Although cartoonist Tom Mathews seems to have been around Dublin forever, he remains something of an enigma, writes Donald Clarke
Before meeting Tom Mathews, cartoonist, writer and Dublin institution, I telephone a few colleagues and friends to get some background information. I am, of course, familiar with Mathews as a humorist and a presence. Since the early 17th century or so - moustache variously bushy, droopy and tidy, but always there - he has been pottering about such soothingly brown, city-centre pubs as The International, The Stag's Head and Grogan's.
Meanwhile, his cartoons, featuring sad men in hats beside happier dogs, ducks and goldfish, established a loyal following among readers of In Dublin, Hot Press and The Irish Times (his weekly Artoon appears on Page 8 of this supplement). Everyone knows Tom Mathews. Yet, strangely, nobody has much to add to the quasi-public persona.
"He drinks a lot in Grogan's, I think," somebody says. "I've known Tom for years. I see him every week. He's a great reader, you know," another source unhelpfully adds. Apparently he knows a lot about James Joyce. He has never quite been married. He lives in rented accommodation near Harold's Cross. He is 53.
Jim Cogan, the resident cartoonist at the Sunday Independent, is somewhat more helpful. "Tom is as constant as the Northern Star," he tells me. "He has barely changed over 30 years . . .There is a streak of decency that runs through him and he is a very good friend to have."
We meet in a side room of Neary's pub in Chatham Street, but both of us become equally irritated by the arrival of screeching infants, and soon move to the main bar. "I long ago made an agreement with children," Tom says, gathering together his hot whiskey and the Status Quo CD he just picked up in the Hot Press office.
"If you don't come running round my milieu shouting and screaming and sticking peanuts up your nose, then I won't drink pints of stout in your creche."
So is there a mystery to Tom Mathews? If his many associates were to be invited back to Harold's Cross, what might shock or surprise them? "Oh, the enormous collection of children in cages," he says. "No nothing. Just piles of books and CDs not sorted out in any way. Millions of files filled with nonsense. Aside from that, I tend to be neat and tidy most of the time."
I wonder what he makes of the fact that he has become that most dubious of entities: a Dublin Character. It must be flattering, but at the same time, for a man of no great age, it must feel a little as if he has somewhat prematurely had a preservation order slapped on him. They'll be bolting a blue plaque to his forehead next.
"It is something I have never aspired to being. I certainly had no such intent," he says with characteristic linguistic formality. "God, I think of the old story of Miles and Kavanagh and Behan lamenting to one another that there were no characters about any more. Ha-ha! I think of Damon Runyon: 'I was just a guy who was around'. I had no pretensions. I just tried to bring some expertise to a very small area."
Mathews, whose father was a meteorologist, grew up in Dalkey. His first job was with an advertising agency. (Dublin being an even a smaller city then, we should not be surprised to learn that Jim Cogan was his immediate boss.) Tom felt that advertising might be the sort of business in which he could combine his aptitude for verbal composition with his ability to draw, but soon found that his main task seemed to be washing brushes.
He took a course at the National College of Art and Design and then set forth on his career as a freelance cartoonist. Most people I have talked to suggest that not much in his daily life has changed since.
"I wouldn't have thought so. No. I get up around 10 in the morning, have a shave and wander out to see what the world might bring," he says. "What's to change? I decided as a young man I never wanted to wear shoes that I had to lace up or trousers that need buttons. Why make life any more complicated than it is?"
A glance through the excellent new collection, The Best of Tom Mathews, suggests that the cartoonist's style has, over the years, altered as little as his lifestyle. Rarely bothering with matters topical or political, Tom's cartoons, drawn in a loose unfussy style, tend to hang upon verbal ambiguities, social absurdities and the imagined consequences of responding too literally to instructions.
"When I set out I was more interested in the absurd than in commenting on the world," he explains. "I am not Pope. I am not Gillray. Maybe Martyn Turner does that job. To me, the political scene is so funny, there is nothing I could do to make it any funnier. I was always happy following Thurber, Milligan and Lewis Carol."
