Punch and the Surrealists

As well as bookshops, there are many other places in Britain where a scattering of second-hand books is to be found, and one of these is in antiques centres. Sometimes a book-dealer may have a dedicated unit, but otherwise the book stock is often highly miscellaneous and presumably arrived alongside other things from auctions or house clearances. Recently I wandered around a local antiques emporium, spotting about half-a-dozen nooks where a jumble of books lurked.

In one of these I found a copy of the Punch Almanack for 1941, published November 1940, with Punch as a playing card king in full colour on the front cover. It was issued to mark the centenary of the journal. Inside, there was a Kai Lung story by Ernest Bramah, good to find, and lots of light wartime humour, such as the colour plate of a guest dressed as Mephistopheles at a fancy dress ball who confides that he has joined the A.F.S. (Auxiliary Fire Service), where he would have been in good company with the writers Henry Green and William Sansom, among others. There are other fine colour plates. There was also a highly enjoyable spoof ‘family curse’ story, ‘The Luck of the Wapentakes’, about an ominous barometer, drawing on such legends as ‘The Luck of Edenhall’ and haunted house stories generally. 

Also to the fore I found some good-natured satire on modern art. Surrealism had probably first come to the vague attention of the British public through the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 and subsequent happenings. They tended to understand it as a term for all sorts of modern art and identified it in particular with the work of Paul Nash, Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson. By 1940, evidently, Punch and its contributors could make fun of it confident that readers would know what it was.

The satire is actually quite indulgent and affectionate. An artist, naturally bearded, scruffy and bohemian, is warned off painting near a naval dockyard even though his work is a jumble of angles, abstract and non-representational. A mild bespectacled gentleman in a telephone box in full heraldic regalia rings home to ask his maid to check if he is in bed sleeping and if so to wake him up.

An adventurous advertiser has a full page display advising country cottage owners to add Surrealist sculpture and art and a tubular chair to the guest bedroom to make their Chelsea friends feel at home, but not to make any changes to dinner, which will still of course start with the advertiser’s famous chestnut soup. The advert is interesting for the assumptions made about its customers. They are of course comfortable, cozy people with a quaint old cottage in the country: but they are sophisticated and open-minded enough to have artistic friends and to buy modern art for the guest room. And, of course, they are discerning enough to know that some things, such as the chestnut soup, never go out of fashion.

Punch was at its height around this time, the Forties, with over 100,000 readers, but later became a standing joke, not in a good way, for being not particularly funny and for being often found in dog-eared copies in dentists’ waiting-rooms. Certainly, the humour always tended to be wry rather than uproarious, and conformist, not absurdist. It stuck with a sort of gentleman’s club milieu and did not pick up on the new vogues in humour and satire exemplified by The Goons, Round the Horne, That Was the Week That Was and so on. Despite several rescue attempts, it faded out around the turn of the millenium. But on the evidence of this, admittedly special, issue it had once been somewhat livelier than its later reputation, brisk, bright, broad-minded and inventive. 

And Symington's Chestnut Soup? No longer made, I'm afraid. You'll just have to make your own. Chop and fry an onion and leek until soft and translucent. Add some chopped garlic, a teaspoon of sage and a teaspoon of thyme. (At this point you will be unable to stop singing the chorus of 'Parsley Thyme Rosemary and Sage'). Stir in so the herbs adhere to the onion and leek. Add a packet of pre-cooked chestnuts, continue stirring. Now add a splash of balsamic vinegar and a twist or two of black pepper. Add just enough vegetable stock to cover the contents and burble away for ten minutes or so. Take off the heat and stir in a good splurge of soya cream or oat cream. Voila. A dish fit for a surrealist magus.

(Mark Valentine)