Maps and Legends

by Michael Chabon

  All seven of these typical narratives converge in “The Evening Combinator,” through whose seventeen pages Katchor begins, not without regret presumably, to effect an evacuation from the blasted country of the newspaper strip to the rumored paradise of something known, a hundred years after a bald boy in a yellow nightdress first appeared in the lonely, teeming streets of New York City, as the graphic story. Interesting things are happening there; whether they ever reach the level of high quality combined with mass readership of the great comic strips—the creation of immense shared hallucinations—remains to be seen. Perhaps in a broken, nocturnal, past-haunted city of solitary wanderers and lunatic leagues, like this one, such universal fantasies and the fellowship they provide are no longer possible. No matter how we crave them.

  THOUGHTS ON THE DEATH OF WILL EISNER

  BACK WHEN I WAS learning to love comic books, Will Eisner was God. Not God as in Eric Clapton—to be bowed down before, forehead to the ground, in a haze of dry ice and laser light. Gustave Flaubert once wrote in a letter that “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” In 1975 Will Eisner was God like that to me. Some of the artists and writers of the day whose work I liked most—Neal Adams, Jim Steranko, Steve Gerber, Steve Ditko—had been directly influenced by Eisner, but I didn’t know that. All I knew about Will Eisner was what I had read in Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes. In that book, by one of Eisner’s protégés—a key work in the history of comics history—Feiffer passionately instructed the reader that Will Eisner was a genius and a pioneer, the one from whom all others stole and so forth. And I believed him. But I pretty-much had to take Jules Feiffer’s word for it. The eight-page Spirit story that Feiffer reprinted in his book—“The Jewel of Death”—remained for a long time the only full example of Eisner’s work that I had ever seen. Eisner was out of print, out of comics. As a publisher, a packager, a talent scout, an impresario, and as an artist and writer, Will Eisner had created the world of comics as I knew it. But until I saw some of the later Warren (or maybe it was the Kitchen Sink) reprints, I really had no idea who he was or what he had done.

  By the time I sat down to interview Will, in 1996, I was better educated. I had just started to write the novel that became The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. A crucial part of my preparatory research was getting hold of all the Eisner I could find—the Spirit, the graphic novels, the books of comics theory—and the truth of Jules Feiffer’s claims was obvious. Eisner brought radical technical innovations to the comics page—some borrowed from the movies, some from the theater, some from the fine-art tradition—and that was impressive and important. But the amazing thing about his Spirit work—all of Eisner’s tricks and technical bravado, his wild angles and striking use of shadow—was how fresh and new it still looked, even after fifty years of constant imitation by peers, inferiors, and successors. A parallel can be drawn here to Citizen Kane, and to a certain extent Eisner and Welles stand as parallel figures in their respective media. Both of them were prodigiously gifted and managed at a young age to get their hands on a vehicle—a Hollywood studio, a newspaper syndicate—that would allow them to put on a dazzling display of those gifts. Both had a phenomenally sharp eye for talent in others, and the knack for yoking it to the service of their own schemes and ambitions. Both of them served as the secret and open inspiration, as touchstone and mark of comparison, for the generations of directors and comic-book artists who followed them. But Will Eisner had something—was something—that Orson Welles never quite managed, or permitted himself, or possessed a head hard enough to be: Will Eisner was a businessman. He was a Welles and a Selznick, a Brian Wilson and an Ahmet Ertegun. He was labor and management. He was the talent and the guy who had to fire the talent. Sometimes he signed the paychecks, and sometimes he was hanging on, himself, until the next one. He started companies, negotiated contracts, acquired rights, packaged material for sale. At the same time that he was practicing all that capitalism, he was dreaming and writing and drawing. He revolutionized an artistic medium, opened it up and theorized it and made it a superb vehicle for his memories, his emotions, his way of looking at the world. He had his failures, as an artist and as a businessman, because he took risks, as an artist and as a businessman.

