Nuisance

David Low's first published cartoon was printed in a New Zealand paper in 1902, when he was eleven years old. It represented the local authorities as lunatics because of their reluctance to remove certain trees that obstructed traffic. Ever since that time he has pictured himself as a "nuisance dedicated to sanity." His definition of sanity embraces a good many statesmen and policies: Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, armament races, Nonintervention, and Prime Minister Neville (Chamberlain's political "realism." Some of the personages scared by his corrosive brush have had good reason to regret that young David did not become a bishop as his mother wished, instead of becoming the world's deadliest political cartoonist.

After free-lancing in New Zealand and Australia, David Low went to England in 1919, where he drew for the London Star ' until 1927, when Lord Beaverbrook hired him for his Evening Standard. There he has ever since made fun of his employer's arch-conservative opinions. This month, A Cartoon History of Our Times, the seventeenth and best collection of David Low's work, with an explanatory text by Quincy Howe (author of England Expects Every American To Do His Duty), is to be published in the U. S.* Covering the hectic years of 1932-39, most of the car toons have kept their timeliness surprisingly well. His interpretation of the "Open Door," drawn in 1934, anticipated by five years Japan's present at tempt to drive foreign interests out of China, an eventuality which the British Government at that time thought highly improbable. The drawing of the gorged wolves appeared on Dec. 2, 1938, shortly after Polish troops occupied Teschen, completing the post-Munich occupation of Czecho-Slovak territory. The Spanish dancers were drawn last February when France and Great Britain were preparing to recognize the Franco Government.

Cartoonist Low is a unique combination of a student of contemporary politics and a superb draughtsman. A passionately sin cere democrat, he is also a hard worker.

He begins the day at 8 o'clock, digesting thoroughly the daily papers. Breakfast is a political meeting, with the cartoonist, his wife, and his two young daughters threshing out the news. After breakfast he walks to his roomy, book-lined studio where with much pacing and squirming and pipe-smoking, he struggles to express a complex idea in a few vivid lines and a brief, usually wry, caption. The final drawing is done rapidly with a fine brush.

How Artist Low got that way politically is not hard to explain. He recalls that he became "socially conscious" at 19, when he went from deeply socialistic New Zealand to deeply laborite Australia. But for all his savage conviction, he is still a sly humorist. The words he puts in the mouth of his most famous cartoon creation, globular, mustached Colonel Blimp, archtype of the Tory diehard, are an acid parody of Conservative thought. Sample: "Come, come, let's be fair to Franco.

Let's assume he is a great Christian gentle man, prepared to doublecross his Italian and German friends without the slightest hesitation." The bewildered little man who frequently appears with the Colonel is the cartoonist's conception of himself.

Adolf Hitler he usually depicts as an in sensate madman, Benito Mussolini as a simple gangster, Francisco Franco as a malicious child, Neville Chamberlain as a confused old man.

*Simon & Schuster ($2).

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