Toward the end of Crime and Punishment, the rake and child molester Svidrigailov pulls out a gun on a lonely Petersburg street and prepares to shoot himself. The only witness is a Jewish soldier whose face, Dostoevsky says, has “the eternal expression of resentful affliction that is etched on every Jewish face without exception.” When Svidrigailov draws his gun, the guard rushes toward him, and exclaims, “This is no place for jokes!” But the old nihilist has prepared his last line: “If anybody asks,” he says as he fires, “tell them I’m going to America.” Thus, with a bang, the Russian novel was off to America. And the people who brought it over, and nourished it with their tears, were the descendants of that poor Jewish guard. One of the strengths of Jewish-American writing, from its beginnings a century ago, has been its capacity to recreate the turbulent spirit of Russian literature: a spirit of resentful affliction and desperate yearning, of self-reflection and self-mockery, of gallows humor and laughter through tears, of schlemiels who think they are heroes and heroes who think they are schlemiels. In the works of Bellow and Malamud, of Roth and Heller and Ozick, of Jules Feiffer and Lenny Bruce, of Woody Allen and Bob Dylan, we see how the thriving American Empire of the twentieth century, no less than the decaying Russian Empire of the nineteenth, has nurtured a species of marginal and maladjusted men and women who agonize endlessly, brilliantly, over the meaning of life.
“Spring, 1982. My comic book has been losing money hand over fist. My job has been getting on my nerves. I’m forty-two years old. I’ve been writing for nationally distributed publications for twenty-three years and I’m still an alienated schlep like I was when I was nineteen.” It is the voice of Harvey Pekar, of Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Underneath the words we see a man, etched in the deepest black, emerging from an even blacker background, bent tensely over a table, clinging to his head as if to keep it from collapsing. Our vantage point is weird, from behind and below, as if through the eyes of someone who has collapsed already; the picture, drawn by Kevin Brown, suggests an expressionist woodcut of Despair. We are in the midst of American Splendor, the adult comic book that Pekar self-publishes, whose latest number has just hit the stands. Pekar has put American Splendor together with a number of talented Cleveland or ex-Cleveland artists (Robert Crumb is the best known) who illustrate the stories he writes. These stories, “From off the Streets of Cleveland,” reveal Pekar as one of the most brilliant and imaginative neo-Russian writers working in any country today.
Pekar’s world is divided into three parts, which echo the classic zoning of the Russian novel. There is the solitary rented room—a friend, lover, or spouse may temporarily share this space, but the fundamental loneliness never lifts; there is the city street, generally crummy, in a neighborhood full of people who are down and out—decrepit and often dangerous, yet rich in human vitality for those who know how to look and listen; finally, inevitably, there is the government office. Pekar, like so many heroes of Russian fiction, works as a clerk in the lower ranks of the civil service. Like them, he is an educated proletarian, at once anchored and enchained by his job, smart and sensitive but with no power. Working in the bowels of a vast bureaucracy (he is a file clerk in a public hospital), he gets a close-up of the ways in which a social system can grind people down—but also of the ways in which subjected people schmooze, flirt, hondle, and create an abundant life between the lines. In Pekar, as in his Russian precursors, the clerk’s job appears as a parable of the writer’s vocation: This hero has absolutely no power—except for the power to describe and transcribe people and things precisely as they are, the power to record the truth.
Pekar’s presentation of himself oscillates between two classical Russian archetypes: the Superfluous Man (first defined by Turgenev) and the Underground Man (which goes back to Dostoevsky). The SM is exceptionally sensitive to other people and their needs, but inhibited in fighting for, or even recognizing, his own needs. On the job, he is likely to be passed over, if not laid off, or treated as a lovable eccentric who need not be taken seriously. With women, he is apt to be rejected, or exploited (he may be the odd man out in ménages à trois), or not noticed at all. He is a loyal friend, a sympathetic confidant, but his best moments tend to be vicarious; he is a marvelous observer of life who can’t seem to make it as a participant. The UM defines himself as the SM’s antithesis. He is determined not to be victimized. He overflows with rancor, spite, “resentful affliction,” toward everything and everyone in his life—sometimes, it seems, toward life itself. His intensity is exciting; he raises the emotional temperature of any room or any human encounter close to the boiling point. But he is crippled by an inability to see other people, except as projections of his own needs. Where the SM falls idealistically in love with people, the UM is apt to say The Hell With Them. Ironically, the UM turns out to be just as stymied as the SM in his pursuit of happiness and fulfillment. He starts out to ride roughshod over everyone in his way—and yet, somehow, ends up turning most of his aggressive energy against himself, and humiliating himself more than he could ever be humiliated by anyone else. Pekar knows both, he is both. He has managed for years to make poetry out of the quarrel between them. And there are magical moments, when neither he nor we expect it, when he somehow manages to assimilate and transcend them both, to affirm himself and others. But the SM and UM complexes are never far away from Pekar: they are Family.
