My Favourite Gay Nazi.
Is it time to start burning some children's books?
I used to wonder who short film festivals imagined were in attendance? Who was it precisely that urgently needed to endure 7 or 8 ten minute films explaining that war is bad, racism hateful and homophobia pathetic? Pol Pot? Osama Bin Laden? Liz Truss? These days I get my easy morality from children’s books where, to be fair, the intended audience usually are struggling with the basics.
Nevertheless, opening yet another book where some brightly coloured creature is lectured in verse that they must share, be kind, be brave, stay happy, calm down and play nicely sets my teeth on edge. Yes, sure, but what else? So I can’t quite love Fair Shares by Pippa Goodhart and Anna Doherty, but I do appreciate it breaking down the concept of relative fairness. They’re right, it isn’t actually fair to give both Bear and Hare only one chair each, if Hare needs two chairs to reach up to the pears.
Oh but give me a writer in flow! A writer out of control! Like Judith Kerr, always promising answers but never finding any. Or Dostoyevsky trying to write piously in support of the Orthodox Church and ending up with the Brother’s Karamazov because he couldn’t stop his pen exploring a reality fuller than his narrow convictions allowed for. Or Hergé, commissioned by a Fascist priest to write Tintin for a rightwing Catholic newspaper but soon finding his creation explored a world more complex than either artist or publisher expected.
There’s no hiding from it though, Tintin poses a problem. Racist? Sure. Openly and shockingly so in Tintin in the Congo, an early work of pro-Colonial propaganda that grows more obscene the more you comprehend what the Belgians did in that country. Anti-semitic? Subtler (‘aint it always) but also inescapable. But looking behind the art to the intentions of the artist we find… oh, that Hergé was charged with collaboration for continuing to publish Tintin in Le Soir, a newspaper run by the Nazis during the occupation of Belgium. In fact even before the war, Abbé Norbert Wallez, who kept a signed portrait of Mussolini on his desk, wasn’t just Hergé’s editor and patron but the father figure who arranged his first catastrophic marriage.
So Hergé held the views of his time, right? Well, he’s not the only children’s author to have lived through the war against fascism. Tove Jansson, artist and author of the equally seminal Moomin stories wrote in the same period. Her response to the war was to satirise Hitler in an anti-fascist magazine. It’s not like it’s was a surprise that the Nazis were wrong. It’s not the case that everyone was a jew hating, misogynistic, homophobic racist until 1983 so anyone with those views before then gets a free pass. Yes cultural standards have changed but even by the standard of 1933 Hergé was a bigot and that’s not even getting into the essential misogyny of a worldview all but absent any female characters at all. So extreme is Hergé’s erasure of women that today it’s hard not to read the books as works of groundbreaking gay fiction. Far easier now Tintin’s unspoken love for his over protective bear Captain Haddock than the 1970’s soft porn sexuality of Asterix and Obelix. (“Daddy, why is Obelix following that lady into her house?”)
Tove Jansson was born in 1914 in Helsinki, part of the Swedish speaking minority community. Her father a sculptor, her mother an illustrator and graphic designer who worked at Garm, the anti-fascist magazine that would later publish her daughter’s work. All three of their children became artists. Tove travelled Europe with her family and studied in Helsinki, then Stockholm, then Paris. She was seven years younger than Georges Remi, who was born in Etterbeek in Brussels. His father, who worked in a confectionary factory was the illegitimate child of a chambermaid, Georges’ mother was a housewife. They were Catholic and conservative, both Georges and his younger brother would join the army. Georges described his childhood as grey and lonely and would later talk opaquely of physical trauma “seared into my mind during my youth and adolescence”. Georges did travel extensively across Europe as a teenager but only thanks to his immersion in the Boy Scout Movement, it was his Scoutmaster who first encouraged his artistic ability. So whilst it is wrong to pass off the man who would be Hergé as just “a man of his time”, it is also too simplistic to demand that this boy from a little grey suburb should see the same rainbow as the girl growing up welcomed as both artist and outsider.
Hergé did publish comics that lampooned Mussolini and Hitler, they’re not as good as Jansson’s but they had the same effect, the same affect as short films about how bad war is. Hergé wrote in defense of the Native Americans, and against capitalism and imperialism. In 1934 Zhang Chongren, a Catholic Chinese artist studying in Brussels, introduced him to Taoism, inspiring greater degrees of realism and cultural curiosity in his work. I mean granted the subsequent story, Tintin and the Blue Lotus is racist about the Japanese but their army had just committed war crimes in Manchuria so, to be fair, no one comes out of this well.
Hergé drew the world at the pace he encountered it. He never became the man you or I might wish him to have been, but lives are not lived as moral lessons for my children. The Tintin stories are gripping, funny, hopeful and mad. This is the world as Hergé wished it but also as he saw it. That unresolvable tension animates, fails simplicity and instead creates blanks we must fill. Isn’t the fearful power of art not what it smuggles from the creator but what it brings out of ourselves? Pioneer of the ligne claire drawing style, Hergé renders the world stark and flat yet simultaneously rich in detail and full of complexity.
More modern delights getting heavy bedtime rotation at the moment are Nadia Shireen’s subtly subversive and deliciously silly Billy And The Pirates and Chris Haughton’s Maybe which is masterpiece of comic tension.
My screenwriting course runs again this September in London and on zoom. Book your place here. “Ben’s course was the best investment I’ve made in the writing of my screenplay”