From one heckler to another
Terry Mosher pays loving tribute to Duncan Macpherson
Duncan Macpherson (19241993) was Canada’s most celebrated political cartoonist. He won six National Newspaper Awards for his work at the Toronto Star and was awarded the Order of Canada, among many other honours.
But his output ended before the internet, and many Canadians are not aware of him or his work. In an engrossing and beautifully crafted and illustrated biography published this month, Terry Mosher – another political cartooning giant – has done his best to place Macpherson “back on the map as a great cartoonist, a great Canadian and a great artist.”
With Professional Heckler: The Life and Art of Duncan Macpherson (Mcgill-queen’s University Press), he has written and art-directed a masterful work that gives readers a sense of the man, flaws and all, his personal journey and the time in which he lived, and illustrates his prodigious talent. It is Mosher’s hope the book will find its place in libraries and archives.
Although lauded as a brilliant cartoonist, Toronto-born Macpherson was generally dismissed as a passable painter, a “mere illustrator.” Mosher believes that needs re-examining. He “drew as well, if not better, than any other Canadian artist who comes to mind,” Mosher writes.
“I don’t have a lot of time for people who can’t draw very well. But when somebody draws well, as Duncan did, I almost swoon,” he said. “Look at the confidence. Then you combine that with wit and cleverness and, my God, it is wonderful.
“And so in that way, Duncan influenced me in terms of the importance of the text within a cartoon. I feel a debt to him for so many things. That’s why writing the book is so important to me.”
The two men met in 1971, while doing courtroom sketches in Montreal – Mosher for the Montreal Star (he jumped to the Gazette in 1972) and Macpherson for the Toronto Star. They would gather at the Press Club in Montreal or Toronto for drinks. In the 1970s, both were “functioning alcoholics,” as Mosher puts it in the book. He quit drinking in 1985; Macpherson never expressed a desire to stop.
Some drink to excess “to forget or mask pain in their lives,” Mosher writes. “Others drink because it enables them to become the type of person they admire: creative, gregarious and popular. I believe that
Duncan Macpherson fell into the second category. Inevitably, there is a price to be paid.”
He was brilliant, said Mosher. But he had his demons.
When he wasn’t drinking, Macpherson was “a gentle, thoughtful and even apologetic type,” Mosher writes. Drunk,
“he could be heavy-handed, arrogant and a troublemaker. He freely acknowledged those faults, but insisted I was worse. I’m in no position to judge.”
Macpherson’s most famous cartoon was one he did soon after joining the Star in 1958, depicting John Diefenbaker as Marie Antoinette, queen of France during the French Revolution. When told that her peasant subjects were starving and had no bread, the story goes, she said: “Let them eat cake.”
In February 1959, Diefenbaker announced his Progressive Conservative government’s baffling decision to scrap plans for the Avro Arrow, a promising twinengine fighter jet, resulting in the loss of jobs for thousands of skilled Canadian workers.
With that cartoon, “Macpherson established himself almost overnight as the pre-eminent cartoonist in Canada,” Mosher writes.
Throughout more than three decades creating cartoons for the Star, Macpherson “was always an equal-opportunity lampoonist, caricaturing prime ministers, cabinet ministers, the Loyal Opposition, provincial premiers and mayors,” Mosher writes.
As Macpherson himself put it in The Hecklers: “You’re a heckler, basically. And to be a good professional heckler, you’ve got to throw insults at all of them. I criticize my subjects the same way you’d criticize a hockey player for his play on the ice. You react to a situation, not because you’re a moralist or anything like that. It’s because you’re a contrary sort of person, a cynic.”