Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: Life in the Back of Beyond byTomi Ungerer

If the New Year Return to the Ordinary has you dreaming of ditching it all and moving to the pastoral country where you can be in touch with nature and animals, please read this book before setting your former life alight like a dried out Christmas tree. Modern life largely shields us from the muddy, dirty, bloody side of nature and animals but Tomi Ungerer is here to expose you in his illustrated memor, Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: Life in the Back of Beyond. Truly, bringing the unspoken into the light through images and words seems to have been Ungerer’s life work.

I could have started the VQC New Year out sunny and optimistic, squinting into our collective bright future but FOIFE is a dark, stark and wintery book, perfect for a deep January gloom. Did you know Ungerer lived on a remote seaside farm in Gull Harbour, Nova Scotia for almost five years? He and his wife Yvonne - the true hero of this tale, and apparently a very private person - left NYC for the rural Maritimes in 1971, looking for a simpler life. “We were more like refugees, not knowing why or from where”, [p.10]he writes. 

The refugee life was familiar to him. He was born in Strasbourg, France in 1931, a city that ping-ponged between French and German control, reverting to France after WWI and then occupied by the Nazis from 1940-44. When the Nazis took over, as Ungerer turned 9, French language and culture was outlawed, then returned at liberation. Ungerer wrote about his self-described traumatic childhood in Tomi: A childhood under the Nazis and the picture book Otto: The Autobiography of a Teddybear.   “Strasbourg is the sphincter of France and we were the first to know when France had indigestion”, he said in the 2012 documentary about his life by the same name. He had to shift identities and languages at the whim of a new regime: “You can learn a language in four months, you don’t need Berliz, you just need a knife to your throat” and continued his searching until landing in Ireland in 1976.

So perhaps Ungerer was more prepared than most to tackle the challenges of a remote, falling down farmhouse in rural Nova Scotia, and certainly the tasks he describes his wife Yvonne and himself handling in a regular day are enough to keep me in the city forever. Yvonne was his third wife, but they were married from 1970 until his death in 2019. According to the few notes I could find about her, and I would like to know much more, they met on a subway and she worked for the Children’s Book Council. Certainly in this book she comes across as capable and incredibly hard-working. The very first entry from September 29th, 1974 is typical:

“Got up at 7:30 am after breakfast in bed. Went down to the cellar to turn and clean the goat cheeses. Joined Yvonne who was busy cleaning the barn, and after a spell in the dung pile, went back to the studio to draw. Yvonne had already cleaned the pigsty when I returned to the barn. Put some order in the woodpile and started building more rabbit cages. 

Let the goats in around the compound to eat the thistles. Brought in the sheep to pick the ones to be sold. A guy came and bought two head for 38 dollars each. 

10 am There is a whiff and a sniff of Fall in the air. Most late flowers here are yellow, as if to store up some of the summer’s glow. That feeling of latent insecurity, brittleness, shaky as a leaf in a world of pine needles…then helped Yvonne caulk the dory”. [p12-13]

What a partner. She’s all hands on deck, in the barn and the kitchen, even in the many, many scenes of animal raising and processing, Vegans or sensitive stomachs like mine, fair warning:

“A questionnaire sent out to authors for some kind of reference book arrived. One question was “Hobbies”, I answered: “My wife and butchering”.  I have hundred of hobbies and I wrote this answer just for effect, but there is still a spine of truth in it”. [p.61]

There are spines, and carcasses, and traumatic births and animal husbandry and he is matter of fact about it all. He turns his gaze to the people too, local farmers and fishermen, no sweet and charming Avonlea, but a region in crisis as the fisheries fell, “now looking back, it seems that our stay coincided with this locality’s time-crises, choked between puberty and menopause, adjusting to modern times”. [p.165]

The stereotypes of Canadians as charming, non-violent, helpful people is buried in the mud and ignorance of Gull Harbor:

“There are no local police, the last town cop was beaten up and gave up his job…this does not suffice to reinforce either law or order in a society where guns can be bought at the grocery store…The town has no bars, but a state-run liquor shop…it is forbidden by law to drink outside your home…so what does the rum-starved fisherman do? Hide and drink. [p.8]

There is little talk of his children’s books in this book, as he had left NY in a small blaze of scandal about his erotic drawings and adult books that librarians and educators couldn’t square with his kids offerings. The documentary film of his life by the same name, Far Out Isn’t Far Enough, presents an imaginative and animated overview of his life, that definitely spills into erotica. He wasn’t afraid to dive right in, to the muck and shadows of life.

