Looking at Ralph Steadman’s caustic caricatures you’d be forgiven for thinking that he is one of the world’s angriest men But, deep down, he tells Sally Vincent, that’s all because he’s only really angry with one thing: himself.
Something terrible has happened. The air is full of inaudible squeaks of post-holocaust bats’ ghosts. I had imagined Ralph Steadman would look like something out of one of his cartoons; a kind of inverted, anthropomorphised, prehistoric creature, feral, lethal, with razor teeth snarling through an ill-fitting human mask. But he’s a mild-looking bloke, brown-eyed, stocky, with a stillness that might or might not brood to eruption. The first copy of Gonzo: The Art, lies closed in disgrace on the kitchen counter, like a shitty brick hurled through the window by some passing and totally disinterested vandal.
“I’ve seen better printing …” he says in that dangerous tone where anger is well on the way to being subsumed by sorrow “… I’ve seen better printing in a seed catalogue.” His finger, black-grimed around the nail from a lifetime’s intimacy with Indian ink, points to the red-clawed monster on the cover. “It looks like something that’s been left in the barber- shop window for a month,” he laments. “The whole thing smacks of state-of-the-art technology.”
He becomes plaintive. He had been looking forward to this moment. Put everything into this book. And now he is crushed; crushed and disappointed, like the big boys have taken his marbles and put them down the drain. They took an electronic pencil, and drew round his lines, flattened out his graduated backgrounds, stole his depth, reframed his frames, faded out the red of his red, the blue of his blue, while reds and blues of truth and beauty shout their inimitable qualities from their original manifestations in the paintings around us.
“It was rich,” he says, thrusting the poor imitation up against the real thing. “And now it’s poor … Not enough ink … I feel my blood is spilt and left out on the rocks to dry. My heart has been cut out. My guts … Is it worth going on?”
“It’s all right,” says Anna Steadman at last. “He’s had his rant.”
Not so sure, I offer the tale of the fellow who came to plumb in my lavatory and found a heart-searing Steadman dirge of lost love on the cistern and went all teary. “Perhaps my words resonate more than my pictures,” said the poet, somewhat grudgingly. He wanted to know which one it was; even riffled the despised pages to find it. “They can’t fuck up your words, can they?” No, I lied, and tucked my tape recorder under his chin like a bib while he declaimed himself with thrillingly Celtic cadence and a lust for the taste of the emotive fragment.
“`This is the cry/Of hearts betrayed/That would have stayed/To hear the song/That no one played.’ Is this the one the plumber found? `I have danced with many yet I call out to you from the blackness of my ribald night.’ Wry-bald, do you think, or rib- bald? Wry, definitely wry. Yes, wrybald, lovely word. `Come back to rebuild my heart/That woke in darkness just as it had died/In darker ages when the world was young/And I was living proof of life denied.’ Christ, there’s a literal. A bloody misprint, can you believe it? Is there no end to the perfidy?”
There’s nothing for it but to up the ante. This is the poem I once faxed to a thug who had betrayed me, and with no motive other than to hope it broke his worthless heart. Wasn’t that a disgusting thing to do? To use somebody’s most tender sentiments as a weapon of destruction? Steadman is only momentarily lost for words. “I think,” he says, “it’s nice. Nice you did that. What’s poetry if you can’t use it? It’s supposed to be a weapon. Make you laugh, make you cry, anything rather than leave you indifferent. It’s a funny old business. Very gonzo.”
Gonzo has to be contemplated sooner or later. What it means, where it came from, how you recognise it when it bites your bum, none of which you can ask if you don’t want to be taken for someone who was born yesterday with a screw loose. At any event, Steadman doesn’t know any answers, not as such. Only the past historic aspect has any degree of reliability. If we go back 30 years, to an age of relative innocence and political complacency, long before fear and loathing became a household couplet, before the drawing of Richard Nixon with Spiro Agnew spewing out of his backside made its indelible mark on political awareness, before Steadman met Hunter S Thompson in a bar in Kentucky and struck up the rapport that was to revolutionise journalism. Before any of that, there was a man called Bill Cardoso, who knew what gonzo was.
