The Wrath of Ralph : Ralph Steadman’s Political Cartoons Are Gone. His Gut-Level Sensibilities Have Been Transferred to Opera and Many Other Pursuits.

Ralph Steadman draws lustily on a Scotch whiskey, washes it down with a Mexican beer and pricks up his ears. “Listen to this!” he says as a haunting new opera spills out of the Napa Valley cottage where he and his wife, Anna, are briefly burrowed.

“This is the little child asking for his own life,” he says, savoring the rich, vaguely South American score as a child’s voice sings. “ ‘Can I have the life that’s mine? Can I sing for you? Can I see the things you’ve seen? Can I live before I go?’ This is an angry thing.”

He smiles not angrily but sweetly. And smile he should: Steadman wrote the uncompromisingly pro-environmental libretto.

Opera writing is only one of many pursuits being explored by the celebrated British illustrator. Sculpture is another. Graphic arts, too; illustrating catalogues for the arty, adventurous British wine distributor Oddbins is what brought him recently to California’s wine country.

But his political cartoons, for which Americans best know him, are history.

Steadman--whose slashing, splotchy style splendidly captured the knee-in-the-groin sensibilities of Hunter Thompson’s gonzo journalism in the 1970s--fears that politics has been reduced to a “blizzard of . . . pouring out of the television set” and he will participate in it no longer.

He still feels passionately about the human condition and what he thinks is its inexorable decline, he just doesn’t think political cartoons can stop it.

“The political cartoon is seriously out of date. It is outmoded, tired. It has become background noise; you don’t have to pay attention to it,” he said, sounding sad but unsentimental.

“It’s part of the game, filling that space--kerplunk!--and then listening as everybody the next day says, ‘Oh, that’s true!’ Well, you see, they know it already. And nothing changes. What you’ve got to do is shock them; come at them from another angle. So, rather than going on doing that same, tired old bloody nonsense, I’m stopping and doing something else.”

Even as an affable 54-year-old with a shock of gray hair, Steadman can show flashes of being an angry young man.

Coming of age in the socialist ferment of postwar Britain, Steadman, the son of a traveling salesman and a coal miner’s daughter, said he looked to politics as the practical application of ideals and aspirations--”about what we hoped for in our society, not for ourselves.”

In the 1960s, Steadman lashed out in the acerbic British satire magazine Private Eye with the sort of angry art that later came to identify the gonzo journalism of ‘70s.

But politics in the 1980s, both in Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s America, became a Roman circus of greed and self-interest, he said, adding, “People are voting for themselves. They are voting for ‘me.’ That’s the worst way to vote.”

He recalled how his hometown, a village called Loose (pronounced Loooz) in Kent, southern England, changed in the middle of the decade when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party introduced the gospel of profit to the British masses by selling off British Steel, British Telecom and other formerly state-run enterprises.

“It was so funny,” he said. “Down at my local pub, everybody was walking around with a copy of the Investors Chronicle under their arms. They looked at it, following share prices every day: ‘Oh, boy! Have I made a few quid today!’ Suddenly, there was this terrible crash, in 1987. The next day, you didn’t see an Investors Chronicle anywhere. They had all burned their fingers. I thought, ‘Serves you right’. . . . They got what they’d voted for, because they voted for themselves. They didn’t vote for the ideal.”

He adds, as an aside: “I still vote socialist, not because I think we will ever have a truly socialist community, but because the ideal is so good.”

Instead of promoting “common humanity and a sense of fair play,” he said, “career-oriented” politicians--which is to say most of them nowadays--play to the lowest common electoral denominator: “What is in it for me?”

He is both disappointed and disgusted.

“If I wouldn’t want to have these people over to dinner,” he said, “why would I want to draw them?”

When he had had enough--it was “two or three” years ago, when he drew his last political cartoon, portraying the prime minister as a Henry Moore-style statue of a bronze maiden for an art magazine whose name slips his mind--he decided to take “a long-term sabbatical” to work on other things.

“It’s not just saying I want to be alone, like Greta Garbo. It is actively thinking, ‘How can I get out of this mode?’ You have to do something desperate and start again,” he said. “So starting again is doing things like this, the opera and trying to be an artist.”

The opera, “The Plague and the Moonflower,” a fantastic allegory in which the destruction of the environment is symbolized by such things as a 30-foot-tall, red-eyed, black-draped demon, and a rare, delicate little flower discovered by artist Margaret Mee that blossoms only at night.

Written by Steadman and composer Richard Harvey for the Exeter Festival, it has already been performed in two cathedrals in England (the Daily Telegraph of London described it as “ferociously satirical”) and is scheduled for a third performance in October at Canterbury Cathedral. He said that he is looking for a “serious, Green sponsor” to bring the opera to America.