In some of these moments of transcendence, Pekar places himself directly in the Russian-Jewish tradition. “Miracle Rabbis” (#7; art by R. Crumb) reworks a short story by I.L. Peretz on which generations of Jewish children have been brought up. In Peretz’s turn-of-the-century story, a skeptical intellectual laughs at the legend that the local wunder rebbe disappears in the dead of night and ascends to heaven to meet with God. He decides to trail the rabbi on his midnight rambles. To his amazement, the rabbi changes into the clothes of a Polish peasant, and, disguised, visits the wretched hut of a poor crippled widow, to whom he brings enough food and firewood to survive each day. The intellectual is so moved by this combination of charity and modesty that he becomes a disciple. From then on, whenever anybody speaks of the master ascending to heaven, he adds, “If not higher.” In Pekar’s version, the wunder rebbe is “Dr. Gesundheit,” an old guy with a thick Polish-Yiddish accent who constantly accosts Harvey in hospital corridors, regaling him with jokes that are corny or inscrutable or (somehow) both, and clamoring to be put into his book. Here he tells a rather lame miracle-rabbi joke; Harvey rolls his eyes and looks toward the exits. At that very moment, a decrepit old patient schleps up to the doctor and thanks him for saving his life. But Dr. G. puts him off: “No, you must be mistaken sir, zat’s not me … I can’t take credit for zis.” Harvey plays along with his shtick: “He hasn’t saved a life in years. Actually, he isn’t a doctor at all; he’s a good humor man.” The patient, a little slow, is totally befuddled; the crevices in his face deepen into craters; at last he shuffles away. Dr. G. picks up just where he left off, not missing a beat: “Zo anyway here’s anuzzer story …” as he and Harvey fade away down the hall. What’s happening here is that a modern miracle rabbi, confronted by a recipient of his goodness, puts the man on, even treats him cruelly, rather than take credit for what he has done. And Harvey, a modern skeptic par excellence, by playing along with the doctor and helping to protect his cover, is acknowledging his righteousness, and acting as his hasid—even if only for a couple of frames. This is how righteousness manifests itself in the modern world: it’s mixed up with corniness, with crankiness, but it’s for real. Indeed, the fact that righteousness exists in the midst of this mess is the real miracle.
American Splendor’s peculiar format seems to ensure its marginality—alas, comic-book distributors have little feeling for the tragic, while dealers in “serious literature” can’t see the seriousness in cartoons. But, at the same time, the format brings out its originality and depth. Once we have read Pekar’s stories with these pictures, it is hard to imagine doing without them. The texts and images often play against each other and generate a dialectic of their own. For instance, on the front cover of #6, drawn by Gerry Shamray, it is a lovely spring day, and Cleveland’s apartment houses as well as its foliage are ablaze with color. One of Harvey’s friends, a clean-cut, outdoorsy-looking fellow, has stopped his English bike for a dialectical chat with Harvey. “It’s hard enough,” the fellow says, “to convince people that socialism is a good thing, without basing your argument on some abstract theory of human nature. Plato tried and failed, Fourier tried and failed, Marx tried and failed, Sartre tried and failed …” Harvey’s hair is turning gray, his shoulders slump, he has a paunch, he is physically more decrepit than his friend; yet spiritually he is more youthful, springy, as he stretches himself and says, with a cracked grin, “Well … maybe I c’n learn from their mistakes.”
