Front cover of Literary Life by Posy Simmonds (2003)
I’ve noticed that many of Simmonds’s books are not numbered. This slender hardback contains sixty-four pages of cartoons satirising all aspects of the literary life, from the panic of sitting in an empty room staring at a computer with writer’s block, to the backstabbing and paranoia of literary parties, to the loneliness of book signings, to the plight of small independent bookshops, and so on.
The obvious thing about this subject is its extreme obviousness. They say, ‘Write about what you know’, well what could be more familiar, and more hackneyed, clichéd and done to death, than the subject of a writer writing about writing – about the petty discomforts, the irritations, the niggling jealousy and petty rivalries and bitching and in-fighting and gossiping of the literary world.
What ‘serious’ novelist hasn’t written a book about a novelist writing a book or how tough it is being a writer or how hard it is coming up with new stuff, and so on and self-pityingly, narcissistically on…
Literary Life
- Writer’s block Six frames showing a woman writer alone in her kitchen (apart from her cat, natch) struggling from 9.05 am to 12.30 pm to produce just one sentence and that one, in the end, one of venom and violence expressing her suppressed frustration.
- Wintergreenes An independent bookshop which is being threatened because a vast branch of ‘Boulders’ has just opened down the road. Three characters, the plump middle-aged owner, Penny, a skinny girl assistant Zoe, and a stubbly angry young man who swears so much abuse at the new Boulders that Penny calls him in because he’s putting off the customers.
- Wintergreenes Colin is still moaning about the new branch of Boulders up the road to which optimistic Penny replies that it’s a muzak-filled hypermarket whereas what their little shop offers is intimacy and personal service. Colin jaundicedly replies that what their shop offers is shelter from the rain for a couple of alcoholics and a mum with her shopping.
- Time goes by… At a book launch a middle aged man tells his companion that when he was young, he used to get turned on by leggy young things dressed in short black skirts but nowadays he remembers they’re just from the publicity department and fantasises about… them selling more copies of his novel.
- Panel A Q&A session at a literary festival. The joke is the panel consists of a kindly old buffer, a smart young woman, a stubbly dud smoking a fag and a broad serious-looking man, so that when a guy in the audience asks a question about so-and-so’s work being all about extreme violence and sadism and coprophilia and so on, we’re expecting him to be addressing stubbly bloke or broad serious bloke, but it turns out he’s talking about the works of the harmless looking old buffer in the half-rim glasses.
Q&A by Posy Simmonds (2002)
- The same character in the right of the strip above (Owen), appears at home in a book-lined study reading a newspaper review to his wife and rejoicing because it slaughters the new book of a rival, right up till the moment that his wife points out that the only reason he hates his rival (Denton) is because he slept with her (the wife) at Oxford.
- One big picture showing four adults on a long train journey trying to read their own books while an enthusiastic schoolgirl gives them a long, detailed explanation of the latest Harry Potter book. (The first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published on 26 June 1997.)
- Wintergreene The rep of a publishers makes his monthly visit and tries to interest Penny in their latest publication. She insists it is garbage, rubbish, with zero cultural value until the rep mentions that the same author’s last book sold 400,000… at which Penny swiftly changes her tune and says, Put me down for six.
- A man’s soliloquy about moving to the country and joining the village reading group which gives an accurate and withering portrayal of all the petty jealousies and rivalries and irritations it causes.
- Owen’s book signing We learn that the rugged-face author we first met in the Q&A panel is named Owen Lloyd and we see him at a book signing in a bookshop where no one at all stops by to buy a copy of his book. There is some bitter Simmonds satire because what we read is Lloyd’s maundering self-pity about nobody coming up, the pity in the eyes of the booksellers and his PR agent, and how nobody, oh nobody, knows what it is like to be ignored, he thinks as… he and the pretty young publishers assistant walk right by a homeless man on the street begging for some change.
- A teenage couple are in bed asleep when there’s a knocking at the door and they realise her parents have come home early. She opens the door an fraction to the suspicious parents but then completely diverts their attention by assuring them she is doing her revision and quoting from Keats. Mollified, they go away.
