Leunig's Lonely Baby Is Learning The Bleak Facts Of Life
The Age
Sunday July 30, 1995
I WAS shocked and upset at Leunig's Thoughts of a Baby in a Child Care Centre last Wednesday. I've been upset about it for days. Does this mean, as a woman friend said today, that I can't love him any more? Michael Leunig speaks straight from the heart. This is a dangerous practice for cartoonists and other endangered species.
To be successful, as Jonathan Swift put it, a satirist ``creates a glass for us to look into and recognise every face but our own". We laugh because it is a true reflection but not, (we think), quite true as to ourselves, who are wise because we can see the joke. Satire reveals forbidden and often lonely truths and changes how we look at things. It also hurts.
When we take it seriously, as simple political comment, we kill it (and possibly the satirist). The satirist is at risk because it takes an exquisitely personal, private pain to reveal these truths and, by so doing, become public property. Swift himself, the author of essays such as the `Modest Proposal' for ending the Irish famine (an economic rationalist proposal that its starving population eat their own babies) was ostracised after writing Gulliver's Travels (which is certainly not a children's tale) and spent his last years generally regarded as a misanthropic lunatic.
Leunig risks the same. Depending on which letters to the editor you read and approve, he is either St Michael, Defender of the Innocent, or Michael the Misogynist. I think he is much more than either.
I don't actually know Michael Leunig, but I think of him fondly as a slightly daffy hitch-hiker on an alien starship whose crew is on crack. More often than not a Leunig cartoon resonates like a great tuning fork, deep down. I remember them for years, with joy. To create delight is both the act of a genius and a very great kindness.
Leunig may be inspired I think he is but he is also just a man. I do not always agree with him. I expect to, because he is a cultural icon. When I don't, I'm disappointed, which is my problem, not Leunig's. His success depends on his being an alternative reality. He sees the world as a butterfly: mine is the monochrome view of a worker bee.
That cartoon got Leunig criticised as I haven't seen before. Kaz Cooke, who is also a brilliant comic and a fine and fiery feminist, gave him both barrels for laying yet another guilt trip on working women. Others got stuck in too mothers who do and mothers who don't use child care; their children; people who believe that ``only a mother can care for a baby" (which isn't so: my dad was a fantastic ``mother"); experts; and the odd anti-feminist (sigh).
I think that they have missed the point.
Leunig wasn't criticising child care: that's far too narrow a topic for him. For decades he has written about the loneliness of the human condition: his own deep sense of abandonment, despair, and the hope that laughter keeps alive. This is a man who's looked deeply inside himself. We probably saw the same counsellors a decade or two back. This cartoon was about the grief which begins from the moments after birth and the doomed love affair between any baby and any mother. The little separations multiply sleeping alone, weaning, walking, school. The grief begins with the cry in the delivery room and life is a succession of greater griefs and disappointments until the separation is complete. For some it never really happens.
I don't know nor care whether he is ``angry at his mother" or ``hates women". We are all angry at our mothers. None of them was perfect. Every parent betrays the trust of every child. The best are the guilty, who are ashamed of every unloving act, each violent impulse, the misunderstanding and lashing out, the wounding words; that they forgot what it was like to be a child. Leunig has simply captured in the artistic imagination, as Herbert Marcuse said, ``the unconscious memory of a liberation that failed, of the promise that was betrayed. " Is child care bad for babies? Of course it isn't, any more than growing up (and forgiving their parents) is bad for children, but by God it's painful to leave a child, and painful to be left. These days there are few choices the legions of unemployed, under-educated and exploited grandmothers, unmarried cousins and aunties and non-working wives-at-home are long gone and, in their places, are mothers and fathers with family responsibilities who are exhausted, worried, resentful and longing and doing the best that they can. Which does not dissipate guilt.
So what WAS Leunig saying? We could always ask him, I suppose, but I'd rather not. It's like asking Picasso what Guernica meant.
To me, it said that life's a bitch, not that a working mother is; that the intense griefs of children direct adult behavior and that, if we understood the unconscious origins of neurotic, self-destructive adult behavior, we could break the cycle.
Those ``thoughts of a baby lying in a child care centre" should not be seen as a piece of visual, anti-feminist polemic. Leunig has entirely succeeded in making us think about its subject: guilt, grief, and shame. He did more. He made everyone who saw it feel it.
Leunig probably doesn't need to be defended, though he strikes me as a man who feels his hurts more than most. A few years ago, the same man wrote:
``When the heart
Is cut or cracked or broken
Do not clutch it
Let the wound lie open
Let the wind from the good old sea blow in
To bathe the wound with salt
And let it sting
Let a stray dog lick it
Let a bird lean in the hole and sing
A simple song like a tiny bell
And let it ring
Well, he has.
© 1995 The Age