  Sometimes it’s hard, trying to make art you know you can sell without feeling that you are selling it out. And then sometimes it’s hard to sell the art that you have made honestly without regard to whether or not anyone will ever want to buy it. You hope to spend your life doing what you love and need and have been fitted by nature or God or your protein-package to do: write, draw, sing, tell stories. But you have to eat. Will Eisner knew that. He knew what it felt like to be hungry, to feel your foot graze against the cold hard bottom. He knew how lucky you were to be born with a talent that people would pay you to share. But he was also graced with the willingness (and, when he was lucky, the ability) to get people to pay a little bit more, to drive the price a little bit higher, to hold out for a better deal or a. lower price from his suppliers. Will Eisner was a great artist and a skilled businessman; inextricably both. I loved that about him. More than fifty years after the first issues of Blackhawk and Doll Man and the other titles that he and his partner Jerry Iger packaged for Quality Comics had hit the newsstands, he still remembered the sales figures, the distributors’ names, the dime-and-dollar details of hits and flops. And I sensed that all that stuff was every bit as interesting—every bit as important—to him as the nuance of an inked line, the meaning that could be compressed into and sprung from three square panels in a row. There may be many routes to happiness for a man; there may be only a few. But in his artistry and acumen—in the way he moved so comfortably through the world as an artist who worked for money and as a businessman who worked for art, I think that Will Eisner came awfully close to finding one of those routes. He was lucky like that.

  MY BACK PAGES

  I STARTED TO WRITE The Mysteries of Pittsburgh in April of 1985, in Ralph’s room. Ralph was the Christian name of a man I never met, the previous owner of my mother’s house on Colton Drive, in the Montclair District of Oakland, California. He had died, hit by a car while standing at the end of his driveway, shortly before his house was sold. I always pictured him as a stooped, soft-spoken man in a cardigan, scorned by the world, who retreated to his laboratory, where he turned into Ernest Thesiger and called wild Transylvanian lightning down from the skies. His so-called room was in fact a crawl space, twice as long as it was wide, and it was not very wide. It had a cement floor and a naked light bulb. It smelled like dirt, though not in a bad way—like soil and cold dust and bicycle grease. Most people would have used it for suitcases and tire chains and the lawn-darts set, but at some point this Ralph had built himself a big, high, bulky workbench in there. He built it of plywood and four-by-fours, with a surface that came level to the waist of a tall man standing. It might have been a fine workbench, but it made a lousy desk, which is how I used it.

  I was living with my mother and my stepfather that spring, working as an assistant in my stepfather’s optometry office and trying to get the hang of California. I had moved from Pittsburgh in December with the intention of applying to an MFA program out here. At the University of Pittsburgh I’d had three great writing teachers—Dennis Bartel, Eve Shelnutt, and Chuck Kinder—and of them Bartel had an MFA from UC Irvine and Kinder had studied writing at Stanford. Both gentlemen had said they would put in a good word for me at their respective alma maters. I’m sure Kinder did his best, but his effort could not avail, and in the end I found myself headed to UCI.

  That winter I had been down to check out Irvine, whose writing program was staffed by a couple of novelists, Oakley Hall and MacDonald Harris. Of the seven first-year MFA candidates I met during my brief visit—they would of course be second-years when I showed up the next fall—all were at work on novels (three of which, by my count, were subsequently published—a pretty high rate). I rode the ferr
y and ate a frozen banana at Balboa Island, looked at the ocean, and wondered if Southern California would ever feel less strange to me, less of a place where people I would never know led lives I couldn’t imagine, than Northern California did. There were lots of young women walking around in swimsuits and negligibly short pants and I suppose I probably wondered how many of them I would never get to sleep with. I was kind of on a losing streak with women at the time. I was in a bad way, actually. I was lonely and homesick. I missed Pittsburgh. I missed the friends I had made there, friends about whom I felt, with what strikes me now as a fair amount of drama-queenliness, that 1) I would never see them ever again on this side of the River Styx, and 2) they were indissolubly bound to me by chains of fire. My loneliness and homesickness were of intense interest to me at the time, as were young women in short pants, novels, and my eternal-yet-forever-lost friendships, and when I read a page of Remembrance of Things Past (as it was then known), the book that was my project for the year, I felt all those interests mesh like teeth with the teeth of Grammar and Style, and I would imagine myself, spasmodically, a writer. I hope you can infer from the above description that I was not yet twenty-two years old.

