawings, and as colloquial as they are, and the little hesitation devices (the er’s and ah’s) have a proper French timbre. Thanks to his extensive reading, his speech is also eloquent and literary, and he often delights and amazes his French interlocutors when he quietly murmurs into the conversation a word such as ‘désinvolture’ (a word that translates uncomfortably into English as ‘casualness’). It’s possible to speculate here about what his French-speaking may mean for Blake. The Czech proverb ‘Learn a new language and get a new soul’ says something about a kind of freedom from the perceived self that mastery of a second language can bring, and which has been described by many psychologists. The non-native speaker can use a second language to express aspects of their personality, which may be more satisfyingly and differently articulated using words or expressions in the second language.

  Blake chose to learn French again as an adult: he knew it would help him in his work and so the learning of it was full of moments of pleasure and achievement. In the sense that when a person speaks another language he takes on ‘someone else’s words’ and makes them his own, it is not so different from acting. Maybe the francophone Blake is another version of the actor manqué, who joins seamlessly with Blake, the boy who acted at school and in the army, and Blake the mimic, who pretended to be a frog and made his RCA students helpless with laughter in a Paris restaurant.

  It is not just the French language that Blake has loved and read and practised all these years. We have seen that his family connections with the country were full of meaning, and how attractive its art and culture were to him from an early age. It is also the territory that beckons to him, its towns and villages, and its people, the way they shop, eat, drink and celebrate. As with many of his generation, for Blake France was the first bit of ‘abroad’ after England and even in a period when the British were discovering Italy, Spain and Yugoslavia, he tended to go back there for holidays, taking a car with friends and renting houses or staying in modest hotels. All of which culminated in a wish to buy a property there, which, thanks to the financial success of his collaborations with Dahl, he was able to do in 1990. He does admit though that he was almost put off the purchase by the then daunting prospect of the protracted uncertainties involved in buying a property abroad.

  Chez lui

  Blake’s first French visit had been to Bordeaux, and since then he has been particularly drawn to the south-west region. Holidays in and around La Rochelle had introduced him to the Charente-Maritime, and its flat coastal landscape was attractive to him: it’s a place of wide skies, egrets, herons and storks; views where concrete water towers, Romanesque churches and agricultural buildings seem to punctuate the green expanses with equal monumental nobility; an undramatic environment, dotted with signs of oyster cultivation: the oystermen’s modest wooden cabins with their red-tiled roofs and cheerfully painted woodwork, and an endless mosaic of claires, those rectangular ponds, formerly salt-pans, where oysters from the Marennes region are refined for the final stage of their complex life-journey to the French dinner table. Blake decided to buy a property there and spent time looking for the right house but, as usual, the search itself was not a wasted experience: one rejected house became the setting, and inspiration, for his book Cockatoos, the story of a not-so-bright professor with a collection of pet cockatoos who outwit him by finding ingenious hiding places all around the home. Blake finally settled on a maison bourgeoise in a village on the Arvert peninsula north of Royan, where he has spent several months every year. This house and its location seem to contain and represent some of the things about France Blake is closest to. The village is comfortable but unremarkable, with few notable or historic buildings. But it has a thriving primary school, two churches, a minimarket and a bar – it feels open for business in a way that many shuttered French villages do not. A singular path leads down to the river, along which, in the season, the oystermen open their cabin doors and set out little round tables with rusty chairs, where shell-fish can be taken, with a glass of local white wine.

  The house itself, stone, with pale blue shutters, still bears the traces of its previous owners: a stretch of wallpaper with tiny orange and blue flowers, the rambling attic where owls once found a nesting place, the pine-clad laundry room – intended or not, it’s as if, by leaving them unreplaced, Blake takes on some of their Frenchness by osmosis. A blue-checked kitchen where Blake cooks, in simple, French style, leads to the calm, dark-wood-panelled dining room. Here the remains of breakfast may form an unintentionally beautiful still life, lit by the sun pouring in through the French doors.

