An air raid siren for the Left.

In London in 1937, Stefan Lorant, a Hungarian photojournalist who had served time in a Nazi prison, started a pocket-sized monthly magazine which combined English humor with European style. It was called Lilliput. Throughout the Second World War it entertained readers in bomb shelter, canteen, and mess with its unique mix of stories, articles, photography, and cartoons.

On the magazine's third birthday, in the August 1940 issue, as London came under sustained night attack, the editors wrote:

   When we started Lilliput, in July 1937, we
   planned for the first time an intelligent
   magazine for intelligent people, at a popular
   price. It has been our guiding policy ever since.
      But in July 1937 we could not have foreseen
   that less than three years later we would be
   producing Lilliput in the middle of a world
   war, although, even then, Lilliput was in its
   own way attacking the dictators and warning
   the democracies of the dangers ahead.

The magazine was subtitled "The Monthly Magazine for Everyone," and so it was. First of all, the covers were drawn by Walter Trier, another European refugee. Trier's charming artwork always showed a man, his girlfriend, and their dog, walking, working in a munitions factory, or sunbathing. Then there were the advertisements: All-Bran cereal, Kiwi shoe polish, Macleans toothpaste, and Mars Bars. My Goodness--My Guinness! Milk of Magnesia. Eno's Fruit Salt. Ministry of Food recipes pompously exhorted housewives to make cakes out of potatoes, carrots, and powdered egg.

The first column was always by "Lemuel Gulliver," decorated by the drawings of Victoria, another refugee, this time from Berlin. Her depictions of Gulliver, in his pigtail wig and wide-cuffed coat, were a feature of the magazine. Each month Gulliver, an innocent descending into the abyss, would meet a different representative of London life--a confidence man, a black marketeer, a racing tipster--and would be suitably shocked. His encounters were often funny, and always informative.

Each issue featured articles by such writers as James Agate, Antonia White, D. B. Wyndham Lewis, Margot Bennett, and Alec Waugh. These would be historical, biographical, or whimsical in nature. There were translations from Chekhov (by Constance Garnett) and de Maupassant, and Arthur Waley's versions of poems from the Chinese. One issue had a double-page spread of an English version of Baudelaire's poem "Her Hair." Yet Lilliput wasn't literary in a self-conscious way--just literate. Many features consisted of snippets from writers from ancient times to the present, on a particular theme--Love, or The German Character, or Tobacco--always well chosen and succinct.

The first-person accounts were of a high order. Lion Feuchtwanger, many years after Jew Suss (and after his own escape to the U.S.), wrote brilliantly about an art dealer, Mr. Wollstein, whom he had met in an internment camp. Bill Naughton, whose creation "Alfie" is now the subject of a movie remake, regularly contributed vivid stories of northern England city life. Patrick Campbell's hysterically funny stories, usually based upon embarrassing episodes in his own life, formed his comic reputation.

There was also a sprinkling of ghost and horror tales: "The Girl They Couldn't Hang," "The Upas Tree." Algernon Blackwood's 1910 story "The Wendigo" was reprinted in a Lilliput of the 1950s. These would be illustrated by such artists as Eric Fraser, whose staring terrified faces and shiny blood drops transfixed the viewer, and Mervyn Peake, who in a few lines could imply boundless menace. (When I read Peake's Gormenghast books, I hurried back to Lilliput to examine his earlier drawings. I don't know how Titus Groan would hold up these days, but those drawings are as striking as ever.) During the same period as he drew for Lilliput and wrote his novels, Peake worked as an official war artist. Dispatched to Belsen at the war's end, he saw horrors which exceeded even his dark visions.

So who was reading Lilliput when it first came out? Evidently, many service personnel, who themselves contributed. Firsthand stories of service life would be by-lined simply "Lance-Corporal," "Airgunner," "An A.T.S. Private [Auxiliary Territorial Service--the women's army]." These were usually excellent, often funny, often very sad. Probably many were written by already published writers, now serving in the forces.

It is clear that women readers were just about as numerous as men, as most of the ads, and many of the articles, were probably aimed at women. Nor was the magazine's audience confined to Britain. Many contributors were from the U.S., suggesting that many readers bought copies there, and there was a strong following throughout the British Empire.

Ronald Searle, whose St. Trinian's cartoons began in Lilliput, sent his first drawing to the magazine in 1941. His unit was in Singapore when the Japanese invaded in February 1942. On February 13, under enemy fire, Searle found a copy of the October 1941 Lilliput among rubbish in the street, and thus saw his drawing in print. As a prisoner of the Japanese in Changi and on the Thai-Burma Railway, Searle continued to make drawings, and after the war he walked into the Lilliput office with an armful of them. Not only did he subsequently marry the Assistant Editor, Kaye Webb, but the St. Trinian's cartoons--influenced by the horrors which Searle had endured--became legendary. (Kaye Webb became editor of Puffin Books through the Sixties and Seventies, publishing such classics as C. S. Lewis's Narnia series, and Tolkien's Hobbit.)