The tension between texts and images expresses a contradiction in contemporary reality itself: Middle-aged souls can soar as bodies droop; alternately, bodies can grow lithe and supple as minds freeze. (On the back cover of #6, drawn by Greg Budgett and Gary Dumm, the equation is reversed. Harvey’s body has grown strong and ruddy, but the text again belies the image: his rap reveals him sinking into depression, oblivious to the vitality his body exudes.) The cover of the latest issue (#8), also by Budgett and Dumm, shows Harvey in the hospital cafeteria where, with a wicked grin on his face, he makes a wisecrack to one of his superiors who doesn’t happen to be as smart as he is, a wisecrack that makes the man look (and probably feel) even dumber than he is. However, in the bottom left corner, there is a much smaller image that criticizes—and in some sense refutes—the main one. Harvey is pushing a car in the snow, trying to get it to move. Here, instead of sophomoric complacency, we see naked desperation. He is trying to “get started”—not merely the car, but himself: His body is angled like a rocket on a launcher. He seems to want to hurtle himself—his real self, the person he is “deep down”—through the constraining frame, and into the center of the cover, where his “false” self reigns in the midst of a thoroughly alienated scene. This small picture of Harvey straining to move a car through the depths of the long Russian/Cleveland winter is a parable of his life and work: It is his myth of Sisyphus.
Pekar’s picture has come to look especially grim to him in recent years, because there was a period when it seemed that his life was going to brighten up. At the end of 1979, Carola Dibbell wrote a laudatory article about him and American Splendor in the Voice. That fine piece put him on the map in front of a national and influential audience. Calls began coming in from both coasts; it must have seemed that fame and fortune were on the way. Indeed, if there were justice in the universe, Pekar would be rich and famous, fighting with agents, translators, and producers. But there isn’t much justice in the universe—who can explain the mysteries of the culture market?—and his hopes went unfulfilled. Meanwhile, an apparently happy marriage, tenderly celebrated in #5 and #6, abruptly came apart. In #8, four years after his big break, Pekar is still on the street, still in Cleveland, still a file clerk, still horny and lonely, still working in samizdat because no one wants to publish his book. True, samizdat is a noble Russian tradition, but it is the nobility of the down-and-out, and after years and years of this nobility, who needs it? Instead of worrying about whether success would carry him too far from his working-class sources of inspiration—as Gorky, Lawrence, Mike Gold, Farrell, Springsteen had to worry—he has been thrown back on the sort of worries he knows only too well: as he said in #3, “Awaking to the Terror of the Same Old Day.”
It is a tribute to Pekar’s inner strength that he has been able to go on putting his life on the line. But upheavals like these have got to take their toll. The early issues of American Splendor, especially the brilliant #3, were distinguished by a delicate aesthetic and emotional balance: His books expressed a range of human emotions, hot and cool, up and down, and everything in between; but these eruptive feelings were remarkably balanced and counterbalanced in a dynamic equilibrium that made each book an integrated whole. In Pekar’s last two books, all that is eruptive erupts, carrying everything else in its path, dragging us into Pekar’s inner maelstrom, leaving us no way to get through or out—except to stop reading, or not to start. In #7, Pekar hit us with not one excruciating divorce, but two: he threw in the disastrous breakup of his first marriage in the early 1970s. The weight of all this unmediated pain was too much to bear—I put the book down for months, thereby missing many wonderful things in between the catastrophes. A panel in #8 (drawn by Crumb), showing Harvey surrounded by cartons of unsold #7s, suggests that many potential readers stayed away.
If the SM’s sadness overpowers #7, the UM’s rage threatens to run away with #8. “Assault on the Media,” at the book’s center, is a diatribe against The Village Voice (What have they done for him lately?), but also against all the other East and West Coast people who claim to love his work but so far have done nothing to put his name in lights. With such friends, he doesn’t need enemies. Indeed, he says, he prefers enemies: With people who hate him and his work, at least he knows where he stands. In case the political implications aren’t clear, Chairman Mao’s motto, “Combat Liberalism,” adorns the wall. In this centerfold, aided and abetted by Crumb, Harvey comes across as a raving meshugginer, shouting and banging the wall. I couldn’t stand it (maybe—though I doubt it—if I myself weren’t trying to plug-Pekar in the Voice, I would’ve got a kick out of it). I dropped the book like a hot rock and put it at the bottom of the pile.
