Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd. 

         What did scar me was the treble isolation of being an only child of parents who were distant from me and from each other; being myself, whoever that was, amid my peers, who all seemed to have firm identities; and being a stranger in a strange land. It could have been the recipe for another Hitler, and it certainly explains in part my lifelong interest in bizarre loners, including the Führer, whom I see as a kind of crazy country cousin, or at least a warning to the curious, a signpost pointing to how we shy, silent brooders, brewing our resentments like black Irish tea, might end up.

     Fortunately, circumstances deposited me far short of Hitlerization and merely made me the timorous, introverted, blustering, and stateless soul that I am today. In a word (actually two, initial-capped): A Writer. I don’t know when I started writing, but I read A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six a year too late. My reaction was, “Now I am seven.” This led, with my Anglophile Mum’s encouragement, to Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows and Just William and an imaginary English childhood of puddle-bright lanes and dew-heavy oaks and thatched cottages and hunting horns in the New Forest and my first attempts to connect words on paper. Encouraged by having no other source of entertainment, television being banned from our house (I never had a TV until I was over twenty, and still regard the things with faint traces of my early superstitious awe), I remember circumnavigating the writing art for quite a while as an amateur draughtsman, or draughtsboy; I drew comic strips and cartoons featuring valiant ducks and gallant geese and heroic seals, all aquatic animals an astrologer would no doubt ascribe to the water sign (Cancer) under which I was born. My first written work, destined not for the ages but for the dumpster, was the multi-volume series The Adventures of Louie Duck, a series of plotless non sequiturs interspersed with clumsy drawings depicting, for example, the hero duck as a kind of walking pillow surmounted by an egg to which a banana was affixed. I was inspired by the Walt Disney cartoons and the Belgian comic strip Tintin: the dramatis personae of the former, the globe-trotting and boisterous humor of the latter. My Louie was a traveling duck whose best friend was a seal (as I drew it, a medieval-looking hairy bewhiskered fish), a distant relation no doubt of that stuffed seal long lost on Trafalgar Square. Together, in a Renault Alpine convertible, shifting gears with humanoid wing or flipper, they went where I’d never been: Nepal and Peru and China, for example, places I could only imagine but where adventure took my mind and my proxies. No humans ever appeared in Louie’s adventures. For one thing, for a bad artist, animals were easier to draw than humans. For another, animals are blank slates on which any kind of personality, from the noble to the buffoonish, can be inscribed: hence the success of Mickey, Donald & Co.

    Anyway, Louie was more homage to Tintin than to Disney’s banal cartoon ducks. The characters are spoofs, but endearing and recognizable, and always deftly drawn: Tintin himself, the arch-boy scout; Professor Tournesol (anglice Calculus) the mad scientist; the Dupont twins, dry runs for Inspector Clouseau, and in some ways much funnier; Captain Haddock the blustering boozy old sea-dog; Colonel Sponsz, the Beria of Borduria (The Calculus Affair), an ideal Balkan autocrat, down to his cigarette holder, shaved head and monocle. Ottokar, King of Syldavia (King Ottokar’s Sceptre), has the sensitive manliness of a Tsarevich, or—more likely, given Hergé’s Belgian origins—an idealized King Leopold. The miracle of Hergé is that in his stylized caricatures he managed somehow to create a cast of characters more vivid and enduring than those in most novels. Personally, I identified with Captain Haddock, who, in Red Rackham’s Treasure,  found a fortune and spent it wisely on whiskey, a country manor (Moulinsart, brilliantly rendered “Marlinspike” in English), and a cream-colored Plymouth convertible. The Tintin books contain menace and derring-do and generosity, but no carnage; and the illustrations elevate the series to the level of art. In each panel, the cars, buildings, airplanes, uniforms and other details of everyday life are rendered with near-obsessive accuracy. Only sex is missing, but I didn’t miss it. Tintin’s is a brawny, boyish world with no keyholes to peer through (and nothing to peer at, anyway, even if there were).