<?page no="0"?> Popular Fiction Studies Detlev Gohrbandt An Apology for Pictures Studies in Popular Illustrated Narrative in Europe, 1918-1939 <?page no="1"?> An Apology for Pictures <?page no="2"?> Popular Fiction Studies edited by Eva Parra-Membrives (†) and Albrecht Classen volume 8 <?page no="3"?> Detlev Gohrbandt An Apology for Pictures Studies in Popular Illustrated Narrative in Europe, 1918-1939 <?page no="4"?> DOI: https: / / doi.org/ 10.24053/ 9783823395645 © 2024 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Überset‐ zungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Alle Informationen in diesem Buch wurden mit großer Sorgfalt erstellt. 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Internet: www.narr.de eMail: info@narr.de Druck: Elanders Waiblingen GmbH ISSN 2197-6392 ISBN 978-3-8233-8564-6 (Print) ISBN 978-3-8233-9564-5 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-8233-0517-0 (ePub) Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. <?page no="5"?> 1 9 1.1 9 1.2 17 1.3 42 2 59 2.1 60 2.2 70 2.3 86 2.4 97 3 121 3.1 121 3.2 138 3.2.1 139 3.2.2 162 3.2.3 181 3.2.4 201 3.3 214 3.3.1 222 3.3.2 241 3.3.3 255 3.4 264 3.4.1 268 3.4.2 274 3.4.3 277 4 287 4.1 290 Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How this study was born and grew up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts . . . . Models for the cultural study of the illustrated book . . . . . . . . Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850- 1932 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Techniques and economics of book illustration . . . . . . . . . . . . Art and ethics of the illustrated book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Components of the book reform movement in Germany . . . . Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan . . . . . . Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series . . . . . The many meanings of “popular” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fayard’s Le Livre de Demain (1923-1947) . . . . . . . . . . . . J. Ferenczi & Fils: Le Livre Moderne Illustré . . . . . . . . . . The Grand Prix Gustave Doré and the rules of illustration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Librairie Hachette and Les Grands Écrivains . . . . . German illustrated book series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Illustrated fiction in the Insel-Bücherei . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Samuel Fischer: Fischers Illustrierte Bücher . . . . . . . . . . . Kurt Wolff: Die schwarzen Bücher and other series . . . . Illustrated fiction series in Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John Lane The Bodley Head . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chatto & Windus and the Phoenix Library . . . . . . . . . . . Penguin and the Penguin Illustrated Classics . . . . . . . . . The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kinds of ornament and illustration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . <?page no="6"?> 4.2 305 4.3 333 5 355 5.1 356 5.2 372 5.3 406 6 433 439 453 461 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book . . Verbal and visual signs in The Patriot’s Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . Case studies in writers and illustrators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Five illustrated versions of Flaubert’s «-Un Cœur simple-» (Trois Contes) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Illustrating an argument: verbal and visual satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God . . . . . . . . . . Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world . . . Afterword: Some conclusions and an outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography of Secondary Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selective Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents <?page no="7"?> Sir Philip Sidney on the philosopher, the historian, the poet and the perfect picture The philosopher […] and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example. But both, not having both, do both halt. For the philosopher, setting down with thorny argument the bare rule, is so hard of utterance and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him till he be old before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest. For this knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and general, that happy is that man who may understand him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand. On the other side, the historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine. Now doth the peerless poet perform both: for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in some one by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture, I say, for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth. For as in outward things, to a man that had never seen an elephant or a rhinoceros, who should tell him most exquisitely all their shapes, colour, bigness, and particular marks; or of a gorgeous palace, the architecture, with declaring the full beauties might well make the hearer able to repeat, as it were by rote, all he had heard, yet should never satisfy his inward conceits with being witness to itself of a true lively knowledge; but the same man, as soon as he might see those beasts well painted, or the house well in model, should straightways grow, without need of any description, to a judicial comprehending of them: so no doubt the philosopher with his learned definition - be it of virtue, vices, matters of public policy or private government - replenisheth the memory with many infallible grounds of wisdom, which, notwithstanding, lie dark before the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poesy. (Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, London: Nelson, 1965: 106 f.) <?page no="9"?> 1 Introduction 1.1 How this study was born and grew up It is something of a challenge to summarise the topics of this book under one single heading, and a comprehensive title like that proffered on the title page is bound to fall short of one’s various aims. Briefly, this is a study of illustrated fiction published in three European countries, England, France and Germany, between the end of the first and the beginning of the second world war. Before going on to present a sketch of the main perspectives under which I propose to deal with the subject of illustrated popular fiction, I would like to explain how I came to discover this topic after many years of academic teaching and research in the field of English literature. Living close to the French border, my wife and I very soon got into the habit of spending our holidays in France, for our own sakes but also for the sake of our children, who were learning French at school. We soon got into the habit of haunting flea markets and “vide greniers”, always on the lookout for cheap antiques and curios, including pottery and glass, prints and books. One day, I remember, I happened on a stand with a box full of old French illustrated books, including one in a yellow paper cover, which caught my attention. It was La Randonnée de Samba Diouf, a novel by the brothers Jérôme and Jean Tharaud, whom I had never heard of before, illustrated with “40 bois originaux de Pierre Falké”, an artist equally unknown to me. The volume belonged to a collection called Le Livre de Demain, published by Arthème Fayard, Paris, in January 1926. And the illustrations were lovely! On the page facing the half-title I discovered a list of the 16 “derniers ouvrages parus dans la même collection” and the announcement of the next title to be published. Dear Reader, I’m sure you know how the story goes on. It took me quite a few years to complete my collection of this series, especially since I discovered that there were so many other series and individual volumes just waiting to be rescued and repaired and read. By and by I started pondering the question of why so many of these illustrated paperbacks had been produced in France during the 1920s and 30s, whereas I had hardly ever come across any comparable illustrated books from the same period in Britain or in Germany. That initial question spawned many others, some of which I would like to share with my readers. I have concentrated on what may be classed as “popular” books, an epithet that has several different meanings, to be discussed later, but can for the moment be taken to designate illustrated books produced by commercial publishers and designed and priced so as to be attractive and accessible to most people, even <?page no="10"?> during the economic straits of the inter-war years. Books for “everyman”, for “le grand public”, “für das einfache Volk”. These form a segment of the book market that has received far too little attention from art and book historians, and from literary and cultural scholars, who have preferred to focus on the canonical writers and artists, or on the more or less luxurious limited editions typically produced since the 1890s by the private presses. We will see that the “popular” or “demi-luxe” books (as they are sometimes called in France), however much they have been neglected by the academy, were and remain interesting and important from a number of perspectives, which will be adopted in the chapters of this book. By way of a tentative first approach, I shall now sketch eight of these perspectives in order to suggest why illustrated fiction should have been so important during the years after the Great War, and why it remains a fertile field of research today. First, these books offered an accessible canon of contemporary and recent texts, especially when issued at regular intervals in publishers’ series or collections. These books were cheap and available not only from booksellers but also from local newsagents, kiosks, railway bookstalls and many other outlets. Thus, even people of limited education and low earnings found it quite easy to assemble a private library of literature (mostly narrative genres, but also philosophical and political essays) that at the same time offered and was integrated with a collection of contemporary art work. In France, cheap illustrated series had long been on offer by publishers such as Calmann-Lévy (Nouvelle Collection Illustrée, 1903 ff.) and Fayard (Modern Bibliothèque, 1904 ff., and the Livre Populaire, 1905 ff.), so when the war was over readers expected such fare to be made available in a more up to date mode. Inexperienced readers could hope that a series might provide them with books worth reading, books that informed people also read, because they saw them as giving access to information, arguments and attitudes, and might thus be helpful in making a new start in post-war France. Not for nothing did Fayard proclaim their series to be Le Livre de Demain, and Ferenczi insist that theirs was Le Livre Moderne Illustré. These new names avoided the term “populaire”, which was retained for genres like the adventure tale, the romance and the detective story produced for less ambitious readers not yet willing or able to outgrow their juvenile preferences. Finally, these publishers’ series were generously illustrated with woodcuts made by contemporary artists of repute (like Raymond Renefer and Jean Lébédeff) and their pupils, so that regular buyers were not only accumulating a private library but also a gallery of second-generation expressionist or art deco prints through which, in the course of browsing and reading, they acquired familiarity with the idioms of modern graphic art. We will see that this popularisation of modern graphic art took place above all in France, 10 1 Introduction <?page no="11"?> whereas in Britain it proceeded more hesitantly in a comparatively traditional vein. In Germany, series like the Insel-Bücherei started off again after 1918 with volumes illustrated by Kokoschka, Unold and Rössing, expressionist artists whose contributions were gradually, as the rise of fascism took effect, ousted by more conformist styles of illustration, so that the publisher might escape the fate of the Büchergilde Gutenberg or the Kurt Wolff Verlag. Second, in their combination of text and illustration these books appealed to a class of readers long nurtured on illustrated magazines and illustrated serial fiction, and now increasingly becoming radio listeners and cinema goers: in Britain the BBC was founded in 1922, its weekly listing magazine The Radio Times followed in September 1923 and The Listener magazine in January 1929, while by 1926 the number of cinemas had risen to about 3500. Such mixed media demonstrated for all to see that words and pictures belonged together and could be experienced as forming a whole, whether in everyday life, in education, or in art and literature. This was by no means a new insight, but rather confirmed philosophical and pedagogical ideas discussed and widely accepted since Locke and Pestalozzi, and put into practice by Comenius in his Orbis sensualium pictus (1658, English translation 1659) and the French encyclopaedists, and in fields like the illustration of children’s books and schoolbooks. Then, long before the “visual turn”, there was a succession of international exhibitions, from the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London to the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs Modernes of 1925 in Paris, which were above all visual events, advertised in magazines and posters by a combination of word and image. Today, research in the neurobiology of perception provides evidence suggesting that holistic, multi-sensory models are much more appropriate to the experiences of reading and looking than any purist insistence on the sanctity of the word or the uniqueness of seeing. Third, the visual cultures of advertising, fashion, photography, architecture and design as presented by the various print media, films and many national or international exhibitions of the inter-war years were reflected and affirmed as relevant to contemporary society in the texts and illustrations of books of all kinds. This cultural environment also appears in some of the paratexts, e.g. the decorated and illustrated front and sometimes back covers, and in the illustrated advertisements printed inside the covers or loosely inserted. The inserts often ended up in the waste paper basket, but those that survive provide important clues to the tastes and interests and growing affluence of the readership. Such ephemera are documents of everyday culture, for then as now readers were smokers, travellers, drivers, cinema-goers, holiday-makers, gourmets, bridge players - and of course eager for stories of all kinds in all kinds of books and papers, reading matter for long railway journeys and protracted stops in waiting rooms. 1.1 How this study was born and grew up 11 <?page no="12"?> Fourth, these books reflect, narrate and comment the political and moral upheaval of the Great War that resulted in the erosion and often destruction of significant aspects of the old social, moral and political orders. But this experience also opened the road to economic, educational and electoral reforms which had long been on the agenda but been delayed by prejudice, apathy and then the urgency of the war effort. Many people now contemplated ideas of new and better societies, while others yearned for a past that seemed more valuable than anything the future might bring. All three national cultures under consideration appeared to contemporaries as divided, generally speaking, between traditionalists and reformers, monarchists and republicans, christians and liberals, nationalists and internationalists, a multiple dividedness going back at least to the late 18 th century, and now sensed as acutely threatening to national identity and unity. For the French, the war of 1870-71 had made the disruption of national identity a personal experience: citizens of Lorraine and Alsace who refused to become German subjects had no choice but to emigrate to “la vieille France”, while those who remained had to adopt German as their public language. Such pressures and conflicts and resulting emotions always seek expression, and narrative fiction is a perfect medium for representing and debating them. We will see that there is hardly an illustrated book of the period that does not participate in these debates both in its verbal text and in its pictures. Fifth, the issues of national identity just mentioned have analogues in various ‘modern’ debates about questions of social and personal identity which the fiction of the period deals with in detail and in many modes, both verbal and visual. The role of women is clearly one such issue, always implying and implied by the role of men, and by the idea of the family, but increasingly thought of as transcending limiting notions of gender. The significance of paid work for the status of men and women is another issue, often examined in contrast to the life style of the leisured class. Class itself had become subject to questioning and redefinition, with new white-collar occupations like the office clerk or the executive forming a marked contrast to traditional ones like farmer, craftsman, or factory worker. Many narratives focus on the breakdown of traditional categories of class, gender and occupation, and on the decline of institutions, some urging reform and rejuvenation, others advocating a return to the old order. The illustrated book itself, as a semi-manual, semi-industrial artefact, is involved in this “querelle des anciens et des modernes” and is full of speaking portraits, architectures and landscapes, some expressing the past, others envisioning the future. Sixth, there is the issue of national unity (from the perspective of today) which was not achieved in Germany until 1871, much later than in Britain (Act 12 1 Introduction <?page no="13"?> of Union, 1707) and in France (the incorporation of Alsace at the end of the 30 Years War, 1648, and the annexation of Strasbourg, confirmed in the treaty of Ryswick, 1697). Previously, Germans had defined themselves through their linguistic identity, promoted in Protestant states by Luther’s Bible translation of 1534, and a regional identity, e.g. as Prussians or Brunswickians or Bavarians. This regional identification remained a strong force, while disagreement about the concept of a German nation, violent during the 1840s and 1850s, and muted during the “Gründerzeit” (i.e. founding period, 1870-1914), continued in the strife between conservative and socialist reformers. In centralised France, the temporary loss of Alsace-Lorraine had enhanced a traditional sense of the singular character and achievement of all the country’s regions, and a need for renewed solidarity with those who had suffered most between 1870 and 1918. This awareness was expressed and fostered in many ways, most effectively through elementary school textbooks like Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (1877), which was written and illustrated to provide an instrument of republican education after the establishment of the Third Republic in 1875 (Willms 2009: 22-29). Its juvenile protagonists leave the German-occupied town of Phalsbourg for free France, through which they undertake a year-long tour recounted as a geography-cum-history of French landscapes, cities, crafts and industries, and famous Frenchmen and monuments, all of them what Pierre Nora called “lieux de mémoire” (Nora 1984-92). This composite text (and others like it) leads me to propose the thesis that the narratives assembled by publishers like Fayard, Ferenczi and others in their comprehensive collections together constitute a national encyclopedia of the regions, people and themes of France, “la matière de France” recast 700 years after. Whether this thesis can be extended to England and to Germany remains to be seen. Seventh, in all the different kinds of narrative, whether oral or written, poetry or prose, from the Homeric epics to the Chansons de geste, from Don Quixote, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Télémaque to the flowering of the modern novel in the 18 th century and beyond, place, travel and time are fundamental thematic and structural features. As Vladimir Propp showed in 1928, elements of travel are central to traditional folk narrative, if only because nothing much happens to a hero who stays at home (Propp 1970, 36 et passim). And as Matthias Claudius put it, in words that have become proverbial: „Wenn jemand eine Reise tut, so kann er was erzählen“ (Urians Reise um die Welt, 1774, repr. 1966: 425). What is so important about travelling as an element of narrative is that it takes you to places and so gives you the chance to meet all kinds of people, hear their stories and tell your own. This is exactly the starting point of Édouard Estaunié’s L’Appel de la route (1922), as a Livre Moderne Illustré in 1929 and in Hachette’s 1.1 How this study was born and grew up 13 <?page no="14"?> more upmarket illustrated series Les Grands Écrivains in 1930), which can serve here as a first concrete example. Three young men meet in Paris in late 1918 and agree to tell each other about what they have been up to since they last met: Qu’un soir de 1918, au retour de la guerre, nous nous soyons ainsi retrouvés, trois camarades d’enfance, à la terrasse du café de la Paix, et que, près du désir de mieux nous informer les uns des autres, nous ayons décidés de dîner ensemble au cabaret, ceci, j’y consens, n’a rien que de naturel. Mais qu’ayant suivi, à partir du collège, des carrières parfaitement divergentes, qu’ayant vécu l’un à Versailles, l’autre à Paris, le dernier dans une ville retirée de Bourgogne, nous ayons été chacun témoin d’une des faces d’un drame unique; que de plus, sans nous donner le mot, ni d’ailleurs soupçonner où nous allions, nous ayons eu l’idée, ce soir-là, de raconter ce que nous en avions vu, et découvert de cette manière qu’au total nous avions assisté à une même aventure ; qu’enfin nous soyons aujourd’hui encore les seuls à le savoir tandis que les acteurs euxmêmes l’ignorent, voilà en revanche de quoi provoquer chez tout être qui réfléchit un «pourquoi» d’autant plus anxieux que nulle réponse n’y peut être donnée. (Estaunié 1929: 10, italics in the original text) All three had left their homes to fight in the war and each had witnessed one particular aspect of it. Now, on meeting again by mere chance, they feel the urge to tell each other what they have seen. The result is an unexpected discovery, namely that as witnesses they have all been involved in one and the same adventure, or course of events. This was true of countless Frenchmen, Germans and Englishmen whose lives the war had disrupted. On returning home and telling others about their experiences and perceptions they achieve an awareness, a savoir, which those not present at the telling and listening could not possess. Estaunié’s prelude to the first tale of his novel thus identifies a situation in which the unanswerable pourquoi looms large, not only as a question to be addressed to the past but also as having implications for the years to come. The first story teller, Pierre Duclos, at the beginning of his tale most emphatically makes this point: Toute compte fait, déclara-t-il soudain, on a traversé quatre années assez rudes ; quels renseignements en avez-vous tirés ? Pour ma part, aucun … À peine une ou deux lumières sur des choses que je savais. Par exemple, il est clair que la guerre n’est que la souffrance, un grand torrent de souffrance roulant à la même heure dans son flot imbécile une portion d’humanité ; mais c’est de la souffrance collective, de la souffrance dans le bruit. […] À parler franc, une guerre nouvelle m’effrayerait moins que la paix qui guette chacun de nous, car la paix est silencieuse et l’on y est solitaire […] (ibid.: 11) 14 1 Introduction <?page no="15"?> The only way to overcome the silence and solitude of a deceptive peace is to communicate, to tell one’s story and to listen to other people’s stories, whether oral or written. Always these are stories about what one has seen and heard, and they are intended to make others hear and see. It is only these meaningful narratives that can give substance to the sparse and insufficient lumières Duclos refers to. This idea is reaffirmed when he speaks of the evil of everyday life, “ce jeu de la bête humaine, fabriquant le mal à la manière d’une sécrétion” (ibid.), as having been illuminated for him by the war. Like so many references to seeing and understanding, to short-sightedness and blindness, this can be taken as asserting the need for illumination to continue during the peace. Long before photography and the cinema, it was the illustrated book and the illustrated magazine which had provided such lights and insights for the man on the street, for common people whose active minds were receptive to all the senses, and thus of common sense, for “l’homme moyen sensuel”. The point to be argued, once more, is that none of the senses can function properly in isolation. Instead, all are involved, all the time, in a complicated interaction and mutual reinforcement, complementation and correction, whether at work or at play, whether watching a film or reading a book. Eighth and finally, this brings us to illustration itself. “Illustration is one of the most discredited genres of art”, says John Ashbery, reviewing a 1979 exhi‐ bition of “Fantastic Illustration and Design in Britain, 1850-1930” in Providence, Rhode Island (Ashbery 1989: 380). But he immediately adds: The trouble is, we all like it. Most people first experience art in the form of a comic strip or illustrated children’s book, and the heat of that first encounter, like that of first love, is never entirely equaled afterward. Later on we become aware that illustration isn’t quite respectable, and the love no longer dares speak its name. (ibid.) There will be more to say about what determines the status of different kinds of illustration in the hierarchy of the arts during the period under consideration here, but for the moment Ashbery’s remarks may serve to remind us of the contemptuous neglect it still generally meets with after childhood and primary education are over and when the child has learned to read so fluently that illustrations no longer seem to serve a purpose. Almost always, it is the ability to read a text which is regarded as the primary goal, while illustration is seen as only playing an ancillary part. But the ability to look at pictures in a competent manner could equally be the main target, with reading and speaking serving as supporting skills. At bottom the neglect of illustration is due to a misconception about the nature and relation of verbal and visual perception and expression, twins of remarkable but imperfect power, whose peculiar strengths each serve 1.1 How this study was born and grew up 15 <?page no="16"?> to make up for the limitations of the other. Neither is self-contained, both need and always receive the support of the other, as Catherine J. Golden explains in her summary of ideas about illustration from Walter Benjamin to Robert Patten (Golden 2000: 2-6). There will always be moments of mute contemplation and admiration in the face of a powerful painting or sculpture, but sooner or later this silence will yield to words trying to express and indeed expressing the beholder’s emotions and reflections. This topic is explored by David Freedberg in his The Power of Images (1989: Chs. 1-3), on spontaneous, conditioned and repressed responses to pictures. In the course of this study, the etymology of “illustration” and the different meanings and uses of the word will be referred to in order to remind us that illustration is always the illustration of something, usually but not necessarily of an accompanying text. An illustration can equally refer to an absent text, e.g. a text unknown to the viewer, or to a text not yet spoken or written, so that it precedes the text. In that wider sense any drawing or painting or sculpture is an illustration - none of them have full existence in a state of wordlessness. From this radical insight we can move forwards to a more comprehensive concept of illustration than that in current use. Again and again, writers have insisted that illustration must be subservient to the text, even reformers like Édouard Pelletan. But that is an error, a logocentric illusion, for illustration is by no means secondary, neither in the sense of derived from and inferior to the word, nor in the sense of necessarily coming after the word. Rather illustration and word are necessary adjuncts of each other: all the word sequences we hear or read evoke sensory images of some kind, and all the visual images we see give rise to naming and telling. In an essay called “Out of a Book” (1946), Elizabeth Bowen remembers her childhood reading experiences when “at the very touch of a phrase there [was] a surge of brilliant visual images” (Bowen 1986: 52). Seamus Heaney, in his poem “Seeing Things”, in the volume of the same title (1991), tells us how contemplating a sculpture of the baptism of Jesus on the façade of an unspecified cathedral leads to a verbal account: - […] Lines Hard and thin and sinuous represent The flowing river. Down between the lines Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else. And yet in that utter visibility The stone’s alive with what’s invisible: Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off, The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself. (Heaney 1991: 17) 16 1 Introduction <?page no="17"?> Carved lines do not remain mere lines, they are identified as representing things, making them present by recalling them to the beholder’s memory. Thanks to his memory, to his store of knowledge, “seeing things” is equated with naming them. Beyond what can be seen lies what is known or what can be imagined - the waterweed and the grains of sand, for example. The visible summons the invisible, and equally the visible summons the verbal. What we beholders achieve as a result of these processes is a balance. Not a static one, but one that remains dynamic, even when it has been quiescent. There is also a balance of the same kind between words and pictures: words are very good at doing some things, and not nearly so good at others, and the same goes for pictures. Luckily, where words falter or fail, a picture may succeed, and vice versa. It all depends on how the words and the pictures co-occur, or how one follows on from the other. Throughout this study I shall therefore be arguing for a conception of illustration that accords it a status equal, in principle, to verbal narrative. Of course, some illustrations are better than others, and some are quite awful, and the same goes for texts, so we must investigate into the criteria on which such judgements may be founded. We will find that some criteria stem from the graphic techniques employed, others may relate to a period or genre style, and yet others to the relation between an illustration and the typography, paper and binding of the book in question. The relation between verbal and visual representation will remain at the centre of the discussion and all these relations will be explored in some detail in a sequence of case studies in chapters 4 and 5. 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts Illustrated books consist of combinations of text and illustration forming a whole of a very particular kind. It will therefore be important to examine the nature of the two main components, and the relations and interactions between them. These will turn out to be relations between acts of seeing and understanding, with different kinds of seeing and things seen, and different kinds of adjunctive response to both text and picture, including speaking, writing and even drawing. Adjunctive responses are enabled by certain verbal and visual structures characterised by a degree of indeterminacy, e.g. alternative analogies like “So are you to my thoughts as food to life, / Or as sweet-seasoned showers are to the ground” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 75: 1f.), or the ambiguous brushstrokes in Bonnard’s “Le Chasseur d’Images” discussed below. In each case, the reader or beholder may feel called upon to work out approximations to the implied meanings. Senses like hearing and smelling may also be involved. 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts 17 <?page no="18"?> These perceptual and communicative activities are all illustrated, visually and verbally, in the opening episode of Jules Renard’s Histoires naturelles (1904, repr. 1941). Following the arrangement in the book, we will begin with the full-page illustration by Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) that precedes the text: Fig. 1: P. Bonnard, «-Le Chasseur d’Images-» (Renard 1941-: 5) The illustrations are reproduced as process prints of pen and brush originals that mostly keep to very simple black and white contrasts, without intermediate shades of grey. Under the title, printed in a bold Glyphic (or incised) type, we see the narrator in profile, who looks very much like Renard, standing at the edge 18 1 Introduction <?page no="19"?> of a field with a staff in his right hand. The sky is full of big cumulus clouds, that may be a village on the horizon, but because of Bonnard’s broad brushwork, one can’t be sure. We should bear such lack of certainty in mind whenever we are concerned with visual perception, or any other kind of perception, since our senses are liable to be imperfect and misleading. Just look at the illustration again: is that a bird flying across the cloud above the huntsman, or just a shadow? Here is the first paragraph of Renard’s story about the hunter of images, meaning mental data resulting from different kinds of sensory input processed and stored in the mind: Il saute du lit de bon matin, et ne part que si son esprit est net, son cœur pur, son corps léger comme un vêtement d’été. Il n’emporte point de provisions. Il boira l’air frais en route et reniflera les odeurs salubres. Il laisse ses armes à la maison et se contente d’ouvrir les yeux. Les yeux servent de filets où les images s’emprisonnent d’elles-mêmes. (ibid.-: 6 f.) All the senses participate: the taste of fresh air, the sniff of healthy scents, the sight of drizzling rain on the river feeling like gooseflesh on his skin, the sounds the huntsman hears all around him. If he keeps his eyes wide open, they will serve him as nets to catch images: “les yeux servent de filets”. As he walks through the countryside of the Nivernais (the region around Nevers) he becomes a fisher of images: the first image is of the footpath he is walking along, the second is the river, the third the fields of wheat and lucerne, with a skylark (or is it a goldfinch? ) flying overhead. Then he enters the woods, and now, in the shadow of the trees, he inhales their fragrances and hears their soft rustling. Here is the short paragraph about this part of the hunter’s walk, in which his perceptions lead to an astonishing climax: Puis il entre au bois. Il ne se savait pas doué de sens si délicats. Vite imprégné de parfums, il ne perd aucune sourde rumeur, et, pour qu’il communique avec les arbres, ses nerfs se lient aux nervures des feuilles. (ibid.-: 8) In order that the hunter may communicate with the trees, his nerves connect up with the veins of their leaves. In French the connection between the literal and the figurative use of “nerves” is more evident than in English, where leaves have veins, or in German, where they have “Adern”, though botanists also refer to the “Nervatur” of a leaf. Renard’s striking analogy between “nerfs” and “nervures” alludes to the vague but common knowledge of the time that the sensory organs communicate with the brain via nerves, and thus creates a powerful sense of our perceptual empathy with the world around us. This reading may be reinforced when we remember that “se lier” is often employed in the sense of “making 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts 19 <?page no="20"?> friends”, or “sticking together”. But now our huntsman has had more than enough: “vibrant jusqu’au malaise, il perçoit trop, il fermente, il a peur, quitte le bois” (ibid.), so he returns home: Enfin, rentré chez lui, la tête pleine, il éteint sa lampe et longuement, avant de s’endormir, il se plaît à compter ses images. Dociles, elles renaissent au gré du souvenir. Chacune d’elles en éveille une autre, et sans cesse leur troupe phosphorescente s’accroît de nouvelles venues, comme des perdrix poursuivies et divisées tout le jour chantent le soir, à l’abri du danger, et se rappellent au creux des sillons. (ibid.-: 9) His head is full of images, and once he has put out the light he is at leisure to count, recount (F: raconter, G: erzählen) and review them as they are revived in his memory, one image jostling the next, like a flock of partridges, safe at last together in the deep furrows of some field. In this context, the field is nothing less than a metaphor for the cerebral cortex, the deeply grooved layer of “grey matter” covering the cerebral hemispheres, and divided into four lobes; the frontal lobe (concerned with planning activities, control of movement, working memory), the parietal lobe towards the back of the head (processes and integrates information about touch and space around the body), the occipital lobe, at the lower back of the head (processes visual input) and the temporal lobe below the frontal and parietal lobes (concerned with hearing, language and memory). Renard will not have known about this functional geography of the brain, but he knew very well that the images were recorded in his head, together with the sounds and smells and touches, so that he was able to recall them. In his Journal for 23 May 1902 he notes: “L’homme porte ses racines dans sa tête” (Renard/ Barousse 1995-: 72). We can take a look inside a human skull, with the forehead on the left and the back of the head on the right, and discover the four lobes of the cerebral cortex: Fig. 2: The four lobes of the cerebral cortex (cp. Kandel 2006: 111) 20 1 Introduction <?page no="21"?> In his fascinating In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2006), Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel has written both an autobiography and a history of the sciences of perception, thought and memory to which he has contributed so much himself. In the chapter on “The Brain’s Picture of the External World” he summarises the state of research in the 1960s in a way that throws light on “Le Chasseur d’Images”: The Gestalt psychologists argued that our coherent perceptions are the end result of the brain’s built-in ability to derive meaning from the properties of the world, only limited features of which can be detected by the peripheral sensory organs. The reason that the brain can derive meaning from, say, a limited analysis of a visual scene is that the visual system does not simply record a scene passively, as a camera does. Rather, perception is creative: the visual system transforms the two-dimensional patterns of light on the retina of the eye into a logically coherent and stable interpretation of a three-dimensional world. Built into neural pathways of the brain are complex rules of guessing; those rules allow the brain to extract information from relatively impoverished patterns of incoming neural signals and turn it into a meaningful image. The brain is thus the ambiguity-resolving machine par excellence! (ibid.: 296 f.) Renard’s huntsman reports walking through a landscape he is familiar with, for he has seen it over and over again, and its salient features are stored in his long-term memory, and are linked there with other kinds of information such as the names of the shrubs growing along the path to the wood, and the names of the fruit they bear. One image is linked with another, wakes it up, as the huntsman tells us, and gives it meaning, for as in language it is the differences we recognise between sounds and shapes that produce meaning. That is what Kandel is referring to when he speaks of “relatively impoverished patterns of incoming neural signals”. The brain selects certain details of the information passed on to it via the retina and the optic nerve and compares them with data registered in the hippocampus, the seat of longterm memory. There, the significant elements of everything we see are checked against what we know from earlier experience, and are thus identified. But perhaps it is better to read Kandel’s account than to rely on my simplified one: The analysis of perception is more advanced in vision than in any other sense. Here we see that visual information, relayed from one point to another along the pathway from the retina to the cerebral cortex, is also transformed in precise ways, first being deconstructed and then reconstructed - all without our being aware of it. In the early 1950s, Stephen Kuffler recorded from single cells in the retina and made the surprising discovery that those cells do not signal absolute levels of light; 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts 21 <?page no="22"?> rather, they signal the contrast between light and dark. He found that the most effective stimulus for exciting retinal cells is not diffuse light but small spots of light. David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel found a similar principle operating in the next relay stage, located in the thalamus [above the brain stem]. However, they made the astonishing discovery that once the signal reaches the [primary visual] cortex, it is transformed. Most cells in the cortex do not respond vigorously to small spots of light. Instead, they respond to linear contours, to elongated edges between lighter and darker areas, such as those that delineate objects in our environment. Most amazingly, each cell in the primary visual cortex responds only to a specific orientation of such light-dark contours. […] Deconstructing visual objects into line segments of different orientation appears to be the initial step in encoding the forms of objects in our environment. (ibid.: 300 f.) Kandel emphasises that as a result of such research, which confirmed earlier Gestalt psychology and recognised that our sensory systems are “hypothesis generators” (ibid.: 302) rather than instruments for recording data directly and with precision, the foundations for the modern science of the mind were laid. I have quoted these passages from In Search of Memory because they show that it is necessary for us to supplement and sometimes correct our everyday assumptions and intuitions about how sensory perception works. Such background knowledge will enable us to compare our acts of visual perception of the world around us with acts of looking at pictures and illustrations, and help us to find out in what ways they differ and where they follow the same principles. We will also remember that we need the other senses to make up for the limitations of our eyesight, our sense of touch, for instance, which helps us to recognise by stroking carefully over a page (preferably the verso) how a text or an illustration have been printed. Another dimension we must study is the concatenation of seeing with speaking that is so familiar from our everyday lives: every person, every flower, every tool has a name by which we can call it and identify it. Every picture, every book, every piece of music has a title and an author, though we may not always remember them. Moreover, all of these creatures and artefacts may provoke their perceivers into a verbal response of some kind, whether an exclamation, a comment, a question, a continuation or an anecdote of the “d’you remember? ” kind. These adjuncts form an important part of all our responses to literature, whether narrative or drama or poetry. They inevitably come into play in every act of reading and looking, when the fictional or factual world out there and the world of the reader move into close contact. An illuminating example is Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938, 2 1943), written in the form of a letter in three chapters in answer to her correspondent’s question “How in your opinion 22 1 Introduction <?page no="23"?> are we to prevent war? ”, and a number of related issues (Woolf 1943: 7). In the first part, she comments on photographs of the Spanish Civil War sent her by the Fascist Government as documentation of the atrocities allegedly perpetrated by the rebel nationalists: They are not pleasant photographs to look upon. They are photographs of dead bodies for the most part. This morning’s collection contains the photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a birdcage hanging in what was presumably the sitting-room, but the rest of the house looks like nothing so much as a bunch of spillikins suspended in mid air. (ibid.: 20 f.) This comment shows how difficult it can be to identify the subject of a photograph, especially when it is not contextualised by an adjacent shot, and so many ambiguous signs are involved. But Woolf goes on to make quite a different point: Those photographs are not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye. But the eye is connected with the brain; the brain with the nervous system. That system sends its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling. When we look at those photographs some fusion takes place within us; however different the education, the traditions behind us, our sensations are the same; and they are violent. You, Sir, call them “horror and disgust”. We also call them horror and disgust. And the same words rise to our lips. War, you say, is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped at whatever cost. And we echo your words. War is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped. For now at last we are looking at the same picture; we are seeing with you the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses. (ibid.: 21) Woolf’s sketch of the physiology of the brain is perfectly adequate for her purposes and valuable in stressing the interconnectedness of memory and present awareness. It is by looking at the photographs and by speaking about them, and about the memories and emotions activated by what we see in them, that we come to understand what they mean, for ourselves and for other people. We do not need to find the same words, and our feelings may not be exactly the same, but we may be close enough in our responses to understand each other, and to be able to discuss how to proceed in trying to prevent wars or end them. That, however, is probably the point where we will begin to disagree with each other, because we may have different political and ethical convictions, and also differ in our sense of how to resolve the conflict between ideal aims and 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts 23 <?page no="24"?> pragmatic options. Photographs and illustrations can help readers to understand a newspaper report or a novel, but they will not necessarily lead to the same understanding. At this stage it may be helpful to consider some other approaches to questions of reading and response, and to visiting and understanding. From decorous reading to adjunctive reading In the first two chapters of his Ferocious Alphabets (1981, repr. 1984), Denis Donoghue (1928-2021) reports on his experience of giving a series of six fiveminute talks in a B.B.C. radio programme called “Words”. He remembers how strange it was to be speaking to “invisible people” (Donoghue 1984: 4) and how hard “to put up with the fact that I was talking to people who could not answer” (ibid.: 41). The talks are transcribed in Ch. 1 under the heading “Dialogue of One”. His detailed commentary on the talks follows in Ch. 2 and leads to reflections on “Communication, Communion, Conversation”, which are immediately relevant to our present topic. Recalling these eccentric, one-way talks, he puts the following question to us, his readers: But isn’t this the situation of the writer, the man of print, sending his sentences to people who are absent? No, it isn’t. Print is a silent medium, like paint on canvas, it does not expect to be answered. No eccentricity is involved in a page of written words or print, there is a decorum ready to receive such things; their invitation is sufficiently acknowledged when a silent reader peruses the page. (ibid.: 41 f.) Now to talk about print as being silent and not having expectations is to use rather misleading anthropomorphic metaphors. Yes, print is a medium, a means by which something is expressed, but it becomes animate when a reader (who is by no means condemned to silence) processes it in the responsive act of reading, just as I am at this moment processing the lines quoted from Donoghue’s book and responding to them in thought, word and script. My first reaction to the double silence was to pencil a big question mark in the margin, and then to add the word “response! ”. I was reminded of J. Hillis Miller (1928-2021) and his The Ethics of Reading (1987), in which he raises the question of what “the real situation of a man or a woman reading a book, teaching a class, writing a critical essay” is (Miller 1987: 4). He explains: My question is whether ethical decision or responsibility is in any way necessarily involved in that situation and act of reading, and if so, how and of what kind, responsibility to whom or to what, decision to do what? The ethical moment in the act of reading, then, if there is one, faces in two directions. On the one hand, it is a response to something, responsible to it, responsive to it, respectful of it. In any ethical moment there is an imperative, some “I must” or Ich kann nicht anders. I must 24 1 Introduction <?page no="25"?> do this. I cannot do otherwise. If the response is not one of necessity, grounded in some “must,” if it is a freedom to do what one likes, for example to make a literary text mean what one likes, then it is not ethical, as when we say, “That isn’t ethical”. On the other hand, the ethical moment leads to an act. It enters into the social, institutional, political realms, for example in what the teacher says to the class or in what the critic writes. […] If there is to be such a thing as an ethical moment in the act of reading, teaching, or writing about literature, it must be sui generis, something individual and particular, itself a source of political and cognitive acts, not subordinated to them. (ibid.: 4 f.) Miller is arguing in favour of a double responsibility of reading. The reader’s response to a text should first of all not falsify its message and its pragmatic intent, and second it should be the source of responsible acts, of considered interventions in education, public debate or politics, proposing new insights derived from what one has been reading. Reading which leads to responsible action is entirely different from silent reading according to traditional rules of what is decent and proper, and it is the only kind of reading worth having. We will come back to Miller’s concept of responsible reading in connection with his ideas about illustration. For the moment, we should consider Donoghue’s definition of communica‐ tion as conversation or communion, and then proceed to his distinction between two basic kinds of reading, which he calls “epireading” and “graphireading”. We have seen that his dissatisfaction with his radio talks was mainly due to the absence of response from his audience. He would have preferred a dialogical format, easy enough to organise nowadays, but not feasible in the 1970s, except as talks given to a limited audience present in a lecture hall. He rejects the minimalist models of communication proposed by linguists like Roman Jakobson and I.A. Richards, according to which an addresser sends a message to an addressee. Instead, he ranks conversation as “the best form of verbal communication”, which he analyses thus: What happens in a conversation? Each person describes or tries to make manifest his own experience: the other, listening, cannot share the experience, but he can perceive it, as if at a distance. Complete proximity is impossible. What makes a conversation memorable is the desire of each person to share experience with the other, giving and receiving. All that can be shared, strictly speaking, is the desire: it is impossible to reach the experience. But desire is enough to cause the reverberation to take place which we value in conversation. (Donoghue 1984: 43) This analysis is important for its insight that a listener cannot ever fully share a speaker’s experience, but he can try to get as close as possible to what she is 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts 25 <?page no="26"?> telling him, and to what she feels about her experience. He must attend to her words, to her emphases, and perhaps euphemisms and ellipses, and also take into account the look on her face, her posture and gestures, the tone and pitch of her voice. All this is much more than just receiving a message. Donoghue sums it up when he says: “It is because each person gives himself to the conversation that the words are valid” (ibid.: 44). The shortest way of putting it is to speak of “desire”, for that implies a falling short or postponement of full understanding. And that is crucial - no reading or rereading of a text or of a picture can ever exhaust its meanings, ambiguities, indeterminacies, first because no text or picture fully expresses, makes explicit, all the meanings embedded in its semiosis, i.e. the process by which something functions as a sign, and second because no reader will identify all those meanings, however much he desires to. In the words of Charles S. Peirce: It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects […] or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by semiosis I mean, on the contrary, an action, an influence, which is, or involves a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and his interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs. (Peirce, Collected Papers V: 484; www .commens.org/ dictionary/ term/ semiosis) When we try to share ideas clothed in words (or signs) with others, what we as interpretants respond to is the reverberations, as Donoghue called them, or the echoes mentioned by Woolf, produced our minds during the conversational exchange. What we have in our minds is the echoes of words rather than the words themselves, and the echoes of ideas (or objects) in our minds rather than the ideas themselves. Perhaps Donoghue’s use of the word desire, quoted above, is an echo of Roland Barthes’ four-part talk “Sur la lecture”, given in 1975 at the Writing Conference in Luchon (Pyrenees), the third of which deals with “Désir” and distinguishes between three kinds of reading, the third being the adjunctive desire to speak up and write caused by reading (Barthes 1984: 44 f.). We all have slightly different echoes of words and ideas because our previous experience of them has not been quite the same, even when we seem to be using the same words. The more meaning we can share in talking about them, the nearer we move towards communion, in its basic sense of sharing. Now such proximity between human beings engaged in speaking and listening is an extended foundational experience that has accompanied us all, if we were lucky, from our first moments in life to the present. We generally learn our mother tongue from our mother, or from someone else, the important thing 26 1 Introduction <?page no="27"?> being a continuous and reliable relationship with at least one person. We listen and learn, we speak and practise, and that pattern of reception and production continues for as long as we live. We listened when our mother told us a story or sang a song, and when she read aloud to us, we were attentive listeners. We did not lose these habits when we grew older and learned to read for ourselves. All this suggests that reading and listening are closely intertwined both in the structure of stories and in the social practices of story-telling and reading aloud, and continue to be so in our later silent reading. That is where epireading comes in. It is an insight that one finds in John Locke’s recommendation of games for reading in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693: § 156, repr. 1884), namely that speaking and showing come before reading, and must remain important ingredients in a child’s learning to read, for example, Aesop’s Fables in an illustrated edition: If his Aesop has pictures in it, it will entertain him much the better, and encourage him to read, when it carries the increase of knowledge with it: for such visible objects children hear talked of in vain and without any satisfaction whilst they have no ideas of them; those ideas being not to be had from sounds, but from the things themselves, or their pictures. And therefore I think that as soon as he begins to spell, as many pictures of animals should be got him as can be found, with the printed names to them, which at the same time will invite him to read, and afford him matter of enquiry and knowledge. (Locke 1884: 133) We can see how up to date Locke’s account and advice are from the “childhood reading histories” of (a) Nikki Gamble and (b) Sally Yates, the authors of Exploring Children’s Literature ( 2 2008): (a) Dad started reading aloud to me when I was very young. […] I developed a repertoire of favourites that I would ask for every night and I knew many poems by heart. From Struwwelpeter I could recite “Shockheaded Peter”, “Harriet and the Matches”, and “Little Johnny Head in Air”. The untimely deaths of the disobedient children were not in the least off-putting, and neither did I believe that I would meet a similar end if I sucked my thumb or refused to eat my soup. (b) My earliest memories of reading are of some Ladybird books, stories told in rhyme about anthropomorphised animals. One was called Downie Duckling, and the other was about “Bunnies”. These books fascinated me as I learnt the story through the rhyme and can still remember the cadences of this. I was rather threatened by some of the illustrations though, which I found macabre. I much preferred the pictures of the Noddy books by Enid Blyton which I read avidly, and still remember the thrill of seeing Noddy move on a neighbour’s television […] (Gamble/ Yates 2008: 1 f.) 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts 27 <?page no="28"?> The two authors then compare their experiences, finding that they had some in common, while others differed: We were both avid readers from early childhood and we were encouraged to own and borrow books from the public library. We varied in the amount we were read to at home and that affected the range of texts to which we were introduced. However, sharing books with others in the family, including siblings, was an encouragement and allowed book talk to be engaged in and enjoyed. (ibid.: 3) These excerpts show that listening, talking and looking were intrinsic elements in their reading histories, that rhythms and rhymes helped them to remember texts, just like illustrations that could both attract and repel. Most of the children’s responses to books and pictures were appropriate, even if they sometimes seemed to fall short of parts of their explicit message, and even if they conversely sometimes added meanings to them that were not obviously supported by the text. This reciprocal surplus of an open text and its cocreative reading, as of suggestive illustrations and their attentive and enriching reception, is a basic feature of all cognitive input/ output processes. The key element that encourages such creative attention to words and phrases, to lines and surfaces, is indeterminacy in its many forms, a subject we will return to presently. Now for Donoghue’s distinction between epireading and graphireading. Epireading is defined thus: Epireading is the reader’s form of compensation, making up for the tokens of absence and distance which he finds in written words. Epireading is not willing to leave written words as it finds them on the page, the reader wants to restore the words to a source, a human situation involving speech, character, personality, and destiny construed as having a personal form. […] From print to voice: that is the epireader’s direction. And because of the proximity of voice to feeling, the reader takes the voice as that mode of feeling which is audible. […] The only requirement in epireading is that reading be construed as a personal encounter, the reader enters into a virtual relation with the speaker. Knowledge arises in the sense of coming to know a person, rather than in the sense of discovering a secret. (Donoghue 1984: 98-100) All this means that readers must also be listeners, who speak when they are spoken to. That includes the demand that they must also be tellers and writers, for otherwise they would not leave any traces of their dialogue. We may conclude, once and for all, that reading must always be responsive listening, thinking and speaking as well, inevitably so, since they are all connected with each other in our brains. For the same reason, I would add visualising, smelling 28 1 Introduction <?page no="29"?> and touching as well, as demonstrated in Renard’s text. It is the glory of a well told story that it can invite (anthropomorphic metaphor) its readers to celebrate all these responses. In the concluding chapter of his book, Donoghue sums up epireading as that kind of reading which “allows for continuity between ordinary conversation and extraordinary literature” (ibid.: 206). Epireading establishes the speaking self, while graphireading, exemplified according to Donoghue in Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (1897), “imposes an atomic view of language, making each word a unit of whatever attention the sceptical reader chooses to bring to it” (ibid.: 206). It is true that Mallarmé’s highly innovative text makes considerable demands, but for any unhurried reader who takes the trouble to discover it for herself or himself it will soon become evident that the text is founded on a stringent and persuasive logic that does not impose very much beyond patience and careful attention to the ambiguity of its words and phrases and arrangements. The poem consists of one single sentence of free verse, with 707 words printed in 200 lines, unpunctuated except for graphic signals like line breaks and white spaces. The typography is just as eccentric, with roman and italic, large capitals (for the words forming the title) and small capitals distributed over four pages, and upper-case initials only for certain words like “Abîme” or “Esprit” or “Fiançailles”, and also for the closing verse: “Toute Pensée émet un Coup de Dés” (E: Every Thought emits a Throw of Dice; G: Jeder Gedanke führt zu einem Würfelwurf). It is not true that Mallarmé makes each single word a unit of attention, for there are many lines of up to ten words, and of course many phrases can be read consecutively as syntactic units. On the other hand, that last line just quoted suggests that a reader’s thoughts while reading this poem will move forward several steps from her/ his momentary position, depending on how many dots show on the upward-facing side of the dice, just as if they were playing a dice game. In reading the dice, the readers recognise again and again that every word or phrase they encounter has an indeterminate meaning, so they cannot be sure which of two or three or more meanings to take into consideration, but must try them out. Such reading experiences establish Mallarmé’s poem as a highly self-referential artefact, designed to make readers think hard and long about what is involved in reading and understanding or constructing a poetic message. I can only quote the critic Jean-Pierre Richard (1922-2019) from his L’Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé (1961) on this essential aspect of Mallarmé’s poetry, its awareness of variable or fluid meaning: Rien de plus glissant que ces poèmes dont le sens semble se modifier d’une lecture à l’autre et qui n’installent jamais en nous la rassurante certitude de les avoir vraiment, 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts 29 <?page no="30"?> définitivement saisis. Mais cette variabilité du sens doit avoir justement être reconnue comme la signification véritable du poème. (Richard 1961-: 553, cf. 601-605) At this point it may be helpful to look at a simple poem that shows some of the indeterminacy and openness that we have been discussing, namely William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”, first published in Spring and All (1923): So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens (Williams 1958, repr. 1978: 37) I am quoting this from Williams’ I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet, because there he also tells us about the volume in which the poem originally appeared, explaining that it “was written when all the world was going crazy about typographical form and is really a travesty of the idea”, adding that the poems “were kept pure - no typographical tricks” (ibid.: 36 f.). He also points out that the poems were untitled until reprinted in the Collected Poems, which is important because, as we shall see in a moment, the title is misleading. What we do find in the short poem is the same absence of punctuation and the very short lines that Mallarmé repeatedly employed in “Un Coup de Dés”. It also opens with a thesis statement of two lines comparable to that in Mallarmé’s full title. Graphically both poems form visual patterns, one simple, the other complex. The brevity of “The Red Wheelbarrow” allows a comparatively brief response. I remember that my students were happy with the vivid images of the scene evoked by stanzas 2 to 4, but puzzled by the claim that “so much depends” on wheelbarrow, rainwater and chickens. How could such a disparity be resolved? Our reading of other poems by WCW soon showed that the poet often wrote about his wife, his English grandmother and other personal or even private experiences. We concluded that in order to move closer to an empathetic understanding of the poem each of us should seek to go beyond the poet’s memories of wheelbarrow, rain and chickens by finding three items that had left important traces in his or her own individual memories, and also constituted a scene. It had become clear that the poem is not really “about” a red wheelbarrow, 30 1 Introduction <?page no="31"?> but about the way some memories become important for us. That was a topic that every student in the class could write about. We agreed to devote the next session to presenting and discussing the students’ own scenes, based on a simple skeleton version of the original poem - “So much depends / upon” followed by stanzas two to four, retained only as syntactic structures. Here are two results of this experiment, each printed as one line, to save space, but mainly to signal that none of us pupils of WCW had the intention of supplanting his poem: a) So much depends / upon / a black-and-white / kitten / purring with / pleasure / be‐ side the white saucer b) So much depends / upon / a green apple / tree / hung with red / fruit / beside the white cottage The skeleton structure of the poem turned out to be a fertile generator of quite individual and vivid little texts, each of which demonstrated that their readers-turned-authors now understood much better what Williams was aiming at. Each writer had used the pattern to evoke a cherished memory and to agree with Williams that, yes, indeed, we all have memories on which so much depends. I propose that this is a form of graphireading which works by turning puzzled, helpless efforts to discover an obscure meaning into an enlightening pleasure. It uses the basic propositional and syntactic structure of a given text and substitutes alternative lexical items for the original ones in order to bring about a new mise-en-scène, appropriate to the writer’s intentions and expressing an honest readerly response to the original text. “Scene” is a form of adjunctivity discussed in my Textanlässe, Lesetätigkeiten: Poetik und Rhetorik der Unabgeschlossenheit (1998: 260-264), a systematic analysis of those linguistic structures of texts whose particular kind of indeterminacy, ambiguity or openness give the reader occasion and impulse to revise the text or add to it, in order to move nearer to an adequate though still provisional meaning. The basic assumption, as many writers, from Augustine to Thomas Carlyle (“The Hero as Poet”, 1840) and Lewis Hyde (The Gift, 1979, 2006: 191-198), were well aware, is that no literary text achieves a full expression of its meanings, that it is always dependent on the reader’s cultural and linguistic contribution to unfold more of these. There are many different verbal structures involved in this activation of readers, certainly more than the 32 listed in the synopsis given in Textanlässe (277-281). Some of the following chapters will go beyond my original project to deal with different kinds of illustration as adjunctive to the requirements of a text, and show that they themselves contain visual adjunctive structures leading to mainly verbal responses. My aim will be to show how texts 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts 31 <?page no="32"?> produce openings for illustrations, and how these refer back to the texts and fill in blanks or gaps (F: vides, blancs; G: Leerstellen) through reading activities such as expansion, substitution, concretisation, resolution of alternatives, answering and supplementation. A word now on the philosophical foundations of my approach to the question of the communicative interaction of writers and readers. I am asking specifically to what extent a writer (or speaker) can communicate the ideas, events, actions and judgements that make up a narrative to his readers and listeners, and vice versa how the readers and listeners fare when they try to understand the implications and ambiguities of what a writer or speaker offers them. The approach is based on the critical examination and development of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) carried out by the philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels (*1934) since the 1970s. In Der Spielraum des Verhaltens (1980) Waldenfels compares the empiricist concepts of perception and knowledge with Husserl’s theory of eidetic perception, i.e. the mental intuition of essences, and sums up the difference in a single sentence: “Wesenserkenntnis drängt auf einen Abschluß hin, die Erfahrung hat immer Neues zu gewärtigen” (Waldenfels 1980: 79). In other words, striving for knowledge of an essence demands closure, while experience is always open and ready to encounter something new. These two modes - perceiving and knowing - seem to be radically antithetical, but actually turn out to be connected with each other through interaction and development, through a kind of give and take. It is necessary for us human beings to gather experiences repeatedly over a period of time before they add up to anything near definite knowledge. Conversely, we cannot retain knowledge of something without repeated experiences of it. This situation prompts Waldenfels to raise an either/ or question: Ist die Eidetik das Endziel oder ein Durchgang, der immer wieder in eine Offenheit der Erfahrung und der Lebenspraxis einmündet? (ibid.) Husserl himself tended increasingly towards the second alternative of striving for definite knowledge as a passageway, and not the final goal, as Waldenfels reports. He himself propagates an open dialectic of experience, “eine offene Dialektik der Erfahrung” (ibid.: 90), which can explore the whole field between the extremes of indeterminacy and determinacy. Here is his own summary: Im Ausblick auf eine solche Theorie [der offenen Erfahrung] greifen wir zurück auf die Differenz von Bedeutung und Gegenstand; angewandt auf die Erfahrung ist es die Differenz von Sinn und Wirklichkeit. Immerzu meinen wir etwas, das uns gegeben ist, als etwas. Abgeschlossen wäre eine Erkenntnis, wenn die Differenz verschwände in der völligen Deckung von Gemeintem und Gegebenem, in der 32 1 Introduction <?page no="33"?> restlosen adaequatio intellectus ac rei; entsprechendes gilt für die Praxis. Offen‐ heit besagt demgegenüber eine doppelte Inadäquation; wirklich Gegebenes und ausdrücklich Gemeintes bleiben hinter einander zurück. Positiv gewendet handelt es sich um einen wechselseitigen Überschuß; wir meinen mehr, als uns wirklich gegeben ist, uns ist mehr gegeben, als wir ausdrücklich meinen. Im einen Fall sprechen wir mit Husserl von „Mehrmeinung“, im anderen Fall über Husserl hinaus von einer Überfülle des Gegebenen. (ibid.: 90) “Immerzu meinen wir etwas, das uns gegeben ist, als etwas” - when I ask my wife a question like “Shall we go for a walk, it’s lovely weather? ” my intention is to express some idea given to me, present in my mind, and bearing a meaning that is possibly relevant for both of us at that particular moment. My given idea is one thing, but the meaning received by her may be another, and not wholly identical with what I have in mind. Thirty years later, in Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, Waldenfels explains this disparity as the primary difference between what appears and how it appears, the latter having two forms, a how it is meant (“das Wie des Gemeintseins”) and a how it is given (“das Wie der Gegebenheit”) (Waldenfels 2010: 42). Since my question is part of a ritual, my wife will know what I mean, but may not feel like going for a walk at the moment, in which case it will not appear to her as something given, fully present to her. How does this inevitable inadequation of what is explicitly meant and what is actually given apply to the constitutive parts of an illustrated text? In some respects, the verbal medium is richer than the visual medium, and in others it is poorer. The relation is in any case a highly desirable one of reciprocal surplus. Words may conjure images of flowers and landscapes in the reader’s mind, but perhaps not with the immediacy and specificity of an illustration. Vice versa, a landscape drawing shows flowers and trees whose names may escape the beholder’s memory. The same inadequacy may apply in the representation of time. A single illustration tends to represent just one moment in time, and can do little more than suggest a longer span, whereas narrative texts are full of retrospectives and foreshadowings. Take the postponed frontispiece to François Mauriac’s novel Le Désert de l’Amour (1925), published in 1927 as no. 49 of the series Le Livre Moderne Illustré, illustrated with woodcuts by Germaine Bernard (1883-1977). 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts 33 <?page no="34"?> Fig. 3: François Mauriac, Le Désert de l’Amour: frontispiece The person portrayed in this woodcut by Germaine Bernard is identified, it seems, in the very first sentence of the novel as Raymond Courrèges. But when a few pages later we learn that Raymond is only 35 years old, and turn back to reconsider the frontispiece, we can only wonder if we are not mistaken. Perhaps it is a portrait of Raymond’s father Paul, now a man in his fifties, who is in some ways very similar to his son, especially as regards their difficulties in communicating with each other. Perhaps it is even a double portrait of father and son, conflated into a single physiognomy, into a visual symbol of identity and difference, of then and now. The corresponding narrative is unfolded in Ch. 2 of the novel, which takes us back in time to Raymond’s schoolboy years in Saint- Genès-de-Lombaud, a small village some 20 kilometres south-east of Bordeaux, where Doctor Courrèges works in a hospital and Raymond attends a Catholic school. Father and son travel to Bordeaux every workday morning in the doctor’s coupé, and this journey is the closest they get, their only opportunity to talk with each other. But what do they make of the opportunity? Here is a passage reporting on this routine from the omniscient narrator’s point of view, starting out from that of Raymond, and towards the end moving into his father’s: Au premier étage, brûlait, derrière une vitre, la lampe du docteur Courrèges. Raymond irait-il se coucher, ce soir encore, sans embrasser son père ? Ah ! c’était assez le matin, 34 1 Introduction <?page no="35"?> de ces trois quarts d’heure d’un silence hostile : car, dès l’aube, le coupé du docteur emportait le père et le fils. Raymond descendait à la barrière de Saint-Genès et, par les boulevards, gagnait son collège, tandis que le docteur poursuivait sa route vers l’hôpital. Trois quarts d’heure dans cette boîte puant le vieux cuir, entre deux vitres ruisselantes, ils demeuraient côte à côte. Le clinicien, qui, quelques instants plus tard, parlerait d’abondance, avec autorité, à son service et aux étudiants, depuis des mois cherchait en vain le mot qui atteindrait cet être sorti de lui. Comment se frayer une route jusqu’à ce cœur hérissé de défenses-? (Mauriac 1927-: 18) This distance between the two men extends to almost all the other figures and constitutes the “desert of love” that stretches between them. The novel at this early stage spans some twenty years, from 1904 to the narrative present, and it will continue to move to and fro in time till it comes to a halt after twelve chapters. The chapter just quoted from begins with a headpiece showing father and son sitting next to each other in the coupé. Their family likeness is unmistakable, and the atmosphere is that of hostile silence, as Raymond has just put it to himself. Fig. 4: François Mauriac, Le Désert de l’Amour: 15 Together the two woodcuts show how illustrations in sequence can illuminate each other, and also highlight a theme, in this case the relations within an unhappy family. The key passage on the subject is to be found in Paul Courrèges’ interior monologue in Ch. 5: 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts 35 <?page no="36"?> Ils n’ont pas besoin de moi. Un enterré vivant a le droit, s’il le peut, de soulever la pierre qui l’étouffe. Vous ne sauriez mesurer le désert qui me sépare de cette femme, de cette fille, de ce fils. Les mots que je leur adresse n’arrivent même plus jusqu’à eux. (ibid.-: 60) In this passage, Paul is verbalising a “scène imaginaire” (61) in which he anticipates the longed-for conversation between himself and Maria Cross, one of his patients, who is also the woman who was once his son’s mistress, and on whom Raymond has long desired to take revenge. Mauriac’s narrative weaves his characters’ past experiences and the long history of silence and evasion among all the members of the family together in such a way that we soon recognise that any dreams of future bliss cannot but turn into nightmares. The 24 illustrations give the readers of the novel many opportunities to pause in their reading and linger over the woodcuts long enough to think about the sad story of the Courrèges. How human speech evolved: gesture, tools and parable Since, on the strength of these few examples, epireading means a revival of hearing and speaking in the praxis of reading, and graphireading a revival of memory and writing, we should briefly fill in the anthropological background and consider how speech evolved out of human’s sensory equipment. On the basis of the findings of André Leroi-Gourhan (1911-86), presented in the two volumes of his Le geste et la parole (1964 and 1965), it seems likely that speech developed in consequence of palaeolithic hominids assuming an upright posture and developing a short face, leaving their hands free to use tools, and adding communicative gesture to facial expression (Leroi-Gourhan 1964: 32f.). The finding, production and use of tools must have led to communication by gestures and digital signs such as pointing among the hominids involved. These acts of showing will increasingly have been accompanied by sounds, out of which language then gradually developed. In more technical terms, the neuro-scientists’ response to the question about how human language originated is that though only hypothetical answers can be given, they are founded on what we know about the human brain: In most individuals the left hemisphere is dominant for language, and the cortical speech area of the temporal lobe (the planum temporale) is larger in the left than in the right hemisphere. (Mayeux/ Kandel 1991: 841) The authors of the article on “Disorders of Language: The Aphasias”, quoted from above, are reporting on the work of a colleague, neuro-radiologist Marjorie LeMay, who in the 1970s examined endocranial casts of human fossils for traces left on the skull by the gyri (gyrus: the crest of a fold on the outside of the cerebral cortex) and the sulci (sulcus: the groove between two gyri): 36 1 Introduction <?page no="37"?> Since important gyri and sulci often leave an impression on the skull, LeMay searched the fossil record for the morphological asymmetries associated with speech in modern humans and found them in Neanderthal man (dating back 30,000 to 50,000 years) and in Peking man (dating back 300,000 to 500,000 years). (ibid.) The authors add that we do not know more precisely than these dates indicate when human speech began to develop, but confirm that a combination of the vocal and the gestural theories of language evolution is not unlikely: […] language may have emerged from the co-evolution of gesture and vocalisation. This possibility might account for the still inexplicable correlation of verbal language and hand dominance (gesture), both localised in the left hemisphere. (ibid.: 842) This reminds me of the scene that E. M. Forster sketches of Neanderthal storytelling in his Aspects of the Novel (1927, repr. 1962). In the chapter on “The Story” he evokes its origins thus: It is immensely old - goes back to neolithic times, perhaps to palaeolithic. Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? (Forster 1962: 34) I remember that when I first read this passage as a student, I could not place the remark about the skull of Neanderthal man, and thought that Forster was joking. But in the context of the neuroscientific literature available today and accessible even to lay readers, the reference, while remaining a joke, makes sense. Forster’s idea of the storyteller’s audience kept awake and attentive by the question “What will happen next? ” was in a manner taken up and recast as a coherent theory by Mark Turner, a linguist and cognitive scientist, in his study on The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (1996). He proposes that language may have arisen from parable, defined as “the projection of story”, by which he means “a general and indispensable instrument of everyday thought that shows up everywhere, from telling time to reading Proust” (Turner 1996: 7). With reference to the Thousand and One Nights, Turner identifies a series of strategies of “narrative imagining” by which we make up stories in our minds. In these strategies he recognises “the fundamental instrument of thought”, and “our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining” (ibid.: 4 f.). Parable in this extended sense is based on bringing together and comparing elements of story, and projecting these onto other stories of past or future events, including our own remembered experiences, and then learning from the comparison or projection. Both Forster 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts 37 <?page no="38"?> and Turner identify a kind of narrative structure or grammar that we all use in order to understand what happens in the world, what has happened to ourselves and others, and what may happen next. Forster defines story as, “a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence” and intensely attractive to any listener’s “primeval curiosity”. To this he adds a second necessary quality that he calls “value” or “pinnacles” of experience (ibid.: 35 f.). Like Forster I imagine that storytelling was born of telling each other what happened first and what happened next and what might happen then. The skill of telling must have grown gradually as the language skills of both teller and listener developed and their repertoire of story patterns increased, and as they switched roles and learned to tell their own and listen to the other fellow’s story. It is this reciprocity of speaking and listening which appeared so essential to Denis Donoghue and which caused him to insist on the need for listeners to enter into some kind of communicative exchange. The same reciprocity must have grown in the course of man’s social evolution when everyday interaction between the members of a group led to different kinds of communication. Those who could tell and those who could attend to the telling were able to aid each other. Telling must have involved showing, pointing at objects, places, traces, but also showing in the sense of demonstrating a skill in a sequence of actions, and showing another person how to perform such actions and achieve the same result. If all this was accompanied by vocal sounds, over and over again, then specific sounds and sound patterns would, in the perception of all those present, become attached to specific actions and other visible things, and therefore be remembered and repeated. Turner gives a much more systematic account of parable that includes a number of points we have already come across: Stories have a structure that human vocal sound - as sound, not language - does not have. Stories have objects and events, actors and movements, viewpoint and focus, image schemas and force dynamics, and so on. Roughly, parable takes structure from story and gives it to voice (or bodily signs in the case of sign language). Parable creates structure for voice by projecting structure from story. The structure it creates is grammar. Grammar results from the projection of story structure. Sentences come from stories by way of parable. Parable draws on the full range of cognitive processes involved in story. Story involves spatiality, motor capacities, the sensory modalities (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste) and submodalities, patterns that run across sensory modalities and submodalities, perceptual and conceptual categorisation, image schemas, and our other basic cognitive instruments. Parable draws on all of this structure to create grammatical structure for vocal sound. Grammar, built from such structure, coheres with it. (ibid.: 141) 38 1 Introduction <?page no="39"?> Stories have structures derived from human actions and interactions, actions that are performed, that the agents themselves know about, and can express through actions, gestures and sounds. One such structure is referred to as “image schema”: Image schemas are skeletal patterns that recur in our sensory and motor experience. Motion along a path, bounded interior, balance, and symmetry are typical image schemas. Consider the image schema container. Like all schemas it is minimal. It [the container] has three parts: an interior, an exterior, and a boundary that separates them. We experience many things as containers: a bottle, a bag, a cup, a car, a mountain valley, rooms, houses, cupboards, boxes, chests and drawers. Two of our most important containers are our head and our bodies. (ibid.: 16) Turner then explains how image schemas lead to language and grammar, namely through simple image schemas combining to form complex image schemas. In the case of “container” the scheme is linked to the action of putting something into it, or pouring something out of it: For example, the goal of the path can be the interior of a container. This combination produces the complex image schema into. Alternatively, the source of the path can be the interior of the container, producing the complex image schema out of. The path can intersect a container, producing the complex image schema through. (ibid.) From our point of view as students of illustrated narrative there is an analogous correlation between verbal story and gestural picturing. Writing, drawing, painting and graving lines and dots are all carried out through controlled gestural movements of the artist’s hand and tool on a surface, and it is not for nothing that John Ruskin referred to the phenomenon as “the art of scratch” in the opening chapter of Ariadne Florentina (1890: 31-34). It is an art as old as language, each having accompanied the other’s development over thousands of years, and each making up for the other’s deficits. Ambiguous visiting: travel, paths, perception The topic of image schemas like path and goal leads us to further schemas, such as point of view (or place) and temporal space or distance which also contribute to the grammar of narrative. The links between paths, perception and storytelling are also an important topic in Michel Serres’ study of Les Cinq Sens (1985), a thoughtprovoking book that calls the dominance of language and its conventionalised, abstract rules in question and argues for the primacy of the senses. As Jacob Vivian Pearce puts it, in his review of the English translation, “Serres is attempting to save the body from the addiction of language - the transformation of the world into one governed by the word” (Pearce 2010: 89). But that only goes for decayed forms of 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts 39 <?page no="40"?> language such as officialese, newspeak, journalese and the language of advertising. What Serres gives us in his book really amounts to a celebration of the creativity and poetry and sensuousness of language, so much so that it is often difficult to keep up with all his allusions, punning, archaisms and inventions. Les Cinq Sens is composed of five chapters that are not numbered and have seemingly cryptic but actually metonymic one-word titles: “Voiles” (E: veils, G: Schleier) deals with the sense of touch and the skin as its sense organ, “Boîtes” (E: boxes, G: Kästen, Kisten) is about sounds and silence, “Tables” (E: tables, G: Tafeln, Tische) focuses on taste and smell, while “Visite” (E: visit, G: Besuch) has sight and seeing as its subject, and explores how these enable travelling, discovering and story-telling. The final chapter is “Joie” (E: joy, G: Freude) and treats of the perceptiveness and creativity of the body as a whole, and of the power that language still possesses to express the beauty of the world (Serres 1985: 380). For the purposes of our discussion of the senses as employed in reading and listening and looking and speaking and writing it will be sufficient and (I hope) illuminating to discuss some of the meanings of visiting that Serres unfolds in the fourth chapter of the “Philosophie des corps mêlés” (the subtitle of his book). In the first part of this subchapter Renard gave us an account of the “chasseur d’images” walking through a landscape with all his senses awake and gathering a wealth of images to take home. Serres might be addressing the same landscape when he says, in the first section of “Visite”, called “Paysage (Local)”, that the French countryside is built of rags and tatters, bits and pieces, just like the human body: Et si le paganisme, si le polythéisme construisaient mêmement un monde en haillons au moyen de pièces pareilles à celles qui montent le bâti du corps ? Comme si le monde ne différait pas, en sa surface apparente, de la peau : paysage-guenille qui s’habille par morceaux. Ci vulgaire, là superbe. Le pagus, canton, département, partition de sol ou d’espace, fait la pièce du pays, l’élément de paysage : carré de luzerne, vignoble, lopin, petite prairie, un jardin assez propre et le clos attenant, la place du hameau, le mail. Dans le pagus, tenure du paysan, quartier de sa noblesse vieille, se fixent de rustiques divinités. Là reposent les dieux : dans le creux de la haie, sous l’ombre de l’orme. Le paysan cohabite avec son dieu païen dans l’élément de paysage. (ibid.-: 259) Renard’s huntsman must have heard his pagan gods whispering in the leaves, gods that are so important for Serres because they resist the uniformity, totality, immobility of creeds and practices based on a single idea, on what Serres calls “monotheism”. This antithesis of plural and singular is a major force in his thinking and is invoked again and again in this chapter and elsewhere, not to serve a strictly theological argument, but to emphasise creative qualities like variety and 40 1 Introduction <?page no="41"?> variability, motion and mobility, individualism and pluralism as features of a living community and of real communion (cf. Donoghue 1984). What I want to concentrate on now is the connection Serres makes between visiting and reading, between landscape and book, alluded to in the quotation above in his use of the Latin word “pagus”. In Roman times, the term designated a rural district around a town forming part of a tribal territory, like the Nivernais mentioned above, and later it could refer to a village or a cluster of settlements. The French word “pays” is a 10th century derivation from Vulgar Latin “page(n)sis”, with “paysan” and “paysage” following later (Robert 1962, s.v. pays). No wonder that Serres goes on to invoke the ancient language with which this country grew up: “Paysan païen, l’antique langue en a gardé le souvenir” (Serres 1985: 259). From this point on, he conflates “pagus” and “page” and develops the traditional image of the poet writing verses just like a peasant ploughing his field in furrows: Comme le paysan, l’écrivain compose. Habite longuement page ou lopin, y honore le reposoir, travaille aux limites, au mur du champ clos qui le sépare du sanctuaire voisin et, parfois médite sur le paysage, vu à mi-vallon. (ibid.: 260). The peasant and the poet are kindred spirits, composing a work, or working out a composition, whether on a plot of ground (“lopin”) or on a leaf (F: feuille, G: Blatt) of paper, keeping within the borders of their terrain, balancing work and rest, respecting the holy ground beyond the wall, and taking their time to meditate on what they see and to consider how to improve it, so as to create “un supplément de perfection” which might one day enchant a tired passer-by, “étourdi où méditant sur la perception et la nature” (ibid.: ). A writer is himself a traveller, one who cannot confine himself to a couple of fields, but must tread many paths and always keep a lookout for traces of story, history and parable: Pas de paysage, pas d’œuvre ni d’histoire sans accidents ou événements singuliers diffusant autour d’eux quelque emprise cantonale, inattendue pour qui vient du voisinage. La singularité qui les touche s’y rapporte difficilement. Il faut du travail et du temps pour tracer les chemins vicinaux qui séparent ou enchaînent, cousent ou mêlent ces circonstances voisines. Le temps coule sur ces routes. […] Le paysage, l’œuvre, l’histoire intègrent partiellement ces circonstances contingentes et font alors tableau, parc ou jardin, morceau choisi, période ou intervalle. L’intégration globale, route droite perçant la forêt, en appelle à la méthode ou à la science. […] Le voyageur raconte et dit le détail, ses suffocations et découvertes, la randonnée le long du chemin vicinal, cite les contingences et percole comme le temps. (ibid.-: 261) It takes time and trouble for the itinerant writer, visiting an unfamiliar region, to recognise how its winding paths separate and flow together again, how the 1.2 Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts 41 <?page no="42"?> seemingly unrelated bits and pieces, under the impress of this corner, or canton, of the country, are stitched together to make a whole. He learns to identify singular but typical elements of this landscape and to see them as pictures, gardens and parks, choice morsels shaped and placed by history. What he sees there is the very opposite and denial of the straight road cut through the forest, obedient to global scientific method, but wholly out of place in this “haillon patiemment cousu des milliers de pages labourées”, the multi-coloured coat of France (ibid.: 261 f.). The analogy between peasant and visiting writer is grounded in their shared love of this countryside as the source of their different kinds of creativity. Serres’ style of thinking and writing is an implementation of his own argument about the cognitional aspect of travelling, a demonstration of how unhurried walking, seeing, and meditating can interact and establish communication with his readers. “Live in fragments no longer. Only connect! ”, as Forster’s Margaret Schlegel puts it to herself in Howards End (1910, Ch. 24) in order to define the programme by which she hopes to build a bridge between herself and Mr. Wilcox, an adjunctive passage. 1.3 Models for the cultural study of the illustrated book The illustrated book is a complex cultural artefact, but the complexity of its material and symbolic dimensions has only rarely been taken fully into account. This deficit was pinpointed by Leah Price in a review of two collections of essays on book history (London Review of Books) in which she explained why literary and textual criticism on the one hand and book history on the other were and perhaps still are unable to come together: It’s not simply that, unlike historians, literary critics aren’t trained in material culture, it’s also that a common-sense Cartesianism teaches them actively to filter out the look, the feel and the smell of the printed page. Even if one accepts that these things bear meaning, the ways in which they produce that meaning are rarely those which literary critics are best qualified to analyse. Conversely, book history provides few tools for identifying how books - especially literary books - function differently from other commodities. (Price 2002: 37) It seems, then, that specialists in literary studies and book historians have not been trained to work together, let alone draw on the findings of neurobiology and psychology. Instead, each discipline has been happy to cultivate its own garden: literary critics and academic teachers have focused on the hallowed text, historians of the book explore economic and sociological topics like publishing, book production, marketing and readership. Other disciplines, like art history, 42 1 Introduction <?page no="43"?> have also been interested in illustration, but most historians of graphic techniques and processes, in books with titles like A History of Book Illustration (Bland 1958), or The History of the Illustrated Book (Harthan 1981), have tended to tear the pictures and the texts asunder, disregarding entirely the literary work that the illustrations belong to and instead treating these as if they were self-contained aesthetic objects. They seem to have forgotten that visual artefacts like altarpieces or statues have almost always been made for a particular place, for a temple or for some public building, where they were visible and culturally meaningful for all members of a society. This fact is an important starting-point for Julius Meier- Graefe’s Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (1903, 2 1914): Das gemalte oder gemeißelte Bild ist seiner Art nach unbeweglich. Nicht nur, weil es ursprünglich für einen ganz besonderen Raum komponiert war, sondern weil die Empfindungswelt, die ihm gehört, vollkommen abseits liegt. Diese kann so mächtig sein, daß sich ihre Verbindung mit dem Alltäglichen nicht ohne grobe Nachteile entweder für sie selbst oder für das Alltägliche vollzieht. (Meier-Graefe 1914: 12 f.) The awareness of the necessary link between a work of art and the particular place and sentiment it belonged to was eroded, Meier-Graefe explains, by the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation, at exactly the same time as the Renaissance movement in the arts attained its full development in central and northern Europe. Over the years, this concurrence of events led to a secularisation and popularisation of the arts that has been described by Johan Huizinga in his Dutch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century (1941, English translation 1968). More and more people took to hanging up framed pictures in their homes, or simply pinning prints on their walls, and replacing them by others, when the opportunity arose. While it is true that in such private spaces pictures become more mobile, the essential immobility of commissioned work like church windows, wall paintings and public statues is not called in question. Furthermore, Meier-Graefe’s insight is of immediate relevance to book illustrations, for every one of these was composed for a particular place in a specific book, whether as a frontispiece or a headpiece or a “finis” tailpiece (to give just three examples). That they could be recycled for use in other printed books is a different matter. Their size and shape were often calculated to fit the space left blank for them by the letterpress. They were functional in marking the beginning and the end of a chapter, or other divisions in a running text. They could not be omitted or removed without causing gaping holes. There has, however, always been a certain danger of “criminal mobility” in the case of full-page plates (F: hors-textes; G: Tafeln), which tend to attract a certain kind of collector, and whose theft might leave hardly a trace in the spoliated volume. In the course of this study there will be many opportunities to 1.3 Models for the cultural study of the illustrated book 43 <?page no="44"?> discuss the functionality of illustrations of different kinds, including ornaments and decorated initials, most of them tending to confirm Meier-Graefe’s concept of functional immobility, and to extend it to other features of the book, such as its text and typography and binding. But such links are not merely material or formal, they also constitute a give-and-take relationship between the visual and the verbal constituents. This relationship had existed in temples and churches for over a thousand years, as Meier-Graefe explains: Die Malerei hatte nicht viel mehr Bedeutung als irgendein anderes Gewerbe. Ihre bevorzugte Stellung verdankte sie lediglich dem Umstande, der Natur ihres Wesens nach für den Dienst des Religiösen da zu sein; sie schmückte die Kirche, das Heiligtum. Der Schmuck geschah in volkstümlicher Weise: er füllte den Platz, den der Baumeister gelassen, zur Zeit der Gotik der eigentliche Künstler in den Augen der Menge. Die Malerei handelte von ganz bestimmten Dingen, sie entsprach genau den religiösen Vorstellungen, das heißt, sie hatte von vornherein eines vor der unseren voraus: Das Gegenständliche war als das Auszeichnende ausgeschieden, da es bei allen das Gleiche war. Dies mußte notwendig zu einer rein künstlerischen Entwicklung führen, der die Menge folgte. (ibid.: 11 f.) The gothic master builder left spaces for artists to fill, so that the congregation could look at the altarpiece or the windows or the murals while listening to the priest conducting the service. The words and the music and the pictures were all familiar and easy to understand, so that everybody could fully enjoy their aesthetic qualities. All this applies in an analogous manner to reading works of illustrated fiction. The main challenge for the reader is to work her or his way through a hundred or more pages of narrative text, through what is frequently a “Bleiwüste”, as we say in German, meaning a desert of unrelieved letterpress. But as soon as the desert is watered by oases of illustration even the most arid text will begin to produce shoots and blossoms that the reader can perceive as sufficiently familiar, suggestively meaningful shapes, patterns and shades. All readers carry a storehouse of visual information in their minds, in their memories, and will take recourse to these and their verbal denotations to cross the desert and reach their goal. In case this description sounds too metaphorical, we can turn once more to relevant insights of contemporary neuro-biology for confirmation. Reading and looking as mental processes The cultural practices of reading texts and looking at pictures both involve protracted acts of visual perception. It is important to have clear ideas about how visual perception works in human beings, about the processes that take place between an observer and the thing observed, and the limitations of these 44 1 Introduction <?page no="45"?> processes. Some basic information about the brain structures involved has already been given. Let us follow Eric R. Kandel again and consider the processes of vision, described in his Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures (2016), beginning with the “bottom-up processes”. Our ocular perception of an object consists of no more than the light reflected by the surface of that object facing us and forming a two-dimensional image on the retinae of our eyes. This minimal information is sufficient for the brain to identify what we have seen. With Kandel we can ask: “How does the brain do that? ” (Kandel 2016: 25). Here is his explanation: A guiding principle in its organisation is that every mental process - perceptual, emotional or motor - relies on distinct groups of specialised neural circuits located in an orderly, hierarchical arrangement in specific regions in the brain. However, while brain structures are separable conceptually at every level of organisation, they are related to one another anatomically and functionally, and therefore cannot be separated physically. (ibid.: 25 f.) This leads Kandel to a definition of vision and a description of the mental processes involved: Vision is the process of discovering from images what is present in the visual world and where it is. This implies that the brain has two parallel processing streams, one that deals with what an image is about and one that deals with where it is located in the world. These two parallel processing streams in the cerebral cortex are the what pathway and the where pathway. Both pathways start [together] in the retina, the light-sensitive layer of cells at the back of the eye. […] The retina sends visual information to the lateral geniculate nucleus, a group of cells located in the thalamus, a structure deep within the brain that relays information to the primary visual cortex (V1). […] The primary visual cortex is located in the occipital lobe at the back of the brain and is where visual information enters the brain. […] The visual information that reaches the primary visual cortex is relatively simple and lightly processed information about what things are and where they are. (ibid.: 26-28) This information is now split up between the what and where pathways, each forwarding their own particular kinds of information to those areas of the brain equipped to deal with them. In the case of the what pathway, this area is the inferior temporal cortex, where objects and faces are processed with regard to qualities like shape, colour and motion, which determine what the object is or whose face it is. The next area it reaches is the hippocampus, deep down in the temporal lobe: The what pathway is of particular interest in the context of portraiture. It not only carries information about form but also is the only visual pathway that leads directly 1.3 Models for the cultural study of the illustrated book 45 <?page no="46"?> to the hippocampus, the structure in the brain that is concerned with the explicit memory of people, places and objects and that is recruited by the beholder’s brain for top-down processing. (ibid.: 28) What happens in the first phase of processing is the reception of external sensory data, in this case of light reflected from an object, in the retina, and its transmission to the primary visual cortex. This is called bottom-up processing. In a later phase, called top-down processing, the raw data are matched against data stored in the memory as a result of previous perceptions and experiences, including cultural knowledge acquired over the years, and either identified accordingly or rejected as irrelevant. We will see in a moment that there is an intermediate stage of processing, which is set going in the V1. The essential fact is that vision is a process, an extremely rapid one, but a process nonetheless, in the course of which more and more information is added to the original input of reflected light. But now for the where pathway: The where pathway runs from the primary visual cortex to areas near the top of the brain. This pathway, known as the superior pathway, is concerned with the processing of motion, depth, and spatial information to determine where an object is in the external world. (ibid.) At this point, where Kandel has again emphasised the importance of the spatial dimension of visual perception in connection with the dimension of motion through space, it seems high time to remember Meier-Graefe’s assignation of works of visual art to specific places, which applies so well to the illustrations made for a printed page. What conclusions can we draw from Kandel’s analysis of visual perception that would support this transfer? Reading a printed text and looking at an illustration are both acts of visual perception as described by Kandel. We should bear in mind here that our schools do not pay nearly so much attention to teaching pupils to read pictures as they do to reading texts, with obvious consequences. As a reader moves from the text to an illustration, and back to the text, to and fro, backwards and forwards from one space to another, she practises the same kind of mental mobility required of a churchgoer listening to the priest while looking at the altarpiece. As she moves through her book, our reader turns to an illustration and remembers a phrase she has just read in the text or has stored in her memory, a phrase she remembers because it seems to apply to the picture, which in turn she will keep in mind while she goes on reading, again very much like an attentive churchgoer. Such peregrinations between things seen and remembered and words heard and remembered are very characteristic of all kinds of activities, from sightseeing to shopping, from watching a film to going to the opera. But they need to be practised in the classroom in the mother tongue as 46 1 Introduction <?page no="47"?> well as in foreign language courses. I know from experience that students often find it very difficult to give adequate verbal responses to visual material taken out of its context to be used for educational purposes. Worksheets like the example below (from one of my own classes) can provide some of the basic vocabulary for talking about different kinds of pictures, from political cartoons to photographs, and they can be supplemented by contextual information, the student’s own notes or by further worksheets on genres, technical terms, question routines etc.: Fig. 5: Worksheet “Talking about Pictures” In this study we will be considering pictures that are quite small and compara‐ tively simple, and most of them in black on white. That makes them easier to come to terms with than the masterpieces of painting discussed by Kenneth Clark (1903-83), the British art historian and broadcaster, in his Looking at Pictures (1960). In his introduction to the book he shares his own experiences of what sounds so simple, but is actually complex and strenuous: 1.3 Models for the cultural study of the illustrated book 47 <?page no="48"?> I believe one can learn to interrogate a picture in such a way as to intensify and prolong the pleasure it gives one […]. The meaning of a great work of art, or the little of it that we can understand, must be related to our own life in such a way as to increase our energy of spirit. Looking at pictures requires active participation, and, in the early stages, a certain amount of discipline. (Clark 1960: 15) Clark then goes on to identify a certain pattern of response that has structured his looking: “impact, scrutiny, recollection and renewal” (ibid.: 16). He explains: First I see the picture as a whole, and long before I can recognise the subject I am conscious of a general impression, which depends on the relationship of tone and area, shape and colour. This impact is immediate, and I can truthfully say that I would experience it on a bus going at thirty miles an hour if a great picture were in a shop window. I must also admit that the experience has sometimes been disappointing. I have jumped off the bus and walked back, only to find my first impression betrayed by a lack of skill or curiosity in the execution. So the first shock must be followed by a period of inspection in which I look from one part to another, enjoying those places where the colour is harmonious and the drawing grips the things seen; and naturally I become aware of what the painter has intended to represent. If he has done so skilfully, this adds to my enjoyment, and may, for a moment or two, deflect my attention from pictorial qualities to the subject. But quite soon my critical faculties begin to operate, and I find myself looking for some dominating motive, or root idea, from which the picture derives its overall effect. (ibid.) This is followed by a warning that we must take seriously, since it alerts us to the limitations of the verbalisation project that I have just sketched. When one is looking at works by great artists like Vermeer or Raphael or Titian, Clark says, one may soon feel that one’s linguistic skills are inadequate: [T]hese great works are deep. The more I try to penetrate them the more conscious I become that their central essences are hidden further down. I have only scratched the surface with the worn-out instrument of words. For, apart from shortcomings of perception, there is the difficulty of turning visual experiences into language. (ibid.: 17) We will not often come across book illustrations that are deep in this manner, for they are embedded in words that usually give the reader sufficient information to understand what is represented and to place the picture in the running text. The words in the text will help readers to find their own, adjunctive words. It is important for any reader to remain aware that they will never be able to exhaust the full meaning of an illustration possessed of a certain amount of depth, and that the same holds for the text. All communication, whether verbal or visual, is essentially approximative, and we cannot hope for more than an approximative 48 1 Introduction <?page no="49"?> understanding of anything we see or hear. Pragmatically that is usually good enough. We often have to struggle or negotiate for a clearer understanding of something we are listening to or reading or looking at. We often think we have understood something properly, only to realise after a while that we have missed some of the meaning. We become silent for a moment, reaching the state that Greek rhetoric calls aposiopesis, and are thus given the opportunity to rethink our response as we go on reading and looking. Now for the three levels of visual processing that Kandel distinguishes: Together with the where pathway, the what pathway performs three types of visual processing. Low-level processing occurs in the retina and is concerned with detecting an image. Intermediate-level processing begins in the primary visual cortex. A visual scene comprises thousands of line segments and surfaces. Intermediate-level vision discerns which surfaces and boundaries belong to specific objects and which are part of the background. Together, lowand intermediate-level visual processing identify the areas of an image that are related to particular objects and the background area that is not. Intermediate-level processing is also concerned with contour integration, a grouping operation designed to combine features into distinct objects. These two types of visual processing are critical for the bottom-up processing of the beholder’s share: High-level visual processing integrates information from a variety of regions in the brain to make sense of what we have seen. Once this information has reached the highest levels of the what pathway, top-down processing occurs: the brain uses cognitive processes such as attention, learning and memory - everything we have seen and understood before - to interpret the information. In the case of a portrait, this leads to conscious perception of the face and recognition of the person who is depicted. Information in the where pathway is processed in much the same way. Thus the what and where pathways of our visual system also function as a parallelprocessing perceptual system. (ibid.: 28 f.) My purpose in mustering all this neuro-biology is to make sure that in the detailed analyses of illustrations, decorations and typographic features, to be carried out in connection with analyses of narrative text, we will have a solid scientific fundament to build on. When we look at a woodcut illustration like the one below, we will recognise that it does indeed comprise a large number of “line segments and surfaces” as well as contours, which we as beholders and readers are called on to distinguish and assemble, in order to make sense of what we see. In modern woodcuts and engravings these lines and surfaces are often very stark and striking, in keeping with a new aesthetic moving away from verisimilitude towards formal design, especially aspects of design that people encountered in their everyday lives. Let us consider as an example the title-page 1.3 Models for the cultural study of the illustrated book 49 <?page no="50"?> of the novel Le Sel de la terre, by Raymond Escholier (1882-1971), published in 1938 as volume 302 of the Livre Moderne Illustré collection, and illustrated by Louis Neillot (1898-1973), with a woodcut vignette giving the reader a first visual idea of what the novel is about: Fig. 6: Raymond Escholier, Le Sel de la terre, title-page The book is dedicated to the memory of the writer Louis Pergaud (1882-1915), “tombé aux avancées de Verdun” (ibid.: 7). It was first published in 1924 by Edgar Malfère, Amiens. The title is taken from Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount”, Matthew 5: 13, and the reference is given at the head of the two-page preface. There Escholier declares the text to be the original “carnet” or notebook of his friend and comrade Louis. For the moment, we want to consider how legible this title-page vignette is. It is small, 3½ x 4 cm, so that it fits neatly into the space between the name of the illustrator and the series title. Any reader who turns 50 1 Introduction <?page no="51"?> the first few pages and sees the reference to Verdun will realise immediately that this must be a book about the Great War, so she or he will not hesitate to read the figure shown in the vignette as a soldier in the trenches, thanks mainly to the simplified outlines of helmet, head and torso, all familiar image schemes. In the background one can see the outlines of what might be a truncated tree, or perhaps two or three, and curving shapes and lines that suggest a hilly landscape. The 22 illustrations that follow this first vignette all show variations on the theme: soldiers in trenches or shelters, battlefield landscapes, broken trees, dead bodies in ruins, skulls, and as a final tailpiece the sun setting on a battlefield. Many of the woodcut lines and shapes in these illustrations mean nothing else but unidentifiable broken, torn, collapsed structures, which is wholly appropriate to the subject of the book. They are indexical signs, showing the result of some action but not the agent, and may be a useful reminder that not every woodcut mark has a fully recognisable signified, and that its purpose may be to contribute to a pattern or rhythm that accompanies and supports the narrative. Notes on the cultural study of illustrated fiction After 1918 the violent innovations of expressionist graphic art had settled down to stylistic varieties of woodcut that, by the 20s, were becoming acceptable to new audiences grown accustomed to contemporary poster art and typography in public spaces like the London Underground or the Paris Metro. Magazines like Vogue, which crossed the Atlantic in 1916, brought fashion and design, epitomised in beautiful covers, to Britain and later to Italy and many other countries. But of course, culture remained divided into different strata, from the highest to the lowest, with upward movement being dependent on chances to get acquainted with distant or current forms of expression. It is a problem of bridging or connecting them, in showing how they can become relevant for new audiences. That brings us back to Forster’s Howards End, of which John Carey in his The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) has the following to say: When early twentieth-century writers depict beneficiaries of this reform [the Educa‐ tion Reform acts of 1870 and later] - representatives of the newly educated masses - they frequently do so with disdain. The effort of the mass to acquire culture is presented as ill-advised and unsuccessful. E.M. Forster […] depicts a lower-class young man called Leonard Bast, who works as a clerk in an insurance office. Leonard lives in a nasty modern flat, eats tinned food and is married to a vulgar young woman called Jacky, who is, Forster tells us, “bestially stupid”. […] What Forster cannot condone is Leonard’s attempt to become cultured. (Carey 1992: 18) 1.3 Models for the cultural study of the illustrated book 51 <?page no="52"?> Now what does Carey mean by saying “Forster tells us”? Is it really Edward Morgan Forster who is telling us this? No, certainly not, it is the voice of a narrator that we hear, not the voice of an implied author or the author himself. The phrase is used by the narrator in a scene in Ch. 26 of the novel reporting on a quarrel between the Schlegel sisters about how to help the Basts after Leonard has lost his job. The narrator enjoys siding with Margaret’s sense of the practical against Helen’s invocations of justice and duty and so makes the most of the turmoil involved in rescuing the Basts. And then, what about Leonard’s “attempt to become cultured”? Here is a short passage on Leonard reading Ruskin’s Stones of Venice and hearing Ruskin’s voice declaiming from a gondola: And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard’s life. For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are. Leonard listened to it with reverence. He felt that he was being done good to, and that if he kept on with Ruskin, and the Queen’s Hall concerts, and some pictures by Watts, he would one day push his head out of the grey waters and see the universe. (Forster 1996: 45) The narrator is both mildly critical of Leonard’s cultural menu and sympathetic to his aspirations, and he certainly does not condemn either. Carey is reducing a highly ironical and empathetic fiction to supposedly documentary evidence for the highbrow/ lowbrow distinction. Such misjudgement denies the significance of books for the real lives of their readers, for their ideas and practices of living at specific places and at a particular time. The tendency towards different kinds of reductive one-dimensional approaches to books is frequently camouflaged, in all disciplines, by scholars making passing reference to matters outside a limited central focus, but without seriously allowing these to broaden that focus. For that would mean recognising that an illustrated book, like any other artefact produced in a culture, can only be known adequately when it is considered both as a whole and in all its parts in relation to the “political, economic, and ‘social’ arrangements” and “activities” out of which and for which they are produced (Williams 1961: 62). It is this insight that leads Raymond Williams, building on T.S. Eliot’s concept of culture in “Notes towards a Definition of Culture” (1948), to formulate his well-known reflections on the nature of culture as a patterned set of relationships: Cultural history must be more than the sum of the particular histories, for it is with the relations between them, the particular forms of the whole organisation, that it 52 1 Introduction <?page no="53"?