- Enemies of promise A woman writer is trying to write in the stylish open plan house but is completely put off by the sound of her husband upstairs trying to give a bottle to their toddler, with accompanying commentary and chatter. Pity the poor woman writer in her luxury house!
- Big single cartoon of a drinks party in a big bookshop and a middle-aged writer chatting up one of the short-skirted waitresses with the immortal line: ‘You know, you’re really beautiful… Have you ever thought of being a novelist?’
- A cool, stubbly author in shades spends ten pictures of the strip complaining like mad about how awful it is to be so successful and rich and be recognised everywhere and be bothered by fans all the time – his doleful friend uttering agreement – saying they just won’t leave him alone, take that couple of young women over there, they… they… but in fact the two women get up and simply walk out the bar… at which point the ‘successful’ author says ‘Bitches’.
- Same young male author who we now learn is named Sean Poker and is ringing his agent because he’s been offered the opportunity to model for a new set of designer pants.
- A woman writer in a nice Pringle sweater is sitting in a front room festooned with Christmas tree and cards (and accompanied by her cat, natch) as she reads through several paragraphs she’s written about the First World War till she comes to the word stuffing (‘kicked the battered armchair whose stuffing…) at which point she leaps up and runs outside to catch her husband who’s just getting into the car to go shopping, and tells him not to forget the stuffing.
- At a literary party attended by Owen Lloyd a woman is explaining how she organised a petition to complain about some political cause. ‘And has there been a reaction?’ asks Owen. ‘You know, the usual predictable stuff,’ she replies, and what she means is there’s been a jealous outcry from all the authors who weren’t invited to join the petition.
- Wintergreene In the local independent bookshop one customer is giving bother, dripping rainwater and coughing and sneezing over the books.
Wintergreene by Posy Simmonds
- One big illustration showing a confident man leading his reluctant wife and friends on a big walk through the woods and pontificating: ‘… and when, you know, any minute we could all die of smallpox, or anthrax… you think “Why? Why does one write? What a futile occupation! What difference could a bloody book make to anything!?… and then you think, “No, come on… isn’t that something rather magnificent – sitting at one’s PC in the face of Armageddon?” And, that in a nutshell, is the theme of…’
- Wintergreene Penny the owner tells skinny Zoe to be more polite so the next customer who comes in get the full ingratiating service and Zoe agrees to order three copies of a book which, it turns out, the lady ordering wrote herself and is published by a vanity press – at which point Penny explodes with swearing and angriness, contradicting her own earlier strictures for Zoe to be polite, at which point… they both realise that trying to give up cigarettes is HELL, so that’s what the strip is really about.
- Full page cartoon showing a big tall paunchy man in a suit on the phone in an open plan office complaining, at length, about the shoddy production values on a recent book…
- Ecstasy Featuring the thickset author Owen Lloyd, he is surfing the internet looking to see how much copies of his novels are fetching on Ebay and is gratified that first editions are fetching up to $790 until he comes across a copy which bears a personal inscription, which he remembers writing to the love of his life, and so is FURIOUS with her.
- A big one-page cartoon showing various children’s characters (bears, giraffes, Alice in Wonderland I think) all drinking and smoking in a book-lined room, obviously at a sort of party for children’s book characters and one rabbit is asking another: ‘So how did you get into children’s publishing?’ and the other is replying, ‘Oh, it’s in the family… my father was a Flopsy Bunny’. As so often with Simmonds, you feel it’s clever without being actually funny.
- A big, page-sized cartoon spoofing magazines aimed at women and their babies: this is called Your new Baby but ‘baby; is metaphor’ for book.
- The Literary Three Three parody schoolgirls from a 1950s private school receive a book from their time-travelling Uncle Bill. It is a book about schoolgirls in 2003, for some reasons schoolgirls in New York whose parents are frightfully rich if divorced, and she and her friends play truant, nick things from shops, smoke joints and go all the way with boys.