  Outside on three sides of the house rambles an English-looking garden with lawns, fruit trees, roses and flower beds; only a clump of robust palm trees suggests the southern latitude of this place.

  This is an area where the French holiday – small towns by the water, where the Bay of Biscay meets the Seudre estuary, fringed by campsites in the pine woods, and little villas called ‘Brise du Soir’, ‘Nos Ancêtres’ and even one which, according to Blake, he saw once but has never managed to find again, the unforgettably named ‘Hasty Weekend’. Blake will choose a bar for his visiting friends, perhaps by the sea, but, just as likely, it will be one in an ordinary corner of the town, with nothing particular to recommend itself to the uninitiated. This will be a place to drink a coffee or a demipanaché, or eat an ice-cream, at a street-facing table of course. Because the view of French town life going about its business, is as attractive to Blake as any perfect beach perspecti
ve, perhaps more so. Sitting with him in such a place I have sometimes caught a glimpse of him, apparently looking purposefully at (but never sketching) the small details that may later find their way into his drawings and give them their character: no traces of heavy realism here, but a light-touched authenticity which is all the more convincing: the design of a wicker basket, the angle of the shopper’s head closely inspecting a fish in a market stall.

  The café pause might be followed by a walk along the wild white sandy Atlantic beach, whatever the season, but probably not a dip in the sea, even in hot summer. Then, later on, a dinner might be had in one of the many plain-speaking establishments of the area. Blake enjoys these meals, the food of course, especially traditional dishes that his mother or grandmother would have produced if they had been French, rognons de veau in a mustardy sauce, or a guinea fowl with mashed potato. But he seems to enjoy every aspect of the restaurant experience, from the waiter’s deft bottle-opening manoeuvre, to the preposterous Wild West painting on the wall, to the napkins, tortured into absurd folds for the sake of bourgeois elegance, to the fact that someone actually spent time on this activity.

  Paris

  When not in the Charente-Maritime, Blake also has reasons to be in Paris. Just sniffing the air would be one, but more often his work takes him there. He might be curating an exhibition, as he did in 2005 when the Musée du Petit Palais Museum reopened its doors after a major refurbishment and invited him to select works from their reserve, animated by his own drawings on the walls. Or perhaps he will be working on a hospital project: a scheme for the Hôpital Armand-Trousseau, a children’s hospital in the unfashionable 12ème district, was a demanding example in 2008, involving Blake (then 75 years old) in trips across Paris, often by Métro and on foot, followed by lengthy meetings with staff and patients, all in French of course.

  Blake has also recently shown his own work in the Paris Galerie Martine Gossieaux in the Rue de l’Université. This gallery has for 20 years specialized in the graphic arts, in particular the work of Sempé, and Blake’s recent exhibition there was of a series of works called Nos Compagnons (2014). These images felt particularly at home on the Left Bank – sophisticated, sexy, witty and intellectual.

  And the Left Bank is also where Blake himself feels at home, reassuringly close to the Gallimard Jeunesse mother-ship, also in the Rue de l’Université, and to his favoured small hotels and restaurants: Les Marronniers, Le Petit Zinc, and, in the past, the now sadly departed and poetically named Temps Perdu.

  Like the Charente-Maritime, the Left Bank seems also to resonate well with Blake’s personality, although addressing a different aspect of it. Not for Blake the painter’s Paris of Montmartre – he is more likely to be nosing out Daumier lithographs in a print dealer’s in the Rue de l’Université. Although he certainly does visit exhibitions – the Musée du Luxembourg and, for sentimental reasons, the Musée du Petit Palais are both favourites – his preference these days is to spend time in the bookshops of Saint-Germain, establishments with names such as L’Écume des Pages, an atmospheric small shop with very tall shelves, which stays open until midnight most evenings, where he might pick up anything from the rare Simenon novel he has managed not to have read, to something by the art historian Daniel Arasse; he might equally be found in the similarly poetically and nautically named La Hune (The Crow’s Nest), with its refined stock of literature, arts and humanities books. In between visits to these two, also geographically between them, a porto blanc might be taken at one or other of those icons of Left-Bank culture, the Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots.