> is especially concerned. I would then define the theory of culture as the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life. The analysis of culture is the attempt to discover the nature of the organisation which is the complex of these relationships. Analysis of particular works or institutions is, in this context, analysis of their essential kind of organisation, the relationships which works or institutions embody as parts of the organisation as a whole. A key-word, in such analysis, is pattern: it is with the discovery of patterns of a characteristic kind that any useful cultural analysis begins, and it is with the relationships between these patterns, which sometimes reveal unexpected identities and correspondences in hitherto separately considered activities, sometimes again reveal discontinuities of an unexpected kind, that general cultural analysis is concerned. (ibid.: 46 f.). In this model of culture, particular elements contribute to making up a whole, and knowledge of this whole can only be approached through the perception and analysis of its elements and the patterns they form. Some cultures have been aware of this principle for a long time, as revealed by Neil MacGregor’s presentation of an ancient Chinese scroll, the “Admonition Scroll” of about the 7 th century CE, on BBC Radio 4 in 2010: “It embraces three separate art forms, known in China lyrically as ‘the three perfections’, painting, poetry and calligraphy” (www.bbc.co.uk/ sounds/ play/ b00sfgxb). These component parts stand in relationships to each other and in relationships to the whole, which they thus embody. In the same way, any illustrated book is (or should be) such a structure of parts recognised as standing in a complex of relationships. Any book in its material parts relates to a variety of makers: the author and the artist, the publisher and the designer, the printer and the binder, the bookseller, the critic and the reviewer, and many other different kinds of reader. All these agents pursue a variety of related activities, which are all forms of making sense: they read and look, write and talk, design and discuss, learn and teach - and then they begin all over again, each in her or his sphere but working together with the others, when they start on another book. Each new book, and each old one read again, is perceived and appreciated and understood in the context of previous acts of reading and looking, talking and learning, in continuations of familiar paths, or in new departures. As I have already explained, in this study such generalisations refer specifi‐ cally to inexpensive illustrated books of narrative prose produced during the inter-war years for a popular market, and not to exclusive “livres d’artiste”, private press books or other luxury productions expressly aimed at a limited market of well-heeled collectors, who might or might not be readers as well. Especially in France, illustrated books for the popular market were often published in uniform series, whose attributes - the series title and the name 1.3 Models for the cultural study of the illustrated book 53 <?page no="54"?> of the publisher, the format, binding, cover design, typography and style of illustration - made them easy to recognise. In contrast to any individual book, a book from a series can be perceived as belonging to a pattern, without the reader/ beholder perhaps knowing exactly what this pattern is. Looking at a French series may well make us aware of corresponding patterns as well as significant differences in comparable German or English series. Thus, every illustrated book stands in a relationship of continuity and discontinuity with the tradition of illustrated book-making in its own country, and in comparable relationships with relevant traditions in other countries. That is why it is important for the present study to take off from particular books, specimens of what Williams calls “documentary culture” (ibid.: 41), leading to the discovery of other books and series, which are both similar and different in remarkable and as yet unexplored ways. Very soon this sequential procedure leads to the discovery of new patterns, and to the insight that patterns may change, fade or even disappear. In such patterns the particular artefact is again and again brought into relationships with economic or political events and structures in ways that help to account for perceived continuities and discontinuities. A concrete example of this discovery of a pattern is to be found in the relationship between travel narratives in school books and in popular fiction of the period after 1871. This was something I stumbled on through reading Johannes Willms’ book on Frankreich, published in the series Die Deutschen und ihre Nachbarn in 2009. In the first chapter Willms discusses the concept of "les deux France", the bitter rivalry between legitimists and republicans that was so characteristic of 19 th and early 20 th century France, and lives on as a political and cultural fault-line in French identity up to the present day. After the defeat and capitulation of Napoleon III at Sedan on 2 September1870 and the proclamation of the Third Republic two days later, it became imperative to stabilise the new government by implanting a thoroughly republican consciousness in the minds of the common people. To this end, in 1879, the Marseillaise was adopted as the French national anthem, and a year later the 14 th of July was established as France’s national holiday. Willms explains why this was so important: Kurz, es galt, das Wesen der Republik zum Kern einer nationalen Identitätsstiftung zu machen, deren historische Fundamentierung weit über die Epochenschwelle der Revolution von 1789, die eben jene Spaltung in „zwei Frankreich“ bewirkt hatte, in die Vergangenheit zurückreichte. (Willms 2009: 20) This could only be accomplished by providing a new system of education for all, organised by the state, designed to make sure that in future all young citizens would be well instructed in republican virtues and duties. Under Jules Ferry, 54 1 Introduction <?page no="55"?> the minister of public instruction, the laws of 16 June 1881 and 28 March 1882 introducing free, compulsory, and non-clerical primary education were passed. The exclusion of the clergy was confirmed in the Loi sur la séparation de l’Église et l’État of 3 July 1905. The most famous and influential of the new textbooks was already in print some time before Ferry’s educational reforms. Its title will sound familiar even to those who have never heard it before: Le Tour de la France par deux enfants. The first edition was published in 1877, and later editions add the motto “Devoir et Patrie” as a subtitle. The story it tells begins in September 1871, three months after Alsace and most of Lorraine had been declared “Reichsland” and formally annexed by Germany. The author hid her identity behind the pseudonym “G. Bruno”, in the Third Republic “a symbol for the struggle against reactionary Catholic-conservative oppression” (Mautner 1997, s.v. Bruno, Giordano). Her real name was Augustine Fouillée (1833-1923), and she was the author of a number of successful textbooks. Practically every schoolboy and schoolgirl of this period was raised on Le Tour de la France, and a well-worn copy of this “Republican Bible” (Willms 2009: 25) had a place of honour in almost every home (Cabanel 2007: 147). The book sold six million copies between 1877 and 1906, and over two million more by 1947 (ibid.: 153). My own copy is of 1903 and was still in use by several pupils throughout the 1930s, as one can tell from the various dates jotted down in pencil at the head of many of the 121 chapters. The point to emphasise here is that Le Tour de la France par deux enfants is a textbook in form of a fictional travelogue. It tells the story of two orphan boys from Phalsbourg in Lorraine, whose father is fatally injured when he falls from a scaffold. The last word he speaks on his deathbed is “France,” an admonition to his sons to leave for free France. André, the fourteen-year-old son, promises to obey, and together with his seven-year-old brother Julien leaves Phalsbourg by the Porte de France, setting off on the road to Marseille, where they hope to find their Uncle Frantz, their sole remaining relative, and begin a new life in liberty. In the course of their journey, the two boys discover their native country, her landscapes, villages and cities, her heroes past and present, her industries, crafts and natural resources, and above all her hospitable people. The book is copiously illustrated with 198 engravings and diagrams, and 16 maps, visualising and placing the third-person narrative of the boys’ adventures and the many embedded stories that are told by their various hosts and fellowtravellers. André and Julian are willing learners, and the generations of pupils who read and discussed their adventures in class from the late 1870s to the 1930s could not help but learn with them as they travelled together through the regions of France. They were to carry the experience into their private 1.3 Models for the cultural study of the illustrated book 55 <?page no="56"?> reading, for which the many popular publishers’ series provided hundreds of illustrated novels employing the same underlying narrative pattern of travels through domestic as well as exotic regions. Signposts for the analysis of illustrated fiction An inclusive, holistic approach to the illustrated book - in the present case books of illustrated narrative - is bound to be a complicated affair, so it seems wise to set up a number of signposts indicating the directions to be taken in exploring the subject. I propose the following six principles, to which I shall be referring throughout the following chapters, modifying and specifying them as necessary. Functionality: The purpose of illustrating a text is to decorate it and to make visible, memorable and comprehensible some of the ideas that it communicates in words. Every text provides verbal clues for the reading of its illustrations. Therefore combinations of text and illustration must be treated as functional wholes. Materiality: Texts, paratexts and illustrations are printed on pages bound together as books, so the pages themselves and every item printed on the pages, the covers, end-papers and dust-jacket must be considered as components of the whole material book, and in relation to all the techniques, processes and materials used. This materiality subtly affects the way a book is looked at and read and can thus modify the meanings transported in the book’s component parts. Relationality: All books are produced within and to some degree deter‐ mined by social, economic, political and educational structures, and their corresponding cultural practices and discourses. Books can therefore best be understood in relation to these structures, practices and discourses, to which they may adopt a wide range of critical to affirmative attitudes and which in one way or another will have effects on the society they have sprung from. The relation is at core an ethical one, i.e. it exists as a debate about values and right judgement and action, and it remains to be examined in what ways visual and verbal elements contribute to this debate. Worlds: Texts and illustrations, in their own particular semiotic ways, refer to worlds and make worlds, full of places and times, people and ideas. These various worlds are related to each other in the act of reading in ways that require the reader’s active supplementation, such as gloss, annotation, commentary, narrative and interpretation. Genre: Texts and illustrations are implicated in their particular divergent and possibly overlapping narrative and pictorial genre conventions, which need 56 1 Introduction <?page no="57"?> to be identified and analysed with respect to the question how they contribute towards a whole. Rhetoric and reciprocity: Texts and illustrations partake of the rhetorical traditions of oratory and the visual arts, modifying and developing them to serve their own purposes and the requirements of the bi-medial book. Illustrations and texts reciprocally exceed and fall short of each other, i.e. illustrations can show things that texts cannot say, and texts can say things illustrations cannot show. Therefore illustrations require text and texts require illustration. These principles imply most of the topics to be addressed in discussing individual illustrated books and the series they were published in. They can only be shown to be operative principles if they lead to methodological consequences, the most important of which may be comparison of different kinds, and to a deeper understanding of how illustrated texts work. We will be comparing a number of illustrated series from three countries, and especially the styles of illustration and of mise en page employed. There will be comparisons of different versions of one text, sometimes in different languages and mostly in different illustrations. We will compare the selection of texts and illustrators before and after a historical turning point like the enabling act of 1933 in Germany, and will have to watch out for possible changes in the relationship between text and illustration. We will study the book beautiful and the ideal book in the precepts and practices of reformers like Morris and Crane as compared with Lepère, Bracquemond and Pelletan, and with Bierbaum, Poeschel and Moholy-Nagy, to name just a few. 1.3 Models for the cultural study of the illustrated book 57 <?page no="59"?> 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 This chapter deals with selected aspects of book illustration as presented in manuals on the subject, and in critical reflections on the crafts, industry and theory of graphic art, that taken together can provide a contribution to the historical background of post WWI book culture in Europe. We will be moving to and fro between different facets of culture that are all interrelated and that influence each other in ways that propelled the technological, economic, social, aesthetic and ethical debates of the period. In these eighty-odd years, a cultural process comes under way that takes us from Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843) via Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) to the writings of Ruskin and Morris and their disciples discussed below. My focus is mainly on Britain, because it was there that the Industrial Revolution first took impact by changing the patterns of production and of labour, after the building of turnpike roads and a canal system, and the improvement of steam engines and railways had facilitated travel and the transport of goods. As G.M. Trevelyan wrote, in his classic English Social History ( 3 1946), “the whole character and scope of British commerce began to assume its modern form of supplying necessaries for all, instead of merely luxuries for the rich” (Trevelyan 1946: 386), and these necessaries of course included newspapers and books. The abolition of stamp duty on newspapers, on 15 June 1855, made way for penny newspapers, and it is no coincidence that the first issue of the Daily Telegraph was published a fortnight later (Altick 2 1998: 354). In 1861 the duty on paper was repealed, and since paper was now increasingly being made of esparto grass and later of wood pulp, and printed by steam machines and rotary presses, books became much cheaper and remained so till the end of the century (ibid.: 306-309). Taken together, the accumulated agricultural, industrial and democratic revolutions in Britain, France and Germany (and elsewhere) all played their part in shaping people’s everyday habits, their interests and preferences, their work and its products, and their ability to listen and to speak. Thomas Carlyle had all this in mind when he declared in Past and Present (1843, Centenary Edition 1899) that “the proper Epic of this world is not now ‘Arms and the Man’; how much less, ‘Shirt-frills and the Man’; no, it is now ‘Tools and the Man’: that, henceforth to all time, is now our Epic” (Carlyle 1899: 209). <?page no="60"?> 2.1 Techniques and economics of book illustration At this point we must turn to the material and economic dimensions of bookmaking and especially of book illustration. In order to understand a print, i.e. a printed picture or design (F: estampe, G: Druck, Druckgrafik), to read it with insight and empathy, we need to know how it was made, and why it was made in its particular manner. “How? ” is a technical question and “why? ” a question about aesthetic standards and cultural change. Artists and critics have generally agreed that both kinds of knowledge are needed and often complained of the public’s ignorance, and sometimes of each other’s ignorance as well. Léon Rosenthal, the Lyons art historian, teacher and critic, and author of La Gravure (1909), put it like this: L’histoire de la technique est la clef de l’histoire de la gravure : une image est inintelligible à qui ignore la façon dont elle a été obtenue ; mais l’explication des procédés, si on la veut complète, est longue, ardue, obscure à tout autre qu’au praticien, inutile enfin pour ceux qui ne désirent pas apprendre à graver, mais qui veulent savoir simplement comment l’on grave. Je me suis donc contenté d’indiquer l’allure générale de chaque procédé, en insistant sur son caractère spécifique. (Rosenthal 1909: iif.) This insight is gained from his retrospective analysis of different kinds of engraving from the 15 th to the 19 th century, and is linked to the recognition that the art has declined and lost its originality since it has become merely a technique for the reproduction of other people’s inventions. Just five years later, the practising engravers Max Bucherer (1883-1974) and Fritz Ehlotzky (1886-1942) see themselves as part of a modern reform movement and on the basis of this self-awareness make much the same point in their Der Original- Holzschnitt. Eine Einführung in sein Wesen und seine Technik (1914, 2 1922), but now with emphatic reference to contemporary wood cutting: [G]erade der Holzschnitt, wie er heute geübt wird, will vom Gesichtspunkte seiner Entstehungsweise aus betrachtet werden, weil er, wie keine andere künstlerische Technik, ganz und gar in seinem Material wurzelt und diesem seine Besonderheit und auch seine Reize verdankt. (Bucherer/ Ehlotzky 1922: 7) The authors are so enthusiastic about the rediscovered virtues of wood cutting that they exaggerate, ever so slightly, the medium’s singularity. All types of print grow out of the materials that artists use to make them, but in some the material and the tools with which the material is worked leave traces that are difficult for the layman to recognise. It will therefore be helpful to review the traditional techniques for obtaining a printed image, beginning with the three basic kinds of print. They are distinguished according to the process by which 60 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="61"?> ink is pressed onto the paper: relief, intaglio and planographic prints. Reduced to the bare essentials, the differences are as follows. • On the wood block for a relief print (F: gravure en relief, gravure en taille d’épargne; G: Hochdruck) such as a woodcut or a wood engraving, those areas meant to come out white are excised, and only the untouched surface or relief, so called because it forms a plateau standing higher than the parts cut away, is inked by means of a roller and will print traces on a sheet of absorbent paper when pressure is applied. • The metal plate for an intaglio print (F: gravure en creux, gravure en taille douce; G: Tiefdruck) such as a copperplate engraving is scored or incised with a burin or graver making grooves of varying breadth and depth. The ink is rolled over and into the grooves, and the smooth surface of the plate is wiped clean. It can then be printed on dampened paper in a rolling press, under much higher pressure than is required for printing a relief block. The resulting print will show a pattern of raised lines, of varying height, depending on the amount of ink pulled out of the grooves by the paper. Another intaglio technique is etching (F: gravure à l’eau forte; G: Radierung), which is defined as drawing with a needle “through an acid-resisting ground laid on a plate so that the acid will attack the design and etch it” (Buckland- Wright 1953: 89). • The third type of print is planographic or flat (F: impression à plat; G: Flachdruck) and in the case of a lithograph is based on the mutual repulsion of grease and water. Using greasy crayons, ink or paint, the artist draws or paints a design on a chemically treated flat lithographic stone or metal plate (zinc, copper, or aluminium), from which prints can be made in a suitable press. There will be more to say about these three basic types of print in the following sections on the book reform movements in Britain, Germany and France, and again when we come to analyse in detail the illustrations in publishers’ series and individual volumes. First, however, we will need to investigate the tools and materials a print-maker uses, and the introduction of processes modifying the traditional types of print. Without such insight into the material foundations of an illustrated book, the reader-cum-viewer is liable to form inappropriate judgements, such as expecting a woodcut to produce effects which only a wood engraving can achieve, simply because he is unaware of how the making of black or white lines in a woodcut differs from the same task in wood engraving. In his book on The Craft of Woodcuts (1963), which is actually about wood engraving and linocuts as well, John R. Biggs (1909-1989) summarises the main 2.1 Techniques and economics of book illustration 61 <?page no="62"?> differences between cut and engraving in a full-page diagram that contrasts the characteristic tools, wood blocks, and modes of cutting: Fig. 7: Wood engraving and woodcutting (Biggs 1963: 13) The oldest form of printing from a block of wood is the woodcut. It uses planks of comparatively soft wood, sawn with the grain like the planks used for building shelves, doors, table tops etc. (F: bois de fil; G: Langholz). The tools used for cutting the long grain wood block are mostly knives, either European or Japanese, plus a gouge, with a hollow, curved cutting edge (F: gouge; G: Hohleisen), and a chisel, with a flat cutting edge (F: ciseau; G: Flacheisen) for clearing spaces between lines and around the edges of the block. A European 62 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="63"?> knife is held at an angle like a pen and drawn towards the body, but vertically like a dagger in the case of a Japanese knife. Cutting along the grain is easier than across or at an angle, where “there is the danger of a jerky cut and possible slips” (Biggs 1963: 16). Tools must always be kept sharp, for “a blunt tool is uncontrollable” (ibid.: 21). Another kind of tool is the scrive or V tool, with a Vshaped cutting edge which is pushed away from the body and allows the artist to cut a channel in the wood with one single stroke (ibid.). William Andrew Chatto, in his famous Treatise on Wood Engraving, Historical and Practical, had described the scrive as a tool used “to cut numerals or other characters on timber” (Chatto 1839: 2), but its other uses were explored by many woodcutters over the following century. The engraving tools, gravers for short, are different from the classic wood cutting tools because they are used on a block of wood cut across the grain, so that its fibres are vertical (F: bois de bout, bois debout; G: Hirnholz). Boxwood (F: buis; G: Buchsbaum) is the material most engravers prefer because of its close and even texture, which obviates the difficulties of cutting against the grain, alluded to above. Engraving tools are held like the scrives just mentioned, and each makes different kinds of cuts - the oldest kind of graver, known as burin (F: burin; G: Stichel, Grabstichel), can produce lines of varying width, while a spitstick is good for curved cuts, a scorper can clear spaces, and a multiple tool produces a number of fine parallel cuts in a single operation. Generally speaking, wood engravings look lighter, more delicate, and show a greater variety of tints than woodcuts, which tend towards stronger lines and well defined areas of black and white. In the period under consideration here, engraving tools were often used in a kind of crossover when making woodcuts in order to obtain effects not feasible with a knife. It may therefore not always be easy to distinguish a cut from an engraving, and one often enough comes across books with title-pages announcing “mit Holzschnitten” when the illustrations are in fact wood engravings (e.g. Insel-Bücherei nos. 194, 302, 328). Eric Gill (1882-1940), in his 1925 introduction to the second edition of Wood Engraving (1921, repr. 1938) by R. John Beedham (1879-1975), is another spokesman for the importance of being able to distinguish the techniques of illustration. After an impassioned critique of contemporary photographic processes, he identifies the virtues of wood engraving, the first being the undivided responsibility of “the workman who draws, engraves and prints his own blocks” (Gill in Beedham 1938: 11): Another advantage of wood-engraving is that it forces upon the workman some respect for the thing in itself and makes it impossible for him to place a merely relative value upon the art of drawing. Mere likeness to nature is much more easily achieved 2.1 Techniques and economics of book illustration 63 <?page no="64"?> by drawing, whether in line or wash, upon paper. The graver and the wood both of them make their own demands and make mere imitation of nature almost impossible. The workman is compelled to consider his work primarily as an engraving and only secondarily as a representation. This is a good thing, for a work of art is primarily a thing of Beauty in itself and not a representation of something else, however beautiful that other thing may be. This the public does not understand. (ibid.: 11 f.) Rather than the first “impossible” Gill surely means “possible” or even “neces‐ sary”, for the drawing will be always be modified by the action of the graver. Beedham himself takes up Gill’s first argument by insisting that “the modern wood engraver design his own engravings”, so that artist and craftsman become one. He adds that he must also select his own tools, “the kind of tools which will best express his own individuality” (ibid.: 19). Like Biggs and all the many authors of handbooks of arts and crafts, he describes these tools and the appropriate kinds of wood in considerable detail, both for wood engraving and wood cutting (ibid.: 21-24, 29, 50-52) and then, in the section about drawing on the wood, adds a caveat: The engraver is to remember that the production is to be an engraving and not a drawing; that it is to have the character of an engraving - an engraving manifest and not the imitation of another drawing, half-tone, or any other process. Let the dependence be on the engraving tools rather than on the pencil. (ibid.: 33) The draughtsman should therefore avoid drawing lines and shades that cannot be produced by engraving, which if he is also the engraver, he will surely do. For the beholders it is important to learn to recognise an engraving by the authentic traces of the tools, by the kind of lines the artist has made with them, and so recognise the individuality of the artist. This may be easier for some artists than for others - a woodcut by Jean Lébédeff or Frans Masereel is quite easy to identify, and so is a wood engraving by Joan Hassall or Agnes Miller Parker, once you have learnt to pay attention to their lines and the differences between them, and have become sufficiently familiar with their work. But in other cases that may be more difficult, especially in work that uses both cutting and engraving tools on a plank grain block. Here is an example from Morin-Jean’s Manuel pratique du Graveur sur bois (1926) that follows and illustrates a passage discussing different kinds of line and hatching, including the use of an awl or even a nail to scratch grooves on the smooth surface of the block, which will print as thin white lines. The artist’s aim, he says, addressing the reader, is to achieve a balance of black lines on white, and white lines on black: 64 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="65"?> C’est à vous à alterner habilement les effets de lignes blanches sur fond noir avec ceux de lignes noires sur fond blanc. De ce jeu savant dépend la réussite ; voyez par exemple une des illustrations de Dufy pour Le Béstiaire de Guillaume Apollinaire. Fig. 8: Raoul Dufy, «-L’Écrevisse-» Jugez de l’effet décoratif puissant tiré de ce centre clair où le dessin s’enlève en noir solide sur le fond du papier et de ce pourtour velouté où se jouent des arabesques blanches exécutées avec la richesse d’une somptueuse dentelle. (Morin-Jean 1926, 21961: 29 f.) This is a compelling reading and verbalisation of the beautiful arrangement of black on white, and white on black in Raoul Dufy’s woodcut of a crayfish, moving from the centre to the borders. Morin-Jean’s simile is also used by Douglas Percy Bliss in his History of Wood Engraving when he speaks of “delicate lace-like engraving” (Bliss 1928: 5). The crayfish is one of a series of 26 cuts of animals and insects illustrating Apollinaire’s first book of poems, Le Bestiaire (1911). The book’s subtitle is Cortège d’Orphée, i.e. Orpheus’ Parade, because it is divided into four sections, each opening with a full-page woodcut of Orpheus, whose music enchanted beasts and even trees and rocks, as recounted in many bestiaries written over the past 1600 years, popular reading that was often illustrated. The quatrain which Apollinaire composed on the subject of the crayfish goes as follows: 2.1 Techniques and economics of book illustration 65 <?page no="66"?> Incertitude, ô mes délices Vous et moi nous nous en allons Comme s’en vont les écrevisses, À reculons, à reculons. (Apollinaire 2017-: 51) I feel invited, in this trilingual study, to turn this into macaronic verse by rendering the last line as “Back, step by step, im Rückwärtsgang”. Translation is just as much an adjunctive response to a text as is Morin-Jean’s choice of Dufy’s woodcut to illustrate his own ideas about the harmony of black and white, and his commentary on the woodcut is the next adjunctive step in a potentially endless series in which all readers of texts and images can participate. Another point that needs to be dealt with is why woodcuts and wood engravings are so suitable for book illustration, much more so than etchings or copperplate engravings. There are a number of reasons and they are explained by Hans Alexander Müller (1888-1962) in the final chapter of his How I Make Woodcuts and Wood Engravings (1939, 2 1945): A book illustrated with woodcuts can be one of the finest products of the printing press, if for no other reason than that the same principle, the relief process, applies to the printing of both type and illustrations. In this uniformity, all good printers and publishers recognize an advantage over other methods of reproduction. It is of great importance from a technical and practical viewpoint that in most cases the illustrations and type can be printed at the same time. Whether an illustration is printed from the original block or from a facsimile of it, the electrotype, is immaterial. A good electro reproduces the original to minute detail. And it is advisable to take good care of the original, since wood is not so hard as metal and in printing a large edition the block might be damaged or split. The making of an electro is cheaper than any method of reproducing an original drawing. On the other hand, the artist’s fee for making his illustrations in woodcut is slightly higher, but that is justified on various grounds, and should not be an issue with the publisher in giving the commission. (Müller 1945: 88) Technical uniformity is also an aesthetic matter, first in the contrast of black and white, and second in the characteristic linearity of both type and picture. This second feature means that the type should be chosen to harmonise with the style of illustration, or vice versa. Heavy typefaces like Egyptians and Clarendons, with thick slab serifs, may go well with a woodcut’s strong black lines, but jar with the fine lines and hatching of a wood engraving, which calls for a lighter typeface, such as Baskerville or Garamond. The illustrator must therefore 66 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="67"?> know what type will be used to print the text and either adapt his style to the typography or ask for a different typeface. Reading Printed Texts and Illustrations The texts and illustrations under discussion are both printed, mostly in black on white, in order that they may be looked at and read. There are many factors involved in making a printed text easy and pleasant to read, such as the choice of typeface just mentioned, the type size, the quality of the paper, and a number of others. The type size must be appropriate to the size of the page. Type size is measured in points, a system developed in France first by Pierre Simon Fournier between 1737 and 1764, and improved in 1775 by François-Ambroise Didot by basing it on the “pied du roi”, the French foot of 12 inches. This was gradually introduced and modified worldwide to fit regional pre-metric measures and later the metric system (Updike 2 1937: I, 28-32). Today most of us are familiar with both the names and looks of a number of typefaces as well as with the point system through working with digital text programmes providing a large choice of types and formats that can be adapted to the user’s requirements. In traditional typesetting, whether by hand or by machine, there was always a conflict between legibility and economy to be resolved. This concerned the type or text area (F: surface de la page composée; G: Satzspiegel, Schriftspiegel), the length of a full line of letterpress in it, the horizontal space between the lines that can be increased by leading, i.e. strips of lead inserted between lines of type (F: interlignage; G: Durchschuss), and the space between words, which all influence readability to a large extent (Albert Rahmer, Kleine Schule der Typographie, 1966: 24-26, 82-85). The margins around the type areas of a double page also help the reader to focus on the text and to move smoothly from one line to the next. They are traditionally defined by the rule that the left (verso) and right (recto) outer margins must be wider than the inner margins that meet at the fold between the two pages and merge into a single space. The margins at the head of the two pages are by the same rule a little narrower than at the foot, for a practical reason, namely that the pages correctly folded in a gathering all have the same space from the top fold to the first line of letterpress, but when the sheets of paper are not of uniform size, or when the imposition (F: imposition; G: Ausschießen) of the letterpress is not on centre of both sides of the sheet, the folding will lead to uneven bottom edges. Spacing is also effected by dividing the text into sections, chapters and paragraphs, with initials, headpieces and tailpieces being used not merely as decorations, but as markers alerting the reader to such divisions, and as signposts pointing forwards and back. 2.1 Techniques and economics of book illustration 67 <?page no="68"?> Paper is a very important factor in the pricing of a book, especially during a period like the 1920s, when economic crises and political turmoil combined to make it scarce and expensive. From the reader’s point of view, an illustrated text printed in black on a glaring white paper is less agreeable than one printed on a cream-tinted paper, often called paper-white, on which letterpress and relief-printed illustrations stand out very well. The paper’s opacity is just as important, for if the black of an illustration or ornament shows through the paper, it will literally obscure the type and also reduce the clarity of an illustration. This will often be the case in inexpensive editions printed on thin paper, e.g. volume 91 of the Livre Moderne Illustré series published by Ferenczi in December 1929, a few weeks after the Wall Street crash. The book in question is the novel Le Beau Baiser by Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, with “bois et illustrations en couleurs” by Gérard Cochet. The 23 pen drawings have much less show-through than the two full-page woodcuts, which have blank versos, like all the eight full-page pen-drawings, while the pen-drawn smaller vignettes, used as headpieces or tailpieces, hardly show through at all. It seems that Ferenczi and his art director Clément Serveau, having to make do with the paper available, decided to reduce the number of woodcuts in favour of the lighter pen drawings, in order to ensure unimpaired legibility. “Couleurs” here means that some illustrations, six to be exact, use pale green as a second colour that also does not leave much of a trace on the verso. A woodcut produces an embossed pattern on the page and one can feel the edges of the relief by stroking gently over the paper, preferably on the verso side. A printed page with a blank verso, as in the example discussed above, is called unperfected or not backed up (F: sans retiration; G: ohne Widerdruck). A relief block or electro will be made up exactly to the standard height of the metal type (0·918 inches, 23,317 mm) so that letterpress and blocks can be assembled together in a forme (F: forme; G: Schließrahmen) and printed in one single step and on the same paper. In the same way, the illustrations and ornaments can be placed on the page exactly where they belong or fit in best. Such allin-one printing thus has three advantages: first, it saves time and money in comparison with all other traditional methods of printing illustrations, from intaglio copperplate engraving to planographic lithograph, which must be printed separately and usually on a different kind of paper as a “hors texte” that requires to be tipped in, i.e. pasted down along one edge (F: collage d’un horstexte; G: eine Tafel anpappen) on the appropriate page or on the first or fifth page of a gathering, prior to trimming. The perfect placement of text and image is the second advantage, in that it establishes their semantic relationship. Third, it is aesthetically pleasing, for the letterpress and the relief block make 68 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="69"?> the same kind of sharp-edged impression, especially when the type and the block display a similar variety of line thicknesses and so achieve a harmony that meets one of the basic requirements defined by proponents of the book beautiful during the 19 th century. In the 18 th century, when intaglio copperplate engraving had become the preferred medium for illustration, engravers in France ( Jean-Michel Papillon, 1698-1776) and Britain (Thomas Bewick, 1753-1828), seeking a cheaper material than copper and one that would allow longer print runs, experimented with different kinds of wood and with modified engraving tools. In his Traité historique et pratique de la gravure en bois (1766), Papillon came to the conclusion that boxwood was particularly suited to making relief engravings that can be embedded in the flow of type, and makes explicit reference to using blocks cut across the grain: Le Buis est le premier & le plus excellent bois sur lequel on puisse graver. […] Le meilleur est de couleur jaunâtre, & étant scié en travers, paroit luisant & plein ; celui qui paroit graveleux par le bois de bout, ne vaut absolument rien, il est trop sec, ou il est pourri. (Papillon 1766: II, 58) The block must be homogeneous and moist, dense and without holes or hard gravelly bits, so that a tool worked across the surface will meet with even resistance throughout and produce even and elegant lines. In reading Papillon’s description one must remember that he was aiming at a way of producing type-embedded initials, ornaments and vignettes as similar as possible in appearance to copperplate engravings, which would continue to be employed for full-page engravings till the early 19 th century (Friedländer 1921: 212 f.) and then practically disappear with the industrialisation of printing. By accepting the subordination of wood engraving to copperplate Papillon was unable to take the decisive step that Bewick took a generation later, namely to develop a new and comprehensive style of engraving born out of the black surface that a carefully inked block would print on a sheet of paper. Each cut with the graver would produce a white line, or dot, or squiggle, and crosshatching (which in My Life Bewick explicitly rejected, cp. Bewick 1981: 177) would be no more difficult than rhythmic parallel lines. The black surface origin shows, quite deliberately, in many of Bewick’s engravings, as a dark, shadowed, mysterious core, from which the design can be seen to unfold. His “Fox under the rock” is a good example: 2.1 Techniques and economics of book illustration 69 <?page no="70"?> Fig. 9: Thomas Bewick, “Fox under the rock” (Uglow 2008: 99) Jenny Uglow has described this vignette as resembling a lyric poem, in which “the animal springs forward against the darkness below the slabs of millstone grit and the central image is framed in a rolling counter-movement of water and wind-blown foliage” (ibid.: 98f.). It is actually a central darkness that spreads to link rock, bushes and sward in “a condensed suggestiveness” (ibid.) of violence allied with peace. Bewick’s paradox is all the more telling for his naturalistic precision in the rendering of observed shapes and textures, created out of the originally uniform black. This style of white line engraving became the inspiration of much modern illustration, especially in Great Britain, as we will see in later chapters. 2.2 Art and ethics of the illustrated book Gill’s arguments that the relation between the artist and the craftsman should be determined by responsibility, respect and authenticity are essentially moral, and in their emphasis on the artist’s own “sense of what is beautiful in itself” (Gill in Beedham 1925: 12) their bent is aesthetic. In both respects they stand in the tradition of John Ruskin’s famous analysis of the division of labour in The Stones of Venice (1853, 2 1886). The phrase may be familiar, but it is misleading, Ruskin says: It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: Divided into mere segments of men, broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. (Ruskin/ Morris 1892: 22f.) I am quoting here from The Nature of Gothic, a reprint of Vol. II, Ch. 6, of Ruskin’s book, namely the Kelmscott edition of 1892, designed and printed 70 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="71"?> by William Morris, using the 1886 text and adding a short preface by Morris. Fortunately this is available in a facsimile edition (2011, 2 2015), so that one can enjoy the typography, the ornamental borders and initials of the fourth book produced by the Kelmscott Press, as well as absorb Ruskin’s trenchant critique of the evils of industrial machine production, of its effects on the minds of working men and women. Ruskin argues that the factory system is to blame for isolating the workers from each other, and for cutting them off from the work as a whole, so that they have no chance to exert their brains in devising improvements of the product, or of the process of making it. In producing this Kelmscott edition, Morris embodies Ruskin’s ideal of the fusion of arts and crafts, and of comprehensive responsibility. He used his own Golden Type, a version of Jenson’s roman of 1476, to set the text, and designed and engraved the decorated initials that open each new paragraph. Here is a sample page on the subject of perfection, from the first of six sections in which Ruskin discusses “the characteristic or moral elements of Gothic” (ibid.: 6), the first and most important being “savageness”, the opposite of perfection: Fig. 10: John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic (Ruskin/ Morris 2015: 31) 2.2 Art and ethics of the illustrated book 71 <?page no="72"?> The page is simply but effectively organised, with the keyword at the head of the outer margin, an ornamental initial half-way down, and a concluding definition in capitals at the bottom. The type is clear, without any excessive flourishes, and heavy enough to balance the emphatic initials. The main point, however, is that Morris was able to combine the functions of writer, designer and craftsman and so create a harmonious whole, which may not be perfect (as Daniel Berkeley Updike confirms in his Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use, Vol. II: 206-208), yet is most impressive and very legible. But what is Ruskin saying in the quoted passage and the page reproduced above? He is first of all focusing on the plight of factory workers who are alienated from their own best abilities and aspirations by monotonous assembly line work, “this degradation of the operative into a machine” (ibid.: 20), or, as explained on page 31 above, are turned into slaves by an architect unwilling to “take his workmen as he finds them, and let them show their weaknesses together with their strength”. He had pointed out earlier that in the great manufacturing cities everything is manufactured except men: [W]e blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. (ibid.: 23) In order to remedy this serious omission, it is necessary to find out “what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy” (ibid.). This can be done ex negativo by observing three simple rules about what kinds of labour to avoid: 1. NEVER encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in which Invention has no share. 2. NEVER demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end. 3. NEVER encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving records of great works. (ibid.: 24) These rules can be applied immediately to what has been said above about the various print techniques, which all possess and even require the six characteristic elements of Gothic. These are, in order of importance, a certain degree of “savageness”, “changefulness”, and “naturalism”, by which last Ruskin means “the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistical laws” (ibid.: 48). The rules also leave room for the other three characteristics, “the sense of the grotesque”, “rigidity”, meaning “the peculiar energy which gives tension to movement, and stiffness 72 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="73"?> to resistance” (ibid.: 81), and finally “redundance”, which means an excusable tendency towards over-ornamentation in cases where the “loveliness of simple design and grace of uninvolved proportion” would have been enough (ibid.: 86). There is a passage in the paragraph on rigidity that evokes Gothic architecture and seems, from a 20 th century perspective, to foreshadow the expressionisms of Munch, Gauguin, Vallotton and Kirchner: Egyptian and Greek buildings stand, for the most part, by their own weight and mass, one stone passively incumbent on another; but in the Gothic vaults & traceries there is a stiffness analogous to that of the bones of a limb, or fibres of a tree; an elastic tension and communication of force from part to part, & also a studious expression of this throughout every visible line of the building. (ibid.: 81 f.) This is an excellent description of how, for example in a good woodcut illustration, the weights and lines are brought into relation with each other, producing different effects, which become visible as an “elastic tension” and a “communication of force from part to part”. These express the vision that governed the artist’s pencil or pen, knife or graver, in their movements across the paper or block, and bring forth a design that the reader of the illustration can decipher and put into words, however hesitant and approximative they may be. Ruskin has exactly this sense of how tools and materials must be brought to cooperate that we find in so many craft manuals of the early 20 th century, which of course owe many of their insights to his example. But Ruskin’s idea of the mixed and fluctuating nature of Gothic and its elements is also very modern, a truly dynamic concept involving change, variety and even self-contradiction. In this sense, “rude and wild” (ibid.: 8) is not only a characteristic feature of northern architecture, but is exactly the quality rediscovered in the “genuine new birth of art”, that Morris predicted in a letter to the Daily Chronicle of 10 November 1893 (Briggs 1962: 144), a renaissance that produced Expressionism and other movements in the arts. In the course of the 1870s and 1880s Morris took up and developed many of Ruskin’s ideas and questions, contributing all the while to public debate through his letters, lectures and articles, and of course his utopian romance News from Nowhere (1890). He echoes Ruskin’s ideas about bad work and good in his popular lecture on “Useful Work and Useless Toil” (1884). There Morris distinguishes between work that is worth doing, because it is full of hope, and toil that is worthless, because it contains no such hope. He identifies three kinds of hope that belong to worthy work: What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work, makes it worth doing? 2.2 Art and ethics of the illustrated book 73 <?page no="74"?> It is threefold, I think - hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and of good quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth having; product worth having by one by one who is neither a fool nor an ascetic; pleasure enough for all of us to be conscious of it while we are at work; not a mere habit, the loss of which we shall feel as a fidgety man feels the loss of the bit of string he fidgets with. I have put the hope of rest first because it is the simplest and most natural part of our hope. Whatever pleasure there is in some work, there is certainly some pain in all work, the beast-like pain of stirring up our slumbering energies to action, the beastlike dread of change when things are pretty well with us; and the compensation for this animal pain in animal rest. […] As to the hope of product, I have said that Nature compels us to work for that. It remains for us to look for it that we do really produce something, and not nothing, or at least nothing that we want or are allowed to use. If we look to this and use our wills we shall, so far, be better than machines. The hope of pleasure in the work itself: how strange that hope must seem to some of my readers - to most of them! Yet I think that to all living things there is a pleasure in the exercise of their energies, and that even beasts rejoice in being lithe and swift and strong. But a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works. Not only his own thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his hands; and, as a part of the human race, he creates. If we work thus we shall be men, and our days will be happy and eventful. (Morton 1973: 87 f.) This “pleasure in the work itself ” is not in danger of being stifled by working in manual crafts of whatever kind, as long as the craftswomen and craftsmen “use their wills”, heed Ruskin’s solicitous rules, and remain in full command of their materials, techniques, tools and even machines, which are perfectly acceptable for doing repetitive work. The notion that Morris objected on principle to the use of machines is mistaken, for while he repeatedly invoked the horror of workmen being turned, metaphorically speaking, into machines, he fully recognised that machines could lighten the weight of toil that labourers were often made to carry. A prominent example of this mistake is Nikolaus Pevsner’s claim, in his Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936, revised and expanded as Pioneers of Modern Design, 4 2005), that a “decisive antagonism in Morris’s life and teaching” is revealed by his hatred of machines: His work, the revival of handicraft, is constructive, the essence of his teaching is destructive. Pleading for handicraft alone means pleading for conditions of medieval 74 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="75"?> primitiveness, and first of all for the destruction of all the devices of civilization which were introduced during the Renaissance. (Pevsner 2005: 16) Keeping in mind Morris’s discussion of work and hope, we can now listen to what he really says about machines in his lecture on “Art and its Producers” (1888, published 1901). Most of the lecture rephrases issues and ideas we have already come across, so we can join him as he moves towards his conclusion: If my premises are accepted the practical position is clear; we must try to change the system of the production of wares. To meet possible objections once more, I do not mean by this that we should aim at abolishing all machinery: I would do some things by machinery which are now done by hand, and other things by hand which are now done by machinery: in short, we should be the masters of our machines and not their slaves, as we are now. It is not this or that tangible steel or brass machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny, which oppresses the lives of all of us. Now this enterprise of rebelling against commercialism I hold to be a thoroughly worthy one: remember what my [introductory] text was, and how I said that our aim should be to add to the incentive of necessity for working, the incentive of pleasure and interest in the work itself. I am not pleading for the production of a little more beauty in the world, much as I love it, and as much as I would sacrifice for its sake; it is the lives of human beings that I am pleading for […]. (Morris 1901: 15 f.) It is difficult today, almost 150 years later, to see what there is to misunderstand about this statement, though it does confirm that Morris himself felt the need to explain himself again and again to his contemporary audiences. Today machines remain an issue, especially if they displace a superior form of production by an inferior one in order to increase profits. Let me take an example from bookbinding: after 1836, when William Hancock patented his “caoutchouc binding”, a form of adhesive binding, in which a machine removes the back folds of a book’s gathered sections, and then glues the block of single leaves along the roughened and sometimes notched back. Such adhesive bindings make it difficult to open a book flat, and they are liable to crack if too much pressure is applied in the attempt. Over the years the glue tends to become brittle, and sooner or later the book will begin to fall apart and require rebinding, or have to be recycled if the paper is too acidic and has therefore become discoloured and brittle. In cases like these, machine-bound books are undoubtedly inferior to those bound in traditional techniques that are on principle always reversible. Other machines do not have such drawbacks, e.g. the bookbinder’s cutting or trimming plough that serves to give a smooth trim the fore, top and tail edges of a sewn block of sections. When I learned the basics of bookbinding as a boy 2.2 Art and ethics of the illustrated book 75 <?page no="76"?> at Farnborough Grammar School, the sewn block was clamped vertically in a lying (i.e. horizontal) press, on which the plough with its adjustable horizontal trimming blade could be moved to and fro. Fig. 11: Lying press and plough (Cockerell 1920: 128) Today I use a less bulky vertical plough made of birch and ash by a Dutch company, in which the book to be trimmed is fixed flat on a base board, with the edge to be cut facing to the left, and the right hand free to push and pull the vertical trimming blade along the guide rail. It is easier to use than the traditional plough and produces excellent results. It deserves to be classed as a machine, but not to be derided because it can carry out only one operation, in contrast to a simple tool such as a knife, which is versatile and can cut straight or curved lines, sharpen a pencil-point, or scrape impurities off an old sheet of paper. A tool is good if you know how to use it and if it fulfils your expectations, and the same applies to a machine. The pioneering thinking and teaching of Ruskin and Morris was codified and applied to the arts and crafts of practical book design during the first decades of the 20 th century by their disciples Thomas J. Cobden-Sanderson (1840-1922), Walter Crane (1845-1915), Emery Walker (1851-1933), Reginald 76 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="77"?> Blomfield (1856-1942), and Edward Johnston (1872-1944). All of them were active as lecturers, writers, teachers and art-craftsmen. In 1900, Cobden-Sand‐ erson, supported by Walker, founded the Doves Press as a reaction against the (in his view) overladen aesthetics of Morris’s Kelmscott Press. His first measure was to have a new type designed for the Doves Press, in part based on the roman type that Nicolas Jenson had used to print Pliny’s Historia Naturalis (Venice, 1476). A copy of this book from William Morris’s library was sold by auction at Sotheby’s, two years after Morris’s death, in December 1898 and bought on behalf of Cobden-Sanderson by the bookbinder Douglas Cockerell. The other model for the new Doves type was a similar roman used by Jacobus Rubeus for Lionardo Aretino’s Historia del Popolo Fiorentina (Venice, 1476) (Tidcombe 2002: 13). The result was a beautiful new type, larger and lighter than Morris’s Golden Type, and admirably suited for inaugurating the Doves Press programme, which may seem to lie far beyond our focus on popular book production, but did influence it, as the next example will show. Walter Crane is best remembered as the designer and illustrator and occasion‐ ally author of popular children’s books, from The Fairy Ship (1870) to The Baby’s Opera (1886), but he was also an influential teacher of design and craftsmanship in the Arts and Crafts movement and founding president of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society from 1887. His handbooks Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New (1896, repr. 1984), The Bases of Design (1898), and Line and Form (1900) show how concerned he was as a teacher to identify the constitutive parts of the printed and illustrated page, and the general principles by which these can be judged. He gives a summary of ten principles of design in the final chapter of Decorative Illustration. His starting point is to reassure his readers that he is not going to lay down the laws of design for all time: [T]here is nothing final or absolute in Design. It is a matter of continual re-arrangement, re-adjustment, and modification or even transformation of certain elements. A kind of imaginative chemistry of forms, masses, lines, and quantities, continually evolving new combinations. But each artistic problem must be solved on its merits, and as each one varies and presents fresh questions, it follows that no absolute rules or principles can be laid down to fit particular cases, although as the result of, and evolved out of, practice, certain general guiding principles are valuable, as charts and compasses by which the designer can to a certain extent direct his course. (Crane 1896: 216) The second point considers “the open book with the double-columns” as the basic unit in book design, with the qualification that as regards illustration the single page may be decisive. He designates the column or type area as “the designer’s panel” in which “any of the territory not occupied by the type is a fair field for 2.2 Art and ethics of the illustrated book 77 <?page no="78"?> accompanying or terminating design” (ibid.: 217). He is especially interested in “terminating design”, meaning tail-pieces to fill the blank space left at the end of a chapter. In his third point, Crane suggests that the rectangular shape of the page and the type area should find an echo in any illustration inserted. One finds that head-pieces very often conform to this idea, while tail-pieces tend to take the shape of an open vignette, or, especially in French books, of a cul-de-lampe in the shape of an inverted triangle. Next, Crane turns to the endpapers of a book, of which he says that they should be “delicately suggestive of the character and contents of the book” (ibid.: 221) but should not compete with the illustrations. The fifth point concerns the frontispiece and title-page. The frontispiece may be pictorial and suggestive, he says, but the title-page should be essentially typographic and informative, each according to their function for the text they are introducing to the reader. Crane uses Morris’s The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), the very first Kelmscott Press publication, as an example of how a double-page opening may be ornamented (by Morris) and illustrated (by Crane). In this particular case the title-page is placed on the left, giving us the title plus the first alternative title in black calligraphic script with five decorated white initials within a panel of light linear flowers and leaves. The panel is framed by a “marginal border” containing a heavier “floral arabesque” (ibid.: 222): Fig. 12 + 13: William Morris, title-page and opening of The Glittering Plain 78 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="79"?> If these pages seem rather over-decorated, that could be excused as redundance, the sixth characteristic of Gothic, according to Ruskin. I do not like the decorated initials of the title, for they clash with the calligraphic simplicity of the lettering and distract from the information that the page is supposed to supply. Crane’s next principle is opening chapters, with the opening of Ch. I on the right-hand page where we find a similar floral border enclosing a panel of the same size as that on the left. The two titles of the story (there is also a third, The Acre of the Undying) are repeated at the head of the panel, but the author’s name is omitted, perhaps because it was announced on the half-title two leaves earlier. Then, moving towards the centre, we cross another border, composed of grapes and vine leaves, and reach the square head-piece illustration, which shows the three riders who have arrived in search of “the Land where the days are many” (Morris 1891: 3). The engraving is one of 23 contributed by Crane. The chapter heading is printed in red beneath the illustration and its border, and it leads the reader to the opening initial - or does it? It is not till one realises that the “bold initial letter [T] designed in a square” (Crane 1896: 226) and the letters following it do not make a word that one looks elsewhere. The missing initial is hidden on the left in the creeper winding itself round and through a capital I, stretching almost halfway up the border. Is this what Crane means by “uniting ornament with type” (ibid.)? Surely not, but perhaps it is a case of insufficient cooperation between designer and illustrator. Nonetheless, early flatback numbers of Everyman’s Library adopted and varied this Morris pattern of the double-page spread, for example Ruskin’s Sesame & Lilies (EL 219, 1907). Principle number seven is precisely the “harmony between type and illustration and ornament” (ibid.) that has just been found wanting. It is usually a matter of weight, the uniform weight of solid black lines, contrasting with areas of light lines and a white background. Number eight is “headings and initials at the opening of a chapter” and is a plea for uniformity of size and style in the ornamental spaces and the initials throughout a book (ibid.: 230f.). Principle nine deals with half-page illustrations that create the effect of a continuous frieze if they are repeated as a series from one page to the next. Finally, Crane comes to “the space at the end of the chapter”, which provides opportunities that he relishes: For my part, I can never resist the opportunity for a tailpiece if it is to be a fully illustrated work, though some would let it severely alone, or be glad of the blank space to rest a bit. I think this lets one down at the end of the chapter too suddenly. The blank, the silence, seems too dead; one would be glad of some lingering echo, some recurring thought suggested by the text; and here is the designer’s opportunity. (ibid.: 231) Crane leaves it to the reader to find a suitable example of a tailpiece showing a “lingering echo” of the text. He distinguishes three shapes of tailpiece: the 2.2 Art and ethics of the illustrated book 79 <?page no="80"?> “mousetail termination”, perhaps inspired by the tail-shaped poem in Ch. III of Alice in Wonderland, the “inverted triangular plan”, that in France is known as culde-lampe, and the “medallion form” that can enclose a figure or symbol, or any other shape with a contour, like a flower or leaf or shield, which should be “free, not rigidly geometrical” in treatment (ibid.: 232). Crane is sometimes expressing personal preferences in setting up such principles, but in the main he codifies the late Victorian consensus. It is striking that his emphasis is on questions of form, space, harmony and decorative feeling, while ethical issues are left out of the picture. Roger Fry (1866-1934) represents the next generation of artists and critics for whom “the closed book of European painting began steadily to open” after about 1905 (Shone 1977: 13), the year when a group of young artists gathered round Walter Sickert (1860-1942) who during his years in Paris had made the acquaintance of painters like Degas, Bonnard and Signac and had now returned to London. Out of Sickert’s growing circle were born the Allied Artists’ Association (1908) that organised exhibitions along the same lines as the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, and in 1911 the Camden Town Group that aimed to bring art closer to the everyday life of ordinary people. This was the situation in which Fry organised an exhibition of “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” held from November 1910 to January 1911, and which Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister, remembers thus: Then, suddenly, bewilderingly, here, well arranged, not too many yet enough, in a pleasant gallery in Grafton Street were all the painters one had had glimpses of: Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin. It is impossible I think that any other single exhibition can ever have had so much effect as did that on the rising generation. The fuming and storming of the elders added to the fun of course, but in that first show the only possible shocking quality was that of unfamiliarity. To the young that lasts a very short time and there was no affectation in their enthusiasm. […] To those who had ‘lost their way’, and I think many had or might soon have done so, here was a sudden pointing to a possible path, a sudden liberation and encouragement to feel for oneself, which was absolutely overwhelming. (Bell 1998: 129 f.) A second exhibition followed in 1912, with Matisse as its focus, and an English section organised by Clive Bell (1881-1964), Vanessa’s husband. This new departure of young British art, initiated by Fry’s exhibitions and nurtured by his and Bell’s critical writings, did lead many young artists to rethink their own work and follow the inspiration given by powerful artists like Cézanne or Van Gogh or Gauguin. The question is whether it had any effect on the book arts of the 1920s and 30s, on its illustration, decoration and typographical design. In order to find an answer, it will be necessary to consider just a few of the basic ideas of Fry and Bell as expressed in their programmatic works, 80 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="81"?> Bell’s Art (1914) and Fry’s Vision and Design (1920, repr. 1957). The two authors were closely acquainted, they argued and wrote concurrently, and if they did not always agree, they supported each other in finding answers to questions that occupied them both very much. Fry was very much concerned to find out how the arrival of Post-Impressionism and the gradual turning away from representational depiction was affecting contemporary life, and that was the topic of a lecture on “Art and Life” that he gave to the Fabian Society in 1917. In this, he makes a distinction between two different kinds of vision, that of the artist and that of the “ordinary man”, that may be relevant to our question. The impressionists, he says, “upheld, more categorically than ever before, the complete detachment of the artistic vision from the values imposed on vision by everyday life” (Fry 1957: 10). They introduced “new effects of atmospheric colour and atmospheric perspective, thereby endowing painting with a quite new series of colour harmonies” (ibid.), but that was not all: They did more than this - the effects thus explored were completely unfamiliar to the ordinary man, whose vision is limited to the mere recognition of objects with a view to the uses of everyday life. He was forced, in looking at their pictures, to accept as artistic representation something very remote from all his previous expectations, and thereby he also acquired in time a new tolerance in his judgements on works of art, a tolerance which was destined to bear a still further strain in succeeding developments. (ibid.: 10f.) Fry rightly concentrates on the demands made on the spectator, on what Ernest Gombrich in Art and Illusion called “the beholder’s share” (Gombrich 1960, 5 1977: Part Three), namely her ability to learn as she looks and contribute her insights to further encounters with works of art created in this new mode of representation, as well as later modes like pointillism, cubism and abstraction. This topic of the reader’s and the spectator’s participation was broached in Ch. 1.2 and was developed by Wilhelm Worringer in his Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908). It is not wise of Fry to undermine his focus with the crude distinction between ordinary vision and artistic vision, a dichotomy that only marks two extreme points on the cline of perception, with all kinds and degrees in between. I prefer to follow Herbert Read’s argument in The Meaning of Art (1931, Penguin edition 1949) that “the aesthetic sense is inherent in most people” and belongs to the human heritage, as is evident when one considers “the art of primitive peoples” or observes “in the unconsciously aesthetic appreciation which the man in the street will betray in the presence of the latest six-cylinder Cadillac” (Read 1940: 53), without ever considering its use for everyday life. This non-utilitarian potential is exactly what Fry’s focus on the beholder’s share implies, namely that looking closely at unconventional works of art can unsettle old ways of seeing and engender new 2.2 Art and ethics of the illustrated book 81 <?page no="82"?> ones. From a prejudiced notion about the deficits of “ordinary” people, he leads us to the enlightened conclusion that given the chance they can overcome their supposed deficiencies. Fry’s thinking about spectators’ responses also embraces a new medium like film. In “An Essay in Aesthetics” of 1909 (reprinted in Vision and Design) he investigates the question of how seeing a real-life event differs from watching the same kind of event shown in a film or depicted in a painting, and leads to very different kinds of response in the spectator: If, in a cinematograph, we see a runaway horse and cart, we do not have to think either of getting out of the way or heroically interposing ourselves. The result is that […] we see the event much more clearly; see a number of quite interesting but irrelevant things, which in real life could not struggle into our consciousness, bent, as it would be, entirely upon the problem of our appropriate reaction. (Fry 1957: 18) Fry is once more contrasting everyday perception with aesthetic experience. In the everyday world our perception of the event would quickly be superseded by a pragmatic response, while in viewing a film, and still more in looking at a picture, we remain at leisure to contemplate. Here the distinction between pragmatic and aesthetic seems valid, and it reminds us that pragmatic responses to a painting are not required (except when you decide that you must get a postcard of the picture you are looking at in a gallery, or a catalogue, and so on). Clive Bell’s ideas about art and modern painting developed after his marriage to the painter Vanessa Stephen through his contacts with the Bloomsbury group, and after meeting Roger Fry in 1910. They were documented in his Art (1914, 2 1915), in which he aims to present “a complete theory of visual art” that will make it possible to distinguish reliably between “works of art and all other objects” (Bell 1915: v). The seemingly self-evident distinction is ultimately based on the concept of ‘significant form’, introduced in his first chapter, “The Aesthetic Hypothesis”. Bell first states the premise of his argument, the response of the beholder: The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art. All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art. I do not mean, of course, that all works provoke the same emotion. On the contrary, every work produces a different emotion. But all these emotions are recognisably the same in kind. […] This emotion is called the aesthetic emotion; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics. (ibid.: 6 f.) 82 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="83"?> Now what is this personal and peculiar emotion? How can “all sensitive” people have it, seeing that we are sensitive in so many personal and particular ways? Bell qualifies his claim by admitting that different works provoke different emotions, without however saying how they may differ. He actually denies that they differ “in kind”, claiming that in this generic respect they are “recognisably the same”. They are claimed to be the same by being subsumed under one single umbrella term, “the aesthetic emotion” (ibid.: 7). I must admit that I feel unhappy with Bell’s use of the terms emotion or feeling, as in an utterance like “We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it” (ibid.: 8 f.). But a few lines later he adds the following: A good critic may be able to make me see in a picture that had left me cold things that I had overlooked, till at last, receiving the aesthetic emotion, I recognise it as a work of art. To be continually pointing out those parts, the sum, or rather the combination, of which unite to produce significant form, is the function of criticism. (ibid.: 9) So a good critic can help a beholder to see things he has not recognised, to gain a new insight, a deeper understanding. Insight is a step-by-step cognitive process, not a sudden emotion, though no doubt it can lead to one, such as the pleasure and satisfaction of making a discovery. But quite apart from the misleading emphasis on emotion, Bell’s concept of significant form may to be useful for identifying a characteristic that representational art shares with those kinds of art that have moved away from the traditional goal of “illusional accuracy”. So how does Bell define significant form? In each [work of art], lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call “Significant Form”; and “Significant Form” is the one quality common to all works of visual art. (ibid.: 8) Herbert Read replaces the term “aesthetic emotion” by the wider concept of “aesthetic experience”, which he defines as “a response of the body and mind”. He also expands Fry’s concept of significant form to five “physical elements” of a work of art, namely “rhythm of line, massing of forms, space, light and shade, and colour” (Read 1949: 37), all these embedded in a suggestive definition of art itself, calculated to make his redefinitions plausible: All art is primarily abstract. For what is aesthetic experience, deprived of its incidental trappings and associations, but a response of the body and mind of man to invented or isolated harmonies? Art is an escape from chaos. It is movement ordained in numbers; it is mass confined in measure; it is the indetermination of matter seeking the rhythm of life. (ibid.: 33) 2.2 Art and ethics of the illustrated book 83 <?page no="84"?> Both Fry and Read draw our attention to abstract formal elements that seem to be constitutive of all works of art, and that can easily be overlooked by inexperienced beholders caught in the illusionist tradition. Another term for this abstract element is “composition”, which Herbert Furst (1874-1945) in his study of The Modern Woodcut (1924) defines thus: Composition in art means a re-ordering of objects as they are found in nature - it involves a disturbance of their natural order. Representations of natural facts which appear in a work of art are, therefore, always subject to conditions which are not those of nature. A work of art is then quite definitely not an accurate representation, copy or imitation of nature. (Furst 1924: 100) Have we now found a consensus among early 20 th century British writers about what constitutes a work of art? Composition is the traditional term, and significant form may be a modern and more explicit version of the same idea. Bell’s term supplements “composition” by “form”, and “re-ordering” by “significant”, thereby adding the dimension of meaning to arrangement. This needs to be illustrated and explained with reference to a concrete example of significant form, something which Bell does not provide either in “The Aesthetic Hypothesis” or in “Aesthetics and Post-Impressionism”, the first two chapters of Art. To remedy the fault, here is a woodcut from my own collection that promises to display some of the elements of significant form. Fig. 14: Ursula Dethleffs, “Das Mädchen Namenlos”, woodcut 1949 84 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="85"?> Ursula Dethleffs (1933-1994) was the daughter of Fridel Dethleffs-Edelmann, a paintress associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit, and learned the basic graphic techniques as a young girl under the tuition of her mother. She exhibited widely in Germany and abroad and won a number of prizes for her work. This is a very early yet sophisticated work, which uses a number of different contrasts to achieve an immediate effect - the simple black outline profile of a female figure, the nameless girl of the title, which dominates the composition. The contrast of black and white is also used to divide the picture plane into a foreground and a background, without really suggesting depth. The surface inside the black frame is more like a backcloth for the nameless girl and surrounds her outline with a rhythmic pattern of six decorative elements that suggest but do not represent vegetable and animal growths. What is striking is how the three white motifs across the black band at the top lead the beholder in a clockwise movement to the contrastive harmony of the three black motifs across the white band below. First (starting top left) there are white-on-black flowers, the girl’s hair, and a fruitbearing tree, and then three black-on-white floral motifs. These create a second visual rhythm, diagonally from corner to corner, in which the white silhouettes are transformed into black ones, and a virtual X is projected onto the picture. The white form of the girl is fully contained in its outline, an effect emphasised by two elements of body language, her arms hugging her knees, and her eyes lowered. Thus shape, line, colour, pattern, signs and surface all work together to elicit movement and rhythm in a significant form. Here we have a basically static composition suffused with a strange, intriguing tension which requires the beholder’s full attention. Such a description of formal structures inevitably demands an inquiry into their meanings, the signified of the signifiers, or the content of the form, as the art historian Erwin Panofsky puts it: In a work of art, ‘form’ cannot be divorced from ‘content’: the distribution of colour and lines, light and shade, volumes and planes, however delightful as a visual spectacle, must also be understood as carrying a more-than-visual meaning. (Meaning in the Visual Arts, 1955; Peregrine Books 1970: 205) Searching for meaning one can ask all kinds of questions: Who is this nameless girl? Is she really nameless, and if so, why? Is there a story behind the posture that she assumes? Her calm gaze seems to be directed inwards, it is selfsearching rather than outreaching. A literary source is not unlikely. An inquiry with the Galerie Dethleffs suggested that the woodcut might refer to a tale by Hans Christian Andersen, but there is none with the title “The Nameless Girl”, though some, like “The Little Match-Girl”, do feature a nameless protagonist. An internet search revealed that Ernst Wiechert’s Märchen (1945), illustrated by 2.2 Art and ethics of the illustrated book 85 <?page no="86"?> Hans Meid, does contain a tale entitled “Das Mädchen Namenlos”. Perhaps this book, written during the last years of the war and reprinted several times from 1946 to 1981, was available in the Dethleffs’ household, and this tale inspired 16-year-old Ursula to produce her woodcut. Her design certainly echoes the tale’s central motif, a version of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke X: 33-37) or of the story of St. Martin of Tours who shared his cloak with a beggar. The first sentence of the tale contains the motif in a nutshell: Es war einmal ein armes Mädchen, das hieß bei allen Leuten Namenlos, denn es war eines Morgens am Ufer des Stromes gefunden worden, in einer aus Rohr geflochtenen Wiege, und es hatte nichts an als ein Hemd aus sehr feinem Linnen und eine dünne goldene Kette um den Hals, so dünn, als hätte eine Spinne sie über Nacht gewoben. (Wiechert 1981: 395) Little Namenlos is put in the care of a widow known to be wicked and hardhearted, who immediately robs the girl of her gown and necklace. Fortunately, Marti the farmhand working for the widow, takes pity on Namenlos, looks after her and tells her all his dreams of a better future. One cold day in winter, when Namenlos, wrapped up in the old coat that Marti has given her, is looking after the widow’s sheep, she sees an old woman in a thin ragged dress coming towards her across the heath. The freezing woman begs the girl to give her the coat, which Namenlos of course does. This incident is repeated the next day, and again the day after, till finally on the fourth day Marti’s dreams come true: a young prince who has been told of her compassionate deeds arrives to reward her. Perhaps Wiechert’s tale provides a clue to the more-than-visual meaning of Ursula’s woodcut. 2.3 Components of the book reform movement in Germany The protracted birth of what is called the “Buchkunstbewegung” in Germany and Austria may be dated to the two Münchner Kunstgewerbeausstellungen of 1876 and 1888, and a third exhibition, the Deutsche Kunstgewerbeausstellung, which took place in Dresden in 1906, all three culminating in the Internationale Ausstellung für Buchgewerbe und Graphik, Leipzig 1914, popularly known as BUGRA. It was the Dresden event, which only invited practising artists and craftsmen to exhibit, and excluded the industrial producers who had participated in the two earlier exhibitions, that marked the turning-point. The first exhibition, with its motto of “Unser Väter Werk”, and the second, under the slogan “Deutsch-National”, both stood for conservatism, stylistic historicism, 86 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="87"?> and the eclectic imitation of traditional forms, materials and ornaments that seemed to go so well with Germany’s new status as a united Reich. Thirty years later, the Dresden exhibition rather belatedly reflected the influence of the British Arts and Crafts movement, for it was not till word of the productions of “Morris and Company” (founded in 1861) and of ventures like Liberty’s “Art Nouveau” shop (opened in 1875) had spread to the Continent in the 1890s that concrete activities began. The publication of new magazines in the field of literature, debate and art was one such activity, with The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, launched in London in 1893, serving as a model. Actually, it had been preceded by Der Kunstwart in 1887, founded in Dresden by Ferdinand Avenarius (1856-1923) and edited by him till his death. The German “Wart”, cognate with English “warden” or “warder”, means someone who guards and protects, and that characterises Avenarius’ pedagogical attitude, of which more in a moment. Most of the new art periodicals were focused on innovative and reformist developments, and the first of these on the Continent was Pan (1895-99), edited in Berlin by Otto Julius Bierbaum and Julius Meier-Graefe. In Munich, the magazine Jugend, which gave the Jugendstil its name, was launched in 1896, followed in 1897 by the Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde, founded by Fedor von Zobeltitz in Leipzig. The latter was closed down by the Nazis in 1936, but resumed publication by merging with Imprimatur: Jahrbuch für Bücherfreunde and exists under that title to this day. In Austria, in 1898, the Vienna Secession launched Ver Sacrum as its official organ, which was famous for its unusual square format and beautifully designed covers, but ceased publication after six years for lack of funds. A fifth important though short-lived review was Die Insel (1899-1902), edited by Bierbaum, Alfred Walter Heymel and Rudolf Alexander Schröder, out of which the Insel Verlag emerged (cp. Ch. 3.3.1). These and other periodicals attracted an ever-growing readership, as the Austrian writer Hermann Bahr (1863-1934) confirms in an anecdote in his book on Expressionismus (1916). He tells us about a young lady he has met recently in a small German town, who invites him to have a look at her paintings, which her parents disapprove of as ridiculous and crazy: Ich kam in ihr Atelier, und es war mir seltsam, in dieser fernen kleinen Stadt im Osten plötzlich wie mitten in Paris zu sein: die junge Dame malte Matisse, ja fast bis zu Picasso hin. Sie war niemals aus ihrer Heimat fort gewesen, sie kannte die neue Malerei bloß aus Kunstzeitschriften. (Bahr 1916: 40) Another important educational activity was the founding of combined crafts schools and workshops, such as Charles Robert Ashbee’s Guild and School of Handicraft (1888), inspired by the architect Gottfried Semper, who way back in 2.3 Components of the book reform movement in Germany 87 <?page no="88"?> 1851 had written an urgent and unforgotten memorandum on “Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst: Vorschläge zur Anregung nationalen Kunstgefühls” after visiting the Great Exhibition in London. Yet another reformer inspired by developments in Britain was Herrmann Muthesius (1861-1927), who spent six years in London as cultural attaché at the Germany Embassy and made the most of the opportunity to study current developments in English domestic architecture. His findings and conclusions were published in the three-volume Das englische Haus (1904 f.), which was full of ideas about how to improve the standards of housing in Germany. In 1907, together with a group of architects, manufacturers and artists, Muthesius founded the Deutscher Werkbund, a crafts association, to spread the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and to reconcile them with advanced industrial technologies, in this respect responding to the various arts and crafts exhibitions just mentioned, and foreshadowing the Bauhaus (Nerdinger 2018: 10-12). Among those who signed the appeal for the foundation of the Werkbund were the publisher Eugen Diederichs, the typefoundry Klingspor, the printing press Poeschel & Trepte, and the Kunstdruckerei Künstlerbund Karlsruhe, which was founded in 1897 and specialised in inex‐ pensive lithographic reproductions of works of art for the general public. Carl Ernst Poeschel (1874-1944), born into a Leipzig printing family, served his apprenticeship, studied in the USA for two years and then travelled in England, where he met Emery Walker, William Morris’s closest collaborator, as well as disciples of the movement like T.J. Cobden-Sanderson (of the Doves Press), Edward Johnston (the specialist in lettering and illumination) and Eric Gill (the typographer and engraver). Poeschel returned home, his mind seething with what he had seen and heard in London, and determined to teach and to put into practice all he had learnt. In 1904 he published an 80-page handbook on Zeitgemässe Buchdruckkunst, fortunately available as a facsimile reprint (1989), with an informative afterword and bibliography by Hans Peter Willberg. Arts and Crafts in everyday life It is striking how, in this period, the arts and crafts were moving out of the studios and galleries and museums, teaming up with the cultural industries and merchants, and coming closer to ordinary people and their everyday lives, including the way they furnished and decorated their homes. A historical precedent for this rapprochement can be found in Leone Battista Alberti’s famous De re aedificatoria (1452, complete edition 1485), translated into English by James Leoni as Ten Books of Architecture (1726, 3 1755, reprinted in facsimile 1986). In Book IX, Ch. IV, headed “With what Paintings, Plants, and Statues, it is proper to adorn the Pavements, Porticoes, Apartments and Gardens of a Private 88 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="89"?> house” (Alberti 1986: 192), Alberti makes detailed suggestions on how and to what purpose affluent citizens might embellish their walls with suitable works of art. Here is one: In that Apartment which is peculiar to the Master of the Family and his Wife, we should take Care that nothing be painted but the most comely and beautiful Faces; which we are told may be of no small Consequence to the Conception of the Lady, and the Beauty of the Children. (ibid.: 192 f.) However much things may have changed over the next 500 years, questions of style and utility in home furnishing and decoration continued to occupy families in town and country, and became particularly urgent in the second half of the 19th century, when “there were so many combinations and com‐ promises that historians […] have written of an unprecedented ‘bastardisa‐ tion’ of tastes” (Briggs 1999: 260). Such a state of affairs called for practical measures, and prompted Avenarius, whose magazine Der Kunstwart has just been introduced, to proclaim, in the February 1900 issue, “Zehn Gebote zur Wohnungseinrichtung”, ten commandments for how to furnish a home: 1. Richte Dich zweckmäßig ein! 2. Zeige Dich in Deiner Wohnung wie Du bist! 3. Richte Dich getrost nach Deinen Geldmitteln ein! 4. Vermeide alle Imitationen! 5. Gib Deiner Wohnung Leben! 6. Du sollst nicht pimpeln! 7. Fürchte Dich nicht vor der Form! 8. Fürchte Dich nicht vor der Farbe! 9. Strebe nach Ruhe! 10. Führe auch freie Kunst in Dein Heim! (Avenarius 1900: 341-344) Let me suggest an approximative version in English: 1. Choose functional furnishings! 2. Let your home show you as you are! 3. It is your taste that matters, not your money! 4. Avoid all imitations! 5. Put life into your domicile! 6. Don’t be pedantic! 7. Don’t be afraid of form! 8. Don’t be afraid of colour! 9. Home, peaceful home! 10. Invite the fine arts to your home! This alliance between the fine arts, modern design and enlightened indus‐ trial production is perfectly illustrated by a publication called Das Deutsche Warenbuch, a catalogue of household goods published in October 1915 by the Dürerbund-Werkbund-Genossenschaft. In an article of 29 January 1915, in Deutscher Wille, as the Kunstwart called itself during the war, Avenarius announced the forthcoming publication of the catalogue. It pursued a double 2.3 Components of the book reform movement in Germany 89 <?page no="90"?> aim, first of combating the production of inferior wares, and second of raising the standards of taste in Germany. This was to be supported by founding a central marketing company in Hellerau, the new garden city north of Dresden, and establishing a cooperative network of trading companies all over the country. The catalogue contained explanatory texts on glass wares, ceramics, metalwork, ornamental wares and jewellery, and on 258 pages provided photographic illustrations of over 1500 different items (Avenarius 1915: 19-22, accessible at http: / / digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ diglit/ deutscherwille29_1/ 0037). The Warenbuch was kept in print till 1927, so it was able to exert considerable influence on the formation of people’s taste and expand their knowledge of what household wares were available and how to judge them. At the same time, magazines like Die Kunst für Alle appeared, founded in 1885 by Friedrich Bruckmann in Munich, and supplemented by his Dekorative Kunst in 1897. In 1900 these two were merged into Die Kunst: Monatshefte für freie und angewandte Kunst, which presented a confusing (and sometimes amusing) mixture of articles and advertisements promoting heavy historicist furniture and pretentious interior design side by side with reports on forward-looking modern artists like Anders Zorn and James Ensor (Die Kunst, 26/ 9, June 1925). The Bauhaus and domestic decoration At this point we can turn to the Bauhaus again, where just at the time we have been considering, Walter Gropius was in the process of reconstructing his institution’s programme. He had quarrelled with Johannes Itten and Theo van Doesburg, who insisted on their right to practise and teach individualistic creativity, and proclaimed that the original Bauhaus slogan of “Kunst und Handwerk - eine neue Einheit” must be replaced by “Kunst und Technik, eine neue Einheit” (Nerdinger 2019: 37). When Itten left the Bauhaus in 1923, Gropius invited the young Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), who had been working in Berlin since 1920, to join the staff at Weimar and take over Itten’s metalwork classes. Moholy-Nagy was particularly interested in the potential of new synthetic materials, especially transparent or translucent ones, and in using photographic techniques, both static and kinetic, with or without a camera. His wife Lucia (1894-1989) meanwhile served an apprenticeship with Herrmann Otto Eckner in his Bauhaus photography studio, and while she did a lot of documentary and portrait photographs for the Bauhaus, she also collaborated extensively with her husband. Unfortunately, he tended to play down her part in their projects and hardly ever acknowledged her contributions. In the eighth volume of the Bauhausbücher, Moholy-Nagy’s Malerei Photogra‐ phie Film (1925, revised edition 1927 as Malerei Fotografie Film), in which a 90 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="91"?> photograph by Lucia Moholy is credited, we find a short chapter under the heading “Haus-Pinakothek” that relates directly to home decoration: (Moholy- Nagy 1967, facsimile reprint of the 1927 edition: 23 f.). In a very short prefatory note, reproduced below, the author lists the keywords for his discussion of contemporary visual design in the ten chapters (two for “Licht”) of the book, which are followed by some 80 pages of photographs: Fig. 15: Die Schlagwort-Problematik optischer Gestaltung (Moholy-Nagy 1967: 10) A page like this exemplifies Moholy-Nagy’s concept of functional typography: the basic roman type is riddled with a bold narrow sans-serif for the keywords, 2.3 Components of the book reform movement in Germany 91 <?page no="92"?> including “Tafelbild”. The English term for this is panel painting, and both expressions refer to a painting done on a thin wooden board that is mobile, like the boards laid on trestles of a medieval table (G: Tafel) that could be dismantled after use. By contrast, wall paintings and altarpieces are immobile, they have a definite space allotted to them in a church or other building. During the Renaissance and after, when paintings were done on copper, parchment, canvas or on various kinds of card and paper, the term lost its original meaning, but still implied mobility. In modern German “Tafel” is still used to designate a full-page illustration in a book, where it has become immobile. In the sphere of domestic furnishing, a picture will be fastened on a cardboard support and framed so that it can be hung on a wall in a suitable place, and moved to another place if desired - it is mobile. Moholy-Nagy is interested in the relations and tensions between static and mobile (or kinetic) elements in an architectural whole. That is why he recommends a “Haus-Pinakothek” or picture box, in which householders can store their collection of prints, and exchange one picture for another whenever they feel their furnishings have become too static: Die einem jeden mit gleichem Recht zukommende gleichwertige Befriedigung seiner Bedürfnisse ist heute das Ziel jeder fortschrittlichen Arbeit. Die Technik, und ihre Ver‐ vielfältigungsmöglichkeiten von Gebrauchsgegenständen haben in weitem Maße eine Nivellierung und gleichzeitige Nivohebung der Menschheit durchgesetzt. (Moholy- Nagy 1967: 23) That applies to books, which almost everyone can afford, and equally to the reproduction of pictures. Moholy-Nagy is an advocate of machine-production because it liberates us from the dominance of hand-made originals and their exaggerated market value. Selbstverständlich wird ein solches Bild nicht wie heute als toter Zimmerschmuck verwendet, sondern wahrscheinlich in Fächern, in „Haus-Pinakotheken“ aufbewahrt und nur dann hervorgeholt werden, wenn ein wirkliches Bedürfnis danach verlangt. (ibid.) Note how our author introduces phonetic spelling for foreign words like “niveau”. He also pinpoints the indubitable fact that in many households the pictures originally chosen for some specific reason do in the course of time become “dead decoration” that nobody notices any more. Since pictures, whether original prints or reproductions, should be protected from light, dust and unwashed fingers, such picture boxes are much to be recommended, and may even be an incentive to start a proper, documented collection. At a time when so many books were being illustrated with woodcuts, these were often 92 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="93"?> cut out and used to decorate one’s home - I have often found volumes for sale at flea-markets from which illustrated pages were missing. Woodcuts look very well on one’s walls, because their bold black and white can be appreciated from a distance, while the vandalised paperbacks can be stored in one’s home pinacotheca. Proposals for updating the arts of printing In conclusion of this chapter, we must turn to Carl Ernst Poeschel, briefly introduced above. His proposals for updating the arts of printing, published in Zeitgemässe Buchdruckkunst (1904), directly and indirectly refer to earlier English and French initiatives, and like them strive to clarify the basic dos and don’ts of modern typography. He rejects the idea of setting up rigid rules, since these would prevent creative development. He stresses that a printer must unite the qualities of craftsman and artist in order to produce a page which is both flawless and beautiful. Above all, it must be legible, for texts serve to communicate messages, and the readers’ eyes should have no difficulties in transmitting the typographic images to the brain: Diese Tätigkeit des Lesens muss dem Auge nun so leicht und bequem wie möglich gemacht werden, und das lässt sich nur durch Verwendung klarer, deutlicher Schriften erzielen. (Poeschel 1904: 12 f.) There is therefore no point in trying to beautify individual letters of a type by adding flourishes or what Poeschel calls “Auswüchse” (excrescences) of whatever kind, for these could lead to ambiguity or to misreadings. What really counts in making a type legible is its simple linearity: Bedingung für eine schöne, leserliche Schrift ist fernerhin die wohlabgewogene Schwere und Stärke des Schnittes. Sie soll einen bestimmten, selbständigen Charakter tragen und von kräftigem, energischen, dabei aber nicht fetten Schnitt sein. […] Aus alledem geht hervor, dass wir einer einfachen, dabei aber charaktervollen Type den Vorzug geben müssen. (ibid.: 15) In many cases this led to types which applied Jugendstil and Art Nouveau fashions to traditional roman models, like the Eckmann-Schrift of 1900 designed by Otto Eckmann (1865-1902), or the Behrens-Schrift and the Behrens-Antiqua of 1901 and 1908 by Peter Behrens (1868-1940), both of whom are mentioned by Poeschel. Like the Grasset and Auriol types in France during this period, they served their purpose at the time but have long since dropped out of current use. Here are some examples of Eckmann’s and Behrens’ work, as well as typefaces by Rudolf Koch (1876-1934) and Walter Tiemann (1876-1951): 2.3 Components of the book reform movement in Germany 93 <?page no="94"?> Fig. 16: German typefaces, 1900-22 (Rodenberg 1973: 165 f.) These are taken from an article on Karl Klingspor and his type foundry by Julius Rodenberg, reprinted in The Fleuron Anthology (1973), a collection of important articles first published in The Fleuron, a periodical devoted to typography, which appeared in seven volumes from 1923 to 1930. In contrast to Édouard Pelletan (cp. Ch. 2.4), Poeschel devotes six pages to the importance of colours in printing and urges his readers to train their sense of colour by seeking their beauties and harmonies in the natural world, or in artefacts like Japanese ceramics. But he does not call the primacy of black in question: Natürlicherweise ordnet sich die Farbe dem Zweck der Drucksache ebenso oder vielmehr noch strenger unter, als die Verwendung von Schrift und Ornament. Ein 94 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="95"?> Zuviel ist mit grösster Vorsicht zu vermeiden, wenn die Arbeit vornehm bleiben soll. […] Bietet sich aber Gelegenheit, mehrere Farben anzuwenden, dann hüten Sie sich vor den verwaschenen, ausdruckslosen Tönen, wie sie in den sechziger und siebziger Jahren Mode waren. Beweisen Sie, dass Sie die verlorene Farbenfreudigkeit wieder gewonnen haben, arbeiten Sie mit schönen aber bestimmten Farben […]. (Poeschel 1904: 53) So Pelletan and Poeschel would not really have disagreed on the matter of black and colours, had they ever met to discuss it. Among the leading lights of printing and publishing in the pre-war decade in France, Britain and Germany there was a general consensus about most of the central issues, in spite of differences of national tradition. From a transatlantic perspective, this is confirmed by the typographer and historian Daniel Berkeley Updike (1860-1947). In his Printing Types, their History, Forms and Use: A Study in Survivals (1922, 2 1937) he points out that revived and redesigned types meant for books must above all be suitable for “continuous reading”: [W]hen a book becomes decorative at the expense of its readability, it ceases to be a book and becomes a decoration, and has then no raison d’être as a book. Again: being unaccustomed nowadays to the purer letter-forms to which these types usually approximate, fonts of the kinds we have been considering are for continuous reading almost always consciously trying to the eye. Last and chiefly, such types do not readily lend themselves to the literary and typographical needs of to-day; and indeed there is a great deal of printing that must to-day be done and done well, to which these fonts are not suited at all. The convention which is properly required in their employ restricts their use. For in “artistic” types, as in so much else, art to the Anglo-Saxon is thought out, not felt - conscious rather than instinctive. So-called aesthetic printing, - be it English, American, or German, - taken en bloc, is, in the long run, a bit tiresome. It is so much in earnest that it charms too wisely rather than too well, and fails in the purpose for which all types and books exist. (Updike 1937: II, 218 f.) For visual examples of the German typefaces of the revival movement Updike refers his readers to The Art of the Book, a Studio publication of 1914, edited by Charles Holme, with a section on “The Art of the Book in Germany” by Ludwig Deubner. This volume was simultaneously published in the USA, as well as in a French edition, L’Art du Livre, in the same year, and in 1990 was reprinted in facsimile by Studio Editions, London. The international discussion documented here was seriously hampered by the outbreak of the first World War, and only resumed under entirely different conditions in the 1920s. Although Updike nei‐ ther discusses nor shows any of the German revival types, and does not mention 2.3 Components of the book reform movement in Germany 95 <?page no="96"?> and describe a single German book, he does permit himself a judgemental summing up of the state of German book production in 1920: While the cheap, popular books were admirable, the more ambitious German volumes were mannered and intentional. Like most modern German work in other forms of artistic endeavour, they produce a certain sensation, but not that of pleasure; they astonish rather than charm. To one who possessed a modern “secession” house, with a classic-hygienic-penal looking library, I suppose such books would be the only kind to have. For these determined volumes, as we view them in perspective, seem to have run true to form and to have been characteristic of the life about them - but alas, that is another story! For us, German book-making closed memorably with the beautiful exhibition held at Leipsic in the summer of 1914. (ibid.: II, 221) Perhaps the final sentence explains what moved Updike to pronounce such a malicious verdict, but it does not really justify it. On the other hand, this “classic-hygienic-penal” label is not so far away from Golo Mann’s description of Germany after the victory of 1871. In this, Mann contrasts Thomas Carlyle’s enthusiastic response to the event with Ernest Renan’s justified dismay at Germany’s punitive violence towards a feeble opponent that he sums up thus: Neu-Deutschland zeige nur Macht, blanke, wirksame, schneidende Macht ohne jede frohe Botschaft. Sein Triumph sei ein materieller und nichts weiter, und solche Triumphe brächten keinen Segen. (Mann 2 1966: 461) Updike may have been right, though, about the cheap, popular books, if he was thinking, for example, of the early volumes of the Insel-Bücherei, some of which he may have seen at the Leipzig BUGRA in 1914. He seems to have attended the exhibition, but not as a delegate of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, founded early in the same year in response to an invitation from the BUGRA to show a selection of American books in Leipzig (Wells 1969: 93, in Schauer 1969). The U.S. Department of State decided not to take part, and only the American Library Association sent a small delegation, headed by Theodore W. Koch, then director of the University of Michigan Library, to demonstrate in section 14 of the exhibition the up-to-date library systems operated there, at the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. His report is enthusiastic, and explicitly critical of his government’s refusal to cooperate (https: / / alphabetilat ely.org/ bugra/ IMPRESSIONS.txt). 96 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="97"?> 2.4 Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan Woodcuts and engravings: transition and transformation Writing in the Gazette des beaux arts in January 1921, the art critic and historian Noël Clément-Janin (1862-1947) remarked on the current fashion in prints and in book illustration: Aujourd’hui la floraison du bois est merveilleuse. Tout le monde veut du bois et tous les artistes en font. Il n’est plus nécessaire de prêcher et de convertir. Les éditeurs pullulent et demandent des bois ; les sociétés se fondent et exposent les bois ; les artistes flairent le vent et, entre la lithographie à peu près morte, l’eau-forte qui leur prodigue ses sourires, se décident pour le bois. Nous devrions donc nous réjouir, et pourtant nous ne nous réjouissons pas entièrement. Pourquoi? (« Le Bois original et le bois d’interprétation-» : 192) Woodcut illustration may have been flourishing after 1918, but something seems to have gone wrong. The author immediately reveals why rejoicing is not called for: Parce que nous aimons la gravure et que ces découpages sommaires que l’on nous donne pour de la gravure, - « tout l’obscur d’un côté, tout le clair de l’autre », disait déjà, il y a longtemps, [ Jacques Cazotte] l’auteur du Diable amoureux, - ne sauraient nous satisfaire. Et nous disons aux improvisateurs : « Prenez garde ! Vos maladroits coups de couteau vont tuer le bois-! -» (ibid.) Phrases like “clumsy hacking with a knife” and “improvisers” suggest that Clément-Janin is not happy with the standard of woodcutting practised at the beginning of the 20s. Without yet naming any artists, he describes their work as crude and heavy handed, and claims that they have had no proper training, even though he is aware that some of them, like Gabriel Belot and Paul-Émile Colin, “possédait ce sens de la gravure qui est un don et qui fait qu’une planche exprime ou n’exprime pas” (ibid.: 193). The motive for the author’s critique seems to be his fear that if the arts of cutting or engraving on wood continue to decline, there will soon be no craftsmen left able to engrave designs made by other artists, who may be good draughtsmen and painters, but not competent engravers. For this reason, if for no other, the fine art of original wood engraving “en creux sur bois de bout”, must be kept alive. It was brought from England to France in 1817 by Charles Thompson (1791-1843), who had learned wood engraving under John Bewick, the younger brother of Thomas Bewick. In Paris, Thompson soon founded a school of engraving on the end grain, and 2.4 Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan 97 <?page no="98"?> by 1824 the new process had caught on and was used to illustrate books like Béranger’s Chansons (1828), with designs by Achille Devéria engraved by Henri Porret (Audin 1926: 51 f.). This practice of reproductive engraving supplied the illustrations for the ever-growing number of popular magazines such as Le Charivari (1832-1937) and Le Magasin pittoresque (1833-1938), and many other papers, till it became the dominant form of illustration. As a craft it stood under the influence of specialists such as Héliodore Pisan, François Pannemaker and Adolphe Gusman and their “gravure en teintes”. This was a highly refined technique of reproductive engraving in delicate shades of black and grey and white that they had developed in order to translate the brushwork gouache designs of Gustave Doré (1832-1883) into a printable form. At first such engraving was an entirely manual craft, but after 1858 it was gradually supplanted by various photomechanical processes. In his 1930 overview of “La Gravure originale en France”, the art historian Charles Kunstler identifies the desire to return to original, pre-industrial engraving as the first “transformation” after decades of reproductive and process engraving. A second transformation followed around 1875: Vers 1875, autre transformation avec Edmond Morin, Daniel Vierge, et, un peu plus tard, avec Lepère. Lepère a su tirer le parti le plus heureux du bois de teinte. Mais il se lasse de ce procédé au moment même où celui-ci atteignait, avec lui, aux limites de la perfection. Pour donner à ses œuvres plus de sobriété et plus de force, il revient à la vieille technique du bois de fil et du canif. Il rendra ainsi son caractère particulier à la gravure sur bois et retrouvera la saveur naïve des œuvres primitives du Moyen Age. (Basler/ Kunstler 1930-: 176). All three were gifted draughtsmen and illustrators, with Morin occasionally doing engravings too, but only Auguste Lepère (1849-1918) was also a skilled engraver. Shortly before the turn of the century, he was influenced by the etcher, engraver and lithographer Félix Bracquemond (1833-1914) to reconsider the older and simpler form of woodcut as the kind of print most fitting for original work in the contemporary period. Artists like Gauguin and other members of the Nabis and the Groupe Synthétiste of Pont-Aven, including Félix Vallotton, had in the early 1890s made their mark by producing highly individual and original modern woodcuts, often using La Revue Blanche (1889-1903) to spread their ideas. The painter Émile Bernard (1868-1941) is quoted as saying that “we must simplify in order to disclose”, and his friend Gauguin agreed that the artist must synthesise his perceptions and “paint from memory” (Lucie-Smith 2003, s.v. “Synthetism”). In Lepère’s woodcuts, however, simplification and synthetism take a form of their own, for while he follows Bracquemond’s advice to give 98 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="99"?> greater play to the whites in a picture, he remains fascinated by the evanescent textures of leafage and textiles, water and clouds. Both whites and textures are evident in “Le Paysagiste” (1912), a portrait of his friend the landscape painter Adrien Lavieille (cf. Malcolm Salaman, Modern Woodcuts and Lithographs, The Studio, 1919: 59). Fig. 17: Auguste Lepère, “Le Paysagiste” The beholder’s attention is immediately drawn to the area framed by the pole of the sunshade and the painter’s easel, first perhaps to the black surfaces of Lavieille’s hat and jacket and bag, then to his face and his concentrated gaze, which leads across the white country lane, over the landscape beyond it and into the white expanses of sky. The contrast of almost unbroken black and white surfaces is very effective, with the soft bend of the lane leading one into the background, where the black and white surfaces also contrast with the way the trees and their leafage are rendered, for they look as if they were done with brush and ink, rather than cut on wood. In his monumental The Modern Woodcut, Herbert Furst refers to the same picture and comments: Lepère started as a wood engraver of the old school and as such achieved some remarkable feats of tone and texture engraving, as for example in his “L’Abreuvoir à l’île Saint-Louis” or his “Sortie du Théâtre du Châtelet”. When, however, he took up woodcutting with the knife, he produced black and white and colour prints in which pen and brush drawing is reproduced with remarkable fidelity: “Le Coupeur des bouts 2.4 Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan 99 <?page no="100"?> de cigares,” “Le Paysagiste” or “La Fin de journée”, in which the same applies to a tinted pen drawing. None of Lepère’s work has, however, real glyptic qualities; the design is wholly independent of the material, and regarded purely as designs they are often lacking in balance and concentration. (ibid.). (Furst 1924: 74) I agree that some of Lepère’s woodcuts do not look like woodcuts at all, so strongly did his lifelong training and practice interfere with his intention to renew his style. Nevertheless, his best illustrations do have a strong character of their own, synthesising different and even contradictory elements, and that perhaps defines him as a transitional artist. Félix Bracquemond brings light into the debate Over the years, Lepère’s interaction with his fellow artists was certainly very intense and productive for all concerned. Together with Félix Bracquemond, Daniel Vierge and Tony Beltrand, he started the magazine L’Estampe originale (1888-95), and in 1896-97 became the art director of L’Image: Revue artistique et littéraire, edited by Henri Floury and published by the Société Corporative Française des Graveurs sur bois, whose programme as announced on the cover of the “Numéro Specimen” of 1896 was “la conservation d’un art que les procédés méchaniques tendent à faire disparaître” (www.johncoulthart.com.feuilleton/ 2 019/ 01/ 04/ limage-1896-1897). In the course of the same year Bracquemond had published a series of nine articles entitled “Trois Livres. Étude sur la gravure sur bois et la lithographie” in Le Journal des Arts, which through the patronage of Henri Beraldi were published in 1897 in book form as Étude sur la gravure sur bois et la lithographie. This manifesto deserves to be quoted at length because it sets and justifies the standards by which many of the illustrations for popular series of the 20s and beyond may be judged. Bracquemond begins by asserting a basic principle: J’ai compris que pour le bois, la pierre ou le métal, matières productives d’estampes, un seul principe, celui de la distribution logique des ombres et des lumières, actionne tous les procédés dans les divers métiers des arts. (Bracquemond 1897-: 6) The expression “distribution logique” is perhaps best translated as “meaningful distribution”, though Bracquemond himself gives it a slightly different sense: Et si, en outre des qualités d’exécution manuelle, le dessin que représente ce bois est formé par des ombres et des lumières provoquant des contrastes clairs et obscures logiquement distribués, c’est-à-dire d’un bon modelé, c’est l’œuvre toujours rare, malgré l’abondance de la production de tous les temps ; si rudimentaire soit-elle, on ne saurait trop la méditer. (ibid.-: 8) 100 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="101"?> This passage leads Bracquemond to identify what he calls an immutable criterion for judging the worth of any drawing, lithograph or woodcut, namely “la quantité de modelé qu’il contient” (ibid.: 9). This shaping, or modelling, as of clay or wax, is to some extent metaphorical, but can also be realised in its literal sense as meaning a suggestion of depth, distance, or three-dimensional roundness, qualities we have just recognised in “Le Paysagiste”. Bracquemond finally settles for defining the distribution of light and shadow as “composition lumineuse” (ibid.: 10-12), a phrase that has the virtue of emphasising the importance of light for building up visual structures in any kind of print. This is something that artists learn in the course of their training and practical work, but it may not be fully understood by outsiders like writers, critics or ordinary people who only occasionally visit an art gallery. For most of us, it is what an artist puts on the paper that counts - the marks made by pencil, crayon, brush or pen etc. are marks that beholders can read as signs, much as they read the printed letters on the page of a book, without noticing the paper. Bracquemond regards such perception as defective and therefore insists that it is not the black of the ink that is the fundamental element of a print, but the white of the paper it is printed on: “L’élément fondamental de l’estampe, c’est le blanc du papier” (ibid.: 29). In the explanatory paragraph that follows, he describes the white as the sensitive and active element of a print: Il scintille à travers les réserves, tailles, hachures, griffonnis des grains de toutes les gravures. Sa faculté agissante, il la démontre en nuançant de valeurs diverses les réserves de blancs laissées par les praticiens sur les plans lumineux, chacune de ces réserves donnant l’illusion d’une teinte différente, plus lumineuse, luisant d’avantage que sa voisine, bien que toutes soient restées intactes d’un travail quelconque de gravure ou de crayonnage, aussi intactes que les marges de l’estampe. Telle estampe semble offrir toute une gamme de blanc variés ; et cependant c’est le même blanc, le blanc intact du papier, mais qui joue différemment, par contraste avec le noir-! (ibid.-: 30) The white surfaces will be seen as sensitive and active only by the equally sensitive and active beholder who has learned to watch out for the different kinds of “réserve” or unprinted area to be found in a relief print (E: lowered space; G: ausgeschnittenes Feld) - lines, dots, hatching, different shapes of different sizes, which can suggest different signifieds and different luminosities. John Buckland-Wright (1897-1954), himself a prodigious engraver, who worked in Paris throughout the 30s, gives an account of wood engraving that has much in common with Bracquemond’s. He points out that wood engraving is similar to painting in that the basic technique in both is “a matter of planes”: 2.4 Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan 101 <?page no="102"?> With his burin as a fine-pointed brush, and his gouges as broad ones, [the wood engraver] delineates, stipples in his greys, and brushes in boldly his masses of white. The result is a series of planes, a pictorial conception, in which a three-dimensional illusion is given to the two-dimensional plane of the print. This effect of light slowly revealing the complete composition, this three-dimensional illusion given by the white line and subtracted planes on the black surface of the block is the true characteristic of wood engraving. In the same way the graphic qualities of the black line are the true characteristic of the woodcut. (Buckland-Wright 1953: 226) The emphasis on light is decisive, it is the common denominator shared by all modern illustrators, and of course it presupposes the use of black as the structural or “emic” condition for creating the opposition in which both black and white become meaningful. Progress and regression In order to rescue these truths about original woodcutting and wood engraving from the neglect and oblivion they had fallen into during the years of reproductive work and the inflation of photomechanical processes, all kinds of initiatives were taken. In 1911 Lepère together with eight other engravers and “amis du bois” founded the Société de la Gravure sur Bois Originale (S.G.B.O.) that remained active till 1935. Over the years it brought together 44 « sociétaires graveurs » and 144 « membres non-graveurs », according to the lists compiled by Agnès de Belleville. Her Dictionnaire des artistes de la Société de la Gravure sur Bois Originale (2000) is a mine of information about the French and foreign engravers who worked together in the society, contributing to its almanacs and yearbooks, posters and postcards, and to the Imagiers published annually from 1920 to 1929. In the article on Lepère, Belleville gives an introduction to his work as an illustrator. Les recherches sur la xylographie originale en noir et en couleurs, effectuées par Lepère, trouvent également leur application dans le livre illustré auquel il se consacre lorsque les journaux ne requièrent plus sa collaboration. Il travaille pour des mécènes et des sociétés de bibliophilie. Entre 1890 et 1903, il traite presque exclusivement de la vie et des sites parisiens ou provinciaux. Grâce aux commandes d’Henri Beraldi, qui ne cesse de l’encourager dans cette voie, il illustre successivement Paysages parisiens d’Émile Goudeau, bois et eaux-fortes, 1892, [et] Paris au hasard de Georges Montorgueil, 1895. Il dessine des bois que gravent Eugène Dété et Tony Beltrand pour Les Minutes parisiennes (Minutes parisiennes. Midi, le déjeuner des petites ouvrières de Georges Montorgueil, 1899) et donne des xylographies originales, en même temps qu’Eugène Dété pour Minutes parisiennes. 