The Tintin books provide an alternative history of the 20th century, from the
Russian revolution through to the space age, in which the innocent never get
hurt. A 15-year-old boy and his talking dog emerge unscathed from a
relentless sequence of plots, tyrannies, explosions and natural disasters.
What kind of man did it take to create this joyful fantasy? A wise, kind
idealist, surely, whose heart was torn by the sufferings of the real world
and its children. Well, no. Pierre Assouline’s bio-graphy shows that
Tintin’s creator was, in fact, an emotionally retarded workaholic who cared
for nothing but his art, disliked children, and collaborated with the Nazis.
Georges Remi (his pen name Hergé was his reversed initials, RG, as pronounced
in French) was born in 1907 in a Brussels suburb. His father worked in a
sweet factory. Home life was uniformly “grey”, he recalled, but he was mad
about drawing and covered his schoolbooks with sketches. The school, run by
Catholic priests, had a scout troop, which was his other passion. He became
leader of the Squirrel patrol and drew his first comic strip for a scouting
magazine. One character in it later provided the model for Tintin who,
though ostensibly a cub reporter, represented, for his creator, the perfect
boy scout, helpful, chivalrous, brave and asexual.
On leaving school, Remi got a job on an ultra-Catholic paper that advocated
authoritarian government as a bulwark against democracy. Its editor, Father
Norbert Wallez, kept a signed photo of Mussolini in his office, dedicated to
him personally as “the friend of Italy and fascism”. This enterprising
cleric became Remi’s inspiration and spiritual director. “I owe him
everything,” he avowed. Wallez fixed him up with a wife, Germaine Kieckens,
a slightly older woman who had been Wallez’s secretary, and he also
suggested the subject for the first Tintin story. Serialised in Wallez’s
paper (and drawn in black and white like all the early stories), The
Adventures of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets gave a cautionary account
of the famine, terror and repression rife under the atheist Bolsheviks.
Success was instant. In May 1930, to celebrate the story’s publication in book
form, thousands of fans converged on Brussels’s Gare du Nord to greet a
15-year-old boy scout dressed up as Tintin, his hair gelled to give it the
trademark quiff, and a lookalike Snowy on a lead. Accompanied by Remi, they
were driven through cheering crowds to the paper’s offices, where Tintin
made a speech from the balcony. The follow-up was Tintin in the Congo,
another of Wallez’s ideas. The horrors and brutalities of Belgian
colonisation in the Congo had inspired Conrad’s nightmarish Heart of
Darkness. But Wallez wanted to fire his young readers with missionary zeal,
so Remi’s Congo is a happy place. Its natives are childish and lazy, but
friendly, and they revere Tintin as a great white medicine man.
Attacked in later years for the book’s racist caricatures, Remi retorted that
they were commonplace at the time. His aim was to catch the mood of the
public, not give them moral or political instruction. What concerned him was
the clarity of his line, and making his stories instantly intelligible. All
this was probably true, Assouline reckons. Remi was not so much malign as
thoughtless and shallow. He was a perfectionist in his art, and seemingly
did not stop to think that, by luring young readers to Wallez’s paper with
Tintin stories, he was also exposing them to editorials that justified
Hitler’s persecution of the Jews.
With the outbreak of the second world war and the German occupation of
Belgium, the paper Remi had published in was shut down, and he agreed to
transfer Tintin to Le Soir, the leading Brussels French daily, which the
Nazis had taken over as their mouthpiece. Whether he felt himself to be a
traitor is not clear. He claimed that he was following the advice of King
Léopold III to his people, which was to compromise and wait for better
times. It was just a job, he insisted, with no political implications: “I
worked, period; that’s all. Just like a miner works, or a streetcar ticket
taker, or a baker.” To others it seemed that he was handing the occupying
powers the endorsement of the most popular comic-strip hero in Belgium, and
doing very well out of it. From 1940 to 1945 annual sales of Tintin books
rose from 34,000 to 324,000.
Tintin’s adventures during the war remained mostly fantastic and escapist. But
one, The Shooting Star, reflected the prejudices of Remi’s new masters. Its
villain was a banker called Blumenstein, whose facial features replicated
Nazi anti-semitic stereo-types. While the serial was being published,
Assouline points out, anti-Jewish laws were being passed, and, six days
after its final episode, it became mandatory for Belgian Jews to wear the
yellow star.
At the liberation, resentment against collaborators was fierce. Le Soir’s
editor was condemned to death. Many journalists were imprisoned. Remi was
arrested four times, but released on each occasion. Incarcerating Tintin’s
creator, it was feared, would bring Belgium’s young people out on the
streets, and nobody was prepared to risk it. So he was merely banned from
newspaper work for two years, and spent the time preparing colour versions
of the black-and-white adventures. Then some former resistance fighters who
had gone into publishing invited him to become the artistic director of a
new Tintin weekly. It was such a hit that he had to take on other artists to
help with the workload. From now on Tintin was a joint effort, though Remi
always refused to allow anyone’s name but his own to appear in the credits.
By the mid-1960s, Tintin books were selling 1.5m copies a year.
Despite this success, all was not well. Remi was shocked and hurt by the way
he had been vilified after the war. In his eyes, he was the victim, and he
remained incredulous when told of Nazi atrocities. He suffered several
breakdowns and his marriage fell apart. Childless, he and Germaine had
adopted a boy from an orphanage, but his presence irked Remi and he made
Germaine send him back. He found a new, younger wife, and decided to
reinvent himself. He could no longer stand the sight of Tintin, he said.
Instead he turned to eastern philosophy — Zen and Taoism — collected modern
art, and tried to become an abstract painter, paying a professor of
aesthetics to come and discuss art with him every Thursday at noon.
Assouline handles his difficult subject with objectivity and occasional
distaste. He has interviewed Remi’s closest surviving associates, including
his wives, and is an expert on the stories and Remi’s many later revisions.
It is hard to imagine the job being better done. Yet it reads like the
biography of a shadow. Remi, Assouline admits, is of no interest without
Tintin. All that was worthwhile about him went into the books. As he
explained in a letter to Germaine, “Tintin has been for me the means to
express myself, to project my desire for adventure and violence, the bravery
and resourcefulness within me.” Leaf through any Tintin book, and within
moments the imaginative vitality will captivate you, and the shabby
compromises Assouline documents will be forgotten. That is why we need to be
reminded of them.
Hergé by Pierre Assouline
OUP £16.99 pp288
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