details, what was wrong with the nuclear family, the thankless tedium of duty, at the same time as the conventional culture all around sang the praises of the homestead. It was a highly concentrated and dyspeptic sitcom, but – and this is the mystery and spirit of cartoon art – it was still funny. It made me laugh then, and, now that I am however strangely happily in that centurion’s caligulae, more or less, it makes me laugh even more.
But when young, in those days, one felt that merely to hold a book with such a number of illustrations was a signal of rebellion in itself; we felt obscurely that Searle’s drawings begged authoritarian disapproval simply by existing in such profusion. That they also flayed their subjects with a merciless and unforgiving line – both grotesque and precise, one never looked at the world the same way after his illustrations as one did before – made it all the better. That it was done with such sympathetic relish made it even better than that. Parents were embarrassing, hypocritical cretins, either callous in the victory of worldly success, or living pitiable lives of continual defeat; schoolmasters incompetent frauds, either grasping, sottish, brutal, ignorant or half-dead. Searle got them just right. We learned, through this astonishing partnership between text and pictures, the incontrovertible urgency of satire.
And in that we see the circular, autophagic compulsion of the satirist. The world is horrible; but without the horror the satirist would be out of a job. It is necessary that the satirist does not make it a better place. This can drive them mad; Swift predicted as much of himself, and he was right. Searle, however, has not been driven mad, precisely because of the medium he works in, which is low enough in the conventionally accepted artistic hierarchy to escape either serious and damaging scrutiny or pontification; and, crucially, it makes us laugh. This is a matter of almost tiresome obviousness but it is important. The cadaverous bookseller who asks the invisible purchaser – us? – whether he or she wants The Anatomy of Melancholy wrapped up ‘or will you read it now?’ is in itself (as Burton intended his own work to be) a cure for melancholy, yet acknowledging the fundamental justness of the bookseller’s position. It also bespeaks a strange satisfaction with one’s own gloomy view of the world – that one just can’t wait to read The Anatomy of Melancholy. (I would not be surprised to learn that Searle was handed the cartoon on a plate, as it were, by an event in real life.)
Searle’s laughter has something heroic in it: he may expose his subjects as figures of fun, but there is in this an implicit gratitude that such people have persisted, 1 despite the artist’s knowing, eternal gaze, and against their better judgement (that is, had they any such to speak of), in their dreams of success. Hence his sequence of drawings for his own Rakes’ Progresses, where instead of a Hogarthian denunciation of indolence and vice, he mocks instead the aspirations of those deemed worthy by society: the politician, the doctor, the poet; the most tenderly observed is, paradoxically, the incompetent Master of Foxhounds, continually breaking his collarbone (that most ludic and trifling of injuries) and in the end mourned by a pack, if that is the word, of baying foxes.
We know this is satire, and not pasquinade, because so much of it still works. We might not get all the references, but their surroundings still jolt us with their timeless perspicacity. (The politician’s downfall: ‘Encouraged by success expresses an opinion. Cast out by whips. Expelled from Party.’) Some have been waiting to be fulfilled: the St Trinian’s girl being exhorted, while injecting a competitor with a tranquillizer, to fair play: ‘always use a clean needle.’
Searle was born, in 1920, in Cambridge, into a socially anonymous background, where male children were expected to be clerks or minor civil servants. Placed almost squarely in the middle of society, he had the ideal vantage point from which to observe his country, without having to suffer the distortion of an undue affection for his origins. It is an easy background to shrug off if you know what you want to do with yourself, and Searle did know, from an early age. In his introduction to Ronald Searle in Perspective (1984), he wrote:
Quite suddenly I began to draw. I had been scribbling for ever. Now it took shape and I became, first