New York Caricatures
David Levine’s pictures from the Review’s early days
The David Levine Album of Drawings from The New York Review of Books
The image of W. H. Auden appears, cross-hatched. The first of David Levine’s collection of caricatures. What is he doing? He’s standing quite casually. Cigarette, of course, burning away in languid, forgotten hand. It’s the face we’re interested in. The immense, lined face. Ugly, one might even say, a face that’s been around, a face quite beaten and worn. Keen dark eyes shrouded — surrounded by a great flyaway mop of uneasy hair.
A weary philosophe — is that what Levine wants us to think of Auden? A man whose fame was at its heights when he was somehow, improbably young?
Of Charles de Gaulle, there are more definite things to say. He is less enigmatic. Some features are obvious and more eagerly applied by Lebine. The great Gallic nose — beloved of French caricaturists, from the most elegant to the more scurrilous — is represented here. It casts an immense shadow over the bottom left quadrant of the general’s face. The massive head summits a reed-thin body. And the general is grasping a microphone stand. He’s singing like a crooner, a flowery bow-tie about his pencil neck. ‘J’entends ...’ the general is singing.
I hear.
Less interesting, I must confess, are the Beatles. Levine has them as bizarre characters — mop-topped midgets (beetles, would you believe), except Harrison, whose face is long and distended and somehow aristocratic. Paul McCartney has the front teeth of the cartoon chipmunk; Ringo Starr taps away at a child’s drum. John Lennon wears sunglasses, has slightly more unruly hair than the rest, and looks both more self-satisfied and, with less pleasant features, more severe.
Dame Edith Sitwell is the insane Englishwoman of common recreation. Her features — already sharp and terrifying in real life and photographs — are filed down to a brutal point here. She is bent-backed with age and eccentricity, covered in muslin and silks like some bad imitation of an oriental aristocrat. In a cruelly straight, and bizarrely patterned, wing-back chair, around which she gazes at the viewer like a serpent. An immense, parabolic nose almost touches the papers balanced on a minute escritoire.
And Jack Kerouac, of course, is a barefoot youth, a hobo. Wandering the world dressed in roughs, a bindle over his shoulder. And he’s got long hair, hair so long and untidy that it’s slanting over his head and covering one eye. The other eye looks out at you cynically. As if he knows all and you’re just too square, too incapable of seeing it, man — unequipped to know what it all means.
The spectacle of Lyndon Johnson, a false conquering hero from antiquity, clad in toga with the laurels of triumph placed mockingly on his nose, is less interesting. This picture, for all its technical competence, has little to arrest the viewer. It might appear, sixty years on, in a textbook of American history. But I can’t imagine many of Levine’s own day seeing it and believing that he’d really potted his subject and got to his cold, black heart.
Ditto Picasso, depicted here as an old satyr, small and covered, of course, in coarse fur. With his goat legs and hooves, how much subtlety can we really claim for this satire? All we might say in its defence is that Picasso’s face and head are well rendered; that it is funny for a disciple of Pan to hold a palette and a brush, and to be perched upon a rock, facing the viewer.
Perhaps the most audacious picture of this collection is one of Rupert Brooke, dead fifty years by 1965 but perhaps undergoing another cycle of public approval and tragic worship at that very moment. Levine has him with a small, lithe body and an immense, beautiful head. Boyish, a lot of hair in messy curtains. The figure is crouched, staring eagerly at his own reflection in a tranquil pool. Pure Narcissus — the impression many readers of Brooke ever since have partly shared.
Pope John XXIII, en passant, is depicted looking like all fat popes: undistinguished save in bulk. No different to all the rest of them. Perhaps this is a strangely generic caricature of the man who called the Second Vatican Council.
Baudelaire, meanwhile, looks cruel and hard: his long hair ferociously receding, his dress old fashioned and raffish, a big forehead, a brutal gaze. While Günter Grass — moustachioed like a Mexican bandit — sits underneath a restaurant table, amid a forest of legs, contorted and pulled into himself, his knees abutting his shoulders, as he pecks away at a typewriter, his dull eyes looking furtively around. Freud gives a tour of an immense couch to a lady — hidden behind him, almost eclipsed — with Freud himself serious and determined and his glasses heavy and immense and thick-rimmed.
It is the last that interests me most, perhaps. This is a sketch portrait, where much of the form is almost neglected. This last picture is of Alexander Pushkin, author of Onegin, one of the greatest poets the world has yet produced. In pictures by others — formal portraits by Kiprensky, for instance, ridiculous mock-heroic renderings by Repin — Pushkin seems older than his years, measured even if in declamation, serious.
Yet I think Levine gets at something different: his Pushkin has immense, wild eyes, a puckish air, a barely suppressed madness. This is, after all, the Pushkin who provoked a duel that killed him. The Pushkin who appeared to fight without a second. The Pushkin of vast debts and a death wish. Of course there was some madness about him.