The cartoons likely were Lilliput's most popular feature: Alex Graham (later known for his much feebler, seemingly interminable Fred Basset strip), Starke, David Langdon, Andre Francois, Saul Steinberg of New Yorker fame, Acanthus, and odd ones like Haro. It is well known that the cartoons from the nineteenth-century issues of Punch are staggeringly unfunny. But Lilliput's cartoons, on the whole, wear very well indeed, mad some repay revisiting many times.

Yet it was the photography for which Lilliput is known, if known at all, today. Brassai and Zoltan Glass featured in Lilliput's pages. Then there was Bill Brandt. His shots of buildings and streets, in which the contrasts suggested so much mystery, were reason enough to read the magazine. His scenes of Haworth captured all the nightmare beauty of the Bronte country. Another memorable sequence had photos by Brandt alongside drawings by Henry Moore, all depicting Londoners in the underground air raid shelters. Each medium echoed and enhanced the other; the overall effect was chilling, yet the subjects' stoicism was the impression that remains.

"Juxtapositions" was the title given to the feature which consisted of a double-page set of two photos, the right hand one resembling the left, but actually of something completely different. Most were funny, and some truly brilliant. Before computer searching, when a real person had to look through hundreds if not thousands of pictures from the agencies (Fox, Keystone, Black Star) to find a match, the amount of labor involved must have been immense.

Where did Lilliput stand, politically? It is remarkable how little politics it displayed, beyond the faintest pink tinge. There were slightly lefty articles by Claud Cockburn; Gulliver sometimes made a snide remark about capitalists; a wartime article by Negley Farson told of a "better world after the war." A few translations appeared of crudely humorous pieces by contemporary Soviet writers such as Mikhail Zoshchenko, of which the only point can have been to exhibit solidarity with the Soviet ally. But that was all. Today's most trivial weekend magazine piece is more overtly left-wing, while flaunting advertisements for luxury cars and Cartier watches. Lilliput, with its ads for toothpaste and breakfast cercal, was as culturally and politically unpretentious as an intelligent magazine can be.

The war pervaded everything--the ads, cartoons, and stories--yet the magazine's tone was resolutely low-key: Hitler and Goebbels were laughed at, rather than demonized. (George W. Bush is more abused in our quality press than Hitler was in Lilliput.) The lights were out in Europe, and London itself was ablaze each night, while the magazine maintained its tone of gentle amusement. The cartoons made as much fun of the absurdity of British army life as they did of the enemy. The editors were conscious of Lilliput's role in assisting with morale; the September 1940 issue claimed cheerfully:

   We believe that a paper such as Lilliput can
   help to win the war!

      We have had hundreds of letters telling us
   how eagerly it is looked forward to by all
   branches of the Services, and how it has
   helped to lighten the long hours of 'standing
   by' that are an inevitable part of the work of
   A.R.P. (Air Raid Patrol) personnel.

There is no equivalent today of either Lilliput's gentle editorial attitude or its contributors' identification with the British war effort. Since Vietnam, Western journalists have felt it part of their job to oppose any cause for which their countrymen were fighting. "Support the troops," yes, but question, endlessly, the purpose of their deployment, thus undermining it in public opinion. Yet in 1940, the Lilliput writers' and artists' commitment was not only theoretical--in many cases, they were risking all.

It is hard not to conclude that the change is fundamental. Would even air raid sirens every night convince today's writers that their freedom and their very lives were at risk? Is the problem their ignorance, or in fact their susceptibility to admiration of anti-Western violence? (A more generous interpretation is that their attitude strives for a "reverse magic": if they forecast disaster for U.S. and Western interests in the Middle East, it is partly to demonstrate their omniscience, partly to ward off the catastrophe. Perhaps.)

The war was Lilliput's finest hour. After 1945, it began to lose its way. Connoisseurs can discern a falling off, the onset of a silver age, even before 1950. True, pieces by many of the same writers and artists continued to appear, but something was rotten. There were more girly pictures, but not the arty melancholy nudes of earlier issues--more the high heels and make-up style. Presumably its publishers were trying to turn it into a small-scale British Playboy. But don't judge it by its mid-1950s death throes. If you see a 1940s issue of Lilliput, buy it: a glance at eBay.com reveals that copies from the war years range in price from less than one pound to about ten. The prose, photography, and drawings in each issue are Important in their own right, as well as being a precious token of the survival of civilized life through the worst years which Europe and Britain have so far known.