- A writer sits in a book-lined room with his laptop open, unable to write while he flips through TV channels, which are showing: 10 worst motorway pile-ups, Killer mud-slides, Killer bees, Hitler’s torturers, until he finally comes upon a channel showing Noddy, cheers up, and starts tapping away at his book.
- A strip satirising a woman writer writing a sex scene who, the more feverish the scene becomes, the more intensely she focuses and writes. More to the point, the more brutal and primal the cartoon becomes, until drawn in wide, thick, primal lines. The couple she’s describing climax, and the writer leans back and lights herself a cigarette.
Writer’s orgasm by Posy Simmonds
- Wintergreene Zoe is off to the local supermarket. The ‘joke’ is that she can buy books from the supermarket to stock their little independent bookshop cheaper than they can buy them from the publishers.
- One large cartoon showing a tearful woman walking out on a bespectacled writer sitting in front of his computer, and saying: ‘Wait, Charlotte!.. You can’t leave me now, I haven’t finished my novel – I need your misery!’
- A young woman tells her frumpy middle-aged mother that she’s packing in writing a book, and even being a reviewer, because she wants to be a full-time, stay-at-home mum. The mum gives a whole list of how horrible it will be to be so isolated and patronised and then cheerfully concludes, there’ll be a good polemical feminist book in it!
- The national character Successive hikers come across a stand of daffodils and, in succession, fumble to quote the famous Wordsworth poem.
- Dr Derek’s casebook Spoof advice column in which the twist is that Dr Derek gives ‘literary’ advice to struggling writers. Suzie X spends sits for hours and hours in her little room and nothing comes out. Yes, she has writer’s block!
- Dr Derek’s casebook Vicki X comes about her husband, who’s developed a swollen head ever since he won the Booker Prize. Yes, he’s suffering from ‘swollen head’.
- One big cartoon in which a couple well into middle-age are sitting in their book-littered front room and, to his great irritation, his wife is reading some of the old love letters he sent her.
- Facts and fallacies No.6 Children’s picture books An extended satire on common misconceptions about children’s books i.e. they are written by women in Suffolk cottages, only take five minutes to think of the story, 98% of people who work in children’s publishing are called Emma, everyone who works in picture books are held in the highest esteem. — Reading a strip like this you get the impression that there is no aspect of her life which Posy Simmonds can not feel aggrieved about. It doesn’t strike me as at all funny, but a moan from someone who feels that their own picture books aren’t taken seriously enough.
Facts and Fallacies No. 6 by Posy Simmonds
- Spot the differences Two large cartoons of a dad in his dressing gown in the family kitchen reading review of his new book in the paper watched by his wife and two little girls (and the cat). We are invited to ‘spot the difference’ between one picture in which ‘They rate it’ and the other picture in which ‘they hate it.’ I looked quite carefully and decided there are no differences except that in the ‘rate’ it one, the author, the wife and daughters and the cat are smiling. At about this point I wondered why I was bothering to read this book.
- Pride and prejudice Jane Austen is invited to return from the Great Beyond and be given the full media treatment of an author i.e. rude and probing questions and decides, er, no thanks.
- Facts and fallacies No.11: Publishers’ readers i.e. it is not a cushy little job, 97% of publishers’ readers are not multi-tasking home-makers, there is not a cabal of London writers who reject possible rivals, and so on.
- A big, single cartoon satirising the vast multi-story, department store-style bookshop.
Department store bookshop by Posy Simmonds
- Dr Derek’s casebook James X turns up at Dr Derek’s surgery bleeding, it’s one of the worst cases of ‘a critical mauling’ that he’s ever seen.
- A modern woman is at home on the sofa watching the tennis, for nine frames. On the ninth she hears the front door opening, turns the telly off, and sneaks back into her study, which is where her husband, returning from taking the kids out for a walk, finds her pretending to be hard at work.