Hence, when the Thompson/Steadman partnership first saw the light of day within the pages of a now defunct and then blacklisted American journal, Cardoso penned a fan-letter. “Dear Hunter,” it said, “That was pure gonzo.” It sounded like a compliment; if not that, it provided a suitably amorphous corporate identity to be going on with. So far as the young Steadman was aware, gonzo meant irony; not just any sarky old irony, but a deep, mind- bogglingly obfuscating irony. The ultimate spanner in the works, the big cock-snook at the ways of the world, the half-cut slouch up the stony path of good intentions that leads to we-all-know-where. Apart from which, it’s either self-defining, or what he says it is, because, like Humpty Dumpty, what he says three times is true. And he means it at the time. He always did. He still does, except there’s a point where gonzo shoots himself in the foot.
Like Kurt Vonnegut’s monstrous twins who when they touched became a single genius, Steadman and Thompson were two disparate creatures who sparked each other into a controlled and angelic subversion. Thompson was Southern posh gone to the bad, gifted, unstable, an ex-con coke-head; Steadman interminably ungifted, a student of artfulness, a fellow who had never so much as smoked a fag behind the bike shed. They were young; in those days, 30 was pretty well adolescent.
In the first flush of their glory days, they sailed fairly close to the wind. Steadman recalls a high jink of dubious quality, when they took it upon themselves to cover the Americas Cup. One night, having indulged in a quart or so of Old Granddaddy, or some fine stuff, they took a sloop out into the harbour to get in among a few billion dollars-worth of the world’s best racing yachts, equipped with a can of spray-paint and a couple of flares.
Alongside the finest craft, Steadman shook his can, which made a hell of a rattling. “Quick, quick,” said Thompson. “Get on with it. We must flee.” What a wonderful word, flee, thought Steadman, who had not imagined he was to be the writer on this joint venture. “Go on,” said Thompson, “You’re the artist.” And so he cast his graffiti on the million-dollar hull and they fled to the pier, where Thompson let off his flares to distract the cops.
So what did he write? What epithet of political correction did he leave behind to shame and enlighten the capitalist pigs of the leisured classes? “Fuck the Pope,” he says, mumbling. He couldn’t think of anything else. And he had to put something.
Once upon a time, he possessed the bravado and naivety to believe he could change the world, that people were amenable to improvement and development. He thought there were good people, of which he was one, and bad people, like Adolf Hitler, who would change when they saw the error of their ways. He thought he’d live to see worldwide peace, harmony and love, a burgeoning of tolerance for diversity of opinion, a general ethos of fair play, decency and all things bright and beautiful. He thought despair was something you drove through hell for leather, and if you put your heart and soul into it you’d find grateful miscreants hanging on your coat-tails heading for nirvana. And now he doesn’t. The bad sods just keep coming. There are too many of them. Which makes him a phoney. He doesn’t believe in the innate reasonableness of humanity, yet he persists with his sentimental, pompous ego-trip against all the evidence of its fatuity because he doesn’t know what else to do. “Gonzo: The Art,” he says darkly. “Now there’s a pathetic cry for help.”
Like all people who famously express anger and disgust for a living, Steadman is neither an angry nor a disgusted man. How could he be? He had a happy childhood. He was well brought up by loving parents, unaware that he, or they, were different from anyone else in the world. He was a compliant, dutiful sort of boy, anxious to do what was expected of him, but lacking the talent and imagination to exert or express himself to any noticeable effect.
He went to school, joined the scouts, sang in the church choir, kissed his bearded aunties and mocked the afflicted. He could see nothing wrong with anything in his boy’s world.
