Posy Simmonds is carrying a cardboard portfolio almost half her height. She has been invited to the London’s French Institute’s Night of Ideas, to do something unusual: draw on stage, with her sketches streamed live on screen during a panel discussion on women’s rights.
Simmonds’ drawings have made it to another kind of screen before: the graphic novels she is best known for, Gemma Bovery (2000) and Tamara Drewe (2005-6), serialised in The Guardian, were adapted for cinema, respectively by Anne Fontaine in 2014 and Stephen Frears in 2010.
She has a habit of drawing parallels from 19th century novels. It’s very transparent in Gemma Bovery, a comical take on Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and more subtle in Tamara Drewe’s chronicles of the little cruelties of the countryside, reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. The idea came from a trip to Italy where, she tells me before the event, she “saw Madame Bovary”. As she describes it: “We heard terrible yawns, someone sighing behind us in a café, and there was this very beautiful young Italian woman, smoking, with her lover who she was treating terribly badly, surrounded by shopping bags. We thought: what despair!”
Her Bovery is “not incredibly bright” but has been “fed dreams”, about love (she takes a lover, get dumped, so marries the next one), about her appearance and weight (she calls her clothes “her accessories”), about her escape to France (which turns out to be the same hell as in Britain). “Being really pissed off with your life is something which goes on forever,” Simmonds says. “I was trying to make her a contrast between a 19th century heroine, who is sort of in the background, and a contemporary one.” Her next graphic novel, which she’s almost finished, will be about burlesque – and obviously, it will borrow from a (still kept secret) 19th century novel, to the point that it is “almost buried in it”.
Simmonds’ work is studded with dark humour and finely observed, razor-sharp social portraits like Bovery’s. Now 72, she has chronicled British family life for decades, through her series “Mrs Weber’s Diary”, in The Guardian during the 1980s. “My brief was: ‘write about Guardian readers,’” she says. “It was to put a magnifying glass over domestic life.” So, of course, the characters are “rather bien pensant”, she adds with a smile. In Tamara Drewe, the heroine turns from ugly duckling to every man’s sexy apparition thanks to rhinoplasty. Through Tamara, Simmonds blows up the stereotype that beauty is incompatible with intelligence (“Do you think when they changed my nose, they removed a bit of my brain, too?” Tamara demands). The book, Simmonds says, dives into “this whole thing about the country”, depicting a village with “no bus service, no post office”, where there are tensions between the locals and metropolitans seeking a rustic retreat, and teenagers squat bus shelters to read magazines. Nowadays, it would be Facebook or YouTube, but the result is the same. “They know more about J.Lo’s extensions than about their aunt or granny,” Simmonds says, without malice.
Young people in Simmonds’ work are often the more clear-sighted. Tamara Drewe’s teenage duo, Jody and Casey, debate on whether Tamara is a “slag” and the meaning of the word: “My friend’s sister is a slag for doing it once with Jeff Price after he lied he loved her. But Tivoli Garnier [in their magazine] ISN’T, when she’s like full-on with a different guy every week. Weird”, says Casey. To which Jody replies: “It’s cos Tivoli’s doing it in her Aspen Ski lodge, not in the Feathers car park.”
Simmonds, who is from “that generation of second wave of feminism”, hopes her work is feminist. “In a graphic novel, I don’t want to sort of bash people over the head with bromide, but absolutely, there should be a feminist element,” she says. One of her first jobs as an illustrator was drawing for the “great feminist” Jill Tweedie’s column on The Guardian’s women’s page, in 1972. “Feminism was beginning to be talked about. The Guardian did it first.” Yet at that time, women’s rights had a long way to go: “If you wanted to have a bank account, you had to have a male guarantor.” She remembers working in a department store around men who “thought it was just pin money” and boys her age paid more than her for doing exactly the same thing. (A generation later, only one of these two experiences faced by women has changed.) “These are the kinds of things I grew up with, which were really annoying,” she says.
A self-proclaimed “Luddite”, Simmonds keeps away from social media (when she tells me, she hesitates on the pronunciation of “Twitter”). On her black, large-sleeved top, she is wearing a little red brooch in the shape of an old-fashioned corded telephone. “I wish it really were mine,” she says, smiling as she picks the receiver up to answer an imaginary call.
But this doesn’t at all mean she has missed the #metoo wave. “It’s about being assaulted,” she says. “In my generation, you didn’t say anything, but I don’t know anybody who hasn’t been groped.” As a 17-year-old arts student in Paris in the early 1960s, Simmonds would get a suburban train into the city, where she learnt that it was “best to stand up”, because although “they may grope your bum”, it was better than sitting down, where men would find elaborate ways to press their knees between your legs. “You felt frightened and horrified”, she remembers, and so she developed her own defense tactic: carrying a tube of red oil paint. “I would just take the top off and they would stop.”
Now, she follows the next wave of feminism with enthusiasm: “It’s sort of energised, and with good reason. It’s terrific.” On stage at the Night of Ideas, she sketches the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst in front of Buckingham Palace in 1914, as suffragettes archives are shown to the audience. For Pankhurst, carried away by two policemen, she adds a speech bubble: “#MeToo”.
Emmeline Pankhurst’s #metoo, by Posy Simmonds, drawn on stage at the Night of Ideas, 25 January 2018
With authorisation from Posy Simmonds for the New Statesman
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