Amid Harvey’s score for flourishing trumpets and soaring organ, Steadman’s message is a somber counterpoise:

Plun- plun- plunder

Plunder deep inside the soul.

‘Til earthly powers are spent

Darkness

Spawns its own lament.

Steadman’s sculpture is similarly somber. One piece is called “Dying Black Swan”; another, “The Sentence,” depicts a “soulless creature” wearing what looks like a wig traditionally worn by English judges.

He also keeps a hand in two-dimensional art: He sometimes shows a work that he calls “Cabinet of the Mind,” a fanciful collection of imaginary political leaders made up of Polaroids that he has snipped, reassembled, distorted and discolored.

And he still publishes a new book every year or two.

His next will be Tales of the Weirrd, a compendium of oddball characters from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, such as a man who tried to devour himself. His last book, “The Big I Am,” published in 1988, depicted a disappointed deity assessing humankind.

At the same time, Steadman is thinking again of teaming up with occasional playmate Hunter Thompson to commit “one more monstrous thing before we die.”

Together, they invented a new “gonzo” style of participatory journalism born in Rolling Stone magazine and expanded in such books as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,” “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72,” “The Curse of Lono” and “A Generation of Swine.”

Steadman said, “there’s still that spark there” with Thompson, whom he calls a “rather brilliant writer.” He showed off a stack of faxes from the writer, including visual jokes, such as an badly exposed snapshot that Thompson claims is a photo of himself being struck by lightning, and missives asking Steadman to write a foreword, an introduction or a chapter for Thompson’s next book.

A friend and former editor, Paul Perry, recently approached Steadman about writing a biography of Thompson, a drug-munching, handgun-carrying free spirit who recently beat allegations that he had molested a pornographic film star in his Colorado hot tub.

Steadman, who served as chairman of the British branch of Thompson’s legal-defense committee, said Thompson rejected the idea when it was first suggested years ago, but recently changed his mind.

“When I spoke to Hunter about it, he said, ‘Hell, why don’t you do it? You know more about me than anyone. You can say what you like about me, and I can sue you and we can get a whole publicity thing going,’ ” Steadman said with a schoolboy’s devilish grin. Clearly, he was keen to work once more with his old friend; this seemed to be as good as anything.

“I could write scurrilous things about him,” he said with mock excitement as he surveyed the vineyard surrounding his guest house. “I could write about the terrible things he did to me! About the terrible situations that he put me into!”

For now, however, Steadman must focus on commerce, not camaraderie. He must press on with his commission from Oddbins: Capturing the essence and spirit of the Napa Valley in pen-and-ink drawings that will liven up the wine merchant’s next semi-annual price catalogue.

Since 1987, he has drawn scenes from Portugal, Italy, Australia and France for earlier editions of the catalogue, so he has established a routine: “Take photographs, make impressions, interview people, get a feel for the place and develop a theme for the thing.” In Napa, it took four days, which included a glider ride over the valley and a visit to a local women’s wine-tasting social.

“It is the most wonderful release to do something about a subject which is really quite soft and lovely, that is wine,” Steadman said, explaining why he took the Oddbins job.

When he has completed his worldwide wine tour--next are Germany, Chile and possibly Bulgaria, Soviet Georgia and other Eastern European nations--he said he may assemble all the work eventually in a book to be called “The Grapes of Ralph.”

Meantime, the Bacchus bug has bit him. He has planted 101 wine grapevines on his English estate. In his mini-vineyard, Steadman has a small shrine to Bacchus, the Greek god of wine. He put a bottle of wine there “so that the grapes, when they ripen, know what they bloody well have got to do.”

Introducing Britain’s traditional beer lovers to the sensual pleasures of a “black curranty” Bulgarian Merlot or an amusing Australian Shiraz are merely a temporary commercial diversion, a way to pay the bills while he continues to pursue his politics.

The trip to California, for example, also let him stop by Tucson, Ariz., to tour Biosphere II, a $30-million closed-environment experiment where eight men and women plan to spend two years isolated from the rest of the world except for sunlight, energy and electronic communications. Its goal is to show how to build a colony on another planet while also allowing research on environmental processes on Earth.

Steadman was invited to tour it by the owners of the gallery where he shows his art; the gallery owners also are sponsoring Biosphere II. The bold goal of the project, coming so close to the millennium, has set Steadman to thinking.

“The end of the century should be like a customs (check) point, like an edge, like a door,” he said. “You must go through it . . . but you can only pass through with a certain number of items. So you don’t take with you oil spills, and you can’t take CFC gases or nonbiodegradable products of any kind. And you surely can’t take through an internal combustion engine.

“You have to leave it all behind, in the 20th Century. You have to pretend it never happened. Pretend the 20th Century was just a bad dream. What we need to take through are a box of new values--not 10 new commandments, just simple human values.”