The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  “Make that a cheeseburger,” he said.

  While he listened to the hissing of the pale pink leaf of meat on the grill, Joe looked out the window and mulled over the things that Sammy had just revealed. He had never given much consideration to the feelings that had, for a few months during the fall and winter of 1941, drawn his cousin and Tracy Bacon together. To the small extent that he had ever given the matter any thought at all, Joe had assumed that Sammy’s youthful flirtation with homosexuality had been just that, a freak dalliance born of some combination of exuberance and loneliness that had died abruptly, with Bacon, somewhere over the Solomon Islands. The suddenness with which Sammy had swooped in, following Joe’s enlistment, to marry Rosa—as if all that time he had been waiting, racked by a sexual impatience at once barely suppressed and perfectly conventional, to get Joe out of the way—had seemed to Joe to mark decisively the end of Sammy’s brief experiment in bohemian rebellion. Sammy and Rosa had a child, moved to the suburbs, buckled down. For years they had lived, vividly, in Joe’s imagination, as loving husband and wife, Sammy’s arm around her shoulders, her arm encircling his waist, framed in an arching trellis of big, red American roses. It was only now, watching the traffic stalled on Thirty-third Street, smoking his way through a cheeseburger and glass of ginger ale, that he grasped the whole truth. Not only had Sammy never loved Rosa; he was not capable of loving her, except with the half-mocking, companionable affection he always had felt for her, a modest structure, never intended for extended habitation, long since buried under heavy brambles of indebtedness and choked in the ivy of frustration and blame. It was only now that Joe understood the sacrifice Sammy had made, not just for Joe’s or for Rosa’s or for Tommy’s sake, but for his own: not a merely gallant gesture but a deliberate and conscious act of self-immurement. Joe was appalled.

  He thought of the boxes of comics that he had accumulated, upstairs, in the two small rooms where, for five years, he had crouched in the false bottom of the life from which Tommy had freed him, and then, in turn, of the thousands upon thousands of little boxes, stacked neatly on sheets of Bristol board or piled in rows across the ragged pages of comic books, that he and Sammy had filled over the past dozen years: boxes brimming with the raw materials, the bits of rubbish from which they had, each in his own way, attempted to fashion their various golems. In literature and folklore, the significance and the fascination of golems—from Rabbi Loew’s to Victor von Frankenstein’s—lay in their soullessness, in their tireless inhuman strength, in their metaphorical association with overweening human ambition, and in the frightening ease with which they passed beyond the control of their horrified and admiring creators. But it seemed to Joe that none of these—Faustian hubris, least of all—were among the true reasons that impelled men, time after time, to hazard the making of golems. The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something—one poor, dumb, powerful thing—exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiums and Hippodromes of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly painted flats and hokum, animated all the while only by this same desire, never fulfilled: truly to escape, if only for one instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the mysterious spirit world that lay beyond. The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited “escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.

  “You need something else?” said the counterman, as Joe wiped his mouth and then threw his napkin to his plate.

  “Yes, a fried-egg sandwich,” Joe said. “With extra mayonnaise.”

  An hour after he had left, carrying a brown paper bag that contained the fried-egg sandwich and a package of Pall Malls, because he knew that by now Sammy would be out of cigarettes, Joe returned for the last time to Suite 7203. Sammy had taken off his jacket and his shoes. His necktie lay coiled around him on the floor.

  “We have to do it,” he said.

  “Have to do what?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. I think I’m almost done. Am I almost done?”

  Joe bent forward to see how far Sammy had gotten. The Golem appeared to have reached the twisting and jerry-built stairway, all splintered wood and protruding nails—it was almost, deliberately, like something out of Segar or Fontaine Fox—that would lead him to the tumbledown gates of Heaven itself.

  “You’re almost done.”

  “It goes faster when there aren’t words.”

  Sammy took the bag from Joe, unrolled it, and peered inside. He took out the foil-wrapped sandwich, and then the pack of cigarettes.

  “I worship at your feet,” he said, tapping the pack with a finger. He ripped it open and drew one out with his lips.

  Joe went over to a stack of boxes and sat down. Sammy lit up the cigarette and flipped—a bit carelessly, to Joe’s mind—through the last dozen or so pages. He set his cigarette down atop the still-wrapped sandwich and tied the pages back into the last portfolio. He jabbed the cigarette back into his mouth, unwrapped the sandwich, and bit away a quarter of it, chewing while he smoked.

  “So?”

  “So,” Sammy said. “You have an awful lot of Jewish stuff in here.”

  “I know it.”

  “What’s the matter with you, did you have a relapse?”

  “I eat a pork chop every day.” Joe reached over into a nearby box and pulled out the jacketless book with its softened pages and cracked spine.

  “Myth and Legend of Ancient Israel,” Sammy read. “By Angelo S. Rappoport.” He flipped through the pages, eyeing Joe with a certain respectful skepticism, as if he thought he had found the secret to Joe’s salvation, which he was now obliged to doubt. “You’re into all this now?”

  Joe shrugged. “It’s all lies,” he said mildly. “I guess.”