But he couldn’t draw. He knew a boy who drew Mickey Mice that actually looked like Mickey Mouse, and though his admiration was aroused, he experienced no sense of personal aspiration in that direction. In art class, he produced the same old effort: a stretch of rocky cross-etching from right to left, with a bit of twig sticking up dead centre – “Moonlandscape. 1953. R Steadman”. He sketches it out by way of explanation. “The tree, you see, is dead,” he says. He had drawn it on the back of an abusive fax from Hunter S Thompson. “Dear Ralph,” it began, “You really are a filthy little bastard aren’t you.”
This morning, we are in the huge, upturned dustbin of a studio; an exact replica, he insists, of the inside of his brain – with the CD player going full tilt on Spike Jones and His City Slickers. There is hope for us all. You can learn to draw, learn to paint, learn to write, learn anything, even to fly. It doesn’t have to be innate. You don’t have to be born like it. And it’s never too late.
“I can’t reason things,” he says. “Things ease themselves out from amongs the debris. I’m staggering about in a bomb site and coming up with a bit of brick, going, `Here, here it is!’ It’s scatology. Scatology’s a marvellous form of art.” He is a collage; his bits of bricks are words, pictures, music, and the impeccable sleight of hand and eye he takes to them. From time to time, the products of other men’s minds float to the surface to substantiate a bit of the collage. Friedrich Nietzsche – he’s very into Nietzsche – and Spike Milligan, Sigmund Freud, Albert Schweitzer, Leonardo da Vinci, William Burroughs and, of course and always, Hunter S Thompson.
My life, he says … well, it’s been going on for years, and he’s fiddling about with his tapes, looking for another voice with which to express himself. He became a cartoonist out of sheer desperation. He’d tried everything else, and failed. And then he took himself to America. And now listen to this: a portentous flurry of orchestral grandeur preludes the slow, deep, immaculate drawl of Burroughs and sticks around to tart up the odd dramatic pause.
“Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986,” it begins, and proceeds with quiet dignity and no tinge of bitterness to thank America for its world-beating bounty. “Thanks for the American dream/To vulgarise and falsify till the bare lies shine through. Thanks for Indians/Who provide a modicum of challenge and danger. Thanks for the KKK/For decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.” (“Gorgeous, gorgeous,” cries Steadman.) “Thanks for Kill a Queer for Christ stickers … thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs. Thanks for a country where no one’s allowed to mind his own business. Thanks for a nation of finks. Thanks for all the memories/ All right, let’s see your arms. You always were a headache and you always will be a whore.”
And suddenly we’re back, clawless and unable to fly. This is relevant, or revalant, as Steadman pronounces it, lest you should think he’s about to get serious. We have culturally constructed ourselves to be superior to animals. Because we have language. We’re better than them because they don’t talk. We forget they communicate telepathically, which is magic. And why we make animals into totems, all that stuff and nonsense of old, all so beneath us now. Especially in evangelical cultures like America.
It’s all right to have a Jimmy Swaggart in America, he says, shuffling through his tapes for something to say it better. Think of your worst thought, double it, and Swaggart’s done it. That’s evangelicism. Hold something under a stone long enough and it goes rancid. Ah well, he concludes, might as well wear myself like an old suit. Here comes the Gonzo Song, 1970 something or other, featuring himself with the odd comment thrown in by Hunter and (if I heard this right) Nixon’s lawyer’s wife. There’s a lot of Ooooh Gardings and Oooo Yezzzing, and something about weird and twisted nights that rhymes with civil rights, then this sepulchral bellow: “It never really happened anyway.” That’s Hunter. He wanted that in.
And then there are the songs he wrote for Da Vinci, all 18 of them. “The man who woke up in the dark.” While an earlier Steadman sings his tender song, today’s prowls around being relevant. You get your best thoughts in the early hours, he says. When it’s still dark. When you wish you had a pencil and paper by the bed, and you think, hell, I’ll get it down later, but later it’s gone. Not like those smarty-pants who’ve got the pencil, sharp as a tack. Bastards. Leonardo must have woken up in the dark. When he invented all those things nobody wanted. Did all those things. “It’s what we all want to do, isn’t it?” he says clearly, as the song ends. “Lots of things?”
