The late Harvey Pekar made illustrated literature out of a working stiff's every day life. But not single handedly. Artists, including Robert Crumb, recognized his genius for social and personal insight and flocked to his work. Each issue's multiple illustrators delivered stylistic if not narrative contrast inside Pekar's eclectic personality. American Splendor changed the course of comics. It got a certain number of old folks and a lot of otherwise hip people into comics. The collected works were made into a brilliant movie starring Paul Giamatti -- and sometimes Pekar himself -- as Harvey. In the comics world, Pekar had typecast himself.
But American Splendor wasn't Pekar's only work. He did a graphic version of Studs Terkel's Working and a history of the SDS. His collaboration with a number of writers and artists The Beats: A Graphic History revealed his intellect and his passion. It's story, in words and pictures, is a great introduction to this great American literary school. Those well-read in the movement will also find it appealing, for its illustration of some of the seminal Beat events and its emphasis on the interdependence of its major figures. Just picture it...
During times of conformity, it’s the non-conformist who draw all the attention. The Beats of America’s 1950s stood so far apart from the duty-bound, God-and-country, organizational-man times that they soon became the freak-show focus of films, big-circulation magazines and television shows. It didn’t take long for the commercial culture to assimilate them in a wave of berets and bongos. Like the hippies that followed, they were stereotyped and scorned for a supposed anti-work ethic. Never mind that they created some of the greatest literary works of their generation.
That’s why we’ve always thought that “Beat” and “Beatnik” were two different schools. Beatniks were the posers, the wannabes that modeled their cool after what they saw in Look magazine and on The Steve Allen Show. Beatniks spewed “daddy-o” while living off their daddies. Those that represented a true counter culture were Beat. Their resistance to the status quo and the pursuit of their own lives outside accepted social definitions made them truly radical and innovative. The Beats were largely a literary movement. Beatniks were a cultural and commercial fad.
This hair-splitting is important to understanding The Beats. Many of their subjects don’t seem to be beatniks, but something else entirely. The comic celebrates the individuals that made up the anti-establishment of the times and whose art and social action outlive them. The stories, edited by historian and popular culture professor Paul Buhle (who also edited a graphic biography of Che Guevera) are drawn by an eclectic mix of cartoonists and told by characters—including Pekar--every bit as individualistic as their subjects.
The book’s first hundred pages focuses on the generation’s three central players: Jack Kerouac (who gets the largest section), Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs. Pekar gives us just the bare bones of their stories, emphasizing the formative moments and underscoring how they influenced each others’ work. It’s this no-man-is-an-island connection between them that made Beat literature a true movement. In different panels we see the often drunk and shiftless Kerouac urge Burroughs to write a novel. Ginsberg, finding Burrough’s pages strewn around his Mexico City apartment, assembles and edits what was to become Naked Lunch.
It’s Ginsberg who emerges as the movement’s saint, aiding his fellow writers, challenging the system and remaining true to his principles. All three men are shown to be flawed, addictive and with, the possible exception of Ginsberg who seems something of a pure sexual being, sexually confused and abusive to women.
Beat lovers will be disappointed the simplistic, boilerplate hash of these lives, especially readers who’ve delved into the excellent (and not so) biographies of these three central figures. Buhle and Pekar acknowledge as much in the book's intro:
“The book before you is a comic art production with no pretension to the depth of coverage and literary interpretation presented by hundreds of scholarly books in many languages, a literature also constantly growing. It has a different virtue, curiously in line, somehow, with the original vernacular popularization of the Beats.”
That virtue, they neatly explain, is its fresh, visual approach and appeal to narrative rhythm. And it’s true for much of the book. Some eleven illustrators contribute and their panels, ranging from symbolic realism to the surreal bring the movement to life. We’re shown the crash-pad hovels, the anger, frustration and depravity, the exotic locations and the confusion of the squares in comic detail. Pekar and five other writers supply the words, often restating the obvious when a quote or illustration would do.
This isn’t the first time comics have been used to convey Beat life. Rick Bleier’s heavily cross-hatched “Visions of Paradise: Kerouac in N.Y.C.” which appears in The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats is a visually fascinating if glamorized, short account of the movement’s beginnings that surpasses in language and visual appeal of most of what’s in Pekar’s book. Where Pekar et al succeed is in their addressing the lesser but still important figures of the Beat movement.
The Beats’ second hundred pages-- “The Beats: Perspectives”-- is its best. It emphasizes the era’s poets and the important role of women to both its creative achievement and social consciousness. Poets Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, Gregory Corso, Charles Olson and others, not all of them necessarily pegged as Beats, are given brief, respectful treatment. Joyce Brabner’s (Pekar's widow) “Beatnik Chicks” is an eyes-open view to the contributions and hardships, not to mention stereotyping, faced by women of the movement. Brabner defines the “Beat-chick” model as well as the their lack of acceptance by many males in the movement. She gives a shout-out to Carolyn Cassady, Hettie Jones, Joyce Johnson and others, but no more than a shout out (readers should dig up Brenda Knight’s Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution for considerations and examples of these women’s work). Pekar and Mary Fleener’s chapter on poet Diane di Prima, first seen in Everett Rand and Gioia Palmieri’s spring 2008 edition of Mineshaft (a great publication true to the underground comics and literary spirit…find it here) is a mix of cold reality and spiritualistic surrealism that symbolizes the entire movement.
Pekar's involvement in counter-culture history gave his career new life. The last run back in 2008 of American Splendor was something of a disappointment, as if Pekar had exhausted ways to make his everyman stories relevant. The Beats gave him worthy material. While not as engaging as his graphic history Students For a Democratic Society (also edited by Buhle), The Beats introduces an American cultural phenomenon to a new audience while giving some of its less well-known players fresh exposure.
ILLUSTRATED IMAGINATION business: I'll be deep in the Bob Marshall wilderness of Montana with a 76-year-old Scotch guzzling, defrocked priest and a worthy psychologist when this is published. Please have at it while I'm away.
Anyone interested in taking on a column about whatever in graphic novels stimulates your own imagination? Let me know in the comments below. Otherwise, I'm thinking of discussing the magical realism of Brazilian twin brother Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba next week...or maybe Jonathan Ames' excellent memoir The Alcoholic. Until then, up, up and away!
CABBAGE RABBIT REVIEW OF BOOKS AND MUSIC