- Dr Derek’s casebook Quite a humorous strip in which Dr Derek counsels novelist Colin X about how to do sex in novels properly i.e. cut the purple passages, don’t feel shy about using a rubber (to rub out embarrassing passages) and… once a chapter is quite normal!
Dr Derek’s casebook by Posy Simmonds
- Le Déjeuner sur le Sable One big cartoon parodying Manet’s famous painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe adapted to show three posy Brits sunning themselves in the South of France, with the main male figure reading Proust. — Simmonds has parodied this painting in at least two previous strips.
Le Déjeuner sur le Sable by Posy Simmonds
- Dynaglobe’s summer party Once again we are with author Owen Lloyd as he attends the annual party given by publishing conglomerate, Dynaglobe. How he hates it, getting trapped with some stupendously successful airport novelist, who patronises him on his minuscule sales, the coven of women writers, either trying to rope him into discussion groups, or who you shagged last year and can’t remember their names, or a new young nymphet who you just start chatting up when you notice the gaggle of middle-aged women opposite all watching and tittering. He only goes so people know he’s still alive. — Having been to similar London parties of the well-heeled and successful I find this totally accurate and grimly depressing.
- Nurse Tozer Quite a funny strip which extends the idea of Dr Derek, the literary doctor, over-wrought and on holiday he overhears some bronzed bimbo dismissing a book by Victor Hugo as ‘junk’ and explodes, explaining who Victor Hugo was and calling the woman a moron, until he is hustled away by ever-watchful Nurse Tozer, who then gives quite an interesting speech to the holiday woman about how popular literature comes in bite-sized chunks which wear down your brain. — This was a good strip because it felt like the comedy premise really bore up all the way through the strip.
- Writer’s problems No.4 How to create a buzz An unnamed male author complains that, although he has written three successful crime novels, he has never created a buzz, his real-life persona is too boring, he doesn’t take drugs or have affairs, he loved his parents etc. The strip then ironically recommends that next time he’s at a literary party he takes a pair of rubber gloves, blows one up, places it over his head, then lets it go and it will blow round the room creating… a tremendous buzz!
- seasonal traditions in the book trade No.2 Spotting the Christmas turkeys The three staff at the independent bookshop, Wintergreene, which we’ve come to know through several strips – owner Penny, slender sprite Zoe and stubbly earnest young man Colin – are depicted reading the publishers’ catalogues for the upcoming Christmas period and taking the mickey out of the synopses of the direst-sounding books – ‘lifts the lid off media-folk in Alderley Edge…’, ‘… an epistolary novel done in text messages…’, ‘… another bloody book about moving to a Provençal village…’
- One enormous cartoon showing a disgruntled author (Nat Tarby) in a vast modern bookstore all set and ready to do a book-signing with piles of his books on the table in front of him and… not a customer in sight. — I feel like Simmonds has depicted this scene of the disappointing book-signing at least 3 or 4 times already. She may think it’s endlessly funny, but once was sort of enough.
Murder at Matabele Mansions: A Christmas Mystery
A six-page graphic short story, a murder mystery in which woman Detective Sergeant Stoker phones Detective Inspector Collar from a crime scene at the back of a mansion block. The body of unpopular second-hand book-seller Godfrey Fibone, 58, is found round the back of Matabele Mansions, apparently in the act of carrying a black bin liner out to the dustbins he slipped and cracked his head.
However, Stoker and Collar notice that the contents of the bin-liner are strangely inappropriate for a man who lived alone, including dirty nappies (he had no children), tea bags, a curry TV dinner, and cat food tins (he didn’t own a cat).
So they set about interviewing all the inhabitants of the mansions – which gives Simmonds an opportunity to display her gift for characterisation, not only in drawing but in the very dense text which describes each of the dead man’s neighbours, being:
- Viv and Chris Collins-Smith, website designers
- June Tozer, divorcee and masseuse
- Gavin Boyce, novelist
- rude Dennis Buttril
- Mrs Kowalski, entertaining her daughter and son-in-law to dinner
- Tim Makepeace, a research chemist
- Ian MacDire, worked for British Telecom
Next day forensics confirm Fibone was murdered, then carried out to where his body was arranged to make it look as if he’d slipped and had an accident. The detritus in the bin bag, combined with what the two police learned in their interviews, should be enough for the reader to work out who the murderer was. Can you work it out?