2 heures de Gustave Geoffroy, 1899. (Belleville 2000-: 227) 102 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="103"?> The emphasis on topographic work is striking, the more so since it forms an important part of the programme of later publishers’ series like the Livre de Demain and the Livre Moderne Illustré that will be discussed in Ch. 3 and elsewhere. The information given above about Les Minutes Parisiennes needs to be completed, however, if one wants to understand what kind of project this was. It turns out to be a series of illustrated books published by the Librairie Paul Ollendorff, Paris, in a small octavo format. The cover and the title-page of each volume state the names of the engravers as “Collection Beltrand et Dété” and in the case of Midi and 2 heures the name of the artist who produced the original design is given as “Illustrations de Auguste Lepère”. Fig. 18: Cover of Les Minutes Parisiennes-: Midi (1892) 2.4 Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan 103 <?page no="104"?> It was part of the basic concept for the series that artists should cooperate with engravers and work together as a team to produce the illustrations, a concept that actually cemented the division of labour. If it is true, as Belleville suggests, that Lepère also contributed original wood engravings, that would not contradict the plan set out in the 15-page “Avertissement” of the first volume: Il s’agit, en effet, d’une décision tout à fait inouïe, paradoxale, invraisemblable, prise par les collaborateurs de cette publication en vingt-quatre petits volumes. N’ont-ils pas osé, en effet, à la fin du XIXe siècle, après tant d’expériences à demi réussies ou manquées, après tant de révoltes et tant de soumissions, n’ont-ils pas osé assumer la tâche de faire eux-mêmes leur œuvre, c’est-à-dire de la concevoir, de la présenter, en artistes et en écrivains indépendants, voulant donner à leur travail une forme librement choisie. Le seul intermédiaire admis, acceptant son rôle, qui est d’ailleurs de grande importance, c’est l’éditeur, l’éditeur aimant son métier, désireux de faire agréer par le public l’œuvre qui lui est confiée. C’est l’éditeur favorisant l’initiative d’un groupe, apportant sa collaboration comme un hommage rendu à l’indépendance de la pensée. (Montorgueil 1899-: 2 f.) The “éditeur” in question was Paul Ollendorff, a Paris publisher of German extraction who at this time was at the peak of his fortunes, publishing writers like Guy de Maupassant and Jules Renard. Originally the Minutes Parisiennes were to comprise 24 volumes, one for each hour of the day, beginning with Midi, and these are listed and described in detail in the Avertissement, no doubt written by Ollendorff himself. Actually, only 11 volumes were produced, from Midi to 8 heures, plus 1 heure [du matin] and 6 heures [du matin] (1899-1904), and all the volumes that did see the light of day, except for one, changed titles, authors and/ or illustrators, a sure sign that the “unlikely group” had begun to fall apart after the first three tomes were on the market. The whole project turned out to be a flop, for even though the little books are pretty to look at and make entertaining reading, they did not embody any new ideas for popular, illustrated publishing in the 20 th century. Organisations like the S.G.B.O, however, did play a considerable part in continuing to raise the level of awareness among young artists and engravers, as well as among amateurs and collectors, gallerists and publishers, by organising exhibitions, lectures, and publications like Le Nouvel Imagier, L’Imagier, and the Album de la S.G.B.O. (1929). Talking of galleries, I must mention, as an example of their educational work, the Galérie du Nouvel Essor, Paris, 40 rue des Saints-Pères 40, in the 6 th arrondissement just south of the Seine and the Pont du Carrousel. Unfortunately, the gallery seems to have closed down around 1992, but in February and March 1920 it mounted a remarkable exhibition of young woodcutters. The catalogue 104 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="105"?> Dix Graveurs sur Bois du « Nouvel Essor » lists ten artists: Jacques Beltrand, Robert Bonfils, Angelina Béloff, Louis Bouquet, Roger Grillon, Jean-Émile Laboureur, Frans Masereel, Louis Moreau, Ludovic Rodo, and Jean Lébédeff, all except Rodo with an entry in Belleville’s Dictionnaire. The catalogue, which once cost two francs, is available from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), digitally or as a photocopy. It devotes a double page to each artist, with an editorial text facing an example of the artist’s work. A brief introductory essay presents the artists as the most inventive members of the younger generation, who all offer “une oeuvre claire”, with vivid contrasts and no fussy detail. We are told the exhibition will travel in France and abroad, and that it is hoped that “le public cultivé la jugera avec l’attention et le soin qu’elle mérite”. The Galérie du Nouvel Essor (new impetus) thus made its contribution towards shaping the taste of the public and preparing it for encounters with similar work in contemporary illustrated books and series, and there must have been many other galleries in Europe working in the same direction. Édouard Pelletan and the renewal of tradition We now come to the last protagonist in this brief account of the French book reform movement, the “renouveau du livre”, namely Édouard Pelletan (1854- 1912), a native of Paris, who after a career in the Foreign Office, on the Quai d’Orsay, opened his “Éditions d’Art Édouard Pelletan” in February 1896 on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. He must have been an active bibliophile over the previous twenty years, and have pondered deeply on the strengths and weaknesses of French publishing after 1871. A protestant, he is known to have moved in positivist circles, which became very active in Paris soon after the publication of Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42), so he must have imbibed the “optimistic faith in intellectual and moral progress” that Comte’s teaching expressed (Mautner 1997, s.v. Comte). The same goes for the positivist emphasis on the data of sense experience, and for the insight that a communitarian form of society is the most appropriate for modern democratic societies, in which the production and dissemination of books contribute to the improvement of education and empathy of all citizens. So Pelletan’s aim was to make better books for a larger readership. Noël Clément-Janin, with whom this chapter started, had met Pelletan in intellectual circles, shared his bibliophile interests and cooperated with him as editor and adviser in his publishing venture. In the “Préface” to the first Catalogue général de l’œuvre d’Édouard Pelletan (1908), reprinted in the 1913 catalogue, after Pelletan’s early death, Clément-Janin remembers the ten-day exhibition of 175 watercolours 2.4 Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan 105 <?page no="106"?> and 95 original prints which had served to publicise the opening of the new publishing house in 1896: De chaque côté, les médaillons de Goethe et de Condorcet, - plus tard, ceux encore de Corneille et de Molière, - puis, surmontant les deux vitrines, les effigies de Virgile et de Balzac. Ailleurs, le portrait d’Auguste Comte. Dicté par une sympathie érudite qui aurait voulu pouvoir s’étendre davantage, ce choix de quelques-uns des « pères de la pensée-» révélait l’aspiration naturelle de l’esprit vers les plus hauts sommets de l’Idée et de l’Art universels. (Clément-Janin 1913, «-Préface de la première édition-»: 1) This takes us back to the publication by which Pelletan introduced himself to Parisian bibliophiles and art lovers: Le Livre, suivi du Catalogue illustré des Éditions Édouard Pelletan (1896a), printed in 600 copies, 500 of them destined “pour être offerts à MM. les Bibliophiles”. The slim volume consists of a 22-page essay by Pelletan on “Le Livre”, followed by a “Catalogue illustré” of 24 pages. An “Invitation permanente et valable pour deux personnes” on a small folded sheet is inserted at the beginning of Pelletan’s essay. The catalogue devotes short, informative essays to each of the first four books planned, with ten sample engravings, and an occasional critical remark, e.g. concerning the editions of Beaumarchais’ Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro, illustrated by Daniel Vierge and engraved by Clément Bellenger: Beaumarchais est mort le 18 mai 1799. Il nous a paru honorable de commémorer cette date par une édition du Centenaire, dont chaque scène sera illustrée, mais sans que le dessin rappelle le jeu des acteurs sur les planches. Le livre n’est pas la scène, et les illustrations, qui orneront les deux volumes en préparation, ne devront rien au photographisme fâcheux qui forme le fond de l’illustration de nos jours. (Pelletan 1896-: 46) The term photographism, which today refers to forms of photographic abstrac‐ tion as practised by Victor Vasarely, is here used disparagingly. Just as the theatre and the opera have characteristic modes of visualisation in situ, so the printed book or script requires a specific visualisation for a dramatic author’s text without any reference to the stage and the actors. What may also be meant is that the unselectiveness of a photograph and still more of a film recording is entirely incompatible with the need for the architect of an illustrated book to select details and transform them into patterns that will harmonise with the typography, with its basic contrast of black and white. Pelletan’s motto, borrowed from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, is ΚΤΗΜΑ ΕΣ ΑΕΙ, meaning “a possession for all time”, and one finds it on all his title-pages and as the watermark for some of his papers. Like Bracquemond, he sought 106 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="107"?> immutable foundations for his project of renewing the book beautiful, and expresses them as follows: On a, alors, les trois conditions du beau livre : un texte remarquable, - illustré de gravures sur bois, d’après les dessins, à ce composés par un illustrateur spécialement choisi, - et imprimé avec un soin parfait. (ibid.: 4) The first condition, remarkable texts, is explained as a careful selection of the best texts in definitive editions. “Ce qu’il nous faut, c’est une grande diversité de lectures” (ibid.: 4 f.), including all genres, especially poetry, and foreign works in the original language facing the French translation (ibid.: 6). Pelletan then discusses illustration at length, and first establishes that the only legitimate illustration for a printed book is “la gravure sur bois”, always, as we have seen, an ambiguous term: Mais toute gravure n’est pas légitime. La seule que l’on puisse employer est celle dont le sens typographique est en harmonie avec la lettre, celle qui, se tirant en relief, offre avec le caractère d’imprimerie des valeurs concordantes et rappelle, par le jeu des noirs de l’encre et des blancs du papier, l’effet du mot imprimé. Cette gravure est la gravure sur bois. (ibid.: 7) So far, so good, or rather not. Pelletan goes on to quote Babin de Grandmaison, the author of a Résumé de l’histoire et des procédés de la Gravure (1887), who asserts that the infancy of engraving is intimately linked to the beginnings of printing in the 15 th century and that the first typographically printed book was a Lettres d’indulgence of 1454. The date is confirmed by John Boardley in his Typographic Firsts: Adventures in Early Printing (2019), who explains that in prereformation years such letters were printed by the thousands as instruments of fund-raising for the church. Quite a few were printed by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz, and sold via licensed pardoners to the pious who hoped they could thus escape punishment in hell. But these letters of indulgence were not books at all, they were single sheets of printed text with spaces left for the date of issue and for the name of the recipient. This particular letter bears the handwritten date of 22 October 1454 and is thus “the earliest precisely datable piece of typographic printing in Europe” (Boardley 2019: 23). The reason why Pelletan refers to Grandmaison is that the mid-15 th century date identifies the kind of “bois” used to decorate and illustrate the earliest books - it was woodcut and not wood engraving. That is why he adds: Tant que dura la belle époque du livre, la xylographie servit seule à son illustration. Au XVIIe siècle, la gravure au burin la remplace, et au XVIIIe nous voyons régner l’eau-forte. (ibid.) 2.4 Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan 107 <?page no="108"?> This sounds as if Pelletan meant to return to the woodcut as practised in the 15 th century, “gravure sur bois de fil en taille d’épargne”, but he is mainly invoking the period in order to claim a venerable ancestry for his own project. In 1896 he would not have found nearly enough illustrators able to produce their own cuts on the plank, so he had to make do with those engravers on hand who were able and willing to translate other artists’ designs into an engraving on wood. His periodisation is not quite correct, for gravers and burins of different kinds were often used in the 16 th century (and in Italy even earlier) to add white line effects to woodcuts (Koschatzky 1975: 54). Etching reached two early pinnacles in France with Jacques Callot (1592-1635) and Claude Lorrain (1600-82), and was next adopted as a medium for book illustration after 1750 by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724-80) and Jean-Michel Moreau (1741-1814) (ibid.: 145, 147). In spite of Papillon’s experiments in the 1730s, the technique of engraving across the grain did not make any progress before Thomas Bewick took it in hand in the late 1790s, and first perfected it. Pelletan must have had all these developments in mind and considered them as the fundament from which he could proceed towards achieving “notre œuvre de renovation du Livre illustré” (Pelletan 1896: 19). His views on book illustration and the task of the illustrator are already quite clear: L’illustrateur […] doit d’abord traduire plastiquement l’idée d’un écrivain, sans trahison, comme sans platitude. C’est une lutte courtoise qui s’engage entre lui et l’auteur ; mais tandis que l’auteur a pu choisir son sujet, lui est obligé de subir le sujet qu’on lui impose, et il lui faut, comme on dit en argot de coulisses, « entrer dans la peau du bonhomme ». Ses qualités seront donc plutôt l’esprit, la fantaisie, l’imagination dans le détail, la verve, - que le style. (ibid.-: 9) That does not mean that an illustrator may not develop an individual style, but rather that however individual it may be, it must be subservient to the requirements of the text. Pelletan lists three points that an illustrator must observe: first, he must always bear in mind where each particular illustration is to be placed in the text; second, he should try to vary its shape so that it will always be wedded to the text around it, like an island in the sea; third, he should allow the paper to produce the greatest possible effect. He then sums up these points in a formula: “Illustrer un livre, c’est interpreter un texte et décorer une page” (ibid.). Neat as this formula may sound, it does contain two distinct and possibly contradictory ideas, as becomes evident in the discussion of “la grande querelle du fac-simile et du ton” (ibid.: 10). By facsimile Pelletan means the kind of wood engraving in the post-Bewick tradition that reproduces a drawing designed to be engraved. He contrasts it with “ton” or what we have 108 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="109"?> already referred to as the “bois de teinte” perfected by Doré’s engravers and later Lepère. This tonal engraving also has qualities which Pelletan does not want to do without, and so he decides to use both: “Dans nos éditions nous avons résolu d’employer concurremment le fac-simile et le ton; le fac-simile dans le texte, et le ton dans les hors-texte” (ibid.: 11). The point of this distinction is that the engravings and the running text they are inserted in would share a pronounced linearity and clear contrasts of black and white, and of course they could be printed in one operation on the same paper. In the case of full-page illustrations, i.e. plates, the tint engravings would have to be printed separately on a suitable art paper and be tipped in after the printed sheets were folded, usually at the beginning or end of a gathering. This is an expensive compromise, aiming at the best of both worlds of illustration, without having to declare a distinct preference. In his first books Pelletan evidently wished to demonstrate his respect for bibliophile traditions, without excluding the possibility of gradual modifications and innovation in the course of time. In April, Pelletan continued and extended the communication with his customers through a 14-page Première Lettre aux Bibliophiles (1896b), subtitled “Postscriptum au Livre”. The main topics were the kind of audience he was trying to reach, the kind of illustration that was most suitable, and the question of how to achieve a harmonious relationship between the genre and style of the text and its typography. Pelletan and his collaborators were still struggling to decide what the new illustrated book should look like. A Deuxième Lettre aux Bibliophiles of 24 pages followed in November (1896c), subtitled “Du Texte et du Caractère typographique”. A third letter on the subject of illustration was projected but never carried out. Pelletan begins the first letter by replying to the charge voiced by some of his correspondents that a print run of 500 copies, as practised in the case of Alfred de Musset’s Les Nuits & Souvenir, was far too high to attract bibliophiles. He replies thus: En entreprenant l’édition d’art, j’avais un double but : d’abord satisfaire les biblio‐ philes ; ensuite augmenter leur nombre, en atteignant le public instruit, mais de fortune moyenne, que les circonstances font les acheteurs de ces livres qualifiés de luxe, et qui sont trop souvent des modèles accomplis de fausse élégance. […] Pour arriver au public que je voulais conquérir, il ne fallait pas lui proposer les exemplaires uniques sur grand papier que se réservent les seuls bibliophiles. Il fallait des exemplaires de prix abordable, n’obligeant pas l’amateur hésitant à un trop lourd sacrifice. Le prix de cinquante à soixante francs m’avait paru répondre à cette nécessité. Mais tout se lie. Des exemplaires à cinquante francs ne pouvaient couvrir les frais qu’à la condition d’être en nombre suffisant, et cette considération fixa le chiffre du tirage. (Pelletan 1896b-: 2) 2.4 Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan 109 <?page no="110"?> Pelletan again opts for a compromise, carefully negotiated but fraught with difficulties. Can a publisher hope to attract affluent bibliophiles and middleclass readers at the same time? 50 francs in 1896 had a purchasing power of over € 200 in 2015. There would no doubt have been enough middle-class book lovers who could afford such a luxury. But what about the poorer section of the population? A French worker in 1896 would have had to work more than 200 hours to earn 50 francs (www.historicalstatistics.org: currencyconverter.html), so he was obviously excluded from making such an acquisition. We will see in the next chapter that in the first three decades of the 20 th century publishers realised that cheap books could only be produced economically if the sales were high enough. Pelletan had recognised this, as the above quotation shows, but he had no inkling of what was later called the mass market. For the moment he decides that it is wiser to change tactics, namely “réduire le chiffre du tirage et, par suite, majorer les prix des exemplaires restants” (ibid.-: 3). Things are a bit more complicated, however, because of the principle of staggered print runs observed from the very first book. We can take Chateaubriand’s Aventures du dernier Abencérage (1897), Pelletan’s fifth book, as an example. This historical novella of 1826 recounts the adventures of the last member of the Moorish Abencérage family, a survivor of the conquest of Granada in 1492. It was published in a limited edition of 350 numbered copies, 30 in a quarto format, the other 320 in a large Jésus octavo. The first group is divided into three categories, the first of which comprises just two copies “stuffed” (F: truffé; G: Vorzugsausgabe) with Vierge’s original drawings, new drawings on the half-titles, and signed artist’s proofs. These two copies are not priced, so presumably they were destined for the publisher’s archives and gallery. In the second category there are fifteen copies, each supplemented with an original watercolour and a sequence of signed artist’s proofs. Again, these copies are not priced, so one assumes that they will be offered for sale at more than 600 francs, which is the price tag on the thirteen copies, numbered 18 to 30, in the third category, each with a supplementary double sequence of signed artist’s proofs, on two different papers. In the second group we have four categories, with the last two perhaps intended to appeal to “le public instruit”. The first category of fifteen copies, each of which is augmented by a separate print-run on Japanese paper of all the 43 engravings by Frédéric Florian, is priced at 300 francs. The second, comprising 55 copies, is identical except that the extra copies of the engravings are printed on China paper and the price is 250 francs. The third category is identical with the second, except that its 100 copies are printed on “vélin à la cuve”, a wove paper with Pelletan’s watermark, and is sold for 150 francs. Finally, there are 150 more 110 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="111"?> copies printed on the same wove paper, but without any additional material, so that the price is reduced to 100 francs. There can be no doubt that at this stage Pelletan was aiming at a limited readership of wealthy connoisseurs who would buy his books again and again, visit his exhibitions and invite like-minded friends to join them. Five years later, when he published Le Procurateur de Judée (1902) by Anatole France (1844-1922), in an edition of 400 numbered copies, the principle of staggered print-runs was modified. There were two versions, one of 22 copies printed in a quarto format on Whatman or on Japanese paper and enriched in different degrees with the original designs and suites of artist’s proofs. The second version, which had no stuffing, comprised 378 copies printed in an octavo format, the first ten on China paper, unpriced, and 368 copies on watermarked vélin du Marais wove paper, priced at 75 francs. This time Pelletan is aiming mainly at the upper middle-class readership and providing just enough luxury copies to satisfy such bibliophiles as would not have enjoyed the simple version. In order to make sure that their needs were not neglected, a supplementary edition of 20 suites of artist’s proofs of the twelve engravings was printed, to be sold at 100 francs each. It is certainly not a coincidence that this modification is linked to an author like France, a popular and political writer, a stout republican in sympathy with socialist ideas, and at the same time a cultural traditionalist. He was a good friend and advisor of Pelletan, and was his most important author, with over 20 titles. France regularly contributed articles to Pelletan’s Almanach de Bibliophilie (1898-1903) and four volumes of essays, lectures and addresses to the Bibliothèque Sociale et Philosophique (1904-13), a series of really cheap little books at 60, later 75 centimes each, well printed on brownish paper that shows no signs of decay, and all four illustrated with frontispiece portraits of the author and small woodcut portraits of relevant historical figures. These books were affordable for almost anyone interested in contemporary social and political issues: L’Église et la République (1904) and three volumes of Vers les Temps meilleurs (1906). It is now time to look at some examples of Pelletan’s books in order to see how they reflect the programmatic ideas proposed in Le Livre and the two Lettres aux Bibliophiles. The following three texts from the first decade of the 20 th century will be considered: • Anatole France, L’Affaire Crainquebille (1901), 63 drawings by Théophile- Alexandre Steinlen. Issued in a limited, numbered edition of 400 copies, 27 in quarto format, unpriced, and 373 copies in octavo Jésus format, of which 343 were printed on watermarked wove paper and sold for 80 francs, according 2.4 Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan 111 <?page no="112"?> to the 1906 catalogue. My edition is a German translation, Crainquebille, published in 1947 by the Büchergilde Gutenberg in Zurich. • Jérôme & Jean Tharaud, Dingley, l’illustre écrivain (1906). Unlimited edition, in crown octavo format, decorated but not illustrated, at the price of 3,50 francs, and 25 unpriced copies printed on Hollande paper. • Jules Renard, Les Philippe (1907), 101 original woodcuts by Paul-Émile Colin, eight of them in “camaïeu”, i.e. black and colour woodcuts printed from two or three blocks. Issued in a limited, numbered edition of 1100 copies, of which 1000 were printed on wove paper “du Marais” and cost 20 francs each. My copy is no. 766. What strikes one immediately is the tendency towards higher print runs and lower prices, confirming the development of his readership that Pelletan had hoped for. Crainquebille was rather expensive at 80 francs, and because of its calculated scarcity today fetches upwards of € 500. The Swiss Büchergilde Gutenberg edition is a very carefully produced medium octavo version of the Pelletan edition, reproducing all its illustrations and imitating the use of red ink for printing the titles, typographic initials, page heads and page numbers. The letterpress is of course printed in black, but instead of the Grasset used to set the French text, the Büchergilde decided to use a 12-point roman Cochin for the translation by Ferdinand Hardekopf. The 63 illustrations, engraved on wood by a team of eight “praticiens”, fall into different categories: there are nine headpieces, ten tailpieces, seven full-page pictures and 37 of all kinds of shapes and sizes printed “en texte”. Steinlen’s style is traditional and realistic, very much concerned to move the beholder to feel sympathy with the maltreated protagonist. The subtle shades of grey that mediate between the extremes of black and white in the engravings may be seen as constituting a “significant form” for the ethical issues presented in France’s accessible and moving novella. A further point concerns the relation between the end of the story and the final illustration. Crainquebille, hungry and exhausted and almost at his wits end, decides to try out once more the “Mort aux vaches! ” strategy that got him into prison at the beginning of the tale. This time the policeman he accosts reacts as he must, gently but decidedly telling him to move on. He obeys, as the last sentence tells us: “Crainquebille, la tête basse et les bras ballants, s’enfonça sous la pluie dans l’ombre”. The final tailpiece tells us even more: 112 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="113"?> Fig. 19: Anatole France, Crainquebille, final tailpiece (France 1947: 121) Steinlen has added a scene to France’s tale, and most readers, I am sure, can read his illustration, if only they look closely enough. Crainquebille’s suicide is the inevitable end of the story. Steinlen performs a classic reading activity, as defined in Ch. 1.2, and his tailpiece is a meaningful adjunct that readers can accept or reject as they wish. A very different quality of adjunctivity is to be found in Jacques Feyder’s silent film version of Crainquebille (1922), in which the old man is saved at the last moment by a newsboy he has befriended, who takes him by the hand and persuades him to make a fresh start. There is not the slightest hint of such a happy end in France’s text, and it contradicts his narrative argument, but for a medium like the silent film the temptation to appeal to the public’s sentimentality was no doubt irresistible. As David Lodge points out in his discussion of narrative endings, “this kind of last-minute twist is generally 2.4 Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan 113 <?page no="114"?> more typical of the short story than of the novel” (Lodge 1992: 225). But in this respect, a film is quite different from a novel or even a novella, because readers can always tell from the number of pages left to read that they are approaching the end. In a film “there’s no way of telling which frame is going to be the last” because “at any point the director chooses, without warning, without anything being resolved, or explained, or wound up, it can just … end” (ibid.: 227). Does that justify the last-minute twist that Feyder gave to his film version? And now for Dingley, l’illustre écrivain, first published in 1902 in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. The Pelletan edition of 1906 is the revised fifth edition, which won the Prix Goncourt for its author in the same year. The famous writer’s full name is Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), “Dingley” being an anagram formed by letters from his first and second names and his surname. The book is a fictionalised biography of Kipling in his Transvaal years, using the many differences of opinion with his wife to develop psychological and ethical issues in a manner that touches on satire. The Tharauds were sympathetic observers of the Boers’ struggle to recover their independence in the conflicts of 1881 and 1899-1902, and they were critical of Kipling’s role as a propagandist of empire, while admiring him as a writer. In what amounts to a concerted act of patriotic censorship, Dingley was never translated into English, but was of course available in French, just like many of Kipling’s own works. In 1907 Kipling was the first Englishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The astonishing thing about Pelletan’s edition is its price, which was only possible because the edition was not limited and not illustrated. It was set in 12-point Grasset (designed in 1897 by Eugène Grasset for the type-foundry Georges Peignot) with 2-point leading, which makes the text very pleasant to read. The book was decorated in a reticent and functional manner with a typographic headpiece (F.: bandeau; G.: Kopfleiste) and a closing vignette of flowering ivy for each of the five chapters. Each chapter is subdivided into eight to two sections, which always open with a decorated typographic initial, 22 in all. In was, in other words, a decidedly democratic edition, the first of its kind for this publisher, with a second following soon after. This was the Tharauds’ La Ville et les Champs (1870-71), two novellas, “L’Ami de l’ordre”, set in Paris, and “Les Hobereaux”, set in rural Périgord. According to the catalogue, the two stories combine elements of the picturesque with erudition, philosophy and emotion: C’est ce que l’on trouve dans La Ville et les Champs, où les deux nouvelles forment un dyptique racontant, dans le raccourci d’un drame poignant, deux épisodes de 1870 et de 1871, de l’année terrible et de l’année tragique qui la suivit. (Clément-Janin 1913-: 78) 114 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="115"?> The allusion is to Victor Hugo’s epic poem on the Franco-Prussian war, L’Année Terrible (1872), dramatically illustrated by Daniel Vierge and Léopold Flameng (1831-1911). La Ville et les Champs followed the same pattern as Dingley, except that it had five illustrations by Alméry Lobel-Riche (1880-1950), engraved by Eugène Froment and Jules-Léon Perrichon. The third and last unlimited title priced at 3,50 francs was Robert Déran’s Au Bruit des sources, à l’Ombre des forêts (1907), a little volume of prose and poetry. After this experiment in popular publishing of books that all referred, directly or indirectly, to war and peace, town and country, world and nation, Pelletan once more revised his policy by raising the price of the cheapest category to 6, 8, 20, 25, 40 or 65 francs, depending on how well it was furnished with decorative and illustrative elements, and what kind of readership it was targeted on. This did not prevent him from producing luxury editions of books that could be relied on to sell well, such as Anatole France’s La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1912), with 190 illustrations by Auguste Leroux (1871-1954), at 350 francs for one of the 333 copies printed on wove Marais, and no price declared for the other 77 copies on the usual expensive, exotic papers. With Jules Renard (1864-1910) and Les Philippe we find Pelletan steering a middle course without sacrificing any of the literary, aesthetic and material standards developed since 1896. Since the publication of Poil de Carotte (1894) and Histoires naturelles (1896), often in illustrated editions involving artists like Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Renard had won a wide and appreciative readership. Les Philippe has a generous super royal octavo format and is set in the same 12-point Grasset that was used for Dingley, which had 27 lines to a full page, but now only 26 lines, so that the interline space is increased, which goes very well with the wide margins. It is a pleasure to read the text and to turn the pages, for it is not only the letterpress that has so much space to unfold on the smooth cream paper, but also the orange-red typographic initials for each of the 31 unnumbered chapters (or episodes) and especially the 101 illustrations by Paul-Émile Colin. Colin designed and cut his illustrations himself, so they really do deserve to be called “bois originaux”. He soon added the second Christian name in order avoid confusion with his namesake, Paul Colin, also an illustrator and designer of posters, and a Lorrainer like himself. The story of the Philippe family is told by Renard as a first-person narrator, who is present in most of the episodes and is always addressed as “Monsieur”. That explains why the first camaïeu, placed on a sheet between the half-title and the title-page, shows the author-narrator in conversation with the protagonist Philippe, a basic situation in the novel. The narrator introduces himself and his native village in a three-page preamble entitled Patrie! Renard grew up in 2.4 Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan 115 <?page no="116"?> the tiny village of Chitry-les-Mines, situated on the Yonne 40-km north-east of Nevers, where he went to school. From 1904 to his death he was mayor of Chitry, his father’s successor in this office. Now, as he walks through the village, he is joined by one child after another, the first two holding his hands, the others following and then all vanishing like ghosts as he reaches the open road. The preamble ends on a pensive note: Resté seul, sûr qu’avec un peu d’imagination je retrouverais le lendemain, toujours, aux mêmes endroits et à mon gré, cette famille d’ombres, j’écoutais s’éteindre en moi le bruit d’un cœur ému et je me disais-: Trois ou quatre maisons, juste ce qu’il faut de terre et d’eau à des arbres, de pâles souvenirs d’enfance dociles à notre appel, comme c’est quelque chose de simple, la patrie ! Et puisque tous les hommes peuvent en avoir une pareille sans plus de frais, pourquoi font-ils tant d’histoires-! (Renard 1907-: 13) This is a notably mild, unaggressive kind of patriotism that Renard also advocates in his Journal 1887-1910 (Renard/ Barousse 1995, s.v. “Patrie”). The preamble is framed by a headpiece and a tailpiece, the first (below) showing the main street of the village, the second giving us a glimpse of the landscape. Fig. 20: Woodcut: “Chitry-les-Mines” (Renard 1907: 11) The story of Les Philippe begins with a postponed woodcut frontispiece intro‐ ducing the whole family in their natural setting. The woodcut was printed off two blocks, one inked in black, the other in olive green. The olive block was printed first, then the black one. Thanks to the cream paper, the result 116 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="117"?> is a composition in three colours. It is not, strictly speaking, a camaïeu at all, as the following definition from Christian Galantaris’ Manuel de Bibliophilie: Dictionnaire (1997) shows: Composition monochrome obtenue par différents tons d’une même couleur, y compris en grisaille. Le principe s’applique aussi bien en peinture (huile, gouache, aquarelle) qu’en teinture, gravure … Dans ce dernier cas, la technique consiste à tirer succes‐ sivement plusieurs planches en demi-teintes d’une même couleur avec des repères ; on utilise comme teinte supplémentaire le fond blanc du papier. (Galantaris 1997 : s.v. Camaïeu) This definition is borne out by Paul Robert’s Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la Langue Française (1960), with the information that the word “camée” (E.: cameo; G.: Kamee) originally designated a gemstone composed of layers of different shades that are made visible by carving into them. Once more, we come across a terminological confusion caused by a technical term being borrowed by one craft from another. Colin’s illustrations are woodcuts, as Pelletan explains in his prospectus for the book: Et toujours suivant son tempérament, il a traduit ses impressions d’un canif robuste et délicat, dans des bois qui ne pourront que réjouir ceux qui ont conservé l’amour vivifiant des franches xylographies. […] Ces bois sont des images sommaires et séduisantes, comme des images de deux sous, mais faites de main d’artiste. (Clément- Janin 1913-: 84) Eight of them are polychrome woodcuts, with the colours partly separate and partly overlapping. In the case of the double portrait of Renard and Philippe, mentioned above, three inks are used: a pale violet for the sky and clouds, an ochre for the fore and middle ground, and black for outlining the men’s features and for suggesting structures and modelling. The paperwhite shows brightest in the clouds and on Renard’s left shoulder, and the violet peeps through in a flower and on Renard’s shirt. The overall effect is very convincing, with a clarity of line that relates the illustrations to the letterpress. Throughout the book this interlacing is brought about by the systematic use of a headpiece and a tailpiece for every episode, with only two exceptions for the single-page episodes 4 and 16, where the tailpieces are replaced by small in-text illustrations. We will have to content ourselves with one last example from Les Philippe in order to show how this union of text and illustration is brought to a climax. The final and longest episode of the novel, no. 31, is a collection of Philippe’s habits and sayings, which have not changed over the years. Here is the fifth page of the seven-page episode: 2.4 Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan 117 <?page no="118"?> Fig. 21: Jules Renard, Les Philippe-: 134 The first two lines refer to the previous page, so we can begin with the first intext vignette. Like the other illustrations on this page, it does not have a frame separating it from the text, and this is part of the definition of a vignette: it takes its name from the vine leaves and tendrils which, in ancient hand-written books, often decorated initials and shaded off into the margin. Here the illustration merges with the text, and vice versa. This vignette shows Philippe (whom we have learned to recognise) wading barefoot in the Yonne with a cast net, and 118 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="119"?> taking the opportunity to have a bath. The next illustration shows Philippe kneeling in what may be a muddy dell, and we are told that he doesn’t mind being dressed in rags, as long as he doesn’t catch cold. The third vignette shows him looking out for a cow, and again the text provides the solution: this is the cow he has named Charming, which is a useful name, because it saves him from calling her Camel when she doesn’t respond. In vignette number four, Philippe is reading a notice stuck on a wall, and we learn that it is his custom to ignore the town hall’s announcements till they begin to droop, for as long as they stick there’s no hurry. And finally, when we see him sitting on a bench, with a hen on his left and a dog wallowing in the dust on his right; we are told that this makes him laugh, but his laughter sounds (and now the text continues on the next page) like someone sobbing! “Il faut voir Philippe pour être sûr qu’il rit” (ibid.: 135). This sequence of alternating illustrations and short texts extends over five pages, with 19 vignettes for just 22 sentences. Is this grand finale of the novel an early precursor of the graphic novel? It certainly shows what can be achieved by thinking hard about the basic constituents of a book and about the relations that must operate between them if the result is to be not just satisfactory, but as perfect as possible. After a decade of publishing, Pelletan comes very close to this target with a book like Les Philippe. In the Deuxième Lettre aux Bibliophiles, of November 1896, subtitled “du Texte et du Caractère typographique” he enunciates a set of principles to be observed in planning the design of a book: Le livre est un texte, mais tout texte n’est pas un livre, par exemple, le texte d’un discours ou celui d’un manuscrit. Pour qu’un devienne un livre, il faut l’intervention d’un nouveau facteur, qui est le caractère typographique. Cela nous amène à énoncer notre seconde formule : un livre est du noir sur du blanc. […] De cet énoncé écoulent immédiatement deux conséquences. D’abord, la proscription des encres diversement colorées […] À l’exception des lettres capitales, qui traditionnellement peuvent être tirées en rouge […] - le bariolage doit être sévèrement proscrit des ouvrages d’art. Ensuite, la décoration de la page, dans le texte, doit être, comme celui-ci, également noire. Introduire parmi les caractères, des taches ou des lignes de couleur, rompt l’harmonie et l’homogénéité de la page. […] Le livre, considéré au point de vue imprimeur, étant de noir sur blanc, le choix du caractère ne saurait être indifférent. […] Il faudra naturellement mettre d’accord le caractère avec le format, ce qui revient à dire qu’il y a une proportion à conserver entre le noir et le blanc. […] Nous sommes partis de ce postulat, à savoir que l’éditeur d’art ne saurait se contenter de posséder un beau type de caractère, mais qu’il devait varier le caractère avec le 2.4 Book reform in France from Bracquemond to Pelletan 119 <?page no="120"?> texte et l’illustration. Nous considérions qu’il y a un rapport étroit entre le texte d’un livre et le caractère dans lequel ce livre est imprimé, et qu’il n’était pas indifférent de révéler l’esprit et l’époque d’une œuvre par l’œil de sa typographie. (Pelletan 1896b: 13-16) Pelletan does make some finer distinctions as well, admitting for example that the principle of black on white must take into consideration the fact that paper comes in many shades of white, cream and grey, so that it may be necessary to use different shades of black for printing on them. The rule that in-text illustrations should be printed in black makes sense and is confirmed by the example from Les Philippe that has just been discussed. His notion that coloured inks should not be admitted, except for the use of red for typographic initials or other forms of rubrication (F.: rubrique, rubriquer; G.: Rubrik, rubrizieren), did not prevent him from permitting a more liberal use of red in Crainquebille, as described above. The idea that a publisher should vary the typeface according to the character of the text and the illustrations may sound plausible, but on second thoughts it does not seem feasible. Is there anything in the “character” of a text that can be expressed in the design of a typeface? Perhaps an 18 th century text deserves a typeface of the period, but does a sentimental text require a sentimental typeface, and if such a thing exists, should one want to use it? No, a type should be unobtrusive and legible, and if we consider Fayard’s use of the Jenson type throughout the Livre de Demain series, we will recognise that this uniformity is a virtue. Despite such objections, I would argue that Pelletan’s rules offer useful criteria for analysing and judging the quality of a printed, illustrated book and should therefore always be borne in mind. 120 2 Invention, decline and reform in the history of book illustration, 1850-1932 <?page no="121"?> 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series 3.1 The many meanings of “popular” This chapter serves to introduce the major series of popular illustrated fiction published in France, Britain and Germany between the two world wars, and to establish an empirical basis for the comparison and appraisal of the different cultural practices involved in providing new and growing readerships with illustrated narrative texts. First, however, a number of questions about how the term “popular” can be used to characterise these texts, their readers, as well as the making, selling and buying of books, will require at least tentative answers. This term, together with related terms in its word-field, such as “common”, “ordinary”, “folk”, “mass”, “vulgar” etc., has meant so many different things at different times to different people, that it will be necessary to clarify some of the shades of meaning that might be relevant to this study and the period it deals with. Then, with these in mind, we will be able to consider a series of statements about the idea of the popular in relation to reading, looking and everyday life, which may confirm or modify or even contradict our expectations. In a third step, the major illustrated series in French, English and German will be presented and related to the meanings of “popular” we have identified. Meet the Common People Let us begin with a concrete example from the year 1942, a book of photographs and texts relating immediately to current events and at the same time harking back to happier times, but also to the first World War. Its title, Meet the Common People, echoes a phrase from a radio broadcast by Prime Minister Winston Churchill of October 21, 1940, addressed “To the people of France” and given in French. At Dunkirk in early June, the French troops had suffered a crushing defeat by the German army, which rapidly occupied all of northern France and the whole of the Biscay coast and its hinterland, while the French government under Maréchal Pétain retired first to Tours and thence to Vichy. The final passage of Churchill’s speech is printed on the front endpaper of the book, only omitting the “Vive la France! ” formula that originally opened it: “Long live also the forward march of the common people in all the lands towards their just and true inheritance, and towards the broader and fuller age …”. (Carrick & Bradley 1942: 2) <?page no="122"?> Meet the Common People (that is how the title is given on the spine, while the dust jacket, top board and title-page print it as meet “… the common people …”) was compiled by Edward Carrick, who selected the photographs, and Gerry Bradley, who wrote the running commentary. Churchill’s broadcast was an appeal to the French, designed to assure them of Britain’s sympathy and solidarity and to encourage them to “rearm [their] spirits before it is too late”, but Carrick and Bradley were now addressing their own people, all of the people of the British Isles, men, women and children of all ranks and conditions, without exception. The term “common” is used here, it seems, with all the positive connotations of expressions like “common sense”, “common weal” or “Commonwealth”. Indeed, in Churchill’s use, “common” transcends national boundaries to include all people of good will, in particular all those willing to fight Hitler and Fascism. A brief description of Meet the Common People will suggest how this inclusive meaning of “common people” is developed over 95 pages, both in the 80 documentary photographs (mainly film stills) and in the one to six lines of running commentary beneath each photograph, with occasionally a full page of text in between. A number of quotations from Shakespeare, the Bible, Virgil, John Masefield and others are interspersed. In his introduction, Carrick explains that “documentary films are the chronicles of modern times - photographic records of sounds and images in our everyday life” (ibid.: 5). He is aware that new media may not always be properly understood, so he takes the trouble to point out the difference between documentary films and the newsreels shown in cinemas: News-reels record events. But life is not all ‘events’ - hot news - climaxes as it were, and it is the intervals in between and leading up to them that the documentary film makers search for, inquire into and record […] (ibid.) These “intervals” are the stuff of common people’s everyday life, and it is the common people themselves that we see in the photographs in which “the actual people concerned became the actors - as opposed to those [films] in which actors represented reality against fictitious backgrounds” (ibid.). Here we find the concept of common people unwittingly splitting up in a confusion of “agents” (people living their own lives and carrying out actions) and “actors” (playing roles on the stage or in a feature film). Carrick goes on to make a similar distinction between “our fighting men in the services”, whose deeds are amply recorded in the picture press, and the common people, who are often overlooked: […] as we looked at more and more of these films, we realized what a profound part in the present struggle is played by the common people. And so we thought to make a little chronicle of how the war affected these ordinary men and women in this island 122 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="123"?> nation, as they went about their work and were captured by the moving camera of the documentary film makers from the time of the first alarm in 1939 to the call to the factory front in 1941. (ibid.: 6) Bradley then begins his chronicle by asking the obvious question: “Who are the common people? ” (ibid.: 8). He offers the following definition: […] I would say it is those many of us who are without a surplus. Those who live close to the standard minimum - a little above - a little below. They are the rank and file of the civilian army, roughly forty millions of them. They are the immobile people. The people who have to stay put whatever happens, for they have to be where their job is and where the brood is springing up. They are tied by the leg to the machine of which they are the sentient parts. (ibid.) The population of Great Britain in 1940 amounted to c. 44,7 million. That leaves over four and a half million people who do not count as common or ordinary, who do dispose of a surplus and whose mobility is not restricted. These are “them” as opposed to “us”. Such a clear-cut antithesis scuttles the inclusive meaning of "common" and implies that it is an illusion. The evidence had already been presented by George and Margaret Cole in their October 1936 report on The Condition of Britain, in which they suggested that the “Two Nations” diagnosis of British society, developed in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), should be replaced by a triadic model based on the distribution of income: “the rich, the comfortable and the poor” (Cole/ Cole, 1936: 65 and cf. 79f.). If we adopt the Coles’ analysis, which is based on the figures for 1929 before the slump, then the rich are those with an abundant surplus, while those placed sufficiently above the standard minimum, the prosperous middle classes, can be seen as comfortable. Those who have to spend every penny they can earn are without any surplus and must therefore count as “have-nots”, which is closer to the truth than calling them “common”. The Coles are quite explicit about what this means: Even if the estimates are only approximately correct, the gross inequality of the existing distribution of incomes stands plainly revealed. The well-to-do, with over £1,000 a year, are only 1½ per cent of the income receivers; but they get over 22½ per cent of the income. The middle groups, ranging from £250 to £1,000, are just under 11 per cent of the recipients, and get nearly 20 per cent of the income. The have-nots include 87½ per cent of all the recipients of incomes; but they get only 58 per cent of the total income. In the light of these figures there would seem to be not so much two as three “nations” in the Britain of today. (ibid.: 63) Such glaring inequality casts doubt on all glib talk about “the common people”, and reminds one of Richard Hoggart’s remark about “the vagueness which 3.1 The many meanings of “popular” 123 <?page no="124"?> almost inevitably results” from using the term (Hoggart 1957: 19). The phrase is revealed to be a rhetorical construction whose meaning shifts according to situation and illocutionary purpose, only seeming to refer to the whole population (below the peerage). In a situation like the Battle of Britain, such rhetoric may be justified as part of a morale-boosting strategy for the home front, and so a book like Meet the Common People can be seen as a representative example of wartime culture, an audio-visual reportage about the people and for the people, with its text helping them to read the photographs, and vice versa. Easy readability is of course an important quality of texts aiming to address a wide readership, and depends in large measure on typography and illustration. The type face used for this book is a slab serif of the kind called “egyptian”, that was often employed for posters and other kinds of advertising. It is printed in bold and with generous spacing, so that it stands out against the photographs and is easy to read even over someone else’s shoulder. Curiously enough, considering the raging war, it is a version of Emil Rudolf Weiss’s Memphis type, issued in 1929 by the Frankfurt type foundry Stempel (Macmillan 2006: 183). The book’s visual style and the quality of the commentary are very similar to what one finds in Picture Post, “the most celebrated magazine in the history of British photo-journalism” in the years 1938-1957 (Gascoigne 1993, s.v. Picture Post). We should now consider some concrete examples of the combination of text and photograph in order to clarify these ideas about the meaning and use of “popular” and “common”. “The Blitz”, as it was called in British newspapers and thus by their readers, meant the bomb attacks on London and other British cities by the German Luftwaffe that started on 7 September 1940 and went on until May 1941. Historian Peter Clarke describes it as an experience that was “thoroughly unpleasant for all, fatal for some, devastating for those who lost their families and homes”, adding that “it did not lead to general demoralisation, still less a quick collapse” (Clarke 1997: 200). One part of the unpleasantness was that many Londoners whose homes had been destroyed, or who had no basements or gardens, took to sleeping in the nearest London Underground stations. By the end of September some 177,000 people were taking refuge in 79 tube stations in Greater London (Weinreb/ Hibbert 1983: s.v. Blitz). In the second chapter of Meet the Common People, “War Comes to the Cities”, four half-page photographs with the following captions show the measures taken in London to prepare for nightly air-raids: • With night’s coming the wardens and the observers quicken into wakeful‐ ness. • Great mechanical ears search into space to catch the throb of raiding engines. 124 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="125"?> • The stretcher bearers bring out their apparatus. • Ambulances move into position. Stretchers are stacked in readiness. (Carrick/ Bradley 1942: 28-31) Thus prepared, we can turn to the double-page spread immediately following: Fig. 22: Carrick/ Bradley, Underground shelters: p.-32 3.1 The many meanings of “popular” 125 <?page no="126"?> Fig. 23: Carrick/ Bradley, Underground shelters: p.-33 The first photograph sets the scene: the posters on the walls, the lamps hanging from the ceiling and the “To Trains” sign show that this must be a tube station. We also see at least two rows of people lying on the platform, wrapped in their bedclothes, with suitcases and bundles at their feet marking the boundary of their makeshift dormitory. The text describes what is going on here and adds details and judgements that are not evident from what we see in the 126 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="127"?> photographs. The second picture is a tranquil close-up of “old and young” which does not, to my mind, really express the “uneasy juxtaposition” that Bradley speaks of in his commentary. Perhaps this father and his daughter are sleeping not in the Underground but in an Anderson shelter erected in their garden, “two walls of corrugated steel sunk into the ground with a mound of earth on top” (Weinreb/ Hibbert 1983: 73). Actually, the walls were rounded to meet at the top and form a stable and protective arch, as one can see very clearly in another illustrated book featuring the Blitz, Raymond Briggs’ Ethel and Ernest: A True Story (1998: 36-38, 57), a strip-cartoon biography of his lower-middle class parents from 1928 to 1971. In these examples, and generally speaking in all bi-medial genres, we will find productive tensions between the visual and the verbal, since especially photographs show both more and less than the accompanying commentary will put in so many words, and conversely the text will tend to add interpretations which both fall short of and go beyond the pictures. This is the “double inadequation” (Waldenfels 1980: 90-94) between author-text and reader-text discussed above (Ch. 1.2) that applies in much the same way to reading pictures that refer to texts, as to reading texts that refer to pictures. However, it is only in careful analyses of specific cases of reading such a picture-cum-text artefact that we can determine exactly how reciprocal dearth and surplus interact to produce individual apperceptions of that artefact. This is all the more important since, to keep to our example, these texts and pictures about the Blitz stand in some kind of relation to other texts and pictures on the same or similar topics. As soon as we become aware of relations, we begin to identify similarities and differences. Take the texts and photographs published in issues of Picture Post during 1940 and 1941 that were reproduced selectively in later anthologies such as the hard-cover Penguin Picture Post 1938-50 (1970), edited with an introduction by Tom Hopkinson, editor of the magazine from 1940-1950. This carries a section from a “Diary of the War” for May 21-26, 1940, taken from the June 8, 1940 issue under the heading “Blitzkrieg” (ibid.: 67-77). It focuses on the destruction caused by German bombing, but makes no mention of the subway shelters in London. Two decades later, in The Picture Post Album (1989), edited by Robert Kee, Picture Post staff writer from 1948 to 51, our topic surfaces again in a chapter on “The War”. This shows a series of 13 photographs of “Men, women, and children at war”, i.e. sleeping on the Underground platforms and escalators and even in stationary trains. The Album is not paginated, nor does it give exact dates and locations for most of the photographs, and that may tell us something about how this anthology was expected to be read, 45 years after the end of the war. One can imagine grandfathers and grandmothers turning its pages and being reminded 3.1 The many meanings of “popular” 127 <?page no="128"?> by one photograph after another of their childhood experiences and of course commenting accordingly: Fig. 24: “Men, women and children at war” (Kee 1989: 109, lower half) Up to this point we have been concerned with texts and pictures which found a wide or popular readership. The same events were also represented in a rather different way in the shelter drawings made by the sculptor Henry Moore in 1940 and 1941. In October his London studio was bombed, so he and his wife moved to the Hertfordshire village of Much Hadham, some 40 miles north of London. Moore reports, in words recorded by his friend and pupil John Hedgecoe: I returned to London two days a week spending the nights in the Underground where I was filling a sketch book with the shelter drawings. The people had taken over the Underground to escape the bombing. It wasn’t only on the platforms, it was in an empty tunnel, too, where they were excavating to put a new line in. Of course, I couldn’t do the drawings on the spot - it would have been like drawing in the hold of a slave ship. I might have made a note - to remember the line of someone’s legs, say - but I had to do them from memory. I had never seen so many reclining figures and even the train tunnels seemed to be like the holes in my sculpture. And, amid the grim tension, I noticed groups of strangers formed together in intimate groups and children asleep within feet of passing trains. (Moore/ Hedgecoe 1999: 170) 128 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="129"?> On the page opposite, Hedgecoe shows us one of the drawings Moore made as a result of his shelter visits. Fig. 25: Henry Moore, “Sleeping Figures”, 1941 (ibid.: 171) It is inscribed “Sleeping figures (shelter drawing)” on the sheet, but Hedgecoe identifies it as a “Study for Three Sleeping Shelterers” from the Second Shelter Sketchbook of 1941 and adds that the drawing is done in “pencil, white wax 3.1 The many meanings of “popular” 129 <?page no="130"?> crayon, green and yellow crayon, watercolour wash” (ibid.: 208). It focuses on the postures, gestures and facial expressions of three sleeping children, with two images of each child, thus creating a temporal dimension reminiscent of a comic strip. There is no hint of patriotic rhetoric here, of any intention to persuade an audience of values like courage or solidarity. Moore simply shows children in different phases of sleep, smiling, dreaming, sighing, in a six-part pattern which invites the beholder to read the body language of the sleepers and compare them, horizontally and vertically. Because this is a drawing, without any iconic sign of place or other extraneous details, the spectator’s response is bound to be rather different from most responses elicited by photographs such as one finds in Meet the Common People or Picture Post. Still, I would suggest that Moore’s sketch is popular in the sense that with the help of the title everyone will be able to recognise the subject, namely the children and the situation they are in, and thus share their experience. On the other hand, Moore’s means of representation, which are so distant from photography, create what Mary Acton, in a discussion of another shelter drawing of 1941, has called a “layered effect” that “gives depth and resonance to the subject” (Acton 1997: 180). Moore’s technique and composition probably enable most spectators to reach a sophisticated level of reflection about the children and their situation, without detracting at all from the immediate popular appeal inherent in representations of such events. We may conclude from these examples that the idea of the “popular” in the visual arts and in different kinds of writing, from journalism to literary fiction, refers to a very broad span of artefacts and responses and should not be restricted to some kinds of lower-class cultural production. To come back briefly to the term “common” that this section started with, I would like to quote from a book by the historian Eric Hobsbawm that he gave the title Uncommon People (1998). In the preface he refers to the journalist Joseph Mitchell, who was well known for his character studies published regularly in The New Yorker and who “wrote in protest against all those who talked, however sympathetically, about ‘the little people’: ‘They are as big as you and I’.” Hobsbawm comments: Their lives are as interesting as yours and mine, even if nobody has written about them. My point is rather that, collectively, if not as individuals, such men and women are major historical actors. What they do and think, makes a difference. It can and has changed culture and the shape of history, and never more so than in the twentieth century. That is why I have called a book about ordinary people, the ones that are traditionally known as ‘the common people’, Uncommon People. (Hobsbawm 1998: vii) It may help to prevent misapprehensions if we bear this protest in mind when discussing “popular fiction”, “les romans populaires”, “Volksausgaben” or 130 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="131"?> “Popkultur”, and similar labels. Cheap editions like those published by Reclam or Fayard or Penguin must be judged on their own merits, and that requires detailed and unprejudiced comparative study of the material, both verbal and visual. More meanings of “popular” “Popular” is one of the 131 words that Raymond Williams discusses in his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976, 2 1983), adding crossreferences to related articles on “common”, “culture”, “democracy”, “folk” and “masses”. In its late 15 th century use, during the period of “transition from feudal to bourgeois society” (Morton 1965: 137), in the phrase “action popular”, it meant “a legal suit which it was open to anyone to begin”, and thus designated a form of empowerment available to all. A century later, in the phrases “popular government” and “popular estate”, it referred to “a political system constituted or carried out by the whole people”, but at the same time to a part of this whole, namely the lowest order or class in a tripartite society and political system, the “tiers état” (Williams 1983: 236). In this way “popular” was at one moment inclusive, at the next exclusive, and thus self-contradictory. Since the term’s reference often shifted like this, it inevitably accrued complex ambiguities, far removed from the meaning of its etymological source. When the term is subject to a shift in perspective, the result may be new meanings. This is the case with the concept of “popular culture”. Williams quotes a late 19 th century American magazine observing that people “have come to take popular quite gravely and sincerely as a synonym for good” (237). He explains: “Popular” was being seen from the point of view of the people rather than from those seeking favour or power from them. Yet the earlier sense has not died. “Popular culture” was not identified by the people but by others, and it still carries two older senses: inferior kinds of work (cf. “popular literature”, “popular press” as distinguished from “quality press”); and work deliberately setting out to win favour (“popular journalism” as distinguished from “democratic journalism”, or “popular entertainment”). (ibid.) When people belonging to a specific local and mainly oral tradition describe their particular culture, they do so largely in terms of the practices and activities that fill their own lives, habits of making and doing that also express their own values, often received from their forebears and transmitted to their descendants. In The Uses of Literacy, his analysis of working-class culture in Britain since the 1920s, Richard Hoggart (1918-2014), gives a vivid account of how class cultures differ: 3.1 The many meanings of “popular” 131 <?page no="132"?> To live in the working-classes is even now to belong to an all-pervading culture, one in some ways as formal and stylised as any that is attributed to, say, the upper-classes. A working-class man would come to grief over the right way to move through a sevencourse dinner: an upper middle-class man among working-class people would just as surely reveal his foreign background by the way he made conversation (the tempo of conversation, not only the matter or idiom), used his hands or feet, ordered drinks or tried to stand drinks. (Hoggart 1957: 31) In the period we are considering, such differences extended through almost every aspect of everyday life, and however much they may have been modified after 1945, many of them are still in evidence. Today you may not be able to distinguish people by their clothes any more, since high-quality factory-made clothing and a general preference for casual wear have led to a uniformity that Hoggart had seen coming in the 50s but was not yet able to confirm (cf. Hoggart 1957: 21). Describing his own aims and procedure in The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart says: I am writing particularly of the majority who take their lives much as they find them, and in that way are not different from the majority in other classes; of what some trade union leaders, when they are regretting a lack of interest in their movement, call ‘the vast apathetic mass’; of what song-writers call, by way of compliment, ‘just plain folk’; of what the working-classes themselves describe, more soberly, as ‘the general run of people’. Within that majority there is obviously a very wide range of attitudes, and yet there is a centre at which a great number of people are represented. (ibid.: 22) There is no doubt that we will also find a very wide range of features belonging to things classed as popular, and one can try to identify attitudes of readers on the basis of the different kinds of traces they have left in their books: signatures, stamps, underlining, marginal notes etc., though such traces of reading are not as frequent as one would wish. I do not expect to find a centre representing a large number of readers, since dog-ears, thumb-marks, tobacco stains, crumbs and the like do not reveal much worth knowing, except perhaps that books formed a part of people’s everyday lives and habitual activities and were not only read in a study or library. Other clues like print-runs, reprints etc. can be reported, and identifying the authors and illustrators best represented in publishers’ series will also tell us something about people’s tastes in reading, but hardly coalesce to form a centre. At this stage in our reflections on concepts like popular and common it might be helpful to have recourse to a structural model that allows for the great variety of features these concepts display. Instead of working with a three or more level pyramid structure as proposed and often used for hierarchical concepts 132 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="133"?> like class, or with a dichotomy like popular vs. serious, I suggest we borrow the notion of “cline”, introduced by the biologist Julian Huxley in 1938, and adapted by M.A.K. Halliday in the 1960s for the field of systemic linguistics. I first came across the concept in Style in Fiction. A linguistic introduction to English fictional prose (1981) by Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short when I began teaching introductory courses on English and American fiction. The OED defines the noun “cline” as used in biology as “a graded series of characters or differences in form within a species or other group of related organisms”, and for its application in linguistics it gives Halliday’s own definition: A cline resembles a hierarchy in that it involves relation along a single dimension, but instead of being made up of a number of discrete terms a cline is a continuum carrying potentially infinite gradation. (Halliday, Word, XVII, 1961: 249) One basic topic in these fiction courses was the representation of direct and reported speech, as well as the various in-between and beyond stages. Leech and Short had worked out a “cline of ‘interference’ in report” which made it easier to recognise and understand the various possibilities of speech representation on the basis of the six categories they distinguished. Their cline is a horizontal line, moving from free direct speech to narrative report of action, i.e. from the smallest degree of interference by the narrator to the highest degree (Leech/ Short 1981: 124). In free direct speech (FDS) quotation marks and reporting clauses are omitted, so that the reader reads and hears just the words spoken by a character. In narrative report of action (NRA) the original spoken words are replaced by a short summary in the narrator’s own words. The intermediate stages are direct speech (DS), free indirect speech (FIS), indirect speech (IS) and narrative report of a speech act (NRSA). The concept of cline has several features to recommend it. First, the cline itself can be drawn as steep or flat, straight or curved, depending on its topic. Second, it represents a continuum, open-ended in both directions, so that even the seemingly limited varieties of speech representation could be expanded, e.g. by representation of speech and thought through illustration. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) provides three innovative examples of this, and also features a famous sequence of “tolerable strait lines” representing the narrative structure of the first five books (Book VI, Ch. XL). One visual device is the black page (Book I, Ch. XII) signifying that Parson Yorick’s eyes are forever closed. Then there is the “marbled page” that the narrator himself identifies as a “motly emblem of my work! ” (Book III, Ch. XXXVI). The last illustration is closest to speech, since it derives from gesture, a form of bodylanguage that often enough accompanies verbal saying. Here it is a dialogue 3.1 The many meanings of “popular” 133 <?page no="134"?> between the corporal and “my Uncle Toby” on the subject of the latter’s amours. The corporal is doing his best to warn Uncle Toby of the dangers of being trapped by the Widow Wadman, and he accompanies his words by performing flourishes with his stick, which underline and delineate them. Fig. 26: Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Book IX, Ch. IV This flourish inscribed into the air is given specific meaning by the comment that follows immediately: “A thousand of my father’s most subtle syllogisms could not have said more for celibacy” (Sterne 1912, Everyman’s Library no. 617, repr. 1964: 445). The third useful feature of a cline of the kind proposed here is that it does not pit two antithetical poles against each other in fruitless, static opposition, but offers instead two fluent, fertile and indeterminate directions, the realisations of which at any point are unpredictable. A cline of popular fic‐ tion could lie between the two contrary inclinations of “simple” and “complex”, as long as we bear in mind that seemingly simple texts can turn out to be complicated, while vice versa a complexity can be quite simple once you are familiar with it. 134 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="135"?> A more recent development of the concept of cline is to be found in Pierre Bourdieu’s reflections, in Les Règles de l’art (1992), on the way the literary field at the turn of the century was shaped by the opposition of two poles, one of pure production, in this case avant-garde creation and reception, the other of commercial mass production. Within this tension between two poles there is room in the field for secondary solidarities and antagonisms, inclusions and exclusions: [L]e pôle de la production pure, où les producteurs tendent à n’avoir pour clients que les autres producteurs (qui sont aussi des concurrents) et où se retrouvent des poètes, des romanciers et des hommes de théâtre dotés de propriétés de position homologues, mais engagés dans des relations qui peuvent être antagonistes ; le pôle de la grande production, subordonnée aux attentes du grand public. (Bourdieu 1992: 175) The notion of one pole as a “pure”, wholly disinterested creative production is perhaps misleading, for without a viable economic basis, it could not exist. Equally, the opposite pole of commercial mass production could not succeed in attracting a large readership unless it offered wares of sufficient interest and recognisable value, cultural and material, in return for comparatively small sums of money. It might therefore be better to think of Bourdieu’s literary field as a cline, literally a sloping field, with an unlimited number of potential positions between two poles that themselves do not have a fixed meaning or position. Bourdieu himself insists that one should beware of establishing “une frontière tranchée” (ibid.: 174) between the poles. The idea of a slope is so useful because it always reminds one that there is bound to be movement, whether “glissement” as Lacan calls it, or “différance” in Derrida’s neologism, of the concepts involved, since their meanings are always fluid in response to developments in society and to what its members know and believe. I would now like to consider an earlier passage from Bourdieu’s Règles de l’art, in which he identifies the peculiar position of the novel in what he calls “the literary field”, and the consequences this position has for novelists’ reputations. Bourdieu explains that the economic status of the novel was different from that of all other genres because it involved a much larger number of writers and reached a much larger and more diverse public. It had a very much higher spread than poetry (whose cultural status was high, while its economic status was low, because it did not sell sufficiently) or drama (whose economic status was high because it guaranteed high profits for a very small number of authors and theatres, even if it appealed mainly to a bourgeois audience). The novel’s public had spread beyond the “monde littéraire” and the “monde bourgeois” into the realms of the “petite bourgeoisie” and even the “aristocratie ouvrière” 3.1 The many meanings of “popular” 135 <?page no="136"?> - an expression that Bourdieu himself puts in inverted commas (ibid.: 166). This dominant status of the novel is unfolded by Bourdieu as follows: Quant au roman, situé en position centrale entre les deux pôles de l’espace littéraire, il présente la plus grande dispersion du point de vue du statut symbolique : bien qu’il ait acquis ses lettres de noblesse, au moins à l’intérieur du champ, et même au-delà, avec Stendhal et Balzac, et surtout Flaubert, il reste associé à l’image d’une littérature mercantile, liée au journalisme par le feuilleton. Il acquiert un poids considérable dans le champ littéraire lorsque, avec Zola, il obtient des succès de vente exceptionnels (donc des gains très importants qui lui permettent de s’affranchir de la presse et du feuilleton), en touchant un public beaucoup plus vaste qu’aucun mode d’expression, mais sans renoncer aux exigences spécifiques en ce qui concerne la forme (il parviendra même à obtenir, avec le roman mondain, une consécration bourgeoise jusque-là réservée au théâtre). (ibid.: 167) It is this in-between position of the novel which may turn out to be important for understanding publishers’ fiction series of the 20s and 30s as popular texts. First of all, we must remember that young adults of this period had learned to read at school through illustrated narrative primers (called “livres de lecture courante”) like Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (1877), by G. Bruno (i.e. Augustine Tuillerie), or for English schoolchildren Jane Anne Winscome’s Dear Old England (1861), all reprinted and revised over the following decades. In Germany, the narrative mode was ignored in favour of the traditional anthology format, as employed in Das Vaterland: Lehr- und Lesebuch zur Pflege nationaler Bildung by W. Jütting and H. Weber (1877), and similar textbooks, whose titles and concept no doubt reflected the country’s long history of particularism and the desire to shape an embracing national identity. Then, thanks to educational reforms in the last third of the 19 th century, all three countries achieved a high degree of literacy, which together with technological innovation was the prerequisite for an extended market for newspapers and illustrated magazines, as well as an ever-increasing supply of inexpensive reprints of classic and contemporary texts, both for young readers and for adults. A decisive point is that these different kinds of printed text all interacted with each other, allowing readers to move from serialised novels in newspapers and magazines like L’Illustration (1843-1944), with its supplement La Petite Illustration (1913-1939), or Lectures pour tous (1894-1971), or Lisez-moi (1908-1951), to real books in complete editions, and back again. Zola’s mercantile success, to which we have just seen Bourdieu refer, was in part enabled by selling later impressions of a novel like Thérèse Raquin (1867, 2 1868) in an illustrated edition. This was published in Paris by C. Marpon and E. Flammarion in 1883, in 49 “livraisons” 136 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="137"?> or instalments of eight pages, two per week, each with a full-page illustration by Horace Castelli, at the price of 10 centimes per instalment. The publishers added a story “Le Capitaine Burle” which comprised seven instalments at the same price, these illustrated with four pen drawings by H. Dupray. So readers could buy Zola’s novel for less than five francs, plus his story about the captain for 70 centimes, unbound of course, and spread the cost over half a year. By way of a conclusion for this section I would like to quote a passage from a book by Robert Garric, one of the many French writers who discussed issues of cultural literacy and adult education in the 20s and 30s. In 1920 he founded the “Équipes sociales”, a reformist educational project similar in aims to the Workers’ Educational Association in Britain, founded in 1903 by Albert Mansbridge, and “dedicated to offering a non-ideological liberal education to working-class students” (Rose 2002: 258). Garric’s book carries the simple title Belleville, with a subtitle “Scènes de la vie populaire” on the cover. Belleville is a district in Paris between the Gare de l’Est and the Père Lachaise cemetery. In Belleville, in the Rue Fessart, there is a library, he says, which can serve “comme observatoire de la vie intellectuelle de Belleville” (Garric 1928: 129). He describes this library as one that is open and welcoming to all who wish to use its facilities: Nos habitudes des autres bibliothèques sont d’un coup déroutées ; aucune bureaucratie hargneuse, aucune barrière entre les lecteurs et les livres, pas d’échelles, pas de hauts rayons : tout est sous la main. On peut feuilleter, se documenter, «essayer» le livre avant de le prendre. Toute une éducation du goût, et de la vraie culture qu’ici, par miracle, le règlement favorise. […] Nul n’en est exclu, et surtout pas les enfants. Ils ont leur coin, - la bibliothèque n’est pas à eux seulement […] mais ils sont chez eux, avec les livres à leur hauteur, à leur portée, et l’habitude du silence et des livres d’images et de contes, que l’on regarde avec émotion et respect. Mieux encore : tous les jeudis, à l’heure du conte, les petits sont groupés pour entendre la belle histoire. C’est moins une bibliothèque, au sens habituel du mot, qu’un foyer, où l’on vient passer à lire une après-midi de loisirs, ou finir une rude soirée. Les tables de lecture sont là, avec les revues, les journaux … Le cadre est agréable : quelques fleurs, des reproductions de tableaux, et surtout une bonne atmosphère d’intimité et de grande politesse, créée par les maîtresses de la maison, à laquelle chacun est sensible (ibid.: 138 f.). Garric then goes on to quote from an article written by Ernest Coyeque for the Mercure de France of July 1, 1927: Le lecteur libre, dans la bibliothèque libre : libre accès aux rayons, libre choix ; un foyer, un home, pas un bureau de distribution de numéros… Et ce n’est pas tout ; 3.1 The many meanings of “popular” 137 <?page no="138"?> ce n’est même pas l’essentiel. L’essentiel, c’est un ou une bibliothécaire, connaissant le métier pour l’avoir appris, aimant les livres, monnaie courante, aimant le lecteur, qualité rarissime en raison des vertus qu’elle implique […] (ibid.: 139 f.) Such libraries, such cultural hospitality and such “Cercles d’Études où de jeunes travailleurs s’habituaient à discuter d’une lecture, d’une idée” (ibid.: 135), were an essential part of the cultural renewal in the course of which, during the years after the Great War, a new and ardent readership was encouraged to grow and grow strong in France, in Britain and to a lesser extent in Germany. It was a readership well prepared to enjoy the many new illustrated paperback series of narrative fiction that were being published during these years, and we will now consider them in detail. 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France This section will be devoted to three popular illustrated fiction series published in France between 1923 and the 1940s. The first, Le Livre de Demain (LdD), was launched in February 1923 by the publisher Arthème Fayard, finally comprising 235 titles. In September of the same year, Joseph Ferenczi & Fils followed suit with a similar series, Le Livre Moderne Illustré (LMI), which even attained 366 numbered volumes. Both were produced as inexpensive paperbacks, published initially at the rate of one volume per month, and illustrated with woodcuts by contemporary artists. Over the years, certain modifications were introduced in Ferenczi’s LMI, such as the use of a second colour for some of the illustrations in a volume and the gradual replacement of woodcuts by other graphic techniques. We will be discussing some of the differences and similarities between these two series, and in order to gain a broader basis for comparison a third series will be included, which aimed a little higher and was too expensive to become popular. This series was called Les Grands Écrivains (LGE), and published by the Librairie Hachette in 18 volumes from 1928 to 1932. There were three different get-ups, the first an unlimited paperback edition printed on smooth wove paper, the second with the same paper but in a half-leather hardback binding, top edges gilt, and the third “broché” like the first, but as a limited and numbered edition printed on an expensive watermarked paper. All three had the same woodcut or engraved illustrations. 138 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="139"?> 3.2.1 Fayard’s Le Livre de Demain (1923-1947) Arthème Fayard in 1918 During the Great War, the number of books published in France decreased dramatically, the 1913 production of 11,460 titles dropping to 4,484 in 1918, a mere 39 % of the pre-war figure (Fouché 1986: 190; cp. Parinet 2004: 266). The subject-matter was similarly reduced, with fiction titles and books on military topics accounting for the bulk. Once the war was over and France faced the task of physical and mental reconstruction, new books of many different kinds would be needed. At the publishing house of Arthème Fayard, founded in 1857, and specialising in cheap illustrated non-fiction and fiction, plans for new series marketable under adverse conditions such as rising prices and paper shortages had been in the make for some time. Thus in 1915, when Joseph-Arthème, a.k.a. Arthème II, was at the helm of the company, the decision was taken to add to existing series such as the illustrated Modern-Bibliothèque (1904-1916) and the unillustrated but extremely cheap Livre Populaire (1 st series 1905-14, price 65 centimes), both published monthly, a new series called Les Maîtres du Roman Populaire (Séguin 2005: vol. 2, iv-ix; Grandjean-Hogg 1996: 361 f.). The title of the new series is revealingly paradoxical - it aimed at popular reading but explicitly lifted this to the level of the “masters”. All these formats were kept going after 1918 for as long as they sold, though without new titles being added to the series. Meanwhile it became increasingly evident to the publishers that in programme and presentation such series were relics from a past world and might not now attract new readers looking forward to what they hoped would be a different or even better world. These would be expecting ready access to the kind of books they might previously have admired from a distance, but that had been beyond their means and beyond their cultural horizons. To provide such books had been precisely the aim of the Modern-Bibliothèque, whose pseudo-English “modern”, however, was simply not persuasive enough. To be successful now, Fayard’s books would need to look as up to date as the revues and operettas that became so popular in Paris after the war (Bouvet/ Durozoi 2010: 46-50), and of course the cinemas: Going to the cinema was the nation’s favourite pastime after the war. It was cheap, offered a wide choice of films that changed regularly, and the many cinemas provided places for young people to meet on a Saturday night and for family outings on a Sunday afternoon. (Bouvet/ Durozoi 2010: 312) In their combination of image and sound the “talkies”, since the late 1920s, had caught up with and even bested the mixed-media standard of the illustrated 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 139 <?page no="140"?> magazines and the illustrated book. The culture of the 20s was intensely visual, but when sound and then speech were integrated into films, this had the effect of strengthening their narrative dimension. Thus literature returned to the cinema, as Laurent Gervereau explains: Surtout, la tendance narrative [du film] se trouve renforcée par le parlant. Le ‘réalisme sonore’ (même avec l’irréalité musicale et l’artifice de plans multiples, du découpage, du montage) a imposé une forme de retour littéraire au cinéma. […] Le public, de 1930 à 1960, va rêver à de ‘grandes histoires’, à des romans en images. (Gervereau 2003: 216) In 1923 Arthème II may not yet have been aware of this imminent “return of literature”, but with the instinct of an experienced publisher he and his sonin-law and co-director Fernand Brouty recognised that if they waited too long, someone else would beat them past the post. Preparations for Le Livre de Demain And so Fayard and Brouty decided to assemble a team to draw up a blue-print for Le Livre de Demain. The novelist and dramatist Pierre Valdagne (1854-1937) who since July 1921 had already been responsible for Les Oeuvres Libres was now nominated “directeur de collection” (Grandjean-Hogg 1996: 546). For a short period, the recruitment of illustrators was put in the hands of Lucien Curel, once employed by the publisher Édouard Dentu (1830-84) till his firm went bankrupt in 1895, and Fayard took over some of its stock and personnel. In the mid-1920s Curel’s task devolved on the painter and engraver André Dignimont (1891-1965) (ibid., 446, 546). At that time Dignimont had won praise for his skills as an engraver-illustrator by his woodcuts for two books in Ferenczi’s competing series, Le Livre Moderne Illustré, namely Francis Carco’s Les Innocents (LMI 7, 1924) and Marc Elder’s La Maison du Pas Perilleux (LMI 15, 1924), and his woodcut contributions to Ferenczi’s short lived anthology-magazine Demain in 1924-25. That suggests that Dignimont was wooed away from Fayard’s main competitor, for whom in fact he produced no further work. Agnès Belleville reports that after doing etchings for two books in a new luxury series, Les Contemporains illustrés (published by Les Arts et le Livre, Paris 1926), he ceased making woodcuts or wood engravings (Belleville 2000: 122). Instead, he turned to etching and water-colour as his preferred techniques, in which he scored numerous successes until the 1950s. The selection of authors and texts was soon entrusted to the highly produc‐ tive and versatile writer Henri Duvernois (1875-1937), a journalist, novelist, dramatist, screenwriter and opera librettist. His works were mostly in a light 140 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="141"?> and popular vein, and many of them were turned into films during the 30s and 40s (including Faubourg Montmartre, La Poule and Les Sœurs Hortensia, novels all issued as LdD). Duvernois gives us the opportunity to step back briefly into the history of 19 th century publishing in France, in this case into the house of Charpentier. As a seventeen-year-old, Duvernois had started work in publishing when he joined the firm of Georges Charpentier, the son of Gervais Charpentier (1805-1871), founder of the famous Bibliothèque Charpentier in 1838. This series utilised a new paper-saving compact octodecimo (or eighteenmo) format, i.e. sheets folded to form sections of 18 leaves = 36 pages, which was designed as a challenge to the cheap mass productions imported from Belgium and the domestic two or three-decker octavo productions, and sold at half their price, namely 3,50 francs (Blasselle 1998: 36 f.). The Bibliothèque Charpentier was the first series of paperback pocket books in France, with up to 500 closely printed pages squeezed into one volume, easily identifiable thanks to their canary yellow covers, and imitated by many “Railway Libraries” and the like. Georges Charpentier in 1876 had started an offshoot, the Petite Bibliothèque Charpentier, as a series illustrated with etchings and thus addressed to bibliophiles. The original series was kept going as a library of standard texts, and was gradually upgraded as Charpentier’s business went through a series of mergers with other publishers, with Fasquelle taking full control in 1896. With this background and his many connections in Paris publishing and the theatre world, Duvernois was well equipped for his new task and it was perhaps he who suggested the yellow paper covers for the LdD. Duvernois together with his friend Sacha Guitry had previously helped Valdagne to get Les Œuvres Libres started and used this organ from the very first number to place his own texts and those of his literary acquaintances, a policy he also applied to the LdD. Promoting Le Livre de Demain This is the place to discuss some of the promotional activities undertaken by Fayard in connection with the LdD. Jean-Étienne Huret, in his pioneering bib‐ liographical study of the LdD, reproduces an “annonce publicitaire” published in the Bibliographie de la France of 1923, which makes considerable claims for the new series: Les œuvres de nos écrivains modernes les plus célèbres, les ouvrages inédits des jeunes auteurs de talent seront publiés sous la forme artistique réservée jusqu’à ce jour aux volumes de grand luxe par le LIVRE DE DEMAIN / Nouvelle collection littéraire ornée de gravures sur bois / Papier de pur alfa. - Grandes marges, caractères neufs d’une lisibilité parfaite - Impression magnifique / Gravures sur bois de nos artistes les plus 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 141 <?page no="142"?> admirés. […] 2,50 fr. le volume […] Les collections similaires se vendent couramment 30 fr. le volume. (Huret 2011: 243) As promising as these claims may have sounded in February 1923, a few years later there would have been ample reason to call them in question: the series offered neither the most famous writers, nor were they all previously unpublished, nor printed on the very best Alfa paper, nor perfectly legible. Most of the authors stemmed from the publisher’s backlist and at most only 16 of the 235 titles in the series qualify as “ouvrages inédits”, previously unpublished books (Huret 2011: 111-116), i.e. less than 7 %. While it is true that the format allowed generous margins, even when trimmed, the paper was not sufficiently opaque to prevent the letterpress and woodcuts from showing through. In the course of time the quality of the paper visibly declined and so did the quality of the print. A 32-page advertising brochure distributed by Fayard in 1926, Coup d’œil sur les Lettres françaises, raises similar doubts. It is an interesting document, whose importance is demonstrated but not exhausted by Huret, presenting the publisher’s current projects in ten short illustrated texts, which amount to a coherent programme (Huret 2011: 25-28). Les Œuvres Libres are dealt with in an “Avant-Propos: Coup d’œil sur les Œuvres Libres” by the novelist René Boylesve (14.04.1867-14.01.1926), written shortly before his death. None of the other texts name their author, who one may safely assume to be Henri Duvernois. Boylesve, who at that time had already had two of his novels reprinted in the LdD (Le meilleur ami, LdD 5, and Je vous ai désiré un soir, LdD 22), praises Arthème Fayard and Les Œuvres Libres for giving an opening to young talents who do not hesitate to write as their spirit moves them, without making concessions to polite conventions but also without transgressing the limits of good taste - “les limites du goût français” (Fayard 1926, 4). This idea about respecting good taste is taken up by text no. III, devoted to the LdD: Ne parlons pas ici de Modern Théâtre et de Modern Bibliothèque, collections depuis longtemps célèbres et dont le succès ne se dément pas en dépit des ans. Mais nous avons cessé d’y ajouter des œuvres nouvelles, pour nous consacrer au Livre de Demain, dont la présentation convient davantage au goût moderne. (ibid.: 21) This “goût moderne” in book production is specified as follows: Indépendamment de sa présentation, de la qualité de son impression et de son papier, le Livre de Demain se recommande par le choix très strict qui lui donne douze nouveaux titres par an et douze illustrateurs de talent. (ibid.: 22) It is not really clear what this means. The term “presentation” probably refers to the striking design of the yellow cover, as well as to the generous octavo 142 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="143"?> format. The quality of the printing of course remains important, depending largely on the quality of the paper and the font, which are not specified. The limitation to one volume a month is in itself not a criterion of quality unless it can be taken to mean that each volume is prepared with individual attention and great care. The twelve volumes listed for 1925, LdD’s third year, were indeed illustrated by twelve different artists, with three cooperating on Flaubert’s Trois Contes (LdD 29), and Renefer and Hermann Paul entrusted with two titles each (cf. Ch. 5.1). The implication is that this was no mass production but painstaking and imaginative work over which the artists could and did take their time. What the brochure does not mention is the important fact that Renefer and all his fellow artists designed and cut their “bois originaux” themselves, in accordance with the standards of the Arts and Crafts movement we have already discussed (Ch. 2). Nor is the reader informed that the illustrations were printed from galvanic replicas, rather than from the original wood-blocks, which is an important difference in comparison with limited editions, though not necessarily a sign of inferior quality. It seems clear that the brochure’s advertising copy was consciously directed at an audience largely ignorant of the technical and economic details of typography and print-making and naïve enough to be impressed by catchwords like “taste” and “quality” and “choice”. The same is true of the following passage vaunting the artistic value of the LdD: La valeur artistique de cette collection (la liste des graveurs le prouve) est très grande. On constate déjà l’influence que le Livre de Demain, en donnant à la gravure sur bois une nouvelle vogue, a eue sur la bibliophilie elle-même. Et il ne manque à ces volumes, pour attendre de hauts prix, que d’être tirés à 27 exemplaires. Hélas! Ils tirent davantage. (ibid.: 23) Perhaps some publishers did print on the quiet more than they stated, but a print run of 27 would have been out of the question, except perhaps for a private customer. For most readers in 1926 the mere list of artists would not have proved anything, unless they had been faithfully reading and contemplating the LdD since their inception in February 1923, in which case they might have recognised seven names. One assumes that they would not have known these names from expensive bibliophile productions, where many of Fayard’s artists were also active. The second claim is even more astonishing, because the “nouvelle vogue” of woodcut illustrations, quite apart from its international renaissance since the 1890s via Morris, Crane, Munch, Gauguin, Dufy, Vallotton and others, had of course long before 1923 been powered by the small bibliophile and reforming presses under the direction of Léon Pichon, Édouard Pelletan, Georges Crès, Georges and Antoinette Mornay, or Henri Jonquières. It was Pichon himself 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 143 <?page no="144"?> who had just recently confirmed the exemplary importance of these publishers in his account of The New Book-Illustration in France, “new” meaning since 1896. This was published in an English translation (but not in a French edition) by The Studio in 1924, and made friendly acknowledgement of the LdD by including a page from Duvernois’ Crapotte (LdD 8) illustrated by Achille Ouvré (Pichon 1924: 130). Material constituents of the Livre de Demain The LdD was published in 235 monthly numbered volumes from February 1923 to June 1947, with a supplementary volume in February 1928 (to celebrate the series’ fifth birthday? ) and one each in December 1936, 1937 and 1938, apparently pre-published to profit from the Christmas trade and the New Year “étrennes”. In 1940 the war upset this rhythm and only seven new numbers were issued, followed by thirteen in 1941 and only six in 1942, two in 1943 and none at all in 1944 and 1945. After the war, quarterly publication was attempted, with number 233 for the “premier trimestre” of 1946, and number 235 for the “deuxième trimestre” of 1947. The series came to a close with number 235 in June 1947, Francis Carco’s La Rue, with 41 woodcuts by Jean Lébédeff. In view of the many economic and political difficulties encountered almost from the beginning, one can only marvel at the publisher’s skill and tenacity in building up such a remarkable collection, each volume of which was fully illustrated. Now for some material details. The LdD has all the essential features of a publisher’s series: first, it has a uniform format of ca. 23,5 x 18,5 cm (9 ¼ x 7 ¼ inches), i.e. medium octavo, but is as wide as a crown octavo. This format is produced by printing on both recto and verso sides of a sheet of paper measuring ca. 74 x 47 cm, which is then folded in half three times to produce a section of eight sheets (hence octavo) equalling 16 pages. The sections (usually eight to ten) are then gathered, lightly machine-sewn and the cover is glued on the spine. The top, front and bottom edges were not trimmed, so the first reader had to slice open those top and front edges which were folded. Sometimes this was done “with clumsy fingers”, as Richard Jefferies puts it in his essay on “Country Literature” in The Life of the Fields (1884) (reprinted 1947, with wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker: 236) or some blunt instrument, which inevitably results in jagged edges and losses to the maltreated pages. The yellow cover is also uniform and its typography is distinctive. Such features enable a reader to recognise a book immediately as belonging to a series she is already acquainted with and may wish to read regularly. 144 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="145"?> Fig. 27 : spine / front cover of Pierre Villetard, Monsieur Bille dans la tourmente The cover is not just yellow, it’s tango! Les Œuvres libres often carried adver‐ tisements for new and recent numbers of the LdD, announcing them as “La Célèbre Collection Tango” (ŒL, 216, June 1939: 320). The colour tango is defined by the Petit Robert as a bright or dark orange, a colour that takes its name from 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 145 <?page no="146"?> the tango vogue in Paris during 1913-14, which later, during the 1920s, spread to the popular “bals musette”. The typographic design of the front cover is a jumble of four scripts, two with and two without serifs, the top half with the author’s name, the title, and the illustrator being cut individually on a block instead of set from type. A typeface reminiscent of that used for the titles was later revived by Josep Patau under the name “Gisele” (<www.myfonts.com/ fonts / t26/ gisele>). The unchanging lower half of the cover displays the series title, the publisher and the stylised image of a bush of bryony with red berries, followed at bottom left by half a typographic line indicating the price. This two-part design is maintained throughout the series, except that from volume 177 on the firm’s “raison sociale” is changed to “Librairie Arthème Fayard”. With number 179 the price per volume went up to 5 FF. Half a year later, from number 185 on, this information was discreetly moved to the back cover. Each back cover has a central woodcut vignette by the artist responsible for the text illustrations that serves as an (additional) tailpiece. Having just described the typography of the LdD covers, we can now consider the typeface used in printing the body text of all the books in this series, including the title page and headings: the body type (Glaister 1996; Schuwer 1977; G: Brotschrift; F: caractère labeur). This is an element of uniformity that may not be recognised at first sight by most readers even though it contributes decisively to the visual identity of these books. Fig. 28: headpiece for Ch. IV Villetard LdD 28: 34. 146 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="147"?> In Rookledge’s Classic International Typefinder (an excellent help in identifying and describing types) we find the following characterisation of the type used here: The letters have a calligraphic (oblique) stress but the change from thick to thin strokes is gradual whilst the serifs are strong and steeply sloped. The most obvious characteristic is the sloping bar to the lower case e [ e]. (Perfect/ Rookledge 2004: 14) Now what is remarkable is that Fayard should have decided to select a type that derives from the first flowering of book-printing and for that reason is entirely representative of the book reform movements in Britain, Germany and France. The choice is all the more convincing for being transnational, a fact that will now lead to a digression allowing us to compare the use of this type in the three countries we are considering. It implies a reference to a French typographer and printer active in Venice since 1468, who had probably learned the craft in Mainz, producing works printed in a renaissance roman type (F: romaine; G: Antiqua), meaning a type design that unites roman capitals with mid-15 th century manuscript lower case letters (Morison 1949: 16). His name is Nicolas Jenson (c. 1420-80), and Fayard or his associates will have been reminded of him and his achievements by a standard textbook on book history, Le Livre, l’illustration, la reliure: Étude historique sommaire, by Henri Bouchot (1886). Just a year later this was translated into English as The Printed Book and widely reviewed (Tidcombe 2002: 15). Bouchot gives an extensive account of Jenson’s career and is full of praise for his achievements as a printer, which he declares to be “des chefs-d’œuvre” deserving to be imitated by modern printers (Bouchot 1886: 50). A year before the LdD started, the American printer and historian of typography, Daniel Berkeley Updike (1860-1941), published his monumental Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use (1922, 2 1937, repr. 1951), in which he describes Jenson’s type as follows: The characteristics of Jenson’s font were its readability, its mellowness of form, and the evenness of colour in mass. […] Jenson’s roman types have been the accepted models for roman letters ever since he made them, and, repeatedly copied in our own day, have never been equalled. There were other printers in Italy whose types rivalled his, but no other man produced quite so fine a font, or had better taste in the composition of a page and its imposition upon paper. (Updike 1951: I, 73 f.). A similar eulogy comes from the Dutch polymath Jan Poortenaar (1886-1958): One of the finest, if not the best of all types is that by Nicolas Jenson, a Frenchman who worked in Venice. Between 1900 and 1916 it was revived by Emery Walker and Cobden Sanderson of the Doves Press, who closely followed it; while William Morris also based his “Golden” type on Jenson’s. “I mastered the essence of it”, said the master of the Kelmscott 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 147 <?page no="148"?> Press; and to him and the Doves Press modern book production in Holland and Germany owes much. […] A fine design, an eternal life! (Poortenaar 1935: 11f.). In England, Stanley Morison (1889-1967), typographer and print historian and, by the way, co-creator of Times New Roman in 1932, also praised Jenson’s roman and especially his mise en page, but was very critical of his over-large capitals, a fault that he believed was inherited by the Doves and all other types based on Jenson’s (Morison 1949: 23 f., 46). Be that as it may, it is this lineage from Jenson to Morris’s Golden type (1890), Emery Walker’s Doves (1900), Bruce Rogers’ Montaigne (1902) and Lucien Pissarro’s Brook type (1903) that is really significant (Macmillan 2006: s.v. Jenson & s.v. Walker). In deciding to use a Jensonienne, i.e. a modern re-creation of Jenson’s original, Fayard implicitly placed himself in the reform tradition, took sides with the innovators and strove to make their aesthetics of readability accessible to every man and woman. Like its original, the new Jenson roman avoids sharp contrasts of bold lines and hairlines and so produces a very even impression (F: impression nette; G: gleichmäßiges Druckbild) that goes well with the modern style of woodcut illustration. More than two decades earlier, the Anglo-German Harry Graf Kessler (Count Harry Kessler, 1868-1937) had anticipated Fayard’s choice when on one of his frequent visits to London and the Doves Press, Emery Walker showed him his new type. Kessler was so impressed that he soon set about organising an exhibition of modern printing and calligraphy, the “Ausstellung von Werken der modernen Druck- und Schreibkunst” at Weimar’s Kunstgewerbemuseum (April and May 1905). It showed specimens from the Kelmscott, Vale, Eragny and of course Doves presses, as well as illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, and examples of printing from Pan and Die Insel. Admiration turned into emulation when in 1910 Kessler commissioned Walker to design a version of the Doves type for his projected Cranach Presse in Weimar, which did not get started till 1913 (Zimmermann 2013: 156 f.). In view of this enthusiasm for Jenson typefaces in England, France and Germany, it is not surprising to see them used by a sizeable number of publishers aiming at both the bibliophile and the commercial markets. In his survey of The New Book Illustration in France, Léon Pichon presents fifteen examples of illustrated books employing a Jenson, taken from the production of French publishers like Pelletan, Jacques Beltrand, Mornay, René Kieffer, Berger-Levrault, Fayard and of course Pichon himself. In Germany its use was limited by a wavering between traditionalism in the use of black letter types (G: Fraktur) and a reforming spirit expressed in an increasing preference for roman types (G: Antiqua). An instructive example of this is the series of eight Sanssouci-Bücher published in 1923 by Hans Müller and Irmgard Kiepenheuer, who had left her husband Gustav to realise her 148 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="149"?> own ideas of a well-made book. Of the seven volumes in my collection, two are set in black letter and five in roman type, two of these in the Jenson-derived Tiemann Antiqua. There is no recognisable logic in how author and type are paired - why should George Meredith’s Chloes Geschichte (The Tale of Chloe, 1879) be printed in Unger Fraktur and Tsurayuki’s 10 th century Das Tosa Nikki (The Tosa Diary) in Tiemann Antiqua? The relation between type and illustration might provide an answer, were it not that Hermann Häger’s tonal lithographs for the Meredith have nothing in common with the Unger Fraktur, not even the colour of the ink. Similarly, the polychrome lithographs by Erich Glas, which half-heartedly imitate Japanese prints, while not jarring with the roman type do not visibly connect with it. In both cases what we get is an eclectic mixture of styles and cultural connotations that is a far cry from the Bauhaus modernism that Kiepenheuer and Müller claimed to be so supportive of. In England, where one might expect some overflow of Jenson types from the private presses just mentioned to commercial publishers, these hardly ever seem to have used them. My corpus of English illustrated books contains only a very small number of examples. The most astonishing one is The Open-Air Library, a twelve-volume series published and reprinted by J.M. Dent from 1932 to 1947. Perhaps the best way to introduce it is to quote from the front flap of an earlier number’s dust-jacket: The books are all newly set in Mr. Bruce Rogers’s Centaur type; and Mr. Eric Fitch Daglish, the editor of the Library, contributes a special Foreword where desirable, and has executed special wood-engravings for the title pages and frontispieces. (Dust-jacket of W.H. Hudson, Afoot in England, 3 wood-engravings by Eric Fitch Daglish, 1933) Some of the information that would usually be given in the colophon in a more ritualised form, is here used on the dust-jacket to advertise the series and to endow it with a distinguishing mark and quality cachet. Bruce Rogers (1870-1957), an important American book designer and typographer, created two Jenson revivals, the Montaigne type in 1902 and the Centaur in 1915, of which a Monotype version was produced in 1929 (Macmillan 2006: 156). Rogers came to England in 1916 to work together with Emery Walker and moved on to become a counsellor to Cambridge University Press, with the result that Stanley Morison was appointed typographic adviser to the press. After the war Rogers returned to the USA, but from 1928 on he was involved in a number of projects for Oxford University Press including an edition of the Odyssey (1935), translated by T.E. Lawrence, and set in Centaur type. The firm of Dent, now carried on by his son Hugh, must have recognised that a uniform type would help to affirm the identity of The Open-Air Library as a series and make it look different from Everyman’s Library. One must 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 149 <?page no="150"?> take into account that post 1918 readers were very keen on books about regional and rural themes as a panacea for recent and continuing worries. A great number and variety of titles on the subject were put on the market, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that two further titles from my collection belonging to this category are both set in a Jenson type, as if this had something rural and comforting about it. The first is The England I Love Best by James Turle, with wood engravings by his wife Eileen Turle, published by Constable in 1934. The body text is set in Centaur, with all the headings in an unidentified flowing script. The dust jacket titling is in a geometric sans serif, Rudolf Koch’s Kabel (1929), whose harmony and legibility make it a modern descendant of Jenson’s roman. Fig. 29: Dust jacket of James Turle, The England I Love Best 150 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="151"?> The other title is Farmer’s Boy by John R. Allan, illustrated with full-page penand-ink drawings by Douglas Percy Bliss, and published by Methuen in 1935. This is not set in Centaur but in a type very similar to Jenson Old Style (no. 34 in Rookledge’s International Typefinder). Perhaps it was indeed the restful, nostalgic quality of this type that made it seem particularly suitable for reflective rural narratives. The next material component that is important in judging the quality of a book is the paper used in printing it. It is referred to in Fayard’s (and other publishers’) advertising as “papier alfa” and repeatedly claimed to be a “papier de luxe”. Jan Poortenaar gives a contemporary account which brings us closer to the truth of the matter: Paper used for books should have certain qualities: it should be durable and not too transparent, and it should absorb the ink to a given extent. It must be neither so brittle that it cracks nor so soft that it tears, and the surface should preferably be dull rather than glossy, since a glossy surface is tiring to the reader’s eyes. The ideal paper which fulfils all these demands perfectly will prove far too costly for normal use in the cheaper type of books and in popular publications. European paper-makers have to rely on rags, wood and esparto grass for their products. Wood or wood-pulp […] is imported from Russia, Scandinavia, and Canada, while esparto grass grows abundantly in Spain and North Africa. (Poortenaar 1935: 116 f.) Esparto grass, stipa tenacissima, called “alfa” or “halfah” in Algeria, where it grows wild and was used to make mats, rope, sandals and the like, had become a viable substitute for the dwindling supply of expensive linen and cotton rags, and as such was definitely superior to wood-pulp. The use of alfa in Europe can be traced to the efforts of a number of British and French researchers in paper technology from the 1830s to the 1860s. It was finally Thomas Routledge from Eynsham near Oxford who discovered a chemical treatment making it possible to process esparto grass economically, and which was patented in 1856 and 1860 (Magee 1997: 115 f.). The new process was first adopted in France by the Papeteries Outhenin-Chalandre in 1875, with many others like Lafuma following suit. One should remember that Algeria had been under French control for much of the 19 th century and completely so after the suppression of the Kabyle insurrection of 1871. The French were now free to exploit the natural resources of Algeria, and when British freighters unloaded Welsh coal at the north African ports, they filled their empty holds with esparto grass for the paper makers back home. Dard Hunter, in his classic history of papermaking, describes alfa paper as “smooth, with a soft printable surface” and reports that 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 151 <?page no="152"?> British periodicals like the Illustrated London News, The Graphic (1869-1932) and The Sphere (1900-64) were all to some extent printed on paper made using this material (Hunter 1947: 562). Gérard Coste, an engineer and teacher at the EFPG (École Française de Papeterie et des Industries Graphiques) in Grenoble, describes alfa papers as “réputés pour leur opacité, leur bouffant, leur douceur”, i.e. their opacity, volume, and softness, but he also points out that the bundles of esparto transported in coal freighters had to be carefully washed (Coste 2006). The paper was produced in different qualities, containing more or less than the prescribed minimum of 10 % alfa, and so the cheaper papers used by Fayard and Ferenczi are often insufficiently opaque for print and especially woodcuts not to show through, and do not always guarantee sharp impressions, nor are they sufficiently tear resistant to stand careless handling. Alfa papers are particularly prone to oxidisation, or foxing (F: rousseurs; G: Stockflecken), if too much woodpulp has been added to the half-stuff (the mash of alfa fibres) and the paper is then exposed to sunlight and moisture. Talking about paper means talking about prices, and that, as we will see, means talking about ethical behaviour. Alfa paper is not very heavy, a square metre of the quality used for the LdD in the 1930s weighing about 65 g, and an average paperback untrimmed tome about 200 g. A print run of 10 000 would thus require roughly two tons of paper. If we bear this in mind, we can understand the message Fayard is communicating to his readers in an insert “À nos lecteurs” in LdD 27, Paul Bourget’s Tragiques Remous, of April 1925. The leaflet is printed on a reddish-brown paper that makes it difficult to read. Here is a transcription of the most interesting parts: Nos lecteurs nous auront rendu cette justice que, jusqu’à présent, bien que le coût de la vie se soit accru et que la puissance d’achat du franc ait diminué, nous n’avons jamais augmenté le prix du LIVRE DE DEMAIN. Des stocks de papier achetés antérieurement, des contrats passés avec nos fournisseurs nous avaient permis d’établir ce volume de luxe au prix, jusqu’ici inchangé de 2 frs 50, et nous avons tenu, aussi longtemps que possible, à faire bénéficier notre clientèle de ces avantages. Nos réserves d’alfa épuisées, il a fallu effectuer de nouveaux achats, particulièrement en Angleterre, la principale pourvoyeuse de cette spécialité. Or, nul n’ignore le cours de la Livre et la considérable augmentation des salaires ouvriers en France. […] Force nous est, à notre tour, de demander à nos lecteurs un sacrifice, au reste léger et provisoire. À partir de maintenant, le prix du Livre de Demain sera de 3 francs au lieu de 2,50 […] A. FAYARD et Cie. [Avril 1925] 152 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="153"?