The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  “I don’t know, Joe,” Sammy said. “I’d like to think we could do something like that. But come on. This is just, I mean, we’re talking about comic books.”

  “Why do you look at it that way, Sammy?” Rosa said. “No medium is inherently better than any other.” Belief in this dictum was almost a requirement for residence in her father’s house. “It’s all in what you do with it.”

  “No, that’s not right. Comic books actually are inferior,” Sammy said. “I really do believe that. It’s—it’s just built in to the material. We’re talking about a bunch of guys—and a girl—who run around in their long johns punching people, all right? If the Parnassus people make this Escapist serial, believe me, it’s not going to be any Citizen Kane. Not even Orson Welles could manage that.”

  “You’re just making excuses, Clay,” Bacon said, taking them all by surprise but no one more than Sammy, who had never heard his friend sound so serious. “It’s not comic books that you think are inferior, it’s you.”

  Joe, sipping his coffee, looked politely away.

  “Huh,” Rosa said after a moment.

  “Huh,” Sammy agreed.

  Sammy and Joe got in to the office at seven sharp, pink-cheeked, tingling from lack of sleep, coughing and sober and saying little. In a leather portfolio under his arm, Joe had the new pages he had laid out, along with Sammy’s notes not only for “Kane Street,” the first of the so-called modernist or prismatic Escapist stories, but also ideas for a dozen other stories that had come to Sammy, not just for the Escapist but for Luna Moth and the Monitor and the Four Freedoms, since last night. They went down the hall to find Anapol.

  The publisher of Empire Comics had abandoned the vast chromium office that had so discomfited him and taken up residence in a large custodial closet, in which he’d had installed a desk, a chair, a portrait of the composer of Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin, and two telephones. Since the move, he claimed to be far more comfortable and reported that he slept much better at night. Sammy and Joe walked right up to the office-closet door. Once Anapol got in, there was really no room for anyone else. Anapol was writing a letter. He held up a finger to signal that he was in the middle of an important thought.

  Sammy saw that he was writing on the letterhead of the Szymanowski society. Dear Brother, the letter began. Anapol’s hand hovered while he read the line over, moving his fleshy purple lips. Then he looked up. He smiled grimly.

  “Why do I suddenly want to hide my checkbook?” he said.

  “Boss, we need to talk to you.”

  “I can see that.”

  “First of all.” Sammy cleared his throat. “Everything we’ve done around here up to now, as good as it’s been, and I don’t know if you ever look at what the competition’s doing but we’ve been better than most of them and as good as the best of them, all of that is nothing, okay, nothing, compared to what Joe and I have worked out for the Escapist from now on, though I’m not at liberty to divulge just what that will be. At the moment.”

  “That’s first of all,” said Anapol.

  “Right.”

  Anapol nodded. “First of all, you should congratulate me.” He sat back, hands clasped smugly over his belly, and waited for them to catch on.

  “They bought it,” Sammy said. “Parnassus.”

  “I heard from their lawyer last night. Production is to commence by the end of this year, if not sooner. The money is certainly not enormous—we’re not talking M-G-M here—but it isn’t bad. Not bad at all.”

  “Naturally we are obliged to ask you to give us half of it,” Joe said.

  “Naturally,” Anapol agreed. He smiled. “Now tell me what it is that you two have worked out.”

  “Well, basically it’s a whole new approach to this game. We saw—”

  “What do we need with a whole new approach? The old approach has been working great.”

  “This is better.”

  “Better in this context can mean only one thing,” Anapol said. “And that is more money. Is this new approach of yours going to make more money for me and my partner?”

  Sammy looked at Joe. He was, in fact, still not entirely persuaded of this. But he was still feeling the sting of Bacon’s accusation the night before. And what was more, he knew Shelly Anapol. Money was not—not always—the most important thing in the world to him. Once, years before, Anapol had cherished hopes of playing the violin in the New York Philharmonic, and there was a part of him, albeit deeply buried, that had never completely resigned itself to the life of a dealer in whoopee cushions. As Empire Comics’ sales figures had climbed, and the towering black cyclones of money came blowing in out of the heartland, Anapol, out of this residual ambition and a perverted sense of guilt over the brainless ease with which colossal success had been achieved, had grown extremely touchy about the poor reputation of comic books among the Phi Beta Kappas and literary pooh-bahs whose opinions meant so much to him. He had even imposed upon Deasey to write letters to The New York Times and The American Scholar, to which he then signed his own name, protesting the unfair treatment he considered those publications had given his humble product in their pages.