So why feature this book on VQC, clearly meant for adults, besides wanting to show his sepia, bleak sketches of a harsh and beautiful place?  Well one, I didn’t know he had ever lived in Canada and two, it sheds so much light on his lifetime of work. I grew up loving his 1958 classic Crictor* and later, taught many of his books in a French/American library, as Ungerer’s frankness and lack of puritanical manners landed more naturally in Europe and he is still widely available and published there. I taught Otto with first graders, much to the dismay of one of the French teachers who saw childhood as commensurate with innocence and goodness, and me out to spoil it. I think Ungerer knew children experienced dismay and violence and confusion just like adults, as he surely experienced. He doesn’t sugar-coat, and sometimes a bracing Nova Scotia spray of seawater, like Far Out Isnt Far Enough is needed to remind us the world contains a cold, glinting edge but there is still art and words to help us make sense of it all.

*Though please enjoy this review of Crictor from “Manybooks”, on Worldcat, I suspect TU would have laughed loudly at it and would’ve been pleased to make this reader uneasy:

Although I do find the general storyline of Tomi Ungerer’s 1963 Crictor somewhat amusing (and yes, I have certainly found the serpentine alphabet and numbers, not to mention how Crictor fights off the burglar sufficiently engaging), since I have never been all that much a fan of either cartoon-like illustrations or in fact snakes in general, I really cannot say that I have all that much truly enjoyed Crictor on both a reading pleasure and visual aesthetics level. Yes, Crictor is seemingly considered a classic, and also appears to be rather beloved by many, but I have personally found Tomi Ungerer’s presented narrative only mildly entertaining at best, have tended to wonder at the woefully unsnakelike manner in which Crictor is approached and cared for, and actually also consider at least some of the accompanying illustrations peculiarly strange, and possibly even creepy (for while as an adult, I can and do laugh and smirk at the image of Crictor basically fixedly staring at the old lady's backside while she is measuring him and is in another picture taking Crictor for a walk, really and in my humble opinion, these two illustrations could almost be deemed as potentially sexual in nature, and especially considering that Crichton is indeed a serpent). And although I well realise that Crictor is meant to be a rather fantastical tale about a little old lady from France receiving a rather unusual serpentine pet for her birthday, the fact that the poor snake is sent to her through the mail in a cramped and constricting cardboard box (with likely no air holes and no food or water available), and as someone who loves animals and wants and needs animals (both wild and pet animals, both domesticated and wild creatures) to be humanely approached and humanely transported if that becomes necessary, the method how Madame Bodot's nephew (who is supposedly even a snake expert) sends Crictor to her, that really does bother me to no end, and indeed, my realisation that Crictor is a fantasy, does not change my annoyance and personal frustration with this enough for me to consider but two stars as a ranking for Crictor (well, actually two and a half stars). Finally, I also do have to wonder if I would appreciate Crictor considerably more now and as an older and often rather academically inclined adult, had I also read this book as a young child, or more to the point, had I had Crictor read to me or with me as a young child. For there are indeed a goodly number of especially animal-based fantastical, patently unrealistic picture books that have high star ratings for me simply because of nostalgia, just because I remember loving them as a toddler.

References:

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Strasbourg". Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 Sep. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/place/Strasbourg. Accessed 6 January 2023.

DCStamps. “Alsace, German Occupation in WW2 (1940-1944), January 21, 2018. Accessed 4 Jan. 2023.

“Far Out Isn't Far Enough.” Kanopy Streaming 2014. http://www.kanopystreaming.com/node/110155. Accessed 5 Jan. 2023.

Free Library of Philadelphia: Children’s Literature Research Collection. "Tomi Ungerer Papers, 1955-1974 Finding Aid Description”. Free Library of Philadelphia: Children’s Literature Research Collection, Accessed 4 Jan. 2023.

Maughan, Shannon. “Obituary: Tomi Ungerer”. Publishers Weekly, February 12, 2019. Accessed 5 Jan. 2023.

Sellers, John. A. “Tomi Ungerer Relaunched, via Phaidon”. Publishers Weekly, October 6, 2008. Accessed 3 Jan. 2023.

Tomi Ungerer. Official website. Accessed 3 Jan. 2023.

Ungerer, Tomi. “Tomi Ungerer: All in One”. The Drawing Center’s Drawing Papers, vol. 120, published Jan. 8, 2015. Accessed Jan 3, 2023.

]Ungerer, Tomi. Far out Isn't Far Enough: Life in the Back of Beyond. Phaidon Press, 2011.

Ungerer Tomi. Otto : The Autobiography of a Teddy Bear. Phaidon 2010.