posted on 31 Jan 2019

Stuff by Martin Rowson

Those of you familiar with the anarchic spirit of cartoonist Martin Rowson’s spectacularly vicious political satire won’t be in the least surprised to hear that Stuff, which is described as a memoir, takes an entirely sideways approach to its topic. It’s just not Rowson’s style to go for the sun-dappled summer days of his past, the occasional risqué anecdote, the transition of boy to man and the ultimate accommodation with his past. Instead we enter the junk room of his memory where his family – especially his mom, his dad and his step-mother are remembered by virtue of the stuff they accumulated and that remains after they have departed the material world.

We plunge into Rowson’s world as he starts the job of clearing the family house after the death of his father and step-mother in what was actually quite rapid succession. His dad, always a slightly eccentric scientist, has filled the house with things that range from the utilitarian to the bizarre and creepy – including bottles of horse blood that were being kept for the cultivation of some kind of virus. One end of the living room has been turned into some kind of functioning workshop equipped with heavy machinery and despite (or perhaps because of) all this, Rowson clearly finds himself lost in a sort of odd mental space – some part of him is obsessed by death and decay and another is being dragged into a more sentimental speculation about his childhood in the late 50s and 60s in this house in Stanmore.

But there is no linear narrative to be found here – that’s just not the way Rowson thinks:

"Viewed from the present, the past is refracted through too many prisms and lenses picked up on the journey ever to be seen quite clearly." 

So time moves about and we just have to try our best to build whatever picture we can hold together. Rowson, adopted as a baby, comes across, rather surprisingly given that his cartoons would give Gilray a run for their money, as a rather gentle and somewhat old-fashioned type. William Leith in his review of the book for The Guardian back in 2007 also caught this mood:

“The house in question is in Stanmore, and Rowson brilliantly describes his childhood memories of the place, a 1960s suburb still stuck in the 50s. This is one of his themes - that the 70s were much more like the 60s of our collective memory, just as the 50s were much more like the 30s, and so on. This is because we tend to remember the avant-garde, whereas most of us live in what he calls the "garde". One of the many good things about this book is that it is resolutely un-trendy.”

The undoubted star of the book though is his dad, Kenneth. You’ll want to read this book just to make his acquaintance. As a boy Kenneth, for a range of medical reasons, spent much of his childhood in a full body cast, unable to run around or join in with his peers and this experience, as well as leaving him with a life-long limp. He did, however, have a long and colourful subsequent life – as an adoptive parent, foster carer, medical scientist and traveller. His trips to medical conferences in the former Soviet Union had a direct influence on Martin who became obsessed with all things Soviet and led him as a child to fantasise that maybe the extraordinarily banal postcards his father sent home were in fact a cover for his spying activities. Rowson confesses that he was just a tiny bit disappointed that there "wasn't a thickset stranger standing at the back of the crematorium at my father's funeral, who'd leave without saying a word after dropping a small floral tribute, with no message, on the steps outside".

Rowson’s first adoptive mother died of a brain tumour when he was just 10 years old and his father married again – quite astonishingly it was the midwife in the maternity hospital who had carried him from his natural mother to his adoptive mother. These are the sort of extraordinary events and coincidences that transfigure everyone’s ‘ordinary’ lives. And I think that’s Rowson’s main message here. Death is an inevitable end for us all and what will be left behind us will be our stuff and ultimately that accumulation, the material manifestations of our psyche, which not only helps us to be remembered but to be remembered as extraordinary.

 

Terry Potter

January 2019