  “Lots,” Sammy said. “Piles, boss.”

  “Show me.”

  They fetched the portfolio and tried to explain what it was they intended to do.

  “Adults,” Anapol said after a few minutes of listening. “You’re talking about getting adults to read comic books.”

  The cousins looked at each other. They had not quite expressed or understood it that way before.

  “I guess so,” Sammy said.

  “Yes,” said Joe. “Adults with adult money.”

  Anapol nodded, stroking his chin. Sammy could see a relief flowing into his shoulders and the hinges of his jaw, unknotting them, sending Anapol tilting back in his big leather swivel chair with a grandeur and an ease not entirely free of the threat of metal fatigue and failing springs. Whether it was relief at having at last found a worthy basis for his commerce, or merely that he was comforted by the reassuring proximity of certain failure, Sammy could not be sure.

  “Okay,” Anapol said, reaching for his unfinished letter. “We’ll give it a try. Get to work.”

  Joe started to walk away, but Sammy took hold of his arm and pulled him back. They stood. Anapol added another sentence to his letter, considered it, then looked up.

  “Yes?”

  “What about this not-enormous money from Parnassus?” Sammy said. “We got a piece of the radio show. You gave us a piece of the newspaper strip. I don’t see why we—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Anapol said. “Don’t even bother to finish, Mr. Clay, I’ve heard it all before.”

  Sammy grinned. “And?”

  Anapol’s smile grew cagey and very, very small. “I’m not averse. I can’t speak for Jack, but I’ll take it up with him and see if we can’t work something out.”

  “A-all right,” Sammy said, surprised and a little suspicious, sensing an imminent condition.

  “Now,” Anapol said, “see if you can guess what I’m about to say to you.”

  “They’re putting Szymanowski on a bubblegum card?”

  “Maybe you aren’t aware of this,” Anapol said, “but Parnassus Pictures does a very healthy business in Europe.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, their second-biggest market after the domestic is, of all places—”

  “Germany,” said Joe.

  “Naturally, they’re a little concerned about the reputation you two have earned for this company, in your many imaginative ways, as antagonistic to the citizens and government of that nation of fanatical moviegoers. I had a long talk with Mr. Frank Singe, the studio head. He made it very clear—”

  “Don’t even bother to finish,” Sammy said. He was disgusted. “ ‘We’ve heard it all before.’ ” He looked appealingly at Joe, willing him to speak up, to tell Anapol about his family and the indignities to which they were being exposed
, the one hundred cruelties, gross and tiny, to which, with an almost medical regimentation, they were being subjected by the Reichsprotektorat. He was sure that Anapol would give in once again.

  “All right,” Joe said softly. “I will stop the fighting.”

  Anapol’s eyebrows shot up in surprise.

  “Joe?” Sammy said. He was shocked. “Joe, come on. What are you talking about. You can’t give up! This—this is censorship. We’re being censored! This is the very thing we’re supposed to be standing up to. The Escapist would stand up to something like this.”

  “The Escapist is not a real person.”

  “Yeah, I know that. Christ.”

  “Sam,” said Joe, his cheeks reddening. He put a hand on Sammy’s arm. “I appreciate what you think you are doing. But I want to do this now.” He tapped the portfolio. “I’m tired of fighting, maybe, for a little while. I fight, and I am fighting some more, and it just makes me have less hope, not more. I need to do something … something that will be great, you know, instead of trying always to be Good.”

  “Joe, I—” Sammy started to argue, but just as quickly gave up. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll lay off the Nazis. It won’t be long anyway till we’re in this war.”

  “And then I promise to give you the satisfaction of reminding me of my ignoble behavior here this morning,” said Anapol. “As well as a share—something very modest, I assure you—in the small bounty that Hollywood is going to provide us with.”