  “I remember when you first got here. That first day we went into Anapol’s office. Do you remember that?”

  Joe said that naturally he remembered that day.

  “I handed you a Superman comic book and told you to come up with a superhero for us and you drew the Golem. And I thought you were an idiot.”

  “And I was.”

  “And you were. But that was 1939. In 1954, I don’t think the Golem makes you such an idiot anymore. Let me ask you something.” He looked around for a napkin, then picked up his necktie and wiped his shining lips. “Have you seen what Bill Gaines is doing over there at E.C.?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “They are not doing kid stuff over there. They have the top artists. They have Crandall. I know you always liked him.”

  “Crandall is the top, no doubt.”

  “And the stuff they are doing, grown-ups are reading it. Adults. It’s dark. It’s also mean, I think, but look around you, this is a mean age we’re living in. Have you seen the Heap?”

  “I love the Heap.”

  “The Heap, I mean, come on, that’s a comic book character? He’s basically, what, a sentient pile of mud and weeds and, I don’t know, sediment. With that tiny little beak. He breaks things. But he’s supposed to be a hero.”

  “I see what you’re saying.”

  “This is what I’m saying. It’s 1954. You got a pile of dirt walking around, the kids think that’s admirable. Imagine what they’ll think of the Golem.”

  “You want to publish this.”

  “Maybe not quite like it is here.”

  “A
h.”

  “It is awfully Jewish.”

  “True.”

  “Who knew you knew all that stuff? Kabbalah, is that what it’s called? All those angels and … and, is that what they are, angels?”

  “Mostly.”

  “This is what I’m thinking. There’s something to all this. Not just the Golem character. Your angels—do they have names?”

  “There’s Metatron. Uriel. Michael. Raphael. Samael. He’s the bad one.”

  “With the tusks?”

  Joe nodded.

  “I like that one. You know, your angels look a little like superheroes.”

  “Well, it’s a comic book.”

  “This is what I’m thinking.”

  “Jewish superheroes?”

  “What, they’re all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.”

  Joe pointed to the stack of bulging portfolios on the ground between them. “But half the characters in there are rabbis, Sammy.”

  “All right, so we tone it down.”

  “You want us to work together again?”

  “Well … actually … I don’t know, I’m just talking off the top of my head. This is just so good. It makes me want to … make something again. Something I can be just a little bit proud of.”

  “You can be proud, Sammy. You have done great work. I have always been telling you this all along.”

  “What do you mean, all along, you’ve been gone since Pearl Harbor.”

  “In my mind.”

  “No wonder I didn’t get the message.”

  Then, startling both of them, there was a flat, tentative knock. Someone was rapping on the frame of the open door to the corridor.

  “Anyone here?” said an oboe voice, tentative and oddly familiar to

  Joe. “Hello?”

  “Holy Amazing Midget Radio,” Sammy said. “Look who it is.”

  “I heard I might find you boys up here,” said Sheldon Anapol. He came into the room and shook hands with Sammy, then shambled over and stood in front of Joe. He had lost almost all of his hair, though none of his bulk, and his jaw, more mightily jowled than ever, was set in a defiant scowl. But his eyes, it seemed to Joe, were shining, full of tenderness and regret, as if he were seeing not Joe but the twelve years that had passed since their last encounter. “Mr. Kavalier.”

  “Mr. Anapol.”

  They shook hands, and then Joe felt himself being enveloped in the big man’s fierce and sour embrace.

  “You crazy son of a bitch,” he said after he let Joe loose.

  “Yes,” Joe said.

  “You look good, how are you?”

  “I’m not bad.”

  “What was all that narrishkeit the other day, eh? You made me look very bad. I should be furious with you.” He turned to Sammy. “I should be furious with him, don’t you think?”

  Sammy cleared his throat. “No comment,” he said.

  “How are you?” Joe asked him. “How is business?”

  “A pointed question, as ever, from the mouths of you two. What can I tell you. Business is not good. In fact, it’s very, very bad. As if television was not problem enough. Now we have hordes of Baptist lunatics down in Alabama, or some goddamned place, making big piles of comic books and setting them on fire because they are an offense to Jesus or the U.S. flag. Setting them on fire! Can you believe it? What did we fight the war for, if when it’s over they’re going to be burning books in the streets of Alabama? Then this Dr. Fredric Stick-Up-His-Ass Wertham, with that book of his. Now we have the Senate committee coming to town … you heard about that?”

  “I heard.”

  “They served me,” Sammy said.

  “You got subpoenaed?” Anapol stuck out his lip. “I didn’t get subpoenaed.”

  “An oversight,” Joe suggested.

  “Why would they subpoena you, you’re just an editor at that fifth-rate house, pardon me for saying so?”

  “I don’t know,” Sammy admitted.

  “Who knows, maybe they’ve got something on you.” He took out his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead. “Jesus, what lunacy. I never should have let you two talk me out of the novelty business. Nobody ever made a big pile of whoopee cushions and lit them on fire, let me tell you.” He went over to the lone chair. “Mind if I sit down?” He sat and let out a long sigh. It seemed to begin rather perfunctorily, for show, but by the end it carried a startling cargo of unhappiness. “Let me tell you something else,” he said. “I’m afraid I didn’t come up here just because I wanted to say hello to Kavalier. I thought I ought to—I thought you might want to know.”