He sold his first cartoon at 16. Bought by the reconstituted Dublin Opinion, the drawing depicted Long John Silver shouldering a one-legged parrot with a crutch similar to the pirate's own. This already sounds very, well, Mathewsian. "It wasn't that great a joke, but it was all right," he says, with the resigned sigh he brings to much of his conversation.
"My drawings were a Frankenstein's creature of every cartoonist who had ever lived, but eventually people began to perceive a style in my work; I suppose in the attitude as much as in the drawing. It is sort of sub-Myles [ na Gopaleen]. Word-directed. Quite verbal. Mind you, I also know how to draw. I know how George Grosz drew. I know how Degas drew. I am not trying to sound high-falutin', but I do try to bring that into the work."
It is astonishing how adept Mathews is at layering his conversation with references to artists, writers and thinkers. Barely a sentence goes by without a quote from Robert Benchley or an allusion to Beckett or a life lesson learned from Picasso.
Dublin's pubs once seemed filled with such people. I suppose - the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake no longer being a respectable pursuit - those who might have replaced them all decided to become systems analysts instead.
He once published a novel named - think about it, modernists - Levon, and is a fecund contributor to Roland McHugh's tome, Annotations to Finnegans Wake.
"I'm happy enough the novel's not in print," he muses. "I wouldn't really want it about the place any more. I wrote it knowing it was a bad novel. But my notion was that Tom Stoppard's first novel was lousy, Joe Orton's novel was lousy and George Bernard Shaw's first five novels were lousy. So, I reckoned I would be sure to go on and write a great play. It didn't quite work out that way."
Maybe that's just as well. If he had become Tom Stoppard he might never have found time to vacuum up all the culture - high and low - which has helped turned him into an ambulatory encyclopedia of the arts.
"It's not as if I have been turning my back on life," Tom says defiantly. "I can hold my own in any conversation. I still like The Ramones; I like to wake up to Blitzkrieg Bop in the morning. Yet I can still discuss Beethoven's Ninth."
So what about his personal status? Sources inform me that he has had amicable relations with a number of women down through the years. It is further suggested that ex-girlfriends tend to remain on good terms with him. This reflects well on him.
"I have an enormous love of women. I have loved a lot of women," he says cautiously. "I think somebody asked me why I never married and I said [ ever so slightly camp]: do you not see my lithe, handsome chauffeur over there? No, it's just that I never met the wrong woman. There were a number of occasions where I might have been prepared to settle down, but I have yet to meet the woman who might be prepared to settle down with me. I don't wish to contradict myself. I contain multitudes. I could be married next year."
It is disturbing to think that any significant aspect of Tom Mathews's life might change. Then again, one suspects that if he did marry his imaginary chauffeur or develop an enthusiasm for Morris dancing, his outward persona would remain unaltered. The ravens continue to lurk outside the Tower of London and Tom, hairy in big coat and slip-on shoes, will surely continue to scribble in Grogan's.
"I draw in bars and I see the way a hair-do goes or a trouser leg looks and that ends up in the notebook," he says. "It all goes into some mad cooking-pot and becomes your style. It's an endless thing. Picasso at the end of his life, while he was raging against the dying of the light, was only learning. You never entirely learn. Just when you think you've got it, it's all over and they turn the lights out."
The Best of Tom Mathews is published by New Island Books (€20).
Perfect: Tom Mathews's favourites
"There are two drawings in that book that are as good as I can ever do. With the one about the wine I got exactly the freedom I wanted and it somehow turned out absolutely perfect. Even if it was slightly accidental. I loved the colour and the madness in that drawing. And then there is one with the cat and the fiddle. I loved that so much I am never going to give it to anybody. It just came out right. It's a mechanical job, but once in a while you think: 'I like that. I'll keep that'."