  The cousins started away. Sammy looked back.

  “What about the Japs?” he said.

  THE SUDDEN SMALL EFFLORESCENCE of art, minor but genuine, in the tawdry product line of what was then the fifth- or sixth-largest comic book company in America has usually been attributed to the potent spell of Citizen Kane acting on the renascent aspirations of Joe Kavalier. But without the thematic ban imposed by Sheldon Anapol at the behest of Parnassus Pictures—the censorship of all story lines having to do with Nazis (Japs, too), warfare, saboteurs, fifth columnists, and so on—which forced Sammy and Joe to a drastic reconsideration of the raw materials of their stories, the magical run of issues that commenced with Radio Comics #19 and finished when Pearl Harbor caught up to the two-month Empire lead time in the twenty-first issue of Triumph Comics (February 1942) looks pretty unlikely. In eight issues apiece of Radio, Triumph, All Doll, and the now-monthly Escapist Adventures, the emphasis is laid, for the first time, not only on the superpowered characters—normally so enveloped in their inevitable shrouds of bullets, torpedoes, poison gases, hurricane winds, evil spells, and so forth, that the lineaments of their personalities, if not of their deltoids and quadriceps, could hardly be discerned—but also, almost radically for the comic book of the time, on the ordinary people around them, whose own exploits, by the time hostilities with Germany were formally engaged in the early months of 1942, had advanced so far into the foreground of each story that such emphasis itself, on the everyday heroics of the “powerless,” may be seen to constitute, at least in hindsight, a kind of secret, and hence probably ineffectual, propaganda. There were stories that dealt with the minutiae of what Mr. Machine Gun, at home in the pages of Triumph, liked to call “the hero biz,” told not only from the point of view of the heroes but from those of various butlers, girlfriends, assistants, shoe-shine boys, doctors, and even the criminals. There was a story that followed the course of a handgun through the mean streets of Empire City, in which the Escapist appeared on only two pages. Another celebrated story told the tale of Luna Moth’s girlhood, and filled in gaps in her biography, through a complicated series of flashbacks narrated by a group of unemployed witches’ familiars, talking rats and cats and reptilian whatsits, in a “dark little hangout outside of Phantomville.” And there was “Kane Street,” focusing for sixty-four pages on one little street in Empire City as its denizens, hearing the terrible news that the Escapist lies near death in the hospital, recall in turn the way he has touched their lives and the lives of everyone in town (only to have it all turn out, in the end, as a cruel hoax perpetrated by the evil Crooked Man).

  All of these forays into chopping up the elements of narrative, in mixing and isolating odd points of view, in stretching, as far as was possible in those days, under the constraints of a jaded editor and of publishers who cared chiefly for safe profit, the limits of comic book storytelling, all these exercises were, without question, raised far beyond the level of mere exercise by the unleashed inventiveness of Joe Kavalier’s pencil. Joe, too, made a survey of the tools at hand, and found them more useful and interesting than he ever had before. But the daring use of perspective and shading, the radical placement of word balloons and captions and, above all, the integration of narrative and picture by means of artfully disarranged, dislocated panels that stretched, shrank, opened into circles, spread across two full pages, marched diagonally toward one corner of a page, unreeled themselves like the frames of a film—all these were made possible only by the full collaboration of writer and artist together.

  Whether the delightful fruit of this collaboration came at a price; whether the thirty-two extra issues, the two thousand extra pages of Nazi-smashing obviated by Anapol’s ban, might somehow, incrementally, have slid America into the war sooner; whether the advantage gained in time would have precipitated an earlier victory; whether that victory coming a day or a week or a month earlier would have sufficed to preserve a dozen or a hundred or a thousand more lives; such questions now can have only an academic poignancy, as both the ghosts and those haunted by them are dead.

