Exile off main street
TOMI UNGERER was once America’s most famous children’s book author. Then he disappeared, before popping up in West Cork in 1975. His extraordinary life is profiled in a documentary that takes its name from one of his catchphrases, Far Out Isn’t Far Enough, which will screen on as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival this month.
Ungerer is a preposterous character, beloved by the townsfolk in Bantry — according to former Fine Gael TD, PJ Sheehan — but brittle in temperament. Ungerer admits, while smiling roguishly, to being paranoid. “I’m always being arrested in my dreams,” he says. He’s full of contradictions. Without them, he says, he’d be jobless, a cute line for an artist but in his case resonant.
“He has a soft side,” says Brad Bernstein, the American director of Far Out Isn’t Far Enough. “I don’t think we were expecting to see that. That’s part of his mellowing with age. He really cares about people and about what people think about him now. I’m sure he was a terror in the ’50s and ’60s, when he broke into people’s houses in the Hamptons just to move furniture around so when they came back they’d be amazed that things had moved. Those days are gone.”
Ungerer was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1931. His father died when he was three, which left the family penniless. His formative years were spent under Nazi rule, during which he witnessed killings, and flowered as an artist under unusual circumstances. In class, he was once asked to draw a Jew. The occupation splintered his already fragile identity — he spoke French at home, Alsatian on the street and German at school.
Failing his high school examinations, Ungerer spent the years after the war tramping around the ruins of central Europe, making it as far north as Norway, and was self-taught from the reading material of Fulbright scholars living in Strasbourg. The pull of America was so strong that he emigrated to New York, sporting an Abraham Lincoln-type beard, in 1956. He blossomed in the city, carving a niche during a golden age for illustrators on Madison Avenue.
It was his children’s books, however, which shot him to prominence, and for which he was belatedly given a Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration, the equivalent of a Nobel Prize amongst his peers, in 1998. He turned the genre on its head.
“He embodied the ’60s — this new way of expressing yourself, initially through children’s books. He changed the landscape for children’s book authors along with a bunch of others from that time period, ” says Bernstein.
At the time, children’s books were full of “bunny rabbits and lettuce leaves and blue skies and shit like that”, says Maurice Sendak, the late author of Where the Wild Things Are, who was interviewed for the documentary before he passed away last May.
Each book — Ungerer created over 30 of them, all with individual styles — had to induce an element of fear. “Why?” says Ungerer rhetorically, “because you’ve to overcome your fear.”
He took the least cuddly animals — bats, octopuses, vultures, and, famously, boa constrictors — and created kids’ picture books around them. The breaking of the taboo about snakes in particular was instructive.
“Can you think of any other children’s author that would have an ogre that eats children as the hero?” asks Patrick Skane Catling, critic and children’s author.
Ungerer’s philosophy was that normally-detested animals were all able to do something that ultimately turned them into saviours.
Ungerer’s prolific output — which included erotic drawings which led to his blacklisting as a children’s author and self-imposed exile in 1970 — featured anti-war posters in, as Ungerer puts it, the hard German “fist style” of the Nazis that coloured his youth.
“If you watch the video clips in Far Out Isn’t Far Enough, of Hitler and Goebbels and their Nazi posters,” says Bernstein, “you really see the influence from the German propaganda machine onto this child and he never, ever forgot that. Then when he felt like he was experiencing that in the 1960s with the Vietnam War he took all that knowledge and threw it right down there on paper and it was as striking and shocking as the images he saw in the late 1930s and early ’40s.”
Bernstein cites a six-month period, which isn’t covered in the documentary, that Ungerer spent observing a dominatrix at a bordello in Hamburg as one of his oddest life chapters. “Fine ladies,” Ungerer once said. “They do the job where the psychiatrists stop.”
*Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story screens 6.15pm on Feb 18 at the Lighthouse.
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