  I returned to chill, gray Oakland from sunny Orange County, to the little basement room in my mother’s house where I did some of my finest feeling lonely and homesick. There I ventured through a few more pages of Swann’s Way and fretted about all those people I was soon going to be surrounded and taught by, people who were and knew themselves to be proud practitioners of novelism. Was everyone obliged to write a novel? Could I write a novel? Did I want to write a novel? What the hell was a novel anyway, when you came right down to it? A really, really, really long short story? I hoped so, because that was the only thing I knew for certain that I could manage, sort of, to write.

  Now here I was, basically required by law, apparently, to start writing a goddamned novel, just because all of these windy people down at Irvine were unable to contain themselves. What kind of novel would I write? Had the time come to leave my current writing self behind?

  The truth was that I had come to a rough patch in my understanding of what I wanted my writing to be. I was in a state of confusion. Over the past four years I had been struggling to find a way to accommodate my taste for the fiction I had been reading with the greatest pleasure for the better part of my life—fantasy, horror, crime, and science fiction—to the way that I had come to feel about the English language, which was that it and I seemed to have something going. Something (on my side at least) much closer to deep, passionate, physical and intellectual love than anything else I had ever experienced with a human up to that point. But when it came to the use of language, somehow, my verbal ambition and my ability felt hard to frame or fulfill within the context of traditional genre fiction. I had found some writers, such as J. G. Ballard, Italo Calvino, J. L. Borges, and Donald Barthelme, who wrote at the critical point of language, where vapor turns to starry plasma, and yet who worked, at least sometimes, in the terms and tropes of genre fiction. They all paid a price, however. The finer and more masterly their play with language, the less connected to the conventions of traditional, bourgeois narrative form—unified point of view, coherent causal sequence of events, linear structure, naturalistic presentation—their fiction seemed to become. Duly I had written my share of pseudo-Ballard, quasi-Calvino, and neo-Borges. I had fun doing it. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop preferring traditional, bourgeois narrative form.

  I wanted to tell stories, the kind with set pieces and long descriptive passages, and “round” characters, and beginnings and middles and ends. And I wanted to instill—or rather I didn’t want to lose—that quality, inherent in the best science fiction, that was sometimes called “the sense of wonder.” If my subject matter couldn’t do it—if I wasn’t writing about people who sailed through neutron stars or harnessed suns together—then it was going to fall to my sentences themselves to open up the heads of my readers and decant into them enough crackling plasma to light up the eye sockets for a week. But I didn’t want to write science fiction or a version of science fiction, some kind of pierced-and-tattooed, doctorate-holding, ironical stepchild of science fiction. I wanted to write something with reach. Welty and Faulkner started and ended in small towns in Mississippi but somehow managed to plant flags at the end of time and in the minds of readers around the world. A good science-fiction novel appeared to have an infinite reach—it could take you to the place where the universe bent back on itself—but somehow in the end it ended up being the shared passion of just you and that guy at the Record Graveyard on Forbes Avenue who was really into Hawkwind. I wasn’t considering any actual, numerical readership here—I wasn’t so bold. Rather I was thinking about the set of axioms that speculative fiction assumed, and how it was a set that seemed to narrow and refine and program its audience, like a protein that coded for a certain suite of traits. Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world. (Twenty-two, I was twenty-two!)