> Rather than simply raise the price, Fayard takes the trouble to explain the situation and why an increase is necessary. The old stock of alfa is exhausted, the price for new shipments has risen, the exchange rate for the pound has gone up and so have wages in France: under such circumstances the old price of 2,50 francs can no longer be maintained and will now have to be raised to 3,00 francs. Inflation and the costs of post-war reconstruction have so eroded the franc that while in 1914 a pound sterling cost 25 francs, in 1919 the exchange rate had risen to 42 francs. A brief period of deflation in 1921-22 eased the pressure, which was increased again in 1924 as a result of measures taken by Britain to force France to end the occupation of the Ruhr and accept the Dawes plan for reparation payments. By this time the franc had lost 70 % of its pre-war purchasing power, and between 1922 and 1926 it lost 43 % more, so measures had to be taken to redress the situation (Berstein / Milza, I, 1996: 150). The new government under Raymond Poincaré raised taxes, engineered a balanced budget and in June 1928 returned the franc to the gold exchange standard, which in turn led to rising unemployment. The European situation is summed up by the historian Harold James as “a trading war of all against all”: From the point of view of each country, the response was quite rational; but the overall result was that everyone had to pay a high price in terms of reduced output, unused capacity, and falling investment and consumption. The effects of the depression were felt until the outbreak of the Second World War, as in most countries, even though production recovered, unemployment remained at high levels. ( James in Blanning 1996: 185) High prices or “sacrifices”, as Fayard puts it, were literally and figuratively an everyday experience in the 20s and 30s, and many readers were willing to accept them, even if they must have suspected that they were provisional only in the sense of continuing to rise. This was confirmed when just over a year later, in June 1926, LdD 42, Claude Anet, Quand la terre trembla, carried an insert announcing another price increase: “Le prix du Livre de Demain est porté de 3 francs à 3 fr.50.” The exchange rate of the pound has continued to soar, the costs of printing, binding and transport have followed suit. It is interesting to see how Fayard appeals to the public’s sense of equity, or fairness. This ethical dimension is important in many walks of life, including that of a businessman such as Arthème II himself, who has to negotiate terms with suppliers of paper, with printers, authors and artists. If such negotiations were not possible, trade would become a form of war, as Harold James phrased it. One must however bear in mind that the alfa trade was a form of colonial exploitation, since Algeria and other Maghreb countries had no option but to 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 153 <?page no="154"?> sell the unprocessed esparto grass cheaply instead of the more profitable alfa pulp (pâte d’alfa), mainly because the supply of clean water required for its production was not available. Now equity and the ethical dialectic are not only relevant to trade and to men’s social intercourse, they are also fundamental to the genre of narrative. In any story, novella or novel we read about how the deeds and words of fictional characters are observed and judged according to social conventions, moral standards and judicial as well as natural laws. With every volume that they read and contemplate, readers of fiction more or less consciously practise their understanding and the virtual application of such rules, by observing and listening to the characters doing and saying and judging, listening to the narrator’s judgements as well, and all the time forming and modifying judgements of their own. It is therefore not surprising to find examples of this negotiation of judgement in any volume of the LdD one happens to open. What about this passage, from the first chapter of Henry Bordeaux’s Une honnête femme (LdD 3, March 1923), entitled “Le bal annuel de la préfecture”? We are first informed that Mme Hétry, the wife of the préfet of Haute Savoie (Upper Savoy), herself of humble origin, takes care to invite only the best sort of people to this event, and to flatter the most ancient and aristocratic families of the region. The narrator comments: Il est vrai qu’après la fête le journal radical se lamentait sur les dangers que courait la République ; mais on supprimait en hâte le traitement d’un desservant de village, et tout rentrait dans l’ordre. Après quoi, le traitement était subrepticement rendu, le scepticisme du préfet lui tenant lieu d’équité. (Bordeaux 1923: Ch. 1, 18) In order to placate the republican radicals, equally critical of the “ancien régime” and the church, a village preacher is first deprived of his living, and then, when things have calmed down, is reinstated. The idea is that the préfet has not acted on moral impulses, i.e. equity, but as a sceptic, or non-believer, has used illicit means to achieve his practical purpose. The conflict between cynical scepticism and faith in honest dealing, referred to in the title, is here announced as the central theme of the novel. With a sigh or a groan, after almost three and a half years of reading and perhaps even collecting the LdD, most people will have resigned themselves to the inevitable. They were in fact rewarded for their patience, since the price of 3,50 francs was maintained for almost eleven years till February 1937, when it went up to 4,00, in August to 4,50, and in November to 5,00 francs, staying at this level till 1940. During the war further increases were necessary, and in 1947 the last two volumes were priced at 50,00 (Huret 2011 gives the full details, 131-134). The quality of the paper declined considerably after LdD 211 (Georges Duhamel, 154 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="155"?> Les Maîtres), the last to appear in 1940, but occasionally some of the better-quality alfa seems to have turned up, as evidenced by my bright copy of Alexandra Roubé-Jansky’s Rose noire (LdD 229). The quality of the printing remains quite high throughout, in spite of a tendency to narrow the margins in an attempt to save paper. Depending on the next variable, the number of lines per page, the body type is generally used in 8p or 9p sizes, only the title page using larger ones. Fayard consciously resisted the temptation to use smaller sizes, which would have helped to save paper, and tried to maintain the qualities which could ensure that the “collection unique” did not degenerate into “une chose ordinaire”. Le Livre de Demain - the first four titles Now, to conclude this section, we can take a look at the first four titles published in the LdD, with particular attention to themes and styles of illustration. No. Author Title Illustrator and no. of illustrations Date 1 René Benjamin Les Soldats de la guerre : Gaspard Renefer (22) [02-1923] 2 Colette [Colette Willy] Mitsou ou Comment l’esprit vient aux filles Hermann Paul [René-Georges-Her‐ mann Paul] (17) [03-1923] 3 Henry Bordeaux Une honnête femme Paul Baudier (25) [04-1923] 4 Gérard d’Hou‐ ville [Marie-Louise- Antoine de Heredia] Le Séducteur Guy Arnoux (37) [05-1923] A mixed bunch, chosen to appeal to a wide range of readers. René Benjamin (1885-1948) opens the series with a novel about the Great War, first published in 1915 by Fayard, and immediately awarded the Prix Goncourt. Once again, it was a great success, with a first print-run of 40,260, and reaching a total of 145,200 over the years (Grandjean-Hogg 1996: 788). The author knew what he was writing about, for he had been seriously wounded near Verdun in September 1914, and after some months in hospital was assigned to the army transport services, where he listened carefully to many soldiers’ tales about their experience in battle and behind the lines. One hears their voices, their different patois, their anger and humour and frustration on every page. In a short story of 1920 by the American actress, feminist writer and campaigner Elizabeth Robins (1862—1952), who lived and worked in England after 1888, there is a scene in which two of the characters discuss the problem of how to speak about the war 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 155 <?page no="156"?> that has just begun with the German invasion of Belgium, how to respond to its horrors and suffering: A comment of his, intended to evoke some of these particulars [about the war] as yet withheld, she met a little sharply. “We won’t say any more.” Then, into the sudden silence, she let fall a half-embarrassed, “I have a feeling that it’s sacrilege.” She caught his widened stare. “It makes a special claim - don’t you think? - to have been with people in great agony. They are sacred. You must not speak of what you know. Unless it’s to those who -” She turned her head suddenly away. “Here’s a book you must read, if you’re interested in the war.” She handed him René Benjamin’s “Gaspard.” “It’s amusing.” (“The Tortoise-shell Cat”, The Mill of the Gods and other stories, 1920: 295) This not only confirms that Gaspard was being talked about in Britain during and after the war, but also tells us something about the function such literature had for contemporary readers. Reading about the war is a reticent form of talking about it, a training in empathy for those who suffered, and in this context “amusing” suggests “a-musing”, i.e. musing about what one is being told. The 160-page novel has 22 woodcut illustrations by Renefer (not 21 as stated on the title-page), with a headpiece and usually a tailpiece framing each chapter, and five full-page plates, plus a small but suggestive frontispiece and a vignette each on the title-page and back cover (which last was, it seems, omitted from the count). Fig. 30: René Benjamin, Gaspard, frontispiece and title-page 156 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="157"?> In 1915 Renefer (1879-1957) had already produced two portfolios of etchings on the subject of the Verdun and Somme battles for the Paris art publisher Gaston Boutitie, who later asked him to provide the illustrations for a bibliophile edition of Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu, published in 1918, which had won the Prix Goncourt in 1916 (cf. “Introduction” to the Goncourt centenary reprint edition of Le Feu by Éditions Douin, 2016). Renefer went on to illustrate 24 further volumes of the LdD, and there will be occasion to refer to some of his other work in illustration and teaching in later chapters. Sidonie-Gabrielle Claudine Colette (1873-1954) was one of the most interesting and successful writers of the period, and today her reputation as a modernist and feminist is higher than ever. Colette herself refused to be labelled a feminist and should rather, as Julia Kristeva suggests, be described as a “génie féminin” whose empathy moved her to protest against both conventional femininity and the ubiquitous exploitation of women, “au music-hall ou ailleurs”: Dans ce rejet du féminisme, j’entends […] moins un déni de l’émancipation que la conscience des frustrations et des blessures subies régulièrement par les femmes de sa génération, désireuses de faire leur chemin. (Kristeva 2011: 63) Colette’s sense of feminine woundedness strongly reminds me of analogies in male writers’ experiences of physical and mental suffering during the Great War, as expressed in Gaspard, and, later in the series, in Claude Farrère’s La Bataille (LdD 12, 1924), illustrated by Auguste Roubille, La Randonnée de Samba Diouf (LdD 37, 1926), by the brothers Tharaud, illustrated by Pierre Falké, and Georges Duhamel’s Civilisation 1914-1917 (LdD 52, 1927), illustrated by Raymond Thiollière. For many readers, of either sex, such books were welcome and necessary reading, psychologically and politically. Mitsou ou Comment l’esprit vient aux filles was published by Fayard in 1919, after part-publication in the weekly magazine La Vie Parisienne in November and December 1917 (Pichois/ Brunet 1999: 243). In a series of narrative passages, play-text dialogues and letters, the short novel portrays the relationship between Mitsou, a Paris showgirl, and a young lieutenant on leave who is trying to get his mind off the war. But all too soon, Robert, “le lieutenant bleu”, has to return to his unit. The narrative breaks off after their two farewell letters, but without closure, so that every reader, including Mitsou and Robert, is left to imagine possible continuations and endings. The book is illustrated with 17 (not 16 as stated on the title page) woodcuts by Hermann-Paul (1864-1940), a very productive caricaturist and illustrator, in whose work the satirical “graphisme” (characteristic graphic style) of Daumier and Toulouse-Lautrec and the style of the “imagerie populaire” of Épinal and other towns are fused with the bold intensity of expressionist woodcuts. He was an active member of the second Société de la Gravure sur Bois Originale and in 1922 and 1928 took part in its exhibitions (cf. 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 157 <?page no="158"?> Belleville 2000: 178-180). The headpiece to the final chapter is a good example of the way Hermann-Paul combines decorative, sculptural and narrative elements: Fig. 31: Colette, Mitsou, LdD 2: 90 (illustration and letterpress) It is striking how the flat ornamental patterns on the curtain’s round folds and the wings motif hovering before and yet on the wallpaper, together form the background, reminiscent of Matisse, that throws the figure of Mitsou at her writing desk into relief. The dark inlaid stripes on Mitsou’s desk are echoed in the patterned shadow of the curtain on the wall, and the roses in the vase flatten as they merge with the wallpaper. These flowers remind the reader-viewer of the roses shown in the tailpiece to Ch. V, which Mitsou bought to decorate her flat on the occasion of Robert’s first visit: 158 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="159"?> Fig. 32: Colette, Mitsou, LdD 2: 94, tailpiece. In contrast to the flatness in this “cul de lampe” vignette, the figure of Mitsou above is portrayed sculpturally, by the action of the engraver’s knife on the plank-grain block of wood. This is visible in the print’s bold outlines and in the minimalist hatching that indicates the roundness of neck, arm and body, and recalls the description given by the narrator of “la longueur démodée et distinguée d’un cou de cygnet” (V, 54). The indeterminate balance of twodimensional and three-dimensional rendering is characteristic of the illustra‐ tions employed in this book, and indeed throughout most of the series. More generally, it is the essential expression of the antithesis between the typographic flatness of letterpress and illustration on the one hand, and the roundness of the narrative on the other, i.e. the bodying forth of figures through words and each reader’s individual memories of what they represent. What an illustrated book demonstrates explicitly, and the unillustrated book can only imply, is this continual fading away of the merely suggested third dimension, the illusion of depth and roundness, into two-dimensional print, but also its reversibility as soon as we admit the illusion again. This “on-off ” effect, as E.H. Gombrich called it in Art and Illusion ( 5 1977: 34), forms a basic principle of verbal and visual storytelling that can contribute much to our understanding of how illustration works. There will be more to say about this in later chapters. Our last example from this volume may take us a step further. It is the vignette on the back cover that was again forgotten in the publisher’s count of illustrations, an ornamental vignette of eight fronds of fern arranged almost symmetrically in a circular pattern. The plant is not mentioned anywhere in Colette’s text, so why should Hermann-Paul have decided on this motif as its visual conclusion? 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 159 <?page no="160"?> Fig. 33: Mitsou, LdD 2: back cover vignette. Because it means something. “Solitude, sincerity, humility” - those are some of the meanings attributed to ferns in current symbol dictionaries (Cooper 1986). Linnaeus classified ferns in the order of cryptogams, a term meaning “secret marriage” and which he devised because he did not know how ferns reproduce. All four meanings are relevant for understanding the emotions of Mitsou and Robert, and the situation they are in. Henry Bordeaux (1870-1963) stems from the Haute Savoie region, and this is the location of Une honnête femme, first published in 1919 by Éditions Boccard, Paris. It is very noticeable that almost all the 25 woodcuts by Paul Baudier (1881-1962) focus on views of Annecy and the surrounding landscape, and only show the characters from behind or as silhouettes. The single exception is a full-page cut of Madame Ferrier, the virtuous woman of the title (cf. Littré s.v. “honnête femme”), asleep in her bed, as seen by her unfaithful husband just returning from his mistress, Germaine. In his presentation of the Ferriers and Germaine, Bordeaux concentrates on their acts of looking, especially the rare moments of looking each other in the face, which can reveal more of the truth than silence or evasive speech. Baudier does not need to show us readers any portraits, because these would mislead us, we are instead given rear views as a warning. In this way, the verbal and the visual dimensions of this psychological novel become mutually supporting, just like listening and looking in everyday life, and especially in language learning. Gérard D’Houville’s Le Séducteur is the fourth volume in the LdD series, and the third from Fayard’s own backlist, having first been published by his company in 1914. The author, whose real name is Marie-Louise-Antoinette de Heredia (1875- 1963), was the daughter of the Cuban-born José-Maria de Heredia (1842-1905) whom his father Domingo, after the death of his wife Louise d’Houville in 1850, had sent to Paris to complete his schooling. Louise’s funeral is the point at which the narrative of Le Séducteur begins, focusing on the childhood of Panchito (= José-Maria) and merging with memories and episodes into a kind of fictionalised 160 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="161"?> chronicle of three generations of the Heredia family between Santiago de Cuba and France. In her preface the author explains to her readers that it is her intention to bring the island where her father and grandfather were born, more than half a century earlier, to life again. She does not yet reveal that it is Cuba, because, in her own paradoxically phrased speculative analysis, […] peut-être n’a-t-elle jamais existé cette contrée que j’ai portée en moi, depuis toujours, à la fois imaginaire et réelle, vivante et fantomatique, chimérique et précise ? Tout ce qui est puéril et joli, voluptueux, embaumé, doux et puissant, fut toujours empreint pour moi d’un peu de « créolie », ainsi que j’appelle en riant tout ce qui nous vient de là-bas. (D’Houville 1923: 7 f.) The term “creole” is notoriously ambiguous and shifting, as the author is aware (cp. Ashcroft/ Griffiths/ Tiffin 2000: s.v. creole), so the definition she adds here in a rather off-hand manner must refer to racial, class and cultural dimensions of the Heredias’ heritages. In this context it is important to note that Cuba, occupied by the Spanish since the 16 th century, experienced a decade of civil war from 1868 to 1878, which resulted in the abolition of slavery in 1886 and eventually in Cuban independence. D’Houville’s narrative is full of incidental references to slavery, to Chinese indentured labour and other aspects of the plantation economy, which seep through her sensuous descriptions of Cuba’s beauty like nasty dark spots. Bit by bit, the reader recognises that these do not become a significant part of the narrative, which gradually turns into the story of a false paradise built on colonial exploitation, racist and class ideologies. This even shows in the illustrations by Guy Arnoux (1886-1951), woodcuts done in a style that resembles a fluent pencil sketch, as in this headpiece for chapter VII, which describes a festive dinner to which Silvina, Panchito’s cousin, has invited her family and friends: Fig. 34 : D’Houville, Le Séducteur, LdD 4-: 49, headpiece 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 161 <?page no="162"?> After a detailed description of the dishes arrayed on the immense dining-table, as sumptuous as the wedding at Cana, we are told, at last the servants are mentioned: Les nègres et les négresses d’un noir irréprochable et vêtus de blancheurs immaculées circulaient autour des convives, renouvelant les lourdes argenteries, passant les plats … De jeunes échansons, à l’avenant sourire, glissaient sans bruit sur les dalles et portaient de très grands brocs doubles d’étain luisant, où la glace rafraîchissait l’eau délicieuse et déjà filtrée par la pierre poreuse de la tinajera. (ibid.: 50) And so on for half a page. The negress shown in the headpiece is literally faceless, and voiceless too, the young cup-bearers are even soundless, and the same goes for almost all the illustrations, in which only white people have facial features, however simply drawn. Arnoux was well known by his contemporaries such as Apollinaire and Francis Carco as a humoristic draughtsman who enjoyed employing pastiche and satire to make a statement (Osterwalder 2005: s.v. Arnoux). This is our second instance of how the depiction of faces can either support or run counter to the verbal narrative, so here is a topic to look out for in future analyses. 3.2.2 J. Ferenczi & Fils: Le Livre Moderne Illustré The publishing house of J. Ferenczi (spelled Ferenczy before 1900) was founded in 1879 in Paris, at 48 rue de Lancry (south of the Gare de l’Est), by Joseph Ferenczy (1855-1934), recently arrived from Baja, in southern Hungary, where he had been born into the Jewish community. In his early days he published cheap popular serial fiction issued in paper-covered 32-page instalments, as well as mildly titillating weekly magazines such as Sans-Gêne (1901 ff.) and Bobèche (1901 ff.), which earned him money, a reputation and involvement in several obscenity trials. About the year 1908 he reoriented his company towards a more respectable market, with series such as the weekly Le Petit Livre (over 2000 titles from 1912 to 1958) and the short-lived Le Livre illustré inédit (1910), to name just two. After the Great War, he developed a line of more substantial serial publications to cater for the growing market, beginning with the monthly Les Œuvres inédites (1920), the Idéal-Cinema (1921), film tieins illustrated with stills, and Mon Livre favori, with over 1250 titles from 1921 to 1958 (cf. Steemann, Les éditions Ferenczi: Collections populaires de 1908 à 1940, exhibition catalogue, 2015). Business gradually picked up, and in 1927 he was able to buy the Imprimerie Moderne at 177, route de Châtillon, Montrouge/ Seine, on the southern outskirts of Paris, and have his books 162 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="163"?> printed by his own company (s.v. “Ferenczi”, in Fouché 2005; Akoun/ Burda 1979: 71-77). On July 1, 1922, Ferenczi reorganised his company as a general partnership with his sons Henri (1894-1964) and Alexandre (1900-1943) under the name of J. Ferenczi & Fils, moving to 9, rue Antoine Chantin, in the 14 th arrondissement of Paris. Just over a year later, in September 1923, a new series was launched under the name of Le Livre Moderne Illustré (LMI). This innovation was no doubt due in large measure to Henri and Alexandre, and to suggestions made by the painter and engraver Clément Serveau, who had been appointed as Ferenczi’s artistic director in 1919, a function he carried out till 1940 (Cailler 1963: 2; Belleville 2000: 339 f.). Launched just seven months after Arthème Fayard had started Le Livre de Demain, the LMI clearly aimed to gain a slice of the new and promising market of upwardly oriented middle-class readers. The series was quite consciously designed to compete with the LdD, imitating some of its features, such as paper and illustration, and differing in others, such as the smaller format and of course its distinctive cover, designed by Serveau. In an advertising leaflet inserted in LMI 13 (July 1924) the series is recommended in the following terms: Le Livre Moderne Illustré : Imprimé en caractères neufs, sur papier pur Alfa, illustré de gravures sur bois, c’est un véritable livre de luxe pour tous. Paraît le 15 de chaque mois. There is a strong hint of paradox here: can there be real luxury articles for everyone? But perhaps the leaflet is suggesting a way of redefining luxury as something partly made of inexpensive materials and partly immaterial. It is not a coincidence that the same leaflet (recto) announced a hardbound edition available henceforth for those readers desiring a more durable product: 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 163 <?page no="164"?> Fig. 35: Ferenczi leaflet, 1924, recto The explicit gendering employed here, with its contrast of “teintes mode”, “gracieux effet”, “élégance” and “gaîté” versus “la sévère bibliothèque de Monsieur”, does at least confirm that women were just as important a target group as men, culturally and economically. A similar advertisement of 1930, using La Payse by Charles Le Goffic (LMI 112) as its centrepiece, stresses that the LMI programme offers “les plus célèbres ouvrages des meilleurs auteurs modernes” (Akoun/ Burda 1979: 72a), a claim made in similar terms by Fayard and Hachette. What is perhaps really telling about such flyers is that they 164 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="165"?> enunciate the most important criteria for judging the quality of a book: authors, paper, illustrations, typography, format and price. By making the criteria explicit, such advertising contributes to making readers more discriminating judges. A brief note on another illustrated series needs to be inserted here, since it was started just before the LMI. It was announced on 15 July 1923 in the first issue of Les Maîtres de la Plume, a bi-monthly review of literature and art, in the following terms: Répandre largement les Œuvres des Maîtres français par la publication de leurs meilleurs romans, contes et nouvelles. Faire place à de jeunes auteurs de talent ; pour cela nous avons ouvert un concours, qui chaque année couronnera plusieurs d’entre eux, dont nous publierons les œuvres en librairie. (Les Maîtres de la Plume, n° 1: 1) This is the voice of Gilbert Baudinière (1893-1953), the managing director, whose new series was given the same title as the review, so that one could promote the other. His book series were published in two formats, one Medium Octavo (for two sub-series “A” and “B”) and the other in Foolscap Octavo, just half the size, both selling at 2,50 FF, soon raised to 3,00 FF. The illustrations tend to be uninspired and old-fashioned, and the print quality was often poor, but the series as a whole must have been reasonably successful, though it is difficult to trace. The review is accessible via <gallica.bnf.fr>. Towards the end of the war, Baudinière was excluded from the Syndicat des Éditeurs because of the blatant anti-semitism of his list, and served a short prison sentence after which the firm did not recover, closing down in 1955 (cf. https: / / fr.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Éditions _Baudinière). Another publishing venture of Ferenczi & Fils is relevant here because it was designed to run parallel to and promote the LMI and illustrated quality fiction in general. This was the monthly literary anthology called Demain, first published in April 1924, under the editorship of Raymond Escholier. A leaflet with the headline “L’évènement d’aujourd’hui c’est DEMAIN” was inserted in that month’s number of the LMI, Édouard Estaunié’s Solitudes, LMI 10, and makes rather hyperbolical claims for what it means to read Demain: Lire DEMAIN, c’est hanter à la fois les milieux aristocratiques, politiques, artistiques, littéraires. C’est connaître vraiment ce qui passera demain ; c’est participer à toutes les manifestations intellectuelles françaises. It was in this spirit that Demain generally offered one complete novel, two novelettes and an essay or two, with woodcut illustrations, all previously unpublished, as well as a section of short articles on topics like fashion (by 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 165 <?page no="166"?> Colette), politics and cinema, though these gradually petered out. Indeed, the whole project soon came to an end with volume 17 in August 1925. There were several reasons for this. For one thing, Arthème Fayard cannot have been happy about Ferenczi copying his idea of a monthly anthology (i.e. Fayard’s Les Œuvres libres, “receuil littéraire ne publiant que des inédits”, launched in July 1921), nor about the cribbing of its name from the rival book series. But the latter accusation would have been off the mark, since an original Demain had been founded by the journalist Henri Guilbeaux in 1916 as a monthly literary review with strong pacifist leanings. This was soon closed down in France, and moved to Switzerland, where it became an organ for expatriate authors like Romain Rolland and Frans Masereel till it was discontinued in 1918. Stefan Zweig, who had got to know Guilbeaux in Geneva in 1915, expressed his admiration for the Frenchman’s political mission in his autobiographical Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (1942): Während die anderen schwiegen, während wir selber zögerten und bei jedem Anlaß sorgfältig überlegten, was zu tun und zu unterlassen, griff er entschlossen zu, und es wird Guilbeauxʼ dauerndes Verdienst bleiben, die einzige geistig bedeutsame Anti‐ kriegszeitschrift des ersten Weltkrieges [Demain] gegründet und geleitet zu haben, ein Dokument, das jeder nachlesen muß, der die geistigen Strömungen jener Epoche wirklich verstehen will. Er gab, was wir brauchten: ein Zentrum der internationalen, der übernationalen Diskussion mitten im Krieg. (Zweig 2 1944: 249) In this connection it is worth pointing out that two of Zweig’s novels were included in the LMI series: La Peur, LMI 271 (1937), and Amok, LMI 308 (1938), the latter with a preface by Romain Rolland, an indication that Ferenczi was a remarkably liberal publisher compared with the decidedly right-wing Fayard. But the main reason for the demise of Ferenczi’s Demain was that at 6,50 FF it was simply too expensive, both in comparison with Les Œuvres Libres at 5,00 and the LMI and LdD at 2,50 FF. In an address “Aux abonnés et aux lecteurs de Demain” in the last number, Marcel Prévost, the director of the literary bimonthly La Revue de France, admits that it is not a lack of readers but financial problems that have led to the cessation. He offers the readers a transfer of their subscription from Demain to the Revue de France: La Revue de France sera fière, sans changer sa propre formule, (laquelle est moins étroitement dépendante des variations économiques), de perpétuer Demain pour ses lecteurs et des abonnés. Elle se plaît à offrir à ceux-ci, comme prime gracieuse, pour l’année d’accueil, la différence entre les prix des deux Revues. (Demain n° 17, August 1925-: 7) 166 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="167"?> So Ferenczi disburdened himself by allowing Prévost, who had no sympathies at all for pacifism, to swallow Demain, which had not proved to be the advertising medium for the LMI that the publisher had hoped for. Format and contents of Le Livre Moderne Illustré The Ferenczis chose a small octavo (or A5) format for their new series, about 20,5 x 14,5 cm untrimmed, quite often used for bibliophile series such as those published by Georges Crès (Les Maîtres du Livre), Charles Marpon (Collection Marpon), Henri Jonquières (Les Beaux Romans) and the Librairie de la Revue Française (Le Paon Blanc). The LMI were printed on what were claimed (yet again) to be “papiers de luxe” such as Alfa Outhenin Chalandre and similar papers, depending on availability and price. Each volume comprised between 130 and 260 pages, longer works being published in two tomes. The books were all sold in the traditional interim binding, i.e. they were provisionally stitched, untrimmed and in paper covers. These covers were immediately recognisable thanks to their uniform, striking design: the front cover showed a symmetrical arrangement of three decorative woodcuts printed in one rainbow colour on cream card with lines of black type inserted. The back cover featured a central woodcut motif in the same colour, that changed from volume to volume, plus a reference to the printer and the year in the bottom right-hand corner. The spine (from bottom to top) named the volume number, the series, the title and the author (even his cultural affiliation, such as “de l’Académie Française”) but did not mention the illustrator. From 1931 on one would find a horizontal lozenge inscribed MH at the bottom of the spine, indicating the "Messageries Hachette", i.e. the distribution company that made sure that these books were available all over France (Mollier 2015: 300-306). This design remained almost unaltered till 1954. All four woodcuts for the covers were designed and cut by Clément Serveau, who as art director was responsible for commissioning the LMI illustrations from the first to the last numbered volume, carrying out the illustrations to 57 of these himself. 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 167 <?page no="168"?> Fig. 36 : F. Mauriac, Le Désert le l’amour, LMI 49, cover and spine The main woodcut on the front cover is designed as an ornamental picture puzzle, an intricate arrangement of leaves and flowers and animal shapes, framing the series title, the publisher’s “raison sociale” and (sometimes) the name of the illustrator. Two of the flower-and-leaf motifs are varied in the small cuts at top left and right of the name of the author, while the back cover decoration shows an arrangement of flowers in a basket behind an open book, with a curtain draped behind. The general art deco effect of the covers is enhanced by the playful mix of mostly sans-serif typefaces, varying from volume 168 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="169"?> to volume. The inspiration for this cover design must have come from a passage in Colette’s La Maison de Claudine, first published by Ferenczi in an unillustrated edition in June 1922, when planning for the new series was well under way, and Serveau was thinking hard about an attractive visual presentation. Here is the opening page of Chapter VII in the LMI 2 version of 1923, with Serveau’s headpiece: Fig. 37 : Colette, La Maison de Claudine, 1923-: 47 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 169 <?page no="170"?> To Claudine/ Colette, well-bound books look much more attractive than the yellowing tattered paperbacks shelved on the wall opposite. She remembers the classics clothed in brownish sheepskin, “basane feuille-morte”, and the dictionaries and encyclopedias with round black backs like so many tortoises. From these she moves in an inevitable association of ideas to Alcide d’Orbigny, the great 19 th century naturalist and explorer. The pages of his Voyage pittoresque dans les deux Amériques of 1836, often reprinted, were full of illustrations of plants and animals, “de dahlias, de perroquets, de méduses à chevelures roses et d’ornithorynques”, a visual delight for curious children, who could hardly help tearing the pages sooner or later. At least seven different animals, one of which is a tortoise, are hidden in Serveau’s maze of leaves and flowers, any of which might be a dahlia, discovered by the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico and brought to Europe in the late 18 th century. At first, all the illustrations for the LMI were carried out as woodcuts, as practised in the LdM, and were announced as “bois originaux”, though actually printed from electrotypes. Whereas Fayard remained faithful to this graphic technique, Ferenczi, when the fashion for woodcuts went into decline during the 1930s, increasingly commissioned line drawings and half-tone imitations of 18 th and 19 th century illustration styles. Initially all the woodcuts were printed in black, but from 1928 on, a second colour was frequently used, no doubt aiming to go one better than Fayard, who kept to black. Once, even the letterpress of a book was in colour, namely maroon, in Abel Hermant’s La Journée brève (LMI 58, 1928). This volume was illustrated by “bois originaux en couleurs de Clément Serveau”, using a pale olive green as the second colour. We will occasionally come back to the use of colour in illustrations in later chapters. A brief look at the first four months of publication will reveal much about what kind of series the LMI was to be. The volumes are numbered consecutively on the spine only, and the year of impression is given on the title page, while the month of publication is not stated in the colophon till mid-1925. When the publishers started their new series in September 1923, they of course wanted to make a splash in the market, and so they squeezed six volumes into a little over three months, in order to ensure availability for the Christmas sales and the “étrennes”, the traditional occasion for New Year’s book presents. From 1924, the rate of publication settled down to one volume a month. From July 1925 onwards (LMI 26), the month and year of printing are mentioned, and after January 1929 we get the exact date. From January 1929 to December 1939 two volumes a month were produced. Here are the first six titles of 1923: 170 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="171"?> No. Author Title Illustrator Number of illustrations 1st pub‐ lished: pub‐ lisher, year 1 Francis de Mio‐ mandre Écrit sur de l’eau Clément Ser‐ veau 25 Émile-Paul Frères, 1908 2 Colette La Maison de Claudine Clément Ser‐ veau 59 Ferenczi, 1922 3 Raymond [and Marie-Louise] Escholier Dansons la Trompeuse Emmanuel Jodelet 28 (= 27) Grasset, 1919 4 Edmond Jaloux L’Amour de Cécile Fougères Clément Ser‐ veau 51 “inédit” 5 José Germain Pour Genièvre Pierre Lissac 35 La Renais‐ sance du Livre, 1921 6 Colette Les Vrilles de la vigne Clément Ser‐ veau 63 (= 42) Editions de la vie parisi‐ enne, 1908 This table confirms the close cooperation between Colette, one of Ferenczi’s leading and well-connected writers, and Clément Serveau, his most important artist. Colette was to assume the additional role of a literary advisor to Ferenczi, who was her preferred but by no means exclusive publisher for many years (Pichois/ Brunet 1999: 400-403). These six volumes average 180 pages and 43 illustrations each, though some illustrations are repeated within a book, especially ornamental frames and illustrated initials. All six have a titlepage vignette or ornament, four have a postponed frontispiece, i.e. a full-page woodcut facing the first page of the text. All make regular use of headpieces and tailpieces to mark the beginning and end of units (chapters, stories, sections), space permitting. Full page episodic illustrations (F. hors textes; G. Tafeln) are employed in five of the books, the exception being the first number. Illustrated initials occur only in numbers 4 and 6, both illustrated by Serveau. All these illustrations are supposed to be woodcuts, but I have my doubts about those by Emmanuel Jodelet, which even though they are announced as “bois originaux” strongly resemble the penwork for which he is known (Osterwalder 1992: s.v. Jodelet) and were probably printed from line-blocks, made by photographic process. There is a clue in Dansons la Trompeuse that confirms this conjecture, namely the fact that the book’s title-page vignette of a wooded landscape is reproduced exactly, only reduced in size from 5 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 171 <?page no="172"?> to 3½ cm diameter, as the tailpiece to Ch. III. That would be difficult and expensive by reproductive engraving, but is easy enough using photographic means. If, as a third possibility, Serveau himself had undertaken the task of turning Jodelet’s drawings into woodcuts, then the standard procedure would have been that followed in Abel Hermant’s Lettres à Xavier sur l’art d’écrire (Librairie Hachette, 1925), a limited bibliophile edition, in which the illustrations are correctly identified on the title-page as “Vignettes dessinées par Emmanuel Jodelet et graves sur bois par Paul Baudier”. It seems that Ferenczi, having promised his readers “gravures sur bois”, did not mind a bit of “faux semblant” (cf. Jean de Meung’s Roman de la Rose) or “false seeming” (cf. Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale”), and kept it up for another two volumes illustrated by Jodelet (LMI 43 and 66), till in Jean-José Frappa’s Le Fils de M. Poirier (LMI 146, 1932) we find pen and ink “Illustrations de E. Jodelet”. In keeping with the change in policy mentioned above, Jodelet produced three more sets of illustrations in his authentic style (LMI 183, 223, and 249). The inconsistency that one can observe in this curious hide-and seek behaviour was no doubt due to market pressures and to a certain decline of interest in woodcut illustration among the general public during the thirties, influenced by representational advertising styles and the visual realism of photography and the movies. Speaking of advertising, one may mention that as in the LdD, self-advertising was practised in the LMI by including in each number a list of previously published volumes and an announcement of the next title in the series, which at this early stage of its history was printed on the verso of the title-page. Flyers like the ones discussed above were frequently inserted, and during the 30s Fayard even used the blank insides of the covers to place advertisements for cigarettes and for his own weeklies, Candide and Ric et Rac. Agnès de Belleville reports that Serveau was also responsible for the layout and the typography of the LMI. Each full page has 25 to 30 lines of text, printed in 10-point Cheltenham (or Gloucester, or other typefaces), the margins and leading varying accordingly. The Cheltenham is a comparatively heavy roman type designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue in 1896 (Macmillan 2006: 92), which like the Jenson meets the standards of legibility set up by William Morris, and goes well with woodcut illustration. Every page has a headline in small capitals, with Les Vrilles de la vigne, a collection of stories, giving the book’s title on the left and the story’s title on the right, in the approved manner. Serveau was clearly aiming for a sober but flexible uniformity, based on the 19 th century tradition, but with the typography and the illustrations sounding the same reformist and international note as did Fayard’s series. Later on, in the 1930s, when paper became more and more expensive, the type size was often reduced 172 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="173"?> so as to squeeze as many lines of text onto a page as possible. Two examples chosen at random are Églantine (LMI 303, 1938), by Jean Giraudoux, with 38 lines to a page, which is taxing but remains fully legible. The same author’s Juliette au Pays des Hommes (LMI 341, 1940) has only 33 lines per page, which is much easier on the eye. Since both books have the same number of pages, namely 156, the longer text has been compressed much more than the shorter one. These visual components of book-making were of course, as in the case of the LdD, part of a strategy aiming to win new readers especially from underprivileged social strata, for whom opportunities for self-improvement and distraction were attractive. The strategy needed to be underpinned by tangible economic and structural incentives. The very concept of a series, with its appeal to order and regularity, guidance and reliability, promising a choice of well-tried as well as innovative texts in a modern format, and saving its readers the difficulty of deciding for themselves what books to read and buy next, constitutes such a structure. It was at the same time an educational instrument, for as a series grew with each month’s new number(s), readers would recognise authors and illustrators they had been introduced to in earlier volumes and feel content in the knowledge about them acquired through viewing and reading. As an economic incentive, the low startingprice of 2,50 FF, exactly the same as for the LdD, was quite obviously a sine qua non, a pre-condition for building the habit of regular book-buying, and of regular reading and looking. In addition to the serial structure and the tempting price, Ferenczi’s publishing strategy employed familiar elements like the promise of visual originality and authenticity of “bois originaux”, the frequent reference to literary prizes won by the authors, such as the “Prix Goncourt 1908” for Miomandre and the “Prix Northcliffe 1921” for Escholier, and the claim of presenting not merely reprints but also the occasional “roman inédit” as in the case of Jaloux. Just one example of a title one might not expect in a series like this must suffice: Voyage au bout de la nuit, by Louis- Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961), with woodcuts by Clément Serveau (LMI 226, two volumes). Céline is classed today among the post-war writers of hate and despair, of “révolte pathétique et hysterique” (Bancquart/ Cahné 1992: 221), of revolt directed against uniformity and conformism, against rationalism and internationalism, horrible in its anti-semitism, but immensely thoughtprovoking (Radisch 2011: 46). It is evident that this publisher was at pains to establish that his project offered quality publishing, a bargain and even an adventure, all at the same time. The fact that 366 volumes of the LMI were 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 173 <?page no="174"?> published by 1943, when the numbered series was discontinued, is sufficient proof that the strategy worked. Authors, artists, themes and genres All five authors of the first six titles, born between 1873 (Colette) and 1884 (Germain), were well established by the time the LMI were launched. Francis de Miomandre (*1880) had been publishing verse, essays and fiction since 1904, and Écrit sur de l’eau was his first novel. Colette, seven years older, had published the first volume of her Claudine tetralogy in 1900, the other three following annually to great applause. Raymond Escholier (*1882) in 1905 married Marie-Louise Pons-Tande, in collaboration with whom he wrote much of his regionalist fiction, their first joint work being Dansons la Trompeuse. Edmond Jaloux (*1878) published his first work, L’Agonie de l’amour, at the age of 20 and contributed six titles to the LdD and nine to the LMI. José Germain (*1884), known as an energetic supporter of the cause of Alfred Dreyfus, was in print from 1911 on, with a new book almost every year throughout the 20s and 30s. Just as all these writers had by 1923 produced substantial work, so all three illustrators had been active for over a decade before being enlisted for Ferenczi. Pierre Lissac (*1878) had been doing illustrations for popular magazines like La Vie Parisienne and Le Rire since 1911, and had designed covers for Grasset; Emmanuel Jodelet (*1883) had been working for La Vie Populaire, Le Cri de Paris and again Le Rire since 1904; Clément Serveau, the young head of the team, had worked for Georges Crès, Grasset and the Annales Politiques et Littéraires before joining Ferenczi. All these writers and artists stemmed from the same long decade of the early 1870s to the mid-1880s which also brought forth the German expressionists from Otto Müller to Max Beckmann, and such British avantgarde engravers as Edward Gordon Craig, Eric Gill and Keith Henderson. Now Lissac, Jodelet and Serveau were none of them avant-garde artists, but they took up and modified, each in their own individual way, the visual languages and attitudes of expressionism, being fully aware of the pioneers of the modern woodcut like Edvard Munch, Paul Gauguin and Félix Vallotton. They thus shaped the final phase of the expressionist movement, or of what Stephanie Barron calls “the end of expressionism” (Barron 1989: 11-39), helping to make modernism palatable for a wide audience. Examples of some of the varieties of this “modified modernism” in illustration will be discussed in subsequent chapters. At this point a few words need to be said on the thematics of the LMI, i.e. its characteristic narrative and visual themes and genres. As in the case of 174 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="175"?> the LdD, I will be arguing that, taken as a whole, the series constitutes an ongoing vademecum or encyclopedia of French places and landscapes, classes and attitudes, myths and arguments, a representation and assertion of French identities past and present and sometimes even future. Miomandre’s Écrit sur de l’eau is set in Marseille and deals with issues of class and gender in polite society, with innocence and ignorance. It was published in hardback as Written on Water, translated by W.A. Drake, by Brentano’s, New York, in 1929, with all of Serveau’s woodcuts. In La Maison de Claudine Colette returns to her birthplace in the Puisaye region of Burgundy as the location of a first-person autobiographical memoir about the character that established her fame. It is full of mildly satirical portraits of her parents, revealing much about their strengths and weaknesses, as perceived by their daughter, always watching, always listening: Je me délectais, aux repas, de récits à mots couverts, de ce langage, employé par les parents, où le vocable hermétique remplace le terme vulgaire, où la moue significative et le « hum! » théâtral appellent et soutiennent l’attention des enfants. (LMI 2: V, 39) This linguistic self-reflexiveness is typical of Colette, and so is her awareness of the workings of narrative. Stories are never wholly explicit, they are told in a way that will keep listeners and readers guessing and forming predictions. That is one reason why they require retelling, and it is the wisely reticent retelling that keeps them alive. Storytelling is a serial phenomenon, with each retelling filling some of the gaps of a previous telling and opening new layers of covert meaning, which need yet more telling, to oneself and to others. What “hermetic expressions” do you remember? What did they refer to? Such reflections reveal that telling is a complex process fuelled by everyday narratives of all kinds, by all kinds of new forms of telling: conversations, reviews, advertisements, prizes and prize speeches, imitations and parodies, translations and rewritings. For economic and cultural reasons, which have to do with power, wealth and status, some forms of telling will, in the hands of publishers, editors, teachers, sponsors etc., become “capital culturel” (Bourdieu 1980: 214 f.) and so tend to assume ascendency over others and to create hierarchies of importance as regards significance, value and influence, by setting up judgemental dichotomies such as highbrow and lowbrow, serious and trivial, beautiful and ugly, and so on. The same holds good for forms of visual representation. Such positive/ negative differences do exist in experienced reality, but not truly as dichotomies, which are merely simplistic mental structures, nor as arborescent hierarchies, which imply a first origin and a final point of achievement. In making this point, I may seem to be leaning on the metaphorical concept of “rhizome” as developed 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 175 <?page no="176"?> by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille Plateaux (1980), but my original source was the less spectacular concept of “cline” as used by Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short to describe and analyse the multiplicity of forms of speech presentation in fiction (Leech/ Short 1981: 324). Together with his wife, Raymond Escholier is generally classed as a regionalist writer (Lalou 1969: 31) and that label certainly applies to their Dansons la Trompeuse. The action of the novel is located in the market-town of Mirepoix, Ariège, in the Cathar country north of the Pyrenees, where Marie- Louise was born. Raymond’s ancestors also stem from the Ariège. Directly or indirectly, the two authors were acquainted with many of the characters they depict, as well as with the social and economic structure, and the dominant mentalities of the region. The central figure is Mme Estelle, who lives in a derelict house ironically referred to as “le château” by her neighbours. She is an impoverished widow, forced to scour the country in search of antiques, curiosities, bric-à-brac and anything old and quaint that she can hope to sell. Her attempts to keep up appearances are met with a mixture of scorn and pity by the peasants she encounters, to which she reacts by repairing her makeup. Her social superiors treat her in much the same way, repeatedly snubbing her, a behaviour she interprets as consciously raising a wall against her, and that is what she complains about to the Abbé Roumens, her spiritual advisor: Aujourd’hui je me suis sentie si isolée, si seule au milieu de ces gens ! … Le marquis m’a paru plus blessant que d’habitude. Les autres ont du bon sens, tant de bon sens ! C’est une muraille dressée entre eux et moi, une muraille derrière laquelle on se retranche pour rire de mes idées, de mes paroles, de ma personne. (Escholier 1923-: 56) This sense of being excluded and made fun of makes Mme Estelle eager to grasp any opportunity to take part in local events and activities, such as the annual celebrations in honour of Saint Gauderic, the patron saint of farmers in the region - “l’heureux saint qui était laboureur! … Depuis des siècles, on danse tous les ans, pendant trois nuits, en son honneur ”, as Abbé Roumens explains (ibid.: 79), adding a few moments later that such events have the happy effect of bringing the bourgeoisie of the small towns together with the local aristocracy. This brings us to the event at which “La Trompeuse” is the most important dance, the dance announced in the novel’s title and illustrated in the postponed frontispiece: 176 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="177"?> Fig. 38: Dansons la Trompeuse, LMI 3: 8f. The combination of a full-page plate on the left and a headpiece followed by the first lines of the text is traditionally called the opening of a book. It can certainly make the act of beginning to read an illustrated book a rather special occasion, because every reader will tend to linger over the two illustrations for some moments before turning to the text. Like the two figures on the right of the plate, the reader will look closely at the woman in the middle ground to find out what she is doing. Yes, she is dancing, one can see the outstretched hand of her partner, and her robe, the flowers and the fan all suggest that a ball is going on. Then one moves to the headpiece on the right, which shows an empty double bed, some curtains and other details that belong to a bedroom. But now there is a problem: what have these two illustrations got to do with each other? What have they got to do with the story? In order to find out, we must start reading, but also remember the dance mentioned in the title. The reader moves forward through the text, but can also move back to the title-page or the book’s cover. This double movement of expectation and remembering will continue throughout the act of reading and will embrace the illustrations and the text equally. There will be occasion to discuss this interesting cognitive process again in later chapters, and to relate it to the rhetorical schemes of anaphora and cataphora. For the moment it may be enough to show how the headpiece to Ch. I points forward (cataphorically) to another headpiece: 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 177 <?page no="178"?> Fig. 39: Headpiece to Ch. X, LMI3 : 149 Here we see the same bed from a slightly different perspective and immediately (or after having turned back to Ch. I) recognise some changes, which will provoke conjecture about what must have happened. In the course of Ch. X we learn that Mme Estelle has just taken part in a procession to commemorate the “Jour des Morts” and suffered a severe crisis, feeling herself getting colder and colder, like the statues in the graveyard. This inner cold turns into a cough and a temperature, then affects the lungs, so that the doctor prescribes a tonic, but her voice becomes weaker, and after four months she passes away. “Elle a fait son chemin, nous ferons le nôtre”, says her servant Basilisse, pronouncing the traditional formula (ibid.: 171). Some of the neighbours come to take leave of Madame: Les femmes avançaient, en se poussant les unes les autres. Mais sur cet immense lit de parade, il n’y avait plus qu’une toute petite chose, presque rien, les plis d’une étoffe qui devait être de couleur tendre à la lumière du jour, - les plis du peignoir rose. (ibid.: 172) This is what we have already seen in the headpiece at the beginning of Ch. X, which the headpiece of Ch. I had foreshadowed. But while this text confirms what we surmised, it also adds a detail that the illustration cannot show, namely that Basilisse has insisted on dressing her dead mistress in a suitable and respectful manner, by wrapping her favourite dressing-gown around her. It is rarely so obvious that one illustration can refer to another, one preparing for the other and being supplemented by it, but as a basic principle of serial illustration 178 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="179"?> it should always be taken into account. Many readers will be familiar with it from William Hogarth’s Progresses, Honoré Daumier’s Actualités, or Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter, and a younger audience will have encountered it in comic strips and graphic novels. As a closing note to this section we can take a brief look at the final numbered volumes of the LMI during the 1940s, when large parts of northern and western France as well as Alsace-Lorraine were labouring under the German occupation. In his autobiographical Un Allemand à Paris (1981), translated as In einem besetzten Land. NS-Kulturpolitik in Frankreich, Erinner‐ ungen 1940-1944 (1982), Gerhard Heller gives a vivid account of cultural life in occupied Paris, where he had served in the propaganda squadron (“Propagandastaffel”) as a literary censor in the rank of lieutenant. One of his tasks was to ensure that the official restrictions on publishing were observed, as laid down in the “Liste Otto” of October 1940, i.e. the official list of prohibited books, named (jocularly) after the German ambassador Otto Abetz. Heller had studied modern languages and history during the 30s, and as a connoisseur of contemporary literature he was happy to meet and befriend so many French writers and publishers, and to cooperate wherever possible, whether by allocating sufficient paper, or by giving warning of repressive measures or denunciations. One such repression affected Ferenczi’s LMI in the summer of 1941, when the German authorities decreed that henceforth the publisher’s name on the cover and the title-page of all new numbers must be replaced by “Éditions du Livre Moderne”. In January 1941 the Germans had appointed the writer Adolphe d’Espie, alias Jean de la Hire, as the provisional manager of the company. The first number affected by this ruling was LMI 353, Chênevieil, a novel by the Norman writer Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, and it remained in force till the series was discontinued in 1943 with no. 366. In volumes 353 and 354, one finds a full-page advertisement for a new series called Le Livre Moderne Européen, announcing as its first volume L’Enfant dans la Maison by Jean de la Hire himself, duly published in September 1941, with a new cover design by A.-M. Le Petit, and numbered “1” on the spine: 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 179 <?page no="180"?> Fig. 40: Front cover and spine of L’Enfant dans la Maison, 1941 But that was all! With the next volume of the series, George Normandy’s Le Pére Decorne et ses semblables, the old LMI cover returned and the consecutive numbering was resumed and maintained for nos. 356-366. No second Livre Moderne Européen has ever turned up. Ferenczi seems to have ignored the new series title, and no one took the trouble to remind him. La Hire’s fate after the liberation of France is summarised in the Wikipedia article on Adolphe d’Espie (cf. https: / / fr.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Adolphe_d’Espie). 180 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="181"?> 3.2.3 The Grand Prix Gustave Doré and the rules of illustration During the inter-war years, literary awards were an important feature of book culture in many European countries, but nowhere so well established and influential as in France. The Prix Goncourt (1903 ff.), Prix Femina (1904 ff.), Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française (1918), Prix Renaudot (1926 ff.), Grand Prix de Littérature coloniale (1921-38) and Prix Interallié (1930 ff.) were important boosters of reputations and sales during this period (Blasselle 1998: 89-92). Little wonder that the LdD and LMI series, whenever possible, adorn the names of their authors with a title-page mention of the prize they have received. In Britain two important prizes were created in 1919 - the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize - and both are still going strong. The French influence is apparent in the Femina - Vie Heureuse Prize for English writers (1920-39), created on the initiative of the publisher Hachette. At the suggestion of Lady Northcliffe, the wife of the Daily Mail founder, this was followed a year later by the Prix Northcliffe for French writers (1921-39). As an after-effect of its long-standing particularism, Germany was different in having a large number of local literary awards but only two noteworthy national prizes, the Kleist-Preis (1912-32, and 1985 ff.) and the Theodor-Fontane-Preis für Kunst und Literatur (1913-31, and 1949 ff. at irregular intervals) (Rasch 2006: xxxix). Occasionally prizes were also awarded for the arts of the book, including illustration, such as in the competition “Schönste Bücher des Jahres” (1929-33, revived in 1951). A competition to encourage young artists to try their hand at illustrating contemporary fiction is yet another matter, and that is what we find in the Grand Prix Gustave Doré. A short history of the Grand Prix Gustave Doré As far as French popular publishing is concerned, the received system of illustration was confirmed in a prescriptive mode by the rules set up for the Grand Prix Gustave Doré, launched in 1925 by the monthly journal ABC Magazine d’Art and sponsored by the publisher J. Ferenczi. The eponymous designation seems inadvertently ironic in that the spectacular and meticulously detailed style of illustration perfected by Gustave Doré (1832-83) was hardly an appropriate model for the 1920s. The ABC Magazine d’Art published many series of articles on topics like watercolour painting (by Bernard Lachèvre), “la gravure sur bois” (by Renefer), etching (by Malo Renault) and other techniques, it organised its own art and writing courses, as well as various arts and crafts competitions, all with the declared aim of recruiting and training new artists: “Nous voulons révéler des talents nouveaux” (ABC, no. 3, March 1925: 10). 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 181 <?page no="182"?> Fig. 41: Front cover of ABC Magazine d’Art, n° 3 The magazine therefore invited young, non-professional artists to contribute black and white line illustrations or woodcut prints for one of two specified works, or for both. This procedure constitutes what Pierre Bourdieu has described as “un abaissement du droit d’entrée” into a cultural field, in this case the field of book illustration (Bourdieu 1992: 184), a lowering or rather 182 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="183"?> extension that seems inevitable in view of the rapid post-war growth of the “reading public” and the spread of novel-reading, deplored as “a drug habit” by Q.D. Leavis (Leavis 1939: 19). The books set for the first year of the Grand Prix were Raymond Radiguet’s Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel, and Édouard Estaunié’s L’Infirme aux mains de lumière. Both had previously been published by Bernard Grasset and were to be reissued with the prize-winners’ woodcut illustrations in Ferenczi’s LMI series. At this time, the LMI was appearing in monthly volumes, and so it made sense to the publishers to ensure a steady supply of young and perhaps less expensive illustrators. The rules of the Grand Prix are interesting because they codified a standard to be met by books aspiring to be de luxe, even as they extended this label’s traditional meaning. The extension is made explicit in the “règlement” of the competition, which describes the LMI as a “collection de luxe dont les ouvrages sont tirés à 50.000 exemplaires sur papier alfa” (ABC, no. 3, 1925: 11). This paradox must have caused raised eyebrows among the ranks of the traditional bibliophiles. How could a print run of 50,000 copies qualify as de luxe? A limited edition would have a print run not exceeding one thousand or 2000 at the very most, and the papers would be expensive ones like Imperial Japan or Hollande or Marais Vellum, rather than the fairly cheap and agreeably off-white, but not always sufficiently opaque and not very robust alfa paper employed by many publishers in the popular sector. As has already been mentioned, the issue was evaded by assigning the LdD and LMI to a middling “demi-luxe” category, in which the print run was not limited, the copies were not numbered, and there was no choice of different luxury papers commanding different prices (but cf. Huret 2011: 219 f., on the series of plates from nine volumes of the LdD printed on China and Japan papers). The rules of the competition laid down that three types of illustration were to be submitted, namely full-page illustrations (“hors textes”), headpieces (“bandeaux”) and tailpieces (“culs-de-lampe”). The precise number of illustra‐ tions was not indicated, provoking questions from readers and aspiring com‐ petitors, and leading the editors to specify, in the May and June issues, that “l’illustration d’un ouvrage doit comprendre une dizaine de bandeaux, autant de culs-de-lampe, et trois ou quatre planches hors-texte” (ABC, no. 6, June 1925: 8). But the rules as printed on the next page still prescribed a headpiece and a tailpiece to open and close each chapter. By 1928, when the third Grand Prix Gustave Doré was announced, the rules had been recast in eight articles and the contradiction just noted was smoothed over by the following wording: Art. 3. - Nombre d’illustrations et formats. - […] 1° Une dizaine de bandeaux environ, et autant de culs-de-lampe formant tête et fin de chapitre. Par conséquent, il devra y 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 183 <?page no="184"?> avoir, autant que possible, un bandeau et un cul-de-lampe par chapitre. Toutefois, si l’ouvrage contient plus de dix chapitres, il ne sera pas nécessaire de les illustrer tous, mais seulement dix d’entre eux au choix du concurrent. (ABC, no. 41, May 1928: 122). Altogether the participants were expected to submit up to twenty-four illustra‐ tions per volume. The rules further prescribed the size of the illustrations: planches hors-texte 13 x 9, bandeaux 6 x 9, culs-de-lampe 3 x 4 or 4 x 3 (h x b in centimetres). Since the type area comprised approximately 15,5 x 10-cm, a fullpage illustration would be allotted slightly wider margins than the letterpress, giving enough breathing space for it to take full effect. Article 4 prescribed the “genre d’exécution”, the graphic technique to be employed. Since the declared aim was “reproduction en gravure sur bois” (ibid.), the designs were to be submitted either as black-and-white pen drawings, or, if the competitors were capable of producing them, as prints made from woodcut-blocks. The high print runs mentioned above were only feasible through the use of hard-wearing electrotype duplicates of the original woodcut-blocks, or of line blocks made by photographing a black-and-white line drawing or print onto a suitably prepared zinc plate, which is then etched in a bath of nitric acid (F: cliché-trait; G: Strichhochätzung). The resulting illustrations are not, strictly speaking, original woodcuts any more, as they would have been in a true de luxe edition. No other prescriptions bearing on the relationship between text and illustration were made in the rules of the competition. The participants were thus not asked to produce a frontispiece, or decorated initials, nor were they required to identify, through appropriate captions and/ or page references, the text passages that their illustrations referred to. It was not customary, in the LMI, to add captions to the illustrations, not even to full page ones - I am only aware of two volumes out of the 366 numbers in which captions are employed. In the absence of more detailed prescriptions, the competitors would of course consult the 24 titles in the series that had been published by June 1925, including nine illustrated by Clément Serveau, the artistic director of the series, and a regular member of the jury. The winners of the 1925 Grand Prix, announced in the October 1925 issue of ABC Magazine, were Paul François (1st prize for his illustrations of Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel) and Geneviève Rostan (2nd prize for her illustrations of L’Infirme aux mains de lumière). Both François and Rostan were presented to the readers through a portrait photograph and a personal statement describing their training, their artistic models and their expectations and experiences during the competition, as well as their plans for the future. François explains why he regards both set books as difficult to illustrate: 184 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="185"?> Malheureusement, ce sont deux livres difficiles à illustrer. Peu ou pas de descriptions, pas de scènes qui fassent image et un drame tout intérieur. Mais en somme des difficultés de ce genre sont plutôt un stimulant […]. (ABC, no. 10, 1925: 11) An excellent analysis! He describes himself as an autodidact who spends his spare time engraving, and names Charles-Èmile Carlègle (1877-1937) as his prime model. Rostan reports that she has benefited from the teaching of Adolphe Giraldon (1855-1933) and Morin-Jean (i.e. Jean Morin, 1877-1940) and now hopes to succeed in her career as an illustrator. While quite a number of books with her illustrations can be identified up to 1932, she did not contribute any more to the LMI. After searching in vain for traces of Paul François, my hunch that this might be a pseudonym was revived by a notice in the March 1927 edition of the ABC Magazine d’Art: M. Paul François, lauréat du premier Grand Prix Gustave Doré, travaille actuellement aux illustrations d’un ouvrage de M. Gaëtan Bernoville, Sainte Thérèse de l’Enfant- Jésus, à paraître à la Librairie de France. (ABC, n° 27, 1927: 68) Bernoville’s book was published as announced in 1928, except that the title-page identifies the artist as one Paul Pruvost (1889-1969). Further enquiries revealed Pruvost to be an Abbé from Bourbourg (near Dunkirk), who in the same year applied for and was granted dispensation to devote himself to religious art. The story of Sainte Thérèse is of course an example of this, albeit an expensive bibliophile production in medium quarto format, limited to 401 numbered copies, with 39 engravings and eight full-page plates, four of them in colour. In October and November 1925, Ferenczi published the two novels by Radiguet and Estaunié as numbers 28 and 29 of the LMI, duly illustrated with the prizewinning woodcuts. The title pages bear the names of the illustrators and the caption “Lauréat(e) du Prix Gustave Doré”. Clearly, the competition was not just a recruiting but also an advertising campaign for Ferenczi and Grasset, as well as for their magazine and its various correspondence courses. At the same time, the competition can be seen as a strategy to keep the illustrated book in line with contemporary taste by getting more and more contributions from young artists. It also addressed the readers of the ABC Magazine d’Art (which changed its title to ABC artistique et littéraire in April 1929, and then to ABC Magazine in 1932) by keeping up for some years a lively discussion about the graphic arts as applied to print media. The competition was continued for four more rounds in 1927, 1928, 1930 and 1931, before it disappeared. The following table gives the results of all five events: 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 185 <?page no="186"?> ABC no., date of results + pages Prize winners authors + titles illustrated LMI no. I 10, Oct. 1925: 9-14 Paul François Geneviève Ro‐ stan Radiguet, Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel Estaunié, L’Infirme aux mains de lumière 28 29 II 31, July 1927: 175- 177 Elise Lagier- Bruno Armand Peti Jean Gilbert, Le Joug Miomandre, La Naufragée 53 56 III 49, Jan. 1929: 8-11 Gaston Foubert Suzanne Trui‐ tard Cherau, L’Égarée sur la route Bainville, Jaco et Lori 78 84 IV 67, July 1930: 218- 222 V. Bonneterre Léopold Simons Thérive, La Revanche (Mauriac, Trois Récits) 115 117 V 84, Dec. 1931: 310 Suzanne Le‐ coanet Ambroise Thé‐ bault (Colette, La Paix chez les bêtes, LdD 122, 1933) Istrati, Kyra Kyralina 148 Faced with this summary, one wonders why the Grand Prix Gustave Doré was discontinued so soon. One reason may have been that most of the prize winners never got beyond the single volume they illustrated for the LMI, namely François, Rostan, Lagier-Bruno, Truitard, Bonneterre and Thébault. François/ Pruvost went on to illustrate other books by Bernoville, all on religious themes. Then there is the case of Léopold Simons (1901-1979), who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lille after the war and since 1921 worked as a caricaturist for the Lille newspaper Grand Echo du Nord. He had hardly won the second prize of the 1930 competition than he lost interest. Perhaps he withdrew his contribution for Mauriac’s Trois Récits after the jury had expressed doubts about the maturity of his drafts (cf. ABC, no. 67, 1930: 221 f.), so that Clément Serveau stepped in for him, or he may have preferred to pursue his budding career as a dialect comedian on stage, radio and film (https: / / fr.wikipedia.org / wiki/ Léopold_Simons ). As for Suzanne Lecoanet (1909-41), who went on to become a professor of art in Mascara, Algeria in 1936, then in Corsica in 1938 (cf. Huret 2012, Catalogue n° 33: 110), there seems to have been a drawn-out dispute between Ferenczi and Grasset about the publishing rights to Colette (Pichois & Brunet 1999: 400 f.). By way of compromise, La Paix chez les bêtes was passed on to Fayard together with Lecoanet’s woodcuts and published in 1933 as no. 122 of the LdD. Thus, after six years, the Grand Prix turned out to be not really 186 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="187"?> worth the trouble, let alone the expense, at least for Ferenczi, who during the coming twenty years would have no difficulty in recruiting enough illustrators to keep the LMI going. The rules of illustration applied: The prize-winning illustrations of the first Grand Prix Gustave Doré The Grand Prix Gustave Doré may have been created mainly for practical purposes, but it was also a contribution to the debates about art, both pure and applied, that were being conducted on different levels in different parts of contemporary society. Among the readers of the ABC Magazine, the “ABCéd‐ aires” (in analogy to “abécédaire”, E: a primer for school beginners, G: Fibel für Schulanfänger), as they are often called in the magazine’s editorials, the competition and the reports about its implementation served to foster a deeper awareness of why book illustration was both desirable in itself and how it could enrich a printed text. The format of the Grand Prix Gustave Doré and its public presentation in the ABC Magazine both involve comparison and judgement, looking at different styles and genres of illustration, and thinking about different solutions to the task of relating pictures to texts. Readers were invited to study the jury’s assessments and compare them with their own experience of illustrated fiction: Nous avons demandé aux artistes éminents qui ont composé le jury du Grand Prix Gustave Doré de nous dire ce qu’ils pensaient des œuvres qui leur ont été soumises, des efforts des concurrents, et de nous donner leur opinion d’ensemble sur ce concours. Rien ne peut être plus intéressant, non seulement pour les concurrents, mais pour tous les lecteurs de notre revue, que de connaître l’avis, combien autorisé, des membres du jury. (ABC, n° 10, October 1925: 12) Unfortunately, none of the nine jurors says anything explicitly and specifically about any of the illustrations, although seven of these are reproduced in the magazine’s report (ibid.: 3, 9-14), and three further opinions and six more illustrations in the next month’s issue (ABC, n° 11, November 1925: 11-13). But perhaps some of the remarks made by the painter, illustrator and caricaturist Abel Faivre (1867-1945) can be read as referring to one of Geneviève Rostan’s illustrations: Illustrer un livre, c’est l’orner, mais c’est aussi l’éclairer et lui donner la vie. L’artiste doit faire la route avec l’écrivain, et ne pas s’attarder aux accessoires quand l’ouvrage fait appel aux choses du cœur. Quel talent innombrable doit être celui de l’illustrateur, qui saute d’un réverbère ou d’une roue de cabriolet à la douleur d’un visage aveugle ? (ABC, n° 10: 12 f.) 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 187 <?page no="188"?> Faivre’s first remarks may be truisms, but they also identify the tension between the ornamental dimension of illustration and its task of throwing light onto a text that may be full of dark passages. The idea of an illustration giving life to a text is at best misleading, for if it had no life of its own, it would not be worth illustrating. The next metaphor of the narrative as a road to be travelled together by the writer and the artist is suggestive of their fellowship and mutual understanding, but surely also of their different perspectives. The illustrator’s countless talents are then expressed in terms that seem to refer to incidents on the road, and may have been inspired by the woodcut reproduced immediately above the passage just quoted: Fig. 42 : Édouard Estaunié, L’Infirme aux mains de lumière-: 61. This is a full-page illustration from Ch. III of the novel, and it marks a turningpoint in the story, set in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France, around 1908-14. A short summary may serve to place the picture in its narrative context. In this chapter the anonymous first-person narrator continues his account of the chance friendship he has struck up with Anselme Théodat in a bistro, the Café de la Comédie in Bordeaux. Théodat is a minor tax official, about to be promoted, and, as we gather from his hesitant conversation, engaged to marry. He comes from a small village, Saint-Christol, not far from Castres, in 188 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="189"?> the Tarn department, where his sister, the “infirme” of the title, lives confined to her wheelchair. Her name is not revealed till much later. After the death of their father and the sale of his farm “en Languedoc” to pay off accumulated debts, she now lives alone in a little old house the family owns at Saint- Christol. She has become wholly dependent on her brother, who finds himself caught in a conflict between his own interests and his fraternal duty. The old house requires considerable repairs, and since it is Théodat who will have to pay for them, he is forced to reduce his personal expenses. The narrator and Théodat give up the fashionable Café de la Comédie and henceforth meet at a much cheaper place, La Rotonde de la Renaissance. Théodat has already been thinking about leaving his flat and renting a cheap room instead. During a late evening walk through the quarter where Théodat lives, he gradually reveals most of this to the narrator, who soon feels, and hesitantly explains, that his friend is being exploited by his sister: “Sous le prétexte qu’elle ignore vos ressources, votre sœur vous exploite” (ibid.: 65). In response, Théodat feels obliged to defend her, and by way of argument enters into a praise of rural retirement. By this time the two men have arrived at the door of Théodat’s house and the narrator points up to the balcony: Arrivé devant la porte de Théodat, je montrai le balcon qui desservait les fenêtres de sa chambre : - A votre place, fis-je gaiement, plutôt que de me coucher, j’y installerais un fauteuil et continuerais de respirer la brise. Avez-vous toujours habité là ? - Oui, répondit-il, vous apercevez-là mon seul luxe et j’y tenais.- Vous y teniez : pourquoi cet imparfait-? - Parce que d’ici 48 heures, je déménage rue Judaïque. (ibid.: 58) It is this moment that Rostan has captured in her illustration, and it is surely this interaction of text and picture that Faivre had in mind when he formulated the third sentence of his commentary, a “retrieval” as Richard Wollheim called such criticism in his Art and its Objects (Wollheim 1980: 185-204). Retrieval is an apposite term for the critical task of bringing together the overt and covert elements of meaning contained in the graphic symbols of the text and the iconic, symbolic and indexical signs of the woodcut. The narrator and his friend can be seen on the left beyond the balcony, and in the middle of the picture there is the “réverbère” that Faivre refers to, spreading a circle of light over the little roundabout. This also functions as a metaphorical expression for the “lumière” of Mlle Théodat’s hands, a motif that together with images of flowers runs through the whole narrative. The circle of light is also taken up by Faivre and varied when he speaks of the illustrator resembling someone jumping down from a streetlamp or from the wheel of a gig at the sight of “la douleur d’un visage aveugle”. The association of wheel and “douleur” may be 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 189 <?page no="190"?> an echo of the wheelchair that Théodat’s sister depends on. Perhaps the blind face is represented in Rostan’s design by the figure standing with downcast eyes beneath the lamp. The antithesis of light and dark is one that a black on white woodcut is particularly good at showing, here in a complex interaction of signifying circles, dots, curves and straight lines, and is of considerable suggestive power, as Faivre’s commentary demonstrates. Such commentaries can help readers to form personal judgements about what there is to see in an illustration, judgements that they may wish or even need to share with others. This is only possible if the participants are able to find adequate verbal expression for what, on the face of it, seems to be non-verbal, an ability that is not well developed in many people, and even in artists and critics. Some kinds of verbal expression may be comparatively simple, as when we identify objects that we recognise by giving them the names we have learned for them. In real life contacts, spectators are accustomed to reading facial expressions and different kinds of body language like gesture and posture. This reading ability can often be transferred to looking at illustrations, especially where the accompanying text provides supporting information, as we have just seen in the case of Rostan’s woodcut. Spectators can often describe items like clothes and hairstyles, or tell what is happening in a picture. Reading a woodcut or an engraving can be more difficult, particularly when it is carried out in an abstractive style like that adopted by Rostan, for one needs to know how the materials and tools employed by the artist affect the work produced (cf. Ch. 2.1). We will now consider a few more examples of illustrations by the prize winners and try to identify some of the basic choices the artists have made. In contrast to the LdD, throughout the LMI volumes the frontispiece has been ousted from its traditional position facing the title page by a list of “Ouvrages parus dans la même Collection”, a material indication that this is a series seeking a wide audience and therefore needing to advertise and to attract collectors by listing all the published volumes. Instead of a frontispiece, we sometimes find a small introductory woodcut panel or vignette on the title page that generally serves to foreshadow some central element of the novel. Both Paul Pruvost and Geneviève Rostan happen to have chosen the leading lady for their first illustration, Mahaut d’Orgel, née Grimoard, for Radiguet’s novel, and Mlle. Théodat for Estaunié’s. But how differently they are represented! 190 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="191"?> Fig. 43: Title-page of Radiguet, LMI 28 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 191 <?page no="192"?> Fig. 44: Title-page of Estaunié, LMI 29 Pruvost’s woodcut is a mimetic representation, showing a young woman with bobbed hair, in the 1920s style. Rostan has chosen to show, in an octagonal format, a bunch of sunflowers, which through metonymic substitution repre‐ 192 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="193"?> sents the “infirme aux mains de lumière”, the sick woman who throughout the novel will be associated with flowers. These recur in the final tailpiece as a reworking of the sunflower motif, in the same format, but with a banderole bearing the word “FIN”. That is a visual example of incremental repetition, with each repetition involving a small change, a traditional device employed especially in oral narratives such as the ballad. Here it achieves the rhetorical figure called kyklos, in which the text comes full circle from the end back to its beginning. The difference between the two approaches chosen by Pruvost and Rostan suggests what a wide range of different modes illustration can command, from imitation to implication. The reader who first enters the book via such a visual threshold (F: seuil; G: Schwelle) will not be able to identify exactly the reference of the images, whether iconic or metonymic, but will understand them in a general way as announcing some leading figure or motif, and for the time being posing a cataphoric puzzle. Cataphora, a term introduced by Karl Bühler in his Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache (Bühler 1934: 122), typically has this quality of puzzling prediction, in contrast to anaphora’s quality of being a helpful reminder of things previously read or seen. Both titlepages thus confront the readers with mild riddles: they do not yet know who the Comte d’Orgel is, nor what kind of ball is being referred to, and similarly, they will not know for quite some time who “l’infirme” is, nor what the metaphor of the “mains de lumière” might mean. On both title-pages links are suggested between the words of the title and the objects illustrated, and such provisional links are also cataphoric, demanding to be specified in the course of the narrative and the sequence of illustrations. In each particular case it will be a matter of interpretation whether the conjunction of text and illustration reduces or increases this quality of enigmatic indeterminacy, and of how it guides the reader’s gradual comprehension. From openings to episodic plates French illustrated books of the second half of the 18th century typically began with two double-pages: first the frontispiece facing the title-page, second the opening, with a full-page engraving on the left page and a headpiece followed by the beginning of the narrative on the right (Griffiths 2004: 32, 36 et passim). In both the LMI tomes under discussion, the work proper begins with such an opening. The full-page woodcut, now functioning as a postponed frontispiece, together with the first headpiece can achieve a strong visual effect, and their juxtaposition at the beginning of the verbal narrative makes sure that the reader approaches the story with the meanings and implications of the illustrations kept in mind: 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 193 <?page no="194"?> Fig. 45: Opening of Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel (pp. 8 + 9) Here, the postponed frontispiece shows a clipper under full sail, yet another cataphoric image. It will gather meaning through verbal hints like the informa‐ tion that Mahaut d’Orgel is a Creole from Martinique, and through a sequence of related maritime images in subsequent headpieces and tailpieces. Some of these will be found to refer to the naval career and death at sea of François de Séryeuse, the father of a son of the same name, twenty years earlier, around 1900. As for the headpiece above, the female figure it shows is surely not the same as that on the title page, so on the strength of the first two sentences readers will conclude that this must be Mahaut, the Comtesse d’Orgel: Les mouvements d’un cœur comme celui de la comtesse d’Orgel sont-ils surannés ? Un tel mélange du devoir et de la mollesse semblera peut-être, de nos jours, incroyable, même chez une personne de race et une créole. (ibid.: 9) Here, “de race” means that she is of noble French descent, though born and bred in the Caribbean, and hence a Creole. The illustrations and the text together provide clues for the reader to develop such informed hypotheses, draw provisional conclusions, and form predictions, all of them subject to revision or confirmation as the looking and reading proceed. These illustrations can thus be read as metonymic references to the relationship between France and 194 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="195"?> its Caribbean colonies, the two locations in which the histories of various noble families that left France in the course of the 18 th century unfolded. In the case of the Grimoard de la Verberie this happened during the reign of Louis XIII, who strove to restrict the privileges of the rural aristocracy (ibid.: 10 f.). The Tascher de la Pagerie later fled to Germany and Austria (ibid.: 23) to escape the terror of the French Revolution (1793-94), with both appositive genitives designating their plantations. Other families like the Séryeuses and the Orgels are also involved in this story through their intermarriage with the Grimoard and the Tascher families, and these, through Marie-Josèphe Tascher, later Joséphine Beauharnais, with the Beauharnais and Napoleon families. All this name-dropping provides the backcloth to the novel’s action, located in Paris in the early 1920s, shortly after the cataclysm that finally confirmed the decline of the European aristocracy. In this situation, we are told how the Comte d’Orgel (whose first name is Anne, often used as a masculine personal name by the aristocracy of the Ancien Régime) and his wife Mahaut (a medieval form of Mathilde), set out to re-establish their position in post-war Paris society: Anne, aidé de Mahaut, redonna un lustre à l’hôtel d’Orgel, où naguère l’on s’était bien ennuyé. Ce furent les Orgel qui, si l’on peut dire, ouvrirent le bal au lendemain de la guerre. Le feu comte d’Orgel eût trouvé sans doute que son fils faisait trop de place, dans ses invitations, au mérite personnel et à la fortune. Cet éclectisme, sévère malgré tout, ne fut pas la moindre raison du succès des Orgel. (ibid.-: 15) At this point “le bal” is used figuratively, standing for any kind of social event by which one can assert one’s own status and confer distinction on those to whom one extends an invitation. In fact, Radiguet is alluding here to the balls held annually in Paris by Comte Étienne de Beaumont, events of the season that it was “a misfortune to miss […] and an even greater one not to have been invited in the first place” (Bouvet/ Durozoi 2010: 166). The narrator next introduces his readers to two prospective guests at such events, two young men, François de Séryeuse Jr. and Paul Robin, “un jeune diplomate”, who, we are told, are friends of a peculiar kind: On ne pouvait rêver deux êtres plus loin l’un de l’autre que ces deux amis. Cependant ils croyaient s’être liés à cause de leurs ressemblances. C’est-à-dire que leur amitié les poussait à se ressembler, dans la limite du possible. L’idée fixe de Paul Robin était d’ « arriver ». Alors que d’autres ont le travers de croire qu’on les attendra toujours, Paul trépignait en pensant qu’il allait manquer le train. Il croyait aux « personnages »et que l’on peut jouer un rôle. (ibid.-: 16) In much the same way, namely by authorial “telling” rather than by “showing” (Booth 1987: 3-16, et passim), Radiguet puts us in the picture about François: 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 195 <?page no="196"?> Par contre, Séryeuse était l’insouciance même. Il avait vingt ans. Malgré son âge et son oisiveté, il était bien vu par des aînés de mérite. (ibid.-: 17) These analyses are summed up in one short sentence: “Ils exerçaient l’un sur l’autre une assez mauvaise influence” (ibid.). The narrative really gets under way when Paul and François spend an evening at the Cirque Médrano, just north of Montmartre, a favourite place for artists like Braque, Picasso, or Léger to gather and do sketches of the acrobats and their animals, and meet fellow artists and writers, and the affluent cultural elite: “D’excellents clowns y attiraient le public des théâtres” (ibid.). The first thing that happens is that Paul discovers the Comte and Comtesse d’Orgel in the audience, and is greeted by them. During the first interval, François sets out to find the d’Orgels in order to introduce himself properly, and discovers them in the dressing room of the Fratellinis, three famous clowns of the day. He meets with sympathy from Anne d’Orgel, who recognises that François “était gêné de n’avoir pas été reconnu et que la partie se jouât inégale” (ibid.: 19). The result of this meeting is an intrigue to make fun of Robin: “On décida de le mystifier” (ibid.), and so to exclude him from a social circle to which he has no right to belong. A second result is that François is beguiled by the charming Mahaut, who is at least 15 years younger than her husband, and when d’Orgel invites him and Paul to join them at a dance held at Le Plessis-Robinson, a tiny village on the south-western outskirts of Paris, famous for its “guingettes” or outdoor restaurants, the young men feel that they are in the process of arriving. It is here in the story, that Rostan has inserted a full-page woodcut portrait: Fig. 46: Full length portrait of Mahaut d’Orgel (ibid.: 25) 196 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="197"?> This must be Mahaut d’Orgel, in a lovely ball-dress, ready to show off her attractions and to be admired by all comers, whether invited members of “le beau monde” or, as Radiguet’s narrator explains, “le public des cinémas de Montrouge, après le programme du samedi, [qui] s’était offert un supplément facultatif” (ibid.: 27). Note the contrast between the two audiences, that of the theatre and that of the cinema. Though formal balls were exclusive entertainments for the upper classes, they could at the same time become public spectacles for the masses, each confirming the other’s status. Now, instead of following the plot and its issues of class, judgement and morals any further, let us leap 60 pages ahead to another full-page woodcut that is uncannily similar, in spite of some obvious differences, to the portrait of Mahaut we have just considered: Fig. 47: Full-page illustration of a woman in a landscape (ibid.: 85) In this chapter, the Orgels are visiting the Séryeuse family, François and his widowed mother, at their home in Champigny, somewhere in the Champagne region. Anne d’Orgel is astonished at the surprisingly youthful appearance of Mme de Séryeuse, much in the same way that François was affected by Mahaut, and is now astonished by his own mother: Ce jour-là, Mme de Séryeuse était étonnante. En l’admirant, François oubliait peu à peu qu’elle était sa mère. Elle se prêtait à cet oubli, car elle parlait sur un ton vif que François ne lui avait jamais connu. (ibid.: 83 f.) Here, meeting and looking at each other with such attention has the same effect on Mme d’Orgel - she feels herself getting younger, too. After lunch the ladies sit together and chat, while the men look on. We must return to the text here, facing 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 197 <?page no="198"?> the woodcut on the right, to see how Radiguet’s wording oscillates between report and implication: Après le déjeuner, Mme de Séryeuse et Mme d’Orgel causaient ensemble ; et comme François contemplait ce tableau, le comte d’Orgel, pour se distraire de son silence, regarda ceux qui étaient accrochés aux murs. Mais son œil s’égarait dans le vague. Mme de Séryeuse qui ne prenait pas ce manège pour de l’impatience, crut que quelque chose intriguait son hôte dont l’œil semblait posé sur une miniature, qu’en réalité il ne voyait pas. (ibid.: 84) You see how the narrator shifts from the figurative use of “tableau” to its literal meaning in “ceux”, the pictures hanging on the walls? This is more than an amusing trick, for it focuses our attention on the topics of looking and understanding, of perceiving versus deceiving, which are so central to this novel. Anne is bored by the women’s talk, and so his eyes wander to the pictures, without really concentrating on any of them. Mme de Séryeuse is deceived by his manoeuvre, she thinks that something is puzzling him about the picture he seems to be looking at, a portrait of Empress Joséphine, and addresses him thus: Vous regardez ce portrait ? Anne se leva pour le voir. Il ne ressemble guère aux images habituelles de l’Impératrice Joséphine. Pourtant, c’est elle, à quinze ans. Il fut exécuté par un Français de la Martinique et envoyé à Beauharnais pour lui faire connaître sa fiancée. (ibid.) This miniature portrait is an informal representation of a young woman, a fluent sketch translated by Pruvost into a delicate engraving. There is none of the display of rank and femininity here that one finds in the many formal paintings of Joséphine, whether Beauharnais or Bonaparte, but instead a modest, relaxed view, which is no doubt the artist’s invention. But what is more interesting, in a discussion of the relations between text and illustration, is that this scene reveals so much about the power of pictures and the different purposes they may serve. Among the aristocracy, who were often not close neighbours, such a portrait could be sent to the distant husband-to-be to introduce his future bride. It is an instrument of courtship and also has documentary value, in this case Anne recognising that Mme de Séryeuse is distantly related, via her greatgrandmother, to Joséphine’s mother, and that therefore François and Mahaut are cousins. The miniature on the wall gives rise to all kinds of verbal reactions and to unspoken reflections, and it certainly complicates the course of the plot, which culminates in the final chapter in a profound misunderstanding between Anne and Mahaut that the horrified reader recognises, but neither husband or wife have the slightest inkling of (ibid.: 186 f.). 198 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="199"?> In conclusion of this section, we can briefly return to L’Infirme aux mains de lumière and consider its opening, which follows the same basic pattern as that of Le Bal, but also differs in some respects. Fig. 48: Opening of L’Infirme (pp. 6 f.) The postponed frontispiece shows two heads, that of the woman half turned to the spectator but looking calmly up and into the distance, the man’s half turned away and looking down. The contrast of light and dark we have already noticed in Rostan’s woodcuts is very strong here, and it unobtrusively foreshadows the conflict that will develop in the course of the story. The flower in Reine-Vigile’s right hand (that is the name of Théodat’s sister, which is revealed for the first time in Ch. VI,) takes up the motif of the title-page vignette, and becomes her personal attribute in later illustrations. On the right there is a vertical pattern of two intertwining stalks of a plant bearing either leaves or thorns, surely an emblem of the relationship between brother and sister. The headpiece contains a verbal clue, “[JOUR]NAL DES DEBATS”, Théodat’s favourite newspaper, which he always reads in the Café de la Comédie. The handshake of course refers metonymically to the friendship which will develop between the two men. Note the pleasant and very legible typeface used here: it is called Romana and was designed around 1860 by Théophile Beaudoire of the Fondérie Générale in Paris as a revival of 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 199 <?page no="200"?> 17 th century Dutch Elzevir types (Updike 1951, II: 185). The two relationships that form the central theme of the novel are presented antithetically, with the fullpage image giving greater weight to the one between Théodat and his sister. The headpiece is emphatic and unambiguous in its statement, and leads directly into the narrative. Thus, as we enter the novel, we start from a precarious balance of images and themes, that will be disturbed in the course of events, with uncertain outcome. That brings us to the end of this novel, and so it makes sense to show the two tailpieces that announce it. The first tailpiece refers to the story that Théodat has just been telling his friend about when his sister, then a very young girl, as they were exploring together in the mountains, discovered high up on a rock a saxifrage, a flower she had never seen before. There is a short question and answer exchange between brother and sister, followed by Théodat’s question to the narrator, and his answer: Fig. 49: Text and tailpiece, L’Infirme (p.-155) The tailpiece represents an augur’s staff, or lituus (Preston 1983: 249), held up in the sky before the halo of the sun. On turning this last page, we find a second tailpiece, an explicit finis, which in its motif and octagonal shape refers anaphorically back to the title-page vignette. Fig. 50: Finis tailpiece, L’Infirme (p.-156) 200 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="201"?> 3.2.4 The Librairie Hachette and Les Grands Écrivains The House of Hachette We now move on from Arthème Fayard and Joseph Ferenczi to the third French publisher and the third illustrated series to be presented in detail. This time we must go back to the beginning of the 19 th century, to Louis Hachette (1800-1864). The different branches of the Hachette family stem from the Ardennes, near the border to Belgium, and the future publisher’s family came from Bertoncourt, a village near Rethel. Louis’ father Jean got caught up in the turmoil of the Revolution and served for three years as an apprentice apothecary in the Rhine Army. Back in civil life he became a town clerk in Rethel, where in 1798 he married, fathered three children, of whom Louis was the eldest. Jean soon resumed his first profession, which finally took him and his family to Paris, where he worked in various functions in various hospitals, and left his wife to look after their children. Fortunately she found work as a washerwoman at the Lycée Impérial (today’s Lycée Louis-le-Grand, in the Quartier Latin), and that made it possible for Louis to be admitted as a day pupil, at a comparatively low fee. He passed his final examinations in 1819, and proceeded to study at the Pensionnat normal, a reformist teacher training institution founded by Napoleon in 1808 (Mistler 1964: 16-19). When this was closed down in 1822 for political reasons, Louis was forced to change his plans. He studied law for a while, earning his living as a private tutor to the son of an influential notary, who helped him to a “brevet de libraire-éditeur”. Without such a certificate, no one at that time could start in business as a bookseller or a publisher, as Jean-Yves Mollier explains in “Histoire de l’édition”, a France Culture programme in the series “La Fabrique de l’histoire”, 4 January 2007 (www.fabriquedesens.net/ Histoire-de-l-edition-4-La). Thus, in August 1826, Hachette was able to open a bookshop in the Quartier Latin of Paris, at 12 rue Pierre-Sarrazin, near the Sorbonne, as the successor to a previous bookshop on the same site. He remained very much interested in educational matters, producing textbooks and manuals of all kinds, notably an Alphabet et Premier Livre de lecture courante (1831), one million copies of which were provided for the new elementary schools in the course of three years. No wonder that in 1836 Hachette was awarded the title of “University Bookseller” (Mollier 2015: 138-143) by François Guizot, “ministre de l’Instruction publique”, and as such entrusted with the implementation of the first Primary Education Law of 28 June 1833. This decreed that all communities with over 500 inhabitants must provide elementary schooling for boys, free of charge for the poor. In view of the mutually beneficial relationship built up by Hachette and Guizot it will not come as a surprise to find the following page in Aubin Aymard’s Histoire de 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 201 <?page no="202"?> France. Cours moyen et supérieur / Préparation au certificat d’études, published by the Librairie Hachette in 1927: Fig. 51: A. Aymard, Histoire de France-: 121 202 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="203"?> This is a textbook for 11 to 13-year-old pupils in the last three primary school years, leading up to the “certificat d’études primaires”, the CEP, in the educational system that was in force till 1936. There were different versions of the book as required for different course levels. What is interesting from our perspective of popular illustrated reading matter is how Aymard connects information about educational reform in France during the reign of Louis- Philippe, “le roi des bourgeois”, with statistics about increasing alphabetisation after 1833, and additional information in the penultimate paragraph about the rise of the popular press in response to growing literacy. There is also a remarkable reference to Switzerland and Prussia as having been a step ahead of France in making primary education obligatory. The two engravings with portraits of Adolphe Thiers and Guizot (two out of over 400 pictures, diagrams and maps in this 190-page textbook) may serve as reminders of what a rich pictorial book tradition the French have enjoyed since the 16 th century (Néret 1953: 38-41). There is no need to go into details of the history of the Librairie Hachette in the 19 th century, but the important role it played in publishing for the railway age should be mentioned. Its main contribution was to set up a network of railway station kiosks and produce a suitable series of books, the Bibliothèque des chemins de fer. This was launched in 1854, after Louis Hachette had been to London three years before to see the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, and had realised the potential of railway stations as points of sale for books, magazines and newspapers. Hachette soon decided to follow the British model of W.H. Smith II, who in 1848 had secured a monopoly to open station bookstalls on the platforms of the London and North-Western Railway (Gascoigne 1993: s.v. “W.H. Smith”; Blasselle 1998: 54 f.). Hachette’s Bibliothèque des chemins de fer comprised seven sub-series, each distinguished by the colour of its paper covers, which stood for different genres: red for travel guides, green for history and travel, pink for juvenile reading etc. - one can see that the categories were chosen with a view to winning a very specific range of customers. With the aid of potent allies in politics and the book trade, Hachette soon convinced the authorities that the old “brevet” regulation need not apply in the case of station booksellers. By the time of his death, ten years later, Hachette had built up a network of 300 station bookstalls, which grew to over a thousand after 1900 (Mollier 2015: 207 f.). A second remarkable item in Hachette’s achievement was the realisation of an educational project that goes back to the days when Émile Littré had been his classmate and friend at the Lycée Impérial: 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 203 <?page no="204"?> Il accorda á son vieil ami, Émile Littré, un généreux contrat de 1841 à 1863, pour lui laisser le temps de rédiger son Dictionnaire de la langue française, montrant également un sens d’investissement à long terme dont seuls les plus grands éditeurs de la planète se révéleront capables. (Mollier 2015 : 146) Littré’s Dictionnaire was not completed till 1874, but was made available in instalments (“livraisons”) beginning at the turn of the year 1863-64, exactly at the moment when Pierre Larousse announced the publication of his Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (ibid.: 147, and cf. Mollier’s chapter on “Le siècle des dictionnaires”: 225-254). Here an academic dictionary of the language and a popular encyclopedic one entered the market together, a market already disputed by many other publishers in what Mollier calls “la guerre des dictionnaires”. Over the years, both Littré and Larousse would diversify, with an abridged edition of the “Grand Littré” becoming available in 1874 as the Petit Littré, and a copiously illustrated and abridged version of the “Grand Larousse” following in 1897-1904 as the Nouveau Larousse Illustré. This is worth mentioning because it bears on the development, education and extension of the reading public in the later 19 th century, and because it is yet another confirmation of the role that illustration played in all kinds of educational and diverting publications. In 1926 the Librairie Hachette celebrated its centenary, and this may have been the occasion to plan an entirely new series, which would continue the tradition of Les Grands Écrivains Français and develop it promisingly into the future. This series had been launched in 1887 under the direction of Jean-Jules Jusserand, and presented monographs on the French literary and philosophical heritage in a modest in-12° format, each illustrated at most with a frontispiece portrait, like the 1889 volume on A. Thiers by Paul de Remusat that I have on my desk at this moment. Jusserand remained in charge of the series till 1913, when it was so well established that it continued with an impressive range of authors and titles until well into the 1950s. There had been no intention of replacing it, but rather of supplementing it by something more elegant, extravagant. The solution seemed to be Les Grands Écrivains, but sadly the series remained unadventurously, exclusively French. Perhaps its early demise, after only 18 volumes, prevented it from reaching out into English, German and Russian writing, which one does find elsewhere in French publishing of the time. This is a deficit which also applies in a lesser degree to Fayard’s and Ferenczi’s series, which do include a small number of translated texts. The LGE series seems to have failed also because it did not really fit into the traditional Hachette programme, with its focus on educational and historical works. But there may be other reasons, as we will now discover. 204 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="205"?> Hachette’s Les Grands Écrivains, 1928-1932 Whereas Fayard’s LdD and Ferenczi’s LMI series share a number of character‐ istics that make them rather similar and at the same time easy to keep apart, Les Grands Écrivains does try to look different. It may be yet another illustrated series of fictional narratives, many of whose authors and titles also featured in the two earlier series, but one can see at first glance that it was designed to reach a different audience: Fig. 52: Pierre Loti, Pêcheur d’Islande, half-leather binding This is the first volume of the series, published in April 1928, in the publisher’s half-leather binding, i.e. leather-covered spine and corners, and the boards covered with marbled paper. The spine is divided into five panels, separated by four raised bands, with the author’s name in gilt letters in the second panel and the title in the fourth. It is a hollow spine, so the bands are what is called “false”, i.e. not functional as an element of the sewing, but decorative. The book’s top edge is also gilt, the other edges are rough-cut. This is a kind of binding that consciously imitates certain characteristics of a hand-bound book, without however pretending to be one. The title page of each volume (printed in black and red) carries the line “Édition Définitive” or “Édition Ne Varietur” (vols. 2 and 3). Hachette was thus claiming this to be an edition whose text has been finally established, but the claim is not substantiated in any way, either by referring to an “editio princeps” or to an authorised final edition such as an “Ausgabe letzter Hand”, or to a responsible editor 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 205 <?page no="206"?> (as practised by the Classiques Garnier, 1896 ff.). The company was clearly pursuing a strategy meant to upgrade the series and make it attractive for quality-conscious and slightly gullible customers. My copy of number 12 in the series, Les Croix de Bois, Roland Dorgelès’ famous novel about the Great War, happened to contain an advertising flyer, an example of the ephemera found so often in books of the period. The verso of the flyer lists the first 15 volumes of the series and features a second subscription ticket for ordering any of these. I have already referred to Édouard Estaunié’s L’Appel de la Route as a representative text, pointing out that it takes as its theme the situation of a group of young men meeting after the war in a Paris café to tell each other about their experiences and their plans for the future. The juxtaposition of these two titles about the war and its aftermath suggests that the topic still carried weight in early 1930, and would continue to do so the larger the threat of yet another war loomed. But let us consider the information given on the recto of the flyer. We learn that the LGE series was published in three different editions: a) A paperback edition, printed on white wove paper with ample margins and space between the lines (“en blanc”) and watermarked with a feather-motif (“filigrané à la plume”), at the price of 40 francs; b) A hardback edition with a slipcase, in a shagreen half-leather binding (i.e. “chagrin amateur”, an inexpensive and not very strong material, as the ambiguous “amateur” may suggest), priced at 75 francs; c) A paperbound and limited, numbered edition of 300 copies for the first seven titles, thereafter 200 copies, and only 50 copies for the last three titles, printed on a high quality wove paper made in Holland by Van Gelder, and watermarked accordingly. This cost 110 francs. All three editions were identical as far as the presswork is concerned. All had the same large octavo format, equivalent to A5, though the format is not mentioned on the flyer. The hardback edition was attractive because it caused no further expense - it was ready to be sorted into one’s library and to be read at leisure. The two paperbound editions were a different matter. The limited edition, which only affluent readers could afford, would have called for a proper professional binding at a price of another 100 francs or more, depending on the materials and style. The unlimited “cheap” edition would most often have remained in that state, and would gradually have decayed. My own collection comprises ten of the 40 francs edition, six of the hardbacks (none of which had a slipcase), and two of the Hollande. In order to put the LGE prices into perspective, one should remember that during the 30s the LdD 206 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="207"?> and LMI were available for 3,50 francs per volume (roughly equivalent to €4,00 today). Hachette’s pricing policy was certainly one factor in cutting short the LGE’s career after only 18 volumes. Another factor was of course the economic situation, culminating in the crisis of 1929, which hit both France and Germany heavily and led into the prolonged depression of the 30s. Also to be taken into consideration is the reception that the LGE series met with. Here is an editorial review from the quarterly Plaisir de Bibiophile (No. 14, Spring 1928), subtitled “Gazette trimestrielle des amateurs de livres modernes”, founded by the Éditions “Au sans pareil” in February 1925: L E S G R A N D S É C R I V A I N S . - La formule des livre dits de «-demi-luxe-» séduit les éditeurs, car ces ouvrages sont susceptibles d’intéresser une nombreuse clientèle qu’attire et que retient la modicité du prix. S’il faut reconnaître que toute diffusion des œuvres d’art est digne d’encouragement, encore ne faut-il pas confondre vulgarisation avec vulgarité. The writer (probably the publisher René Hilsum) goes on to praise those fellowpublishers like Crès (Les Maîtres du livre) and Mornay (Les Beaux Livres) who have not fallen into the trap of vulgarity. He then turns to the Librairie Hachette : Aussi pouvait-on espérer qu’une grande Maison comme la Librairie Hachette ne décevrait pas nos attentes et nos espoirs en créant une nouvelle collection de romans illustrés. Mais ni la typographie composée uniformément en caractères Cochin, ni les gravures conçues, dit le prospectus, « dans l’esprit le plus durable » (ce qui signifie malheureusement « suivant les formules les plus banales ») n’offrent le moindre intérêt. On ne rencontre dans les deux premiers volumes de la nouvelle collection appelée ‘Les Grands écrivains’ aucun souci d’adapter la décoration graphique au caractère de l’œuvre littéraire, et les illustrations de M. Renefer pour La Vagabonde manquent autant d’ingéniosité et de personnalité que celles de M. Dethomas, qui n’a pas trouvé pour Pêcheur d’Islande les accents de sincérité que nous nous plaisions à trouver souvent chez lui. Mais n’eût-on pas mieux fait de confier La Vagabonde à M. Dethomas et Pêcheur d’Islande à M. Renefer ? (Plaisir de Bibliophile, 14, 1928: 127 f.) And that is all the author has to say on the subject. He may be right in questioning the use of a Cochin type, here the Cochin “labeur” (Ponod in Martin/ Chartier 1986: 356). This was an elegant 18 th century alphabet created by Charles-Nicolas Cochin and revived by Deberny & Peignot in 1912. Perhaps it does not harmonise with the heavier contrasts of black and white in the woodcuts, though it goes well enough with the more delicate engravings. Beyond that, all the author has to offer in the way of argument is a number of vague criteria such as “ingeniousness” and “sincerity”. He does not attempt to 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 207 <?page no="208"?> explain what these terms mean or how they (or their lack) are to be recognised in a print. We can try to find out by looking at one of Dethomas’ illustrations, engraved by Paul Baudier, in the classic double-spread of frontispiece and title page: Fig. 53: Frontispiece and title-page of Pierre Loti, Pêcheur d’Islande Hilsum does not even mention the fact that for this book there are two artists who have joined their efforts in producing the illustrations. Maxime Dethomas (1867-1929) was an established painter, draughtsman and lithographer, and won great esteem for his set and costume designs for the Comédie-Française and the Opéra National in Paris. Here he is working in collaboration with Paul Baudier (1881-1962), scion of an extended family of illustrators and engravers, and also an excellent artist in his own right, both as a painter and as an engraver. It may suffice to call to mind the twelve volumes in the LdD series that he illustrated from 1923 to 1947 to indicate his breadth of experience. Dethomas had been illustrating books since the turn of the century, and before long he started working for the publisher and engraver Léon Pichon (1877-1956), one of the leading lights of the book reform movement in France. It is Pichon’s own account of this in the introduction to The New Book-Illustration in France (cf. Ch. 208 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="209"?> 2.3) that shows us how the cooperation between artist and engraver worked. Of Dethomas he says: M. Maxime Dethomas does not himself engrave his fine compositions, but his bold, clear, and broad drawing is so “xylographic” (if the term may be permitted) that his interpreters have only to be conscientious and follow him closely in order to produce a faithful and exact version. (Pichon 1924: 21) Pichon is here reporting his own experience, for in the second part of his book he presents three examples of illustrations by Dethomas for books that Pichon published from 1919 to 1923. All three are described as being “pen drawing[s] on wood [,] engraved by Léon Pichon” (ibid., 85-87). The fact is that Dethomas applied his pen directly to the block of boxwood, in such a way that Pichon could see exactly where and how to apply his engraver’s tools. John Beedham gives a precise description of the process: The artist [drew] on the wood, filling the shading with a wash of Indian ink and finishing by means of pen or pencil lines, or perhaps using the pen alone, but whether drawn by pen or pencil the engraver faithfully reproduced it, line by line. (Beedham 1925: 14 f.) When we look closely at the frontispiece of Pêcheur d’Islande we can confirm that the artist and the interpreter have done excellent work. We can admire the sharp contrasts of black and white surfaces which distinguish background and foreground, and then a more subtle contrast of straight parallel lines, curving parallels, and overlapping contrasting curves in the mast of the fishing boat and elsewhere. We recognise two fishermen, one perhaps younger than the other, identify a winch (exactly in the centre of the picture) and a kind of trough, and if we are not sure, then it is not the engraving that is defective but our knowledge of deep-sea fishing. We will be learning quite a lot about this and other things as we read our way through the book, and it is all these things we do not yet know about that the frontispiece is pointing forward to. The novel is divided into five parts, with six to seventeen chapters per part. The eleven illustrations are spread evenly over the book, with the traditional frontispiece facing the title page, as we have already seen. Each part opens with a headpiece, ten lines high and as broad as the type area (4½ x 9½ cm). The remaining five engravings are carried out as full-page episodic illustrations, one for each part. Here is the first headpiece: 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 209 <?page no="210"?