There is demonic laughter on the tape. A voice proclaims, “We have your best interests at heart.” Another one avows that, in a complacent world, an angry man’s a patsy. Steadman is saying he got bored with the cartooning, so jacked it in years ago. He’d never draw another politician as long as he lived. It only added to their self-importance. When he covered the last election for the New Statesman, he only drew their legs. Not their faces. He fishes out a grotesquery of the queen, with John Major standing on her lap. So he wouldn’t have to draw his face. “There’s something poignant about a leg.” He’s not sure he wants to be a cartoonist any more. Not sure he wants to engage again. Have his peace of mind disturbed. Besides which, it’s all so very sophisticated these days. Not what you’d call brutal.
He spends his entire life looking for tension, while hoping against hope that everything’s fine and dandy. Because, if something bad happens, it’s his fault. He looks around for someone else to blame, but inside he knows it’s down to him. Because of his own inadequacy. Anna Steadman raises an eyebrow at Mr Omnipotence. “Well, there’s an admission,” she says. “I’ll remember that.”
Next morning, he is in what he calls Orbital Remorse. It could easily lead to depression. He lay awake all night worrying, because he failed to answer one of my questions. Hence I have made him feel inadequate. A certain wobbly paranoia has baked, along with the neat rows of bacon he places, with their egg, in a pleasing motif atop a slice of toast. “No butter, see,” he says, like at least he’s got his diet down to all the right stuff. The problem seems to be rooted in his inability to properly express his response to the human condition and the unpretty pass it has reached. The good Dr Albert Schweitzer told us that the suicide of civilisation is in progress wherever we have abandoned the idea that every man is an object of concern to us, simply because he is a man. So Steadman thinks about Bosnia, and he thinks about the capitalist structure of medical research, and he draws a mother, emaciated and ghoulish, feeding a hydrogen bomb to her baby, and a graphic picture of An Arsehole Crying in The Wilderness, which was surely not a bad comment on Aids.
So that’s what he does to stem the tide of human wretchedness swelling all around us. How inadequate can one man be? Nietzsche said we possess art lest we perish from the truth. Ha. To Steadman, that means those who engage in it are merely shielding themselves from the banality of life. The voice of reason, he says, is only a way of not facing something you don’t want to know, because if you did you’d want to know, because if you did you’d be faced with the choice of suicide or telling yourself to buck up.
There is one other alternative: end up an embittered and disappointed old fart. So ha, again. It’s a disgusting world we live in. Violence is not created by the spectacle of one yob kicking another yob’s head in after a soccer match; it is born of the tyranny of one man taking authority over another, and misusing his assumed power. And that’s the best he can do.
So what’s the problem? The problem is that, having explained all these embarrassingly personal things, I pertly inquired what he did in the sex war. As in “What did you do in the sex war, Daddy?” To which he smartly replied, “I kept my mouth shut.” Hence the sleepless night. It was a rotten answer. He has never thought about it. He has let me down. He is inadequate. A phoney. Gonzo lives, okay?
Then he drew me. On the fly-leaf of his book on Freud, with a Biro and some white wine left over from last night. Looking at it was the bravest thing I’ve ever done. The shock was instant and gut-centred. It wasn’t the gaunt cheek, the winky eye, the raggedy mouth, nor even the tragic hank of hair that got me. It was the literal truth. There was no caricature, it was Me. More Me than I am. It was staggeringly wonderful. My ego, with its id in two, flew upwards to crash against the jackpot button of self- importance. Which I now understand is why any self-respecting cartoonist would cease to draw politicians. Too Gonzo by half, that would be.
— Gonzo: The Art will be available in South Africa from Weidenfeld & Nicholson later this month