Cinderella
Another six-page graphic short story, starts with Desmond Duff, 85, inhabitant of an old people’s home (alert readers will remember that Desmond featured as the man of the month for April in the calendar for 1988 which Simmonds drew for the Spectator).
He and his fellow inhabitant, Joan, learn the owners are throwing a lavish Christmas party to which residents are not invited. As they hear the first sounds of music a fairy god-daughter appears and gives them their wish, giving them back their youths, making Desmond a very smart, svelte 20-something, and Joan a stylish young lady in a ball gown and fur. But they must be back in the home by midnight.
They set off to the party and make quite a splash, Desmond impressing with his suavity, Joan being immediately chatted up by a lothario who invites her out to his car for a bit of slap and tickle. Several guests trigger Desmond into giving a blistering lecture about how miserable it is living in their hosts’ old people’s home, how they’re treated like crap, the accommodation is rotting, the food is dismal, and is in mid-flow when he hears the clock ringing midnight and so runs out into the snow where he transforms back into his 85-year-old body…
Finds himself in the car park where the young Lothario emerges partly unbuttoned and holding a slipper, describes how he was in a passionate clinch with the ravishing young beauty who suddenly wriggled out of his grasp and ran off, leaving only a slipper behind. Clutching the slipper, he stumbles back into the party and old Joan comes out of her hiding place behind a car, embraces Desmond, says ‘Wasn’t it wonderful?’ and they potter slowly back towards the home.
But there is a happy end note. Desmond’s rant in the party, in front of lots of influential guests, has spurred the owners to make improvements, sort out the smell on the stairs and fix Desmond’s radiator etc, and generally fuss over Desmond and Joan. So it’s a happy ending! Cheers!
Thoughts
The subject of writers, authors, novelists agonising, writer’s block, book-signings and endless literary parties – I don’t think any subject could bore me more. A few of the strips or cartoons are amusing, but most are wearing, or positively depressing.
The interest, such as it is, comes from the extraordinary variety of cartooning styles which Simmonds deploys. There’s:
- the spoof true romance style of the Dr Derek strip, where the characters all have the same kind of chiselled angular outlines
- the freestanding humorous cartoon of the department story-style book warehouse, where all the figures have softened rounded outlines
- the facts and fallacies strip which, along with the Owen Lloyd cartoons, has a looser drawing style and is meant to create a much wider variety of faces and characters
- the sketchy loose, unfinished lines of the Writer’s orgasm strip, which starts loose and then deliberately becomes bold and fragmented to visually make the point
- the ‘cartoon realism’ of the Wintergreene strips – in the one above look at the tremendous attention to detail paid in the opening picture which depicts the shop frontage in the rain, or the third picture which shows the geography of the shop’s interior, dominated by a stand of books in the foreground which divides the disapproving owner on the left and browsing punter on the right
- the Le Déjeuner sur le Sable style, which is so loose and scratchy that bits of it could almost be by Quentin Blake
- and the Writers’ panel at the top of this review which has realism of a sort – witness the microphones in front of the speakers – but a sort of wobbly or wonky realism – the microphones aren’t drawn with the same razor sharp precision as the exterior of the Wintergreene shop – instead it is a realism softened or mollified in order to bring out the variety of human faces in the audience and on the panel – it is just enough realism to create a space in which comic types can exist
These are all distinct drawing or cartooning styles (plus some others I haven’t mentioned) which Simmonds has mastered and can deploy at will. It’s an impressive display of versatility and virtuosity.
So for me, there are half a dozen funny strips in the book (if their aim is to be funny or entertaining) but the real pleasure to be had derives from Simmond’s impressive mastery of the craft of drawing, her fluency and versatility.
Books & Boots 