  Connections with literary Paris are also often excuses for Blake to be there. Dinner, perhaps, with his friend the prize-winning author Daniel Pennac, in his book-lined dining room at his home in the bustling northern suburb of Belleville. The two men have a great deal in common although they are opposite as personalities: Pennac the larger-than-life extrovert, and the more reticent Blake, who Pennac has beautifully described: ‘Il y a chez lui une gravité et un quant à soi à mon avis infranchissable.’ (There is a seriousness about him, and a self-possession that is, in my opinion, unbreachable.) And these differences may in part account for the mutual admiration, which clearly exists. They are both teachers who left schoolteaching to ‘do’ education differently, Pennac (after 20 years in the classroom), through his writing and public speaking, and Blake, through his books and, increasingly, works beyond the page, both share a humane approach to life, which is supremely contained and expressed in their work.

  Pennac has terrifying experiences of the worst excesses of the French education system, which used fear and rote learning to cram the ossified canon into the heads of reluctant learners, dunces (‘cancres’) as Pennac identified himself. As a result he became a French teacher working in a tough secondary school, knowing what it would be like to be the class failure. He devised ways of encouraging that student to want to read books, the key to all learning, in Pennac’s opinion. His first tactic was to read to students for an hour at the end of the day, and ask no questions after the session (‘A book is not an exam, it is a gift’, he says in Comme un Roman, his first book about education and for which Blake illustrated the cover for the English translation called The Rights of the Reader). After a few of these readings, he found that the most cynical of the class illiterates would come up to him at the end of class, asking, ‘Who was this Roald Dahl then? And did he write anything else?’ and this student would be saved.

  Blake did not suffer from this kind of education; on the contrary, he seems to have been a model pupil who had no difficulties in accessing literature, even though there were no books at home. But he has true empathy with those characters who don’t make the grade or who are rejected, as his works such as Clown demonstrate. And he shares Pennac’s belief in the essential role played by high-quality ‘real’ books (as opposed to publishers’ reading schemes): compelling stories and illustrations which will motivate children to learn to read in the first place and then to become lifelong readers. Both Blake and Pennac have written introductions to each other’s work and both praise a spirit that each recognizes in the other, and which somehow transcends the work itself.

  Pennac writes, in his introduction to Nous les Oiseaux (The Life of Birds):

  Les dessins que Quentin Blake nous propose dans ce livre ne sont pas des illustrations. Ils ne sont pas nés d’une lecture, ni d’une observation, mais d’une vision. Chacun est une oeuvre à part entière. On pourrait écrire une nouvelle, voire un roman, sur la plupart d’entre eux . . . (The drawings Quentin Blake presents us with in this book are not illustrations. They are not born from reading, nor from observation, but from a vision. Each one is a work on its own. One could write a novella, or even a novel about most of them . . .)

  Likewise, Blake writes on Pennac in his foreword to School Blues: ‘There aren’t many books on education, I imagine, that affect one’s feelings as Pennac’s do . . . What he brings to the situation of the no-hoper is the prospect of hope.’

  More recently Blake also visited Paris to carry out a duty that very few Britons are ever asked to do. In the UK when the state honours one of its citizens, the Queen or other members of the Royal Family pin the ribbon and medal on to the proud recipient’s chest, but in France honorands are (delightfully) able to nominate the person they would most like to decorate them. Joann Sfar was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2011 and his obvious choice for the ‘decorator’ was Blake, whose work he had so long admired: in Caravan he draws/writes about the prospect of his first meeting with Blake. The occasion was an interview about the Roald Dahl books commissioned by the cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles.

  This visit is, Sfar says:

  as if Father Christmas in person was granting me an audience. Some drawings you have looked at since childhood help you to learn about reality, how to make the world less frightening. Ever since I was small . . . I’ve learned to see things through Quentin Blake’s . . . eyes. [His] dra
wings have this wonderful ethical power: they help me to put up with my fellow human-beings, love them even sometimes. Oh eternal God, deliver us from priests but protect the people who draw.