  I paced around my room in the basement, back and forth past the bookcase where my stepfather kept the books he had bought and read in his own college days. All right, I told myself, take the practical side of things for a moment. Let’s say that I did write a novel. Your basic, old-fashioned, here-and-now novel. Where would I write it? Novels took time, I assumed. They must require long hours of uninterrupted work. I needed a place where I could set up my computer and spread out and get my daily work done without distraction: Ralph’s room. It had served Ralph as a room of his own, as a secret mountain laboratory; perhaps it would also serve me.

  I lugged my computer in there and up onto the workbench. It was an Osborne 1a. I had bought it in 1983 for all that was left of my bar mitzvah money plus everything I had managed to save since. It was the size of a portable sewing machine in its molded plastic case, with two five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disk drives, no hard drive, and 64 KB of memory. At twenty-five pounds you could shlep it onto an airplane and it would just barely fit under the seat in front of you. Its screen was glowing green and slightly smaller than a three-by-five index card. It ran the CP/M operating system and had come bundled with a fine word processing program called WordStar. It never crashed, and it never failed, and I loved it immoderately. But when I hoisted it onto the surface of Ralph’s workbench, opened up one of the folding chairs that my mother stored in the crawl space, and sat down, I found that I could not reach its keys. Even standing up I could not reach the computer’s fold-down keyboard without bending my forearms into contorted penguin flappers. So I dragged over the black steamer trunk my Aunt Gail had bequeathed to me at some point in her wanderings and set the folding chair on top of it. The four rubber caps of the chair’s steel legs fit on the trunk’s lid with absurd precision, without half an inch to spare at any corner. Then I mounted the chair. I fell off. I repositioned it, and mounted it again more gingerly. I found that if I held very still, typed very chastely, and never, ever, rocked back and forth, I would be fine. Now I just needed to figure out what novel I was going to write.

  I went back out to my room and shambled irritably back and forth from the door that led to the hot tub to the door that went upstairs, mapping out the confines of my skull like the bear at the Pittsburgh Zoo. And my eye lighted on a relic of my stepfather’s time at BU: The Great Gatsby.

  The Great Gatsby had been the favorite novel of one of those afore-mentioned friends whom I had decided that, for reasons of emotional grandeur and self-poignance, I was doomed never to meet up with again in this vale of tears. At his urging I had read it a couple of years earlier, without incident or effect. Now I had the sudden intuition that if I read it again, right now, this minute, something important might result: it might change my life. Or maybe there would be something in it that I could steal.

  I lay on the bed, opened its cracked paper covers—it was an old Scribner tr
ade paperback, the edition whose cover looked like it might have been one of old Ralph’s wood-shop projects—and this time The Great Gatsby read me. The mythographic cast of my mind in that era, the ideas of friendship and self-invention and problematic women, the sense, invoked so thrillingly in the book’s closing paragraphs, that the small, at times tawdry love-sex-and-violence story of a few people could rehearse the entire history of the United States of America from its founding vision to the Black Sox scandal—The Great Gatsby did what every necessary piece of fiction does as you pass through that fruitful phase of your writing life: it made me want to do something just like it.

  I began to detect the germ of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh as I finished Fitzgerald’s masterpiece: I would write a novel about friendship and its impossibility, about self-inventors and dreamers of giant dreams, about problematic women and the men who make them that way. I put the book back in its place on the shelf and as I did so I noticed its immediate neighbor: an old Meridian Books paperback edition of Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth, the one with the lipstick-print-and-curly-script cover art by Paul Bacon, a master of American jacket illustration who would, in a few years, design a memorable cover for the book I was urging out of myself that day. I had never read Goodbye, Columbus, and as I got back into bed with it I remarked, in its lyric and conversational style, its evocation of an Eastern summer, its consciously hyperbolic presentation of the mythic Brenda Patimkin and her family of healthy, dumb, fruit-eating Jews, and its drawing of large American conclusions from small socio-erotic situations, how influenced Roth had clearly been by his own youthful reading of the Fitzgerald novel. That gave me encouragement; it made me feel as if I were preparing to sail to Cathay along a route that had already proven passable and profitable for others.