  At any rate, the circulation figures for the Kavalier & Clay titles increased steadily until, by the abrupt termination of the partnership, they had nearly doubled, though whether this amazing growth was due to the books’ marked advance in sophistication and quality, or was simply a product of the general explosion in comic book sales that occurred in the months leading up to the entry of America into the war, is difficult to assess. Great ringing blizzards—blowing in from Hollywood, from radio, from Milton Bradley and Marx Toys, Hostess Cakes and (inevitably) the Yale Lock Company, but most of all from the change purses, dungaree pockets, and Genuine Latex Rubber Escapist Coin Banks of the nation—blanketed the offices on the twenty-fifth floor of the Empire State Building. It required shovels and snowplows and crews of men working around the clock to keep ahead of the staggering avalanche of money. Some of this snowfall ended up, in due course, in the bank account of Josef Kavalier, where it towered in fantastic drifts and was left that way, aloof and glinting, to cool the fever of exile from the day his family should arrive.

  WHEN FRANK SINGE, the head of production for Parnassus Pictures, came through New York City that September, Bacon got Sammy in to see him at the Gotham Hotel. Bacon had kept Sammy up all night, writing out scenarios, and Sammy, bleary-eyed and poorly shaved, had three ready to show Singe the following afternoon. Singe, a big, barrel-chested man who smoked a ten-inch Davidoff gigante, said that he had two writers in mind already, but that he liked what Sammy had done in the comics, and he would take a look at his pages. He was not at all discouraging; it was clear that he was personally fond of Bacon, and furthermore, as he said himself, it was not like the other two guys up for the job were Kaufman and Hart. After twenty-five minutes of semi-distracted listening, he told Sammy and Bacon that he had a very important appointment to look at a pair of very long legs, and the interview was over. The pair walked down to the street with the mogul from Poverty Row and stepped out of the Gotham into the dwindling afternoon. The weather had been fine all day, and though the sun had already set, the sky overhead was still as blue as a gas flame, with a flickering hint of black carbon in the east.

  “Well, thanks, Mr. Singe,” Sammy said, shaking his hand. “I appreciate the time.”

  “The kid can do it, sir,” Bacon said, reaching an arm around Sammy and shaking him a little. “The Escapist is his baby.”

  It was a cool evening, and in his dense, soft camel coat, with Bacon’s arm around his shoulder
s, Sammy felt warm and content and prepared to believe that anything could happen. He was touched by the degree of Bacon’s eagerness to have him come along to California, though he suspected it, too; he worried that Bacon was really just afraid of being out there all alone. It was between them now just as it had been with Joe, before Rosa; Sammy was always available, always willing to join in, keep up, hang in there, go out, and pick up the pieces after a fight. Sometimes Sammy feared that he was on his way to becoming a professional sidekick. As soon as Bacon had made new friends, or a new friend, in California, Sammy would be left alone with the unhappy souls, pale gaping goldfish, whom he had read about in Day of the Locust.

  “Whatever you decide is fine by me, Mr. Singe,” Sammy said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t even know if I want to move to Los Angeles.”

  “Oh, don’t start in on that again,” Bacon said, with a big fake radio laugh. They shook hands with Singe, and he got into a cab.

  “See you boys around,” Singe said. There was an odd note in his voice, hovering somewhere between mockery and doubt. The cab pulled away from the curb, and he waved a little, leaving Sammy standing there under the arm of his boyfriend.

  Bacon turned on him. “What’d you go and say that for, Clayboy?”

  “Maybe it’s true. Maybe I like it here.”

  Boyfriend. The word flew into Sammy’s mind and careened blindly around it like a moth while Sammy chased after it with a broom in one hand and a handbook of lepidoptery in the other. It sounded like a wisecrack, acidulous, hard-bitten, italicized: Who’s your boyfriend, Percy? Though Sammy now spent all his free time with Bacon, and had agreed in principle on their sharing a house in the event that they did go west, Sammy still refused to admit to himself—at that irrelevant, senatorial level of consciousness where the questions that desire has already answered are proposed and debated and tabled till later—that he was in love, or falling in love, with Tracy Bacon. It was not that he denied what he was feeling, or that the implications of the feeling had frightened him; well, he did, and they had, but Sammy had been in love with men nearly all his life, from his father to Nikola Tesla to John Garfield, whose snarl of derision echoed so clearly in his imagination, taunting Sammy: Hey, pretty boy, who’s your boyfriend?