> Fig. 54: Pierre Loti, Pêcheur d’Islande: 5. We are being invited to look through a window into a private apartment. Two women wearing Breton bonnets are sitting at a table. In the background one can see a fireplace, overhead are the rafters of a low ceiling, and on the window-sill there are three flower-pots, with shutters left and right. The woman on the left is looking out of the window at passers-by or at us, while the younger woman on the right seems to be preoccupied with something on the table in front of her. There are clearly limits to how much of what the illustration shows can be identified at first sight - “wait and see” is the best approach. We move on from this headpiece to the first paragraphs of the novel, from the women waiting at home to the men on the fishing boat, the Marie, under Captain Guermeur. There are six of them, plus a ship’s boy and a dog, and their “gîte” is in stark contrast to the women’s sittingroom - it is narrow and stinks of brine, the big, square-shouldered fishermen crouch low under the beams and deck-planks at their heavy table to sip their wine and cider. Here is a passage which may show why readers will find it difficult both to decipher the illustrations and to understand the text, treating as it does of a way of life so remote from their own: Les cinq hommes étaient vêtus pareillement, un épais tricot de laine bleue serrant le torse et s’enfonçant dans la ceinture du pantalon ; sur la tête, l’espèce de casque en toile goudronnée qu’on appelle suroît (du nom de ce vent de sud-ouest qui dans notre hémisphère amène les pluies). (Loti 1928: 6 f.) They are so alike in dress and figure that one can hardly tell them apart. Two of them, Yann and Sylvestre, are friends, and they love to chaff each other about their girl-friends and affairs, “la grande conversation des mariages” as the narrator calls it (ibid.: 9). This topic is taken up again from a different perspective at the beginning of Chapter III: 210 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="211"?> À Paimpol, un beau jour de cette année-là, un dimanche de juin, il y avait deux femmes très occupées à écrire une lettre. Cela se passait devant une large fenêtre qui était ouverte et dont l’appui, en granit ancien et massif, portait une rangée de pots de fleurs. Penchées sur leur table, toutes deux semblaient jeunes ; l’une avait une coiffe extrêmement grande, à la mode d’autrefois; l’autre, une coiffe de la forme nouvelle qu’ont adoptée les Paimpolaises: - deux amoureuses, eût-on dit, rédigeant ensemble un message tendre pour quelque bel Islandais. […] (ibid.: 20) A moment later, the older woman, who has been dictating the letter, looks up, and the narrator recognises that she is at least 70 and must be a grandmother. We learn that they are writing to Sylvestre, the old lady’s grandson, whom we have already seen on the Marie. A moment later, the letter is finished, except for greetings to Yann that Grandmother Moan asks Gaud, the younger woman, to add, which she blushingly does. The omniscient narrator tells us that at this moment Gaud remembers how she first met Yann last December at the “pardon des Islandais”, held in honour of the patron saint of fishermen, and that is the subject of the next chapter of Part One and the first full-page episodic illustration. If I am not mistaken, it shows us Yann and Gaud at bottom right: Fig. 55: Pierre Loti, Pêcheur d’Islande-: 35. 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 211 <?page no="212"?> A complementary insight into the theme of marriage can be won from a passage that precedes this engraving and throws a shadow on the hopes and desires not only of this young couple, but on all those in Paimpol whose husbands, fathers and sons will be absent from spring to autumn in the Iceland fishing-grounds: À ce pardon, la joie était lourde et un peu sauvage, sous un ciel triste. Joie sans gaîté, qui était faite surtout d’insouciance et de défi : de vigueur physique et d’alcool ; sur laquelle pesait, moins déguisée qu’ailleurs, l’universelle menace de mourir. (ibid.: 33) Are there not signs of the “universal menace of death” in the images that Dethomas has devised to illustrate the pardon? What do these houses suggest? What message do the steep alleys transport? And what about the isolated couple that we have provisionally identified? All these questions keep us wondering and reading. Les Grands Écrivains: Summary The information presented in the following table derives from the title-pages and the colophons of the 18 volumes constituting the series. In the first column the volumes are numbered to confirm the correct sequence. The volumes themselves do not carry a number, but the exact date of printing is given in each colophon. I have added the first names of the illustrators where they were omitted, as is usually the case with Renefer and occasionally with Dethomas. The engraver of the illustrations for volume 8, André Baudier, is the younger brother of Paul Baudier (Osterwalder 1992). The title-pages distinguish between an artist’s “gravures originales” and the cooperation between a draughtsman and an engraver, naming both. All the books were printed by Paul Brodard, “maître-imprimeur à Coulommiers”, a printer of high repute. No. - Author Title Illustrator/ Engraver Date 1 - Pierre Loti Pêcheur d’Islande 11 illustrations by Maxime De‐ thomas, engraved on wood by Paul Baudier 30/ 04/ 1928 2 - Colette La Vagabonde 16 original wood‐ cuts by Raymond Renefer 14/ 05/ 1928 3 - Pierre Benoit L’Atlantide 22 illustrations by Maurice de Lam‐ bert, engraved on wood by Paul Baudier 18/ 06/ 1928 212 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="213"?> 4 Henri de Rég‐ nier Le Mariage de minuit 22 original wood‐ cuts by René Pot‐ tier 30/ 09/ 1928 5 - François Mauriac Le Baiser au Lépreux ; Géni‐ trix 19 original wood‐ cuts by Paul Baudier 10/ 11/ 1928 6 - Alphonse Daudet Sapho 16 illustrations by Maxime De‐ thomas, engraved on wood Paul Baudier 15/ 01/ 1929 7 - André Maurois Les Silences du Colonel Bramble ; Les Discours du Docteur O’Grady 13 + 12 illustra‐ tions by Paul Sarrut, engraved on wood by Paul Baudier 25/ 03/ 1929 8 - Paul Bourget L’Étape 14 illustrations by Robert Mahias, en‐ graved on wood by André Baudier 25/ 04/ 1929 9 - Georges Du‐ hamel Vie des martyrs 1914-1916 19 illustrations by P.L. Guilbert, en‐ graved on wood by Paul Baudier 10/ 06/ 1929 10 - René Bazin Les Oberlé 18 original wood‐ cuts by Henry Cheffer 20/ 09/ 1929 11 - Henry de Bordeaux La Robe de laine 16 illustrations by Maurice de Lam‐ bert, engraved on wood by Paul Baudier 04/ 11/ 1929 12 - Roland Dor‐ gelès Les Croix de bois 18 original wood‐ cuts by Paul Vig‐ oureux 05/ 02/ 1930 13 - Édouard Es‐ taunié L’Appel de la route 18 original wood‐ cuts by André De‐ slignères 15/ 03/ 1930 14 - Maurice Barrès La Colline in‐ spirée 21 original wood‐ cuts by Paul-Emile Colin 15/ 05/ 1930 3.2 Popular Illustrated Fiction Series in France 213 <?page no="214"?> 15 Marcel Pré‐ vost Les Demivierges 16 illustrations by Gaston Fédit, en‐ graved on wood by Paul Baudier 15/ 09/ 1930 16 - Pierre Loti Aziyadé 18 illustrations by Maurice de Lam‐ bert, engraved on wood by Paul Baudier 20/ 01/ 1931 17 - Abel Hermant Souvenirs du Vicomte de Courpière 16 original wood‐ cuts by Omer Bouchery 03/ 04/ 1931 18 - Pierre Benoit Mademoiselle de la Ferté 16 illustrations by L.-M. Myr, en‐ graved by Paul Baudier 05/ 11/ 1932 In summary, it seems that Hachette’s choice of authors and texts was far too conservative to make much of an impression on the demi-luxe book market of the turn of the decade. There was not enough difference between the programmes of the LdD and LMI on the one hand, and the LGE on the other, to encourage readers and book-buyers to turn to the Hachette series, and of course Hachette’s prices would have put off anyone so inclined. The LGE had a style that was recognisably their own, and the quality of typography, illustrations and paper were all as good as or better than in the case of their competitors, but not decisively. The careful observance of the rules obtaining in a colophon is laudable, but was probably only recognised by a minority of readers. It is not surprising therefore, that the series was not a commercial success, and that no other publisher in the 30s attempted the like. 3.3 German illustrated book series Cultural and political shifts in Germany Travelling “by book” (and isn’t it remarkable what a magnificent means of transport narrative fiction can be? ) from France to Germany, and next to Britain, may come as a bit of a disappointment, at least in terms of our subject. We leave behind us a wealth of illustrated editions and series produced in the capital city of a country that had suffered terribly in a war fought to a great extent on its own territory, a city that continued to be “a magnetic cultural centre” and “the very hub of European modernist activity” (Nicholls 1995: 136). After the centralist 214 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="215"?> dominance of Paris, what we find in Germany is that its cultural centres are spread all over the country, from Berlin to Leipzig and Munich, from Stuttgart to Cologne and Hamburg, a positive legacy of what Germans mockingly called their “Kleinstaaterei”. Yet the Germany of 1918 was anything but a cultural backwater. In literature and art, the realist and naturalist movements of the late 19 th century had flourished no less than in France or Great Britain, with writers like Fontane and Hauptmann indicating their widening scope, and their shifts of emphasis and purpose, from reflective realism to committed naturalism, as comparison with the generations before them shows. A painter like Adolph Menzel (1815-1905) fascinates and irritates by the complexities and contradictions of his work, by turns realistic and idealising, and even protoimpressionist. Menzel’s historical paintings of Prussian themes may seem to display affirmative and celebratory attitudes, though elements of satire occur, but like his works on contemporary subjects such as the revolutionary uprisings of March 1848, or the satanic aspect of industrial labour in his Eisenwalzwerk (Iron Rolling Mill, 1875) they are based on careful observation and detailed studies. That is why the art historian Hubert Locher classifies him as “Maler des modernen Blicks” (Locher 2005: 127-131). His early pen drawings (transformed into 200 wood engravings) for Franz Kugler’s immensely popular Geschichte Friedrichs des Grossen (1840) can be cited as a landmark in the tradition of draughtsmanship, together with the very different and even more popular illustrated verse tales of Wilhelm Busch, from Max und Moritz (1865) to Maler Klecksel (1884). This tradition of linear drawing remains a strong conservative force in German illustration after 1900, as we shall see later. In contrast, the many innovative movements that followed Impressionism, such as Jugendstil, Art Nouveau, and Expressionism, and later Bauhaus and Neue Sachlichkeit, together constitute what in Germany is now called “klassische Moderne”, in fulfilment of Charles Baudelaire’s far-sighted dialectic definition in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” (1836): La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitive, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable. […] Cet élément transitoire, fugitif, dont les métamorphoses sont si fréquentes, vous n’avez pas le droit de le mépriser ou de vous en passer. En le supprimant, vous tombez forcément dans le vide d’une beauté abstraite et indéfinissable, comme celle de l’unique femme avant le premier pêché. (Baudelaire, «-Le peintre de la vie moderne-» 1945: 72 f.) Every style of art or of literature is a complex of established tradition, continual change, and often even revolt. Just as the German writers of “Sturm und Drang” turned against the rationalism of the enlightenment, so the expressionist 3.3 German illustrated book series 215 <?page no="216"?> writers and artists turned away from the realist and naturalist doctrines of “observed reality” in favour of a subjective focus on internal realities of the human soul. That does not mean that the cognitive and aesthetic standards of earlier periods were jettisoned, rather that they were understood differently and therefore modified or transformed, as in the step-by-step movement from mimesis towards abstraction that one can observe in the work of artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. In comparing illustrated narratives from three literary and artistic cultures, we are faced with transformations of style that may seem contingent, expressing the transitory nature of styles, and vanishing as quickly or as gradually as they appeared. But styles were also shaped by political, economic and ethical concerns, as in the case of the 1890s revival of woodcut illustration and ornament discussed in Ch. 2: it had a lasting effect on book illustration, even while it underwent changes with respect to composition, perspective, colour, technique and themes. Such innovation has enabled woodcutting to survive and to compete with other techniques, such as white-line engraving, line drawing and water-colour painting, as well as photographic and digital processes. The spirit of modernism was decidedly international, transcultural even, in the sense that its often paradoxical key attitudes and manifestations were shared and developed all over Europe: ironic detachment and nervous anxiety, high hopes for the future coupled with a radical scepticism about the chances of realising them, a keen awareness of the limitations of traditional notions of morality, and the need for new modes of perception and forms of representation beyond the mimetic (Nicholls 1995: 112-117, 242; Radkau 1998: 173-190). These elements of modernism existed not only in opposition to but also side by side with the very attitudes the movement called into question, not least the some‐ times nostalgic, sometimes truculent hankering after the old consensus, the tried and tested order. The different ways of thinking and feeling met and mingled in the newspapers, the magazines, and many other fields of expression and contestation, both private and public. In such an atmosphere, Germany stood fair to achieve a new beginning in the realm of illustrated narrative. The resources of her literary and artistic traditions were enormous, and the socio-economic structures of publishing and reading seemed equal to any challenge. Germany had responded much more enthusiastically than France to the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, whose example inspired quite a number of publishers to revise the design of their books with regard to typography, ornament and illustration. One of the earliest was Eugen Diederichs (1867-1930), who founded his firm in Florence in 1896, moved to Leipzig half a year later, and then in 1904 settled down in Jena. He worked together with graphic artists and typographers 216 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="217"?> like Emil Rudolf Weiss (1875-1942) and Fritz Hellmut Ehmke (1878-1965), and produced editions of Novalis, Maurice Maeterlinck, Ruskin and a wide range of books on topics in cultural history. But in the course of the new century’s first decade, Diederichs moved closer and closer to nationalist and conservative “völkisch” attitudes, publishing bestsellers like Hermann Löns, Der Wehrwolf: Eine Bauernchronik (1910), a “Blut-und-Boden” narrative about the resistance of farmers in the Lüneburg Heath area to Swedish marauders during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). As the pressure on publishers, writers and artists to conform to the rising nationalist and racist ideologies increased in the course of the late 20s, they either had to adjust their programmes, switch to other occupations, or leave the country. The political and social realities in this decade were not auspicious, as Piers Brendon explains with reference to the year 1923: The lost war and the cruel peace had reduced the new Weimar Republic to a condi‐ tion bordering on anarchy. Short-lived governments were challenged by separatist organisations and putsches from the Left and Right. There was a rash of political assassinations. Riots and strikes proliferated. Poverty and hunger stalked the land. France’s intransigent President Poincaré demanded prompt payment of reparations, fixed at the enormous sum of 132 billion gold marks; and when the Germans defaulted in January 1923 French troops marched into the Rhineland, proposing to dig out the Ruhr’s coal, as Lloyd George said, with bayonets. More insidious still, inflation was destroying the value of money like some financial cancer. (Brendon 2000: 31). We should bear this “financial cancer” in mind when we come to consider why so many promising publishing ventures of the 1920s in Germany faltered and finally collapsed, while similar series in France flourished. The social and political differences between the two countries must also be taken into consideration: in 1920, the French had been practising republican citizenship successfully for half a century, and in spite of their share of global economic difficulties, the French governments managed during the 1930s to institute important social reforms such as family allowances, the 40-hour week and paid leave. In Germany, by contrast, the imperial monarchy was not abolished till November 1918, leaving the political parties to find a new balance under the democratic constitution of July 1919. With the moderate socialist Friedrich Ebert as President of the Republic, from 1919 to his death in 1925, this seemed possible, in spite of outbreaks of violence such as the murder in June 1922 of foreign minister Walter Rathenau, who in his book Von kommenden Dingen (1918) had expressed an inspiring gradualist vision of a better society. But Ebert was succeeded by field-marshal Hindenburg, a fervent monarchist and too feeble to resist the encroachments of what called itself national socialism. When 3.3 German illustrated book series 217 <?page no="218"?> he appointed Hitler as head of the government in January 1933, the Weimar Republic collapsed, and a totalitarian dictatorship was established, with all its concomitants: the abolition of the freedom of the press and the arts, and the loss of fundamental political rights, the persecution of Jews and many others. The book burnings of 10 May 1933 were only one of the most horribly spectacular events in this connection, as recounted by Richard Ovenden in his Burning the Books (2020: 119-122). In September 1933 the new “Reichskulturkammer” under Joseph Goebbels began its surveillance of all German authors and artists, which reached a propagandist climax in July 1937 with two simultaneous exhibitions in Munich: one of “Entartete Kunst” (“degenerate art”) in the Hofgarten arcades, and a counter-exhibition of “racially pure art” in the “Haus der Deutschen Kunst”. The German public was urged to come to Munich (and later to Berlin, Leipzig, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt) and see the difference for themselves, to recognise what “völkische Kunst” looked like, Nordic art by and for the people, in contrast to things produced by aliens, non-Aryans, Semites. A decade earlier, in his speech Von deutscher Republik (published as a 40-page pamphlet by S. Fischer in 1923), Thomas Mann had raised his voice in support of the new departure for a republican society, fully conscious of the many mutterings and grumbling protests coming from people who felt humiliated, deceived and robbed of all their hopes of a decent future. The occasion of Mann’s speech was the 60 th birthday of the naturalist writer Gerhart Hauptmann, whose “Volkstümlichkeit des humansten Gepräges” (Mann 1923: 8) prompts Mann to place him in the tradition of the romantic enthusiast Novalis, i.e. Friedrich von Hardenberg, the author of Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799), in which the unity of Europe that had existed before the Reformation is glorified. Hauptmann had already attained recognition from Oxford University (honorary doctorate, 1905) and from the Nobel Committee (Nobel Prize, 1912), and it was the European and transculturally humanist dimension of his writing and thinking that Mann wanted to commend as a model to his audience in the Berlin Beethoven- Saal in October 1922. Mann’s awareness that many of his listeners rejected republicanism as something foreign and un-German repeatedly led him to address them directly, as in this passage: Faßt endlich Vertrauen, - ein allgemeines Vertrauen, das für den Anfang nur im Fahrenlassen des Vorurteils zu bestehen braucht, als sei deutsche Republik ein Popanz und Widersinn, als müsse sie das sein, was Novalis als „verwaltende und charakterisierende fremde Kraft“ bestimmt, nämlich Schwäche! (Mann 1923: 18) It is this lack of confidence in their ability to rebuild Germany as a republic, this fear of seeming weak and losing their received cultural identity, that made so 218 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="219"?> many German people willing to listen to nationalist propaganda during the 20s. It must also have been a force that had an effect on what kind of books could be produced for a popular market, on the authors and titles selected, and on their typography and illustration. An illustrated series before 1923 In order to understand the development of illustrated fiction in Germany during the first third of the twentieth century it may be helpful to begin with a general overview of the field by way of an example. It will reveal a landscape of fits and starts, of hopeful beginnings and sudden collapses, with so many agents involved in so many ventures, building on so many literary and artistic resources, yet not one of them managing to achieve anything like the continuity of their French compeers Arthème Fayard and Joseph Ferenczi during the same period. But first, a brief glance at the period before the Great War. That Germany was an attractive market for readers of illustrated fiction is documented by a publisher’s series called Die Bücher des Deutschen Hauses, launched in late 1907, and by 1910 totalling 113 volumes in five sub-series of 25 numbers each, the fifth series never completed. The series was edited by the writer and journalist Rudolf Presber (1864-1935) for the Buchverlag fürs Deutsche Haus in Berlin and Leipzig. Seeking support for his project, Presber appealed to Thomas Mann for a recommendation, sending him the first 12 volumes. Mann complied and documented his response in a brief article “Die Bücher des Deutschen Hauses” (published in the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, Vorabend-Blatt, 12 February 1908, repr. Mann 2002: 192 f.). Mann is sympathetic to the project, to the choice of authors and titles, and declares that with these twelve books he could easily survive three months of rural solitude. He praises the quality of the bindings, the paper, typography and illustrations, and is astonished at the price: [D]as eigentlich Erstaunliche ist die Ausstattung - zusammen mit dem Preis, für den sie geboten wird. Die Bücher sind in einem modernen Geschmack durabel und stattlich gebunden. Sie zeigen auf starkem Papier einen geräumigen und angenehmen Druck. Unterrichtete Literaten schrieben die Einleitungen. Geschickte Zeichner lieferten den Bildschmuck. Und diese Bücher, deren Ladenpreis man unbedenklich auf mindestens zwei Mark fünfzig schätzt, kosten Stück für Stück fünfundsiebzig Pfennig. (Mann 2002: 193) All the books are bound in full cloth, each of the five sub-series in a different colour, and each with a distinctive decorative pattern on the front and back covers and flat spines. All three trimmed edges show a printed pattern coloured to match the cloth, different for each sub-series. The endpapers are decorated 3.3 German illustrated book series 219 <?page no="220"?> with a stylised floral pattern in black on white, and an ex libris is incorporated on the front endpaper. There is typographical ornament throughout each text, but the number of textual illustrations is limited, and of uneven quality, and after the third sub-series they disappear. Unfortunately, these books were not sewn with a cotton or linen thread but wire-stitched, and therefore liable to rust. After the 20s, wiring was given up except for pamphlets and brochures and the like. By way of compensation, one can make some interesting discoveries in Presber’s series, e.g. Laurence Sterne’s Das Leben und die Meinungen von Herrn Tristram Shandy, with four plates by Lovis Corinth (vol. 39, 1908). There is an introduction by one “W.M.” who explains that the translation by Johann Joachim Bode (1776) has been slightly modernised and abridged by omitting many “längere Abschweifungen” (Sterne 1908: 12). Corinth’s illustrations are reproduced photographically from the brush and black ink originals, and although they are rather dark, they do communicate an atmosphere of merrymaking. It was quite an achievement to produce so many volumes in so short a time, and to provide a popular market with entertaining reading matter that was pleasant to look at and to handle. The programme was mainly German, but authors like Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, Poe, Balzac, Maupassant, Zola, Puschkin, Gogol, Tolstoi etc. ensured an international dimension. Presber himself does not seem to have regarded the project as a success, or he would at least have given it passing mention in his autobiographical Ich gehe durch mein Haus: Erinnerungen (1935). Perhaps at that point in time it no longer seemed opportune for him to recall such exploits in international culture. Before we look at three 1920s examples of illustrated series in Germany, I will give a brief report on two representative accounts of early 20 th century illustration. The first of these is Adolf Sennewald’s bibliographic compendium of Deutsche Buchillustratoren im ersten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts: Materialien für Bibliophile (1999). This provides a detailed list of 113 German illustrators of the period, from Walter Becker to Julius Zimpel, and of the works they illustrated, adding a selective catalogue of eleven illustrated series, ten of which were published between 1906 and 1925. Six of these were comparatively expensive bibliophile series, leaving just four series that can be classified as popular: • Illustrierte Reihe, Josef Singer Verlag, Leipzig, 1919-30 (23 vols.) • Der lichte Steg, Verlag Habbel, Regensburg, 1921-22 (24 vols., 4 as double nos.) • Das Prisma, Verlag Tillgner, Berlin, 1922-23 (13 vols., 2 as double nos.) • Zweifäusterdrucke, Verlag Matthes, Hartenstein/ Leipzig, 1918-25 (c. 200 vols.) 220 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="221"?> Sennewald gives concise and reliable technical data for all the volumes he has been able to identify, but nothing in the way of descriptions or evaluations. He recognises that illustrated publishers’ series are a characteristic phenomenon of the period, but has no more to say about the matter. In his list of illustrators he does refer to series like Fischers illustrierte Bücher, Die schwarzen Bücher and Die graphischen Bücher, but he does not include these in his section on “Illustrierte Reihenwerke”. His focus on bibliophily is replicated in a publication by Lothar Lang, Buchkunst und Kunstgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert: Graphik, Illustration, Malerbuch (2005). The author insists on making a sharp distinction between original illustration as it occurs in a “Malerbuch” (F: livre d’artiste, livre de peintre ; E: artist’s book), and reproduced illustrations used to furnish books produced commercially for “Alltagsleser”, everyday readers (Lang 2005: 39-44). Lang insists that only a “Malerbuch” or “Künstlerbuch” that is an independent or even singular “Kunstobjekt” (F: objet d’art), a status which mass-produced illustrated books can never attain, is worthy of the attention of art historians and collectors (ibid.: 40). I have already argued that this kind of dichotomy is unhelpful, since it obscures the innumerable gradations that span the field between an artist’s original creation and work reproduced in large numbers by craftsmen employing mechanical aids. One of the artist’s books that Lang repeatedly refers to is a posthumous collection of poems by the expressionist Georg Heym (1887-1912), entitled Umbra Vitae. It was first published by Rowohlt (Leipzig) in the year of Heym’s death by drowning while skating on the frozen river Havel. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), a foremost expressionist artist, had begun to work on woodcuts to accompany these poems in 1918, while convalescing in Davos, and since he had contacts with the Kurt Wolff Verlag in Munich via his contributions to Wolff’s journal Genius in 1920-21, he was soon offered a contract to design a new edition of Heym’s poems in all its aspects: typography, layout, paper, cover design and illustration. This was published in June 1924 in a limited edition of 510 copies, the first 10 copies being printed on hand-made Japan paper, bound in leather and signed by the artist. A true artist’s book, no doubt, but what if it were reprinted? In 2009 the Kirchner edition was indeed reprinted in facsimile by Reclam, still famous for their Universal-Bibliothek, initiated in 1867. Now why should this reprint, very carefully produced in an edition of 5000 copies, and presented in a slip case together with an informative 52-page supplement, be aesthetically, culturally or otherwise inferior to the 1924 edition? Because it lacks the aura of the original? Because it has a much lower market value? Surely it remains an artist’s book, in a form that most people can afford to buy, can look at, touch and read and think about 3.3 German illustrated book series 221 <?page no="222"?> as often as they like, and that is what constitutes its real worth. The Insel- Bücherei reprint of 1962 (IB 749) omits Kirchner’s endpapers and frontispiece and replaces the original cover with a completely different design by Eugen O. Sporer, but it does reproduce all the woodcuts and the original typography, though reduced in size by 40-%, all in all a rather half-hearted effort. Now let us see what the Insel-Bücherei of the 1920s and 30s achieved. 3.3.1 Illustrated fiction in the Insel-Bücherei The history of the Insel-Verlag is so well documented that there is no need to retell it here, except to remind readers of one of the cornerstones on which it was erected. The publishing house was born as an offshoot of Die Insel, a monthly magazine of literature and criticism, “mit Buchschmuck und Illustrationen”. Its first number appeared in October 1899, edited by Rudolf Alexander Schröder and Alfred Walter Heymel, who had devised the project while they were still grammar school boys in Bremen in 1897. They were joined by Otto Julius Bierbaum, a dozen years older, who had good contacts in the literary world and editorial experience, and to whom Schröder and Heymel left most of the practical work. When they saw the first pages set up in black letter with heavy ornaments designed by Georges Lemmen they were far from happy, as Klaus Schöffling reports in Die ersten Jahre des Insel Verlages, 1899-1902, his companion volume to the reprint edition of Die Insel (1981: 13). Still, the first year’s issues were quite impressive, with contemporary texts in various genres by Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Detlev von Liliencron, Robert Walser, Franz Blei and Julius Meier-Graefe, as well as by Schröder and Bierbaum. French and English-language writers were well represented. Important illustrators such as Marcus Behmer, Thomas Theodor Heine, Felix Vallotton, and Emil Rudolf Weiss had been won for the project. In the magazine’s second year, the black letter was replaced by a roman type, and the number of illustrations and the price were reduced - Die Insel had not attracted enough readers. In its third year, Bierbaum became the sole editor, and in September 1902 a final double number was published. Many of the characteristic features of Die Insel were carried over into what was later to become the Insel Verlag, directed at first, parallel to their work on the magazine, by Schröder and Heymel. After a transitional phase, it was Anton Kippenberg (1874-1950) who in 1905 took over as the director (Schöffling 1981: 68 f.) and turned the publishing house into a successful enterprise, best known for its still thriving series, the Insel-Bücherei. 222 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="223"?> It was Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), however, who during a meeting with Kippenberg in November 1909 first came up with a proposal to start a new series of “Flugschriften” (F: feuilles volantes; E: pamphlets, or chapbooks), slim octavo volumes of two or three quires in which various kinds of short texts could be presented. An exchange of letters and ideas now began that lasted through the next two years. Zweig was beginning to lose hope when Kippenberg, in January 1912, wrote to confirm the series-title Insel-Bücherei (IB) and suggested an inaugural list of 20 titles of up to five quires, selling at 50 Pfennigs each. A few days later, Kippenberg was able to buy the rights to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (1906) from the Berlin publisher Axel Juncker, and this became the first volume of the new series, on sale in the bookshops in early July (Sarkowski/ Jeske 1999: 116-122). Because of the uniform format and binding, with thin, paper-covered boards and flat spine, and their typical labels on front cover and spine, the books were easily recognised as forming a series. The many different patterned papers used added a welcome note of variety. Our focus is of course on the illustrated numbers of the IB, and especially on the way the illustrations changed over the next years. During the period from July 1912 to the end of 1935, 482 numbers appeared, of which exactly 100 employed some kind of visual material. Of these, 23 are nonfiction guides to topics like flora, fauna, art, crafts and culture, in which short texts served to explain the pictures. A further 25 numbers have one single image, e.g. a title vignette, while the text itself is not illustrated. The remaining 52 numbers in different literary genres have at least two illustrations to the text and can thus count as more or less illustrated. In other words, only one in ten of the IB were books of illustrated fiction. Almost half these illustrations stem from the period before 1850, just over half from 1850 to c.1930. This might seem to indicate that visual traditionalism and modernism strike a balance in the series, but that is not borne out by further investigation. Only 7 % of the fully illustrated volumes were the work of artists active from 1912 to 1935, and not all of these belonged to the avant garde. On the contrary, one soon discovers that modernist artists who contributed to the early IB, like Oskar Kokoschka, Max Unold, Alfred Kubin, Karl Rössing or Hans Alexander Müller, were increasingly displaced by traditionalists such as Fritz Kredel, Fritz Fischer, Willi Harwerth or Josuah Leander Gampp, whose work was more to Kippenberg’s taste (Sarkowski/ Jeske 1999: 381) and even decorated his office (Sarkowski 2002: 30). Writers like Stefan Zweig and Heinrich Mann suffered the same fate, being ousted by Plutarch (IB 122) and Hermann Stehr (IB 62). Even Hippolyte Taine’s Balzac: Ein Essay had to yield in 1933 to Detlev 3.3 German illustrated book series 223 <?page no="224"?> von Liliencron’s Ausgewählte Gedichte (IB 63). The political slant becomes obvious when we see that IB 347, Altjüdische Legenden, edited by Micha Josef bin Gorion (1922), was replaced in 1933 by Der Sachsenspiegel, a 13 th century law book edited by Eberhardt Freiherr von Künßberg. The same programmatic antisemitism is evident in the replacement of Heinrich Heine’s Elementargeister (IB 316) in 1934 by Das kleine Baumbuch, with 35 colourplates by Willi Harwerth and a pseudo-philosophic afterword by Friedrich Schnack, which opens with the dubious assertion that “Der Wald ist ein Volk und die Bäume sind seine grünen Leute” (Schnack 1934: 43). It has remained in print thus to this day. Even if Kippenberg was under strong institutional pressure to eliminate all Jewish items, the original texts could easily have been reinstated after 1945 as a token of both remorse and good will. I would now like to introduce just a few of the illustrated volumes of the IB that substantiate the above remarks and are also of interest for other reasons. We can begin with the year 1919, when the Insel was able to settle down to peace-time conditions again. The first illustrated number in that year was the prose narrative Tubutsch (IB 261) by Albert Ehrenstein (1886-1950). This is the author’s merciless self-analysis of his fictional alter ego, “Karl Tubutsch”, written in an experimental, expressionist mode, both painful and comic, and not easy to read. Perhaps that explains the terse comment that a past owner of my copy has pencilled at the end of the first section: “meschugge! ”, the Yiddish word for “crazy”. This first part, “Ritter Johann des Todes”, was originally an independent short story published in 1910 in Karl Kraus’ satirical magazine Die Fackel, and now serves as a prelude. Tubutsch was illustrated by Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), Ehrenstein’s friend and fellow Austrian, with twelve intriguing full-page pen drawings (one repeated on the title-page in reduced size) made for the first Vienna edition of 1911. Here is the first full-page illustration to the prelude, showing “Ritter Johann des Todes”, an apocalyptic rider reminiscent of Dürer, but transformed, and “die Jungfrau, die alle hundert Jahre aus dem Felsen Not hervorschießt”, a kind of “Belle Dame sans Merci”. It shows a characteristic feature of almost all of Kokoschka’s drawings for this text, namely the layer of abstract diagonal criss-cross lines drawn over the figures, objects and landscapes he portrays: 224 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="225"?> Fig. 56: A. Ehrenstein, Tubutsch: 5 The effect of this veiling is to obscure parts of the primary image, and to draw the reader’s attention to those parts of the drawing that are lit up, that reflect the light. Kokoschka’s illustrations progress parallel to the development of the narrative from heavy initial veiling through more light and less shadow to a paradoxical but convincing climactic radiance. This is achieved in the final illustration, a portrait of Ehrenstein as Tubutsch in the loving embrace of a skeleton, often referred to in German as “Freund Hein” (cf. Kurt Pinthus’ anthology Menschheitsdämmerung, 1920, repr. 1995: 173, 340 f.): 3.3 German illustrated book series 225 <?page no="226"?> Fig. 57: A. Ehrenstein, Tubutsch: 53 The first-person narrative leading up to this illustration extends over more than four pages of the tale and evokes a series of images of Death, from a peasant armed with a scythe, to a minister dissolving the Reichstag. Here is a short passage from the final paragraph which expounds the picture: Und nun soll mir ein strahlender Tod entgehen, Freund Hein mir zusammen schrumpfen zum Spottbild? ! Wäre das gerecht? Mag dem sein, wie ihm wolle, mir bleibt nichts anderes übrig, ich werde von dannen gehen, die Erde, dieses Kabinett mit separiertem Ausgang! verlassen, verlassen … Was ist denn soviel dabei? Rouleaus fallen … man sieht nichts von der Straße … Wie ich mich darauf freue! Wozu sich fürchten? […] (IB 261: 54) In the illustration, Tubutsch-Ehrenstein’s posture, his facial expression, and the gesture of his outstretched hands are full of the grace and light appropriate to 226 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="227"?> the “radiant death” he has just invoked. The questions in the text just quoted all express uncertainty and darkness, while the exclamations proclaim confidence and hope, a remarkable instance of how text and image can be made to interact in the mind of the reader. This interaction is identified as a neglected but defining principle of expressionism by the cultural historian Kurt Breysig in his Eindruckskunst und Ausdruckskunst (1927), a study of the spirit of modern art from Jean-François Millet to Franz Marc, which shows an informed interest in the relations between visual and verbal creation: Nur die seltsame Spalthaftigkeit aller wissenschaftlichen und so auch aller kunst‐ gelehrten und kunstgeschichtlichen Arbeitseinrichtung hat es bewirkt, daß nicht von vornherein und immer die Fäden, die bildende und redende Künste zu einem einheitlichen Netzwerk verschlingen, aufgedeckt worden sind. (Breysig 1927: 134) Starting from this idea of “threads” that intertwine to form a “network” uniting the visual and the verbal, he discusses the poetry of August Stramm (1874-1915) and the paintings of Franz Marc (1880-1916) to show what principles and processes they have in common. He argues that they share the principle of “Zerbrechung der Form”, the fracturing of forms, which involves a reduced selection of elements of the observable and knowable world together with the dissolution of the generally assumed relation between forms. This formal principle goes hand in hand with and requires a second principle of necessary as opposed to contingent content, a kind of “Ahnung” or intuition of those covert truths, values, rights that are constitutive of human dignity (ibid.: 138 f.). Kokoschka’s reductive and selective style of representing figures and objects makes the beholder see through and behind them. The cross-hatched veiling’s effect of making some parts of the drawings fade and others more clearly visible is just as much of an achievement as that of Ehrenstein’s protagonist, who recognises that even if he is a poet, he is in truth no more than a beggar, echoing words spoken by others: Und wenn man ein Dichter wäre, man ist noch immer nicht mehr als ein geborener Tierstimmenimitator. Und bist du ein Meister des Wortes, der Worte fand, voll wie das Brüllen des Stieres: ein Bettler bist du und läßt nachahmend aus dir erschallen die Stimme des über Pferde herrschenden Fürsten und jene des aus schwarzer Puppe sich aufwärts, lichtwärts schwingenden Schmetterlings, wenn es nicht gar die Stimme eines anderen Dichters ist - alle Stimmen läßt du aus dir erschallen, o Tierstimmenimitator, um die eigene Leere zu übertönen, deinen Mangel an eigener Stimme … […]. (IB 261: 48) 3.3 German illustrated book series 227 <?page no="228"?> This reminds me very forcefully of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” (1925), especially of the variations of the following stanza in Part V: “Between the idea/ And the reality/ Between the motion/ And the act/ Falls the shadow” (Eliot 1974: 91 f.). A very similar idea is expressed in Alain’s Système des Beaux- Arts (1926), when in the chapter “De l’apparence”, appearances in painting, he appeals to a common-sense experience as follows: Chacun sait que les yeux ne connaissent jamais que les signes de la forme solide, et que voir des formes c’est interpréter des ombres, des profils et des grandeurs relatives. (Alain 1926: 241) Ehrenstein, Eliot, Alain and of course Kokoschka too, are expressing ideas that were being tried and tested throughout Europe in the 20s and 30s, for example by the art critic Paul Westheim (1886-1963), who deliberately closed his Die Welt als Vorstellung: Ein Weg zur Kunstanschauung (1918) with an analysis of Kokoschka’s ability to look behind the external appearance of a character and to unveil a hidden truth: Er weiß von einer inneren, einer wahreren Natur des Menschen, die allein seine Gel‐ tung ausmacht; sein Ziel kann demnach nur sein, alles, was sie verhüllt, wegzuräumen. (Westheim 1918: 130) No wonder then that many unsuspecting readers of Tubutsch, like the one I quoted above, responded with impatient ire to a combination of text and illustration so radically different from the conventional work they were used to. As a counter-example I can point to Hans von Weber’s enthusiastic applause for the IB in his magazine Der Zwiebelfisch, subtitled “Eine kleine Zeitschrift über Bücher und andere Dinge”, (vol.10, no. 5/ 6, 1919: 269), on the occasion of reporting the publication of Tubutsch in his regular column on illustrated books. Another interesting illustrated volume of the IB is a German classic, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche (1842), published as IB 271 in 1919. This novella is set in the years 1738-1789 in a remote village in rural Westphalia and intertwines realistic and sometimes even naturalistic description with elements of mystery and popular superstition. The 37 illustrations distributed over 80 pages of text are reproductions of charcoal or black crayon drawings by Max Unold (1885-1964) in a style reminiscent of woodcuts. Six of these are fullpage illustrations, one of which is signed and dated 1918, and 22 are in-text pictures (also known as figures), 8 to 12 lines high and always as wide as the type area, either at the head or at the foot, and only three in between. Nine are illustrated initials (or capitals), that indicate the beginning of a new part 228 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="229"?> of the story. The result is a dense and varied illustration that interacts with the text in an unobtrusive and sometimes subtle manner, as we will see in a moment. The definitive edition (Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 1994, reprinted in Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek 14, 1999) distinguishes only two parts, with a break between the years 1756 and 1760, but Unold obviously recognised that the story is sharply divided into nine episodes. There are two gaps of 9 years between the first and second, and the second and third episodes, and another of 28 years between episodes 7 and 8, so that it makes sense to support the narrator’s explicit chronology by inserting illustrated capitals as visual signposts, without altering the text in any way. Unold was one of the founders of the Münchner Neue Sezession in 1913 and later a leading representative of the post-expressionist movement Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”). Towards the end of the Great War, Unold served on the Galician battlefield and had the opportunity to study local Jewish culture and to document it in drawings that served as a basis for the Judenbuche illustrations (Hausenstein 1921: 9). This experience may have roused Unold’s interest in Droste-Hülshoff’s novella and its theme of the villagers’ troubled relations with the Jewish members of the community. The topic is made explicit very early, in the second part, just after Friedrich’s mother Margret has received the news that her drunkard husband Hermann Mergel has been found dead in the forest. Two days later, Margret appeals to her son to stand by her: „Fritzchen,“ sagte sie, „willst du jetzt auch fromm sein, daß ich Freude an dir habe, oder willst du unartig sein und lügen, oder saufen und stehlen? “ - „Mutter, Hülsmeyer stiehlt.“ - „Hülsmeyer? Gott bewahre! Soll ich dir auf den Rücken kommen? Wer sagt dir so schlechtes Zeug? “ - „Er hat neulich den Aaron geprügelt und ihm sechs Groschen genommen.“ - „Hat er dem Aaron Geld genommen, so hat ihn der verfluchte Jude gewiß zuvor darum betrogen. Hülsmeyer ist ein ordentlicher, angesessener Mann, und die Juden sind alle Schelme.“ - Aber, Mutter, Brandis sagt auch, daß er Holz und Rehe stiehlt.“ - „Kind, Brandis ist ein Förster.“ - „Mutter, lügen die Förster? “ (IB 271: 13) Their exchange foreshadows later events. Even decent people like Margret have deep-seated racist prejudices, and of course positive prejudices in favour of “Angesessene”, archaic for local people, “our folks”. The further narrative will reveal that many of the villagers are deeply embroiled in poaching and the illegal felling of trees, and speak ill only of those who are caught in the act, or who lose control over themselves, like Friedrich’s father. The other boys in the village make fun of Friedrich, mocking and taunting him until he bursts into 3.3 German illustrated book series 229 <?page no="230"?> tears and starts fighting his tormentors. Here is the full-page illustration that shows not only the fighting, but also how Friedrich is excluded from the friendly conversation of the group of five in the foreground, or the tête-à-tête of the two boys in the centre, a delicate extension of Droste-Hülshoff’s text that helps one to understand Friedrich’s development: Fig. 58: A. von Droste-Hülshoff, Die Judenbuche: 15 In a linear perspective, from an elevated position, we see the boys on a path that is narrow but not straight, and so acquires a metaphorical dimension, leading to a vanishing point in the dark hills in the background. As spectators we cannot tell where the path will end, but before long we will find out. Such is the cataphoric situation in which Margret and Friedrich, and of course the readers, find themselves at this point of the narrative. Everything that happens now will bring us nearer to the inevitable catastrophe. Part four of the story begins with a historiated initial E that sets the scene and leads to the next events: 230 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="231"?> Fig. 59: A. von Droste-Hülshoff, Die Judenbuche: 32 These events are a series of deaths, suicides and murders that take place in the village B. and in the surrounding forests, and in which Friedrich and/ or his lookalike cousin Johannes always seem to be involved. The series begins with the death of Friedrich’s father mentioned above, which may be mischance, but could be seen as suicide, an act of despair. The first case of murder is the killing of head forester Brandis one early morning in July 1756, shortly after his encounter with Friedrich, who has been watching, or pretending to watch, over his mother’s cows in a meadow near the Masterholz woods. After a violent quarrel, with Brandis jeering at his and his mother’s poverty, they calm down and Friedrich reports that he has heard and even seen the bluecoats, as the lumber thieves are known, passing by the big beech into the forest. Brandis immediately sets off on his own to track down the bluecoats, while Friedrich drives the cows back home. Brandis is soon found in the forest, his skull split by an axe that Friedrich later recognises as belonging to his uncle Simon. An inquest takes place, and Friedrich is among the suspects and witnesses interrogated, but none of the evidence definitely points to him or anyone else as the culprit. Four years later, another murder is committed, shortly after a quarrel that erupts in the midst of a wedding feast between Friedrich and Aaron, a Jewish butcher and trader in antiques, about a silver pocket watch, for which Friedrich still owes him ten silver Thalers. Three days later, after a severe thunderstorm, Aaron’s corpse is found near the great beech in the Brederholz. Since so many wedding guests have witnessed the quarrel between Aaron and Friedrich, he and his wraith or “Doppelgänger” Johann have to flee the village. After the murder, a delegation of the most respected members of the Jewish community buys this beech from the lord of the manor to use as a memorial for their brother in faith. A few days 3.3 German illustrated book series 231 <?page no="232"?> later they meet under the tree and with their hatchets incise in Hebrew letters a predictive warning that is repeated in translation as the closing words of the tale: “Wenn du dich diesem Orte nahest, so wird es dir ergehen, wie du mir getan hast”, i.e. “If you approach this place, you will suffer as you have made me suffer”, which is Droste-Hülshoff’s own version of the biblical law of vengeance as expressed in Exodus 21: 23-27. The prediction comes true in episode 8, when the fugitives return to their native village, 28 years later, on Christmas Eve 1788. We first hear that Johannes has arrived, feeble and penniless, and knocks at a cottage door, seeking a meal and a place to sleep. The cottagers recognise him and want to hear his story, and what has become of Mergel. They were separated, he explains, and he does not know where Friedrich is. When he learns that Simon and Margret are dead, he comments “Alles hin, alles tot! ” (ibid.: 70), which is both a summary and a prediction. Baron Ernst von S., who sympathises with Johannes’ plight, provides a room for him in the village, and listens to detailed accounts of his experiences in Hungary and Turkey. In return, Johannes runs errands for his new master, but one evening in late August he does not return home. The baron sends a search party to find him, but he has disappeared once more. Two weeks later, Brandis junior, a forester like his murdered father, is returning home through the Brederholz after a hot day’s work and is drawn to a cool spot under the Jews’ beech where he can take a rest: “Ringsumher kein Baum außer der Judenbuche” (ibid.: 78). He recognises the inscription, but not till his dog keeps barking does he look up and see a body hanging from a branch. He rushes home, informs the baron and returns with him and a group of foresters to the beech. They take the body down, thinking him to be Johannes, but when they remove the noose and a neckcloth, Baron Ernst recognises a scar by which he identifies the dead man as Friedrich. So it was Friedrich and not Johannes who returned home, and it seems that he has declared himself guilty by returning to the scene of his crime and killing himself where he had killed Aaron so many years ago. His suicidal confession closes the case, as the lord of the manor informs the assembled foresters. Now all these deaths, whether murders or suicides or mere accidents, can be traced to the same complex of causes, whether racial or religious, social or economic: they are the outcome of the vices of a decaying society, such as hate, violence and greed. Not for nothing does Friedrich’s suicide, the climactic death in the ghastly series, foreshadow the fall of the Bastille in July 1789. The question is: does such a climax admit of illustration? Unold does not give us one, he prefers to show less spectacular scenes. In this he is followed by Hugo Wilkens, who illustrated the edition published in 1921 as volume 11 of the Rösl-Bücher (1919-1923), an illustrated small octavo series from the Munich 232 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="233"?> publisher Rösl & Cie. Wilkens’ pastel coloured pen drawings are pretty and decorative but not suited to grim subjects like a hanging. But there are illustrated editions of the novella which do show the Jews’ beech with a dead body hanging from it, for example volume 4 of the Terra-Bücher (c. 1920-1930), a series of about 30 volumes published in Berlin in a Crown Octavo format by the Karl Voegels Verlag. The illustrator is Gustav Weissinger, who produced seven penand-ink episodic drawings for Die Judenbuche, this being the closing one on the penultimate page: Fig. 60: Die Judenbuche, ill. Gustav Weissinger: 60 The picture keeps very close to details of the narrative, such as the baron on the left, Brandis on the right, the Hebrew characters incised on the trunk, and even the man with the ladder, whereas the suicide himself seems rather marginal. Does the illustration contribute any idea or emotion to the text? We can compare Weissinger’s picture with the corresponding one in a Medium Octavo edition of 1923, published by the Walter Hädecke Verlag in Stuttgart, and illustrated with five full-page woodcuts by Karl Sigrist (1885-1986): 3.3 German illustrated book series 233 <?page no="234"?> Fig. 61: Die Judenbuche, ill. Karl Sigrist: 65 This close-up representation of the Jews’ beech shows a living tree with branches and leaves, some of them falling, and of course the dead man, with evident signs of his agony. His bowed head is certainly more expressive than Weissinger’s version. Sigrist has added a crow, an attribute of Chronos and a messenger of death, as in some versions of Pieter Bruegel’s Massacre of the In‐ nocents (c. 1616, Antwerpen) (Kretschmer 2011: s.v. Krähe). The juxtaposition of the carrion crow and the dead body is horribly suggestive, and also foreshadows the decision to bury Friedrich not in consecrated ground but in the knacker’s yard, where old horses are buried. Sigrist’s illustration is focused on clear contrasts, but also carries implied meanings that the beholders can work out for themselves. To conclude this section it will be sufficient to point out a few of the more interesting volumes of the IB and briefly describe how they are illustrated. A selection of three tales by Edgar Allan Poe was published in 1914 as Phantastische Erzählungen (IB 129), translated and given a short bio-bibliographical epilogue by Bruno Busse, a language teacher and historian of drama from Leipzig (? - 1916), but not illustrated. It was replaced in 1936 by an illustrated edition, with “Die Wassergrube und das Pendel” instead of “Morella”. The translations are now attributed to Grete Rambach, who seems to have attempted to modernise Busse’s version, but instead makes her own sound clumsy. The 22 pen drawings are by Fritz Fischer (1911-1968), mostly in the form of delicate and sometimes grotesque vignettes inserted in the text. These go well with the roman type used 234 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="235"?> for this edition, in contrast to the rather heavy Jean-Paul-Fraktur of 1795 used for the first version. My next example again involves replacement, this time of illustrations, and again involves Fritz Fischer, namely E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Abenteuer der Silvesternacht, published in 1919 as IB 276. The original illustrator is Amandus Goetzell (1889-1970), whose 22 drawings are carried out in a relaxed sketchy style. The title page is entirely hand-drawn and shows a devilish-looking male figure with his arm around a lightly-clad female, looking at the reader out of a framed mirror or picture: Fig. 62: Die Abenteuer der Silvesternacht, ill. A. Goetzell: 1 3.3 German illustrated book series 235 <?page no="236"?> Fig. 63: Die Abenteuer der Silvesternacht, ill. A. Goetzell: 57 At the head of the postscript we find a very similar but inverted motif: now the female figure is dominant in the foreground, and the male has faded into the background. So these two illustrations are counterparts to each other, just as the postscript is a counterpart to the editor’s foreword, both framing the four stories which make up the book. After a print-run of 25 000 copies, a new edition of the book was published in 1941, now with 25 illustrations by Fritz Fischer, very similar in style to those for the Poe volume five years earlier. It is difficult to see any reason why this second edition was produced, since the stylistic differences between Goetzell’s work and that of Fischer are evident, but not a matter of quality. Both artists were accepted during the Nazi years, with Goetzell, who was professor at the Badische Kunstgewerbeschule in Pforzheim, even participating in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung in 1939 and 1941 (www.gdk-research.de), and Fischer producing illustrations for the two numbers already mentioned, as well as for IB 479, Wilhelm Hauff’s Das kalte Herz (1935). A short article on Fritz Fischer by K.-H. Kull in the Insel-Bücherei Mitteilungen, Nr. 30, 2011, gives biographical information and mentions the two different versions Fischer produced of the illustrations for Hoffmann, the first in 1941 and the second in 1950, explaining, if that is the right word, that the artist’s style had changed in the course of the 236 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="237"?> decade. He quotes Fischer’s daughter Carla as saying that he didn’t like the old illustrations any more, “also hat er sie neu gezeichnet” (Kull 2011: 39), but does not mention either Goetzell or his original illustrations. A further volume in the series is a translation of Thomas Hardy’s The Waiting Supper (1887), collected in the volume A Changed Man and Other Tales (1913, repr. 1920). The German version, Der angekündigte Gast, was published in 1929 as IB 307, and replaced Miguel de Cervantes’ Der eifersüch‐ tige Extremadurer, one of the Novelas ejemplares (1613), issued in 1919 in an unillustrated edition. One can only surmise that this did not sell well enough, and that competing editions like that in the illustrated series Sanssouci-Bücher (Müller Verlag Potsdam, 1923) were more attractive. Hardy (1840-1928) had an international reputation as a contemporary realist writer with a strong streak of pessimism, who was bound to find interested readers. Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) was an added attraction, a very productive illustrator already familiar in German-speaking countries since his only novel Die andere Seite: Ein phantastischer Roman was published in 1909, with 51 pen illustrations and a map (last reprinted in the Bibliothek Suhrkamp in 2009). Hardy’s novella is set in the Wessex of most of his works, on the river Frome (pronounced [fru: m] and spelt “Froom” in the text), which rises in the Dorset Downs at Evershot, north-west of Dorchester. The story begins in the 1830s in the village of Froom-Everard and relates the romance between Christine Everard, the daughter of the local squire, and Nicholas Close, a young farmer. After Nicholas’ attempt to arrange a private marriage fails, because Christine is not “of age”, and sets the whole village buzzing with rumours, he decides that “exile is the only course” (Hardy 1920: 59), the more so since Christine has always wanted him to travel and educate himself, and thus improve his social standing. Christine and Nic often meet at a secluded spot below the Froom waterfall, accessible from the lawn of the Everard’s house, but otherwise only by wading through the river. There are repeated foreshadowing hints that this approach could be dangerous. Nicholas leaves Froom-Everard, not to return till 15 years later. He then meets Christine again and learns that she has married James Bellston, who later disappeared with her money, and never came back. After much debate, the couple decides “to make the plunge of matrimony” (ibid.: 69) on Christmas Day, so Christine and her neighbour Mrs. Wake prepare a festive supper for the evening, in several senses the “waiting supper” of Hardy’s title. While Christine is laying the table, she glances up at the old grandfather clock, which, as it strikes seven, “slowly inclined forward and fell at full length on the floor” (ibid.: 72). Mrs. Wake immediately recognises this as a bad omen: “It is a sign of a violent death in 3.3 German illustrated book series 237 <?page no="238"?> the family” (ibid.). Christine is now expecting Nicholas, but when she answers the knock at the door, it is a messenger from Bellston, who hands over his employer’s bag and great-coat, and informs Christine that her husband will arrive in the course of the evening. Bellston may be “der angekündigte Gast” of the German title, but that rendering of Hardy’s title entirely misses his intention of emphasising the burden of waiting that Christine and Nicholas have had to bear for so many years. They will in fact have to go on waiting, for Bellston never arrives, the waiting supper will never be eaten, nor will the lovers ever marry. It is not till 17 years later that the mystery is solved, when Bellston’s skeleton is discovered in the rocks at the foot of the waterfall. This inspired Kubin to design a perfect tailpiece for the novella, showing the aged couple resting in their separate armchairs, with a triumphant skeleton upright between them: Fig. 64: Th. Hardy, Der angekündigte Gast: 83 In conclusion, we can take a brief look at two further IB volumes notable for illustrations that are strikingly different from the essentially linear styles employed by Kokoschka, Unold, Goetzell, Fischer and Kubin. The first is Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp (1891), collected in his Island Nights’ Entertain‐ ments (1893, repr. 1921), translated as Das Flaschenteufelchen by Li Wegner and published in 1925 as IB 302. The illustrations are by Hans Alexander Müller (1888-1962), who grew up in Leipzig and taught at the Leipziger Akademie für graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe from 1920 to 1937. His wife Marie Riethoff came from a Jewish family, reason enough for the academy not to 238 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="239"?> renew his contract, and so in March 1937 Müller accepted an official invitation from Columbia University, New York, to attend the opening of an exhibition of his book illustrations organised by the head of the Rare Book Department, Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt. His wife and two sons followed later the same year. In 1939 his book Woodcuts and Wood Engravings - How I make them was published, followed by a second edition in 1945 (Eichhorn/ Salter 1997: 96-98, 100). Müller’s 25 illustrations for Das Flaschenteufelchen were not woodcuts (as the title-page claims) but wood engravings, detailed and delicate, as in this illustration showing Keawe, the present owner of the magic bottle, with his friend Lopaka, who is about to become its new owner, but first wants to see the imp in the bottle - “So come, let us have one look at you, Mr. Imp” (Stevenson 1921: 241). Fig. 65: R.L. Stevenson, Das Flaschenteufelchen: 21 Finally, we should look at Gottfried Keller’s Der Schmied seines Glückes (IB 328), one of the novellas collected in the second part of Die Leute von Seldwyla (1873-74), and one of a series of ten Keller titles (IB 320-329) published in 1921. This was the only one to be illustrated from the start, and the artist was the Austrian Karl Rössing (1897-1987), who taught at the Folkwangschule in Essen from 1921 to 1931, when his contract was cancelled, though in 1934 he was appointed to a post at the Staatliche Hochschule für Kunsterziehung in Berlin. In 1932 the Büchergilde Gutenberg (closed down a year later by the Nazis, and re-established in Switzerland) published an album of 100 satirical engravings by Rössing under the ironic title Mein Vorurteil gegen diese Zeit (reprinted in 1974, with an afterword by Manès Sperber), a resounding critique of the period’s moral 3.3 German illustrated book series 239 <?page no="240"?> decadence and opportunism. Rössing was also well-known for his woodcut illustrations and especially wood engravings for literary works, which were often amusing and milder in their satirical impact. Der Schmied seines Glückes is a tale about self-fashioning in the sense of making one’s fortune by forging a new identity, as a smith would, with hammer and anvil. This is illustrated by the first historiated initial, in which Johannes changes his name to John, soon improving on this by altering his surname from Kabis (Swiss for cabbage) to the more exotic Kabys. Fig. 66: G. Keller, Der Schmied seines Glückes: 3 He later travels to Augsburg to trace the family of a supposed ancestor and there encounters a wealthy old gentleman, Adam Litumlei, who on hearing Kabys’ story is delighted to welcome a cousin. It is Litumlei’s intention to found a dynasty, and by declaring John Kabys to be his natural son, the result of a youthful escapade, he believes he has found a way to achieve his aim. All that is required now is a family history to authenticate the relationship. The illustration below shows the two protagonists, Litumlei and Kabys, sitting together and writing this history. It seems that Kabys has been successful with the first three strokes of his hammer, but the next will go awry, in a manner that I do not wish to reveal here, for that would spoil the fun for anyone who has not read the story. 240 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="241"?> Fig. 67: G. Keller, Der Schmied seines Glückes: 31 All things considered, the IB was perhaps the most interesting and certainly most successful popular series in Germany during the post-1918 period, and it is not surprising that it provided the model for the King Penguin Books launched in November 1939. We could continue to survey many more examples of illustrated numbers of the IB published during the 20s and 30s, but since my purpose is to identify and compare different German series, we will move on to the publishers Samuel Fischer and Kurt Wolff and consider their contributions. 3.3.2 Samuel Fischer: Fischers Illustrierte Bücher Samuel “Sami” Fischer (1859-1934) was born in Miklós, Slovakia, at that time a part of the Austrian Empire, and an important centre of Jewish culture. At the age of 14, eager to get on in the world, Sami moved to Vienna, and became a bookseller’s apprentice. In 1880 he arrived in Berlin and pursued his career in the same branch, soon entering into a partnership with the bookseller Hugo Steinitz, who in 1885 expanded his business to include publishing, for which Sami was to be mainly responsible. After various disputes, mainly due to Steinitz’ lack of interest in contemporary literature, Fischer left him to his own devices and together with his elder brother Moritz in September or October 1886 founded the S. Fischer Verlag (Mendelssohn 1970: 27-40). Two decades later, one of the aims they still wanted to achieve was expressed by the head of the firm, in a letter of May 22 1908 to Hermann Hesse, in this description of a new project: Ich bereite eine Romanbibliothek vor; jeden Monat ein Band zum Preise von 1 Mark. Im Rahmen der gleichmäßig ausgestatteten, gut gedruckten Bibliothek will ich ältere Romanwerke, deren Verbreitungsmöglichkeit durch den teuren Preis begrenzt ist, einem größeren Leserkreis durch den billigen Preis erschließen. Da es sich in dieser 3.3 German illustrated book series 241 <?page no="242"?> Bibliothek nur um Werke von litterarischem Wert handeln wird, so verspreche ich mir für die einzelnen Autoren auch einen starken propagandistischen Zweck von diesem Unternehmen. […] Aus der Reihe Ihrer Werke scheint mir > Unterm Rad < für diese Bibliothek sehr geeignet. (ibid.: 514) Fischer goes on to explain that the sales of Unterm Rad (1906) are falling off, but that he expects to be able to sell at least 30 000 copies of a cheap edition. The royalties would however not exceed 10 Pfennigs per copy. The model for this new venture was probably Engelhorns Allgemeine Romanbibliothek (1884-1919), a very successful series published by Carl Engelhorn in Stuttgart at a price of 50 Pfennigs for the paperback edition, and 75 Pfennigs for the red cloth edition. Fischer studied the “Rotröcke” carefully in order to improve on them: he wanted stout, tasteful volumes, clothbound or in paper covered boards, which would look good on any bookshelf. Ernst Johann’s bibliography, S. Fischer Verlag: Vollständiges Verzeichnis aller Werke, Buchserien und Gesamtausgaben, 1886-1956 (1956), documents how Fischer’s project was carried out. Its first stage started in October 1908 as Fischers Bibliothek zeitgenössischer Romane, which was produced in eight “Reihen” or subseries, each consisting of twelve curry-coloured volumes, spread unevenly over the months till September 1919. Hesse’s Unterm Rad was republished as the first volume of the second subseries, 1909-1910. The series was continued in a second stage under the title Der wohlfeile gute Roman from 1920 to 1924, and contained reprints of previously published titles, plus nine new ones. In the third and final stage, the title of the series was changed to Fischers Romanbibliothek (1925-1927), again with a mixture of reprints and 15 new titles (Johann 1956: 105-108). All in all, just 120 titles were published. Fischer’s policy was apparently to offer a variety of different series, no doubt in the hope of attracting a various public, rather than to concentrate on a central trade-mark series like the Insel- Bücherei. He even tried out an S. Fischer-Bücherei from 1933 to 1940, with 37 fiction titles, which was taken over by Peter Suhrkamp in 1942 in the course of the Nazi aryanisation policy. None of the series described above were illustrated. But Fischer did employ illustration occasionally as a means of enhancing fictional texts so as to make them attractive to well-heeled clients, e.g. Isolde Weisshand, a retelling of the story of Tristram and Iseult by Emil Lucka, illustrated by Emil Preetorius (1909), and Herman Bang’s Exzentrische Novellen, with illustrations by Franz Christophe (1912). It was not till 1914 that an illustrated series was conceived, Fischers Illustrierte Bücher, (FIB), which started off with three slim volumes, only to be stopped in its tracks by the outbreak of war in August. As the following table shows, publication was resumed with one volume in 1922, two more titles three years later, and a final trio in 1926. 242 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="243"?> No. Author Title Year Illustrator + illustrations 1 Hermann Hesse In der alten Sonne 1914 Wilhelm Schulz: 16 pen drawings + cover illustra‐ tion 2 Eduard von Keyserling Harmonie 1914 Karl Walser: 18 pen draw‐ ings + cover illustration 3 Thomas Mann Tonio Kröger 1914 Erich M. Simon: 19 pen drawings + cover illustra‐ tion 4 Bernhard Kel‐ lermann Die Heiligen 1922 Magnus Zeller: 12 pen drawings + cover illustra‐ tion 5 Gerhart Haupt‐ mann Fasching 1925 Alfred Kubin: 12 pen draw‐ ings + cover illustration 6 Thomas Mann Herr und Hund 1925 Georg W. Rössner: 15 litho‐ graphs + cover illustration 7 Herman Bang Die vier Teufel 1926 George G. Kobbe: 17 litho‐ graphs + cover illustration 8 Johannes V. Jensen Der Monsun und an‐ dere Tiergeschichten 1926 Arthur Wellmann: 16 pen drawings + cover illustra‐ tion 9 Arthur Schnit‐ zler Leutnant Gustl 1926 Moritz Coschell: 17 litho‐ graphs + cover illustration The books in this series were not numbered and did not all carry the series title on the front cover. They all have the same Crown Octavo format (18 x 11 cm), and were available, according to the Fischer almanacs for 1925 and 1926 in two versions, “geheftet”, i.e. sewn, in paper covers, and “gebunden”, i.e. sewn and cased in paper covered boards. Headbands at top and foot, with top edges tinted to match, helped to suggest a quality binding. All the books were set in black letter types, some in the light Unger-Fraktur, others in the heavier Alte Schwabacher, depending on how much text it was necessary to get into the type area. The 1925 prices ranged from 1 to 2 Reichsmarks (the currency introduced in 1924) for the first four volumes, and 1,50 to 3 RM for the later ones. I have never come across a paperback FIB. The almanacs always describe the cover illustrations as “handkoloriert”, which can only refer to the original design, coloured by the artist and reproduced photographically (Curwen 1934: 93-95). The almanac Das vierzigste Jahr: 1886-1926 (1926), celebrating Fischer’s 40 th anniversary, contains two items that are of interest with regard to FIB: a 3.3 German illustrated book series 243 <?page no="244"?> page listing the nine volumes in the correct order, and a short article by S. Fischer himself, entitled “Bemerkungen zur Bücherkrise”. The list has a footnote with a promise, namely “Die Sammlung wird fortgesetzt” (Das vierzigste Jahr S. Fischer Verlag: 1886-1926: “Verzeichnis” 80), a promise not repeated in subsequent almanacs, and not kept. If one looks up the print runs realised for each of the nine volumes, one can see that they drop from 95 000 for Tonio Kröger (in 1933) to 31 000 for In der alten Sonne (in 1927) and to a mere 5000 for the last two volumes. That is the background to Fischer’s analysis of the book crisis in the light of changing social and economic conditions in the post-war period: [Das] kulturelle Gemeinschaftsgefühl ist im Sturm der letzten Jahre verblasen. Das Buch, das die Kraft und die Mission einer inneren Bindung in sich trägt, ist heute der großen anonymen, unorganischen Gemeinschaft führerlos preisgegeben. Die Zeit der bürgerlichen Abgegrenztheit ist vorüber, der demokratische Staat mit seinen ausgleichenden Tendenzen ist im Begriff, Gestalt zu gewinnen, ein neues Gemein‐ schaftsgefühl zur Entwicklung zu führen. Wir leben in einer Übergangsperiode, die dazu bestimmt ist, Lebendiges zu erhalten, Verbrauchtes aufzusaugen und Neues vorzubereiten. (ibid.: 82) Fischer’s sense of having a cultural mission is not impeded by his awareness of the economic foundation necessary to carry it out successfully. The publisher’s task in a transitory phase such as the 20s is to preserve texts that have life enough to be worth preserving, to soak up those that have become stale, and to prepare his public for new titles that are innovative and original. Fischer does not say so, but one way to do this is to employ the services of gifted contemporary artists to throw new light on older but also on contemporary texts. In the case of the FIB, this may not always have been achieved, but the illustrations by Wilhelm Schulz, Karl Walser, Magnus Zeller and Alfred Kubin do seem to possess the necessary qualities, and therefore merit closer scrutiny. It will also be worth our while to take a look at the visual contributions made by Hans Meid to Fischer’s literary programme through his illustrations and his designs for book covers, endpapers and even slip cases. Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) is a special case in the field of illustrated literature because he was both a writer and an artist. In his account of his walking tours through the Ticino region of Switzerland in 1917-18 he performs in the triple role of narrator, poet and painter. It was published by Fischer in 1920 as Wanderung, with 14 beautiful watercolour pictures of memorable landscapes and buildings in a carefully produced Medium Octavo volume, exactly twice the size of the books in the FIB series, and designed by K.E. Mende, who also contributed hand-drawn initials. Hesse’s In der alten Sonne, first published in 244 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="245"?> 1914, was the opening volume of the series, and it shares with Wanderung the theme of pedestrian travels, of arriving and resting and leaving. The central figures are four old men known as the “Sonnenbrüder”, because they live together in a little town Hesse calls Gerbersau (Calw on the River Nagold) in what was once the inn “Zur Sonne” and then became a poorhouse. The illustrator Wilhelm Schulz (1865-1952) shows one of the men in his cover illustration, another in the title-page vignette, a third in the illustration below, and the fourth in the final illustration. It should be pointed out that the number of illustrations varies, depending on the edition, in this case the 16 th -23 rd printing of 1921. His pen drawings operate with intense contrasts of black cross-hatching and white spaces, reminiscent of etching, as in this full-page drawing of the former inn: Fig. 68: H. Hesse, In der alten Sonne: 8 f. The house is described on the page opposite as looking crooked and tired, just like its inhabitants, one of whom is to be seen on the sunlit pavement in front of the house. We are now told the histories of these four men, beginning with Karl Hürlin, a boasting locksmith and bankrupt factory owner, who takes to 3.3 German illustrated book series 245 <?page no="246"?> drink, and sinks lower and lower till he becomes the first pauper inmate of the “Sonne”. Its warden is one Andreas Sauberle, who insists on Swabian discipline and cleanliness, as his name indicates, and for much of the time is busy with his knitting machine. Hürlin, terribly bored but too lazy to work, and thirsting for a glass of new wine, starts pestering the warden, who hands him a couple of books to read. He reluctantly browses through an illustrated almanac, and the very first picture catches his attention, a barefoot female figure in fancy dress. He immediately gropes for the pencil stub in his pocket and draws two big round breasts on her bodice. The next picture he finds shows a raging goblin, for whom Hürlin provides the caption “Das ist der Stricker Sauberle, Hausvater”. Rather crude and also common forms of response to pictures, but there is more to come, for the next illustration shows an explosion: Sie zeigte die Explosion einer Fabrik und bestand fast nur aus einem mächtigen Dampf- und Feuerkegel, um welchen und über welchem halbe und ganze Menschenleiber, Mauerstücke, Ziegel, Stühle, Balken und Latten durch die Lüfte sausten. Das zog ihn an und zwang ihn, sich die ganze Geschichte dazu auszudenken und sich namentlich vorzustellen, wie es den Emporgeschleuderten wohl im Augenblick des Ausbruches zumut gewesen sein möchte. (Hesse 1914: 36 f.) This shows, the narrator says, that in spite of his deep-seated egoism Hürlin is capable of empathy with the distress of others, more than he has ever marshalled for himself, especially when it is so vividly illustrated. Recognising so many visual details allows him to identify with the victims. Another illustration that causes him to pause and think is a pleasant woodcut showing a group of young men sitting at a table in an arbour and enjoying their wine. But this time, his reaction is quite the opposite, for he feels unable to identify with these carefree folks: Diese sommerliche Fröhlichkeit in der Laube, diese hellen, guten und freudigen Jünglingsgesichter machten ihn traurig und zornig; er zweifelte, ob alles nur die Erfindung eines Malers sei, verschönert und verlogen, oder ob es auch in Wirklichkeit etwa irgendwo solche Lauben und so hübsche, frohe und sorgenlose junge Leute gebe. (ibid.: 38 f.) It seems that Hürlin’s own experiences have soured him so much that he cannot respond to images of beauty and narratives of happiness other than by denying and vilifying them. Yet the four examples do demonstrate that the impulse to respond is still alive in him and could perhaps be turned into more rewarding channels through the guidance of Sauberle and the sympathy of his fellow paupers. For the moment we can take note that Hesse has integrated the 246 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="247"?> processes of looking at pictures into his narrative, and into our perception of its illustrations, both visual and verbal. We may also remember his reflections “Über das Lesen” (1911, reprinted in Magie des Buches, 1977), in which he points out that every decent book is a concentration and simplification of very complicated things that makes high demands on what I have called the adjunctive skills of the reader (Ch. 1.2). The next guest to arrive in the “Sonne” is the past master ropemaker Heller who has suffered a decline very similar to that of Hürlin, except that in his case drink was its initial and ongoing cause. Hürlin has been looking forward to the newcomer’s company, but is incapable of making friendly advances, so the two men quarrel incessantly, mainly because each deems himself superior to the other. After a few months, two more men from Gerbersau are assigned to the poorhouse, the first, a merry imbecile called Holdria, and a week later, a tramp named Stefan Finkenbein, one of a local tribe of beggars and vagabonds. The narrative continues in a series of comic and tragic episodes till it reaches its sad climax. One December night, Hürlin hangs himself with his braces, for no real reason except that he is tired, and that nobody has ever liked him. Two months later, it is Heller’s turn to depart, when he catches a cold at his work in the sawmill and dies. With the onset of an early spring, when, in Hesse’s words, all the hills and ditches have turned green, it is Finkenbein who decides to leave: Fig. 69: H. Hesse, In der alten Sonne: 105 In this final illustration, Schulz shows Finkenbein turning his back on the town, merging with the church and other buildings, fading away and soon to be 3.3 German illustrated book series 247 <?page no="248"?> forgotten. Fifteen years later, only Holdria is left in the “Sonne”, blissfully content and now the senior member of a community of seven paupers and their warden. Hesse’s parabolic tale is potentially endless, for there will always be new recruits for such a poorhouse, always arriving and leaving, and hardly ever happy. The novella Harmonie by Eduard von Keyserling (1855-1918) was first published in S. Fischer’s literary quarterly Die neue Rundschau in 1905. The illustrations for the FIB edition were carried out by Karl Walser (1877-1943), the elder brother of the poet Robert Walser. Harmonie is to some extent an autobiographical work, for its protagonist, Felix von Bassenow, shares the Baltic origins, aristocratic status and pattern of travels in Austria and Italy of his creator. The narrator’s awareness of his own attitudes and leanings, passions and fears is distanced and objectified in the figure of unhappy Felix, and in the portrayal of some representative members of the ruling class of provincial landowners in late 19 th century Latvia, most of whom had a German background. Keyserling is strongly influenced by the themes and techniques of literary impressionism, in which modes of perception, reflection and self-awareness are decisive. The story begins with Felix’s return to Kurland, Latvia, after a long stay in Italy, and to Annemarie, the wife he married two years before. He had fled to Italy after their child was born and died, and because when Annemarie fell ill, he had felt helpless and unable to show compassion, as he remembers: Annemarie kauerte auf ihrem Bette, die Augen angstvoll weit aufgerissen, und horchte hinaus und hörte Dinge, die sie schreckten, vor denen sie geschützt sein wollte und er wußte nicht wie. (Keyserling 1914: 12) Now that he has returned home, he is head of the family again, and master of the house and its guests and servants, “die Hauptperson” (ibid.: 8) that he had never been on his travels. When he looks at his wife, he is reminded of a painting he saw in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, Antonio Correggio’s Danaë, who embraces Zeus, in the shape of a shower of gold, with genteel composure. Such is the allocation of roles that he now deems appropriate for Annemarie and himself. That evening, a welcome home dinner is to be given in his honour, but Annemarie has already gone to bed, being too weak to stay up so long, as Frau von Malten, Annemarie’s friend and companion, explains. While they are waiting for dinner to be served, Felix has time to stroll round the rooms, admire the new lace curtains and the vases full of flowers, and so encounters Mila: Es duftete nach Hyazinthen und Tazetten. Auf allen Tischen standen Schalen mit Frühlingsblumen. Und all das stand und wartete auf ihn. In einer Fensternische regte sich etwas. Da lehnte ein Mädchen, das ihn mit runden, grellblanken Augen neugierig ansah. Schweres, schwarzes Haar um ein erhitztes, bräunliches Gesicht, 248 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="249"?> das gewaltsam errötete. Ein rotes Kleid, in dem sich volle Glieder ungeduldig regten. (ibid.: 16) Mila is Frau von Malten’s foster-daughter, who helps in the household, and reads to Annemarie, and here is Karl Walser’s drawing of her, inserted just before the passage quoted above: Fig. 70: E. von Keyserling, Harmonie: 15 Does the illustration confirm the narrative? Is the sensuality that Felix perceives in her heated face, flushed with excitement, and in her plump and mobile limbs at all visible to the reader? Perhaps in a nascent form, as a hint of things to come? More is not required at this stage of the story, which will continue to provide a series of incidents and remarks and reflections that all point in the same direction. Walser’s strategy is cumulative, following that of Keyserling, and out of wisps of evidence they will both gradually prepare the reader and beholder for a tragic conclusion, of whatever kind. In the meantime, “what happens next”, as Scheherazade’s husband put it and as E.M. Forster quotes him in Aspects of the Novel (1927, repr. 1962: 35), is simple enough: Annemarie gradually develops a friendship with uncle Thilo, a cultivated man twice her age, and becomes increasingly estranged from Felix, who is jealous of his rival, and will later ask him to leave. Meanwhile Felix has begun an affair with Mila, which 3.3 German illustrated book series 249 <?page no="250"?> Annemarie soon becomes aware of. In this web of half-hidden relations, mutual suspicion and distrust grow apace, till all the characters, closely observed by the attentive reader, are spying and eavesdropping and passing judgement on each other. From the very beginning, the concept of harmony announced in the title of the novella is being called in question and transformed into its opposite, parallel to the ironic inversion of the protagonist’s Christian name. In an early incident, Felix goes on an inspection tour of his estate, together with Pitke, his bailiff, and they pass the cowsheds where the cows are being milked: [E]s war Melkstunde. Neben den Kühen hockten die Mägde, schwer und heiß wie die Kühe, mit den breiten Händen in die angeschwollenen Euter fassend. […] Als die Mägde mit wiegenden Brüsten, den vollen Milcheimer in der Hand, an ihm vorübergingen, bemerkte er: „Auch eine Rasse.“ - „Faul sind die Luders, daher werden sie dick,“ erwiderte Pitke. Aber Felix hatte auch für sie was übrig! Seltsam! Aber hier mitten in all dieser ruhenden Kraft fühlte er sich auch stark. Er spürte die Breite seiner Brust, das Schwellen seiner Muskeln. (ibid.: 27 f.) A moment later, the two men come across a farmhand who has just driven his cart, loaded with tiles, into a rut, and is violently beating the horses with the handle of his whip. Felix responds immediately: Felix fühlte, wie es ihm heiß durch die Adern rann. Dann war er bei dem Burschen, packte ihn, hob ihn empor, schüttelte ihn, ja es war eigentlich ein Genuß, diesen schweren Körper zu schütteln, zu spüren, wie er sich vergebens sträubte. Dann ließ Felix ihn los. „Geh, hol Leute,“ sagte er, „geh! “ schrie er ihn an. Pitke lachte: „Das war sehr hübsch. Der hat den Herrn gespürt.“ (ibid.: 29) These short sequences show the combination of animal strength, sexuality and violence in Felix’s responses to the dairymaids and to the carter. In Keyserling’s portrayal of Annemarie one finds something similar, but with the violence and sexuality muted, as in the episode of the warm summer night when Frau von Malten hears a nightingale singing in the garden, while the black clouds of a thunderstorm gather, and bursts of sheet lightning illuminate the sky: “Ja, Annemarie spürte das im Blut: wie ein kleines Fieber. Als ob da drin auch so etwas Goldnes kommt und geht wie in den Wolken” (ibid.: 37). That is of course another reference to Danaë, and it will be taken up again two pages later. At this stage of the narrative, Annemarie and Felix seem to be moving towards each other, to have found a mutual tenderness that they had almost lost. But their closeness is suddenly interrupted by shrill squeals and laughter from the nearby quarters of the farmhands: 250 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="251"?> „Die Stallburschen und die Milchmädchen,“ erklärte Felix. „Die freuen sich auch dieser Nacht. Die regt sie auch auf.“ „Auch? “ sagte Annemarie und richtete sich auf: „Ach ja, die haben ja da so ihre Sitten. […]“ (ibid.: 38) Here, Felix shows more empathy with his farmhands than Annemarie, whose “Well, they do have their own kind of customs” signals a distance of class and culture. She does not wish her gladness to be placed in the same category as theirs. One recognises in reading such a passage that Keyserling is far from casting Felix as the villain of his tale and Annemarie as the victim: they both have their prejudices, their frailties and their strengths. Again, we see that the troubles of Felix, Annemarie, Thilo and Mila are caused by a decided lack of harmony on the level of individual consciousness, as well as in the social and class relations underlying this provincial, decaying culture. This diagnosis is confirmed by what Bertrand Russell, in the last chapter of Education and the Social Order (1932), defined as the essence of harmony in the life of women and men: If a man’s life is to be satisfactory, whether from his own point of view or from that of the world at large, it requires two kinds of harmony: an internal harmony of intelligence, emotion, and will, and an external harmony with the wills of others. In both these respects, existing education is defective. (Russell 1932: 244) This binary definition corresponds remarkably well with Keyserling’s represen‐ tation of Felix and Annemarie, and even of Felix and Mila. Felix’s understanding of events, the emotions by which he responds to them, and his will, or intentions and hopes, are repeatedly in conflict with each other, and so is his response to the wills of others as they impinge on his own will. In the case of Annemarie, the conflict is less striking, but strong enough, and it is also recognisable in the more limited representation of Thilo. The fact that Russell defines harmony in the context of contemporary debates about educational reform, which is all about training emotional and social intelligence and co-operation, can help us recognise that Keyserling’s tale is on one important level a critique of pedagogical thought around 1900. Inevitably, we now come to the closing scene of the novella. One moonlit night, Felix and Mila are in their garden, Felix lying on the grass and Mila sitting next to him under the chestnut tree. Mila is repeatedly kissing his hand and addressing him each time as “Mein Herr - mein Herr”. They are facing a pond that is overgrown with aquatic plants and now illuminated by the moon. Then they both hear a singing voice approaching, which they recognise as that of Annemarie. She passes by and still singing her soft lullaby reaches the landing stage at the far side of the pond. At the moment Felix cries out to her, she disappears. He immediately attempts to rescue her, and the narrator gives us insight into his motives: “Er vergaß alles in der Wut 3.3 German illustrated book series 251 <?page no="252"?> dieses Kampfes gegen das stumme, tückische Leben um ihn her” (Keyserling 1914: 90). This “mute and treacherous life” might seem to mean the fronds and stems and tentacles of the plants in the midst of which she is drowning, but at this stage of the novella, most readers will feel that in this short passage of indirect thought (Leech/ Short 1981: 337-339), Felix is thinking of himself as the hero fighting a treacherous world in which all are trapped, himself included. But he is not a convincing hero, so one cannot imagine a happy continuation for the survivors. Walser’s tailpiece guides us in the same direction: Fig. 71: E. von Keyserling, Harmonie: 91 An undeclared series S. Fischer produced a large number of books of illustrated fiction, but no further series with an explicit series title. Nevertheless, there was an undeclared series in Fischer’s list, which came about through the illustrator and designer Hans Meid (1883-1957), a pupil of Wilhelm Trübner (1851-1917) at the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe from 1900-1907, who was apparently commissioned to design the paper-covered boards, endpapers, and slip-cases for five volumes in a small oc‐ tavo format (Pott Octavo). For these, Meid employed watercolours throughout, except for the title page vignettes and the illustrations for Thomas Mann’s Mario und der Zauberer, the only volume of the five to be fully illustrated, though without a title-page vignette. Thanks to Meid’s very characteristic brushwork and reduced colouring, these books have a strong family likeness that was never made explicit through a series title. 252 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="253"?> Author Title Year Type Remarks Hermann Hesse Die Nürn‐ berger Reise 1927 blackletter Slip-case and endpapers in brown and green, cover in brown and blue Jakob Wasser‐ mann Golowin 1929 roman Slip-case, cover and endpapers in blue, grey and red Thomas Mann Mario und der Zauberer: Ein tragisches Rei‐ seerlebnis 1930 roman italics Slip-case in blue, red and green, cover in dark blue and black, endpa‐ pers in blue and touches of yellow Gerhart Haupt‐ mann Die Spitz‐ hacke: Ein phantas‐ tisches Er‐ lebnis 1930 roman italics Slip-case in grey, green and yellow, cover and endpapers in blue and yellow, with white highlights Gerhart Haupt‐ mann Die Hochzeit auf Buchen‐ horst 1931 blackletter Slip-case and endpapers in black, blue and bluish green, cover in black and yellow None of the literature dealing with Meid even mentions this serial character, but collectors keen to assemble complete sets seem to have recognised it, so that today prices for individual volumes have reached an astonishing level, far more than the original 4,50 RM. That was the price of the first volume in 1929, as recorded in Fischer’s Almanach 1929 (206). I am reluctant to take leave of Meid without mentioning at least a few of the remarkable illustrated books he was entrusted with by Fischer at this time. These are all clothbound volumes in different octavo formats, roughly twice the size of the series just described. Let us begin with Arthur Schnitzler’s Casanovas Heimfahrt (1921), half-cloth with paper-covered boards, and illustrated with five full-page lithographs. Then there is Gerhart Hauptmann’s Der Ketzer von Soana (1926), in a flexible, pale blue cloth binding, with 14 beautiful etchings, printed in a spacious Fleischmann Antiqua, which is one of my favourite books. Finally, René Schickele’s Himmlische Landschaft (1935), with 29 drawings by Meid celebrates a year of peace and quiet in the landscapes of the Black Forest and its environs, also in a flexible cloth binding. A sympathetic contemporary account of Meid’s early work can be found in Lothar Brieger’s volume Hans Meid in the series Graphiker der Gegenwart (1921), that categorises him as an artist whose main achievement is to have adapted etching to impressionist themes and modes of perception, but does not mention his illustrations, except his 20 Radierungen zur Bibel (1916-18). The omission is remedied by Adolf Jannasch’s study of 1943, which devotes a whole chapter to Meid as illustrator, and part of the final chapter to his 3.3 German illustrated book series 253 <?page no="254"?> work as a book designer, which contributed to a new style of painterly wrappers and boards: Meids Initiative verdankt der malerisch abgerundete „Bildumschlag“ viel von seiner Verbreitung und seinem Niveau, ja man kann sagen, daß der Stil des Meidschen Buchumschlags Epoche gemacht hat. Den Illustrationsstil, die lavierte Federzeichnung vor allem, überträgt Meid auch auf den Einband des Buches, dessen Vorderseite meist ohne jede Schrift gestaltet wird. ( Jannasch 1943: 109-110) This description applies to some of Meid’s designs, but not to the undeclared series discussed above, in which the title and the author’s name are painted calligraphically on the top board and spine, but that Jannasch does not mention. Fig. 72: G. Hauptmann, Die Hochzeit auf Buchenhorst: top board In his contribution about Meid’s “Illustrationen und Buchausstattung” in the catalogue of an exhibition of Meid’s work, Hans Meid, Welt und Gegenwelt, shown first in the Stadtmuseum Berlin and then in the Museum Giersch in Frankfurt am Main in 2008, Michael Nungesser discusses a number of the artist’s book designs, including Mario und der Zauberer and points out that the cover, the endpapers and the illustrations are done in different styles (the first two in 254 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="255"?> watercolour as opposed to the line drawings) but does not mention its slipcase, though the catalogue explicitly refers to it in the appropriate entry, nor the other volumes in the series, even though they too were exhibited - albeit without their slip cases (Nungesser 2008: 192). 3.3.3 Kurt Wolff: Die schwarzen Bücher and other series Kurt Wolff (1887-1963) is generally known as the leading publisher of expres‐ sionist literature and graphic art in Germany from 1913-1930. Thanks to his family background, his musical and literary interests and talents were not only systematically encouraged but also generously financed, so that by the time he finished school in 1906 he was already engaged in writing, editing and of course collecting books. Two years later, his career in publishing began: Kurt Wolff entered the field of publishing during the winter of 1908, when he was a twenty-one-year-old student of German literature in Leipzig. His first step was to join Ernst Rowohlt’s firm as a silent partner. His diary for July 30, 1910 reads: “The firm of Ernst Rowohlt Verlag is now listed in the Leipzig commercial register. Goethe’s Tasso being printed.” Tasso was the first volume of the first series created by Kurt Wolff. “[…] the Drugulin editions were the first to be in large format and printed on the highest quality paper […]. The idea of luxury editions that were still low in price was combined with a carefully thought-out plan for a series of widely varying content: Our aim was to publish masterpieces of world literature in single volumes, in the original language, with a scrupulously correct text.” (Ermarth 1991: xviii) This is a quotation from “Kurt Wolff: A Biographical Sketch”, by Helen Wolff, KW’s second wife, her contribution to Kurt Wolff: A Portrait in Essays & Letters, edited by Michael Ermarth, and translated into English by Deborah Lucas Schneider (1991). Helen Wolff was able to make use of her husband’s diaries, notebooks, letters and lectures, and also consulted the almanacs and catalogues issued, in order to compile this twelve-page account of his aims and achievements as a publisher. The quotation shows that, from the very beginning, Wolff thought of publishing in terms of series, whose identity was to depend on format, paper, typography, price and, one must add, colour. The quotation also reveals some elements of paradox in Wolff ’s conception, as in the idea of lowprice luxury editions, or of publishing works of world literature in the original languages. Let us look at an example to see how Wolff ’s ideas were actually carried out. His first notable series was Der neue Roman, subtitled “Sammlung zeitgenössischer Erzähler”, which is exactly what Fayard’s LdD and Ferenczi’s LMI aimed to be. In 1917, Wolff produced Der neue Roman: Ein Almanach, a 3.3 German illustrated book series 255 <?page no="256"?> promotional collection of 14 essays by his authors, from Heinrich Mann to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, plus a 48-page catalogue of his various series. The first of these is (of course) Der neue Roman (DnR), which is presented in an introductory statement and a list of the 20 volumes already published, followed by a more detailed presentation of each of these titles. The series titles, however, served only for the purpose of advertising in Wolff ’s own almanacs, and are not even mentioned in his 8-page catalogue of “Neue Bücher junger Dichter” inserted in my copy of Sternheim’s Drei Erzählungen (1916). The volumes of DnR were not numbered and did not bear the series title. Some of them were illustrated, such as novels by Charles-Louis Philippe and Romain Rolland, with woodcuts by Frans Masereel. Two other series are listed in the 1917 almanac, namely Neue Geschichtenbücher, and Die schwarzen Bücher (DsB). It seems that Wolff wished to produce publisher’s series, but could not be bothered to observe the basic conventions for presenting them. DsB seemed to be the exception, for in the almanacs for 1917 and 1918 they are listed under this title and specified as being furnished with “originalgraphische Illustrationen”. The 1918 almanac also gives a brief prefatory description: „Die schwarzen Bücher“, eine Reihe illustrierter Werke in Luxusausstattung, sind trotz der wohlfeilen Preise durchaus geeignet, recht verwöhnten Ansprüchen Rechnung zu tragen. Die teils klassischen, teils modernen Texte erster Autoren, vereinigt mit der Kunst unserer besten Graphiker, werden hier in würdigster und zugleich anziehendster Form dargeboten. (Das Neue Geschichtenbuch - Ein Almanach, 1918; catalogue: 10) We are already familiar with Wolff’s paradoxes. The 1918 prices were 8 marks for the paper-covered edition and 10 marks for the half-vellum binding, which is about double the price of a standard book in a smaller format. In the almanac for 1925, the alphabetical catalogue gives a full list of the series Der Jüngste Tag, each volume of which had the series title and the serial number printed on the cover, but it no longer mentions Die schwarzen Bücher. Wolff had obviously decided to drop the series title that was never used in the books themselves, except as a label on the cardboard slip-cases that some volumes were provided with. 256 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="257"?> Fig. 73: Slip-case cover of Achim von Arnim, Die Majoratsherren In view of this rather confused and confusing policy, it has not been easy to decide which titles were supposed to be “black books”. Over the years, I have identified 14 titles of works (excluding poetry and drama) that were referred to, directly or indirectly, as belonging to this series. Here is my provisional list: 3.3 German illustrated book series 257 <?page no="258"?> Author Title Year Illustrator Technique Gustav Meyrink Der Golem 1915 Hugo Steiner-Prag 8 lithographs Carl Stern‐ heim Die drei Er‐ zählungen 1916 Ottomar Starke 17 lithographs Hans Re‐ imann Die schwarze Liste: Ein heikles Bil‐ derbuch 1916 Hans Reimann 96 photogravure repro‐ ductions Carl Stern‐ heim Mädchen 1917 Ottomar Starke 17 lithographs Ottomar Starke Schip‐ peliana, ein bürgerliches Bilderbuch 1917 Ottomar Starke 50 lithographs Achim von Arnim Die Majorat‐ sherren 1917 Karl Thylmann 7 lithographs Nikolaj Gogol Der Zau‐ berer 1917 Karl Thylmann 12 woodcuts Gustave Flaubert Drei Erzäh‐ lungen 1918 Albert Hoppler 14 lithographs Adelbert von Cha‐ misso Peter Schle‐ mihls wun‐ dersame Ge‐ schichte 1918 Emil Preetorius 10 lithographs and 23 sil‐ houettes Francis Jammes Der Hasen‐ roman 1918 Richard Seewald 21 lithographs Voltaire Candide 1920 Paul Klee 26 drawings E. T. A. Hoff‐ mann Der goldene Topf 1920 Karl Thylmann 12 lithographs Anatole France Der dürre Kater 1921 Rudolf Grossmann 21 lithographs Frans Masereel Die Stadt 1925 Frans Masereel 100 woodcuts 258 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="259"?> The first six numbers in this list are all literally black books, because of their black bindings in (half-)cloth or paper covered boards, or simply in a stiff cardboard cover, as in the case of Die schwarze Liste by Hans Reimann (1889- 1969). His title is a play on words, in German, English and French: “jemanden auf eine schwarze Liste setzen”, “blacklisting people under suspicion”, “faire une liste noire de gens à surveiller”, something which became awful reality in 1933. The book is something of a curiosity in our mainly literary context, since its topic is the use of drawings in magazines and in advertising, and especially the way some commercial artists plagiarise other artists’ ideas and style. Reimann is worried that many people are unable to tell the difference between an original and an imitation, and he explains that one purpose of his comparisons is to open their eyes to the differences: “Daß man Augen kriegt, zu sehen. Die Augen öffnen, damit sie offen bleiben” (Reimann 1916: 113). With Schippeliana, Ottomar Starke (1886-1962) also contributes a satirical “Bilderbuch” that is an allusion to and a visual continuation of Sternheim’s comedy Bürger Schippel (1913), but in a narrative, almost a Hogarthian progress, except that Starke mostly focuses on just one to three figures, and only towards the end fills in the background. Schippel is the epitome of the lower-class German striving against all odds to rise into the middle class. He is treated like dirt by those of higher rank, even when they need him, his skills and his support. This is put on the stage in Sternheim’s play, which is at bottom about the difficult transition into a republican democracy. After the war, the black covers gave way to lighter tones, till they were resurrected in Masereel’s Die Stadt, through the massive blackand-white aesthetic of its visual story-telling and the book’s black wrappers. The Wolff edition was a co-production with the publisher Albert Morancé, Paris, and was reprinted in 1961 by Johann Asmus, Hamburg (for sale in the Federal Republic) and by Rütten & Loening, Berlin (for sale in the GDR), both with a black dust jacket. The second volume available in a reprint edition is Voltaire’s Candide, with drawings by Paul Klee, published in 1964 by the Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf, with an afterword by Heinz Peters recording the chequered history of Klee’s illustrations for this book. DsB continued to be reprinted for some years after their first publication, and were duly advertised and reviewed, for example in Hans von Weber’s Der Zwiebelfisch. In its double number 5/ 6 of 1919, one is surprised to find a full-page list of ten of the above titles under the heading “Die graphischen Bücher”, published by Kurt Wolff in Munich. Now the Die graphischen Bücher (GB) was an illustrated series published by Gustav Kiepenheuer, Weimar and Potsdam, in eight volumes (1918-1922), reprinted in a facsimile edition in the late 1970s, so this must have been quite simply a mistake. 3.3 German illustrated book series 259 <?page no="260"?> I have not found the attribution repeated elsewhere. The authentic GB were as follows: No. Author Title Year Illustrator Tech‐ nique 1 Gustave Flaubert Die Sage von Sankt Julian dem Gastfreien 1918, repr. 1977 Max Kaus litho‐ graphs 2 Oscar Wilde Der junge König 1918, repr. 1977 Charlotte Christine Engelhorn litho‐ graphs 3 Nikolaj Gogol Der Mantel 1919, repr. 1978 Walter Grammaté litho‐ graphs 4 E.T.A. Hoffmann Die Königsbraut 1920, repr. 1979 Walter Becker litho‐ graphs 5 Wilhelm Hauff Phantasien im Bremer Raths‐ keller 1920, repr. 1980 Walter Becker litho‐ graphs 6 Honoré de Balzac Jesus Christus in Flandern 1921, repr. 1984 Karl Rössing wood engrav‐ ings 7 Fjodor Dosto‐ jewski Das Krokodil 1921 Rahel Szalit- Marcus litho‐ graphs 8 Charles Sealsfield Das blutige Blockhaus 1922 Rudolf Schlichter litho‐ graphs This is a real publisher’s series, with each volume identified on the half-title as, for example, “Der Graphischen Bücher fünfter Band”. It is almost uniform in format and binding, i.e. Royal Octavo, full cloth binding, with a GB device (F: devise, emblème figuré; G: Signet) impressed on the top board. Each of the GB reprints, whose formats are sometimes modified “for technical reasons”, has a colophon following the half-title, in which the motivation for the original series is reported as “Illustrationen junger Künstler zu Texten des literarischen Erbes als Originalgraphik einem größeren Leserkreis zugänglich zu machen” (GB 1, reprint 1977: 1). It was probably Paul Westheim’s idea to produce such a series, for he had excellent contacts in the contemporary art world and had just started working for Kiepenheuer as the editor of the art magazine Das Kunstblatt, and was preparing a new project, the quarterly print portfolio Die Schaffenden, which he would be in charge of from 1919-23 (Merker 2011: 48 f.). The only 260 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="261"?> exception as regards the format is Hauff’s Phantasien, which is a Sexto-decimo or sixteenmo (F: In-16; G: Sedez), a pocket size that goes well with the amusing stories about the pleasures and dangers of wine. Walter Becker’s drawings are carefully tailored to fit both the text and the page: Fig. 74: Wilhelm Hauff, Phantasien (59) Here we see the first-person narrator (on the left) arguing with St. Peter and Bacchus about his right to take wine in their august company, part of a running joke ever since we learned that Bremen’s town hall has three wine cellars, one named for Bacchus, another for the Twelve Apostles, and a third for the huge cask it harbours, called the Rose. They are the “Weingeister” who become metamorphosed into human figures, and join the merrymaking and storytelling on this night of the first of September. Further illustrated series in 1920s Germany The conclusion to this section will serve to mention some of the other illustrated series published in Germany after 1918 that did not survive the hyperinflation that developed in the 20s. The first of these is the Liebhaber Bibliothek, published by Kiepenheuer (founded in 1910) from 1912 to about 1927 in 65 illustrated small octavo volumes of international classics (Merker 2011: 44 f.). Among the illustrators were Hans Alexander Müller, Helene Vriesländer, Paul Scheurich and Aubrey Beardsley. Next, the publisher and bookseller Axel Juncker, a native of Copenhagen, who had come to try his luck in Berlin way back in 1901. His first illustrated series was the Orplid-Bücher, published from 1912-1925 in over 50 small octavo volumes, with the third number, Kurt Tucholsky’s Rheinsberg: 3.3 German illustrated book series 261 <?page no="262"?> Ein Bilderbuch für Verliebte (1912), illustrated by Kurt Szafranski, achieving a resounding success. After 1920, however, about half of the new books were no longer illustrated. His second series, simply named Juncker-Bücher, was started in 1919 in slightly larger varieties of octavo, all of which were illustrated, without really adding anything new to the programme. Two years later Juncker sold his business and returned to Copenhagen as an antiquarian bookseller. Another publisher already mentioned is Josef Singer, Leipzig, who produced an Illustrierte Reihe of 23 books from 1919 to 1930, mostly 19 th century German texts, illustrated by colour lithography, but offering nothing new. Juncker’s edition of Rheinsberg was passed on to Singer to exploit for his own company, as the imprint of my 1930 copy shows. The Singer edition switched to a format slightly larger than the very uniform small octave Illustrierte Reihe and does not feature the firm’s device shown in all previous volumes, a clear sign that the series was in a state of dissolution. The next series in this list is the Rösl Bücher, already mentioned above, with 17 small octave volumes in all, published in Munich by Rösl & Cie. (1920-1923), as “illustrierte Künstlerbücher”, some with “handbemalte Bilder”, meaning outline designs hand-coloured by means of celluloid stencils (F: pochoir, G: Schablone), others with silhouettes or monochrome reproductions of historical prints. They were bound in half leather with paper boards, top edges gilt or stained, or in full cloth, therefore altogether too expensive to be profitable. In his Zwiebelfisch reports on recent books, Hans von Weber waxes enthusiastic about the Rösl Bücher, describing them as “mit bestem Geschmack ausgestattete und durchweg entzückend illustrierte Bändchen” (Der Zwiebelfisch, November 1921: 73). He does not mention their prices, because at this time they were very unstable, and points out in an editorial “Zur Lage auf dem Büchermarkt” that as the prices rocket, so sales fall (ibid.: 39-43). Nonetheless, new series still continued to enter the market, for instance the Terra-Bücher, also mentioned above, published by the Karl Voegels Verlag in Berlin from 1920-1930, the sixth in this list. This very uniform series comprised 30 numbered volumes, illustrated either by Luigi Malipiero or Gustav Weissinger, all bound in full cloth in various hues, with a gilt banderole bearing the series title on the background of a silhouette of Europe stamped on the top board, and the author and title on the spine. The silhouette of Europe is no doubt meant to suggest the interculturality of a series that included German, Danish, Russian, French, English and American writers. Another series is the Sindbad- Bücher published in Munich by the Drei Masken Verlag between 1921 and 1936. Its programme was defined in the subtitle “Phantastische und abenteuerliche Romane” which was explained in the preface to the backlist printed at the back of each book. The books were not numbered, but all had the same octavo format 262 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="263"?> and initially a uniform half-cloth binding. Only the first twelve volumes were illustrated. Yet another illustrated series was Das Prisma, which started in 1922 with half a dozen 19 th century classics, from Oscar Wilde to Franz von Pocci, and then switched to contemporary texts, from Jakob Wassermann to Kasimir Edschmid. The 13 crown quarto volumes had full cloth or half leather bindings and lithographic illustrations throughout. The publisher was Hans Heinrich Tillgner, Berlin, and the ambitious series was discontinued in 1923. Then we have the Sanssouci-Bücher, published by Hans Müller and Irmgard Kiepenheuer in Potsdam. They had left Gustav Kiepenheuer in 1919 to set up their own firm, Müller & Co.-Verlag, planning to realise their own version of the book beautiful. Under the editorship of Franz Blei (1871-1942), one of the most formative critics, editors and essayists of the period, eight octavo volumes were produced, all in 1923. They were available in a deluxe edition of 100 handbound copies with signed illustrations, and a standard edition of 2000 or 3000 copies in a half cloth binding. Finally, I should mention the Büchergilde Gutenberg, a book club-cumpublisher, founded in 1924 by the Union of German Book Printers in order to give working class people access to good and inexpensive reading matter, both educational and entertaining. The Büchergilde books were carefully printed, often illustrated and well bound in full-cloth, most frequently in Royal Octavo format (24 cms height), and although they did not constitute a series in the usual sense, they did have a recognisable group identity, which was reinforced by the illustrated monthly magazine Die Büchergilde produced for the members of the guild. Some 170 titles were published before in 1933 the Nazi government closed the guild down and arrested its founder Bruno Dressler, forcing it and him to emigrate to Switzerland (Dragowski 1992: 147-150, 159-164). We will return to Wolff’s Der neue Roman in Ch. 4.2 on Frans Masereel as illustrator. The Zweifäuster Drucke, already referred to in connection with Sennewald’s Deutsche Buchillustratoren, will be dealt with in greater detail in the discussion of Robert Budzinski’s work as writer and illustrator in Ch. 5.3. There are two points in this enumeration that strike me as characteristic of this period: first, the enormous fertility and diversity of publishers and series, which show to what heights German popular publishing could have climbed if economic and political conditions had not interfered; second, the refusal of German publishers to countenance paperbacks as a standard form of binding, the “livre broché” that was so well accepted in France. 3.3 German illustrated book series 263 <?page no="264"?> 3.4 Illustrated fiction series in Britain The situation of popular publishing in Britain will turn out to be rather different from that in France, as defined by the three illustrated series we have discussed. Before moving on to illustrated fiction series in Britain, we need to take a look at what is arguably one of the most remarkable publishing successes in the first half of the 20 th century. Almost everyone who read English books during that period will have come across The World’s Classics, established by Grant Richards in 1901 and sold to Henry Frowde, the manager of Oxford University Press, in October 1905. This was one model for Everyman’s Library (EL), founded in 1906 by Joseph Malaby Dent (1849-1926), a non-conformist bookbinder turned publisher. EL will serve us here as a representative example of a characteristic attitude to illustration in British publishers’ series of the time. A note on other predecessors of EL will help to put that series in its context. Dent’s focus on the popular market is already evident in his Temple Shakespeare (1894) and Temple Classics (1896), both titles referring to the location of Dent’s first offices in the Temple Gate area south of the Strand and Fleet Street. The Temple Classics, edited by Israel Gollancz (1864-1930), with their slim octavo pocket format most clearly foreshadowed EL. They were full-bound in dark blue cloth and printed on a crisp Oxford India paper, with very little show-through, and had at least one brief marginal keynote as a guide for the reader on every page. Each volume features a frontispiece portrait of the author or of some important person figuring in the text, and a decorated art nouveau title page, printed in black and red. My copy of Dante’s Inferno (1900, 10 th reprint 1919), with a carefully annotated bilingual text, even provides ten maps, plates and tables designed to help the common reader to visualise and understand the geographical, astronomical and genealogical topics alluded to in the text. On this evidence, Dent’s idea of illustration was decidedly more educational than aesthetic, more focused on providing background information than on visualising aspects of the narrative. EL was never conceived as an illustrated series and never became one. It was however a uniform series, easily recognisable in spite of the changes introduced in the course of time. During the first period, the endpapers and the doublespread title pages were fully decorated by “R.L.K.”, the English architect Reginald L. Knowles (1879-1950), in a style reminiscent of the Kelmscott Press and even more of Walter Crane’s ideas and practice concerning the architecture of the printed book, as expounded in his Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New, 1896 (cf. Ch. 4.1). Many dust-jackets for the cloth-bound, flat-backed Foolscap Octavo volumes of this first period did carry an illustration. In the second period, after 1935, Knowles’s title-page design was replaced by a simple, typographic one, using Eric Gill’s Perpetua roman type, and sometimes adding 264 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="265"?> a small woodcut decoration by Eric Ravilious (1908-42), and further woodcuts on the dust jacket, as in this volume, EL 951, of 1939: Fig. 75: Dust jacket design for R. Jefferies, After London In the third period, after 1953, the old pocket format was replaced by a slightly larger Crown Octavo format, with rounded backs. It is significant that Ernest Rhys (1859-1946), the founding editor of EL, in his autobiographical Everyman Remembers (1931), never once discusses the issue of illustrations for the series, though he does occasionally mention illustrations for other texts, such as “a favourite copy of Keats with a tell-tale portrait to set one thinking of his fate and one’s own predicament as a would-be poet and follower in his fatal steps” (Rhys 1931: 7). The fact is that Rhys sees this frontispiece portrait not as a structural element of the book but as an occasion for fanciful musings about himself. His memoirs show that he was fascinated by writers and especially by playwrights and actors, but not really interested in art or artists, which 3.4 Illustrated fiction series in Britain 265 <?page no="266"?