  “Know what?” Sammy said.

  “You remember we had that lawsuit?” Anapol said.

  The next day—the twenty-first of April, 1954—the Court of Appeals of the State of New York would finally hand down a ruling in the matter of National Periodical Publications, Inc. v. Empire Comics, Inc. The suit had, in that time, made its way in and out of the courts, with settlements proposed and rejected, weaving a skein of reversals and legal maneuverings too complicated and tedious to tease out in these pages. National’s case, in the business, was generally felt to be weak. Though both Superman and the Escapist shared skintight costumes, immense strength, and the odd impulse to conceal their true natures in the guise of far weaker and more fallible beings, the same qualities and features were shared by a host of other characters who had appeared in the comic books since 1938; or had been shared, at any rate, until those characters, one by one or in wholesale lots, had met their demise in the great superhero burn-off that followed the Second World War. Though it was true that National had also pursued Fawcett’s Captain Marvel and Victor Fox’s Wonder Man through the courts, a raft of other strong men who favored performing their feats, including flying, while wearing some form of undergarment—Amazing Man, Master Man, the Blue Beetle, the Black Condor, the Sub-Mariner—had been allowed to go about their business unmolested, without any apparent loss of income to National. Many would argue, in fact, that greater inroads into the hegemony of Superman in the marketplace had been made by his successors and imitators at National itself—Hourman, Wonder Woman, Dr. Fate, Starman, the Green Lantern—many of whom were but distortions or pale reflections of the original. What was more, as Sammy had always argued, the character of Superman itself represented the amalgamation of “a bunch of ideas those guys stole from somebody else,” in particular from Philip Wylie, whose Hugo Danner was the bulletproof superhuman hero of his novel Gladiator; from Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose orphaned hero, young Lord Greystoke, grew up to become Tarzan, noble protector of a world of inferior beings; and from Lee Falk’s newspaper comic strip The Phantom, whose eponymous hero had pioneered the fashion for colorful union suits among implacable foes of crime. In so many of his particulars, the Master of Elusion—a human showman, vulnerable, dependent on his team of assistants—bore very little resemblance to the Son of Krypton. Over the years, a number of judges, among them the great Learned Hand, had attempted, tongues not always quite firmly in cheek, to sort out these fine and crucial distinctions. A legal definition of the term “superhero” had even been arrived at.* In the end, in its wisdom, the full panel of the Court of Appeals, overturning the ruling of the state Supreme Court, would side against the prevailing opinion in the comics trade and find in favor of the plaintiffs, sealing the Escapist’s doom.

  Like the news of the Treaty of Ghent to General Lambert at Biloxi, however, word of the court’s ruling, when it came, already would have been overtaken by events.

  “Today,” Anapol said, “I killed the Escapist.”

  “What?”

  “I killed him. Or let’s say he’s retired. I called Louis Nizer, I told him, Nizer, you win. As of today, the Escapist is officially retired. I give up. I’m settling. I’m signing his death warrant.”

  “Why?” Joe said.

>   “I’ve been losing money on the Escapist titles for a few years now. There was still some value in the property, you know, from various licensing arrangements, so I had to keep publishing him, just to keep the trademark viable. But his circulation figures have been in a nosedive for quite some time. Superheroes are dead, boys. Forget about it. None of our big hitters—Scofflaw, Jaws of Horror, Hearts and Flowers, Bobby Sox—none of them are superhero books.”

  Joe had gathered as much from Sammy. The age of the costumed superhero had long passed. The Angel, the Arrow, the Comet and the Fin, the Snowman and the Sandman and Hydroman, Captain Courageous, Captain Flag, Captain Freedom, Captain Midnight, Captain Venture and Major Victory, the Flame and the Flash and the Ray, the Monitor, the Guardian, the Shield and the Defender, the Green Lantern, the Red Bee, the Crimson Avenger, the Black Hat and the White Streak, Cat-Man and the Kitten, Bulletman and Bulletgirl, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy, Dr. Mid-Nite, Mr. Terrific, Mr. Machine Gun, Mr. Scarlet and Miss Victory, Doll Man, the Atom and Minimidget, all had fallen beneath the whirling thresher blades of changing tastes, an aging readership, the coming of television, a glutted marketplace, and the unbeatable foe that had wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of the great heroes of the forties, only the stalwarts at National—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and a few of their cohorts—soldiered on with any regularity or commercial clout, and even they had been forced to suffer the indignity of seeing their wartime sales cut in half or more, of receiving second billing in titles where formerly they headlined, or of having forced upon them by increasingly desperate writers various attention-getting novelties and gimmicks, from fifteen different shades and flavors of Kryptonite to Bat-Hounds, Bat-Monkeys, and a magical-powered little elf-eared nudnick known as the Bat-Mite.

  “He’s dead,” Sammy said wonderingly. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Believe it,” Anapol said. “This whole industry is dead after these hearings. You heard it here first, boys.” He stood up. “That’s why I’m getting out.”