I was very glad when I picked it up again: #8 is full of material that suggests Pekar’s imaginative breadth. Sue Cavey, an artist who came on board in #7, does about a third of the artwork in #8. She gives Harvey and his world a radically new look, and generates a distinctive dialogue that encompasses Pekar, herself, and us. Cavey, the one woman Pekar has worked with so far (does this mean something?), is also the one artist whose visual style is rooted in symbolism rather than realism. Her figures are shadowy, spectral; they float and hover, melt and fade. In her frames, the boundaries between the self, other people, and the world are shifting and elusive; people’s shadows, especially Harvey’s, may appear as vivid and substantial as the people themselves. Cavey’s work brings out a profound strangeness in Harvey’s world, a strangeness that American Splendor’s artwork has tended to conceal. She opens up a realm of secret thoughts, desires, fears, just behind his back, over his shoulder, at his feet; she transforms streets, living rooms, delicatessens, automotive interiors into dreamscapes and forests of symbols. After several of these stories, a reader may well feel queasy and yearn for the familiar grimy Pekaresque world.
Cleveland, in all its griminess, obsesses Pekar: On one hand, it is a remote provincial outpost, squalid, unbearable in winter, close to bankruptcy; Harvey dreams of escape to New York or San Francisco the way a young Chekhovian lieutenant dreams of Moscow. On the other hand, it’s home, it’s mother and father, it offers warmth and solace when the great world outside betrays you. Thus, in #1, a man returns from California, where he was caught in a disastrous ménage à trois, to shoot baskets happily with his old Cleveland pals: here, at least, he can score. On the back cover, a grizzled old worker (wearing a “Vladic Moving and Storage” jacket) throws an egg at a Greyhound bus leaving for Hawaii (a bus for Hawaii?), and addresses the bizarre-looking crowd that is about to depart: “You fuckers can leave if you wanna, but I’m stayin’ in Cleveland an’ fightin’.” His friend agrees: “‘At’s tellin’ ’em, buddy. Let ’em go, Cleveland don’t need their kind.” In “Getting Adjusted” (#3), maybe the best story Pekar has ever done, an ex-San Francisco hippie, now a young mother, realizes, as she talks to Harvey, that in spite of herself she has come to like Cleveland: The people here are “real good, solid people. They’re not far out or trippy but they do some magical things and they don’t even know it.” To accept Cleveland, in Pekar’s scheme of things, is to grow up, to accept people as they are, the human condition, real life.
“Grub Street, U.S.A.” Pekar’s best story in recent years, reiterates this theme, but in a more complex and deeper way. After all that has happened in the last few years, Pekar finds it harder than ever to believe that the bluebird of happiness is right there in his own backyard. “Grub Street” begins with the tableau of desperate misery I quoted at the start of this piece. Then Harvey hears that Wallace Shawn is coming from New York to promote his film, My Dinner with André. He has heard that Shawn likes his work, and arranges to meet him. Harvey imagines New York life as one great artistic orgy and yearns to become part of the action: “Half th’ city of New York’s putting on plays, an’ I’m here in Cleveland sitting with 25,000 comic books I can’t sell. Oy gevald! the world is passing me by.” Maybe the man from New York will help make him a star. As he listens to Shawn, whom he likes, he realizes that not only does the man lack magical powers, but he’s in a bind surprisingly similar to Harvey’s: Though his work has received critical praise, he can’t raise money for new projects, his girlfriend must work as a waitress to make the rent, his Visa card may be repossessed. Shawn’s lament makes Harvey realize that for this guy, New York is Cleveland—not a magical kingdom run by gods or demons, but a real place, the scene of endless, unremitting, everyday struggles.
And as Harvey grasps how New York can be Cleveland, suddenly, magically, Cleveland becomes New York: A vast horizon opens up (drawn beautifully by Kevin Brown); we see sweeping vistas of the city that Pekar has never let us see before, and Cleveland appears as a great metropolis with cloud-capped towers and a glamorous skyline all its own. For once, Harvey is too worn out to talk. But we can see what he has been through, and what he has won. We can share his sense of peace, and, with him, accept our own cities, our own limitations, our own hung-up and worn-out selves. It may not last, but it’s real: It’s the real American splendor.
This essay was originally published in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, September 1983.