> he only alludes to anecdotally. As a result, even the Dickens editions in EL - texts that had for the most part been illustrated from the very first - were stripped of their original (and subsequent) illustrations. The Pickwick Papers, for example, which had begun life in 1836 as a series of sporting sketches by Robert Seymour, with linking texts by Dickens, was republished in 1907 as no. 235 of the EL series, without a single illustration. As if to make up for the omission, it featured an introduction by G.K. Chesterton, and remained unillustrated till the defunct EL was revived by David Campbell in 1998. His edition follows the “New Oxford Illustrated Dickens” with 43 illustrations by Seymour and Phiz (cf. www.everymanslibrary.co.uk/ history.aspx for Campbell’s own account). When I was a student in the late 60s, cheap illustrated editions were not available, and illustration itself was not considered a topic for serious academic reflection, in spite of the eye-opening final chapter on “The Dickens Illustrations” in the Leavis’s Dickens the Novelist (1970). Here is Q.D. Leavis on what makes the illustrations so important: The illustrations of Dickens’s novels up to Bleak House are a unique addition to the text, not only visualising a scene for us in its historical social detail, and giving a visual embodiment to the characters which expresses their inner selves for us inescapably, besides being a visual embodiment of dramatic flash-points: the illustrations are frequently indispensable even to us, the highly-trained modern reader, in interpreting the novels correctly because they encapsule the themes and give us the means of knowing with certainty where Dickens meant the stress to fall (since his touch is often lightest where most meaningful, and tactfully indirect). Even we lose much if we don’t read the Dickens novels with their original illustrations, and this is true of no other English novelist. (Leavis/ Leavis 1972: 434 f.) The illustrations, if they are well done, serve as complements to the text, there is no doubt about that, whereas Mrs Leavis’ final statement may raise eyebrows - just think of John Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, probably based on Lewis Carroll’s own, or Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall: An Illustrated Novelette (1928), illustrated by the author. But occasionally EL did admit illustrations, as in the case of John Ruskin’s Sesame & Lilies; The Two Paths; & The King of the Golden River, no. 219 of the series, also of 1907 (repr. 1925). While Sesame & Lilies remains unillustrated, the five lectures collected as The Two Paths feature 13 illustrations, two of them full page plates, which are necessary for understanding Ruskin’s discussion of the importance of iron in “Nature, Art and Policy”. Ruskin originally wrote the third text, The King of the Golden River, or The Black Brothers: A Legend of Stiria, in 1841 for the then 12-year-old Effie Gray, who became his wife in 1848. It was first published in 266 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="267"?> 1850 and is here reprinted with the 22 original designs “drawn on wood” by Richard Doyle (1824-1883) and rendered as wood-engravings by a team of seven engravers headed by the Dalziel brothers. In his introduction to the volume, Sir Oliver Lodge finds it necessary to emphasise that this tale is exceptional in Ruskin’s work and therefore “ought to appear with Doyle’s illustrations”, though “it might well be issued in still cheaper form separately” (EL 219: x). Lodge seems to feel that the allegorical tale is strange company for the educational discourses that precede it. We will have to be content with this brief reference to just two EL titles since clearly Dent’s series, famous as it is, has very little to contribute to the understanding of popular illustrated series, except by way of contrast. It seems that after the turn of the century illustration was deemed appropriate for certain restricted uses, but not for the general middle-class public, for whom a ready supply of adequately printed and bound books at low prices was, it was believed, more important than any aesthetic experience. A generation earlier, John Morley had castigated such condescension to the uneducated classes in his 1876 lecture “On Popular Culture”, already referred to above: I think popular instruction has been made much more repulsive than it need have been, and more repulsive than it ought to have been, because those who have had the control of the movement for the last fifty years, have been too anxious to make the type of popular instruction conform to the type of academic instruction proper to learned men. The principles of instruction have been too rigorously ascetic and puritanical, and instead of making the access to knowledge as easy as possible, we have delighted in forcing every pilgrim to make his journey to the shrine of the Muses with a hair-shirt on his back and peas in his shoes. (Morley 1888: III, 25 f.) Morley of course has dissenting institutions for adult education in mind, like the Mechanics’ Institutions and the Working Men’s Colleges, and not contemporary and future publishers, but his criticism applies to both. We will see that as far as the cheap popular book for adults was concerned this ascetic attitude prevailed in Britain throughout the inter-war period, till Penguin in 1937 issued their illustrated classics, too late, alas, to leave a lasting mark. The EL series was devised by Dent in cooperation with Ernest Rhys, already mentioned as his founding editor. It was Rhys who in 1903 had the bright idea for the series title, as well as the motto printed in every volume, and since we have his first-hand account of the matter in his autobiographical Everyman Remembers (1931), he can give us the details himself: […] there occurred to me a larger scheme, a collection of the great literatures beginning with the English, so coordinated that if its readers began with one creative book they would want another and another till the great public had the world literature 3.4 Illustrated fiction series in Britain 267 <?page no="268"?> within its grasp. It was a prodigious, hardly practicable idea. How was one to find a collaborator able and keen enough to work it out? Having made out some ambitious experimental lists at the old book factory, the Reading Room of the British Museum, I went off to Ventnor, in the Isle of Wight, and wrote a piquant letter to J.M. Dent, enclosing my programme, and asking him if he did not want to become “the Napoleon of Publishers”? (Rhys 1931: 238) Dent replied, telling Rhys that he was planning just such a series, and would he call on him in London in order to discuss the details? Dent and his son Hugh, who together with Rhys formed the editorial staff, were enthusiastic and soon worked out ambitious plans to send an “army of books” (ibid.: 239) out into a world only waiting to be conquered. But as yet they still wanted a name for this army. Rhys continues his account: Good titles like good lyrics drop from heaven. The finding of one, arresting and explicit, was the grand crux. We must have made up a score of possible names for the new series, among them the New Century Series, the Masterpiece Library and the Atlantic Library, but not one of them quite satisfied us. Then one day, walking along Garrick Street past the doors of the Garrick Club, not thinking of anything in particular, I recalled a line of the old Mystery Play - “Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide,” … which gave me the cue. It sent me marching into the office where the old chief sat. “Eureka! ” I said, quoting the line: “here’s our title - Everyman’s Library.” He stared a moment incredulously, and then said: “Why yes: you have it! ” (ibid.: 239) The full wording, which continues “in thy most need to go by thy side”, was first incorporated into Knowles’ endpaper design and later printed on the first blank page or on the half-title page. As Rhys’ story and the title as well as the motto of the series all confirm, EL was intended to appeal to all readers and exclude none. Yet by excluding illustration, Dent did make its volumes less accessible than they might have been. 3.4.1 John Lane The Bodley Head There are several reasons for choosing to discuss The Bodley Head here. For one thing, its publishing programme seems characteristic of how certain dominant British traditions were continued into the 20 th century. Another reason is that though it did not explicitly pursue the aim of producing an illustrated publisher’s series, it may in fact have succeeded, at least to some extent, in doing just that. If so, that would raise the question whether such a success could reasonably count as a popular one, aiming at the diffusion of reading skills and cultural knowledge to all classes of literacy, by making books that were inexpensive and 268 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="269"?> attractive at the same time. A third reason is the way the experience that Allen Lane gained in the Bodley Head nest served to fledge his later Penguin project, in a process of adapting to changing conditions in society and the economy. As Jonathan Rose points out in “Modernity and Print I: Britain 1890-1970” (Ch. 25 of Eliot / Rose 2007), the British book trade had gone through a number of changes at the end of the 19 th century and at the beginning of the 20 th , and so had the market it served. Several organisations like the Society of Authors (1884), The Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland (1895) and the Publishers’ Association (1896) had been founded to protect the trade’s interests, e.g. through the Net Book Agreement (NBA, 1900), which ruled that retail booksellers were not allowed to sell books at less than the agreed price (ibid.: 341). In the case of EL, this was originally one shilling per volume. The NBA remained in force till 1997 when it was ruled illegal. Other innovations that were gradually adopted by publishers in the late 19 th century included the employment of professional readers like Edward Garnett, and cooperation with literary agencies, of which by 1939 there were 56 in the UK (ibid. 342). Such innovations reflect the gradual changes in the reading public, which continued to grow and to divide into different groups or levels. Rose gives us important hints concerning these changes and their consequences: Dickens, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope were probably the last novelists who addressed the entire English reading public, which, by 1890, was fragmenting into several different publics reading different kinds of books. Accordingly, publishers began to develop focused lists. Ward Lock specialised in light bestsellers by H. Rider Haggard, E. Phillips Oppenheim, and Edgar Wallace. Routledge and Kegan Paul developed a strong philosophy list, edited first by C.K. Ogden and later by A.J. Ayer. Swan Sonnenschein concentrated on sociology and socialism, including the first English translation of Das Kapital (1886). George Allen and Unwin also published leftist intellectuals ( J.A. Hobson, Bertrand Russell, Harold Laski, Gandhi), as did Secker and Warburg (George Orwell) and Victor Gollancz, though Gollancz also had a strong stable of detective writers (Dorothy L. Sayers). (ibid: 342 f.) And so on, for a dozen other publishers of the turn of the century, including The Bodley Head. This was founded in 1887 by Charles Elkin Mathews (1851- 1921) and John Lane (1854-1925), who shared bibliophile interests and some experience of the antiquarian book trade, and decided to go into partnership at the vacant premises of a print-seller on Vigo Street, just west of Piccadilly Circus. His shop at the sign of the Rembrandt Head inspired the two budding booksellers to adopt The Bodley Head as their shop sign, in honour of Sir Thomas Bodley, the founder of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and born at Exeter like 3.4 Illustrated fiction series in Britain 269 <?page no="270"?> Mathews. After seven years, the partnership was dissolved and Lane carried on as “John Lane The Bodley Head”. In 1896 he set up the John Lane Company as his branch office in New York, which in 1922 he sold to Dodd, Mead and Company, whose name soon appeared on many title-pages. After so much publishing history it is time to turn to the books themselves, their authors and illustrators, in order to find out what Bodley Head books really looked like. Over the years, I have got to know and acquire quite a large number of the illustrated books published by John Lane after 1918, thanks to the internet documentation supplied by libraries and the contributions of booksellers the world over. Before entering into a presentation and discussion of some of the most interesting volumes, I would like to quote the overview of Lane’s programme given by J.W. Lambert in his history of The Bodley Head, 1887-1987 (1987). After the Great War, Lambert tells us, Lane stuck to the track he had been pursuing for 30 years: In general The Bodley Head pursued Lane’s usual path: minor poetry, some of it not at all bad; ‘smart’ fiction, a sprinkling of away-from-it-all rusticity; a few war novels, with old favourites like [William J.] Locke weighing in gallantly as their world was passing away, many new and quickly forgotten first novelists, a quite strong representation of the Frenchman Pierre Mille, self-confessed admirer and follower of Kipling, and of course the apparently unflagging Anatole France; in non-fiction, a quite deliberate extension of the firm’s fancy for anecdotal travel books, on the whole lively first-hand accounts of the military in many parts of the world; a handful of aeronautical books; one or two theatrical books - later to be dismissed by Lane, à propos a suggested reissue of Beerbohm’s drama criticism, on the grounds that they never made any money. (Lambert 1987: 193 f.) It should be noted, however, that after the war, even though civilian life seemed gradually to return to normal, and signs of an economic recovery were visible, “readjustment proved more difficult than expected”, as Eric Hobsbawm puts it in his Age of Extremes (Hobsbawm 1994: 89). He explains the situation as follows: Prices and the boom collapsed in 1920. This undermined the power of labour - British unemployment never thereafter fell much below 10 percent and the unions lost half their members over the next twelve years - thus once again tilting the balance firmly towards the employers, but prosperity remained elusive. (ibid.) This meant a shrinking market, with much less money to spend on luxury items such as books, and tremendous costs for rebuilding Britain as “a fit country for heroes to live in”, as David Lloyd George proclaimed in a speech of November 1918. When 65-year-old John Lane, tiring after 30 years of publishing, took his 270 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="271"?> adopted son Allen Williams-Lane into the firm in 1919, the company gradually moved into troubled waters. But it still disposed of authors like William J. Locke (1863-1930), “a living gold mine”, according to Lambert (ibid.: 143), and Anatole France (1844-1922), who are both relevant to our focus on illustrated fiction, since they sold well throughout the 20s and 30s, and many of their books were produced in carefully illustrated editions. Before we come to them, however, we must mention the works of Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932), which contributed so much to The Bodley Head’s success. My favourite is The Headswoman (1898), a Crown Octavo volume illustrated by Marcia Lane Foster (1897-1983), and a witty critique of gender prejudices and defence of feminist aspirations, rather than the long-winded and sentimental bestsellers The Golden Age (1895, illustrated editions 1900 ff.) and Dream Days (1898, illustrated editions 1902 ff), criticism that does not hold for Grahame’s marvellous fable The Wind in the Willows, published by Methuen in 1908, and illustrated in 1931 by E.H. Shepard (1879-1976), whose Drawn from Memory (1957), an illustrated account of his childhood in London during the 1880s, is warmly recommended. Locke’s The Golden Journey of Mr. Paradyne (1924) was also illustrated by Marcia Lane Foster with eight full-page five-colour line blocks, five black and white vignettes, one used as a cover illustration, and illustrated endpapers. Fig. 76: Frontispiece and title-page of The Golden Journey of Mr. Paradyne 3.4 Illustrated fiction series in Britain 271 <?page no="272"?> The same author’s The Beloved Vagabond was first published by John Lane in 1905 and re-issued in an illustrated edition in 1922. The latter has 16 tipped in plates by Jean Dulac (1886-1968), water-coloured drawings of a rather conventional kind, but supplemented by 35 silhouette drawings that are much more in harmony with the letterpress. The book contains a backlist of 22 works by Locke, all available from The Bodley Head at prices between 7/ 6 and 2/ -, the latter category being labelled “popular edition”, while 6/ was the standard price for an unillustrated octavo. Anatole France is even more dominating in the Bodley Head list, with 42 volumes in all, at least 14 of which were illustrated. Lambert calls the France project “The Bodley Head’s crowning achievement in fiction” (Lambert 1987: 154). Many of these books have the same Royal Octavo format of 9½ x 6½ inches (c. 25½ x 16 cm) that the publisher also used for classic fiction by English and other French writers, mostly bound in black or dark blue cloth with gilt titles and decoration on the spine and the top board. Early illustrated volumes like The Merrie Tales of Jacques Tournebroche (1923) have the slightly smaller Demy Octavo format of 8½ x 5½ inches. This edition is bound in beige cloth, with black lettering on the spine and on the top board, where the lettering is arranged around a small woodcut that one also finds on the title-page. The illustrations are 16 very delicate black and white woodcuts by Marcia Lane Foster, in addition to which each of the nine tales opens with an illustrated framed initial, with three initials for the second tale, one for each of its three parts. The book is printed in a very clear and legible roman type, a Caslon Old Face (cf. Morison 1949: 44 f.). Another novel by France, The Gods are Athirst, first published by John Lane in Demy 8vo in 1913, is a perceptive and moving account of political fanaticism during the French revolution. It went through five more editions before it was produced as an illustrated Crown 8vo volume in 1927, reprinted in 1933. This sequence of seven editions earning money over a period of 20 years before culminating in an illustrated version is typical of Lane’s way of combining commercial acumen with a sense of art as the crowning reward. If Emrys Williams tells us that Lane was known to be “fastidious about the printing and format of his books” (Williams 1973: 39), Jack Lambert reports that “after books, painting was John Lane’s delight, and after painting, old English glass and almost any other objet d’art” (Lambert 1987: 177). The illustrations and decorations for The Gods are Athirst are by John Austen (1886-1948), one of the most accomplished illustrators of his day. Unfortunately, the decorated initials are standard typographic material that does not go well with Austen’s very individual style. The 12 tipped in plates 272 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="273"?> in muted shades of grey, buff, reddish-brown and pale green are printed by photogravure, to which the 22 black and white woodcut illustrations, including a full-page second frontispiece showing “Death the puppeteer”, and 21 tailpieces, form a sober but not too jarring contrast. These examples may be sufficient for the moment, but I do want to underline my point about John Lane having started and Allen Lane brought about, willy-nilly, almost hidden in the midst of a hotchpotch of genres and formats, a library of illustrated classic fiction, with enough uniformity of size and binding to look like a series when standing shoulder to shoulder on a shelf. Perhaps the following selective short-title list, most of them Royal 8vo, can help the reader to visualise this undeclared illustrated series: • Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, illustrated by Herbert Cole, 1900. • Aubrey Beardsley, Under the Hill, ill. Aubrey Beardsley, 1904. • Anatole France, Penguin Island, ill. Frank C. Papé, 1925. • Anatole France, The Gods are Athirst, ill. John Austen, 1927. • Voltaire, Candide and Other Romances, ill. Norman Tealby, 1928. • Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ill. John Austen, 1928. • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ill. John Austen, 1928. • Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, ill. John Austen, 1929. • Laurence Sterne, Sentimental Journey, ill. Valenti Angelo, 1929. • Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ill. Norman Tealby, 1929. • Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ill. G. Spencer Pryse, 1930. • Thomas de Quincey, An English Opium Eater, ill. Sonia Woolf, 1930. • R.L. Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ill. S.G. Hulme Beaman, 1930. • Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, ill. Zhenya Gay, 1931. • Gustave Flaubert, November, ill. Hortense Ansorge, 1934. At prices from 16/ to 25/ the books in this mainly “black series” (cp. Kurt Wolff’s Schwarze Bücher) were of course expensive, with limited editions like Under the Hill or November costing correspondingly more. Today they have become collectors’ items, fetching prodigious prices, for it is the collectors who have recognised their status as cultural monuments. On the other hand, they do not meet the criteria by which one could class them as “popular”: they are not inexpensive, pocket-sized, easy to read, contemporary, fashionable etc., nor were they any of this during the 20s and 30s. One must also admit that John Lane The Bodley Head had not learned to produce such books in modest illustrated editions, which needed neither cloth nor gilt nor coloured plates to attract a large public. But that was in the offing. 3.4 Illustrated fiction series in Britain 273 <?page no="274"?> 3.4.2 Chatto & Windus and the Phoenix Library We can now turn to another British publisher, Chatto & Windus, who from 1928 to about 1945 produced a popular yet demanding series of mainly contemporary works of fiction and non-fiction, The Phoenix Library. The original publishing house had been founded in 1855 by John Camden Hotten (1832-1873) at Piccadilly. When Hotten died, Andrew Chatto (1840-1913), who had learned the trade as Hotten’s apprentice and right hand, took over the firm. This was made possible by William Edward Windus (1828-1910), some of whose verses had been published by Hotten. Windus provided the money to buy the firm from Hotten’s widow, and the two men continued with Chatto at the helm and Windus as a sleeping partner. They were joined in 1876 by Percy Spalding, who took over the firm in 1911 when Chatto retired, till in the mid-twenties he was succeeded by Charles Prentice and Harold Raymond. It was Prentice who came up with the proposal to infuse new life into the massive backlist of the firm by producing a series of inexpensive clothbound titles, an idea aptly expressed through the phoenix image, the ancient emblem of renewal and immortality. Oliver Warner, in his Chatto & Windus: A Brief Account of the Firm’s Origin, History and Development, describes an entrepreneurial situation hovering between a dormant past and a lively future: One of Raymond’s earliest problems, which he described in the Dent Memorial Lecture for 1938, was to ‘job off an accumulation of works which had long ceased to sell. Those who regard Penguins as a modern portent may be surprised to hear that I found a stock of over three-quarters of a million sixpenny paper-covered works lying dormant on Chatto’s shelves.’ Upwards of eighty titles were concerned, and, as Raymond said: ‘it was a very long fiction list that could produce that number of works which would pay to be re-set and sold at sixpence.’ (Warner 1973: 20 f.) Luckily, titles that would pay existed in sufficient numbers in the company’s ar‐ chives, for example works by the Bloomsbury Group, such as Lytton Strachey’s biographies and the critical works of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, as well as the fiction of David Garnett and T.F. Powys, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Aldous Huxley, Rosamond Lehmann and Richard Hughes. When one sees that the names of Anton Tchehov, Marcel Proust, Ernst Jünger and William Faulkner also grace the list, one recognises that there must have been sufficient room to hope that such an up-to-date catalogue in an up-dated costume would be able to attract a large number of readers. Launched in 1928, the Phoenix Library gradually grew to a list of some 120 pocket-size works, at 3/ 6 per volume, and in 274 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="275"?> 1950 an attempt was made to resuscitate the series as the New Phoenix Library, which soon faded into oblivion. But what did the Phoenix Library (PL) contribute in the way of illustration? Only very little, apart from the indispensable phoenix motif on each title-page and blind-stamped on each top board. Two of Julian Huxley’s books about Bird Watching and Bird Behaviour (PL 95, 1935) and Ants (PL 102, 1935) featured monochrome photographic plates. Clive Bell’s Art (PL 12, 1928) talks at length about Futurist and Impressionist art and has a whole chapter on Cézanne without ever showing a picture. Roger Fry’s Vision and Design (PL 15) fares no better and has to do without all the eight plates of the 1922 edition, retaining only the line drawings in the chapter on “The Art of the Bushmen”. Rather unexpectedly there are some volumes in the collection that are illustrated, namely those by David “Bunny” Garnett (1892-1981), which have delightful wood engravings and in one case a line illustration by his wife Rachel “Ray” Garnett (1891-1940). These are: • PL 7, Lady into Fox & A Man in the Zoo, 1928, 12 + 6 woodcuts • PL 21, The Sailor’s Return, 1928, woodcut frontispiece • PL 75, No Love, 1931, title-page illustration (also used for the dust jacket) • PL 101, The Grasshoppers Come & A Rabbit in the Air, 1935, 6 + 2 woodcuts Why did Chatto & Windus make these exceptions? The answer is that the books in question had previously appeared in an illustrated series of sorts almost exclusively devoted to Garnett’s works. These six titles were therefore all available as stereotypes from which they could be reprinted, but only if the illustrations, which were a material part of the forme for a page, i.e. “type matter and blocks assembled into pages and locked up in a chase ready for printing” (Glaister 1996, s.v. forme), were retained. The original six books, later united in the four numbers of PL listed above, all had the same full-cloth binding, with (for the first three titles) a title piece glued on the spine (and an ersatz title tipped in between the last page and the free flyleaf), top edges gilt, and dust jackets. Later volumes had the titles printed on the spine in gilt. The cloth is rather striking: a pattern of mottled black on a purple ground, which resembles the gemstone called “garnet”. Garnett gives an amusing account of the writing and publication of Lady into Fox in The Flowers of the Forest (1955: 243-248), the second volume of his autobiographical trilogy The Golden Echo, but does not breathe a word about the garnet cloth. The books listed above were all printed by the Westminster Press, London, on watermarked Abbey Mills Greenfield laid paper, made mainly of esparto in Wales at Greenfield Abbey, on the River Dee. If one compares the original Garnett and Garnett editions with the PL reprints, 3.4 Illustrated fiction series in Britain 275 <?page no="276"?> one can see immediately that on every page the impression (G: Druckbild, cf. Glaister 1996, s.v. impression) is the same, i.e. the print area is exactly the same in both versions in type and size, and of course the texts and illustrations are also identical. As regards the frontispieces and the title-pages, certain modifications were necessary but easy to carry out. In the case of PL 7 and 101, the pagination of the second text in each number was made consecutive to the first text. Since the PL format (Foolscap Octavo) was slightly smaller than that of the originals (Crown Octavo), the outer margins were shrunk by half and the lower margins by one third. The Westminster Press of course printed the PL versions too, but on thinner wove paper. Here is a page from the first edition of Lady into Fox (1922) with one of Ray Garnett’s engravings, an episodic illustration showing little Polly, Mrs. Cork’s granddaughter, getting acquainted with Mrs. Tebrick turned fox: Fig. 77: David Garnett, Lady into Fox (1922): 47. There is as far as I know only one further volume in this undeclared series, namely A Voyage to the Island of the Articoles by André Maurois, translated by David Garnett, with wood engravings by Edward Carrick (whom we met in Ch. 3.2), published in 1928. But strangely enough this volume was published by Jonathan Cape and printed by Butler & Tanner, though bound in exactly the same format and using the same garnet cloth as the Garnett books we have just been reviewing. One can only guess that Garnett himself or his father, who was publisher’s reader for Cape, arranged for the distinctive cloth to be used. This “mottled series” was no doubt aimed at bibliophiles who did not mind paying a 276 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="277"?> little more for a product that seemed collectable, but that does not explain why Chatto & Windus abstained from a proper series title, generally assumed to be an incentive for collectors. 3.4.3 Penguin and the Penguin Illustrated Classics As related above, Allen Lane was beset with difficulties at The Bodley Head towards the end of the decade, but when after the death of John Lane in 1925 and his wife’s death in 1928, their fortune passed to Allen, his two brothers, and his sister, a material basis was given on which to develop new ideas for the future (Williams 1973: 40). In his biography of Allen Lane, J.E. Morpurgo gives a vivid account of how this happened after a week-end in September 1934 spent with Agatha Christie and her husband in Devon. Returning to London by train, he got stuck at Exeter station: An hour’s wait at Exeter gave him the chance to scour the railway book-stores but there was little to his liking among the piles of glossy magazines, the expensive new titles, the remainders and the shabby reprints of shoddy novels. The long, bookless journey back to London would have been unbearable, if it had not set him to mulling over notions that had been present, if vague, in his mind for several years. Next morning, during the bathroom session, he elaborated his scheme for the benefit of [his brothers] Dick and John. The Bodley Head would publish a new series, reprints of quality fiction and non-fiction, the books to be produced in attractive paper-covers and sold to the public at the unbelievably low price of sixpence - the price of ten cigarettes. (Morpurgo 1979: 80) The story of how this plan was carried out against mostly stubborn resistance and nonetheless became a tremendous success does not need to be retold here. In May 1935 Allen Lane announced the first ten titles under the Bodley Head Penguin Books imprint, and by October 1936 Penguin Books Ltd. was proud to announce that 3 million Penguins had been sold at sixpence each (Fifty Penguin Years, published to commemorate the anniversary exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall, London, September-October 1985: 7, 20). Here I would like to quote a contemporary’s response, collected in Sue Bradley’s The British Book Trade: An Oral History (2008): Tommy Joy It is argued that the book trade didn’t support Allen Lane when he came round with the first Penguins. That isn’t true. We only bought what we could sell, and we had no market in those days for paperbacks. Harrods’ clientele were too toffeenosed to buy paperbacks. They wouldn’t dream of buying a sixpenny book. They wanted a proper book - with covers. (Bradley 2008: 139) 3.4 Illustrated fiction series in Britain 277 <?page no="278"?> Tommy Joy was at that time Senior Assistant at Harrods Circulating Library, which he became responsible for during the war, so he was familiar with the kind of customers that frequented Harrods’ department store, the most famous in Britain. What he calls a “toffee-nose” is a snob, a supercilious person, and the expression probably derives not from “toffee” at all but from “toff ”, which in the lower-class slang of the Victorian period referred to a “stylishly dressed upperclass gentleman”. The phrase may have been first recorded by Henry Mayhew in his report on London Labour and the London Poor (1851) (cf. www.phrases. org.uk/ meanings/ toffee-nosed.html). At any rate, Joy’s awareness of the class dimension in book-buying during the 1930s seems clear enough. On the other hand, the success of Penguins suggests that this taint of class gradually faded over the years as more and more people from all walks of life bought them and read them and even collected them. This is confirmed by Noreen Branson and Margot Heinemann in the “Conclusion” to their social history of Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (1971), namely that several things had changed in Britain during that decade: “a new attitude to poverty was established”, there was a “conscious growth of anti-fascist and democratic feeling” and “deference and respect for one’s superiors perceptibly declined” (Branson/ Heinemann 1971: 349-351). That brings us to a Penguin failure which might well have become a collector’s delight, had it only been designed more carefully and generously. I shall quote Jack Morpurgo’s account of the project in a moment, but first give a complete list of the Penguin Illustrated Classics (PIC) published in May 1938, as appended to each volume: 278 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="279"?> Fig. 78: Complete List of Penguin Illustrated Classics, May 1938 3.4 Illustrated fiction series in Britain 279 <?page no="280"?> All these books had paper wrappers to protect the card covers, with the serial number printed at the bottom of the spine. The inside flaps provide a portrait of and a paragraph of information about the author (front flap) and the artist (back flap). Only three of the books in my complete collection still had their wrappers, worn and torn of course, which is a pity because I do miss the wrapper with information about Theodore Naish, the almost unknown illustrator of C10. The artists for the series were selected by Robert Gibbings (1889-1940), one of the founding members in 1920 of the Society of Wood Engravers, and from 1924 to 1933 owner of the Golden Cockerel Press. In 1936 he was appointed by Allen Lane as art editor of the PIC. All the texts were set in Times New Roman. The introductions to each volume were written by the Shakespeare scholar G.B. Harrison (1894-1991), who was already hard at work editing The Penguin Shakespeare (1937-59). Frances Spalding, the biographer of Gwen Raverat (1885-1957), has some interesting details on how the PIC project was organised: He [Gibbings] immediately commissioned nine wood engravers to work on short texts. In return for a fee of £50, each artist was expected to produce a frontispiece, titlepage and about ten further decorations, none of which could exceed 3 ½ x 2 ½ inches and several of which could be smaller. It was agreed that Gwen would do Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, which perhaps did not suit her, for though her bold, straightforward style is in keeping with Sterne’s colloquial manner, the illustrations lack feeling and atmosphere. Fortunately, she insisted on her right to exhibit and sell individual prints made from these designs before they were transferred to electrotype, for the printing of the illustrations in the book is execrable. (Spalding 2001: 375) Raverat produced 12 engravings for the Sentimental Journey, ten of which are episodic illustrations and exceed the size stipulated by the terms of the commission. The two smallest ones are first the title-page vignette of the “désobligeante” coach setting out on its journey, a motif taken up and developed in the Calais episodes, and setting the erotic note that will carry us to the end of the journal, and second is the vignette closing the story of the starling. Raverat’s engravings are sometimes reticent and sometimes very suggestive of feelings and atmosphere, as one can only show by discussing an example. My choice is the illustration which was also used to decorate the cover, showing the episode in which an infatuated Mr. Yorick buys several pairs of gloves from the beautiful Grisset (“grisette”). 280 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="281"?> Fig. 79: Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, PIC, pp. 84f. This engraving, whose black surfaces come out much better when printed on the smooth card of the cover, but are not execrable on the paper, stands in close connection with Sterne’s accompanying text, which elaborates on the acts of looking that are taking place between Grisset and her customer, “certain combined looks of simple subtlety, where whim, and sense, and seriousness and nonsense, are so blended, that all the languages of Babel set loose together could not express them” (ibid.: 84). Raverat has caught one moment of this looking at and past each other, and drawn it in such a way that it suggests all the other moments alluded to in the narrative, except perhaps Grisset’s penetrating look into Yorick’s “very heart and reins” (ibid.: 85). The whole passage is an apologia, first for not trying to say everything that could be put into words, since silent acts of looking will often signify much more, and second for looking long and closely at the picture so generously provided. Frances Spalding did not, I fear, look carefully enough. Morpurgo’s account of the PIC is not very satisfactory either. [I]n May 1938, Penguin had made one substantial attempt to enter the field of illustrated books. The Illustrated Classics went some way to satisfying Allen’s wish to emulate a mode of book presentation which The Bodley Head in its heyday had indulged with great effect. They gave an opportunity to test the out-of-copyright market which had been so thoroughly exploited by World’s Classics and Everyman but the choice of title[s] was almost too obvious; their newly created British audience expected from Penguin something more original than Jane Austen, Swift, Sterne and Defoe. The American booksellers, who seem to have been a particular target for this series, were not yet convinced of the saleability of the quaint little paperbacks from Britain; they too would have needed something more unconventional than books by 3.4 Illustrated fiction series in Britain 281 <?page no="282"?> Melville and Poe or Thoreau’s inescapable Walden to entice them away from the wellestablished reprints of the classics. (Morpurgo 1979: 142 f.) Morpurgo must have meant “titles”, since his argument refers to what he sees as an unexciting selection of classic 18 th and 19 th century texts, and not to the series title. He knows that Allen’s aim was to present out-of-copyright texts in a new dress, and therefore popular and highly original titles by familiar writers were an obvious choice - many of us have grown up with illustrated juvenile versions of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels - I have mine still on my shelves - and have not hesitated to turn to the original version when the time was ripe. Morpurgo’s further critique is hardly more convincing: But the venture was damned as much by its technical inadequacies as by its failure in editorial judgement or by indifferent perception of the market potential. The charming wood engravings commissioned for the series, some by artists of high repute such as Gwen Raverat and Robert Gibbings, had about them all an outmoded refinement, as if they had been prepared by tired disciples of the old John Lane school of book illustrators. Their extravagant elegance did not match either the bustling, youthful vigour of Penguin or the starkness of a world hurtling towards war. The weaknesses of illustration were exacerbated by the indifferent paper and by the Penguin format, seemingly too cramped to carry illustration. (ibid.: 143) It is true enough that the paper Penguin used was very poor, not just indifferent, and it has not survived the 80 years since publication without becoming fragile and yellowish-brown. Worse still is that the margins are far too narrow, so that the engravings seem to have no room to breathe on the page, and are in fact, not “seemingly”, too cramped. It would have helped to leave out the superfluous running title at the head of each page that only takes up space. To describe the illustrations as “charming” is to descend into a feeble cliché, and to accuse them of “extravagant elegance” undermines any claim to charm. Morpurgo’s dismissive verdict of “outmoded refinement” lumps all the engravers together under one single unfounded and unjustifiable reproach. This writer is suffering from the same disease that afflicts many writers about art, which is that they talk about illustrations without ever taking the trouble to back up their descriptions with reference to concrete examples. To imply that Raverat and Gibbings were the only “artists of high repute” in the team selected by the editor is ridiculous, for all them, perhaps with the exception of the newcomer Theodore Naish, were recognised and widely applauded artists, some of whom we have already met. The PIC series was not the only attempt Lane and his editors made to “enter the field of illustrated books”. Another series that admitted illustration was Penguin Parade (PP), an anthology of “new stories, poems, etc, by contemporary writers”, 282 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="283"?> as the subtitle says, originally planned as a quarterly. PP was edited by Denys Kilham Roberts, a writer and anthologist, as well as Secretary of the Society of Authors, who in each new number invited readers to submit contributions. The first volume was published in December 1937 and contained short stories and poems, all of them “first English publication”, as it says on the cover. This included three woodcuts by Gwen Raverat, J.R. Biggs and Douglas Percy Bliss, all taken from the yet to be published PIC series, and thus not related to any of the texts published in this anthology, which relegates the illustration to mere decorations. The second volume, PP2, followed in early 1938, with three illustrations by Beryl Edwards, Gertrude Hermes and John Oldag, again not referring to any of the texts, but with quite detailed biographies of the authors and artists in the “Contributors” section at the back of the volume. In the long paragraph about Gertrude Hermes, we learn that “[s]he has just illustrated The Story of My Heart for the Penguin Illustrated Classics coming out this May, and is now at work on The Compleat Angler for the second batch”. This reveals that in 1938 ten (? ) further volumes were in preparation for the PIC, and is partly confirmed by the publication in November 1939 of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (first published in 1653) in a yellow cover as Penguin 238, with nine wood engravings (one repeated on the front cover) by Hermes. There is information about what is possibly another volume from the second batch in John Farleigh’s Graven Image: An Autobiographical textbook (1940), the book in which Farleigh gives a detailed account of his cooperation with Bernard Shaw on The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God (cf. Ch. 5.2). In Chapter X, on “Illustrating a book”, Farleigh presents a list of books he illustrated between 1924 and 1939, most of which he discusses in some detail. One book is listed as “Plutarch’s Lives. Penguin Books, 1937; 12 wood engravings”. Farleigh gives no further information about this project, but one can find some details about the plans for a second batch of ten PIC titles in Miscellany 5 (1990), published for the Penguin Collectors’ Society (Edwards 1990: 27-34). Further numbers of PP appeared up to 1945, with PP11, the last one edited by Roberts, now no longer sewn but stapled through all six gatherings, and no longer illustrated either. After the war, a second series was launched in 1947 under the editorship of J.E. Morpurgo, only to be discontinued after the third number (cf. Morpurgo 1979: 129, 209). The relative failure of Penguin Parade was compensated by the success of the King Penguin series, which was referred to earlier in connection with its model, the Insel-Bücherei (cf. Ch. 3.3). In summary, one gets the impression that in early 20 th century Britain the dom‐ inant tradition in publishing developed between two poles. On the one hand, there was a select production of hardbacks for comfortably off, educated, middle class readers, and on the other, a mass production of inexpensive, modest paperbacks, 3.4 Illustrated fiction series in Britain 283 <?page no="284"?> which emphasised the educational and cultural values of its programme and its relevance for the contemporary world of its extensive readership, without ignoring its entertainment value. In the middle ground, series like The World’s Classics, Everyman’s Library and the Phoenix Library combined hardback and pocket format with a minimum of decorative elements to provide students and other serious readers of all categories with inexpensive, reliable textbooks. There is, as we saw in Ch. 3.1 and have found confirmed in this section, a considerable overlap between the different groups of readers and between the publishers’ series concerned. With so many different kinds of readers and so many different kinds of books being produced for them, meaningful generalisations are hardly possible. It makes sense, therefore, to look closely at individual books and series, because that increases the accuracy of one’s descriptions. So let us conclude this section by saying a few words about an illustrated book that itself illustrates some of the problems we are enquiring into. It is Robert Gibbings’ Blue Angels and Whales, published as a Pelican Special, S16, in November 1938. Fig. 80: Frontispiece and title-page of Blue Angels and Whales 284 3 Popular illustrated fiction from 1918 to 1939 - some major series <?page no="285"?> This double page features three completely different kinds of illustration: the frontispiece woodcut is printed in cobalt blue and yellow, which gives an almost black hue where the blue is printed over the yellow, as in the eyes of the fish. On the title-page there is a Gibbings device, combining his engraver’s tools, his initials and the two creatures of the title in a kind of coat of arms, and at the bottom a vignette showing two penguins diving in chase of four flying fish. The first element is exotic and rather awesome, the second rather formal but very apposite, and the third a visual joke in the spirit of current Penguin adverts. Altogether a very mixed bag. Then there are thirty further wood engravings and one line drawing, most of them vignettes portraying ocean inhabitants, and some, especially headpieces, showing landscapes and seascapes. As if that were not enough, there is a whole gathering of sixteen pages of photogravure plates, the first of which is a photographic portrait of the author, followed by twelve pages of reproductions of underwater pencil sketches made on xylonite, a kind of celluloid like that used for making table tennis balls (cf. p. 2 of the plates). The aesthetic problem is that this mixture tends to destroy the visual harmony that the vignettes and the letterpress on their own undoubtedly have. On the other hand, it does provide something for everyone, or value for money, and thus addresses the entire broad range of Penguin readers. It also reflects the breadth of Gibbings’ own activities, from managing a private press (The Golden Cockerel Press, 1924-1933) to working for Penguins, from writing books to illustrating them, from teaching at the University of Reading (1936-1942) to travelling to the Bermudas, Tahiti and the Red Sea to dive and draw, as well as through England and France to explore rivers and produce books about them. Place Blue Angels and Whales next to Sweet Thames Run Softly (Dent 1940, medium 8vo clothbound hardback) and any of the 72 Golden Cockerel books produced under Gibbings’ direction, and you have the full span of his work in front of you, and also recognise the tremendous variety of British publishing at that time. 3.4 Illustrated fiction series in Britain 285 <?page no="287"?> 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction This chapter is devoted to two basic modes of communicating meaning and asks how they can be applied not only to verbal but also to visual artefacts. Semiotics, as already discussed, deals with the process of semiosis and the different kinds of signs and meanings involved in that process. Rhetoric is relevant here through the two categories of schemes or figures (figurae), and the tropes (tropi). Traditionally, figures have been defined as forms of arrangement through repetition, as when paragraphs are marked and linked through anaphora, epiphora or other forms of repetition. To illustrate this we can consider one of ten “Shorts” by W.H. Auden, from his Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957, a poem that shows how anaphora and epiphora can work together to build a memorable structure: Those who will not reason Perish in the act: Those who will not act Perish for that reason. (Auden 1969: 42) The four keywords or key phrases are linked or bracketed vertically with each other, two pairs in initial and two in final position, thus giving the reader a visual pattern combined with a contrasting semantic pattern. The contrast is due to the fact that the two final repetitions each involve a semantic and grammatical shift, a trope known as paronomasia or punning. The poem also confirms the openness of literary texts discussed in Ch. 1.2, for it leads the reader into an aporia, a seemingly unsolvable difficulty, namely the insight that do what you will, you will perish. There may be a way out, however, by finding a good continuation like “Those who will reason, and act reasonably, they will survive”. But perhaps that is too simplistic? If so, the aporia remains unresolved, a conclusion the reader can either bend to, or try to escape by finding a better continuation. Paradox, punning and aposiopesis (a falling silent) can also occur in our reading of the visual arts, so we will be on the watch for pictures in which objects or events are represented ambiguously or have different meanings simultaneously, or simply lead the eye into a black, empty space, like so many of Courbet’s paintings do, e.g. “La Source de la Loue” (1864, Institut Gustave Courbet, Ornans). Visual structures like those in Auden’s poem are not so easily achieved in prose as in verse, but they do occur, as we shall see from examples to come. From a linguistic perspective, Geoffrey N. Leech redefines schemes and tropes as follows: schemes are “foregrounded repetitions of expression”, tropes <?page no="288"?> are “foregrounded irregularities of content” (Leech 1969: 74). Foregrounding is a concept developed in the Prague school of linguistics during the 1930s by Jan Mukarovský and others, and is explained by Leech as follows: Such deviations from linguistic or other socially accepted norms have been given the special name of ‘foregrounding’, which invokes the analogy of a figure seen against a background. The artistic deviation ‘sticks out’ from its background, the automatic system, like a figure in the foreground of a visual field (ibid.: 57). Not every item placed in the foreground of a picture will deviate from the conventions of the genre it belongs to, or from the accepted styles of drawing or engraving, but if there is some form of innovation, some breaking of rules, then the beholder will face the task of connecting the picture with the text and identifying and commenting on any foregrounded elements to be found in either. Let us test these ideas by way of an example and consider a short text by the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956). Its title “Aus dem Leben eines Commis” declares it to be a biographical narrative, more probably an autobiographical one. The word “Commis”, now archaic, is borrowed from the French, where it refers to a minor employee in an office or a shop, typically underpaid, insecure and not respected. The OED has a 1963 reference for “commis” in the sense of “a five pounds a week waiter”. Walser often addresses this topic in his stories and poems as a way of coming to terms with his own failures, his psychic instability, and his inability to make a living as a writer. His first publication was Fritz Kochers Aufsätze (1904), illustrated by his brother Karl, and apart from the 19 essays attributed to Fritz it contains a sequence of nine essays on “Der Commis/ Eine Art Illustration”, plus two further tales (Walser 1995: Insel-Bücherei 1118). In a short introduction we are told that Fritz Kocher is a schoolboy essayist who died soon after leaving school, and that Walser has assumed the role of his editor. In fact, Fritz is Walser’s alter ego, just as the commis is. “Aus dem Leben eines Commis” was written in 1928/ 29 and first published in 1968, and when it was reissued as a separate volume in 2010 by the Munich publisher pictopress it was illustrated by Alfred Liebl. Here is the third page of the short narrative, introducing the protagonist and relating a characteristic incident in his life: 288 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="289"?> Fig. 81: Robert Walser, Aus dem Leben eines Commis, 2010: 5 The commis has lost his job, but still indulges in rapturous dreams of women. In the course of such dreams he offers his services to the director of a substantial business. He presents himself to the manager for an interview, not entirely in vain, but without any success, as we are told. The foregrounded figure in Liebl’s illustration must be the manager, whose magnificent skull, four times bigger than that of the commis, is sign enough of his power, while his pursed lips and intent stare both signal resolution. The illustration was produced with the aid of a digital drawing programme: the outlines are drawn in black using a digital stylus, the spaces are either left white or filled in with shades of grey 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction 289 <?page no="290"?> to black, or with patterns provided by the software. The pattern used for the manager’s jacket suggests an expensive cloth, while the body of the commis is reduced to a mere shadow (metonymy). He resembles (simile) a one-armed puppet gesticulating helplessly while his eyes are raised in supplication to the heavens - or is it to the ceiling? Most of the visual details can be read as bodylanguage. The verbal trope of paradox in the first and in the last lines finds a visual analogue in the contrast between the jagged and the round outlines of the two figures. There is also a striking pattern of repetition in the sequence of “nichtsdestoweniger / nicht unerheblich / nicht ohne Erfolg” that underlines the paradox. The verbal and the visual on this page thus complement each other most effectively, each exceeding and falling short of the other, and thereby inaugurating a complex reading process. 4.1 Kinds of ornament and illustration The purpose of this subchapter is to give an overview of the different kinds of ornament, decoration and illustration that readers encounter in books of the inter-war period, in order to make sure that we can use a received terminology and adequate definitions in a field where one and the same term has been used to mean different things. One cannot hope to eliminate the ambiguities, but one can clarify and so perhaps reduce them. First of all we want to find out how orna‐ ment, decoration and illustration have traditionally been distinguished. Our first guide will be Ralph N. Wornum with his Analysis of Ornament, Characteristics of Styles: An Introduction to the Study of the History of Ornamental Art. Wornum (1812-77) was a portrait painter, art historian, lecturer and librarian, and in 1854 was appointed Keeper of the National Gallery in London. His Analysis of Ornament was first published in 1856, and last reprinted in the tenth edition of 1896. The book begins with a four-chapter introduction to ornament and ornamental styles, focusing on distinctions and definitions, not all of which remain relevant in the 20 th century. Wornum first distinguishes between “two great classes of ornamental styles” (Wornum 1896: 1). These are the symbolic and the aesthetic, the first appealing to our understanding, the second to our feelings. The symbolic style of ornament focuses on elements “chosen for the sake of their significations, as symbols of something not necessarily implied, and irrespective of their effect as works of art, or arrangements of forms and colours” (ibid.). He means elements that in a particular culture have been given a symbolic meaning, one that is conventional and arbitrary. An example is the laurel, wreaths of which were used to crown victors of different kinds. This tradition originated in the Pythian Games of Ancient Greece and was transferred, in the course of 290 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="291"?> centuries, to other occasions and countries, e.g. the institution of Poet Laureate in Britain. The aesthetic style of ornament uses elements “devised solely from principles of symmetry of form and harmony of colour, and exclusively for their effect on our perception of the beautiful” (ibid.). Wornum stresses that both styles of ornament have been practised all over the world and at all times: Universal efforts show a universal want; and beauty of effect and decoration are no more a luxury in a civilised state of society than warmth and clothing are a luxury to any state: the mind, as the body, makes everything necessary that it is capable of permanently enjoying. Ornament is one of the mind’s necessities, which it gratifies by means of the eye; and in its strictest aesthetic sense, it has a perfect analogy with music, which similarly gratifies the mind, but by the means of a different organ - the ear. (ibid.: 2 f.) As Paul Claudel put it, “l’oeil écoute”, that being the initium title of his Écrits sur l’art (1946, repr. 1964), in which he deals mainly with Dutch painting and the double experience of seeing and hearing that it so often brings about. Ornament calls for the regular repetition of elements and so creates a rhythm that may be reminiscent of musical rhythm. Wornum also distinguishes between flat and round ornament (or decoration), flat meaning two-dimensional drawing or printing on paper or on cloth, and round referring to three-dimensional modelling as used in pottery, glassware or furniture. “They have two qualities in common - shape and contrast” (ibid.: 7 f.), produced by outline and the contrast between light and dark, or between different primary or secondary colours, and shape and contrast are therefore the basic principles of the study of ornament. Since we are concerned here with flat ornament, we must inquire how it differs from an equally flat illustration. Wornum explains: Any picture, whatever the subject, which is composed merely on principles of symmetry and contrast, becomes an ornament, and any ornamental design in which these two principles have been made subservient to imitation or natural arrangement has departed from the province of ornament into that of the picture […]. (ibid.: 9) This is a pre-modern distinction that was called in question by the Arts and Crafts movement, by Jugendstil and Art Nouveau. Wornum’s way of expressing the distinction implies that it is not rigid, but leaves room for intermediate stages between imitation and abstraction, between symmetry and imbalance - yet another continuum. We should also remember that some of the modernist currents of the early 20 th century, such as the Bauhaus, rejected ornamentation as non-functional and a waste of labour, material and money. The most outspoken critic of ornamentation was the pioneering Austrian architect and cultural 4.1 Kinds of ornament and illustration 291 <?page no="292"?> critic Adolf Loos (1870-1933), who caught the attention of a wide international readership with his lecture on “Ornament und Verbrechen” first given in Vienna in 1910, and published three years later in France in the Cahiers d’aujourd’hui, while the German version was not printed till 1929, in the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung. Here are some of the main passages from his lecture, not omitting entirely the wilful hyperbole Loos delighted to indulge in: Ich habe folgende Erkenntnis gefunden und der Welt geschenkt: Evolution der Kultur ist gleichbedeutend mit der Entfernung des Ornamentes aus dem Gebrauchsgegen‐ stande. Ich glaubte damit neue Freude in die Welt zu bringen, sie hat es mir nicht gedankt. Man war traurig und ließ die Köpfe hängen. Was einen drückte, war die Erkenntnis, kein neues Ornament hervorbringen zu können. […] Und da sagte ich: Weinet nicht. Sehet, das macht ja die Größe unserer Zeit aus, daß sie nicht imstande ist, ein neues Ornament hervorzubringen. Wir haben das Ornament überwunden, wir haben uns zur Ornamentlosigkeit durchgerungen. (Loos 2012: 95 f.) The argument that Loos develops often has a utopian touch, with glimpses of an enlightened and egalitarian humanity, that reminds one of Ruskin. Here is a typical paragraph that makes this explicit: Der ungeheure Schaden und die Verwüstungen, die die Erweckung des Ornaments in der ästhetischen Entwicklung anrichten, könnte leicht verschmerzt werden, denn Niemand, auch keine Staatsgewalt, kann die Evolution der Menschheit aufhalten! Man kann sie nur verzögern. Wir können warten. Aber es ist ein Verbrechen, daß dadurch in volkswirtschaftlicher Beziehung menschliche Arbeit, Geld und Material zugrunde gerichtet werden. Diesen Schaden kann die Zeit nicht ausgleichen. (ibid.: 99) His point is that all the objects we use in our everyday lives, from clothes to furniture and household articles, should be so well designed and well made that ornamentation becomes superfluous. He establishes the following principle: Ich habe den Satz aufgestellt: Die Form eines Gegenstandes halte so lange, das heißt, sie sei uns so lange erträglich, so lange der Gegenstand hält. (ibid.: 103) That sounds rather tautological, but the principle can be rendered as meaning that an object should be made in a shape or manner that guarantees its proper functioning, and should remain in use for as long as it does function properly. Loos gives a lady’s ball gown as one example, and a writing desk as a contrasting one. A ball gown will change in shape and cloth quite often according to changes of fashion or season, while a well-designed desk is hardly subject to such changes. In other words, the dress should be made well enough to survive the season, but the desk should be made to last for a lifetime, and then their shapes will have 292 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="293"?> justified themselves. Let me add that the same applies to printed material: your daily newspaper will have a very short life-span, but you expect the books you buy to last for generations, to remain readable for as long as possible. Following Loos’ argument, we can conclude that a properly made book has a functional shape and construction that will keep it serviceable for many years. While it does not require any decoration to serve its purpose, a certain amount may enhance the reader’s pleasure in handling the book. A legible title on the spine is more important than any ornament, but if the ornament is pleasing and distinctive, like the different geometrical patterns on the spines of my ten volumes of the Bücher der Epoche series (ed. Lyonel Dunin, Sieben Stäbe Verlag, Berlin 1929-1930), then my pleasure is doubled. The spine designs were all drawn by Paul Pfund (1895-1945? ), who also drew a vignette for most of the top boards. Book ornaments Now where is ornamentation to be found in the books discussed in the previous chapter, like the LMI and LdD series, or Hachette’s Les Grands Écrivains, or the Insel Bücherei, or the The Bodley Head classics? As a rule, we can expect to find different kinds of ornament on the covers, spines, dustjackets, and edges of books, and when we open them we meet with it on endpapers and title-pages. As we leaf through a book we may encounter initials (F: lettrine; G: Initiale) of various kinds opening a chapter, and in some books we will discover ornamental bands (F: bandeaux; G: Zierleisten) at the head or the foot of a chapter. In his Handbook of Ornament (1888, repr. 1957), Franz Sales Meyer (1849-1927) arranges the different categories of ornament in three sections, or “Divisions”. Division I deals with the “Elements of Decoration” and distinguishes first between different geometrical elements, second between natural vegetable or animal forms (including artificial foliage and mythical organisms), and third between artificial objects, such as trophies and symbols (by which last he means, for example, a composition of brushes and a palette standing metonymically for the art of painting). Division II deals with “Ornament applied to Features”, and the first part of this is about the ornamental bands just mentioned. The function of bands according to Meyer is “to give expression to the ideas of bordering, framing, and connecting” (Meyer 1957: 127), which is precisely what they do when employed in books. Here are some examples from volume 34 of the Les Maîtres du Livre series, published in 1914 by Georges Crès, starting with the title-page: 4.1 Kinds of ornament and illustration 293 <?page no="294"?> Fig. 82: H. Taine, Vie et Opinions de M. F.-T. Graindorge, 1914-: iii. 294 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="295"?> This satirical account of life in Paris was first published in 1867. The ornament we see on the title-page is the publisher’s device, with his motto “CRES-CAM”, Latin for “may I thrive”. The device is signed by the artist, Pierre-Eugène Vibert (1875- 1937), an engraver and illustrator from Geneva, who also provided a frontispiece portrait of the historian and critic Hippolyte Taine (1828-93), and the engraved “ornements typographiques” (E: printer’s ornaments; G: Zierleisten, Kopfleisten). These are placed at the head of the preface, the 25 chapters and even the table of contents. They are thus best described as ornamental headbands. At the end of each of these units we find “vignettes” in the same style, about the size of a fingernail, which function as ornamental full stops. Fig. 83: Headband and closing vignette by Vibert, ibid.: 134, 151 Note the small printer’s flower (F: fleuron; G: Röslein) that is used throughout the book to mark sections of a chapter, and the tiny ornament between the two lines of the chapter heading. These are not wood engravings by the illustrator, but cast as type and designed to match a particular typeface. The best-known fleuron is the asterisk (F: astérisque; G: Sternchen). The term “vignette”, a diminutive of the French “vigne”, is one that is correctly used, in all three languages, to designate “an illustration in which the edges of the picture shade off into the surrounding paper, there being no limiting border or frame” (Glaister 2001, s.v. vignette). That meaning has almost disappeared today behind a swarm of divergent uses, so it might be wiser to limit the term to its original sense. I have now upset the order I suggested in answer to my opening question, so let us return briefly to the book’s exterior. My copy of Taine’s book has a contemporary half-leather binding (i.e. leather spine and corners) with handmarbled paper covering the boards. The endpapers are made from a very different marbled paper, probably an industrial product. The spine is divided into six panels by five “faux nerfs” (E: false bands; G: falsche Bünde) that imitate the appearance of old books sewn on raised cords. The gilt lettering of the title is tooled on a green morocco lettering piece glued into the second panel from the top. The top edge is gilt, the front and bottom edges are untrimmed. All these elements have a functional and decorative character, and also make the book 4.1 Kinds of ornament and illustration 295 <?page no="296"?> pleasant to handle, just as the headbands that indicate a new chapter, and the closing vignettes a place to pause, make it agreeable to read. For other forms of closing ornament one can use the general term “tailpiece”, while the French “cul-de-lampe” is defined by Christian Galantaris as follows: Vignette gravée, présentant un sujet ou motif purement décoratif, centrée dans le blanc des fins de chapitre. Ce peut être également une composition typographique en forme de triangle, de losange, d’ovale (Galantaris 1997, s.v. cul-de-lampe) Note that Galantaris uses “vignette” as the generic term for a wide range of ornaments. The pendant knob ornament was was applied under lanterns and chandeliers in many European churches (Meyer 1957: 179, 181), hence the French term. In 20 th century books such triangular tailpieces were only rarely employed, except in allusion to a past style. Some interesting examples of this are to be found in a 1926 edition of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), with decorations, as they are called on the title-page, by the Irish artist Norah McGuinness (1901-1980). Here are two of them, presented as one: Fig. 84: Sterne 1926: “The Remise” (44 f.) Parson Yorick has arrived at Calais, the first stage of his journey, and is thinking about renting a small chaise or “Desobligeant” (French “désobligeante”, i.e. too small to accommodate a second passenger), and getting upset that the owner might be out to cheat him. As he expostulates to himself about such “base ungentle passion” and gesticulates, he is interrupted by a lady raising her hand 296 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="297"?> to her forehead as if to ward him off (ibid.: 23). But this is the beginning of mutual sympathy, with holding hands and conversation. M. Dessein, the hotelier and owner of a shed full of chaises, shows Yorick and the lady a number of these, and they settle for one just big enough for two passengers. The headpiece and the tailpiece, shown in combination above, are actually two in a series of by now six decorations with a chaise motif, and there are more to come, as befits an 18 th century travelogue. The rounded shape of the body of the chaise with its central door and window is transferred from the headpiece to the tailpiece and transformed in the process into a banner shaped like a shield, showing not an emblem (as one might expect) but a picture of Yorick and the lady engaged in relaxed conversation, which we can follow in the next chapter, headed “The Remise Door”. Here, McGuinness is artfully composing variations on the culde-lampe convention that combine ornament with allusions to the text, and she continues in this vein over the next 200 pages. Narrative illustrations We now come to those kinds of illustration that relate directly to the narrative, its fable, its account of the world, past or present, all illustrations aiming to give some kind of visual representation of that which is being told in words. We will begin with a typology of the most important kinds of narrative illustration. Unfortunately, the terminology - as in the case of ornaments - is neither standardised nor comprehensive, and sometimes even contradictory. It is always to some extent dependent on the national traditions of book production. We will also find confirmed that illustration and ornament do not remain separate categories, but will overlap or merge with each other and produce transitional kinds. Still, there remains a common core of kinds of illustration, listed below in the usual order of their appearance in a printed book. Fig. 85: Frontispiece of Delarue-Mardrus, La Cigale 4.1 Kinds of ornament and illustration 297 <?page no="298"?> 1. Frontispiece (F: frontispice; G: Frontispiz): A full-page illustration that prepares the reader for some thematic aspect of the text, e.g. a protagonist, a landscape or townscape, an incident, or, in this case, a composition of objects which stand metonymically for a topic like the music of nature and of man, as in the frontispiece to Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, La Cigale, LdD 13, 1924, illustrated with woodcuts by Renefer. Note the ornamental border of flowers. 2. Title-page illustration (F: illustration de page de titre; G: Titelvignette) : A small illustration inserted between the title line and the name of the author, or between these and the name of the publisher, often related in theme to the frontispiece. In La Cigale, this is a vignette composed of leaves and blossoms, surrounding a hardly recognisable loving couple. Fig. 86: Title-page with a vignette (ibid.) 298 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="299"?> 3. Headpiece (F: en-tête; G: Auftaktbild): An illustration placed at the beginning of a chapter or other subdivision, introducing the reader to its themes. In La Cigale, it stands at the head of Ch. 1, “Bal chez Marion”, but has at first a slightly different function, namely of pointing anaphorically back to the novel’s title, in that it shows two cicadas in a framework of leaves. As soon as one begins reading the text, one recognises that the cicadas, famous for their shrill chirping, are visually preluding the noise at Marion’s ball: “un hurlement de hilarité”, “la crise de fou rire”, “des cris inarticulés” (Delarue-Mardrus 1924: 7). Fig. 87: Headpiece and text opening of Ch. 1 (ibid.) 4. Initial (F: lettrine; G: Initiale): Initial capital letters can be considered as a contribution to narrative illustration when they form an element within the plane of a small representational picture, often in a square or oblong frame, sometimes even in two 4.1 Kinds of ornament and illustration 299 <?page no="300"?> panels joined at right angles. The term historiated initial refers to initials telling a story. Initials mark the beginning of a chapter and sometimes of other subdivisions of the text. Purely typographic or ornamental initials need not be considered, though both often do have an aesthetic appeal. Fayard’s LdD did not use narrative initials for the early volumes of the collection, but from volume 42 on, 30 of the 235 numbers featured decorated or illustrated initials crafted by the illustrator. Jean Lébédeff, who illustrated Voici ton Maître by Marcel Prévost, volume 106 in the LdD series, in 1931, used illustrated and framed initials to mark each of the three numbered parts of the novel and to form a stepping-stone between the half-page headpiece and the text. I prefer to call them illustrated rather than historiated because they each repeat and vary a detail from the headpiece, but do not allude to characters or events. In the example below, the initial resembles a faded memory of the townscape (of Lille) shown in the headpiece: Fig. 88: Headpiece, illustrated initial and text opening the “Première Partie” of Prévost 1931: 11. 300 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="301"?> 5. Plate; episodic illustration (F: hors-texte; in-texte; G: Tafel; Episodenbild): A plate is a full-page illustration facing a page of text, thus forming a double-page spread. An episodic illustration (as I propose to name it) is smaller and is preceded and followed by text on a single page, or has text beneath or above it, or surrounding it, always on a single page. Here is an episodic illustration from no. 10 of the series Die Juncker-Bücher, published in 1920 by Axel Juncker, E.T.A Hoffmann’s Aus dem Leben dreier Freunde, first published in 1818, and now illustrated with seven pen drawings by the expressionist artist Conrad Felix Müller (1897-1977), who later signed his works Felixmüller. Fig. 89: Episodic illustration (Hoffmann 1920: 7) This episodic illustration takes us to an open-air café in Berlin’s Tiergarten, once a royal hunting ground, and later opened to the public by Frederick the Great, where three young men, just returned from the war against Napoleon, meet at Whitsun to celebrate their return to civilian life. Alexander (on the right) has just inherited the house, servant and fortune of a spinster aunt and now entertains his friends Severin and Marzell with stories about the ghosts he keeps imagining and the nightmares his aunt’s portrait and all her relics induce in him. But they have similar stories to tell, and sitting in the park 4.1 Kinds of ornament and illustration 301 <?page no="302"?> have the opportunity to watch a lot of people around them and to speculate on their appearance and behaviour. The result is a lively discussion between the three friends, which repeatedly turns on the subject of how to observe and how to reach viable conclusions about what one sees and hears. This is clearly relevant to looking at pictures. Like a frontispiece, a plate will contain more visual information than most smaller kinds of illustration and therefore tend to hold the reader’s attention for longer than a small picture would. One problem with plates is placing them as close as possible to the text they refer to. Sometimes a caption and a page reference are included to help the reader, but this is never the case with the LdD series that hardly ever uses full-page illustration formats, and only rarely so with the LMI series. In more expensive editions, plates are often printed on a different paper than that used for the text, especially when the illustrations are coloured. Plates do not always have the same size as the type area, but can be reduced to achieve a pleasant balance, as we shall see in our next example. This is taken from The Merrie Tales of Jacques Tournebroche, an English translation by Alfred Allinson (1909) of Les Contes de Jacques Tournebroche by Anatole France. The Bodley Head reissued this in 1923 with woodcuts by Marcia Lane Foster (cf. Ch. 3.4). I have chosen the seventh of the nine tales, entitled “Concerning a Horrible Picture”, which describes the picture in question in some detail and contrasts it with a very different genre of images. We learn that the horrible picture by the ancient Greek painter Apelles shows a sanguinary battle scene with Alexander the Great’s Macedonian army fighting Darius and his Persian army at Issos in 333 BC. Young Philemon was so horrified by “suchlike pictures of wars and bloodshed” that henceforth “’twas his wont to turn aside his eyen” from such images “as contrarie to good and peaceable manners” (France 1923: 122 f.). Philemon then decides to hang the very opposite in his study, namely “scenes of the Golden Age, to wit maidens and young men interlacing limbs in accord with the craving of kindly Nature” (ibid.: 124). Therefore, we are told, “he had in his closet, this same Philemon aforesaid, a very marvellous painting, wherein was limned a young Faun in act to filch away with a craftie hand a light cloth did cover the belly of a sleeping Nymph” (ibid.: 125 f.). Here now, is the plate showing Philemon in his study: 302 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="303"?> Fig. 90: “The good doctor” (ibid.: facing 126) We look in vain for the “very marvellous painting” till we realise that the artist is leaving it to us to imagine it, as best we can and on the basis of the text, in sympathy with Philemon. 6. Tailpiece (F: cul-de-lampe ; G: Abschlußbild) : Tailpieces are the counterparts of headpieces, having the function of closing a chapter and of forming a visual conclusion to the story. They too can be ornamental or representational, or combine the two tendencies. Let us compare two tailpieces, both in the English tradition, beginning with Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) in an illustrated edition published in 1890 by Macmillan, with pen illustrations by Hugh Thomson (1860-1920). The 182 drawings were reproduced photo-mechanically, so that the clothbound edition, all edges gilt, with ornate spine and cover, remained an economic proposition. Goldsmith’s praise of the virtues of family life remains attractive to this day and partly explains why new editions are not lacking. Leslie Stephen, in his Ford Lectures on English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904), identifies two reasons for Goldsmith’s continuing popularity: The greatest attraction of the Vicar is due to the personal charm of Goldsmith’s character, but his character makes him sympathise with the wider social movements and the growth of genuine philanthropic sentiment (Stephen 1904: 201). 4.1 Kinds of ornament and illustration 303 <?page no="304"?> Fig. 91: Text and tailpiece by Hugh Thomson (Goldsmith 1890: 305) Thomson’s tailpiece illustrates both charm and sentiment as expressed in Goldsmith’s “Conclusion”. The ornamental “Finis” tailpiece below is taken from the final chapter of Cranford (1853), by Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65), a novel about gender and class relations in rural Cheshire in the mid-century. This edition was published in 1940 by George G. Harrap in 1940 and beautifully decorated and illustrated by Joan Hassall (1906-88) who also illustrated novels by Jane Austen and Elizabeth Bowen, and stories by Eric Linklater. 304 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="305"?> Fig. 92: Finis ornament (Gaskell 1940: 256) These six kinds of illustration are sanctified by tradition, and in the inter-war years they remained in general use for fictional narrative texts. New or modified styles of illustration were chosen and developed to suit contemporary texts for contemporary readers, and to give texts by authors of past generations an attractive, up-to-date appearance. Ornament and illustration were both, of course, effective means of educating the taste and awareness of readers. It is not surprising, therefore, that different illustrative styles were employed for a great variety of texts. As we have seen, the rigid distinction between ornament and illustration gradually gave way to something more flexible, a continuum between ornament and picture. Parallel to this we find the continuum between the verbal and the visual that has repeatedly been evoked on these pages. The initial, in its various forms, although seemingly of minor importance, is of especial interest in this respect because it shows the transition from the verbal to the visual, and from the picture to the story, in a modest but striking manner. It not only effects a transition but also a junction or even a union of the verbal and the visual. 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book Frans Masereel (1889-1972) is best known for his woodcut novels (G.: Romane in Bildern; F.: romans d’images) or stories without words, as exemplified by the Histoire sans paroles (Éditions du Sablier, 1920), published in a German edition, Geschichte ohne Worte (1927), by Kurt Wolff. Masereel also created a large number of woodcuts for works of narrative fiction by contemporary authors such as Émile Verhaeren, Charles-Louis Philippe, Romain Rolland and Stefan Zweig. We will consider some of these illustrations, and some others as well, and inquire how they take up and develop the established styles that this generation of artists and writers had grown up with. Our first focus will be on an aspect of the tradition often referred to as the architecture of the book. The metaphor asks us to see an illustrated book as a building constructed of different parts and materials, in such a way that human beings can inhabit it in a manner that will bring them pleasure 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 305 <?page no="306"?> and profit. So what kinds of pictures did Masereel create for this building of books, and what pleasures and profits do these offer their inhabitants? The concept of book architecture The architectural metaphor takes us back to the Italian Renaissance, when the invention of the craft of printing from movable types made it possible to reproduce and disseminate the rediscovered cultures of antiquity. The parallel development of Renaissance architecture and of the arts of the book, the two great passions of the Renaissance, as Jacob Burckhardt calls them in his Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860, repr. 1976: 177), led to a transfer of the principles of one art to the other. The progenitor of this transfer is generally identified as the amateur architect and architectural theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72). In his tract De re aedificatoria (cf. Ch. 2.3) or The Ten Books of Architecture, Alberti codified antique conceptions of harmony in memorable analogical formulas: [A]s the Members of the Body are correspondent to each other, so is it fit that one Part should answer to another in a Building. […] To every Member therefore ought to be allotted its fit place and proper Situation; not less than Dignity requires, not greater than Conveniency demands; not in an impertinent or indecent place, but in a Situation so proper to itself, that it could be set no where else more fitly. (Alberti 1986: 13) It is from such ideas, and from their application to printing by type designers like Nicolas Jenson in the 1470s, that the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris and his disciples drew their inspiration 400 years later. In his lecture on “The Ideal Book” (1893), Morris formulated the starting point for the modern debate about the importance of architecture for book design and production: [A] book quite un-ornamented can look actually and positively beautiful, and not merely un-ugly, if it be, so to say, architecturally good, which by the by, need not add much to its price, since it costs no more to pick up pretty stamps than ugly ones, and the taste and forethought that goes to the proper setting, position, and so on, will soon grow into a habit, if cultivated, and will not take up much of the master printer’s time when taken with his other necessary business. (Morris 1996: 145) That was an appeal to his listeners to rethink their ideas about the constitutive elements of book making: typography, illustration, ornament, layout, paper and binding. Morris’s collaborator Walter Crane developed these ideas in textbooks like Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New (1896, repr. 1984), using familiar architectural concepts like column and panel: Although we may take the open book with the double-columns as the page proper, in treating a book for illustration, we shall be called upon sometimes to treat them 306 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="307"?> as single pages. But whether single or double, each has its limits in the mass of type forming the full page or column which gives the dimensions of the designer’s panel. (Crane 1984: 217) Next Crane turns to the endpaper, which he prefers to call “the lining of the book” (ibid.: 221): Here the problem is to cover two leaves entirely in a suggestive and agreeable, but not obtrusive way. One way is to design a repeating pattern much on the principle of a small printed textile, or miniature wall-paper, in one or more colours. Something delicately suggestive of the character and contents of the book is in place here, but nothing that competes with the illustrations proper. It may be considered as a kind of quadrangle, forecourt, or even a garden or grass plot before the door. (ibid.) After so much architecture, he moves on to “a short pause at half-title” and then to the “double-doors” of frontispiece and full title (ibid.). This description was taken up over a century later in Joachim Möller’s opening chapter on “Entrée aus Schrift und Bild: Titelblatt und Frontispiz im England der Neuzeit” in the book of the same title (2008: 9-37). Here is an example of such an entrée, taken from a German edition of Der alte Perdrix (1923; Le père Perdrix, 1903), by Charles- Louis Philippe (1874-1909), with woodcuts by Masereel: Fig. 93: C.-L. Philippe, Der alte Perdrix: frontispiece and title-page 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 307 <?page no="308"?> Masereel here keeps to the traditional double-door opening, with the frontispiece woodcut (verso) facing the title-page (recto), but this is exceptional in his work. Of the four volumes of Philippe’s works offered as a boxed set by Wolff in 1928, only Perdrix has a proper frontispiece, whereas Bübü vom Montparnasse, Das Bein der Tiennette and Die gute Madeleine have a simple typographic title-page. In Perdrix, by putting the title in a dark-grey frame, a balance is achieved on the double page that Morris and Crane would have approved of. Such harmony of art and architecture is the rule in the early 20 th century, as the French publisher, engraver and typographer Léon Pichon (1876-1956) confirms in his preface to Marius Audin’s Le Livre - son illustration, sa decoration (1926) when he insists on upholding “les lois d’équilibre, de stabilité et de sobriété” in the design of books (Audin 1926: ii). The Bauhaus movement also declares architecture to be its founding principle, summed up by Walter Gropius in a programmatic statement on the occasion of the opening of the Bauhaus in Weimar in April 1919: Das Bauhaus erstrebt die Sammlung alles künstlerischen Schaffens zur Einheit, die Wiedervereinigung aller werkkünstlerischen Disziplinen - Bildhauerei, Malerei, Kunstgewerbe und Handwerk - zu einer neuen Baukunst als deren unablösliche Bestandteile. (Schmidt 1964: 231) Architecture is seen as the unifying force of all visual and practical arts and crafts, and metaphorically even of music. It was 17 th century architecture that provided the term frontispiece, used to designate “the main façade of a building or its principal entrance” (The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture, 4 1991, s.v. frontispiece), and in particular the decorated or inscribed triangular gable above the door. In this period and after, title-pages were often designed in an architectural mode, with columns and gables forming a scaffolding for the lines of type. In the late 20 th century, Gérard Genette continues the metaphor in his Seuils (1987) (E: thresholds; G: Schwellen). This is a study of those elements that turn a raw text into a book, elements Genette calls paratexts: Le paratexte est donc pour nous ce par quoi un texte se fait livre et se propose comme tel à ses lecteurs, et plus généralement au public. Plus que d’une limite ou d’une frontière étanche, il s’agit ici d’un seuil, ou - mot de Borges à propos d’une préface - d’un «-vestibule-» qui offre à tout un chacun la possibilité d’entrer, ou de rebrousser chemin. (Genette 1987: 7 f.). The double spread of frontispiece and title-page is one such threshold, and once you cross it you can move from one room to the next, whether they be stanzas or chapters. You can linger where you like to admire the furniture or the pictures, sit down where you please to reflect on what you have seen, or close the door behind 308 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="309"?> you and go home. With these ideas in mind, we can now compare the design of two single illustrated pages of text, each facing a page of letterpress, and ask whether they meet Pichon’s requirements of equilibrium, stability and sobriety. We will begin with a page from a German edition of Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, the fictional biography of a great musician, first published in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine (1904-12). The first illustrated edition with 666 woodcuts by Masereel was published in five volumes by Albin Michel (1925-27). Johann Christof, the German translation of 1914-17 by Erna and Otto Grautoff, was republished by Rütten & Loening in East Berlin in 1959, also in five volumes and with the same woodcuts, their number slightly reduced to 606, omitting almost only small tailpieces. Fig. 94: Romain Rolland, Johann Christof: I, 35 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 309 <?page no="310"?> Masereel’s woodcut for the ninth section of Book I is a column rather than a headpiece, but it serves to prelude the text and is thus functional. It has the same vertical height as the type area, but is only half as broad. The result is a stable balance, which the clear Bodoni type enhances. I like to think that as we read our way down the text column, little Christof, standing in the doorway at the foot of the page, will run up to greet us and bid us enter. The contrasting example is a page from Colette’s Claudine s’en va (1903), in a reprint of 1931 by Albin Michel. This novel was the last of the Claudine tetralogy with which Colette began her career. It was published from 1900 to 1903 under the name of her husband, Henry Gautier-Villars, better known by his pen-name “Willy”, whom she divorced in 1910. The illustrations by Albert Jarach (1874-1962) are unfortunately often under-inked, just like the letterpress: Fig. 95: Colette, Claudine s’en va-: 85 310 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="311"?> Instead of finding clarity and balance, we are faced with a layout that tears the type area to pieces, leaving an isolated one-and-a-half lines at the bottom of the page (E: widow; F: ligne creux; G: Hurenkind). The illustration and Claudine are both straitjacketed by the letterpress, with no room left to breathe, inadvertently a telling image of the situation Colette herself was in during the first decade of her career. In later years, her books would be designed and printed more carefully, as we will see in Ch. 4.4. Visual building blocks as adjuncts of the illustrated narrative The architecture of an illustrated book is to some extent standardised, but it should also take into account the kind of text it houses and the readership it aims to address. Opening and closing elements are basic, just like the doors of a house, but one also finds open spaces instead of doors. Ornamental and historiated initials are facultative, as are frontispieces, which remain frequent in quality productions during our period, but become rarer in less expensive series. Paperback series tend to use uniform decorative covers with variety limited to a single distinctive vignette (like the Penguin Illustrated Classics or the LdD), or a unique cover design varying in colour only (as in the LMI series). An important category of illustration existing alongside these more or less architectural ones is to be found in those pictures of very different sizes and formats that are inserted into the running text as a visualisation of an action or a topic, as a portrait of one or more characters, or as a topographical representation. Such embedded illustrations can serve many other functions as well, and so there is no generally accepted technical term for them. I have introduced them as episodic illustrations, since they mostly refer to a current event or incident in the fable. Let us consider Masereel’s woodcuts for tales by the Belgian Émile Verhaeren (1855-1916) under this heading. The tales were first collected in Le Travailleur étrange (1884), then reprinted by the Éditions du Sablier with Masereel’s illustrations in 1921, and published by Insel as Der seltsame Handwerker two years later. The second of the seven tales is called “Eine fette Geschichte” and has a headpiece and three episodic illustrations. We must look at all four pictures in order to understand how they relate to each other and to the story. The puzzling title of the story is printed on an otherwise blank recto page, whose verso is also blank, providing a quiet zone before the illustrated text begins. The headpiece occupies the top half of the type area, and is followed by the first three sentences of the tale, set in a classic Walbaum type. 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 311 <?page no="312"?> Fig. 96: Verhaeren, “Eine fette Geschichte”, headpiece and text (1923: 21) The text identifies the person we see sitting in his study, looking at a framed picture - he is Ernest Vinck, the protagonist, who owns an old house in Antwerp, one part renovated, the other part, which houses his collection of Flemish genre paintings, sculptures and ceramics, carefully restored in the traditional style. This is the part he inhabits, behind locked doors, surrounded by the objects he loves: Vinck mochte nur die fette Kunst, die den Frieden einer guten Verdauung gewährt und die von guter Laune überschäumt; er liebte abgöttisch alles, was dick war, schwer, plump und vor Gesundheit strotzte […]. (ibid.: 22) 312 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="313"?> The first episodic illustration follows after three pages of text and shows this fat art in the full format of the type area. The walls, the ceiling, the furniture are completely covered with nude figures, as well as fruits and flowers and foliage, all emblems of fecundity. One can see how much Masereel must have enjoyed composing and cutting this hyperbolic design, following and adding to Verhaeren’s three-page description: Fig. 97: Full-page woodcut (ibid.: 25) The second episodic illustration follows on the next double page, but this time it is only half-size, and for a good reason. One day, Vinck enters on an inheritance, a large 15 th century Gothic painting representing Christ’s crucifixion: 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 313 <?page no="314"?> Fig. 98: Half-page embedded woodcut (ibid.: 27) We are told that the medieval spirit of such art is not to Vinck’s taste. That is why he hides the picture away in an anteroom, hoping to get rid of it as soon as possible. But in spite of himself, the painting begins to attract him, and occasionally he finds himself standing in front of it, till he decides to hang it in his study where he can analyse its “tempting magic” (ibid.: 28) at his leisure. Like Vinck in the illustration, we ponder the contrast between the cruel starkness of the triple crucifixion and the merry rotundity of the fat art hanging in the background, and cannot reconcile the opposing forces. The tension between the two kinds of art seems to animate the painted figures in both: the two robbers seem to climb out of the frame, the body of Christ twitches (ibid.), and the fat pictures begin to react against the Gothic intruder (ibid.: 29) by sending angry glares down from the ceiling. Suddenly Vinck realises that big fat drops are dripping from the ceiling. A slow but heavy rain has begun to fall, leaving puddles everywhere, flooding his rooms and all they contain with molten fat: 314 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="315"?> Fig. 99: Full-page woodcut (ibid.: 31) What are we to make of this surreal conflict? Régis Debray, in his Vie et mort de l’image : une histoire du regard en Occident (1992), asks how it comes that Christ is seen as an emblem of all representation: En quoi la personne du Christ est-elle l’emblème de toute représentation ? En ceci qu’il est deux : Homme-Dieu. Verbe et Chair. Ainsi de l’image peinte : chair déifiée ou matière sublimée. L’Éternel s’est fait Évènement, comme à travers un vitrail Dieu se fait couleur. (Debray 1992: 114) This dualism of body and mind, matter and spirit, may be a key to understanding the central issue in the story. Vinck has made the mistake of reducing all the art he has collected to one single dimension, of focusing only on its fleshly aspect and ignoring all others. He made a comparable mistake before when he divided his house into two parts, one renovated and uninhabitable, the other bursting with fat art. He repeats the mistake when he considers the wreckage in his rooms and tries to understand what has happened, for without thinking twice, he tears the Gothic picture from the wall and throws it out of the window. He spends the night in what remains of his study, hoping for the “Resurrection” (Verhaeren 1923: 35) of his dead art, but nothing happens. Vinck, the only living being in this moral fable, has thrown away the chance to move beyond his isolated self 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 315 <?page no="316"?> into a dialogue with the picture of Christ’s crucifixion. That alone could have saved the pictures and himself. The relation of verbal and visual Now that we have established a typology of basic visual elements, we can concentrate on how they function as adjuncts to the verbal narrative. How close the relation between word and image can be becomes evident when author and artist work together on a bi-medial project, as was the case with Rolland and Masereel cooperating on La Révolte des machines (1921) and next on Jean- Christophe. In Ch. 4.3 we will be taking a close look at The Patriot’s Progress (1930), “Related by Henry Williamson and drawn by William Kermode”, as it says on the title-page. When author and illustrator are one and the same person, one can expect to find a similar proximity of word and image, for example in Masereel’s Capitale (1935), a sequence of 66 full-page pen and brush designs, each with a one-line hand-written caption. This is not Masereel’s standard practice, so here is a double page spread to document it: Fig. 100: Frans Masereel, Capitale: 10f. On both pages Masereel depicts the animal life of the capital, described in his own words on the left as “La faune de cette capitale est des plus variées …”, continued on the right with “pourtant elle n’a qu’un seule et même but …”. On the left, the urban 316 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="317"?> mass facing the viewer seems almost static, while on the right page it is suddenly surging forwards in pursuit of that one common goal. Greedy hands are stretching to grasp something, but what could that be? The nude figure wheeling across the top of the picture embodies the same impulse in the same gesture, but without specifying its object. The pages that follow give various answers - money, status, pleasure, liberty … - but one should take note of the strong current of irony in both pictures and captions that casts doubt on all too simple catchwords. Now we come to the standard procedures and begin with the very first paratexts of a book, to be found on the dust-jacket and the front cover, in this case of Das Bein der Tiennette by Charles-Louis Philippe, with 24 woodcuts by Masereel, published in 1923 by Kurt Wolff in a half-cloth binding. Fig. 101: Dust jacket of Das Bein der Tiennette 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 317 <?page no="318"?> Fig. 102: Top board of Das Bein der Tiennette The original title of this collection of 24 tales was Contes du Matin (1916). The title of the German edition is the same as that of the first of the tales, about Tiennette and Tienne, her husband, who are neighbours of the Lebaupain family, Baptiste and Catherine. It also refers to tale 20, “Tienne”, which is about Tienne as an old man. Most of the tales are set in the Bourbonnais, as the region that now forms the northern part of the Auvergne was traditionally called, and portray comic and melancholy incidents in the life of simple, rural folk. The illustrations on the wrapper and the top board anticipate the headpieces to two other tales and invite the curious reader to open the book and find the corresponding texts. The first belongs to tale 21, entitled “Schulschwänzer”, which in French is “L’école buissonnière”, and in English would be something like “Playing truant”. The second refers to tale 2, called “Die Katze in der Butter”, “Le chat dans le beurre” in the original. Another feature of these particular paratexts is their mixture of typefaces. For the dustjacket, as for the body type, the publisher chose a Schwabacher, an early face derived from Gothic script, which because of its legibility was often used for popular texts. For the lettering on the spine and the top board, a sans serif display type, cut in wood, was preferred, perhaps because it has a modern look and goes well with Masereel’s woodcuts. The next visual building blocks (and paratexts) are the frontispiece and the title-page, the double-door already discussed with reference to Der alte Perdrix. 318 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="319"?> For the sake of comparison we can now switch to a very different text, Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). The first illustrated edition of this was published in 1923 by the Drei-Masken-Verlag, Munich, with the English text and 37 woodcuts by Masereel. Fortunately, in view of the exorbitant prices charged for this edition by antiquarian booksellers, it was reset and reprinted in 1978 by the Journeyman Press (London & West Nyack, NY), and made available at the price of £ 1.40. In May 1895, Wilde had been convicted of gross indecency because of his homosexual affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, and was sentenced to two years of hard labour. At Reading Gaol, Wilde was housed in block C, landing 3, cell 3, and C.3.3 became his pseudonym when, after his release in May 1897, he went to France. It was there that he wrote his ballad, not about himself but about a fellow prisoner, Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a member of the Royal Horse Guards, one of the senior regiments of the British army. He had married in 1894 without the permission of his commanding officer, so husband and wife had to separate and were soon estranged. In the course of a violent quarrel, Wooldridge killed his wife, and was sentenced to death and hanged during Wilde’s stay at Reading Gaol. These details may help to understand the frontispiece and the title-page of Wilde’s book: Fig. 103: O. Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol: frontispiece 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 319 <?page no="320"?> The frontispiece shows a prisoner with chained hands, standing at what must be the door to his cell, his face hidden by a poster with Wilde’s pseudonym. The vertical borders show the brickwork of the prison walls, a motif that recurs in many of the following cuts as an emphatic reminder of the horrors of being locked up. Wilde’s identity is restored on the title-page opposite, which gives all the usual information. A really significant paratext appears on the next double page in the form of a dedication, on the right page, opposite the publisher’s imprint: “In Memoriam / C.T.W. / Sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards. / Obiit H.M. Prison, Reading, Berkshire, / July 7 th , 1896”. For the full story, see Anthony Stokes, Pit of Shame: The Real Ballad of Reading Gaol (2007). Wooldridge’s fate no doubt gave Wilde the opportunity to write a stringent critique of the British penal system of his day, without pushing himself into the foreground of his narrative. It is not termed a ballad for nothing, for while the genre is originally oral, sung or accompanied by music, and insofar popular, Wilde’s text is accompanied by woodcuts, which were often used in the past to illustrate broadsides on topics like crime and execution, as Sheila O’Connell reports in her The Popular Print in England, 1550-1850 (1999: 89-98). There is nothing sensational or spectacular about the text or Masereel’s woodcuts, instead they are thoughtful and suggestive, angry and provocative, as the final section of the ballad, consisting of a headpiece, three stanzas and a tailpiece, will show: 320 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="321"?> Fig. 104: O. Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol: 63f. 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 321 <?page no="322"?> The headpiece is no doubt a visualisation of the “pit of shame,” and on the last page of the book the finis-tailpiece shows the “burning winding-sheet” of the first stanza. The provocation lies, it seems to me, in the final stanza, first in the dubious claim that “all men kill the thing they love,” and then in the dubious distinction between cowardly killing and brave killing, a remnant perhaps of ancient class distinctions. Attentive readers here reach a point, I am sure, where they feel they must go back to the beginning, and reconsider the many times Wilde asserts that “each man kills the thing he loves” (ibid.: 14) and in what sense this might be true. A difficult point. Perhaps it helps to know that Wilde is alluding to the trial scene in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (4, 1), in which Shylock insists that Antonio, who has lost his fortune and is unable to repay the loan of 3000 ducats he has taken up for his friend Bassanio, must fulfil his bond by rendering a pound of his flesh. Bassanio, who cannot understand Shylock’s obstinacy, asks him: “Do all men kill the things they do not love? ” and this rhetorical question prompts a debate about justice and humanity. If love is a passion that can lead to irrational behaviour, then perhaps we do all run the risk of hurting or even killing those we love. This is an issue that has preoccupied philosophers of social justice, or “justice as fairness,” as John Rawls (1921-2002) puts it in A Theory of Justice (1971). Here is a relevant passage: Unless citizens are able to know what the law is and are given a fair opportunity to take its directives into account, penal sanctions should not apply to them. This principle is simply the consequence of regarding a legal system as an order of public rules addressed to rational persons in order to regulate their cooperation, and of giving the appropriate weight to liberty. (Rawls 1971: 241) It seems probable that most of the conditions listed by Rawls for judging a crime of passion were absent in the case of Wooldridge, who was not “given a fair opportunity” by his superior officers. Thus, the headpiece shows the last stage of the unbending workings of justice, but in the tailpiece, which is after all the last word, does one not recognise a human hand grasping the shape of something escaping from the burning sheet in which the dead body is wrapped? Wilde’s hand? This last word keeps the narrative open. Retrospective and prospective structures in illustrated fiction Narrative texts present events, actions, topics and characters in a temporal sequence and a spatial order, and so it is the task of a sequence of illustrations to support the presentation of these dimensions in a such way as to make them readily comprehensible, more immediately than any string of words could. Two rhetorical linguistic structures, anaphora and cataphora, which 322 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="323"?> operate in the text and in the illustrations, help to bring this about. As we have seen, anaphoric repetition activates one’s memory of something mentioned or recounted earlier in the text; cataphora, or foreshadowing, activates one’s expectation of something that may or will happen in the narrative to come. Both processes are dependent on the workings of the reader’s mind, on the way the brain processes visual and auditive perceptions. This processing results in two distinct forms of memory, which we need to know about in order to avoid erroneous expectations about what our memories are capable of. The distinction starts off from two types of learning, “one related to specific personal experiences and explicit factual knowledge,” and the other “related to knowledge of rules and procedures, as reflected in skilful behaviour” (Kupfermann 3 1997: 1002), distinguished in other contexts as “knowing what” and “knowing how”. These lead to two different kinds of memory called “declarative memory” and “reflexive memory,” both involved in reading texts and looking at pictures. We will begin with reflexive memory: Reflexive memory has an automatic or reflexive quality, and its formation or readout is not dependent on awareness, consciousness, or cognitive processes such as compar‐ ison and evaluation. Reflexive memory accumulates slowly through repetition over many trials. This type of memory is expressed primarily by improved performance on certain tasks and is difficult to express in declarative sentences. (ibid.) Reflexive memory enables you to do things like driving or laying the table without thinking much about your actions, but when something goes amiss, the declarative dimension is required. Declarative memory depends on conscious reflection for its acquisition and recall, and it relies on cognitive processes such as evaluation, comparison and inference. Declarative memory encodes information about specific autobiographical events as well as the temporal and personal associations for those events. It often is established in a single trial or experience, and it can be concisely expressed in declarative statements, such as “I saw a yellow canary yesterday.” Declarative memory involves the processing of bits and pieces of information that the brain can then use to reconstruct past events or episodes. (ibid.) Kupfermann also has something interesting to report about researchers analy‐ sing how people remembered stories they had heard or read: The versions that the subjects recalled were shorter and more coherent than the stories as originally told, containing reconstructions and syntheses of the original. The subjects were unaware that they were substituting, and they often felt most certain 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 323 <?page no="324"?> about reconstructed parts. The subjects were not confabulating, they were merely recalling in a way that interpreted the original material so it made sense. (ibid.: 1002 f.) This confirms the familiar experience that different people who have been watching the same film, or reading the same book, will give quite different reports of what they remember. I interpret this as an empirical contribution to the theory of adjunctive reading proposed in Ch. 1.2 as an active and declarative mode of making sense of texts or pictures. The subjects taking part in the experiments reported by Kupfermann had probably never during their schooling been encouraged to read creatively, and were therefore unaware that they had done just that in interpreting the original material so that it made sense to them. But now for examples of how cataphora and anaphora are used to direct the reader’s understanding of illustrated fiction. We will begin with cataphora, a concept introduced by the linguist Karl Bühler in 1934, and developed by Wolfgang Dressler in his introduction to the linguistic analysis of texts, Einführung in die Textlinguistik ( 2 1973), and later adopted by M.A.K. Halliday and R. Hasan in their Cohesion in English (1976: 17, 56-70). Now cover illustrations and frontispieces are both essentially cataphoric in that they point forward to contents in the unfolding narrative, without the reader who is new to the text knowing exactly what it is that they are pointing towards. Cataphora always involves a degree of indeterminacy, because it points at something that is not yet visible or has not been made explicit. All narrative texts employ such foreshadowing as a means of waking expectations, raising tension and focusing attention. On the cover of Der alte Perdrix, a woodcut gives a frontal view of the protagonist, so that we cannot miss his dark glasses or his despondent posture, even though we cannot yet account for them. 324 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="325"?> Fig. 105: C.-L. Philippe, Der alte Perdrix: cover illustration The frontispiece, not shown here, presents Perdrix in profile, again with dark glasses, sitting sunk together on a chair in his living room under what must be a portrait of himself as a young man, and would in that case be anaphoric. Then, in the headpiece to the first chapter, we find him staring us in the face, but not seeing us, for he is still wearing those dark glasses. 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 325 <?page no="326"?> Fig. 106: Headpiece and text Ch. 1 (ibid.: 9) When, in the very first sentence, the doctor addresses him as “mon pauvre père Perdrix” we suspect what is up - he is losing his eyesight. Ironically, every reader will now look ahead in order to find out how Perdrix, a blacksmith or more precisely a farrier, who has been shoeing horses all his life, will respond to this diagnosis. The interesting thing is that the reader and the characters join in a prospective curiosity that soon becomes a central theme of the story itself. Perdrix’s fate is speculated on, and revealed, step by step, to himself, to his neighbours, and so to his readers, through the doctor’s diagnosis and instructions, and through Perdrix’s experiences and thoughts, in direct speech and narrative report. The theme is also visualised through a second frontispiece placed at the head of the second part of the novel, almost exactly at the halfway mark. Most readers, I am sure, will discover this spectacular picture long before they get through the first 135 pages of the narrative, so why not present it now? 326 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="327"?> Fig. 107: Frontispiece to Part 2 (ibid.: 139) The question is, of course, what exactly this woodcut shows. Does it announce Perdrix’s suicide? Or an accident? Will he be rescued, or has he reached the end of his sufferings? If this were the headpiece to the last chapter, it would no doubt signify Perdrix’s death, but coming so early, with five more chapters to read, it remains ambiguous. Perhaps its function is to suggest a provisional ending, so that the readers can turn their attention to the social and moral questions raised by Perdrix’s illness, questions the narrator repeatedly touches on in his accounts of the townsfolk’s responses. Why did none of them try to help Perdrix cope with the crisis? Doctor Lartigaud tells him that he is incurable and must give up his work, while Perdrix’s wife Françoise insists he must go on working. Perdrix sees himself reduced to begging, and memories of the many beggars he has encountered pass through his mind and increase his despair. He thinks of the thirty years he spent working in a smithy before he married and opened his own shop. He reflects on his past as a happiness lost and never to be regained: Il pensait à tout cela comme au bonheur perdu, dans une crise où, lui-semblait-t-il, se rejoignaient tous les maux pour se fixer dans sa tête et y rouler leurs images d’enfer. Mais toute la vie on s’était douté ! Les ouvriers ne regardent pas trop loin, tout va 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 327 <?page no="328"?> bien tant qu’on a la force, ensuite il est toujours assez tôt d’y penser. C’est ainsi qu’il y a dans nos cerveaux un coin réservé au malheur pour qu’il descende un jour et se sente à sa place. (Philippe 1950-: 11 f.) This is quoted from the 1950 reprint by the Club français du livre of the original Fasquelle edition of 1903. In this passage, Philippe’s narrator is close to describing a form of declarative meta-memory that assembles bits and pieces from Perdrix’s accumulated store and gives them shape and meaning. Although Perdrix knows that his “malheur” has come to stay, he makes all kinds of attempts to distract himself by finding odd jobs to do and earning a few sous (a small copper coin worth about five centimes). In this way, we get to listen to a long string of stories, often about the most trivial incidents, which span the next three years of Perdrix’s life, years in which he neither loses his eyesight, nor makes any progress towards a satisfactory retirement. There are at least 21 such stories in Chapter 3, the longest of the five chapters making up Part 1. Chapter 4 is much shorter and consists of just one episode, the happy reunion of the Perdrix family at the grandparents’ home, a scene of protracted eating and drinking, joking and sententious wisdom. The last chapter of this part is shorter still, a sure sign that the narrative is moving towards its climax. Unfortunately, the family reunion is interpreted by the local authorities as proof that Perdrix has no claim to the poor relief provided by charity organisations such as the local Bureau de bienfaisance, so he sinks still deeper. The only person who really sympathises with Perdrix is young Jean Bousset, the most promising of his relations, who has won admission to the École Polytechnique, and become an engineer with a company in Paris. When some of Jean’s workers demand higher wages, he speaks up for them and is fired (Part 2, Ch. 3). His parents are horrified, and furious at his imprudence, so naturally Jean turns to father Perdrix for sympathy. That works well enough for quite some time, but when Jean tells him that he has found a new job in Paris and thrice urges him to accompany him to the capital, the fateful moment of decision has arrived: La troisième fois, ce fut encore après une lettre, Jean dit : Fais ta malle, mon Vieux. Dans huit jours on y sera. Le Vieux, soudain, plongea la tête comme on pique un plongeon, rétrécit ses épaules d’un mouvement frileux et s’assit de telle sorte que les idées noires l’entouraient en longues bandelettes. Jean se mit à rire : - Débats-toi des pieds et des pattes. Y a pas, là, je t’emmène-! (ibid.-: 196) This description of the old man in the posture of someone about to jump headfirst into the water confirms what we saw in the second frontispiece, which it may well have inspired. We recognise that this is another foreshadowing of his end. He is the helpless victim of the black ideas that tie him up in their long 328 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="329"?