Matchstick Historian

Low's AUTOBIOGRAPHY (387 pp.)--David Low--Simon & Schuster ($5).

David Low, perhaps the most famed political cartoonist of modern times, worked over the faces of the great with a wooden matchstick dipped in India ink. For his own self-portrait he has chosen pastels.

The exhibits in Low's human menagerie --scowling, smirking, always true to life, yet slightly absurd--have stayed in the minds of millions. Apart from talent, all great cartoonists need a point of attack from which to enfilade their natural and necessary enemy--the great. Low's point of attack was his own New Zealand background. His Scottish-born father was one of those lovable Victorian cranks--a promoter of religions and patent medicines, and a man who fostered domestic harmony by encouraging intellectual debate. In the raucous, blasphemous, antitraditional political life of New Zealand and Australia, Low found his style, starting at eleven as a cartoonist for dim but gallant little periodicals, then graduating to the rambunctious Sydney Bulletin.

He was handicapped by the fact that when he had to draw a horse he had to see a horse. When he needed a steam roller as a cartoon symbol, the city council obligingly had one driven under the windows of his studio. An admirer also presented him with a stuffed lion. Low gave it away later, having already decided that the "Olympian pet-shop" of national symbols was not good enough for a real cartoonist.

Licensed Jester. By the time Low was ready for London in 1919, he had whittled the heavy chip on his provincial, radical, colonial shoulder into quite a weapon. He knew how to de-stuff shirts, e.g., he recalls that Austen Chamberlain, Britain's Foreign Secretary in the '20s, could not read very well through his celebrated monocle; that Stanley Baldwin, famed for his pipe-puffing, "probably smoked cigarettes in private."

The best thing in the book is Low's shoptalk, e.g., his irritation with Churchill because a pink-and-sandy man cannot be properly rendered in black and white. The worst is an occasional resemblance to that dreary form of literature, the theatrical reminiscence. His pride rings out most clearly when he recounts how heads of state sent emissaries to his studio to ask for originals of his caricatures to decorate the walls of their vanity. This may help explain how the boy radical became a sort of licensed jester at the court of his political enemies. Even "Colonel Blimp," Low's greatest gift to the popular mythology of politics, somehow went wrong. They made a film about Blimp, and it turned into a defense of all the stuffy traditions Low had spent his life deriding.

A Nice Cup of Tea. The clue to Low's story is that his Socialist youth in the Antipodes was a garden of innocence which gave him a child's-eye view of all those paper monsters who cry "fee-fi-fo-fum." When real monsters like Hitler and Stalin or even Mussolini intruded into the world, his art--however inspired and amusing--could at times be false. Hitler was not Low's Brunhildish operatic female impersonator. And Stalin was not just Low's slightly wicked "Uncle Joe," but a symbol of a system so monstrous as to make Low's homely truths a kind of lie. Low's masters--Brueghel, Gillray, Hogarth or Daumier--might have dealt differently with these figures. Low actually cossetted and flattered the Englishman's talent for domesticating the strange, savage and barbarous by offering them what Low himself called for at Lord Beaverbrook's champagne dinners--"a nice cup of tea."

That warm twinkle in the eye--which is suggested in his photographs and in Low's own cartoons of Low--is probably what made him stop short of true satire, but perhaps also what endeared him to his public. Low never knowingly struck a low blow in his life, as Bernard Shaw realized when he saluted him in a note:

Unhappy Low, lie down

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

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