> bands, he has lost his home and his way and can only follow Jean. They take the train to Paris where Jean has rented a furnished room in a decrepit hostel on the Île Saint-Louis. Although their room is small and damp, Perdrix seems content, but when the two men cross the Seine to have their dinner in a wine merchant’s shop, he is so dismayed by the gas lights and the noise of the traffic that he comments: “Il m’embête ton Paris. C’est un trop grand cassement de tête.” (ibid.: 202). Three winter months pass, and Perdrix’s fear and loathing of Paris and a longing for his past life in the village grow from day to day. One evening in February he leaves the hostel, deposits the keys in the office and gives the manager a message for Jean: “Vous direz au petit qu’il ne faut pas qu’il s’inquiète” (ibid.: 217). That is meant to be reassuring, but in fact it will set Jean worrying, and it announces to the forewarned reader that the end is nigh. Perdrix has never been on his own in the streets of Paris, and now he hears them roaring like wild animals under a sky burning like a smithy fire. He hurries away along the quays of the Seine and arrives at Pont Neuf, passes the equestrian statue of Henri IV, and goes down the stairway to the lower quay. “La fatigue le pressait, appuyait à sa nuque cinq doigts et le poussait sans surprise : Allons, vieux Compagnon ! ” (ibid. : 220). At that moment he trips over an iron mooringring and tumbles into the river, “tomba tout simplement, sans même l’avoir fait exprès, dans la bonne Seine” (ibid.). Two boatmen who fish him out of the water the next day make the final comments: “En voilà un qui voulait y voir clair. Il n’a pas posé ses lunettes.” (ibid.) Now is the moment to compare these last sentences with the second frontispiece: it shows Perdrix stumbling, not diving into the river. We are not surprised to hear that he was still wearing his glasses, but are we enlightened by the boatman’s interpretation that the drowned man was someone who sought clarity? Perdrix was exhausted, possessed of a dim longing to put an end to things, but without the necessary strength of body or mind. So, pushed by fatigue, he simply drops into the water. His story is over, and it needs no tailpiece beyond that last word “lunettes” that takes us back to the first pictures and the opening sentence. Traditionally, the chapters of a narrative text are closed with an unframed vignette, a “cul de lampe”, a pendant knob ornament. We have already seen that Masereel often uses headpieces to open a chapter, but only rarely employs tailpieces. He seems to prefer the cataphoric character of a headpiece to the anaphoric tailpiece, the quality of expectation to that of confirmation. A striking example is the first story in the volume Cinq Récits, (1920), by Émile Verhaeren, published by Insel as Fünf Erzählungen (1922), called “Der Gasthof zum sanften Tod”, in the original just “À la Bonne Mort”. This has six woodcuts, a half-page headpiece and five full-page illustrations. Of the latter, four are typical episodic 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 329 <?page no="330"?> pictures, while the fourth is physically and functionally a tailpiece, since in the Insel edition it follows and illustrates the last sentence of the story and points back to the beginning, where this conclusion was anticipated. The original was published by the Éditions du Sablier, Geneva, using a slightly larger type, so that the make-up is different and the “tailpiece” precedes the last three paragraphs of the text, allowing this full-page woodcut to be placed on a recto page, like all the others. Either way, we can ask what Masereel’s intention may have been in using a full-page illustration as a finis tailpiece? The story is set near Temse, a small town in East Flanders, Belgium, and relates the terrible hatred that grows between the brothers Adriaen and Saft after the death of their parents, who had managed an inn called Le Cabaret de la Bonne Mort. For two hundred years this inn had been a port of call for pilgrims come to pray and beg for a merciful death at the Church of Our Lady, founded in Temse in the late 8 th century. Verhaeren’s narrator tells us that there had once been a chapel and a statue nearby, both dedicated to the Virgin Mary, from which the inn must have taken its name. On Sundays, people from the surrounding villages would come for a drink and a smoke, and it was Saft’s job to refill the glasses. Adriaen, the elder brother, had once intended to become a priest, but then decided that he wanted to succeed his father as landlord, if only to prevent his brother from usurping that office. After their father’s death, the brothers no longer spoke with each other and avoided each other as much as they could. Saft spent most of the time alone in his garden, where he had a hidden store of smuggled spirits. Adriaen meanwhile taught the choirboys hymns and psalms, and tormented them as much as he could. Before long, the sexton was entrusted with the task in his stead. Both brothers now enter into a steep and rapid decline, which is mirrored in the rapid decay of the inn and the total absence of the pilgrims that in past years had brought such wealth. Their only communication is through insulting letters, carried to and fro by their old servant Mie Bergman. One day, they recognise that she is the only person who keeps what remains of the inn together, and is the only audience for their mutual hate. When even the Sunday guests from the village put an end to their visits, both Saft and Adriaen are thrown back entirely on themselves, are isolated and without any other being to relate to. Therefore, “Il fallait se parler ou se tuer” (Verhaeren 1920: 35). Saft adds some hemlock leaves to the vegetables in their pantry, Adriaen hides arsenic at the bottom of the sugar caster, and after a last meal, without exchanging a single word, each retires to opposite ends of the Cabaret de la Bonne Mort, one to the attic, the other to the cellar, there to die their solitary deaths. 330 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="331"?> Fig. 108 : Tailpiece to Verhaeren, «-À la Bonne Mort-» (31) We are still left with the question why Masereel chose to finish this tale with a full-page woodcut. First, because it forms an emphatic full-stop to the story, second, because it brings us back to the first sentence, quoted above, in a literally vicious circle that represents the fate of these enemy brothers, a circle of their own making, and one that they could not escape. A further example of this unusual form of tailpiece is to be found in Romain Rolland’s La Révolte des machines ou La Pensée déchaînée (1921), a dystopian satire in four acts written in close contact with Masereel. A second edition with a 22-page introduction summarising the letters exchanged by author and artist was published by Pierre Vorms in Paris (1947). The third edition produced by the Büchergilde Gutenberg Zurich (1949) is bilingual, following Vorms for the French text on the recto pages and adding a German translation, Die Revolte der Maschinen, on the verso pages. This is conceived as a sequence of cinematographic scenes with topographic subtitles containing description and narrative, and, as the only cases of direct speech, some excerpts from two speeches by the President, one opening the action (Act 1, “L’Homme, rois des machines”: 44-49), the other closing it (Act 4: “Die glorreiche Zerstörung der Maschinen durch den menschlichen Geist”: 97-101). But one member of the cast, “le maître des machines, Martin Pilon, dit Marteau Pilon”, has absented 4.2 Frans Masereel and the architecture of the illustrated book 331 <?page no="332"?> himself from the action, which culminated in the battle of the machines against the machines, and is drawing up plans for a new machine age, which he projects as dark shadows on the golden evening sky, followed by distant thunder and the pounding of giant motors. The last sentence of the script is short and to the point: “Le Cycle terminé recommence”, and is confirmed by the tailpiece: Fig. 109: Tailpiece to R. Rolland, Die Revolte der Maschinen (102). Both take us back to the beginning of the story. The action is cyclic and is therefore presented verbally and visually in a rhetorical kyklos, suggesting to all who can read and see, then and a hundred years later, that we cannot escape from the world we have built. Masereel’s ideas about illustration and his practice as an illustrator The examples of Masereel’s illustrations presented above all show that his approach to illustration was both founded on received principles and open to innovative, individual solutions. His minimalist black-and-white woodcutting style, his combination of strong linear elements with plain surfaces and clear outlines, as well as the avoidance of shades of grey, all work together to make him give preference to larger formats and to avoid small headpieces and tailpieces. He is more interested in architectural elements that support the narrative as a whole than in decorative items in this or in that corner. His own statements made in tape-recorded conversations of 1961-65 with his friend the gallerist and publisher Pierre Vorms (1903-86), published in 1967 in German as Gespräche mit Frans Masereel, tend to confirm this analysis. Vorms asks Masereel how he got the idea to produce “novels in pictures” like Idée (1920) and how these projects grew 332 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="333"?> in his mind. Masereel’s answer to the second part of this question is revealing: he explains that when he conceives of such a novel, he immediately determines its starting point and its point of arrival (Vorms 1967: 47). This strong sense of beginning and ending shows that he always sees the narrative as a dynamic whole, in which he develops a strong sense of moving forward coupled with a sense of retrospection. He goes on to speak about the reader pausing to reflect on a picture or a narrative passage, and looking back and asking herself how and why this or that has come about (ibid.). What we have been discussing as cataphoric and anaphoric processes was fundamental to Masereel’s way of thinking. What is perhaps more astonishing is his remark at a later point about the opportunities these new novels in pictures offered their beholders: Ich spreche zwar nicht gerne darüber, doch denke ich, daß ich etwas für ein Buch Neues brachte: ein Werk, das nicht gelesen, sondern angesehen wird, einen Roman in Bildern, wie ich es gern nenne. Es war schnell durchgeblättert, jeder konnte nach seiner Phantasie und nach seinem Belieben Szenen hinzufügen, die seiner persönlichen Veranlagung entsprachen. (ibid.: 88) Beholders are invited to imagine a supplementary picture whenever they feel that something visual is lacking, an adjunctive impulse which is just as natural as adding words to a mute picture, and so helping it to speak. Picture books have always been read aloud to small children as a part of their enculturation, in this case the habit of learning to listen to a story and the skill of connecting what they hear with what they see. If there was no printed text, or only a meagre one, all participants could and would add their own contributions, and woe betide Dad or Grandpa if he forgot or altered any details from a previous session. 4.3 Verbal and visual signs in The Patriot’s Progress This chapter discusses a further example of an author collaborating with an artist in the production of a bimodal narrative, in this case a critical documentary tale about the Great War, as contemporaries called it. Its particular interest lies in its genesis, its unusually high ratio of illustration to text, and in its debunking of the patriotic enthusiasm which sent so many young men to their deaths in a war that was not really their concern. Beyond these aspects, it gives us the opportunity to consider how word and image interact over a span of almost 200 pages, and specifically how visual signs correspond to verbal ones. The First World War was reported from the start in word and image by both popular and upmarket newspapers and magazines like The War Illustrated, The Illustrated War News, Illustrierte Kriegsblätter, Kriegszeit: Künstlerflugblätter, L’Image de la 4.3 Verbal and visual signs in The Patriot’s Progress 333 <?page no="334"?> guerre, J’ai vu, and many others. Though British soldiers were forbidden under the Defence of the Realm Act (August 1914) to keep diaries or make sketches of what they witnessed on the battlefield, and similar restrictions applied in the French and German armies, many of them ignored the regulations. They wrote home as often as possible, as is documented in detail by Lyn Macdonald in her 1914-1918: Voices and Images of the Great War (1988). Official war artists like Paul Nash, Percy Wyndham Lewis and William Roberts were commissioned to communicate what the historian Peter Clarke has called a “unique, shared, uncommunicable experience” (Clarke 1997: 79), and independent conscripted artists such as Max Pechstein, Ludwig Meidner and Otto Dix produced records of their war experiences on their own initiative, as did French artists like Théophile Alexandre Steinlen and Raoul Dufy. Illustrated war narratives sold well during the war and afterwards, and were welcomed by the survivors because they furnished ways of thinking and speaking about what to many had seemed beyond words, let alone understanding. Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu: Journal d’une escouade was one such account, written in 1916 on the basis of his own experience in the trenches from December 1914 to early 1916, when he was hospitalised. The book was published in November 1916 and immediately won the Prix Goncourt, its realism earning Barbusse the nickname “le Zola des tranchées”. An illustrated limited edition followed in May 1918, with ten full-page etchings and 76 drawings by Raymond Renefer, the drawings engraved by Eugène Dété. Renefer had seen active service throughout the war as a “dessinateur” whose task it was to investigate and document the topography of the battlefields (Barbusse, Le Feu, repr. 2016: v-xii), so he was never on duty without his sketchbook. The Patriot’s Progress, a cooperative venture I have mentioned Barbusse and Renefer because theirs is an important book, and because they form a French parallel of sorts to a German writer like Johannes Schönherr (1894-1961), whose explicitly pacifist Der große Befehl (1933), published by the Büchergilde Gutenberg, was illustrated with etchings and lithographs that Max Pechstein (1881-1955) had made on the Somme battlefield in 1916-17. An important English book about the Great War, The Patriot’s Progress, is similar to Schönherr’s work in that its pictures were produced before there was a text, and differs from both Barbusse’s and Schönherr’s works in that it led to a close cooperation between the artist and an author inspired by the artist’s work and by his own memories of the war. The book’s full title as printed on the titlepage is The Patriot’s Progress, Being the Vicissitudes of Pte. John Bullock, Related by Henry Williamson and drawn by William Kermode. This was published in April 1930 by Geoffrey Bles, London, and reprinted in the same month, as my 334 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="335"?> copy reveals, so it must have sold quite well at the time. It was reissued in 1968 with a preface and an epigraph by the author, relating how the book came to be illustrated and written. Henry Williamson (1895-1977) had early fallen under the conservative influence of the writer and naturalist Richard Jefferies (1848-87), and even became an admirer of Oswald Mosley during the 30s. William Kermode (1895-1959), born in Tasmania, moved with his family to England when he was 16, and in 1915 volunteered for military service, taking part in the second and third battles of Ypres, and being awarded the Military Cross. After the war he studied at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, founded in 1919, under Iain Macnab (1890-1967), and gave courses there from 1922. In 1925 Macnab founded the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, where Kermode joined him and the linocut pioneer Claude Flight (1881-1955), whose The Art and Craft of Lino Cutting and Printing (1930) remains the standard monograph. Macnab published The Student’s Book of Wood-Engraving in 1938, the same year as Kermode’s Drawing on Scraperboard for Beginners. Under the influence of his teachers and colleagues, Kermode had begun in the late 20s to express his war memories in the form of linocuts, which he showed to the writer and critic John C. Squire, the influential editor of The London Mercury, known for championing writers like D.H. Lawrence and Walter de la Mare, and artists like Eric Gill and Gwen Raverat. Williamson remembers their meeting in his preface to the 1968 reissue of The Patriot’s Progress: The idea of The Patriot’s Progress grew from a suggestion, in 1928, that I should write captions for a set of linocuts which illustrated the Great War. The idea came from J.C. Squire, then editing The London Mercury from a small office in Fleet Street. “They are done by an Australian soldier who served, like yourself, on the Western Front,” said Jack Squire. “If you’d like to talk to him about it, we’ll go into the pub next door.” (Williamson 1968: i) There Kermode showed Williamson his linocuts, and the three men engaged in a debate which revealed certain tensions between the artist’s and the writer’s aims. Williamson had recently been touring the Flanders battlefields to collect ideas for an autobiographical report, published in May 1929 as The Wet Flanders Plain (repr. 2009). But here is his account of the discussions with Kermode: The lino-cuts were almost caricatures, yet the details were real. I wanted the reality itself; and after several meetings with the artist, William Kermode, a quickly perceptive chap, the proposal was made that, if he could see his way to scrapping some of the scenes and cutting new pictures, I’d write an entire story around them, pouring in a concrete of words making, as it were, a line of German mebus, or ‘pillboxes’ of the kind which had frustrated our attacks during Third Ypres […]. His linocuts would be shuttering to my verbal concrete. (ibid.: ) 4.3 Verbal and visual signs in The Patriot’s Progress 335 <?page no="336"?> Evidently Williamson sensed that Kermode’s pictures, however real the details were, did not show the reality that he himself had been looking for during his travels in Flanders. What he means by “the reality itself” is not explained, but it reminds one of Plato’s distinction between phenomena and noumena in the Republic. A phenomenon is a thing that we perceive through our senses, e.g. a trench in Flanders, while a noumenon is knowledge of how a thing really is, independent of our senses. Kant, in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), called the distinction in doubt, because he was convinced that we do not have a faculty of non-sensory knowledge, but did introduce the concept of thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), which sounds very much like Williamson’s “reality itself”. To my way of thinking, as my readers will know, the dualism can be resolved by positing a bi-directional continuum between our sensory perceptions and their coding and storage in our memories. As long as my perceptions do not collide with the information I have stored in my mind, I have no reason to doubt that they conform with reality. In the case of Williamson, since he is willing to let Kermode take the first step of designing new pictures, and promises that his text will follow these, it seems that the reality of the Flanders battlefield is something they will be able to negotiate. Reality is not so much a matter of fact as of understanding. The project thus becomes a model of friendly and successful cooperation, even though Williamson does complain about “the slow, laborious, and at times resented job of work” (ibid.: ii). His metaphor of “the concrete of words” is an allusion to the “Maschinengewehr-Eisenbeton-Unterstände” or MEBUs, as the Germans called the innumerable small concrete machine-gun shelters they had built in their trenches. If Williamson really thought that Kermode’s illustrations served as “shuttering to his verbal concrete” then that might imply that they were needed to give his narrative a firm, definite shape. Actually, all that the 125 linocuts do in this respect is subdivide the text into neat rectangles of letterpress, so that the reader can move steadily forward through the five “Phases”, from text to picture and picture to text. Each illustration makes a cut in the text, which is healed as soon as the beholder goes on reading. At the same time, each new block of text interrupts the sequence of pictures, which like the sequence of text nevertheless remains to some extent in the memory of the reader-beholder. With Jacques Derrida, one can say that the reader-beholder experiences an ongoing state of “différance” (Derrida 1991: 31-33), of deferral of the ends of the narrative, both verbal and visual, coupled with a reminder of the beginnings. The story of the book’s genesis shows that it was planned and carried out as a balanced and close interaction of word and image, and one of the most intensively illustrated works of its kind. Here are the linocuts for the opening “Dedication” page and for the “Epilogue” that together form the book’s visual framework: 336 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="337"?> Fig. 110: Williamson/ Kermode, The Patriot’s Progress: vii. The book is dedicated to the soldiers killed on the battlefield, while the final illustration shows the protagonist, Private John Bullock, as a survivor who lost his right leg when he was hit by a “five-nine” shell (ibid.: 171, 193). The dedication cut shows a wooden cross, often a sign marking a grave, and at the same time a symbol referring to the martyrdom of Christ and the Christian faith. The illegible inscription and the “tin hat” (pars pro toto) make the cross stand for all fallen soldiers. The sharp black and white lines falling diagonally across the whole picture could denote rain or hail or even enemy fire (compare the illustrations on pages 72, 110, 157-170). Aldous Huxley’s novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) employs very similar verbal imagery to describe sights and sounds, when in Ch. IV the protagonist Anthony Beavis, travelling through Surrey on a wet November day and meditating on death, looks out of the window at “the coming darkness and the black branches moving in torture among stars, the sleet like arrows along the screaming wind” (Huxley 1936: 29). In Kermode’s linocut you see a white box-like object on the ground, beneath the cross, out of which a ghostly white shape seems to be rising into the sky. This in turn reminds me of a letter by a British officer revisiting the battlefield in 1919 that is documented in Lyn Macdonald’s Voices and Images. It is now “a garden of wild flowers and tall grasses”, he writes, and continues: I was specially struck by a cross to an unknown British warrior which stood up like a sentinel over the vast cemetery of the fallen in last year’s battle, now hidden under the dense vegetation. Most remarkable of all was the appearance of many thousands of 4.3 Verbal and visual signs in The Patriot’s Progress 337 <?page no="338"?> white butterflies which fluttered round this solitary grave. You can have no conception of the strange sensation that this host of little fluttering creatures gave me. It was as if the souls of the dead soldiers had come to haunt the spot where so many fell. (Macdonald 1988: 331) Kermode’s opening illustration, preceded only by a decorative headband for the table of contents, suggests something very similar. The epilogue tailpiece is different, being a variation of a scene we already know from the second episodic illustration and its accompanying text in the First Phase, which shows the same room and furniture in the summer of 1914, with John typing a letter while looking forward to a fortnight’s holiday at the seaside, and an elderly bearded man, the head clerk, standing behind him. Fig. 111: Williamson/ Kermode, The Patriot’s Progress: 195. Now, after his story is told and the war is over, John is sitting at the same table in the same office and, if I am not mistaken, reading a newspaper. Standing behind him and looking over his shoulder is a younger man, the new head clerk, apparently supervising John. In the epilogue picture we can only see John’s left leg, but we know from the text and the previous illustration that he has lost his right leg, of which only a stump remains. So the left leg and the stump are indexical signs that something dreadful has happened. A second look reveals that the last illustration is in fact a study in legs - John’s chair has four sturdy legs, his superior has two, the table only shows one, but we know, of course, that the others are off the picture. Perhaps Kermode wanted to close the sequence of pictures with a mild visual joke, after the bitter irony of the final episode: it 338 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="339"?> is 11 November 1918, the armistice has been signed in the Forest of Compiègne, and people are out in the streets celebrating, when an old gentleman asks John how he lost his leg. John briefly explains, and when the gentleman turns away “to see the fun” a little boy runs up and cries “Look, daddy, look! […] The poor man hasn’t got only one boot on! ” [sic]. The boy’s father reprimands him: “Ssh! You mustn’t notice such things! ” said the toff. “This good man is a hero. Yes,” he went on, “we’ll see that England doesn’t forget you fellows.” “We are England,” said John Bullock, with a slow smile. The old gentleman could not look him in the eyes; and the little boy ceased to wave his flag, and stared sorrowfully at the poor man. (Williamson 1930: 193 f.) And that is how the story ends. For after the war, very little was done in Britain to reintegrate the returning soldiers. The right to vote was extended to all men over 21 and to all soldiers regardless of age, while women over 21 but under 30 did not get the franchise till 1928. In 1920, unemployment insurance was extended to cover 11 million workers in almost all manual occupations, but when the artificial wartime boom collapsed a year later, unemployment rocketed and “the dole” was introduced, a charity rather than a right. The increasing cost of living was insufficiently compensated by wage increases, and so miners, railwaymen and transport workers resorted to strikes. “It was like the Somme, where not a few of them had fought”, as Peter Clarke puts it, for Lloyd George’s coalition government did not take action, and so “the miners were left stranded on the barbed wire, bitter and bloody, but unbowed” (Clarke 1997: 107). Plans for an extensive council housing programme were worked out during the last two years of the war, but the subsidies were withdrawn when prices went through the roof (ibid.: 108). Progress and genre The term “progress” is borrowed from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to come (first part 1678), a Christian allegory about the flight of the protagonist Christian from the City of Destruction and his adventurous pilgrimage to the Holy City. Bunyan’s book is one of the most frequently illustrated books in English literature and “the most widely available book in England after the Bible” (Bindman 1981: 78), and that of course made it possible for Hogarth to give the term an ironic twist, in The Harlot’s Progress (1731) and The Rake’s Progress (1735), where it designates moral decline and fall. A third meaning, now archaic, first documented in the 15 th century, is found in expressions like “Royal Progress”, i.e. a “state journey made by a royal or noble personage” (OED) to celebrate a victory like the destruction of the 4.3 Verbal and visual signs in The Patriot’s Progress 339 <?page no="340"?> Spanish Armada in 1588. All these meanings overlap in The Patriot’s Progress, visually in the continuous sequence of linocuts and verbally in the five phases of the text. The book reports a sequence of military actions that get stuck in the trenches, a very slow progress towards a victory that most of the soldiers were finally too weary to rejoice in. Not for nothing did Williamson introduce the term “vicissitudes” in the full title of the book, since it means changes for the worse, the opposite of human progress as we usually understand it, asserting the possession of “certain unalienable Rights” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, as Thomas Jefferson put it in The Declaration of Independence (1776), thereby documenting a further dimension in the word’s meaning that no state of war should be allowed to cancel. Compared with such complexities, the structure and fable of The Patriot’s Progress are quite simple. The fictional and satirical third-person narrative fo‐ cuses on a representative common soldier, Private John Bullock, the embodiment of a national Everyman, an ordinary figure without distinctive characteristics, except for his love of his country. While the narrator is omniscient, his protag‐ onist is naïve, a contrast that sometimes leads to satire and sometimes expresses compassion with his abused humanity. Nothing is reported that contemporaries did not know about from their own experience or from other accounts, so it is the narrative art and the ethics of judgement that catch the reader’s attention. Here is an excerpt from the Second Phase, after the soldiers have disembarked in Le Havre and marched to their Rest Camp, nicknamed Y.M.C.A., because the local girls, “fat and painted” we are told, have to stay outside: John Bullock returned to the Y.M.C.A. and wrote a letter to his mother, saying he was enjoying himself; that the crossing had been rough, but he wasn’t very sick. After dinner, feeling the Romance of War, he wrote again to his father, telling him it would be over by Christmas and ending up with a graphic description made of unconsciously borrowed newspaper accounts, of the sullen mutter of the guns bombarding in the distance, etc. etc. Actually the only sullen mutter he could hear was the lumps of bully beef stew being bombarded by the gastric juices of his belly. Two days in the Rest Camp fed them up to the teeth. (Williamson/ Kermode 1930: 45 f.) The following linocut is inserted in the second sentence of the quotation: 340 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="341"?> Fig. 112: French girls outside the Rest Camp, The Patriot’s Progress: 46 The decisive visual sign here is the fourfold barrier of barbed wire separating the girls from the soldiers, the same barrier the men would soon encounter on the battlefields. Here its ostensible purpose is to protect young men’s Christian morals, while between the trenches it trapped many soldiers who became helpless targets for enemy gunners. Private Leonard Hart, of the 1 st Otago Infantry Battalion, wrote home to New Zealand on 19 October 1917 and described his company’s attempt to relieve a “brigade of Tommies” who had advanced some 2000 yards towards the Passchendaele Ridge held by the Germans in their mebus, but got stuck in the mud: What was our dismay upon reaching almost to the top of the ridge to find a long line of practically undamaged German concrete machine-gun emplacements with barbed wire entanglements in front of them fully fifty yards deep! The wire had been cut in a few places by our artillery but only sufficient to allow a few men through at a time. Dozens got hung up in the wire and shot down before their comrades’ eyes. It was now broad daylight and what was left of us realised that the day was lost. (Macdonald 1988: 245) Two paragraphs later, Hart mentions that he is giving his letter to someone going on leave to England, who will post it there so as to circumvent the censor, “so I will tell you a few more facts which it would not have been advisable to mention otherwise” (ibid.). He then identifies a series of blunders that together led to a massive loss of lives, one being the inability of the British artillery to 4.3 Verbal and visual signs in The Patriot’s Progress 341 <?page no="342"?> destroy the barbed wire and knock out the mebus, another the unwillingness to negotiate a limited truce with the enemy in order to carry out their wounded and bury their dead. The barbed wire features in many of Kermode’s illustrations, and what is interesting is that the iconic black, jagged lines representing it seem to turn into white, jagged structures that also signify the power to wound and cut and tear. Here is an illustration from the Third Phase of The Patriot’s Progress that refers to an episode during the Battle of the Somme. It is almost midnight when John Bullock looks over “the watery grey endless wastes of the battlefield glimmering and gleaming with the flares which soared up in white stalks and wavered as they drifted slowly down” (98 f.): Fig. 113: Battlefield near Pozières, The Patriot’s Progress: 101 Three British soldiers can be seen floundering across the muddy battlefield, on which the flares and flashes cast flickering lights, “the clang of light” Williamson calls it, which flings “hard squat shadows on the mud” (ibid.: 100). A fallen body is stretched across the bottom right corner, a German soldier as the distinctive helmet beside him suggests. Perhaps he got caught in the coil of barbed wire shown as jagged white and black signs in the bottom left corner, and was shot down. The shell-craters in the top half of the cut are full of mud and water, so they too mirror the lights. The jagged barbed wire signs are taken up in the saw-blade pattern on the wet sleeves of the soldier’s battle-dress. This visual repetition and variation is taken even further in the next cut, which shows “High explosive shells falling in salvoes on the old German trench which the company was taking over” (ibid.: 103 f.): 342 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="343"?> Fig. 114: Shells exploding over a German trench, The Patriot’s Progress: 103 Here the saw-blade pattern dominates the visual scene, not recording phe‐ nomena so much, but rather noumena, which Williamson puts in words such as “The deep and dreadful night, the vast negation of darkness, […] scored by the white streaks rising in a semi-circle before their lurching eyes” (ibid.). The jagged lines have in the course of the story become a visual metaphor for the horror of wounding and killing, and as the lurching soldier seems to be torn to pieces, one sees, at bottom left, yet another shorthand image of a soul departing, in Bunyan’s phrase, for the Celestial City. It is astonishing how much of the text can be found in the illustration, and how the illustration can develop ideas not made explicit in the text, another example of the reciprocal surplus we have just identified in the dedication cut. At this point a word on the material properties of the linocut medium is called for. The graphic techniques of linocutting What is it about the linocut that makes it so appropriate for illustrating a text like The Patriot’s Progress? The answer, in one word, is its simplicity. Those of us who had the opportunity to learn the basics of linocutting in art classes at school will remember how little one needed: some pieces of brown linoleum, about three-sixteenths of an inch (five millimetres) thick, a set of blades (gouges and V tools) and a handle to fit them in, a penknife to be used as in woodcutting, and a safety board with flanges on two adjacent sides forming a nook that prevents 4.3 Verbal and visual signs in The Patriot’s Progress 343 <?page no="344"?> your piece of lino from slipping as you work on it. An old toothbrush is useful for removing crumbs of lino from engraved lines, and of course you need tacky ink, a roller and a sheet of glass for the printing, and also suitable paper. None of this equipment is expensive. The linoleum is quite easy to cut as long as one observes the basic rules, such as keeping black lines broad enough to withstand the printing process, using patterns of straight or curved lines, and avoiding cross-hatching (Biggs 1963: 26 f.). The finished linocut is liable to break along the incised furrows, so it should be glued on a block of wood, cut to size, before printing it. These simplicities of material, tools and technique do not necessarily lead to inferior pictures, as Frank Morley Fletcher claimed in an article on “The Woodblock Colour-print: A Democratic Art” in The Original Colour Print Magazine (1924: 4 f.) and refuted by Claude Flight in his 1927 handbook Linocuts (Carey/ Griffiths, Avant-Garde British Printmaking, 1914-1960, 1990: 74). In his A History of Book Illustration (1958), David Bland criticises Kermode’s linocuts for The Patriot’s Progress as “far too heavy for the page” and concludes, without showing and discussing a single example, that “generally speaking the linocut, the effects of which are even broader than the woodcut, needs a large page all to itself, preferably without type” (Bland 1958: 372). Bland’s judgement misses the point, namely that the subject matter of the book, nocturnal trench warfare, calls for bold black lines and surfaces contrasting with white areas, lines, stripes and spots, which express not only what, but also how, with what emotions, the soldiers see and hear, feel and smell the battle while they are marching, running and fighting for their lives. Their perception of things and events on the battlefield is often fragmentary, hazy and fleeting, but just as often massive, violent and overwhelming. It is highly repetitive and monotonous, but continually changing pace and even shape. If the illustrations can express this paradoxical experience, using elements of style and composition akin to those developed by expressionist, futurist and vorticist artists, then they fulfil their purpose. Fritz Eichenberg (1901-90), a German graphic artist and caricaturist, who fled Germany for the USA in 1933, points out, in his The Art of the Print (1976), that linocutting may be a humble and maligned medium, but that it has been ennobled by the work of artists like Pablo Picasso, who devised an “elimination method” of printing in colours from a lino block, “in turn cutting away and printing in rapid stages from the same block” (Eichenberg 1976: 137). Kermode’s linocuts also employ a kind of elimination method by omitting all the fancy, finicky details that an object may have, thus reducing object shapes to their basic constituents. This is compensated to some extent by the narrator’s “concrete of words” that is often, however, disavowed by what the illustration 344 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="345"?> tells us. An early example shows the protagonist and his mates at the beginning of the Second Phase, putting together all their equipment before being inspected by their Captain and his officers. The crowning item is their steel helmets: Fig. 115: John Bullock wearing his helmet, The Patriot’s Progress: 34 The text referring to this illustration runs as follows: Steel helmets, called tin hats, were lifted gingerly onto heads, and the chin straps adjusted. The chin strap made John Bullock feel very strong and soldierly. (ibid.: 35) Immediately after this ritual, they are ordered on parade. In the picture, John’s face is left without eyes, so its expression is at best vacant, he hardly recognises himself, and he certainly looks neither strong nor soldierly. So the text is called in question by the way it is illustrated, and becomes an ironic comment suggesting that these soldiers are not ready for the task lying ahead of them in France and Flanders. A few pages later, when they leave the train in Portsmouth and board their ship, we are told that “John Bullock felt very small and lonely as he leaned on the muzzle of his rifle” (ibid.: 39). Then, when the ship taking them to Le Havre moves away from the quay, John begins to realise what is happening: The wriggling shiny lines of the arc-lamps converged and multiplied on the dark water, the unutterably desolate dark water gliding wider between John Bullock and what, he now realised with a piercing anguish, was his life. England! No cheering, no band music, no waving forest of girls’ hands: all so different from what he had scarcely formulated in his mind. (ibid.: 40) 4.3 Verbal and visual signs in The Patriot’s Progress 345 <?page no="346"?> The darkness of night and water, the glaring light of the arc-lamps and then of the searchlights anticipate infinitely harsher battlefield experiences yet to come, just as his present anguish at having to leave England is nothing by comparison with the unimaginable pain he will have to bear. The privileged narrator knows (i.e. decides) what has been going on in John’s mind and can now reveal that it was first vague and then trivial. John has no words to utter his feelings and expectations, so he cannot tell his story in the first person, except haltingly in the occasional passage of direct speech. The soldiers of the B. Company draft of the Blankshire Regiment (Williamson had to invent a fictive unit) are sent to a lower deck where life belts are handed out and strapped on, while their boat moves out into the Channel, with searchlights sweeping over the water, and “dots and dashes of light in the darkness” (ibid.: 41) all around them, till they are ordered to put out all cigarettes and pipes so as not to attract enemy submarines. Kermode takes up the alliterative phrase to produce an illustration like this, in which all the white dots and dashes are reflected light: Fig. 116: B. Company draft on a lower deck, The Patriot’s Progress: 41 346 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="347"?> When we behold such an illustration we automatically look for shapes and outlines we can recognise and name, an elementary adjunctive act of seeking appropriate words. In this case, it is the face at the bottom of the cut that is easiest to identify, the peaked cap indicating that he is an officer. On the left, an upright figure of a man with a long nose and goggling eyes can be made out, perhaps it is John himself. To his left and right there are two more figures with rudimentary facial features, but all the other eight or so figures are reduced to a pattern of dots and dashes and jagged lines. Since this scene is on board a ship, one would expect to see a funnel and cowl vents, and that is perhaps what Kermode shows at the top of the picture. It is not these identifiable objects that the illustration is about, however, but the soldiers’ apprehensiveness and uncertainty, growing as the submarine warning is given and the sea gets rougher, in an almost abstract representation. It is Williamson’s undramatised narrator who adds such psychological details, which the reader can fuse with other parts of the text and then project onto the picture in order to enhance its meaning. In his Flanders diary of 1928, Williamson reports on his arrival at St. Omer and remembers how different his arrival there had been in 1914: We marched that night to old artillery barracks, white-washed, gas-lit, bare, strewn with dusty straw. They increased the feelings I had of being taken into something dreadful and uncontrollable, from which I could never escape. The dim candle-light made me sad, for I was thinking of home, of my mother’s face at the parting. Never to see her again! But the slight frenzy was stifled, and I lay down in the straw and hid my face from my stouter comrades. (Williamson 2009: 27) This is a first-person narrative by a perceptive and eloquent person and it clearly provided much of the material for the story of John Bullock. That is told in a quite different style, laconic and broken up into strings of short phrases, in which the protagonist does not attempt the lucid self-analysis that Williamson in his diary can so elegantly develop out of the combination of showing the external world and reflecting on his perceptions. Relations between visual and verbal artefacts The question of the relations between word and image is central to any analysis of pictorial narrative, and has been discussed at length in Ch. 1.2. Different genres of illustrated texts employing different kinds of illustration do however raise the question again and again, and call for specific answers, as we have seen in the case of The Patriot’s Progress. The topic has been addressed by art historians and theorists focused on work by singular artists or art movements, but only marginally concerned with the bimedial structure of illustrated fiction 4.3 Verbal and visual signs in The Patriot’s Progress 347 <?page no="348"?> or poetry. It is not so long ago that Gottfried Boehm, in an essay entitled “Jenseits der Sprache? Anmerkungen zur Logik der Bilder” (2004: 28-43), urgently called for a new attitude to the relationship, one which would no longer subjugate the picture to language, “die das Bild nicht länger der Sprache unterwirft”, nor cast the shadow of language, “den Schatten der Sprache”, over the iconic image (Boehm 2004: 30, 33). Boehm refers to the second of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 4) and to Plato’s logocentrism in order to show that we have inherited a tradition that identifies the word with God (John 1: 1) and consequently ranks it above any visual image, though images of Christ that early fathers of the church like Gregory of Nyssa (4 th century) accepted as legitimate representations of the divine are an exception. This tradition has produced a parallel secular tradition, Boehm says, “ein säkulares Bildverständnis” (ibid.: 35), which has, however, never called the primacy of the word into question, much to the detriment of the image as such. He argues as follows: Seit dem 19. Jahrhundert geht damit ein massenhafter Bildgebrauch und eine Bilderlust einher, ohne dass sich damit eine Abkehr vom Primat der Sprache, des Wortes oder Textes verbinden würde. […] Wir beobachten, dass die Aufmerksamkeit des Betrachters im Bild von Indikatoren gelenkt wird, die auf Sub- oder Prätexte verweisen, welcher Art auch immer sie sein mögen. Der findige Deuter kommt dem Bild auf die Schliche. Er entziffert, was sich in der Offensichtlichkeit des Visuellen verborgen hat. Er entlarvt das Ikonische als verschlüsselte Umformung von etwas, was primär gesagt wurde. (ibid.) It may be true that today many people, the “mass” as Boehm implies, are so used to reading pictorial advertisements and the like as pragmatic messages about consumer wares of all kinds that they do not consciously attend to the visual elements in front of them. But that does not necessarily disqualify them from noticing, say a picture exhibited in a shop window, in quite a different spirit, lingering to look at it because it has caught their eye. It is not very helpful to describe the mass beholder as a clever detective who unmasks every icon as an encrypted transformation of something that was originally spoken. The relevant question is not whether one medium subjugates or extinguishes the other, but rather to ask if and how they support and enhance each other. Modern neurobiological science of the mind, repeatedly quoted and discussed in these pages, should be recognised as implying an incontrovertible principle, namely that all our senses are in continuous supportive contact with each other, thus permitting us to interact with the world around us. Therefore there can be no reasonable doubt that image and word belong together: that is the firm ground we must stand on. An illustrated text is a simultaneous structure that becomes 348 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="349"?> sequential in the double mental process of reading symbolic signs and looking at iconic signs, a sequence in both directions, from image to text, and from text to image. Just as art has a linguistic dimension, so language, and especially the language of literature, has an iconic dimension, as Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short argue in their Style in Fiction (1981): [I]f there is one quality which particularly characterises the rhetoric of text in literature, it is that literature follows the ‘principle of imitation’: in other words, literary expression tends to have not only a presentational function (directed towards the reader’s role as decoder) but a representational function (miming the meaning it expresses). (Leech/ Short 1981: 233) The authors distinguish between different kinds of miming, from onomatopoetic words (cuckoo, whisper, bang etc.), and phonaesthetic series (glimmer, glitter, glow etc.) to the syntactic reproduction of chronological sequencing in a sentence like “The lone ranger saddled his horse, mounted, and rode off into the sunset” that is turned into nonsense if the chronological order is ignored: “The lone ranger rode off into the sunset, mounted, and saddled his horse”. We expect cause to precede effect in a sentence, and the subject to come before the verb and the object, as in the standard S-V-O order of an English clause (ibid.: 234 f.). They conclude that, hypothetically at least, “we are conditioned to expect that language, for all its arbitrariness, is in various ways an iconic mirror of reality” (ibid.: 235). This confirms our analysis of the relation between text and image in The Patriot’s Progress, with its parallels between iconic text elements and visual structures in the illustrations. It also confirms that the verbal response to pictures is a natural one, and entirely appropriate in bringing two orders of iconicity together. The alternation of reading and beholding may, with increasing practice, merge into a synthesis, but it seems doubtful if this would be more than a momentary experience that soon fades, though it can usually be recalled at a second or further reading. An illustration is only rarely preceded or followed directly by the text it alludes to, so that the reader often has to turn a leaf or two to find it. The same applies when, reading a text, one remembers a corresponding illustration, a portrait or a landscape for example. A mode of reading that pays equal attention to the words and the pictures arranged on the (double) pages of a book is therefore not a simple progression. It is rather a moving to and fro between the visual and the verbal levels, in forward and backward steps, aiming to improve one’s provisional understanding of what is given and what is meant. It involves crossing borders between one location and another, namely text and illustration, between different sensory activities, and different mental 4.3 Verbal and visual signs in The Patriot’s Progress 349 <?page no="350"?> resources of lexical and visual memory, and other dimensions of memory like space. We saw in the previous chapter that reading a book can be compared with walking through the rooms of a building, and now we take that idea up again in describing both as spatial structures that we learn to record in our memory as spatial maps. Eric Kandel explains that since “we do not have a sensory organ dedicated to space” (Kandel 2006: 308), we learn to combine information gathered via those senses we possess, in a complicated process called “binding”: How is information about motion, depth, color, and form, which is carried by separate neural pathways, organized into a cohesive perception? This problem, called the binding problem, is related to the unity of conscious experience: that is, to how we see a boy riding a bicycle not by seeing movement without an image or an image that is stationary, but by seeing in full color a coherent, three-dimensional, moving version of the boy. The binding problem is thought to be resolved by bringing into association temporarily several independent neural pathways with discrete functions. (ibid.: 303 f.) Kandel explains that the new techniques for brain imaging such as PET and fMRI introduced in the 1980s have enabled researchers to “look into the brain and see not simply single cells, but also neural circuits in action” (ibid.: 305). Their attention was focused on the hippocampus, a structure in the temporal lobe of the cerebral hemispheres, in which explicit or declarative long-term memory is stored. This is of evolutionary importance, as one can tell from the fact that “those [birds] that store food at a large number of sites […] have a larger hippocampus than other birds” (ibid.: 306). The same phenomenon has been observed in London taxi drivers, who in order to get their licence have to pass a test on their knowledge of the streets of London and how best to reach them. After two years of training on the spot, brain imaging shows that the cabby’s hippocampus has become larger than that of other people of the same age. Further research with mice and rats showed that their brains respond to the information they gather as they move around an enclosure from one place to another and build up a map of the new environment: The brain breaks down its surroundings into many small, overlapping areas, similar to a mosaic, each represented by activity in specific cells in the hippocampus. This internal map of space develops within minutes of the rat’s entrance into a new environment. (ibid.: 309) The mental representation of space is dependent on a multi-sensory learning process, and that applies equally to the perception of the spaces of narrative texts and of pictures. Kandel explains: 350 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="351"?> Unlike vision, touch or smell, which are prewired and based on Kantian a priori knowledge, the spatial map presents us with a new type of presentation, one based on a combination of a priori knowledge and learning. The general capability for forming spatial maps is built into mind, but the particular map is not. Unlike neurons in a sensory system, place cells are not switched on by sensory stimulation. Their collective activity represents the location where the animal thinks it is. (ibid.) Travelling through the spaces of an illustrated book can therefore be understood as a combinatory, multi-sensory process (and progress) of understanding based on learning and memory, which corresponds to what Michel Serres called “visite” (Serres 1985: 259-340), as discussed in Ch. 1.2. Mapping a landscape or a bookscape always involves adding something to what the traveller recognises as given but not brought to a conclusion or completion, visually or verbally, something that takes up and develops an element by scrutinising its ambiguity or openness, its overstatement or understatement, its combination of literal and figurative meaning. In analysing the different shapes in the linocut “Shells exploding over a German trench” (Fig. 114), it became the beholder’s task to find descriptive terms like “jagged” and “saw-blade”, and relate them to mental concepts like “fear” and “horror” embodied by the visible shapes, concepts that are often but not always made explicit in the texts. At the same time, it was the reader’s task to pick up such words as the text provides, and to draw on her or his lexical memory, and then to apply the words to the illustration, thereby compensating its deficiency. Ergon and parergon Such a supplement can be added as a note written in the margin or as a caption for an illustration, and would then qualify as a “parergon”, the traditional term designating that which is added to a finished painting or drawing or print. The frame by which a picture can be hung on a wall, separating it from other pictures and the world outside, is the most common form of parergon. The term was also used to denote an embellishment of the central topic of a picture (the “ergon”), usually on the border or in the background, where it does not distract the beholder’s attention from the centre, but provides an additional interest (Lucie-Smith 2003: s.v. parergon). Jacques Derrida devoted half of his La Verité en peinture (1978), brilliantly translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod as The Truth in Painting (1987), to the parergon in a discussion that uses various kinds of indeterminacy like unfinished sentences, sentences without an initial opening signal or a closing punctuation mark, or large white spaces between the paragraphs, which call on the reader to complete them with her or his own text or image. Derrida’s puzzling punning style and his 4.3 Verbal and visual signs in The Patriot’s Progress 351 <?page no="352"?> elusive allusiveness do not make for easy reading, but they are immensely suggestive and often memorable. One of many passages about Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), which is at the centre of Derrida’s argument about parergon, several times mentions the discovery by Horace-Bénédicte de Saussure, (the great-grandfather of Ferdinand), of a perfectly beautiful wild tulip, recounted in his four-volume Voyages dans les Alpes (1779-94). Derrida explains why Kant mentions this flower so often: “Kant always seeks in it the index of a natural beauty, utterly wild, in which the without-end or the without-concept of finality is revealed.” (Derrida 1987: 85). This concept of open finality goes beyond the issues of aesthetic judgement dealt with in the first part of the Critique of Judgement to address the problem of the purposiveness of nature as expressed in its creations, i.e. its tendency for them to develop towards useful perfection, without this development ever coming to an end. Now in dealing with narratives and with pictures we are generally faced with artefacts that have limits such as definite visible and/ or explicit beginnings and definite ends, defined in books by blank pages and spaces, and in pictures by empty margins or by frames. At the same time, we know that such parergonal limits do not prevent readers and beholders from ignoring and stepping over them in all directions, often following hints and invitations in the texts and images themselves. This is what Derrida calls “finality-sans-end”. The ambiguity of “end” is important here because it means a lot of different but related things, with “the final part of something” and “a goal or desired result” being the two everyday meanings most relevant here. But let us hear Derrida himself, in the English translation: The wild tulip is, then, seen as exemplary of this finality without end, of this useless organisation, without goal, gratuitous, out of use. But we must insist on this: the being cut off from the goal only becomes beautiful if everything in it is straining toward the end [bout]. Only this absolute interruption, this cut which is pure because made with a single stroke, with a single bout [bout here means blow: from buter, to bang or bump into something] produces the feeling of beauty. If this cut were not pure, if it could (at least virtually) be prolonged, completed, supplemented, there would be no beauty. (Derrida 1987: 87) I agree that the clear-cut typographical ending of a text, underlined by a finis and/ or vignette, produces a satisfaction which can be a feeling of beauty, it expresses finality “without end” in the sense of desired result, just like a suitable frame can confirm and enhance the beauty of a picture and help the beholder to focus on the picture and nothing but the picture. It is not difficult to perceive a picture as a whole, to embrace it visually in its entirety from a certain distance, depending on its size and technique, as E.H. Gombrich explains in The Image and 352 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="353"?> the Eye (1982: 254), but that is not the case when after reading 300 pages or more of a novel I at last come to its end. I will have a sense of the whole, with some scenes I remember vividly, while others will have faded into the background and be difficult to recall. I will remember some characters, actions, phrases, ethical judgements, social issues and political attitudes etc. better than others, depending on how strongly they appealed to me while reading or rereading. As for the ending itself, modern novels are often open-ended in different ways, sometimes coming to a stop quite unexpectedly, sometimes offering explicit alternatives, and so leaving their readers to work out an ending for themselves, as David Lodge reminds us in his chapter on “Endings” (David Lodge 1992: 224). Now let us consider the process of looking at a painting, Sandro Botticelli’s “La Primavera” (c. 1482) for example, to find out what kind of first impression we may get of it as a whole - the picture is immediately accessible via internet. First we see a group of figures, mainly female, arranged on a dark background of lawn and a grove of orange trees, with patches of light-blue sky shining through between them. Then our attention is caught by Cupid flying from right to left, with his bow and arrow, poised above the head of a female figure. She is placed at centre, slightly separate from the adjacent figures, and must be Venus, Cupid’s mother. That is my first impression of the painting as a whole, after which I soon recognise that the figure on the right of Venus must be the goddess Flora, the personification of spring, for her gown is embroidered all over with flowermotifs and she wears garlands of flowers around her neck and on her head. This movement away from the centre of the picture entails a sequential focus on the other figures, from right to left, so that we now move into a narrative reading, or what W.J.T. Mitchell calls “the dialectic of discourse and vision” and “a fundamental figure of knowledge” (Mitchell 1994: 70). Each painted figure has a name and a story that can be read up in Ovid’s Fasti, Book 5, “May”. The first is winged Zephyr, the west wind, who swoops down out of the sky to seize Chloris, his bride to be. She is visibly metamorphosing into the third figure, Flora. Passing by Venus we come to the three Graces, Aglaia, Euphrosyne and Thalia, lesser goddesses of beauty given different names by different authors. Last but really first, leading the mythical train on its circular clockwise course, comes Mercury, the messenger of the gods. In his right hand he holds the caduceus, the herald’s wand, and stretches it as high as possible in order to dispel the clouds that might cast a shadow on the sunny scene. Note that the female figures are framed by the male gods, at left and top and right, and kept in a mode of circularity, just like the Graces, who dance in a closed and self-sufficient circle, as Ulrich Rehm points out in his discussion of the painting (Rehm 2009: 114-117). This circularity brings us back to Derrida’s “finality-sans-end”, for the round dance is beautiful, 4.3 Verbal and visual signs in The Patriot’s Progress 353 <?page no="354"?> endless and without any practical goal. Botticelli’s painting does not envisage any kind of cut, on the contrary its circularity, like the wheel of fortune, stresses the continuity of life through metamorphosis and fertility, as befits a painting produced to celebrate a marriage, that of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici and Semiramide d’Appiano in 1482. This practical purpose, its function of gracing and celebrating a marriage, and of being used to decorate Semiramide’s bedroom in the Medici palace in Florence (Rehm 2009: 107), and at the same time to make a symbolic statement, does not detract in any way from the picture’s beauty, as Derrida claims it must. There is so much beauty in the picture, offset though it is by Zephyr’s act of violence and the potential violence implied in Mercury’s sabre, that Rehm characterises it as “eine programmatische Begründung der Schönheit in der Malerei” (ibid.: 105), an apology for beauty in painting. Derrida would therefore seem to be mistaken in claiming that only a pure cut, an absolute cessation, can be beautiful. A painting like “La Primavera” cannot be appreciated without verbal and cultural supplements of the kind summed up above, although one must admit that its beauty does not depend on them. The narratives out of which this painting was created have not faded into nothingness but remain present in the mind of the beholder to add meaning to its beauty. In this manner such beauty carries meaning, expresses a truth about human life that enables deeper understanding and well-founded admiration. 354 4 The semiotics and rhetoric of illustrated fiction <?page no="355"?> 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators In chapters 1 to 4 one of my main purposes was to present arguments for the importance and interest of popular illustrated narrative as a contribution to the cultural education of those, often referred to as “the masses”, who in the course of their basic education after around 1870 did not really get the chance to become acquainted with fields of experience and reflection, and with modes of persuasion and representation beyond the boundaries of what their schooling and their hum-drum working and domestic lives brought with them. Inexpensive but adequately printed and attractively illustrated books could, as we have seen, open windows into unfamiliar worlds, and tell life stories sufficiently different from the reader’s own experience to raise interest and rouse curiosity. Readers had grown accustomed to narratives being proffered as bi-medial experiences, mediated through texts and their illustrations that together were doubly motivating and supportive for practising one’s verbal reading skills as well as one’s skills of visual perception. Each of the three subchapters in Ch. 5 will focus on a work or group of works by one author, and on a selection of the available illustrations, in order to find out what scenes were regarded as suitable for illustration, and how effective the pictures are. We will begin with Gustave Flaubert’s Trois Contes (written 1875-77), and continue with George Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God (1932), both well-known and canonical writers, and also with a strong regional identity: the Norman Flaubert and the Irishman Shaw. The chapter closes with an introduction to the work of the artist and writer Robert Budzinski (1874-1955), a native of Neidenburg in German East Prussia, large parts of which were returned to Poland in 1920 in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles (1919). Budzinski studied art at Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia up to 1945, when it became a Russian exclave between Lithuania and Poland. Though successful in his own day both as a writer and as an illustrator, Budzinski seems to have left very few traces after his death, and considering his talents that is reason enough to attempt an overview and a critical estimate of his work. The fact that he too reflects his regional origins in several of his books is another reason to associate him here with Flaubert and Shaw. <?page no="356"?> 5.1 Five illustrated versions of Flaubert’s «-Un Cœur simple-» (Trois Contes) One reason for choosing to discuss Gustave Flaubert’s Trois Contes (1877) is that he is the only classic writer of the 19 th century (1821-1880) included in the popular illustrated series Le Livre de Demain as LdD 29 in 1925, which later also featured illustrated editions of Madame Bovary (LdD 94) and Salammbô (LdD 107). A second reason for choosing Flaubert is the fact that Wolff did publish an impressive Royal Octavo edition of Flaubert’s Drei Erzählungen in 1918, translated by Ludwig Wolde, and illustrated with crayon lithographs by the Swiss artist Albert Hoppler (1890- 1919). An English edition, Three Tales, in almost the same format, was published by Chatto & Windus in 1923, translated and prefaced by Arthur McDowall (1877-1933) and illustrated in colour by Robert Diaz de Soria (1883-1971). To these we can add a volume from a French luxury edition, the “Œuvres complètes illustrées” and “Édition du Centenaire”, published by the Librairie de France in 1924, also in this Royal Octavo format. In Germany, the Insel Verlag produced Flaubert’s tales in three separate volumes of the Insel Bücherei in 1912, 1913 and 1920, but none of these was illustrated. The omission was made good by Philipp Reclam in Leipzig in 1960, who produced the Drei Erzählungen with profuse illustrations by Josef Hegenbarth (1884-1962). Thus we have at least four different illustrated editions from our period to compare, a fifth being the Classiques Garnier edition of 1961, edited and introduced by Édouard Maynial, fully annotated and illustrated with documentary photographs, which are a useful complement to the graphic illustrations prepared for the other editions. French quotations will mostly be taken from this definitive edition. In order to make the comparison viable we will concentrate on “Un Cœur simple”, the first of the three tales written between September 1875 and February 1877. The idea of “La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier” had first been conceived by Flaubert in 1846, then put aside and taken up again ten years later, only to be postponed once more till October 1875, and completed in February 1876. “Un Cœur simple” came to Flaubert much more easily and was written in less than six months, thanks to the encouragement of his good friend George Sand (1804-76). It is an explicitly French story, one that Flaubert culls from his “enfance provinciale” in the Haute Normandie, with Trouville, Pont-l’Évêque and Honfleur as its focal centres (Flaubert/ Maynial 1961: i-vii). In other words, in “Un Cœur simple”, the action of which can be dated between about 1809 and 1855, we are being told about events that could have happened in the decade before Flaubert was born, and in the years up to the publication, trial and acquittal of Madame Bovary. Flaubert was working from memory and in close contact with the regions and the people he had grown up with, quite a different matter from the reading and research he had to do for “Saint Julien” and “Hérodias”, both exotic and remote in time and mentality. Each 356 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="357"?> of the three tales features an eponymous protagonist who embodies a distinct form of imperfect heroism, a concept which we will need to specify later. In “Un Cœur simple”, the protagonist’s proper name does not occur in the title, and is emphatically deferred to the end of the first sentence of the story: “Pendant un demi-siècle, les bourgeoises de Pont-l’Évêque envièrent à Mme Aubain sa servante Félicité” (ibid.: 3). Yes, the servant’s name means “felicity”, but since Flaubert’s tale has very little but her unhappiness to report, it would have been excessively ironic to put it in the title, though the irony does flow through the whole narrative. Instead, the euphemistic “a simple heart”, “ein schlichtes Herz” (Ernst Sander) or “ein einfältiges Herz” (Bertha Badt), can keep the reader guessing about how best to describe Félicité, her actions and emotions, her hopes and fears. The German translations all render her name as Felicitas, which sounds out of place in a context of French names, while the English version wisely keeps to the French forms, and I shall follow suit. The number of illustrations devoted to “Un Cœur simple” differs considerably in the editions under consideration, and so does their placing. We will deal with them in chronological order and therefore begin with the one illustrated by Albert Hoppler in 1918. Flaubert, “Ein schlichtes Herz”, Kurt Wolff 1918, lithographs by Albert Hoppler no. page kind description text 1 cover episodic Young Félicité in her chamber p.-14 2 12 headpiece F. tending cattle in the fields p.-15 3 f. 16 fp. episodic F. feeding hens / Théodore approaching p.-16f. 4 f. 36 fp. episodic M. Bourais teaching F. to read a map p.-36 5 f. 54 fp. episodic F. on her knees before stuffed Loulou p.-52f. 6 61 tailpiece F. in her chamber, meditating p.-60f. (f. 16 = facing p.-16, etc.) Of the other two tales, “Die Legende von St. Julian dem Gastfreundlichen” has five illustrations, and “Herodias” has four. The title-page states that the volume has 14 lithographs, an error caused by forgetting to include the illustration printed on the top board, together with the title and the author’s name in capital script. All three tales follow the same pattern in the sequence of their illustrations: each begins with a headpiece vignette and closes with a tailpiece, in the approved manner. The three full-page episodic illustrations were printed separately from the text on a sheet of smoother paper that always remains blank on the verso. Such illustrations have to 5.1 Five illustrated versions of Flaubert’s «-Un Cœur simple-» (Trois Contes) 357 <?page no="358"?> be tipped into a gathering before binding, facing the text they refer to, or as near as possible. It is remarkable that all six illustrations show Félicité, but none of them gives us anything approaching a portrait. What they do suggest, however, is how she ages, each disaster that strikes her leaving its merciless traces. It seems that Albert Hoppler, the illustrator, himself a very sick man, as Marcus Osterwalder reveals (Osterwalder 2005, s.v. Hoppler), must have decided to leave it to the readers to form their own image of Félicité on the basis of his lithographs and Flaubert’s descriptions, such as the one given at the end of the first part of the tale, quoted here from McDowall’s translation: Her face was thin and her voice sharp. At twenty-five she looked like forty. From fifty onwards she seemed of no particular age; and with her silence, straight figure, and precise movements she was like a woman made of wood, and going by clockwork. (Flaubert 1923: 4) But we soon learn that Félicité is not “une femme en bois” and that her physical appearance belies her true character. The narrator, in the very first sentence of the second part, reveals that “She had had her love-story like another” (ibid.: 5), and we discover that in the course of her life she experienced much affection, which was always disappointed in different ways, sudden death being prominent among them. Taken together, these insights could lead us to the conclusion that it cannot be the task of the illustrator of such a story to try to express Félicité’s character through visual portraits. But he can suggest her age and her suffering, as for example in the second illustration: Fig. 117: Félicité watching cattle in the fields (Flaubert 1918: 12) 358 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="359"?> Here she is obviously a child. Flaubert’s text then gives us the realistic details of a childhood that only looks like an idyll in the illustration: Son père, un maçon, s’était tué en tombant d’un échafaudage. Puis sa mère mourut, ses sœurs se dispersèrent, un fermier la recueillit, et l’employa toute petite à garder les vaches dans la campagne. Elle grelottait sous des haillons, buvait à plat ventre l’eau des mares, à propos de rien était battue, et finalement fut chassée pour un vol de trente sols, qu’elle n’avait pas commis. (Flaubert/ Maynial 1961-: 7) This is a concentrated summary of Félicité’s childhood, which could hardly have been rendered adequately in an illustration. Hoppler does include one illustration in which we look Félicité full in the face and so get an idea of what she is thinking, and that is a scene after the cold winter of 1837 which her parrot Loulou has not survived. She has the bird stuffed and mounted on a mahogany plinth, and pays it the same worship that she pays to the crucifix in her chamber, visible in Hoppler’s fifth illustration: Fig. 118: Félicité in her chamber, meditating (Flaubert 1918: 61) Her posture, her eyes, her open mouth all speak volumes, which are difficult though not impossible to put into words. We must keep this issue of the limits of illustration in mind as we turn to the second illustrated edition of “Un Cœur simple”, the Chatto & Windus edition, illustrated by the French artist Robert Diaz de Soria. 5.1 Five illustrated versions of Flaubert’s «-Un Cœur simple-» (Trois Contes) 359 <?page no="360"?> Flaubert, “A Simple Heart”, Chatto & Windus 1923, gouache prints by Diaz de Soria no. page kind description text 1 f. title-page frontispiece Julian and the leper in his ferry boat 76 2 f. 4 fp. episodic F. asleep in front of the hearth, with her rosary 4 3 f. 20 fp. episodic F. praying at the Calvary in Honfleur har‐ bour 20 4 f. 42 fp. episodic F.’s last breath and vision of gigantic parrot 43 This English version of Flaubert’s tales is illustrated with eleven full-page episodic illustrations in colour, reproduced from gouache paintings by Diaz de Soria, of which Arthur McDowall in his “Translator’s Preface” voices the hope that they will communicate what he in his “close to the letter” translation may have missed of Flaubert’s “spirit” (Flaubert 1923: vii). The frontispiece is included in my synopsis because, even though it does not relate directly to “A Simple Heart” but to the final episode of “The Legend of St. Julian”, it does touch on themes that are common to all three tales, namely suffering, death and a vision of “superhuman joy” in the passing from life to eternity (ibid.: 78). Julian’s conversion and death form a mythical parallel to Félicité’s humble and sincere faith that is not impaired by her final delusion about Loulou. The three illustrations for “A Simple Heart” are followed by four more for “The Legend of St. Julian” (plus the frontispiece), and another three for “Herodias”. All the halftone colour prints are pasted on heavy sheets of wove grey card that are tipped in close to the relevant passage, two to three lines of which are also printed on the guard-sheet of each illustration. The text of each of the tales begins with a large decorated typographic initial letter, the first in blue, the second in green and the last in red ink. The publishers were obviously intent on producing the semblance of a bibliophile edition, with full-colour illustrations and laid paper, gilt top-edges and multi-coloured cloth and paper binding. Here is the final illustration for “A Simple Heart”, a representative example of Diaz de Soria’s use of drab grey and brown tones contrasting with patches of light and bright colours, as in the image of the parrot rising through the azure from Félicité’s death-bed, rendered in mild pink to blueish-grey tints. Note that this is the only illustration in this edition that shows Félicité’s face, framed by a double frieze of parrot-portraits at top and bottom: 360 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="361"?> Fig. 119: Félicité “sighed her last breath” (ibid.: 42 f.) When we turn to the third illustrated edition of Trois Contes, with illustrations by Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) for “Un Cœur simple”, Antoine Bourdelle (1861- 1929) for “La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier”, and René Piot (1866-1934) for “Hérodias”, we find a very different approach. Vallotton, famous for his vivid woodcuts, but also an excellent draughtsman and superb painter, has discovered a way of portraying Félicité without encroaching on her privacy and without disfiguring her. His three illustrations, carried out with pen and brush in Indian ink, show her first at work in the kitchen, then attending a children’s service and watching over Virginie at the Église Saint-Michel at Pont-l’Évêque, and finally her deathbed vision of Loulou rising. Flaubert, “Un Cœur Simple”, Librairie de France 1924, drawings by Félix Vallotton no. page kind description text 1 viii fp. frontispiece F. scrubbing the floor in M me Aubain’s kitchen 1f. 2 f. 12 fp. episodic F. in church at Pont-l’Évêque 13f. 3 37 fp. episodic F.’s vision of Loulou rising 38 5.1 Five illustrated versions of Flaubert’s «-Un Cœur simple-» (Trois Contes) 361 <?page no="362"?> This tale, like the other two, also features an ornamental b/ w headband and a decorated initial letter, not designed by the illustrators but available in the printer’s letter-case. Let us consider Vallotton’s first illustration in connection with the text it faces in the second sentence of the story: Pour cent francs par an, elle faisait la cuisine et le ménage, cousait, lavait, repassait, savait brider un cheval, engraisser les volailles, battre le beurre, et resta fidèle à sa maîtresse, - qui cependant n’était pas une personne agréable. (Flaubert 1924-: 1) It would take at least eight illustrations to show this list of tasks, but “faire le ménage” and “laver [le plancher]” are visualised through the bucket, scrubbing brush and floor cloth, and of course through what we see Félicité doing. She is not hidden from us: we see her regular, well-made face, strong arms and hands, and the dark hair peeping out from under her bonnet. Fig. 120: Félicité scrubbing the floor in the kitchen (Flaubert 1924: viii) The clarity and simplicity of Vallotton’s style is even more striking when one considers the illustrations by Bourdelle and Piot that follow. Bourdelle takes up the cue provided by Flaubert in the final sentence of “Saint Julien l’Hospitalier”: « Et voilà l’histoire de saint Julien l’Hospitalier, telle, à peu près, qu’on la trouve sur un vitrail d’église, dans mon pays » (Flaubert 1924 : 73). The reference is to the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen, where this 13 th century gothic window, nine metres high, can 362 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="363"?> be admired from the choir aisle. Bourdelle’s pictures are made to resemble church windows by imitating their division into fields through vertical posts and horizontal bars, and to a lesser extent by giving shapes a solid outline suggesting “cames”, as the grooved slips of lead with which pieces of glass are fastened together are called. Bourdelle uses colours, again in imitation of church windows, but does not keep to the dominating pattern of red and blue in the Rouen window. Piot also uses strong sensuous colour for his three illustrations of “Hérodias”. The fourth illustrated edition is the Trois Contes published as no. 29 of the Livre de Demain series in 1925. The illustrators are Georges Le Meilleur (1861-1945), Jean Lébédeff (1884-1970) and André Deslignères (1880-1968), three of Fayard’s most reputed artists. Le Meilleur, another Norman, produced the 14 woodcut illustrations for “Un Cœur simple”, using engraving tools where required for delicate effects. Flaubert, «-Un Cœur simple-», A. Fayard 1925, 14 woodcuts by G. Le Meilleur no. page kind description text 1 4 fp. frontis‐ piece Victor’s ship in Honfleur harbour 26 2 5 title-page vignette Still-life: a frugal supper 10 3 8 fp. episodic Félicité sitting in front of the kitchen fire 10 4 9 half-p. headpiece I F.’s deathbed vision of Loulou’s rising 50 5 11 tailpiece vi‐ gnette View of the fields from F.’s window 10 6 12 half-p. headpiece II F. tending cattle 12 7 21 tailpiece vi‐ gnette Head of a cock - 8 22 half-p. headpiece III Church service at Pont-l’Évêque 22-24 9 f. 32 fp. episodic Virginie’s corpse is taken to the cemetery 32 10 37 tailpiece vi‐ gnette Sailing-boats and seagulls - 11 38 half-p. headpiece IV Arrangement of two parrots with apple-trees and corn 41 5.1 Five illustrated versions of Flaubert’s «-Un Cœur simple-» (Trois Contes) 363 <?page no="364"?> 12 47 tailpiece vi‐ gnette M me Aubain’s house decaying, with F. sick in her chamber 45 13 48 half-p. headpiece V People leaving church in Pont-l’Évêque, as F. lies dying in her bed 48-50 14 50 tailpiece vi‐ gnette Kitchen still-life with pan and vegetables - The first thing one notices is the large number of illustrations, especially in comparison to the eight allotted to each of the other two tales. Ten illustrations are accounted for by the convention of identifying the beginning and end of each of the five numbered parts of the tale by a half-page headpiece and a tailpiece. None of the other editions does that. A second point is that some of the illustrations do not seem to root in Flaubert’s text but seem to be the artist’s adjunctive invention - that could be the case with illustrations 7, 10 and 11, and also with no. 14, which strikes one as a creative antithesis to what I have called the “frugal supper” shown in the second illustration. Flaubert realistically and repeatedly links the theme of ongoing, inevitable illness and death with conditions of living such as poverty, cold, damp and malnutrition, and Félicité is the main but not the only example of the causal connections. The final tailpiece is therefore perhaps a hint from Le Meilleur about how conditions could be improved, namely by providing nourishing meals for all. Third, there is the whole matter of birds which is developed in a curious way in Le Meilleur’s woodcuts, e.g. illustrations 3 and 4 on the double spread that begins the narrative and presents a parallel representation of a young and an old Félicité. The fullpage episodic illustration shows Félicité sitting in front of a fireplace in which no fire is burning. The following headpiece anticipates Félicité’s deathbed vision of the parrot’s ascension long before we know that she will one day own such a bird. Here she is shown sitting in the same pose at the foot of her own bed in which she is breathing her last, while Loulou rises to the heavens. The cataphoric illustration sums up the “demi-siècle” of Félicité’s life to which the first sentence of the story refers: “Pendant un demi-siècle, les bourgeoises de Pont-l’Évêque envièrent à Mme Aubain sa servante Félicité” (Flaubert/ Maynial: 3). They did not envy Félicité, of course, although they often enough had occasion to admire her, for example when her pluck and presence of mind saved M me Aubain and her children Virginie and Paul from a furious bull by her throwing clods of turf in his eyes (Flaubert 1925: 17). Perhaps there is no need to find a particular reason for Le Meilleur choosing a cock as the tailpiece motif for Part II, a familiar emblem of France and the Gallic spirit that is never out of place. It may serve to 364 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="365"?> stress the exotic character of the parrot that is soon to join the household. But I have found the double parrot headpiece of Part IV (illustration no. 11) puzzling, since there is really only one Loulou. Perhaps Le Meilleur wanted to present the bird in a decorative fashion, as a symmetrical image of two birds framed by two young apple trees, with a cob of maize forming the vertical axis in the middle: Fig. 121: Loulou as a double parrot (Flaubert 1925: 38) In Part IV we learn a lot about Loulou, his love of company, his language training, his relation to the butcher-boy Fabu, his unexpected disappearance and return, and about the way he and his increasingly deaf mistress carry on conversations. Here is the paragraph describing these: Ils avaient des dialogues, lui, débitant à satiété les trois phrases de son répertoire, et elle, y répondant par des mots sans plus de suite, mais où son cœur s’épanchait. Loulou, dans son isolement, était presque un fils, un amoureux. Il escaladait ses doigts, mordillait ses lèvres, se cramponnait à son fichu ; et, comme elle penchait son front en branlant la tête à la manière des nourrices, les grandes ailes du bonnet et les ailes de l’oiseau frémissaient ensemble. (ibid.: 41) Both Félicité and Loulou are lonely, neither can say or understand much, but these deficits are transcended when “the great wings of her bonnet and the bird’s wings quiver together” (Flaubert 1923: 34). This must be the passage that inspired Le Meilleur to design the double parrot headpiece, which of course remains relevant for the story to come. Félicité and the parrot remain inseparable even when death parts them. Mme Aubain advises Félicité to have the bird stuffed, and when at last he comes back from the taxidermist in Le Havre she gives him a place of honour in her chamber, where he is surrounded by all the mementoes she has collected over 5.1 Five illustrated versions of Flaubert’s «-Un Cœur simple-» (Trois Contes) 365 <?page no="366"?> the years. Every morning, when she wakes up, he is the first thing she sees. The image of Loulou is always with her when she goes to church, in memory of Victor and Virginie, and because of the preparations for the Corpus Christi celebrations. This is the English version of the relevant paragraph: Holding, as she did, no communication with anyone, Félicité lived as insensibly as if she were walking in her sleep. The Corpus Christi processions roused her to life again. Then she went round begging mats and candlesticks from the neighbours to decorate the altar they put up in the street. In church she was always gazing at the Holy Ghost in the window, and observed that there was something of the parrot in him. The likeness was still clearer, she thought, on a crude colour-print representing the baptism of Our Lord. With his purple wings and emerald body he was the very image of Loulou. (Flaubert 1923: 37) For Félicité, the parrot has merged with the image of Christ, and it is a popular print of the kind called “images d’Épinal”, not necessarily crude, and sold all over France during the 18 th and 19 th centuries, that confirms this identification in her mind. Her perceptions may be delusive, but they do provide her with an inner harmony that will carry her through the painful last weeks of her life and give her strength enough to attain a sense of final happiness. This is where the idea of an imperfect or perhaps private heroism is appropriate as a recognition of Félicité’s determination not to give in to despair. None of her dreams has ever come true, so she builds a new dream out of the debris of all those unforgotten disasters, a private vision of happiness that nothing can take from her, as long as she lives. It was more than a generation later that Josef Hegenbarth got the chance to produce a completely different illustrated version of the Drei Erzählungen, one that would allow him to begin from scratch, so to speak, and devise his own ideas about how to visualise such a complex, multi-levelled narrative text. The volume has almost the same crown octavo format as the other editions, is bound in full yellow cloth, and has an illustrated dust jacket in blue and green, as well as 54 pen drawings made in 1957 (www.josef-hegenbarth.de). Here is the synopsis of the illustrations for “Ein schlichtes Herz”: Flaubert, “Ein schlichtes Herz”, Reclam 1960, pen drawings by Josef Hegen‐ barth no. page kind description text 1 9 episodic Félicité drinking from a puddle 9 2 f. 13 fp. episodic F. meets Théodore at Colleville 11 3 f. 16 fp. episodic F. narrowly escaping the furious bull 16 366 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="367"?> 4 f. 18 fp. episodic F. and the Aubains riding to Trouville 18 5 f. 27 fp. episodic An Ursuline nun calls to take Virginie to Hon‐ fleur 27 6 31 episodic F. sees horses “hanging in the sky” in Honfleur port 30 7 34 episodic Bourais laughing at F.’s inability to read a map 33f. 8 36 episodic F. collapses after hearing of Victor’s death 35f. 9 39 episodic Virginie dies, F. passes two nights watching over her 38f. 10 42 episodic The new sub-prefect has “a negro and a parrot” 41 11 45 episodic F. rejects a Polish refugee’s proposal of marriage 44 12 47 episodic M. Paul blows cigar smoke into Loulou’s face 48 13 f. 55 fp. episodic F. worshipping the stuffed parrot in her chamber 53f. 14 f. 58 fp. episodic Sick F. quarrelling with Fabu about L.’s death 58 15 62 tailpiece F. dying, L.’s ascension, the C. Christi procession 61f. Of the fifteen illustrations for “Ein schlichtes Herz” six are full page, while the others vary in size from a quarter page to three quarters. None of them is framed in any way, and their combination of fluid thin black pen lines and emphatic black elements that look like brushwork leaves enough space around each picture to integrate it with the light Aldus roman type facing or surrounding it. In contrast to what we have established about the 1918, 1923 and the 1925 editions, Hegenbarth does not hesitate to portray Félicité in a way that enables us to recognise her in each new picture. In this respect, Hegenbarth is closer to Vallotton than to any of the other illustrators we have discussed. The Hegenbarth website mentioned above gives access to the artist’s description of his own graphic techniques, quoted here from an essay “Über meine Arbeit”, first published in the journal Bildende Kunst in 1954 and reprinted in Joseph Hegenbarth, Aufzeichnungen über seine Illustrationsarbeit (Hamburg: Kurt Christians, 1964). He explains that his art is anchored at two poles: the study of nature and his imagination. He invariably carries a sketchbook with him, and is always taking notes that serve as the basis of his studio work. The two poles are also important when working on illustrations: Befasse ich mich mit der Illustration, dann tritt zu der Naturanschauung die Phantasie hinzu. Der Illustrator empfängt seine Eindrücke von der Erzählung. Die Bilder, die 5.1 Five illustrated versions of Flaubert’s «-Un Cœur simple-» (Trois Contes) 367 <?page no="368"?> diese ihm vermittelt, entstehen in der Phantasie. Erst durch das Können, das von der Natur Erarbeitete, wird der Illustrator instand gesetzt, dem erstmalig geistig Erschauten auf dem Zeichenpapier Realität zu verleihen. (Hegenbarth 1964: 15) He goes on to explain that drawing means speaking, and illustrating is storytelling: Zeichnen heißt sprechen. Illustrieren erzählen. Was ist dabei wichtig? Die Schilderung der Charaktere, die Wiedergabe der Portraits je nach der Beschreibung mit allen Phasen seelischer Schwingungen, soweit solche aus der Tiefe bis an die Oberfläche steigen. Die Bekleidung ist Umhängsel. Sie gehört dazu, aber das Wesentliche bleibt der Mensch in seiner Ganzheit. (ibid.) How does Hegenbarth put these ideas into practice? We can find out by looking at some of his illustrations of Félicité’s experiences. He is the only artist in our selection who chose to illustrate this early episode, the encounter with the furious bull that we have already discussed: Fig. 122: Félicité escaping the furious bull (Flaubert 1960: 17) 368 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="369"?> Hegenbarth focuses on the last stage by showing slim and delicate Félicité slipping through a narrow gap in the fence and so escaping the bull. The planks of the rather derelict fence seem to ward off the aggressor and keep him at a distance, while the way Félicité turns her shoulders and stretches her legs to get through the gap shows under what kind of pressure she is. The artist’s use of heavy black to mark the bull’s head and neck, the planks and Félicité’s left foot is a characteristic feature of his style, serving here to emphasise the decisive points of the scene. We also find this stylistic feature in the next illustration, which relates to the story of Félicité’s nephew Victor, who left Normandy for America six months before, but has never sent her news. The local apothecary has now read in a newspaper that Victor’s boat has arrived in Havana, a name that Félicité associates with cigars, but knows nothing else about. She inquires with M. Bourais, the retired lawyer, to find out how far Havana is from Pont-l’Évêque and if there is perhaps a land route Victor could take to return home. Bourais gets his atlas and shows her the relevant pages, trying to explain what longitudes are, and showing her the black spot that denotes Havana. She has never learned to read a map, and so she innocently asks him to show her the house where Victor lives. Here is the scene as captured by Hegenbarth: Fig. 123: M. Bourais laughing at Félicité (Flaubert 1960: 34) Flaubert’s text for this is as follows: Elle se pencha sur la carte ; ce réseau de lignes coloriées fatiguait sa vue, sans lui rien apprendre ; et Bourais, l’invitant à dire ce qui l’embarrassait, elle le pria de lui montrer la maison où demeurait Victor. Bourais leva les bras, il éternua, rit énormément ; une 5.1 Five illustrated versions of Flaubert’s «-Un Cœur simple-» (Trois Contes) 369 <?page no="370"?> candeur pareille excitait sa joie ; et Félicité n’en comprenait pas le motif, - elle qui s’attendait à voir jusqu’au portrait de son neveu, tant son intelligence était bornée ! (Flaubert/ Maynial 1961: 37) Note that English “candour” and “candid” refer mainly to honesty and sincerity, but not often to credulity or simple-mindedness, like the French “candeur” does. There is an interesting entry for “candid” in H.W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage ( 2 1965) showing how its meaning “worsened” from Jane Austen to George Eliot. Hegenbarth gives the mutual misunderstanding a visual shape, with innocent, ignorant Félicité drawn in delicate, sensitive lines, and bending back slightly from Bourais, who is marked as arrogant, rude and contemptuous by a set of heavy black lines and surfaces, and tilted to an extent that indicates a loss of balance, thus foreshadowing his suicide, after his dishonest dealings and shameful life have been made public. The third example of Hegenbarth’s art that I would like to discuss differs in some ways from the two we have just studied. The first illustrated Félicité’s cleverness and courage in keeping the bull at bay and making it possible for the Aubains and for herself to escape the animal’s pursuit. The second showed her lack of education and a certain simple-mindedness in not understanding that one and the same map cannot show a whole island and a detail like a single house in one format. The third shows the episode connected with the Corpus Christi celebrations, in which Félicité discovers the similarity between her parrot and the Épinal print of the Holy Ghost, that was a topic in discussing the Le Meilleur illustrations. Hegenbarth gives us an intimate glance into Félicité’s chamber with its pictures and furniture, dominated by the remains of Loulou on his perch. Once more it makes sense to quote Flaubert’s text as the best summary of her current state of mind. She has bought the print and hung it in her bedroom in place of a print of Charles-Ferdinand d’Artois (1814, repr. in L’Imagerie Populaire Française au Musée d’Épinal, 1988: 26), so that she can see everything that is important to her at one glance: L’ayant acheté, elle le suspendit à la place du comte d’Artois, - de sorte que, du même coup d’œil, elle les voyait ensemble. Ils s’associèrent dans sa pensée, le perroquet se trouvant sanctifié par ce rapport avec le Saint Esprit, qui devenait plus vivant à ses yeux et intelligible. Le Père, pour s’énoncer, n’avait pu choisir une colombe, puisque ces bêtes-là n’ont pas de voix, mais plutôt un des ancêtres de Loulou. Et Félicité priait en regardant l’image, mais de temps à autre se tournait un peu vers l’oiseau. (Flaubert/ Maynial 1961-: 63) Hegenbarth’s full-page illustration cannot visualise all the details of this narrative, but it does show the protagonist in the midst of her collection, 370 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="371"?> and her devotion to the ensemble. All the items are indicated in light linear sketches, showing no more than we need to know about them. The important elements are once more marked by heavier lines, Loulou himself only with one supporting patch of black, and what could be the new Epinal print on the right in an emphatic frame. It is Félicité herself who is given the strongest support in black, emphasising her body and the bed in which her life will soon come to an end. Fig. 124: Félicité worshipping the stuffed parrot (Flaubert 1960: 54) Hegenbarth has drawn a magnificent profile of Félicité, expressing her concen‐ trated devotion to all these sacred relics that will decay just like their mistress and the damp old house of which she is now the last occupant. According to Erich Auerbach, in his Mimesis (1946, English translation 1953), Flaubert was one of the first writers to have portrayed the state of “unconcrete despair” in Emma Bovary and later in Félicité, “in people of slight intellectual culture and fairly low social station; certainly he is the first who directly captures the chronic character of this psychological situation” (Auerbach 1953: 431). His description of Flaubert’s narrative style is very apt: Elsewhere too he seldom narrates events which carry the action quickly forward; in a series of pure pictures - pictures transforming the nothingness of listless and uniform days into an oppressive condition of repugnance, boredom, false hopes, paralysing 5.1 Five illustrated versions of Flaubert’s «-Un Cœur simple-» (Trois Contes) 371 <?page no="372"?> disappointments, and piteous fears - a grey and random human destiny moves toward its end. (ibid.) Auerbach is not speaking of illustrations here, but of verbal pictures, static representations of an “oppressive condition” in which meaning is concentrated and time is condensed. Such verbal pictures invite certain kinds of visualisation, such as those that we have found in the five editions discussed. Auerbach’s description may even help one to understand why Flaubert’s tales attracted so many illustrators. The experience of getting to know five different illustrated versions of “Un Cœur simple” suggests that we can learn a lot from the different kinds of comparisons one inevitably draws, and must admire an author who was able to attract so many different visual responses to his work. One becomes aware of differences and ambiguities, and also discovers continuities, and it is all these that together that make the experience worthwhile. 5.2 Illustrating an argument: verbal and visual satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God In this chapter we will consider George Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932) in order to find out how a satirical argument can be expressed through the interaction of text and picture. Shaw’s book was a tremendous success and at the same time caused a scandal that was kept boiling thanks to a number of dissenting or affirmative “hypertexts” (Genette 1997: 5), some of which were also illustrated. All these texts use Voltaire’s Candide (1759) as their model or “hypotext” (ibid.), in particular the device of the innocent hero or heroine travelling the world in quest of the truth about the divine revelation. Shaw and his parodists advocate very different persuasions and are illustrated in quite distinct styles, thus inviting comparison on the verbal and visual levels. I will not be discussing the spin-offs provoked by Shaw’s book, but do want to mention three of them, all of which and many others are discussed by Leon Hugo in his Bernard Shaw’s The Black Girl in Search of God: The Story behind the Story (2003): W.R. Matthews, The Adventures of Gabriel in his Search for Mr. Shaw, woodcuts by Ruth Wood (1933). C.E.M. Joad, The Adventures of the Young Soldier in Search of the Better World, drawings by Mervyn Peake (1943). Brigid Brophy, The Adventures of God in his Search for the Black Girl: A Novel (1973). 372 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="373"?> Apart from these texts and counter-texts we must consider an “autobiograph‐ ical textbook” by the illustrator of Shaw’s fable, John Farleigh (1900-65). This is Graven Image (1940), with the subtitle just quoted, in which Farleigh devotes an extensive chapter to his experience of cooperating with Shaw on the task of illustrating his story, showing how conscious both author and artist were of the complexities of text-image relations in their joint venture. The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God is an episodic argumentative narrative about an innocent’s quest for God, or more generally for the truth of Christian doctrine. Such a formulaic description begs a number of questions. Is there an argument that is developed in the narrative, and if so, what is its structure and substance? How do the illustrations contribute to the argument? How do verbal and visual satire differ, and how do they complement each other? We will also need to ask why Shaw chose a black girl from Africa for the role of the protagonist, a question that bothered many contemporary readers, some because it raised the issue of colonialist exploitation, others because she is always represented in the nude, as a “Black Diana”. That is how Shaw put it in the letter of 8 May 1932 that he sent to Farleigh, asking him if would like to “co-operate in turning out a good-looking little volume consisting of the story contained in the enclosed proof sheets” by providing “say, a dozen pictures” (Farleigh 1940: 215). Shaw appended a list of twelve “suggested subjects” for illustrations and asked Farleigh to choose one subject for a “trial drawing”. In later letters Shaw added further suggestions. Altogether, the finished volume would have twenty wood engravings plus a design for the front cover and another for the back cover, as well as one for the endpapers. The volume is composed of two parts, the tale itself and a seventeen-page postscript by Shaw, explaining how he came to write it, and reflecting on what it means. Of the twenty illustrations fourteen are episodic, with the tailpiece to Shaw’s fable showing a scene in the future, when the black girl has become the mother of three small children. There are also two decorative headpieces for the parts, each incorporating an engraved initial, and the last illustration is a symbolic tailpiece to the postscript. Here is the engraved title-page showing the black girl in a stylised jungle landscape, with four religious totems, a lion’s head and a crucifix: 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 373 <?page no="374"?> Fig. 125: Title-page, designed and engraved by John Farleigh (Shaw 1932) The title-page sets the scene for the narrative and points forward to several of the episodes in the black girl’s progress, including her encounter with Dick the lion, and later with the Roman soldier standing guard at the scene of the crucifixion. The questions listed above can only be answered by a careful study of the episodic illustrations and the arguments exchanged between the black girl and her interlocutors. As befits a fable, the protagonist is only identified by a generic label, not by a proper name. The black girl remains nameless, in contrast to most of the other figures, because she stands for a type, or combination of types, i.e. she is an innocent, a convert and a self-confident modern woman. Her quest is driven by her inveterate habit of asking questions, seemingly simple questions that are not so easy to answer. Thus, right at the beginning of the tale, the black girl asks the woman missionary who converted her: “Where is God? ”. She receives a bible quotation (Luke 11: 9) in answer: “He has said, ‘Seek and ye shall find me’ ” (Shaw 1932: 7). Then the missionary presents her with a copy of the bible: [S]he was perhaps rash when, having taught the black girl to read, she gave her a bible on her birthday. For when the black girl, receiving her teacher’s reply very literally, 374 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="375"?> took her knobkerry and strode right off into the African forest in search of God, she took the bible with her as her guidebook. (ibid.: 8) This literal-mindedness is a decisive aspect of the black girl’s innocence, specif‐ ically her innocence of the difference between literal and figurative meanings, symbolic and pragmatic uses of words and objects. Her innocence is at the same time the basis of her ability to do away with such distinctions. It allows her to initiate a dialogue by asking questions and by listening carefully to appreciate appropriate answers, or to penetrate the pretentiousness and obfuscation of many of the pseudo-answers that she gets. She also looks closely at everyone and everything she encounters and never fails to see through them. So questioning, making propositions, listening and perceiving are the instruments of her quest on the path to truth, and the foundations of her argument. I have now referred to Shaw’s tale as a quest and a fable, and it also has elements of legend, so it is time to clarify the issue of genre. The term “quest” (F: quête; G: Suche) means a narrative about a journey undertaken to reach a goal, find a person or an object, or discover a truth, with the protagonist having to master new challenges at each stage. A well-known example is the Homeric Odyssey. A fable is a short parabolic narrative that moves from the level of saying to that of meaning, as when Aesop tells us about “The Oak and the Reeds” but means the behaviour and judgement of humans, the virtue of flexibility as opposed to stubbornness. A legend, like the story of The Holy Grail, combines elements from mythical, hagiographic and Arthurian traditions in different versions like the Perceval or Conte du Graal (1180-90) by Chrétien de Troyes, and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (1205). Many of these have been collected and retold in in popular anthologies like Bulfinch’s Mythology (1881) and Gustav Schwab’s Sagen des klassischen Altertums (1838-40). Shaw draws on all these genres as well as on the Bible and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress to produce an original text. Here I must record a curious trouvaille, as the French call it, namely a story by Siegfried Wagner with the title “Jim sucht Gott”, published in Hausbuch für Freidenker (1931: 135-41) by the Freidenker Verlag in Berlin. Hesketh Pearson, in his biography Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality (1942, complete edition 1961), reports in some detail on Shaw’s deep interest in Richard Wagner and mentions Shaw meeting Wagner’s son Siegfried (1869-1930) in London during the 1890s and discussing Siegfried’s role in Bayreuth after coming into his father’s legacy (ibid.: 137). If Siegfried told Shaw about his own activities as a writer, then this may have given Shaw an initial impulse to write The Black Girl. 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 375 <?page no="376"?> Episode One: the protagonist as investigator The reader-cum-observer of the black girl’s tale will usually be less innocent than the protagonist, and well aware of the different levels and kinds of meaning lurking in words and actions and artefacts, but also be happy to learn from the girl’s innocence. The black girl’s way of thinking makes her a close relative of what Karl Mannheim, in his Ideology and Utopia (1929, first published in England in 1936, repr. 1960), called “the modern investigator” who is uncertain about the truth and strives through inquiry to attain it: As a matter of fact, if we believe that we already have the truth, we will lose interest in obtaining those very insights which might lead us to an approximate understanding of the situation. It is precisely our uncertainty which brings us a good deal closer to reality than was possible in former periods which had faith in the absolute. (Mannheim 1960: 75) In this respect Shaw himself is also a modern investigator, a sceptic rather than a believer in absolutes, and so it is no surprise to find that Mannheim’s analyses describe Shaw’s way of thinking so well: [I]t has become extremely questionable whether, in the flux of life, it is a genuinely worthwhile intellectual problem to seek to discover fixed and immutable ideas or absolutes. It is a more worthy intellectual task perhaps to learn to think dynamically and relationally rather than statically. In our contemporary social and political plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. (ibid.: 77) We find this discovery of Mannheim’s confirmed in the very first encounter that the black girl has, after meeting with a mamba and asking it the next (indirect) question in a long series: “I wonder who made you, and why he gave you the will to kill me and the venom to do it with” (Shaw 1932: 9). The mamba beckons her to follow it, and leads her to someone who will be able to answer her questions: The Mamba […] led her to a pile of rocks on which sat enthroned a well-built aristocratic looking white man with handsome regular features, an imposing beard and luxuriant wavy hair, both as white as isinglass, and a ruthlessly severe expression. He had in his hand a staff which seemed a combination of sceptre, big stick, and great assegai; and with this he immediately killed the mamba, who was approaching him humbly and adoringly. (ibid.) 376 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="377"?> The black girl is not impressed by the white man’s appearance and harsh expression, and is horrified by his wanton violence, but she has to put her question: “I am seeking God” she said. “Can you direct me? ” - “You have found him” he replied. “Kneel down and worship me this very instant, you presumptuous creature, or dread my wrath. I am the Lord of Hosts: I made the heavens and the earth and all that in them is.” (ibid.) Fig. 126: The black girl and Jehovah (Shaw 1932: 10) In Shaw’s list of “Suggested Subjects” this first episodic illustration is number one: “The Black Diana (not a Hottentot) going for Jehovah (as in Raphael’s Ezekiel picture) with her knobkerry” (Farleigh 1940: 215). Shaw had no doubt learned about knobkerries (knobbed heavy sticks, used as weapons) and assegais during his stay in South Africa in February 1932, when he had a serious car accident near Knysna in the Western Cape province. His wife Charlotte was badly injured, and in the five weeks it took her to recover and during their return home on an ocean liner, Shaw worked on The Black Girl “to while away the time”, as Hesketh Pearson tells us, producing a tale that “expressed his general attitude to religions, as well as his own faith, more clearly and simply than any of his plays had done” (Pearson 1961: 391). The black girl attacks the self-declared Lord of Hosts with her knobkerry because both his action and his words show him to be a braggart, a bully and a bloodthirsty brute. He has even commanded her to bring him sacrifices - “bring me your favorite child and slay it here before me as a sacrifice; for I love the smell of newly spilled blood” (Shaw 1932: 9). The illustration follows on the next page, after she has voiced her protest and her 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 377 <?page no="378"?> refusal “to believe such wicked nonsense” and declared that “in the name of the true God whom I seek I will scotch you as you scotched that poor mamba” (ibid.: 10). The archaic verb “scotch” (or “scorch” as in Macbeth 3.2.13) means to wound without killing, and that pinpoints an important difference between the modern girl and the ancient god. “But when she reached the top [of the rocks] there was nothing there” (ibid.). One can see this god beginning to disintegrate in Farleigh’s engraving, and the same is happening to the black girl’s bible. In this first episode there has been no proper argument, only self-praise, commands and threats, which pretend to be an “argument from authority” without ever establishing that authority by naming its sources. I am referring here to Anthony Weston, A Rulebook for Arguments ( 3 2000: 24-28), a concise guide to how to compose different kinds of argument. Episode Two: arguing the theodicy In the second episode, which follows directly, our heroine disturbs a rattlesnake that glides away, but turns back when she addresses it: “Well, Clicky-clicky: you are not so ill-natured as the mamba. You give warning and go quietly about your business if we go quietly about ours. Your God must be nicer than the mamba’s God.” (ibid.: 11) The rattlesnake leads her to a glade in the jungle where “an oldish gentleman with a soft silvery beard and hair, also in a white nightshirt” seems to be expecting her, for he thanks the snake for bringing somebody to argue with him. The black girl, who is good at reading body language, is slightly put off by his expression of “self-satisfied cunning” but he assures her that she need not be afraid of him: I am not a cruel god: I am a reasonable one. I do nothing worse than argue. I am a Nailer at arguing. Dont worship me. Reproach me. Find fault with me. Dont spare my feelings. Throw something in my teeth; so that I can argue about it. (ibid.) Note that Shaw uses a simplified spelling which does away with superfluous apostrophes and mute vowels. According to Shaw’s list of subjects this second version of god is one rendered by William Blake in a series of watercolours made for his patron Thomas Butts on the subject of the biblical “Book of Job”. This is the tale of a god who at Satan’s suggestion tests Job’s faith by making him undergo a series of sufferings. James King, in his biography of Blake, “a Christian who despised Christianity” (King 1991: xv), describes these watercolours as a critical transformation of the biblical story, in the course of which Job realises “that the God he has worshipped all his life is simply a narcissistic equivalent to 378 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="379"?> himself ” and is really no different from Satan (ibid.: 194). Similarly, the black girl is not afraid of asking this “reasonable” god a basic question about the creation that broaches a topic known as theodicy: “Did you make the world? ” said the black girl. - “Of course I did” he said. - “Why did you make it with so much evil in it? ” she said. -. “Splendid! ” said the god. That is just what I wanted you to ask me. You are a clever intelligent girl. I had a servant named Job once to argue with; […] I took him down handsomely, I tell you. - “I do not want to argue” said the black girl. “I want to know why, if you really made the world, you made it so badly.” (Shaw 1932: 11 f.) This earns the black girl a lengthy answer from Job’s god, again full of self-praise and disparaging judgements of her, but without any kind of justification of his creation. It closes with a pseudo-question that is really an unfounded allegation: “You think, dont you, that you are better than God? What have you to say to that argument? ” - “It isnt an argument: it’s a sneer” said the black girl. “You dont seem to know what an argument is.” (ibid.: 12) The old gentleman’s answer evades the implied question by resorting to the assertion that all he can do is laugh at her. But now the black girl has the opportunity to nail him down: “I dont mind your laughing at me” said the black girl; “but you have not told me why you did not make the world all good instead of a mixture of good and bad. It is no answer to ask me whether I could have made it any better myself. If I were God there would be no tsetse flies. My people would not fall down in fits and have dreadful swellings and commit sins. Why did you put a bag of poison in the mamba’s mouth when other snakes can live as well without it? Why did you make the monkeys so ugly and the birds so pretty? ” (ibid.) She identifies a first rule of argumentation very well: if one participant asks a question, the other should take the trouble to give a relevant answer, an argumentum ad rem, and not ad feminam. She puts her question in two ways, first abstract, then concrete. The old gentleman should have answered in both modes, but all she gets is an evasive counter-question: “Why shouldnt I? ” said the old gentleman. “Answer me that” (ibid.: 13). Instead of explaining why such a creation was not possible, not even for an omnipotent and omniscient god, he tries to escape by switching to a different propositional category. After some more exchanges of the same kind, the black girl gives up: 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 379 <?page no="380"?> “I am tired of you” said the black girl. “You always come back to the same bad manners. I dont believe you ever made anything. Job must have been very stupid not to find you out. There are too many old men pretending to be gods in this forest.” (ibid.) As in the first episode, she chases the pretender away with her knobkerry, and that is what Farleigh shows in the second episodic illustration: Fig. 127: The black girl and the god of the Book of Job (ibid.) Like his predecessor, this god vanishes into “nothing”, and when the girl opens her bible again, “the wind snatched thirty more pages out of it and scattered them in dust over the trees” (ibid.: 14). Episode Three: contingency The next adventure is not far to seek, for she now comes upon “a remarkably good looking clean shaven white young man in a Greek tunic” (ibid.). The black girl addresses the young man with her usual question, but he does not respond as she expects: 380 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="381"?> “Excuse me, baas,” she said. “You have knowing eyes. I am in search of God. Can you direct me? ” - “Do not trouble about that” said the young man. “Take the world as it comes; for beyond it there is nothing. All roads end at the grave, which is the gate of nothingness; and in the shadow of nothingness everything is vanity. Take my advice and seek no further than the end of your nose. You will always know that there is something beyond that; and in that knowledge you will be hopeful and happy.” (ibid.) Unlike his predecessors, he does not claim to be a god himself, but he only answers her question indirectly, by trying to turn her way of thinking towards the idea of an immanent world without access to the transcendent. The black girl rejects his advice: “My mind ranges further” said the black girl. “It is not right to shut one’s eyes. I desire a knowledge of God more than happiness or hope. God is my happiness and my hope.” - “How if you find that there is no God? ” said the young man. (ibid.) The two participants in this dialogue argue from antithetical premisses: the black girl believes that God exists, the young man does not. Neither can give evidence in favour of her or his convictions. The black girl complicates matters by introducing an ethical dimension into the debate when she says: “I should be a bad woman if I did not know that God exists” (ibid.). She has no doubt been taught to think in this way by the missionary, and continues to insist that there is an important difference between good and evil, one she sums up in the following credo: “Life is a flame that is always burning itself out; but it catches fire again every time a child is born. Life is greater than death, and hope than despair. I will do the work that comes to me only if I know that it is good work; and to know that, I must know the past and the future, and must know God.” - “You mean that you must be God” he said, looking hard at her. - “As much as I can” said the black girl. “Thank you. We who are young are the wise ones: I have learned from you that to know God is to be God. You have strengthened my soul. Before I leave you, tell me who you are.” (ibid.: 16) The young man reveals that he is Koheleth, “known to many as Ecclesiastes the preacher”. Shaw had identified him for Farleigh as “Koheleth, a very beautiful juvenile Plato” (Farleigh 1940: 215). “Koheleth” is the Hebrew title of the Old Testament “Book of Ecclesiastes” that has been characterised as “philosophical more than religious” and arguing in the spirit of gnomic wisdom that “vanity, or universal contingency, qualifies cosmos, human environment, and all human effort” (Dermot Cox, in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, 1993, s.v. “Ecclesiastes”). The concept of contingency means that our knowledge of the world may be true but is not necessarily true, that we may have knowledge 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 381 <?page no="382"?> that seems true for our purposes and needs, but may turn out to be irrelevant or even false. Here the implication is that the black girl may not find god as an entity anywhere in the world, but may recognise or believe that she recognises traces or signs of the divine that she can store to some extent in herself. That seems to be what she means by being god as much as she can. The third episode comes to a friendly close with Koheleth’s farewell: “God be with you, if you can find him. He is not with me.” (Shaw 1932: 16). Fig. 128: Koheleth and the black girl (Shaw 1932: 15) The engraving that illustrates this dialogue is peaceful and relaxed, as the figures’ upright posture of standing leg and free leg shows, adding a non-verbal message to the text. The peaceful atmosphere is carried over into a brief meeting between the black girl and a lion sunning himself on her path, whose throat she gently caresses as she passes by (engraving on p. 17). Shaw had suggested this little scene for an illustration, and mentioned “Landseer’s lions in Trafalgar Square” and “a delightful one named Dick in the Zoo” (Farleigh 1940: 215), but it does not amount to a full-fledged episode. 382 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="383"?> Episode Four: conflicting values In the next episode, the fourth, the black girl meets “a dark man with wavy black hair, and a number six nose” (Shaw 1932: 18), wearing nothing but a pair of sandals. He is not on Shaw’s list of subjects, as the previous ones were, but of course features in the proofs he sent Farleigh and is mentioned in one of Shaw’s letters (Farleigh 1940: 249). The black girl hears the dark man roaring and hooting and has an idea from her missionary bible classes who he might be. He confirms that he is Micah the Morasthite. Micah was a peasant from the foothills of Judah, south-west of Jerusalem, who protested volubly and vehemently against the theft by wealthy town-dwellers of large stretches of land that were the property of Yahweh, in other words common land. As a prophet he warned that the Lord God would come and destroy Jerusalem and the land of Samaria (Micah 1: 3-7). When he asks the black girl if he can do anything for her she gives her usual answer: “I seek God” (Shaw 1932: 18). “And have you found Him? ” Micah asks, and receives the following report: “I found an old man who wanted me to roast animals for him because he loved the smell of cooking, and to sacrifice my children on his altar” (ibid.). Micah’s immediate response is to utter a roar of lamentation, at which Dick the lion (aka King Richard) flees into the forest. Then he answers the black girl: “He is an impostor and a horror” roared Micah. “Can you see yourself coming before the high God with burnt calves of a year old? Would He be pleased with thousands of rams or rivers of oil or the sacrifice of your first born, the fruit of your body, instead of the devotion of your soul? God has shewed your soul what is good; and your soul has told you that He speaks the truth. And what does He require of you but to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with him? ” (ibid.) The black girl recognises that the message of this “third God” is much more to her liking than anything she has heard from the first two pretenders, but it is not entirely satisfactory. She objects that there is more to life than doing justice and showing mercy, and asks: “And what is the use of walking humbly if you don’t know where you are walking to? ” - “Walk humbly and God will guide you” said the Prophet. “What is it to you whither He is leading you? ” - “He gave me eyes to guide myself ” said the black girl. “He gave me a mind and left me to use it. How can I now turn on him and tell him to see for me and to think for me? ” (ibid.: 18 f.) Micah knows no better answer than “a fearful roar”, with the result that one can see in the engraving: 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 383 <?page no="384"?> Fig. 129: Micah roaring (ibid.: 19) Farleigh uses a pattern of flame shapes rising from Micah’s open mouth to illustrate the fearful roar - they are a visual metaphor. Flames like these are a traditional attribute of saints and prophets famed for their faith and their eloquence (Kretschmer 2011, s.v. Flamme). Posture and gesture again play a part, with the black girl clapping her hands over her ears, and lion Dick turning tail. Micah’s raised hands emphasise his roar and at the same time show that he does not have any weapons. The black girl soon asks herself what she is running away from, and comes to a halt, thinking “I’m not afraid of that dear noisy old man” (ibid.: 20). Micah’s account of god has encouraged her to pursue her quest. Episode Five: testing knowledge and truth Her route leads her past someone close by who can read her thoughts: “Your fears and hopes are only fancies” said a voice close to her, proceeding from a very shortsighted elderly man in spectacles who was sitting on a gnarled log. “In running away you were acting on a conditioned reflex. It is quite simple.” (ibid.: 20) This is the beginning of the fifth episode, which features yet another old white man, who immediately assumes the role of a 1920s behaviourist psychologist faced with a patient requiring analysis. His portrait in Farleigh’s full-page 384 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="385"?> engraving resembles photographs of John B. Watson (1878-1958), a pioneer of scientific empirical psychology in the 1920s, aiming to predict and control animal and human behaviour (Behaviorism, 1925). The face and spectacles may be Watson’s, but the beard and moustache are borrowed from the Russian behaviourist Ivan P. Pavlov, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1914, in recognition of his work on the physiology of digestion in dogs and children. Fig. 130: The behaviourist sitting on a gnarled log (ibid: 21) All the details shown in the illustration are important, from Watson-Pavlov’s wrapped-up in himself posture, to the snake coiled around the trunk of a palm tree in the background, and of course the gnarled log the behaviourist is sitting on. His initial response to the black girl’s thoughts, quoted above, develops into a vainglorious account of his own scientific research that really amounts to a satire on behaviourism. Let me quote just a few more lines: 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 385 <?page no="386"?> “This remarkable discovery cost me twenty-five years of devoted research, during which I cut out the brains of innumerable dogs, and observed their spittle by making holes in their cheeks for them to salivate through instead of through their tongues. The whole scientific world is prostrate at my feet in admiration of this colossal achievement and gratitude for the light it has shed on the great problems of human conduct.” - “Why didnt you ask me? ” said the black girl. “I could have told you in twentyfive seconds without hurting those poor dogs.” - “Your ignorance and presumption are unspeakable” said the old myop. (ibid.: 20) The old myop (or “myope”) can only accept knowledge gained by scientific experiments, and so he jeeringly asks her if she has ever performed an experiment: “Several” said the black girl. “I will perform one now. Do you know what you are sitting on? ” - “I am sitting on a log grey with age, and covered with an uncomfortable rugged bark” said the myop. - “You are mistaken” said the black girl. “You are sitting on a sleeping crocodile.” - With a yell which Micah himself might have envied, the myop rose and fled frantically to a neighboring tree, up which he climbed catlike with an agility which in so elderly a gentleman was quite superhuman. - “Come down” said the black girl. “You ought to know that crocodiles are only to be found near rivers. I was only trying an experiment. Come down.” (ibid.: 20-22) Obviously, the black girl is neither ignorant nor presumptuous, and she knows quite a bit about psychological experiments. Her next experiment follows a moment later, when she warns him that “there is a tree snake smelling at the back of [his] neck” (ibid.: 22). He comes down immediately, in a conditioned reflex to the black girl’s warning. Their dialogue continues in a parodic vein for another two pages that we need not discuss, except to mention that our Black Diana does not forget to ask her new acquaintance whether he believes in God or not. He answers as follows: “God is an unnecessary and discarded hypothesis” said the myop. “The universe is only a gigantic system of reflexes produced by shocks. If I give you a clip on the knee you will wag your ankle.” - “I will also give you a clip with my knobkerry; so dont do it” said the black girl. (ibid.: 23) Such a dialogue does not promise much progress. But in its relation of verbal and visual representation, this episode offers a dimension we have not come across before, namely that imagined objects, such as are not present in the visible world at this place and time, can be given visual presence in an illustration. When the black girl encounters the myopic old man he is not sitting on a crocodile’s back, although that is what we see in the engraving, which shows the mental 386 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="387"?> image that the black girl’s words have created in the myop’s mind. The same goes for the snake on the palm tree. Their presence is made plausible by the repeated reference to the man’s short-sightedness. The illustrator has taken up a verbal cue and turned it into an image that we recognise as a part of the story, absent yet present. The black girl and the myop go on quarrelling about concepts like science, wisdom, soul, and wickedness, without coming any closer to an understanding, and so they go their separate ways. Episode Six: violence or dialogue The black girl soon comes to a hill “on the top of which stood a huge cross guarded by a Roman soldier with a spear” (ibid.: 24). The sight sets the girl thinking: Now in spite of all the teachings of the missionary, who found in the horrors of the crucifixion the same strange joy she had found in breaking her own heart and those of her lovers, the black girl hated the cross and thought it a great pity that Jesus had not died peacefully and painlessly and naturally, full of years and wisdom, protecting his granddaughters (her imagination always completed the picture with at least twenty promising black granddaughters) against the selfishness and violence of their parents. (ibid.: 24 f.) The illustration was proposed by Shaw in one of his letters to Farleigh, listing all the details he wanted shown, and adding two sketches of his own in later letters to make his meaning clear (Farleigh 1940: 229-233). His black girl, in this episode, follows her author in filling in the gaps she sees in the scene before her, though it is left to us, her readers, to imagine her granddaughters. It is perfectly natural in acts of looking, listening and reading to modify a horrible sight, an offensive spoken phrase or printed sentence by omitting some part or replacing it by adding another. Our own grandchildren often did that when, sitting together on the sofa, one of us read a story (often illustrated) to them and they commented, asked questions or suggested an alteration or addition to the text or picture. This is known as dialogic reading and has been further developed in pre-school and primary school language teaching, as well as in higher classes (www.cambridge.org/ elt/ blog/ 2019/ 04/ 18/ dialogic-reading ). Here is Farleigh’s engraving for this sixth episode: 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 387 <?page no="388"?> Fig. 131: Roman soldier guarding the cross (ibid.: 25) The black girl is so horrified at the sight of the soldier and the cross that she averts her face “with an expression of disgust” that causes the Roman soldier to attack her “with his spear at the charge” and to command her to kneel down “before the instrument and symbol of Roman justice, Roman law, Roman order and Roman peace” (ibid.: 26). But she side-steps him and knocks him down with her knobkerry, barely visible at the top of the picture. This is the last time we are shown the black girl’s weapon. She will only need it once more, but Shaw will come back to it in the last paragraphs of his postscript, and the Roman’s spear will be seen again in the tailpiece where it cuts through a string of the harp that symbolises divine harmony: 388 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="389"?> Fig. 132: Tailpiece (ibid.: 75) Shaw had asked Farleigh for details like “a bucketful of nails, scourges, thorn crowns” and the inscription “Judge not that ye be not judged” (Matthew 7: 1) to be included in the illustration in order to evoke the biblical context for the beholder (Farleigh 1940: 230). The brief episode with the Roman soldier does not contribute anything to the chain of arguments, it functions as a turning-point leading to a succession of largely peaceful episodes. Episode Seven: fathers and mothers The seventh episode begins two short paragraphs later: Her next adventure was at a well where she stopped to drink, and suddenly saw a man whom she had not noticed before sitting beside it. As she was about to scoop up some water in her hand he produced a cup from nowhere and said: “Take this and drink in remembrance of me.” (ibid.: 26) It is not an ordinary cup she is handed, but a small baptismal font of the kind used to baptise babies. The man makes the font appear and disappear at will, as if he were a conjurer, or a magician. The well is a metonymic reference to Jesus Christ as the source of life and immortality, as in 1 Moses 24: 43-46 (Kretschmer 2011, s.v. Brunnen). They are both very relaxed, till the black girl asks her usual question: “I am in search of God. Where is he? ” (ibid.). This is how their three-page conversation begins, with Jesus giving almost the same answer as Koheleth: “Within you” said the conjurer. “Within me too.” - “I think so” said the girl. “But what is he? ” - “Our father” said the conjurer. - The black girl made a wry face and thought for a moment. “Why not our mother? ” she said then. - It was the conjurer’s turn to make a wry face; and he made it. “Our mothers would have us put them before God,” 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 389 <?page no="390"?> he said. “If I had been guided by my mother I should perhaps have been a rich man instead of an outcast and a wanderer; but I should not have found God.” (ibid.: 26 f.) The black girl goes on to explain that she has always refused to say “Our father which art in heaven” and preferred to say “Our grandfather” instead. The reason is that her own father beat her and even tried to sell her to a white soldier. Jesus’ sense of humour is tickled by her “grandfather amendment” (ibid.: 28), but he recognises that the girl’s literal-mindedness about words like “father”, “love”, and even “body of mankind” prevents her from understanding what he is trying to tell her. He therefore responds to her emphatic “I will not have a God who is my father” by explaining that “that need not prevent us from loving one another like brother and sister”. But again the black girl cannot understand his use of “love” in the sense of human kindness, as opposed to sensual love. The first is called agape, the second is eros. The black girl is not aware of this distinction, and therefore does not understand what Jesus is getting at. Perhaps she intuitively understands that agape and eros can join forces, indeed must do so if mutual love between husband and wife is to be realised. At the same time, she is remarkably articulate in explaining her view of things, for example when she rejects Jesus’ definition of heaven as love and “nothing else” (ibid.: 29) and presents her own version: “It is glory. It is the home of God and of his thoughts: there is no billing and cooing there, no clinging to one another like a tick to a sheep” (ibid.). Her attitude is based on simple common sense: “We have to live with people and must make the best of them. But does it not shew that our souls need solitude as much as our bodies need love? We need the help of one another’s bodies and the help of one another’s minds; but our souls need to be alone with God; and when people come loving you and wanting your soul as well as your mind and body, you cry ‘Keep your distance: I belong to myself, not to you.’ This ‘love one another’ of yours is worse mockery to me who am in search of God than it is to the warrior who must fight against murder and slavery, or the hunter who must slay or see his children starve.” (ibid.: 29 f.) The illustration accompanying this episode cannot contribute very much to the verbal arguments exchanged here, but it does visualise the metonymic relation between the well and Jesus. The well separates the black girl and the white man, but Jesus’ outstretched arm bridges the distance between them in a gesture that is not empty, but caring and welcoming. The plants growing at the foot of the well are signs of life and fertility: 390 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="391"?> Fig. 133: Jesus at the well of Samaria (ibid.: 27) It was Shaw who proposed that “the story should be told by the gesture” and who located the well in Samaria (Farleigh 1940: 244). The well appears again in episodes ten and eleven, after which the tale moves on to the last stage of the black girl’s quest, which has very much to do with life and fertility. Episode Eight: arguments of stone and paper In episode eight the black girl meets “an ancient fisherman carrying an enor‐ mous cathedral on his shoulders” and takes pity on him at once: “Take care: it will break your poor old back” she cried, running to help him. - “Not it” he replied cheerfully. “I am the rock on which this Church is built.” - “But you are not a rock; and it is too heavy for you! ” she said, expecting every moment to see him crushed by its weight. - “No fear” he said, grinning pleasantly at her. “It is made entirely of paper.” And he danced past her, making all the bells in the cathedral tinkle merrily. (Shaw 1932: 30) Here is the illustration on the recto page, facing the text: 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 391 <?page no="392"?> Fig. 134: Saint Peter carrying a Gothic cathedral (ibid.: 31) At top left one sees three more figures carrying paper churches, “smaller and mostly much uglier” (ibid.: 30), all crying “Do not believe the fisherman. Do not listen to those other fellows. Mine is the true Church” (ibid.: 30f.). These churches are all made of bible paper, thin but tough, and as Christian churches they all derive their doctrines from the same biblical sources, but come to different conclusions. Shaw’s narrator is of course making fun of these flimsy churches and their conceited and quarrelsome bearers, who soon start throwing stones at each other, the only arguments they have. The black girl has no choice but to flee, and on her flight she encounters a “very old wandering Jew”, a legendary figure who was supposed to have taunted Jesus carrying his cross on the way to the Crucifixion, and was condemned to wander through the world until the second coming of Christ. Their brief and unillustrated exchange leads to the black girl’s conclusion that “If you wait for other people to come and set everything right […] you will wait for ever.” The Jew utters “a wail of despair”, spits at her, and totters away (ibid.: 32), for he has no argument against the black girl’s common sense. It must be clear by now that her quest will soon be shifting towards a different target from that originally envisaged. We can expect the young girl to meet someone who is younger and arouses her interest, someone like Koheleth perhaps. 392 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="393"?> Episode Nine: live and let live The next episode is illustrated and substantial enough to count as number nine in the series. It is described as follows in Shaw’s list of subjects: Sundry faces from the Caravan of the Curious, like the Vanity Fair jury in The Pilgrim’s Progress - if you have a weakness for the ugly-grotesque. (Farleigh 1940: 216) The black girl first comes across a group of “Fifty of her own black people, evidently employed as bearers, sitting down to enjoy a meal at a respectful distance from a group of white gentlemen and ladies” (Shaw 1932: 32). She can tell from their outfits that they are explorers, the men and the women, and in her puzzlement she turns to the leader of the bearers and asks him what kind of expedition this is: “It is called the Caravan of the Curious” he replied. - “Are they good whites or bad? ” she asked. - “They are thoughtless, and waste much time quarrelling about trifles” he said. “And they ask questions for the sake of asking questions.” (ibid.) Questions are all very well, but like answers they must be directed by the desire for knowledge. The dialogue is interrupted by one of the ladies crying: “Hi! You there! ” and ordering the black girl to move on, because otherwise she (or rather her nudity) will “upset the men” (ibid.). This is the scene shown in the full-page engraving on the recto page, facing the first part of the text: Fig. 135: The Caravan of the Curious (ibid.: 33) 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 393 <?page no="394"?> The African bearers can be seen in the background, while in the foreground we can identify the white lady confronting the black girl, surrounded by five of the male explorers. One of them is holding a butterfly net, which suggests that they are really tourists who have booked a safari, but probably imagine themselves to be treading in the footsteps of famous explorers like Mungo Park, David Livingstone or Henry Morton Stanley. Shaw as quoted above refers us to The Pilgrim’s Progress and in particular to the “Vanity Fair jury” as a key to the caravan. In Part One of Bunyan’s allegory, Christian and Faithful are overtaken on the road by Evangelist, and the three of them enter the town of Vanity, an early station on the long way to the Celestial City. The fair at Vanity is ruled by Beelzebub and the fiend Apollyon, and “all that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is vanity” (Bunyan 1678, ed. Robert Philip, 1848: 89). The pilgrims attract attention because of their clothes, their language, their refusal to even look at the vanities, much less buy them, and their insistence that they would only “buy the truth”. All this together causes a tremendous uproar in the town, which leads to their arrest and examination by the jury of Vanity (ibid.: 93 f.), who finally condemn Faithful to death by burning at the stake (ibid.: 94-100). In Shaw’s analogous version, it is the “first lady” who sentences the black girl to death for talking “seditious rot”. While Faithful will ascend to heaven, the black girl has learnt that since God is within her she can stop seeking him on earth, and seek instead a way to live an earthly bliss of a different kind. We will see how she expresses this insight into the conduct of a happy life in the closing speech she addresses to the caravan. First we should have another look at the illustration. What is striking about the white people in the illustration is that each face expresses a different emotion: indignation in the case of the lady, and (clockwise) doubt, astonishment, amusement, concentration and indifference in the men, while the black girl looks horrified. None of the men is shown looking at the black girl. The debate that ensues among the members of the caravan takes up seven pages and touches on a number of topics, from the question of god or gods changing through the centuries, to alternative explanations of creation like evolution and natural selection, as well as physical, mathematical, medical and merely fantastic accounts of our planet and its solar system. The black girl’s eloquent condemnation of colonial oppression and exploitation brings this confused and quarrelsome debate to a close. She accuses the whites of making inventions like guns and drink in order to suppress and enslave the blacks: “And all the time you steal the land from us and starve us and make us hate you as we hate the snakes. What will be the end of that? You will kill one another so fast that those who are left will be too few to resist when our warriors fill themselves with your magic drink and kill you with your own guns. And then our warriors will kill 394 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="395"?> one another as you do, unless they are prevented by God. Oh that I knew where I might find Him! Will none of you help me in my search? Do none of you care? (ibid.: 39) None of the whites volunteer an answer to her appeal, for they are false pilgrims, and the only response comes from a “huffy gentleman”: “Our guns have saved you from the man-eating lion and the trampling elephant, have they not? ”, to which the black girl immediately gives a reply both witty and serious: “Only to deliver us into the hands of the man-beating slave-driver and the trampling baas” said the black girl. “Lion and elephant shared the land with us. When they ate or trampled on our bodies they spared our souls. When they had enough they asked for no more. But nothing will satisfy your greed. You work generations of us to death until you have each of you more than a hundred of us could eat or spend; and yet you go on forcing us to work harder and harder and longer and longer for less and less food and clothing. […] This must be because you serve false gods. You are heathens and savages. You know neither how to live nor let others live. When I find God I shall have the strength of mind to destroy you and to teach my people not to destroy themselves.” “Look! ” cried the first lady. “She is upsetting the men. I told you she would. They have been listening to her seditious rot. Look at her eyes. They are dangerous. I shall put a bullet through her if none of you men will.” (ibid.: 39-41) The lady draws a revolver, but before she can get it out of its holster the black girl “[lays] her out with her favorite knobkerry stroke” (ibid.: 41) and darts away into the forest, much to the amusement of the black bearers who have been watching and listening all the time. Thus ends episode nine, but not without the aid of her knobkerry, invisible though it remains. The black girl’s ideal of a community of humans and animals who share resources and live together in peace is taken up again by the only in-text illustration of the postscript, in which the girl is shown relaxing in the grass, in company of a lion, rabbits, a deer and a butterfly, birds and a snake - a perfect Garden Eden, except that an Adam is missing (ibid.: 74). Episode Ten: gods and artist-gods It may be significant that the black girl, who does not wish to meet with the caravan again, now tells herself that “one direction is as good as another” and therefore retraces her steps back to the well and Jesus: There she found a booth with many images of wood, plaster, or ivory set out for sale; and lying on the ground beside it was a big wooden cross on which the conjurer was 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 395 <?page no="396"?> lying with his ankles crossed and his arms stretched out. And the man who kept the booth was carving a statue of him in wood with great speed and skill. They were watched by a handsome Arab gentleman in a turban, with a scimitar in his sash, who was sitting on the coping of the well, and combing his beard. (ibid.: 41 f.) All this can be seen in the engraving. The artist at work is a self-portrait of John Farleigh. This subject was number eight in Shaw’s list, and his description gives us more information: “Christ posing on the cross for sixpence an hour with the image maker (say yourself) at work, and Mahomet, very handsome, looking on” (Farleigh 1940: 216). Farleigh chose this as the subject for his trial engraving, because as he tells us, “the model was immediately accessible” (ibid.: 217). His first version, submitted to Shaw, differs from the final engraving mainly in the portrait of the artist, and is shown below: Fig. 136: Farleigh’s trial engraving (ibid.: 218) In the final version Farleigh’s posture is more upright, he looks very concen‐ trated and is smoking a cigarette. The black girl now witnesses a conversation between Muhammad and Jesus in which “the Arab” asks “the conjurer” why he 396 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="397"?> allows the sculptor to make a graven image of him, which was forbidden in the second of the Ten Commandments. Here is the beginning of Jesus’ answer as composed by Shaw: “What else can I do if I am not to starve? ” said the conjurer. “I am so utterly rejected of men that my only means of livelihood is to sit as a model to this compassionate artist who pays me sixpence an hour for stretching myself on this cross all day. He himself lives by selling images of me in this ridiculous position.” (Shaw 1932: 42) While both religions agree in principle that “realistic” three-dimensional repre‐ sentations of the deity are undesirable, these have of course been and are still produced and venerated in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. The conversation quoted above cannot be other than fictional since Jesus (c. 4 BCE-28 CE) and Muhammad (c. 570-632 CE) could never have met. Such inventive fictionalisation of religious history is no doubt another reason for the scandal caused by the publication of Shaw’s book. Actually, their debate about images is very interesting, especially from the perspective of the present study. Here is the Arab’s argument about images, their makers and beholders: “I also have a message to deliver. My people, if left to themselves, would fall down and worship all the images in that booth. If there were no images they would worship stones. My message is that there is no majesty and no might save in Allah the glorious, the great, the one and only. Of Him no mortal has ever dared to make an image: if anyone attempted such a crime I should forget that Allah is merciful, and overcome my infirmity to the extremity of slaying him with my own hand. But who could conceive the greatness of Allah in a bodily form? Not even an image of the finest horse could convey a notion of His beauty and greatness. Well, when I tell them this, they ask me, too, to do conjuring tricks; and when I tell them that I am a man like themselves and that not Allah Himself can violate His own laws - if one could conceive Him as doing anything unlawful - they go away and pretend that I am working miracles. But they believe; for if they doubt I have them slain by those who believe. That is what you should do, my friend.” - “But my message is that they should not kill one another” said the conjurer. “One has to be consistent.” - “That is quite right as far as their private quarrels are concerned” said the Arab. “But we must kill those who are unfit to live. We must weed the garden as well as water it.” (ibid.: 43) Shaw clearly delights in showing up the contradictions between what the major world religions teach and what they practise. In the second Council of Nicaea in 787 CE the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches debated the question of whether the ban on holy images, proclaimed in 754, should be repealed or modified, and decided to condemn iconoclasm. In 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 397 <?page no="398"?> synagogues and mosques, the prohibition against the representation of divine or human figures had long been strictly observed, and only abstract geometrical ornaments, stylised flowers and foliage, as well as arabesques and calligraphy were permitted. The conflict between iconophiles and iconoclasts continued, however, for example in the Puritan movement in England, which from the mid-16 th century campaigned against the practice of bible illustration, which was not resumed till after the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Martin Luther, by contrast, actively encouraged the illustration of bibles as long as the text remained at the centre of attention. There is a much more glaring imbalance in the debate between Jesus and Muhammad about how to deal with idolators, and the latter’s phrase about killing those who are “unfit to live” is dangerously close to what Nazi racist ideology was to practise only a few years later. Shaw presents his conjurer as a wistful, sad, tired man, “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief ” (Isaiah 53: 3), who cannot stand up to the Arab’s self-confident and rather arrogant performance. What follows is another debate, or rather quarrel, between the sculptor and Muhammad about the different concepts of visual art that reign in their respective cultures. It is provoked by the Arab’s evocation of Allah’s sense of beauty: “Even your model here who is sharing your sin will remind you that the lilies of Allah are more lovely than robes of Solomon in all his glory. Allah makes the skies His pictures and His children His statues, and does not withhold them from our earthly vision. He permits you to make lovely robes and saddles and trappings, and carpets to kneel on before Him, and windows like flower beds of precious stones. Yet you will be meddling in the work He reserves for Himself, and making idols. For ever be such sin forbidden to my people! ” (ibid.: 45) That is a remarkable account and vindication of Islamic art and its rejection of illusionist representation. The “lilies [of the field]” and “the robes of Solomon” refer to Matthew 6: 28-30, and perhaps also to Surah 59: 24 of the Quran, which describes Allah as “the Creator, the Inventor, the Shaper” (https: / / quran.com). How does the iconophile tradition, represented here by the sculptor, respond to such a transcendental definition of creativeness, invention and shaping? This is the answer the sculptor gives Muhammad: “Pooh! ” said the sculptor “Your Allah is a bungler; and he knows it. I have in my booth in a curtained-off corner some Greek gods so beautiful that Allah himself may well burst with envy when he compares them with his own amateur attempts. I tell you Allah made this hand of mine because his own hands are too clumsy, if indeed he have any hands at all. The artist-god is himself an artist, never satisfied with His work, always perfecting it to the limit of His powers, always aware that though He must stop 398 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="399"?> when He reaches that limit, yet there is a further perfection without which the picture has no meaning. Your Allah can make a woman. Can he make the Goddess of Love? No: only an artist can do that. See! ” he said, rising to go into his booth. “Can Allah make her? ” And he brought from the curtained corner a marble Venus and placed her on the counter. - “Her limbs are cold” said the black girl, who had been listening all this time unnoticed. - “Well said! ” cried the Arab. “A living failure is better than a dead masterpiece; and Allah is justified against this most presumptuous idolater, whom I must have slain with a blow had you not slain him with a word.” (ibid.: 45-47) The sculptor begins his answer in an unnecessarily rude manner, but drops this when he settles down to expound his idea of the artist-god. We have seen in the previous debates that even the divine creation is far from perfect, and here we learn from an artist why that is so. Creation is an ongoing and essentially endless process, not something achieved once and for all. God’s creation is taken up and continued by the artist, who can thus become an artist-god. Any serious, self-critical creative artist, whether painter or writer or musician, knows that every work he or she produces contains an element of imperfection, a degree of indeterminacy, a falling short of expression by comparison with that which was meant, envisaged or hoped for. We have discussed this topic and its implications in some detail in Ch. 1.2, and taken it up again where relevant. Artists and gods are basically in the same position, though while a god per definition works on a global or universal scale, an artist must restrict herself or himself to humbler projects, anything from a song to a symphony, from a sketch to a painting, all of which may be perfected “to the limit of his powers” but are always in need of further perfection by the performer, and the listener or beholder. This is a way of thinking about the arts which can be found in critical discourses the 20s to the 40s, for example in Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay on the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti, “The Search for the Absolute”, another quest, written for and published in the catalogue of an exhibition of Giacometti’s work in New York, in early 1948. Sartre explains that Giacometti consciously goes back to the beginnings of sculpture, to the palaeolithic artefacts found in the cave of Altamira (Cantabria, Spain) in 1868, and to a contemporary statue of a Neandertal man by Paul Dardé (1888-1963), erected at Les Eyzies (Lascaux, Dordogne) in 1931. Sartre imagines Giacometti imagining that “for the first time, the idea came to one man to sculpt another in a block of stone. There was the model man”, man as a model (Sartre in Harrison/ Wood 1992: 600). What was it in that model man that attracted this stone-age man’s attention, what made him want to picture him? We do not know, but Sartre draws a verbal image of what this first sculptor may have seen, and may have thought about what he saw: 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 399 <?page no="400"?> There was only a long indistinct silhouette, moving against the horizon. But one could already see that the movements did not resemble those of things: they emanated from the figure like veritable beginnings, they outlined an airy future; to understand these motions, it was necessary to start from their goals - this berry to be picked, that thorn to be removed - and not from their causes. They never let themselves be separated or localised: I can consider separately from the tree itself this wavering branch; but I cannot think of an arm rising, a fist closing, apart from a human agent. (ibid.) What the sculptor saw was not a thing, but a moving human being. The man’s movements served practical purposes: to pick a berry to eat, to remove a thorn that made walking painful. The man’s body and his purposive and meaningful movements form “an indissoluble unity” (ibid.), and that is “the absolute” that the sculptor sees and wants to show. The subject of the “spinario” or thornplucker is frequent in Greek and Roman art, and it also features in the oftentold story of “Androcles and the Lion”, so it is not unlikely that its ancestry does reach very far back. Plucking a thorn and picking a berry may seem merely anecdotical and even trivial, but they are acts that communicate essential human experiences and needs, or “goals” as Sartre says, which “emanate from the figure like veritable beginnings” of a work of art. The debate about the marble Venus quickly turns into talk about women in the flesh when the Arab invites the black girl to join his harem and let him make her happy. But she rejects his invitation and gives us a summary of her quest so far: “I do not seek happiness: I seek God” said the black girl. - “Have you not found him yet? ” said the conjurer. - “I have found many gods” said the black girl. “Everyone I meet has one to offer me; and this image maker here has a whole shopful of them. But to me they are all half dead, except the ones that are half animals like this one on the top shelf, playing a mouth organ, who is half a goat and half a man. That is very true to nature; for I myself am half a goat and half a woman, though I should like to be a Goddess. But even these gods who are half goats are half men. Why are they never half women? ” (Shaw 1932: 47) In answer to her question the image maker points to the statuette of Venus (shown in the engraving on p. 46) as a case in point, but the black girl dismisses the idea immediately: “Why is her lower half hidden in a sack? ” said the black girl. “She is neither a goddess nor a woman: she is ashamed of half her body, and the other half of her is what the white people call a lady. She is ladylike and beautiful; and a white Governor General would be glad to have her at the head of his house; but to my mind she has no 400 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="401"?> conscience; and that makes her inhuman without making her godlike. I have no use for her.” (ibid.) That is incisive criticism, which even Jesus cannot counter convincingly. It shows that the black girl is fully aware of her potential as a woman and not ashamed of her animal magnetism, and this foreshadows the end of her quest. She cannot stand the smug self-adulation of the three men and recognises that she has no chance of finding God “where men are talking about women” (ibid.: 52) and therefore leaves them. Episode Eleven: a little garden for yourself After no time at all she comes to “a prim little villa with a very amateurish garden which was being cultivated by a wizened old gentleman” (ibid.: 52 f.). The old gentleman we see in the first engraving for this episode is of course Voltaire in his garden, his portrait drawn by Farleigh from a portrait bust made by Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828) around 1778: Fig. 137: Voltaire in his garden (ibid.: 52) The first exchange follows the familiar pattern and then develops into a dialogue in which the wise old man and the intelligent girl come to an excellent understanding. But let us begin at the beginning: 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 401 <?page no="402"?> “Excuse me, baas” she said: “may I speak to you? ” - “What do you want? ” said the old gentleman. - “I want to ask my way to God” she said; “and as you have the most knowing face I have ever seen, I thought I would ask you.” - “Come in” said he. “I have found, after a great deal of consideration, that the best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for Him there.” - “That is not my idea of seeking for God at all” said the black girl, disappointed. “I will go on, thank you.” - “Has your own idea, as you call it, led you to Him yet? ” - “No” said the black girl, stopping: “I cannot say that it has. But I do not like your idea.” (ibid.: 53) They do not see eye to eye yet, even though the illustration shows them doing just that. The black girl’s literal-mindedness seems to prevent her from understanding what he means by “digging for Him”, but as soon as Voltaire gets the chance to explain what he means, she will be able to follow him. First, however, Voltaire takes up her remark about not liking his idea, and applies it to God: “Many people who have found God have not liked Him and have spent the rest of their lives running away from him. Why do you suppose you would like him? ” - “I don’t know” said the black girl. “But the missionary has a line of poetry that says that we needs must love the highest when we see it.” - “That poet was a fool” said the old gentleman. “We hate it; we crucify it; we poison it with hemlock; we chain it to a stake and burn it alive. All my life I have striven in my little way to do God’s work and teach His enemies to laugh at themselves; but if you told me God was coming down the road I should creep into the nearest mousehole and not dare to breathe until he had passed. […]” (ibid.) The references to Jesus, Socrates and Joan of Arc are clear enough. In order to make this idea that human beings like you and me would not be able to bear the immediate presence of the Almighty plausible to the girl, Voltaire tells her the story of Jupiter and Semele: “Well, Jupiter fell in love with Semele, and was considerate enough to appear and behave just like a man to her. But she thought herself good enough to be loved by a god in all the greatness of his godhood. So she insisted on his coming to her in the full panoply of his divinity.” - “What happened when he did? ” asked the black girl. - “Just what she might have known would happen if she had any sense” said the old gentleman. “She shrivelled up and cracked like a flea in the fire. So take care. Do not be a fool like Semele. God is at your elbow, and he has been there all the time; but in His divine mercy he has not revealed Himself to you lest too full a knowledge of Him should drive you mad. Make a little garden for yourself: dig and plant and weed and prune; and be content if he jogs your elbow when you are gardening unskilfully, 402 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="403"?> and blesses you when you are gardening well.” - “And shall we never be able to bear His full presence? ” said the black girl. - “I trust not” said the old philosopher. “For we shall never be able to bear His full presence until we have fulfilled all His purposes and become gods ourselves. But as His purposes are infinite, and we are most briefly finite, we shall never, thank God, be able to catch up with His purposes. So much the better for us. If our work were done we should be of no further use: that would be the end of us; for He would hardly keep us alive for the pleasure of looking at us, ugly and ephemeral insects as we are. Therefore come in and help to cultivate this garden to His glory. The rest you had better leave to Him.” - So she laid down her knobkerry and went in and gardened with him. (ibid.: 54) In this way, the black girl learns to understand that she can never expect to meet God face to face, but only in a mediated form, through signs that she can interpret as pointing towards him. That is the kind of mediation we are all familiar with from the mainly visual and verbal media that permeate our everyday lives. Telling an appropriate story, for example, one that addresses and plausibly answers the questions raised by the “modern investigator”, is a time-tested method for illuminating an issue which cannot be resolved by any form of immediate experience, only by debate, through premisses, explanations, examples and conclusions. Theological issues like the visual or aural perception of God are presented in the Bible in the form of theophanies, a physical manifestation of the deity that can be seen and interpreted by human beings. They do not show the deity in his transcendence but invariably in some kind of transformation, such as an earthquake or a fire, and the biblical accounts of these vary enormously across the books of the Old and New Testament (Samuel A. Meier in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, 1993, s.v. “Theophany”). What Voltaire is trying to get across to the black girl is the insight she has already gained in her debates with Koheleth and Jesus, namely that we can only know the divine in its immanence, in its assumed workings in the world that we perceive around us and interact with. And now she understands him and so her quest is over. The black girl meets a number of people who help Voltaire with his gardening, and one day she finds “a redhaired Irishman” working in the part of the garden devoted to growing “the kitchen stuff ” (Shaw 1932: 55). This is of course none other than Bernard Shaw, who delights in making fun of himself as a coarse, untutored Irishman. In the company of Voltaire and the black girl he learns “manners and cleanliness”, but sticks to his sceptical convictions: […] nothing would ever persuade him that God was anything more solid and satisfactory than an eternal but as yet unfulfilled purpose, or that it could ever be 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 403 <?page no="404"?> fulfilled if the fulfilment were not made reasonably easy and hopeful by Socialism. (ibid.) It is Voltaire who one day suggests to the black girl that “a fine young woman” like her should get married and have children, and since he himself is far too old, he proposes that she should marry the Irishman. It takes him some time to persuade her, but “at last she gave in; and the two went together into the kitchen garden and told the Irishman that she was going to marry him” (ibid.: 57). Here is his reaction: He snatched up his spade with a yell of dismay and made a dash for the garden gate. But the black girl had taken the precaution to lock it; and before he could climb it they overtook him and held him fast. (ibid.) This scene is illustrated by a full-page engraving that shows Voltaire grasping Shaw’s left arm and holding a snake in his right hand, an invention of Farleigh’s, which as an attribute of Gaia means or in this case predicts fertility (ibid.: 56). After “half an hour or so of argument and coaxing, and a glass of the old gentleman’s best burgundy to encourage him” (ibid.) he gives in, and so they get married. Before long, the young wife’s domestic duties keep her so busy that she finds little time to think about her past search for God, except occasionally, when drying her baby boy after his bath reminds her of it: [O]nly now she saw how funny it was that an unsettled girl should start off to pay God a visit, thinking herself the centre of the universe, and taught by the missionary to regard God as somebody who had nothing better to do than to watch everything she did and worry himself about her salvation. (ibid.: 57 f.) This is her résumé of her quest, and of what it has taught her. Her married life is captured visually in the tailpiece to her story: 404 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="405"?> Fig. 138: Mrs Shaw and her piccaninnies, Mr Shaw digging (ibid.: 58) This looks like the happy end to a satirical fable, and indeed the term “salvation” just quoted from the black girl’s reflections is frequently used in the Old Testament to refer to victory and the escape from danger, as experienced by the black girl in several of her adventures. In the New Testament it most often expresses a spiritual healing “in the sense of admission into the kingdom of God understood as both a present and a future reality” (Michael D. Coogan in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, s.v. “Salvation”). Both meanings apply to Shaw’s protagonist, as we have seen in the eleven episodes of her adventures. From a general, anthropological point of view, the structure of this series of episodes can be described as an example of what Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957) first identified as “rites de passage” or transition in 1909. He defined these as “rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age” and showed that such rites always involve a sequence of three stages, namely separation, liminality and reaggregation. The black girl leaves the missionary post and the cultural conditions that apply there, and moves into a liminal (from Latin “limen”) or threshold period of new and contradictory experiences which teach her that she must move back into a structured society in which she can find a place and a status. As Victor W. Turner, whose account of the rites of passage I have been adapting to the black girl’s story, explains in his study of The Ritual Process (1969, repr. 1974), the entry into the third stage of her passage is “a matter of giving recognition to an essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society” (ibid.: 80-83). This is achieved in the final episode of her quest. 5.2 Illustrating an argument: satire in The Adventures of the Black Girl 405 <?page no="406"?> 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world In this final chapter we move eastwards through Europe from France and Britain to Germany, and do not stop before we reach its easternmost province East Prussia, as it existed up to the eve of the First World War. Since the mid-18 th century, Poland had repeatedly suffered from being partitioned between its expansionist neighbours, Russia and Austria and Prussia, and thus being robbed of its national identity. An area south of the Curian Lagoon (G.: Kurisches Haff; F.: Isthme de Courlande) was originally settled by a Baltic people called Prussen, later referred to as the Old Prussians, and was merged in 1815 with West Prussia to form a united kingdom, with Königsberg (founded in 1283) as its capital city. In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles determined that Germany must return its eastern colonies to the new Polish republic. Parts of East Prussia and Königsberg remained German territory till 1945, so that its schools and the university (founded in 1544) were able to maintain their close contacts with German institutions. Details like these may help us to understand Robert Budzinski’s biography and the themes that dominate both his graphic art and his writing, briefly alluded to in the introduction to this chapter. Robert Budzinski was born in 1874 in the East Prussian village of Klein Schläfken (Polish: Sławka Mała), in the district of Neidenburg (Powiat Nidziki), about 130 km south of Gdansk Bay and the Baltic Sea. He went to school in Königsberg, and attended the art academy there, and later taught graphic art in Konitz (West Prussia). As a freelance illustrator he contributed from 1918 to 1921 to the popular series of Zweifäusterdrucke published by Erich Matthes (1888-1970) in Leipzig and Hartenstein (Franconia) from 1918 to 1929. The fact that both Budzinski and Matthes were active in the “Wandervogelbewegung”, a youth movement founded in 1896, not dissimilar to the Boy Scouts established in 1908 by Robert Baden-Powell, may have helped to bring the two together. Matthes catered for readers active in or sympathetic to the movement by producing books like Ernst Berghäuser’s Pachantenmären: Ein Wandervogelbuch (1915), “Pachanten” being a corruption of Latin “vagantes”. By 1929, when the publisher went bankrupt, the Zweifäusterdrucke comprised some 170 illustrated volumes, 27 of which had been illustrated by Budzinski, four of them with his own texts. The Zweifäusteralmanach for 1924-25 opens with a frontispiece showing a wolf jumping over a trap inscribed “Pleite”. The wolf is ridden by a cherub wearing a fool’s cap and throwing books around him. A caption frames this picture: “Dem Neujahr wünsch’ ich zum Geleite: fern bleib uns Krankheit, Dalles, Pleite! ˮ, the last two words being Yiddish for poverty and bankruptcy. This almanac only mentions Budzinski in connection with the four little volumes 406 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="407"?> of Storm’s tales which still carried his illustrations, all the others having been given new ones, mainly by Fritz Buchholz. There must have been political reasons for Budzinski breaking with Matthes, who was known for sympathising with organisations like the Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft, founded in Dresden in 1920, an intensely anti-modernist and anti-semitic group that campaigned for “pure German art”. Joan L. Clinefelter, in her Artists for the Reich, recognises how deep the cultural change cut into German identity: By casting modernism and its supporters as foreign outsiders, proponents of a uniquely ‘German’ culture exchanged the old idea of Germany as a nation of culture for that of a racially defined people of culture. Art that was tied to the Volk became a medium that could supposedly integrate Germans into a community conceived as ethnically pure and eternal. (Clinefelter 2005: 2) During the 1920s Budzinski contributed prints to the explicitly left-wing Prole‐ tarische Heimstunden: Zeitschrift für proletarische Literatur, Kunst, Aufklärung und Unterhaltung. This was a 32-page monthly with an international programme of political prose, verse and illustration published by Arthur Wolf and his company “Die Wölfe” from 1923 to 1926, continued as Saat und Ernte in 1927 and 1928, as Wolfgang U. Schütte records in his Die Wölfe: Auf den Spuren eines Leipziger Verlages der “goldenen” zwanziger Jahre (2000: 41-44, 54-57, 68). In Wolf ’s publications Budzinski’s woodcuts and etchings feature side by side with works by Frans Masereel, Käthe Kollwitz, Th. Th. Heine and Th. Steinlen. We will return to the question of Budzinski’s political sympathies later. In 1945 he left Königsberg with his family and settled in Warburg in Westphalia. After the death of his wife in 1950 he moved to Marburg (Lahn) with his companion and later executrix Erika Stern, and continued writing and designing prints up to his death in 1955. Unfortunately Budzinski’s life and work have not been well documented, and the available sources are incomplete and sometimes contradictory. It hurts to find the most detailed account in a book like Deutsche Holzschnittmeister des 20. Jahrhunderts ( 2 1979: 110-113) by one Haye W. Hansen (1903-88), who before 1945 was known as Dr. Walter Hansen, a henchman of Hitler and active supporter of his “Entartete Kunst” project of 1937. Budzinski did write a short autobiography that was published in Westermanns Monatshefte (November 1929, 147: 317 ff.) but this was a parody of the genre, in parts so full of exaggeration, understatement and digression that it is hard to discern the reality behind the rhetoric. Other parts deserve to be taken seriously, for example his reflections on how to learn the essentials of artistic form, a topic we have already discussed in connection with Clive Bell’s theory of “significant 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world 407 <?page no="408"?> form” in Ch. 2.2. Here is a passage about his own experiences at the Königsberg art academy: Wir jungen Raffaele und Rembrandts studierten damals aufs sorgfältigste und ein‐ dringlichste vor allem die Form, kamen jedoch nicht hinter ihr Geheimnis, aber auf den neuen Kunstschulen gelingt das noch weniger, weil es überhaupt nicht erlernbar ist. Erst wenn man sieht, was nicht zu sehen ist, erfühlt, was nicht mit Fingern erreichbar, vergißt, was alle wissen, wiedergibt, was nicht gegeben ist, erst wenn man Formen zerstören kann, um sie sich selber wiederaufzubauen, wenn man das Wollen nicht mehr will und das Können nicht mehr kann, erst wenn die verflucht geschickte Hand ungeschickt wird, erst dann kann es vorkommen, daß bei günstiger Gestirnkonstellation, und wenn man seiner selbst nicht mächtig ist, daß dann ein Strich, ein einziger sich formt, der etwas wert ist. (Budzinski 1929/ neidenburg.de: 7). Budzinski apologises for this monster sentence, as he calls it, and points out that he is probably echoing an idea expressed by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875- 1926), but insists ever so gently that there is a modicum of truth “zwischen den Zeilen”. Like Hegenbarth, Budzinski knows that the artist must not subjugate himself to what he sees, and instead must gladly accept that his practised hand can produce the lines that will echo the invisible truth of what he senses. A poem like Rilke’s “Eingang” (Das Buch der Bilder, 1902) gives perfect expression to the idea of liberating oneself from what one sees daily and therefore seems to know, and daring to create instead something that was not there before: Wer du auch seist: am Abend tritt hinaus aus deiner Stube, drin du alles weißt; als letztes vor der Ferne liegt dein Haus: wer du auch seist. Mit deinen Augen, welche müde kaum von der verbrauchten Schwelle sich befrein, hebst du ganz langsam einen schwarzen Baum und stellst ihn vor den Himmel: schlank, allein. Und hast die Welt gemacht. Und sie ist groß und wie ein Wort, das noch im Schweigen reift. Und wie dein Wille ihren Sinn begreift, lassen sie deine Augen zärtlich los… (Rilke, Die Gedichte, Insel 1986: 317) Of the three quatrains, the first serves to set the scene and to address the reader, whoever she or he may be. Note that it mentions the burden of everyday knowledge that Budzinski refers to in his account of the art academy. The second shows an act of creative liberation in erecting a structure that did not previously 408 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="409"?> exist, and the third sums up and explains what the reader has now achieved, namely a new sense of the plenitude of meanings that the world possesses for those who have learned to look, listen and touch (and note that “begreifen” like “grasp” and “comprendre” allies touching with understanding), a point I will take up again in my afterword. Budzinski and the Zweifäusterdrucke We can now take a closer look at Budzinski’s work for the Zweifäusterdrucke. Each volume of the series shows the publisher’s device on the half-title page: Fig. 139: Publisher’s device for the Zweifäusterdrucke It is anyone’s guess what the heraldic background to this coat of arms might be, but a shield displaying armorial symbols and crowned by a helmet and two armoured fists does seem to imply both a respect for traditional values and a readiness to fight. Budzinski worked together with Matthes from the very first Zweifäusterdruck in 1918 and soon settled down to illustrate a series of 17 volumes containing 18 out of the 58 novellas written by Theodor Storm (1817-88). Budzinski was soon joined by a number of other illustrators, so that he found time to write and illustrate works of his own, also published as Zweifäusterdrucke. These show how Budzinski moved forward from illustrating other authors’ texts to developing graphic projects that he could furnish with his own text and introductory or explanatory notes. Here are three typical examples: • Geister- und Gespensterbuch. Die gebräuchlichsten Geister und Gespenster nach der Natur dargestellt für Dichter, Maler und Brautleute. [royal octavo, 37 woodcuts and engravings]. Verlegt bei Erich Matthes in Hartenstein und Leipzig, 1919a. (Zweifäusterdruck 25). 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world 409 <?page no="410"?> • Glockenblume: Ein Märchen. [royal octavo, 22 linocuts]. Verlegt bei Erich Matthes in Leipzig und Hartenstein, 1919b. (Zweifäusterdruck 30). • Antlitz der Menschheit. [medium quarto, 36 full-page prints]. Verlegt bei Erich Matthes, Leipzig und Hartenstein im Erzgebirge, 1921. (Zweifäuster‐ druck 83). The Geister- und Gespensterbuch (Book of Spirits and Ghosts) derives from Budzinski’s amused interest in the fantastic creatures of traditional popular culture, from elves to dwarfs, and witches to angels, from dragons to dryads, and even embraces “Wandervögel” of both sexes, the people he encountered during his own involvement in the Wandervogel movement. Each woodcut has a short title identifying the kind of spirit represented and a line or two hinting at its definition. Here is his “Wurzelmänner”, meaning the thick roots of the hallucinogenic mandrake plant (Mandragora officinarum), which resemble human limbs and were believed to shriek out loud when torn from the ground: Fig. 140: “Wurzelmänner” (Budzinski 1919a: 24) Budzinski’s full caption for this engraving is “Wurzelmänner / auch Alraunen, hängen zusammen mit Galgen, Selbstmördern, Wahnsinn, daher in der Literatur weitverbreitetˮ. He may be referring to a recently published sensational novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune: Die Geschichte eines lebenden Wesens (1911), 410 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="411"?> which became a bestseller and was even turned into a film. He also echoes the German tradition of supernatural tales, from the brothers Grimm to romantic writers like E.T.A. Hoffmann (Nachtstücke, 1817), and is aware of contemporary fantastic fiction like Alfred Kubin’s Die andere Seite (1909), with illustrations by the author, and Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem (1915), illustrated by Hugo Steiner- Prag. The second example is Glockenblume: Ein Märchen, which shows Budzinski’s close and at the same time very imaginative observation of a landscape of flowers and meadows and trees somewhere in Germany in a district of lakes and forests. This is an interactive and communicative world in which the protagonist is a bellflower (genus Campanula) who converses with the hazel bush growing next to her and the bumblebee who pays her regular visits. When a group of young people out for a ramble enter this garden of Eden, the girls start picking violets, and the boys climb trees and fight each other, while the crows protest against the noisy intrusion. The hazel recognises a boy who a year ago cut off some of his best shoots, and then he sees this boy making a girl with long blonde plaits a present of a blue belt with a bright metal buckle. Suddenly the couple come running towards the hazel, and as the girl almost treads on the bellflower, her hair and her belt get caught in the hazel’s branches. She falls to the ground and the buckle falls with her beside the flower, disappearing under the leaves scattered by the boy. A yellowhammer discovers the strands of hair and gives the hazel a grateful chirp for saving them. When the sun sets, the boy and the girl have still not found the buckle, and while the hazel is troubled by a vague feeling that it is all his fault, we learn that “die kleine Glockenblume wußte noch gar nichts von Leben, Sonne, Menschen und allem andern” (Budzinski 1919b: 5). That is the moral reflection which brings this first of six episodes to a close. The bellflower remains at the centre of the tale, together with the hazel. In the third episode, when the girl is present with a group of small children who listen to her telling fairy tales, the hazel and the bellflower take up the question of how to proceed in the matter of the buckle. A finch overhears them and decides he can help. He flies to the bellflower, where the buckle is still hidden, and sings as loud as he can to attract her attention (ibid.: 19). The story of the young couple is gradually unfolded, always in relation to the animate agents inhabiting their world, but also taking dimensions like recent history, in this case the Great War, into account. Space is another dimension that we are led to think about through the perceptions of the bellflower when she listens to the eternal music of the stars mingling with the hymns sung in memory of those killed in the war, and reflects on her own passing away as a repeated metamorphosis and unceasing change, “ein ewiger Wechsel und doch ruhevoll” (ibid. 38). Here is the tailpiece 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world 411 <?page no="412"?> linocut that shows the forest and a woman looking for mushrooms and picking a flower or collecting hazelnuts, thus enacting the passing of the seasons and the peaceful processes of growth and decay: Fig. 141: Tailpiece (ibid.) The topics that concerned Budzinski in Glockenblume are present again two years later in his Antlitz der Menschheit, but are worked out in a different form. “Antlitz” is an archaic word that existed in Old English as “andwlita” and means “face”, literally “what is looking at you”. His three-page preface begins with a question about the human race as it exists today: “Ist es ein Kindergesicht, ist es ein jugendliches, gereiftes oder ein alterndes Angesicht? ” (Budzinski 1921: iii). Humankind has not yet achieved maturity, he says, it is still changing and even developing without anyone knowing towards what end. He seems optimistic, as when he says: Auf jeden Fall: Ein Jugendantlitz ist schön, weil es in die Zukunft weist und weil es eine Hoffnung ist. Weil es ein Goethekopf werden kann, ja wenn es erlaubt ist zu denken, etwas noch viel Schöneres. (ibid.: iv) In analogy to this inquiry, Budzinski also meditates on the situation of the artist who sets out to draw a portrait by following a clear and definite concept in his mind: 412 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="413"?> Der Meister, der am Werke ist, bildet nach einem Plan, den er im Innern rein und deutlich trägt und dem am Ende der Arbeit das Werk entspricht, an welchem er schafft.” (ibid.: iii) If the drawing does not attain this end, then it has failed, or to use the current German terms Budzinski employs, it is “entartet” and “untauglich”, degenerate and unfit. He then returns to the human face as it appears to his contemporaries, describing it as one in which a great illness has left visible traces. He hopes that one day this infirmity will be conquered: Die im Blick erkennbare Lebenskraft wird siegen, mit ihr wird der Geist wachsen und die zukünftigen Formen bestimmen immer reiner und edler, so daß die schweren Falten des Siechtums ausgelöscht werden und nichts mehr an sie erinnern wird und an die entsetzliche Zeit ihres Entstehens. (ibid.: iv) It is important to recognise that Budzinski, writing these lines in Königsberg in the spring of 1921, is not looking forward to what the 20s and 30s may bring, but back to the Great War that is still very much alive in people’s memories as a sickness that has pervaded every dimension of their lives, leaving wrinkles, scars and wounds in their minds and souls that outsiders can only guess at, and that artists will find difficult to represent: Es gibt in jeder Kunst und hier wiederum in jedem Ausdrucksmittel Grenzen, die einzuhalten sind, man kann einfach nicht alles ausdrücken, was man will, sonst gerät man in Gefahr, sich selber zwar und einigen Freunden verständlich zu sein, andern aber in Keilschrift zu schreiben oder in Telegrammzeichen. Der Gedanke an den Expressionismus lag da manchmal nahe, weil seine Formen so abstrakt sind, daß man auch das Abstrakteste damit darstellen könnte. (ibid.: v) There are quite a number of expressionist elements in the 36 full-page prints that make up the body of Antlitz der Menschheit. Before we look at an example, we need to inquire into the sequence of items and the structure of the whole. Budzinski gives a hint in the last line of his preface: “Die Namen der einzelnen Bilder haben mehr die Bedeutung von Stichworten, sie wollen richtungsgebend sein” (ibid.). Most titles therefore consist of a single word or proper name, and “Insel der Seligen” and “Weg der Liebe” are the only ones that require three words. Any further verbalisation is left to the beholder. One can distinguish between four categories: there are proper names like “Buddha”, place names like “Insel der Seligen”, dimensions of human experience like “Weg der Liebe”, and occupational designations like “Weltweiser” or “Einsiedler”. A political category might be added, but there are only two candidates for this, “Kommunismus” 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world 413 <?page no="414"?> and “Revolution”. The following illustration is no. 23 in the sequence and shows “Michelangelo”, as the caption reveals. Fig. 142: “Michelangelo” (Budzinski 1921: 23) The prints in Antlitz der Menschheit were reproduced from the original linocuts by a process called Manuldruck, invented in 1913 by Max Ullmann and named for him. Photo-sensitive sheets of glass were placed on originals and then exposed to light, thus producing negatives that could be printed by offset zincography (Funke 1999: 208). It is worth pointing out here that Budzinski developed linocut techniques which supplemented its typical black and white contrasts. He achieves shades of grey by lowering parts of the linoleum’s surface and carrying out cross-hatching on these lowered parts, a procedure that Thomas Bewick had perfected in the late 18 th century. In chapter 19 of My Life ( 1 1862, restored ed. 1981) Bewick reports on how difficult it was “to lower down the surface on all the parts I wished to appear pale, so as to give the appearance of the required distance” (Bewick 1981: 175 f.). Budzinski’s print above shows Michelangelo kneeling before a huge block of marble on which he projects the image of Moses that he has in his mind. The grey tints do not fully show an image but they do suggest the idea that Michelangelo intends to realise, an idea he has 414 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="415"?> been carrying about with him for some thirty years, ever since Pope Julius II (who died in 1513) commissioned him in 1505 to produce such a statue as a part of his mural grave. The statue of Moses was completed in 1545 and is housed in the church of San Pietro in Vincola, Rome, and there are many photographs of it available in the internet. One can easily make out Moses’ sitting posture, his head and beard, his left shoulder and arm, and his legs and right foot, but none of the details the sculptor has yet to create in the obstinate rock. The statue has a height of 235 cm and hardly less width. By comparison, the dark figure of Michelangelo is puny, a visual litotes expressing what a superhuman task the sculptor faces. In our discussion of Flaubert’s “Un Cœur simple” we noticed that some artists were reluctant to give us a portrait of Félicité, and we find a similar reluctance in Budzinski’s gallery of famous names, very strikingly in this print, and confirmed in the prints devoted to Luther (13) and Bach (22). Moses however is portrayed with remarkable expressionist clarity: Fig. 143: “Moses” (detail) (ibid.: 14) All the expressive elements are concentrated in the upper half of the print: Moses’ face, his hands, the tablet with the Ten Commandments in his right hand, the left hand grasping his heart in a gesture intended to express that he is speaking to the people at God’s command: “Fear not: for God is come to prove you” (Exodus 20: 20). We see, then, that Antlitz der Menschheit is not a gallery of true-to-life portraits but rather a portfolio of ideas represented visually, allowing each beholder to develop her or his individual reading, and to meditate over what this reading contributes to their sense of humanity. The final print has the title “Unsere Zeit” and shows a naked man climbing 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world 415 <?page no="416"?> out of a pit full of skeletons, bones and skulls, from which, above the man, a dark shadow seems to grow upwards into a shape resembling a human body, or a river of life. The man’s gaze is directed upwards too, but one cannot tell what he may be searching for or seeing. Is Budzinski’s title really appropriate? Would “Unser Leben” be more accurate? Well, death may be the only thing about life that is certain, but as long as life continues to grow from the living, we must not despair. There are dozens more of such wise and wiser sayings about death collected in any dictionary of thematic quotations (like the Oxford Dictionary of Thematic Quotations, 2000) that one could reflect on, and everyone is welcome to compose their own variant. The next group of works written and illustrated by Budzinski is that of books dedicated to the memory of East Prussia. It consists of three titles, of which Die Entdeckung Ostpreussens (c. 1914) and Curi-neru (1927) are duly listed in Der Morgen: Ein Almanach des Verlages Carl Reissner, published to celebrate the Dresden publisher’s 50th anniversary on 1 October 1928. The first book was illustrated with 55 woodcuts, to which in editions after 1940 some 17 pendrawings, often dated and monogrammed, were added. Curi-neru is described on the verso of the title-page as a “Neue Folge der Entdeckung Ostpreussens” and as “Eine ostpreußische Robinsonade”, the inconsistent spelling reflecting the originals. A third text with 58 illustrations followed in late 1928 under the title Der Mond fällt auf Westpreußen and was reprinted by Carl Reissner together with the first two in one volume as Das Ostpreußen-Buch (1929). These books were issued in cloth-backed, paper-covered boards in a quarto format. My copy of Die Entdeckung Ostpreussens is one of the eighth edition republished in 1958 by Gräfe und Unzer, Munich, a firm founded in Königsberg in 1722, and inscribed “Weihnachten 1959” by its first owner. My copy of Curi-neru, illustrated with 61 zinc etchings (G: geätzte Zinkzeichnungen) distributed over just 70 pages, carries no date of publication, but is inscribed and dated 1927 by its first owner. Both books were produced by a man who had lost his “Heimat” and wanted to keep his memories of it alive for himself and for the many others who had become uprooted like the “Wurzelmänner” in the Geister- und Gespensterbuch. They are written as light-hearted, evocative and inventive accounts of postcolonial exploration in distant lands, ideal Christmas presents for Germans who still liked to think of themselves as Prussian exiles in the 50s and 60s. The title of the second book needs to be explained. In the first chapter we are introduced to Adam and Eva, just married and living on their property in Elbing, in East Prussia, just south of Gdansk Bay. Their relationship is still a platonic one, and we are told that Eva is deeply wounded physically and mentally, and cannot bear to see other people, Adam excepted. They both feel repressed and supervised by 416 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="417"?> their relatives and other watchdogs, and would like to escape them for a while. Adam proposes holiday destinations in different parts of Europe, but Eva rejects them all. Then Adam has a bright idea: he suggests the South Seas, and Eva is delighted: “Ja, die Südsee! Da sind hoffentlich keine Ostpreußen oder überhaupt Europäer, keine Oberkellner, Drahtseilbahnen und -Menschen” (Budzinski 1927: 7). A few days later, Adam announces that he has organised their holiday in every detail: „Wir fahren nach den Fidschi-Inseln, nach Curi-neru. Rüste dich, am ersten Juni geht es fort.“ - „Nach Curi-neru,“ sagte Eva schlafmüde, „hast du da auch schon Zimmer bestellt? “ - „Dort gibt es keine Zimmer. Wir müssen unsere Stuben mitbringen; denn auf Curi-neru sind wir beide ganz allein.“ (ibid.: 8) Adam insists that Eva must wear a heavy veil and earmuffs all the time they are travelling, so as to be able to rest and sleep as much as possible, and he makes sure that she does not catch any details of their journey by train and boat. Actually they are travelling to the Kurische Nehrung, transformed into Curi- Neru, the long and narrow strip of land separating the Kurische Haff (an inland sea) from the Baltic Sea. Adam pretends that their stopover is Neru-sam on Tasmania, though it is really Masuren, the lake district south of Königsberg, and promises that they will soon reach their destination. The whole story is a crazy travelogue, plus a fable about learning to love, and at the same time a loving introduction to the beauties of the landscape of East Prussia, its pine forests, its lakes and beaches and lagoons. The landscape and human psychology interact and gradually liberate Adam and Eva from the anxieties that have beset them for so long. The author permits himself to conclude his tale as follows, and to add a suitable tailpiece: Fig. 144: Curi-neru, Text + tailpiece “Adam and Eve” (ibid.: 72) 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world 417 <?page no="418"?> Kehr’ um: a journey through German identities and landscapes We can now turn to Budzinski’s only full-fledged novel, again with his own illustrations, which he gave the imperative title Kehr’ um (without an exclamation mark). This was published in 1930 by a social-democratic book club called Der Bücherkreis, founded in Berlin in 1924 as a non-profit venture. Members paid a monthly contribution of 1 Reichsmark which entitled them to one new book per quarter as well as the monthly 16-page Bücherkreis magazine of texts and prints. Additional books from the backlist cost 3 RM each, and non-members could buy these for 4,80 RM per volume. In all, 68 volumes were published, and the 69 th volume, Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben, a classic about the cultural mission of the German bourgeoisie, first published in 1855, which was to go on sale in 1933, was withdrawn from the market after Hitler’s rise to power and the implementation of the policy of cleansing German culture of noxious and undesirable matter through the agency of the Reichskulturkammer under Goebbels. Budzinski’s Kehr’ um was put on the blacklist of banned books, but it does not seem to have been burned in public like so many other books (http: / / daten.berlin.de/ datensaetze/ liste-der-verban nten-buecher). Kehr’ um is a book of 303 pages, 194 of which are devoted to typographic text, and 102 to full-page illustrations. Many illustrations contain handwritten texts, sometimes in standard script, but mostly in Sütterlin, a German script introduced in 1915 in Prussian schools, which was widely employed during the 20s and 30s, but went out of use after 1945. The novel has eight numbered chap‐ ters, all printed in a modern Fraktur, very similar to Rudolf Koch’s “Deutsche Schrift” of 1910, but much lighter, and each chapter begins with a large typo‐ graphic initial. There are also two sequences of text printed in a roman italic type, a Bodoni, the first titled “Personalien dieser Erzählung”, which precedes Ch. 1, and the second titled “Die kapitalistische Gesellschafts ‘ordnung’ ”, which forms a part of the narrative of Ch. 6. The roman italic is used for the captions of the seven pictures that show the personae of the narrative, and also for the explanatory texts (recto) facing the twelve illustrations of capitalist society (verso). The binding was designed by the Viennese artist Lili Réthi (1894-1969), who left Europe via London for the USA in 1939 and became an American citizen. 418 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="419"?> Fig. 145: Cover design of Kehr’ um The author’s name and the title are printed in brown ink diagonally across the bright yellow cloth, and are both linked and separated by what looks like a spearhead or the nib of a pen. This ambiguity visualises the urgency of the title’s call to turn back, and also relates it to the main tool of both writer and draughtsman. The high number of full-page illustrations is bound to attract the readers’ attention for longer spans of time than smaller illustrations embedded in text would. The illustrations themselves are puzzling at first, as when one is confronted by two identical portraits with contradicting captions: the first portrait is labelled “Reinhold Bärting, Künstler, Aktionär” and the second, identical except for being more lightly inked, as one can expect a second impression to be, is labelled “Xaver Schmid, Arbeiter”. The riddle is solved a few pages later, after one has had a cursory look at the five portraits that follow, and has digested the instructions “the editor” gives his readers: Anmerkung des Herausgebers: Nachfolgende Bilder und einige Tagebuchblätter rühren von dem Maler Bärting her. Die Schrift ist ursprünglich in Spiegelschrift geschrieben, bei ihrer Umkehrung ins Positive kamen daher manche orthographische Fehler zum Vorschein. (Budzinski 1930: 16) 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world 419 <?page no="420"?> Some of these diary pages are undecipherable, others are difficult to read, but since the printed text and the illustrations work together to tell the whole story, they mainly serve as an exotic form of ornament that pretends to have a documentary function. This is implied when the narrator, in the quotation above, introduces himself as the editor of the narrative that has just begun, rather like Daniel Defoe in his preface to Robinson Crusoe. One difference is that Robinson tells his story himself, in the first person, and his editor retires, while Kehr’ um is a third-person narrative about Reinhold Bärting, a painter and draughtsman and also a writer, many of whose thoughts and deeds are very similar to those of Budzinski, as the identical initials RB confirm. Identity is indeed a central issue in Kehr’ um, from the very first pages to the final chapter, and it focuses on the main characters being willing and able to change from one identity to another, to live several lives instead of just one, or rather several lives which in sum make a different life. This can be shown by discussing two episodes, one from Ch. 1, which sets the action going, and another, in Ch. 8, which shows how far this active self-definition can take the leading figures in their self-awareness and their decisions. Here is the first page about the artist Reinhold Bärting and his wife: Fig. 146: Kehr’ um: first page of Ch. 1 420 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="421"?> Time and place are not made fully explicit, but “25 years ago” suggests that the Bärtings may have married in March 1902, and are now celebrating their silver wedding on 18 March 1927. Three place names are given elliptically and can be completed as Immenstadt, Oberstdorf and Breitachklamm. That is enough to identify the region as the Allgäu, about 50 km east of the Bodensee, with Oberstdorf (literally “highest village”) well known as a health resort and centre for alpine sports. The Breitach is a stream flowing through a deep, narrow gorge or ravine, called Klamm in German, about four km west of Oberstdorf. The account of the last day of Reinhold Bärting’s life given above is repeated in a significantly different form just a page later. Here we are told that Bärting left his holiday flat (and his wife) in Immenstadt early in the morning of 18 March to take a breath of fresh air, and happened to pass by the post office where a bus was waiting to leave for Oberstdorf. Bärting buys a ticket and stays in O…dorf for the night. The next morning he dons his hiking gear, buys ten cigars and leaves for “R …”, Räppele or Rohrmoos, both on the road to the Breitachklamm. At its beginning he sees a sign: “Zutritt bei 5 Mk. Strafe verboten! ”, which does not deter him in the least, since he wants to explore the Klamm and do sketches: “Er zeichnete hier und da die unheimlichen Formen der Unterwelt” (ibid.: 16). A word more about “verboten! ”, a keyword in many texts about Germany, and one which is characteristic of the political and cultural atmosphere of the 20s and 30s. The best-known example is to be found in Rupert Brooke’s poem “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”, written in the Café des Westens, Berlin, in May 1912, in which he reports nostalgic memories of Grantchester, just south of Cambridge, where he had settled three years before. The relevant lines are his memories of “Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton / Where das Betreten’s not verboten. …”, quoted from the posthumous edition illustrated with a woodcut by Noel Rooke (Brooke 1916: 8). Here is the sketch on the facing page: 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world 421 <?page no="422"?> Fig. 147: Ich komme mir vor wie ein Mikroorganismus (ibid.: 17) The top three quarters of the page represent “the eerie shapes of the under‐ world”, the vertical and overhanging rock-faces of the gorge: the one on the right is illumined by the sun, the one on the left almost obscured in the shade but revealing a sharply outlined crocodile’s head, which at second sight or thought might be the left leg of a grotesque manikin whose outline, face, eyes, nose etc. can be deduced from the graphic marks we indubitably see. At the same time the two rock-faces can be read as the profiles of two heads, one looking to the right, the other to the left. Things become even more complicated as soon as we consider the five lines of Sütterlin script that we find below the drawing. I have attempted to transcribe them, with the help of the BücherWissen postcard no. 3, “Wie liest man eigentlich Sütterlin-Schrift? ”, one of a series distributed by antiquariat.de booksellers: 422 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="423"?> Ich komme mir hier vor wie ein Mikroorganismus in den Gedärmen der Mutter Erde. Etwa als ein Typhus Bazillus, - aber dabei ist immer noch Größenwahn. Eine Mord- und Selbstmörderin! Ich bin an der Grenze des Chaos! (ibid.) If this is to make any sense at all it must be related to what happens to Bärting when he advances further up the gorge. He sees a head appearing from behind a rock ahead of him, then hears a bang, feels his right ear and cheek getting moist, and then someone grabs him and jumps on his back. The aggressor holds him fast on the iron railings high above the chasm, squeezing him so hard that Bärting shouts in his ear: “Mann, Sie zerdrücken ja meine Zigarren! ” The man is so surprised that he steps back and draws his pistol. Bärting immediately tries to buy him off with his full purse, plus some jewellery, and his coat, jacket and boots, but when two dark figures turn up in the mouth of a cave, the assailant snatches all he can and gives Bärting a violent push that topples him over the railings. But one leg catches on the bottom rail, he faints, and the two dark figures, who soon turn out to be policemen, arrive to release him from his predicament. Bärting urges them to report the attempted murder and to take up pursuit of the robber and would-be murderer, but they refuse to listen, and one of them argues that no one has ever been murdered in this Klamm: „Polizei bin ich selber, ich erkläre Ihnen, daß hier kein Mord vorkommen kann, nie vorgekommen ist; Sie phantasieren, Sie sind verunglückt, das ist alles. Sie haben wegen unbefugten Betretens 5 Mk. Strafe zu zahlen.“ (ibid.: 19) The policeman’s words seem to echo Christian Morgenstern’s unforgettable “nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf” from “Die unmögliche Tatsache” (Palm‐ ström, 1910), translated by A.E.W. Eitzen as “that which must not, cannot be” (Das Mondschaf, 1953: 59). Budzinski may well have also had “Die Behörde” in mind, the next poem in Palmström, when he was writing about Bärting’s clash with the two policemen, as quoted above, and continuing as follows: „Himmeldonnerwetter! Also ich gebe Ihnen zu Protokoll: Ich, Reinhold Bärting …“ - „Zeigen Sie die Papiere! “ Der Maler faßte in den Rock und zog eine Tasche hervor, die vom Räuber; als er sie schnell zurückstecken wollte, ergriff sie der Mann vor ihm, sah hinein: „Xaver Schmid heißen Sie ja, Kommissionär, Altenkirch, - Sie Lügner! Sie Schwindler! Nun machen Sie, daß Sie von hier fortkommen! Hier Mörder! Hier ein Mord! Er will nur nicht die Strafe zahlen! Das Märchen vom Mord wird Ihnen keiner glauben.“ (ibid.) 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world 423 <?page no="424"?> The robber must have dropped Bärting’s jacket when he fled from the Klamm and also forgotten that he had swapped his own papers for those belonging to his victim. The policemen have left the scene, and Bärting ponders over his strange situation: Reinhold legte sich platt auf die Erde und schaute zum Himmel. Es kam ihm so vor, als wenn er ganz anders aussah als sonst, auch die Bäume taten das und die Felsen erst recht. Er befühlte seinen Körper und bemühte sich um seine Identität. So nach dem Äußerlichen zu urteilen, stimmte alles. Zum Beispiel kann man den Atem anhalten, also ist er noch da. Und was war da unten vor sich gegangen? Als der Mörder über ihm lag, ordneten sich seine eigenen Vorstellungen unter schneidender Helligkeit zu einem Bild seines Lebens, raum-zeitlos; als zweites erstand dann unter Wollustzittern der Tod. Also das wäre dann gewesen, hatte er noch zu sich gesagt. (ibid.: 19 f.) He is glad to be alive, even if so much seems to have changed, including his identity. Does he feel a sense of loss? Or a sense of opportunity? When his thoughts lead him back to the man who tried to kill him, the narrator puts them into empathetic words: Ja, Bruder, du lebst auch, brauchst ebenfalls vorläufig nicht an den Tod zu denken, hast noch den ganzen Sommer vor dir, was? Wie sind wir beide doch herrlich glücklich! So nichts tun - nichts denken, rühren, so atmen - eins, zwei, eins, zwei, mehr ist auch wirklich nicht notwendig. (ibid.: 20) He is happy to have experienced an “Augenblick des nur Da-seins”, a moment of simply being that may never recur (ibid.). His next response is to rise and announce his new identity: “Er stand auf, lachte wie ein Kind: Xaver Schmid heiße ich, Xaver Schmid aus Dingsda, Kommissionär …, was ist eigentlich Kommissionär? ” (ibid.). A commission agent is somebody who buys and sells goods for another person and receives a percentage of the sum in payment. He is a middleman, a typical member of the capitalist economy as satirised in the section on the capitalist social order in Ch. 6. The narrator tells us that Xaver Schmid (or Reinhold Xaver, ibid.: 27) is exhausted after his struggle and strange transformation, and now returns to R… to report the robbery and attempted murder to the mayor, who, however, refuses to give him a proper hearing. So he looks for an inn where he can recover his strength, sleeps through for three days, and then has a proper meal and finds a report of his adventures in the local newspaper. According to this, a man’s corpse has been found at the end of the Breitachklamm, his head disfigured beyond recognition. His papers and his chequebook identify him as Reinhold Bärting, an affluent painter from Munich. His mourning wife has been informed of the accident and will arrange the funeral herself. Reinhold Xaver immediately sets 424 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="425"?> off for O…dorf and visits the funeral vault where the corpse is laid out. His wife has been there and collected his personal belongings. The funeral is to take place the next day. He reaches the graveyard as the bells toll, but hides behind a bush through which he can make out the mourners, including his wife and son, and listen to the funeral oration: Der hinter dem Busch Stehende hörte seine Grabrede: traurig ums Leben gekommener - liebevoller Gatte - treusorgender Vater und glänzender Künstler - edler vorbil‐ dlicher Mensch - Bürger des Gottesreichs - schaut von oben - bitterster Schmerz - hoffnungsvoller Sohn - Wege unerforschlich, Verlust der Kunst […] (ibid.: 23) And the next speaker continues with similar clichés. The funeral is soon over, and when the mourners have left, Bärting steps forward to his grave to reflect on the situation. He takes his sketchbook and writes down his thoughts. The editor explains that only the first two pages can be shown, as the others are illegible, a topic that by now has become part of the narrative programme. Here is a transcription of the first lines: Oberstdorf, 23.8.27 - Also bin ich tot und begraben, es ist notwendig, daß ich mir’s schwarz auf weiß bescheinige. Zunächst will ich meine Graburne richtig stellen. Wer da begraben wurde, ist der Standesamtsname R.B. […] (ibid.: 25) The real R.B. is still alive, but he will not be able to use his registry office name any more, unless of course he returns to his wife, and with the help of a lawyer takes legal action to resume it. That seems out of the question, for now he is “herrlich glücklich” and intent on living a new life under an identity that he believes he will be able to shape himself. He actually does make one more attempt to regain his name when he goes to see the mayor of O…dorf, surely a higher authority than his colleague in R… . However, the two mayors are of exactly the same opinion that such an attempt to assassinate a tourist must not and therefore cannot be in such an arch-catholic region as the upper Allgäu. Reinhold Bärting’s response to the mayor’s declaration is ironic, but also literally true: “Gut‘, sagte Herr Xaver Schmid, ‚das eben wollte ich gehört haben, ich danke Ihnen‘; und verließ die Stätte des hohen Rats” (ibid.: 27). On his way back to R…, he chances to meet a pretty young woman, and as they look at each other questioningly they both feel puzzled, as if they had crossed paths before. Neither says a word, but the readers are allowed to share Xaver’s thoughts and feelings: […] als sein Herz mit der ganzen Blutbahn in einen andern Rhythmus zu verfallen schien, als irgendwie in seinem Innern Ketten und Fesseln sich fast hörbar lösten, wie es dem treuen Heinrich im Märchen erging. (ibid.: 28) 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world 425 <?page no="426"?> The sight of the young woman, and their mutual, mute response to each other has, it seems to Xaver, liberated him and opened the door to a new and happier future. “Der treue Heinrich” refers to one of the Märchen collected by the brothers Grimm after 1806, known as “The Frog Prince” (G: “Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich”). It is the well-known story of the prince who was turned into a frog by a wicked witch, and is turned back into his original shape and identity when the princess, whose golden ball he has recovered for her out of a well, throws the frog against the wall of her bedroom. The prince and the princess set off the next day for the prince’s kingdom, accompanied by the prince’s faithful servant Henry, who was so grief-stricken when his master was changed into a frog that he had three iron bands set about his heart to prevent it from breaking. Like Henry, Xaver is now liberated and happy, “erlöst und glücklich”, as it says in the original German version in Friedrich Panzer’s centenary edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm (Panzer 1913: 16). Budzinski closes the first chapter immediately after this reference to “The Frog Prince” with a paragraph that addresses the problem of how to overcome a false identity and progress towards an authentic one, which he relates directly to the title of his novel: Zu einer Klarheit und Führung durch den Intellekt kam es nicht, fast war es so, als wenn er sich davor hüten wollte, gleich einem der Gefangenschaft entsprungenen Tier, das überall noch die Gitterstäbe seines Käfigs zu sehen vermeint. Es war der Augenblick, in dem das „Kehr um“ bei ihm vor sich ging, der Anfang der neuen Schöpfung. (Budzinski 1930: 28) The allusion to the novel’s title, and the simile of the animal escaped from captivity, together imply that the protagonist is now at liberty to wander where he will, indeed to undertake a pilgrimage that may lead him to an as yet uncertain goal. The next stages of this voyage of self-discovery through Germany are recounted in chapters 2 to 7, i.e. on 60 pages of illustration and 134 pages of printed text. In the final chapter, Reinhold Xaver leaves Berlin for a region in the eastern provinces that is famous for its lakes and forests. Yes, this is East Prussia, Budzinski’s own Heimat: Es gab einmal eine Art von Erwachen bei ihm, da warf er alles von sich ab und verließ Berlin. Nach Osten reiste er, nicht mehr ins Gebirge. Er wandelte im neuen Lande wie ein Abenteurer umher. Zuletzt blieb er in einer Seenlandschaft etwas abseitigen Charakters in Bewohnerschaft und Kultur. Aber tröstlicherweise führte durch sie ein Schienenstrang. (ibid.: 225) This will sound familiar to my readers after learning about Budzinski’s East Prussia books, which like Kehr’ um are to some extent autofictions that explore 426 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="427"?> the relations between a landscape and the writer and artist born and bred there. How important these relations can be, and often are, is well expressed by the art critic and poet Herbert Read (1893-1968) in The Innocent Eye (1933); an account of his Yorkshire childhood: If only I can recover the sense and certainty of those innocent years, years in which we seemed not so much to live as to be lived by forces outside us, by the wind and trees and moving clouds and all the mobile engines of our expanding world - then I am convinced I shall possess a key to much that has happened to me in this other world of conscious living. […] All life is an echo of our first sensations, and we build up our consciousness, our whole mental life, by variations and combinations of these elementary sensations. But it is more complicated than that, for the senses apprehend not only colours and tones and shapes, but also patterns and atmospheres, and our first discovery of these determines the larger patterns and subtler atmospheres of all our subsequent existence. (Read 1933: 12 f.) Throughout our lives, these “elementary sensations” influence and modify our new experiences, and so do later sensations and the memories connected with them. Reinhold travels on to the Beldahnsee, one of the biggest lakes in Masuria, with his head full of memories, visual patterns and atmospheres, many of which have to do with the young woman he first saw in the Breitachklamm and which have haunted him ever since. The reader has met her as number three in the portrait gallery, where she was identified as “Fräulein Erika Semper, genannt Hortense, auch ‘das blühende Leben’ ”. Reinhold is waiting for her, and again and again he imagines hearing her laugh or glimpsing her bright dress, and before long he finds her on the shore of the lake: Und hier fand er sie nun, liegend in halbsitzender Stellung, nackend und schön braun gebrannt, das Tuch, das ihr als Unterlage diente, blendend gegen den Körper. Man wird es nicht glauben, aber es ist wohl so richtig, das sah er zuerst als Maler. Dann sonst nichts mehr, denn er lief auf sie zu mit offenen Armen; und sie richtete sich nur ein wenig auf und breitete die ihrigen aus. Es kam zu einem formlosen Vergehen, wie etwa zwei Wolken ineinander verschwinden. Nachher, nachdem sie schon wieder die ihnen eigentümliche Umgrenzung erreicht hatten und sie angezogen war, fiel endlich das erste Wort zwischen ihnen […] (Budzinski 1930: 227) What Reinhold says to his beloved does not really matter, it only serves to show that they have not yet learned to talk with each other. What does matter is that they spontaneously consummate their love in what the narrator calls “ein formloses Vergehen”. Now that is ambiguous, for the noun “Vergehen” most often designates a minor criminal offence, whereas the verb “vergehen” 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world 427 <?page no="428"?> generally means to fade, to disappear and even to die. The two meanings become one in the simile “like two clouds merging with each other” that has its roots in classical mythology, specifically in the story of Jupiter turning into a cloud in order to seduce Io, as related by Ovid in the first book of his Metamorphoses. The real point is that both Reinhard and Erika/ Hortense are still working their way out of their habitual “Umgrenzungen” into their new and open individual and social identities. The narrator puts it like this: “Und soviel sie auch sich glücklich fühlten und auf Lebenshöhe, zum eigentlichen Bewußtsein ihrer Liebe kamen sie erst viel später.” (ibid.: 229). This process of gaining consciousness of oneself and of one’s partner as a betrothed couple, beyond each individuality, is narrated over the next fifty pages, and deals with conflicts like the one between Hortense’s fierce conviction that Marxist communism is the only true political creed versus Reinhold’s preference for democratic socialism (ibid.: 231-236). In spite of such quarrelling, they do enjoy their idyll on the banks of the Beldahnsee, illustrated in the following unpretentious picture: Fig. 148: Blaubeersuppe mit Mehlklößen (ibid.: 232) 428 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="429"?> The lake is visible in the background, through the tree-trunks and bushes, and in the foreground we see Hortense, “das blühende Leben”, preparing a meal. They have been gathering blueberries, and now Hortense is making a blueberry soup with dumplings, to be followed by coffee, a “Göttermahlzeit”, the narrator calls it (ibid.: 233). The Sütterlin caption in this illustration is easier to read than many others, mainly because one already knows what it is about: “Wir sind bei Blaubeersuppe mit Mehlklößen und Syndikalismus - Anarcho - Kommunismus.” Their simple meal is very much in harmony with the landscape, but their political dispute goes on and on, till Hortense resorts to physical violence, and finally embraces and kisses her lover, “glühend vor Haß und Liebe” (ibid.: 236). A very different crisis rears its ugly head when on the seventh day of their sharing a room in the village teacher’s house at the edge of the forest, Hortense wakes up and takes her temperature, only to discover that it has dropped to 36,6°C, and diagnoses this as a sign that Reinhold has cured her of tuberculosis (ibid.: 229). For a while, the topic is not mentioned, let alone explained, for they are busy exploring their paradise, presented in a sequence of 22 almost uninterrupted illustrations, till their world seems to consist of nothing but sand, water and the heavens, “eine fast formlose Natur” (ibid.: 264). Budzinski describes what happens: Sie lagen in den Dünen eingebettet und sahen nichts als weißen Sand und die Himmelsbläue. Ihr Leben entfaltete sich in heftigen Zuckungen, weit ausgreifenden Schwingungen und Gewittern gleich. Da bewegte ein nicht allzuschwerer Hustenan‐ fall Hortenses Brust und ließ sie zurücksinken. Es sprudelte ein dunkler warmer Blutstrom ihr aus Nase und Mund, schaumverziert und schön rosarot. - - (ibid.) What does this reversal of fortune signify? Erika/ Hortense has always been called “das blühende Leben”, the very picture of health, but that was probably never a well-founded judgement, but merely a flattering remark. There are limits to a person’s understanding and ability to shape her or his own life, and so we should always bear in mind that “media vita in morte sumus”. Hortense is admitted to a sanatorium and when she next appears, ten pages later, it is through a letter to Reinhold in which she reveals that the doctors do not expect her to survive the next twelve months. Meanwhile we have accompanied Reinhold’s activities at a socialist rally where he gets to know some influential people, and meets a young lady whose pretty face he portrays in two delightful drawings (ibid.: 270 and 271). They spend a whole week together, after the nameless girl has voiced her fear that socialism is no more than a rotten branch of politics, and Reinhold promises to show her that both tree and branch are strong and healthy. Reinhold then pays Hortense a Christmas visit in the sanatorium, 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world 429 <?page no="430"?> a run-down establishment set on making money, and doing more to spread the disease than to cure it. He treats her to a long lecture on death, full of commonplaces and hollow phrases: Der Tod ist nur eine Erscheinungsform des Lebens, man könnte auch genau umge‐ kehrt sagen, es ist das alles gleich. Die Angst vor dem Tode ist eine alte Überlieferung nur, wichtiger ist die Lebensangst. „Gib mir einen Kuß, Liebste, es wäre wohl gut, wenn wir beide zusammen sterben könnten, es wäre vielleicht gut, wenn man überhaupt sterben könnte, aber es ist leider nie und nirgends eine Aussicht dazu vorhanden, keine, es gibt im ganzen Kosmos nicht einen Ort, wo man ungestört vergehen kann. “ (ibid.: 283) This excerpt makes up just a fifth of Reinhold’s monologue, and Hortense is all the while getting weaker and weaker, and probably not listening any more when he suggests: “Ah, mein Mädel, nun wollen wir sterben - -” (ibid.: 284). He gives her a glass of water to drink and adds something that he calls a “Wegzehrung”, a snack for the journey to make things easier for her. But it is a case of euthanasia. He closes her eyes and leaves the sanatorium, stepping out across the snow into the dark December night, till around four o’clock he feels touched and shrouded by a warm breath, that of his “gestorbene Geliebte” (ibid. 285) with whom he engages in a long interior dialogue that gives him a feeling of “Freude und Glückseligkeit” (ibid.: 286). But Reinhold’s attempt to build a new identity for himself has come to nothing, and before long he will confess to Judge Wilbert, who is his landlord and father of Gerhard the communist, and who knows his story, that he would like to try to begin a new life. He has long seen himself as a champion of socialism, and so he lectures Wilbert and Doctor Riebes on the evils and injustices of Berlin, as they go on tours of the city together in Riebes’ motorcar (ibid.: 293-299). The novel closes with the political demonstrations of the Berlin workers on May Day, which was traditionally a celebration of the coming of spring, but since the Second International (Workingmen’s Association) formed in Paris in 1889 it was widely adopted in Europe as a workers’ holiday. The streets are full of young workers, with policemen and security forces keeping a watch on them. When a red flag hoisted on a church is taken down, and demonstrators are arrested, and then a first shot is fired, the crowds get angry and start brawling, throw stones and erect barricades. Xaver Schmid tries to calm his fellow workers down, but is attacked and hurt. Here is the end of the story: Spät des Abends wird er mit provisorischem Verband in seine Wohnung geschafft. Er bittet noch, seinen Wirt, den Landgerichtsrat [Doctor Wilbert], nicht zu stören und 430 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="431"?> ihn allein zu lassen. Als am nächsten Morgen Gerhard [Wilbert] zu ihm hinaufsteigt, findet er an seiner Tür folgenden Zettel mit roten Fingerabdrücken: Fig. 149: Xaver Schmid’s last message (ibid.: 303) Transcribed this reads: „Heute wegen unaufschiebbarer Beschäftigung Läuten verboten“. The urgent occupation that cannot be postponed is to die in peace. The indexical signs employed in this tailpiece are very expressive: the scrawled, irregular handwriting reveals the writer’s fading strength, and the bloody fingerprints document the extent of his wounds. Thus ends the story of a man’s threefold identity, written at a time when the identities of many men and women had become precarious, when many had lost their homes and their work, and they seemed to have no future to look forward to. Reading this novel today, in the knowledge that there was a future even after two world wars, a better future than anyone could have reckoned with in the 1930s, we can ask ourselves if Reinhold Xaver’s story is not one of martyrdom for a good cause, of suffering for his beliefs. In his Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm points out that the socialist labour movements were “as passionately committed to the values of reason, science, progress, education and individual freedom as anyone” and adds a detail that chimes in with the last episode of Kehr’ um: The German Social Democratic Party’s May Day medal showed Karl Marx on one side, the Statue of Liberty on the other. The challenge was to the economy, not to constitutional government and civility. (Hobsbawm 1995: 110) It is certainly true that Reinhold, the wealthy artist, does turn back to lead a simpler life, and if he does not achieve true happiness that must be because he can only partly re-create himself in the light of his own values and is unable to open himself to others. In putting it like that I am echoing Jonathan Glover’s 5.3 Robert Budzinski - artist and writer in a disrupted world 431 <?page no="432"?> analysis of identity in I: The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity (1988). The last point I would like to make is to emphasise the remarkably varied fusion of texts and pictures, and texts in pictures, that Budzinski has created in this novel. One cannot really do justice to such an achievement on the basis of a handful of examples, but I can urge interested readers to get hold of a copy of the book and see for themselves. 432 5 Case studies in writers and illustrators <?page no="433"?> 6 Afterword: Some conclusions and an outlook Looking back over the chapters and sections of this Apology for Pictures that deals with so many different aspects of illustrated narrative books - their history in France, Britain and Germany, their technologies and economies, their interest for and effects on the great reading public - I find that I have given particular emphasis to the issues of perception and cognition involved in reading texts and beholding illustrations arranged in such a way in the material structure of a printed book as to intensify and deepen the interaction of words and pictures in the process of reading. This interaction is prepared on the page, but is realised in the heads of the readers, and more generally in their bodies, from their eyes to their ears, their tongues to their noses, their hands to their fingertips, all cooperating with their brains to register, organise, store and connect the myriads of information received. We have discussed many examples of such interaction confirming that reading illustrated texts is a complex activity calling on all our physiological and mental resources. I have the impression, however, that these resources are not as well developed as they could or should be. Has our schooling, from kindergarten to secondary schools, and beyond, really achieved an education of all our senses, a balance of cognitive and manual skills? In his Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel: Modi ästhetischer Erfahrung (2010), Bernhard Waldenfels discusses how pictures unfold different and unpredictable kinds of power over their beholders, between attraction and repulsion, which many of us have never learned to come to terms with, although we have all had aesthetic experiences long before we encountered art: Die Künste entspringen einem Erfahrungsbereich, den sie mit anderen kulturellen Betätigungen teilen, so daß der Kunstunterricht immer wieder auf Materialien stößt, die in den Nachbarfächern auf andere Weise bearbeitet werden. Bevor Kunst sich von Nicht-Kunst absondert, gibt es vorkünstlerische Motive und Impulse, die früh vertrauten vorgeometrischen Gestalten gleichen wie etwa der Sonnenscheibe, der Ackerfläche oder dem Parkstreifen. (Waldenfels 2010: 129) He points out that we have all grown up to perceive colours in a garden or in the sky, have been fascinated by fires, and experienced pleasure in modelling snowballs and building sandcastles that, though they quickly disappeared, did leave their traces in our hands and eyes, and thus in our minds, preparing us for aesthetic encounters in later life. Such early sensory experiences need to be taken up and furthered by parents and teachers as an important contribution to children’s ability to master the world they live in, their “Lebenswelt”. But do our <?page no="434"?> educational institutions carry out this fundamental task? I have my doubts and find them confirmed every day in newspaper reports about declining skills in the three Rs. In the period we have been concerned with during this study, the state of school education was a much-discussed topic, for example in English for the English: A Chapter on National Education (1922) by the influential educationist George Sampson (1873-1950). Sampson’s main point was that more attention must be paid to helping pupils to improve their practical skills in speaking, listening and writing in their mother tongue, as opposed to knowledge about the language, especially its grammar: We cannot give a lesson in any subject without helping or neglecting the English of our pupils. One of the most useful lessons in economy and lucidity of speech I have seen was actually a practical geometry lesson, in which the teacher required boys in turn to come out and give the class exact directions, step by step, for the working of certain problems. Ability of the pupil to make a concise and lucid statement is postulated in our teaching of every subject; but how many of us ever try systematically to cultivate it? Yet without clearness of expression clearness of thought is impossible. (Sampson 1922: 25) Sampson does not specify what geometrical problems the boys worked on, but one can imagine them sitting at their desks with their exercise books open in front of them and learning how to construct an isosceles triangle with the aid of pencil, ruler and compasses. The boys listen carefully to their fellowpupil’s instructions and carry them out, step by step, as accurately as they can. Since they switch roles in the course of the lesson, they will all practise listening, speaking and geometric drawing. And that brings us to the point: listening, looking and drawing happen consecutively and simultaneously, for ears, eyes and hands cooperate interactively. That is the kind of cooperation we have witnessed again and again in considering the relations between texts and pictures when we have responded by adding words to the texts and filling in gaps in the illustrations, verbally and graphically, so that all our senses and faculties were involved in a cooperative venture. This ability needs to be taught and learned just like any other skill, at all levels of teaching and learning, but unfortunately it is often neglected. Let me take just one example, the book as a material object. How many of us have had the chance to learn about how books are printed, assembled, bound, and repaired? When I went to school in England during the 1950s, my schoolfellows and I at Farnborough Grammar School (FGS) were given this chance in Mr. Foster’s art lessons and were able to practise the skills of bookbinding in his Arts Society, during the midday break. He introduced us to the materials and the tools, to techniques and processes. In 434 6 Afterword: Some conclusions and an outlook <?page no="435"?> his classes we learned to write italic scripts, and how to make and print linocuts for Alfa, our school magazine. His colleague Mr. Pascoe gave woodworking classes and taught us how to make bookends. There was also a Printer’s Guild, in which one of my classmates helped to set up and print pocket calendars of important school fixtures in the coming term. I was an assistant in the spacious school library under Doc Naish, helping to make sure that books were returned to where they belonged and were kept clean and in good repair, and once I was given the task of rewriting all the faded shelf labels for the various departments. In winter or when it was raining, many boys spent the mid-day break in the library, enjoying the opportunity to read old and new Punch magazines. When my family returned to Germany in 1960, where my new school offered nothing of the kind, I could still draw on what I had learned in England and later extend my knowledge in adult education courses. In my experience, this ignorance of practical concerns survived for quite some time in university studies of English and French literature and linguistics. Inevitably, in a Shakespeare seminar, there was mention of the Folio and Quarto editions, but no-one thought to go into topics like Elizabethan publishing and printing. This gradually changed as the traditional philologies broadened their perspective to include Cultural Studies, i.e. the study of cultural practices beyond the verbal, such as visual, musical and physical activities and skills. As my own memories of FGS show, project-based learning (PBL) in small groups, each of which collected information on an allotted topic by reading it up, discussing it and arranging it for the oral presentation to the whole class, or in the form of written and illustrated reports, was already in full swing in the 1950s. It was systematically developed in the following decades under the headings of “Handlungsorientierung” and “active learning” and gradually put into practice in primary, secondary and tertiary education. It is in this context that I hope that the Apology for Pictures will suggest productive ways of working with illustrated fiction in language classes of all kinds, and also encourage research on a subject that has been unduly neglected. Acknowledgements and thanks Looking back over more than twenty years of research and teaching in the field of bi-medial cultural studies, focused and developed through collecting il‐ lustrated books and studying the ways they work, I realise how many interesting and productive national and international contacts I have had the good fortune to be able to make and learn from. Writing, i.e. composing a narrative and constructing an argument, is mostly a solitary occupation, even if it inevitably puts one in the company of so many other writers, all trying to get their word 6 Afterword: Some conclusions and an outlook 435 <?page no="436"?> in, and often succeeding. I have quoted many writers in order to document and analyse their ideas about words and pictures and their relations, and to find out how these ideas complement, modify or contradict my own ideas, and provide new ideas for me to build on. I have always reproduced illustrations when these are required by the course of my argument, and discussed them in some detail in order to guide the attention of my readers and beholders to specific points they might otherwise miss. All this verbal and visual quotation takes place under the auspices of the German Urheberrechtsgesetz §51, accessible in English as Act on Copyright and Related Rights, Section 51: Quotations (https: / / www.gesetze -im-internet-de/ englisch_urhg/ englisch_urhg.html). All the illustrations in this book are reproduced from books and prints in my own collection. Perhaps the most important and enduring of my early companions in thinking and writing about perception and response is Prof. Bernhard Waldenfels, whose Der Spielraum des Verhaltens (1980) has meant so much to me, as well as his Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel (2010). Among those early correspondents who guided me through the world of French illustrated fiction was Jean-Étienne Huret (1934-2023), bookseller and collector in Paris, whom I got to know through an article in Art & Métiers du Livre (N° 278, mai-juin 2010: 40-51), which reported that he was engaged on an “exhaustive bibliography” of the Livre de Demain. This was published in 2011, an immensely useful tome. Sadly, Huret died last August. Thanks are also due to Prof. Jean-Yves Mollier of the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, one of the foremost historians of the book in France, who has always been willing and able to answer my questions. Marc H. Smith, from Newcastle, a leading palaeographer first in Paris and then New York, helped me with questions of typography after I had discovered his “Du manuscrit à la typographie numérique” (Gazette du livre medieval, n° 52-53, 2008: 51-78) and needed information about 1920s types. An unfailing source of information about all things typographical is Wolfgang Beinert, Berlin (www.typolexikon.de), whose newsletter I can recommend. Another English correspondent, who took a lot of trouble to unearth biographical details about Theodore Naish, the illustrator of Gulliver’s Travels in the Penguin Illustrated Classics series, is Geoff Hassell (www.artbiogs.co.uk). Philip Sykas and Jeremy Parrett (Manchester Metropolitan University) kindly cooperated to supply information on Sonia Woolf, the illustrator of de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (The Bodley Head, 1930). Resounding thanks are due to The Society of Authors, London, who not only answered my enquiry about permission to quote (almost the only institution that bothered! ) but actually granted permission to quote as much as I needed from Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God and to reproduce all the 436 6 Afterword: Some conclusions and an outlook <?page no="437"?> engravings that I wanted to discuss. Happily, even the most unlikely enquiries may lead to interesting results: my copy of Irène Némirovsky’s David Golder (Le Livre Moderne Illustré 126, 1938) carries a stamp on the cover and on the title page which roused my curiosity: SIBÉ à Tilh (Landes)/ Épicerie-Mercerie. My letter to the Mairie at Tilh was soon answered by the mayor himself, M. Jean Darraspen, who confirmed that yes, there had been such a shop kept by Mme. Sibé, who lent her books, stamped with their owner’s name and address, to interested customers, including M. Darraspen’s mother and grandmother, who liked to exchange ideas with Mme. Sibé about what they had been reading. Thanks also go to Michel Tomasek of the Société Dunkerquoise d’Histoire et Archéologie who solved the riddle of Paul Pruvost, alias Paul François, winner of the Grand Prix Gustave Doré in 1925. Then I want to thank two German correspondents, first Dr. Maria Effinger, Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, who repeatedly helped me with information about important art magazines of the early 20 th century. Special thanks are due to Dr. Heide Rezepa-Zabel, whose illuminating essay “Neuere Forschungsergebnisse zum Deutschen Warenbuch” I had found on the website of the Werkbundarchiv Museum der Dinge (www .museumderdinge.de). The Deutsches Warenbuch (1915) (discussed in Ch. 2.3) provides a missing link between everyday household cultures and the book cultures of the 20s and 30s. 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