THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW ART SPIEGELMAN
Dreifus, Claudia
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Art Spiegelman 'If there can be no art about the Holocaust, there may at least be comic strips' BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS In the world of art, in the world of literature, Art...
...The second trip, I decided to find out where Birkenau was...
...Here was somebody who went through it and came out...
...Do you realize that the Germans called us schweinT So I said, "Yeah, and the Germans called us vermin...
...I had a lot of encouragement from her...
...It's kind of a compliment to Spiegelman, whose artistic roots are with the underground press movement of the late 1960s...
...Spiegelman: No...
...So I was not really prepared for the idea that people would be that surprised, you know...
...Q: Was it hard for you to be the child of survivors, growing up in the 1950s when it was so important to be "normal" and watch Ozzie and Harriet...
...Q: At what point did you start self-publishing your work...
...My comics were just basically surreal...
...I found myself getting more and more excited about comic strips—which everybody read, but which I ended up wanting to do as soon as I found out these things were done by people...
...In his world, the Jews are mice, the Germans are cats, the Poles are pigs...
...We walked in and it was nearing dusk when we found Birkenau...
...It did seem like—"Oh, it would be nice if people recognize that this thing is a serious work...
...Q: You weren't just "touched by it...
...These are Hitler's...
...Spiegelman: No...
...Q: Do you think part of the attraction of Maus was that you created a character, Artie, who survived and who was liked...
...I think it's a working job description of what you need to go into the world as a comic-strip artist...
...She would make a scribble and ask me to turn it into something...
...From Flatbush to Cracow, Artie Spiegelman was quickly denounced as the purveyor of extreme bad taste...
...Hint: The result was great self-doubt and much public interest...
...Have you...
...Why is he calling his father a murderer—his father went through all that horrible stuff...
...So I certainly asked that question...
...It catches people up short because there's a tendency to see through the eyes of the narrator in any work you read...
...What probably started it all off was spending time with a doodling game my mother developed...
...And that's always been true...
...Also, one of the dangers in dealing with this material is fatuous attempts to draw moral lessons from it, fatuous attempts to give it a happy ending...
...Because there were twenty-five other people making serious comics...
...I didn't say that, because he gave me my opening...
...This is neither dirty nor funny-just great art, great story-telling...
...It's all about transference, which is being able to work out the problems one has with one's parents in a safer setting...
...Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance...
...You wanted to see it first-hand so you could properly draw it...
...I wasn't trying to erase, but to incorporate it...
...Whether I'd make a good living or not never occurred to me that much...
...I would just give them to people on the street, as if they were flyers for a demonstration or something...
...Q: What did you tell him...
...Spiegelman: Well, here I am a father-so it's working out and it's fun...
...to me, it was one of the most serious and profound things that anyone has done in this area...
...Spiegelman: Well, never having been other people—it seems to me that a number of people were out of sync with 1950s America and a lot of them are my friends in the 1980s...
...That kind of shaping has its dangers...
...One thing that made this trip very rich was having a film crew with me while they made a documentary on Maus...
...It's very useful to be able to continue my dialogue with my now-dead father with someone with that particular mind-set...
...So I still say it...
...For whatever reasons...
...In Maus, a young artist asks over and over, "Who am I? Who were my parents...
...These were amateur self-produced magazines...
...But it's something that's been more or less in disrepute in the Twentieth Century...
...They weren't "serious" things that "serious" people spent their time reading in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries...
...Spiegelman: The book just came out a few weeks ago—after three rejected translations...
...It guides people through an experience...
...So now, in 1989, comes Maus II—From Mauschwitz to the Catskills, which is part of Raw Comix, a larger anthology Spiegelman has published with Viking-Penguin...
...I was saying that I know some of this is endearing to some people because everyone can relate to my foibles with my Dad and what my Dad lived through...
...In Auschwitz, we were able to hook up with the curator of the visual archives of the museum, and he helped me find the pictures I needed for my visual reconstruction...
...You think nothing good is ever going to happen to you...
...But by the time I was in my late teens, I was already doing comics in the way that other people sit with a notebook and try to do a poem...
...I was afraid of having to recapitulate the relationship with my father one generation later...
...Also some of Elie Wiesel's books...
...Cj: In Maus II, one of the things you say is, "I don't believe I'm going to be a father-I haven't worked anything out yet...
...But I don't like wearing it as a badge—which may sound like a contradiction, considering what book I've been working on these past ten years...
...They didn't look like other comics...
...So then I had to go learn about sex and drugs in order to do stuff for EVO...
...You do what you want to do and assume that the money will happen...
...It makes me wonder, "Have I exploited the dead...
...Having to go through this communist country that wasn't happy being a communist country was at least as much part of it as anything that might come out of rooting through the dirt, trying to find out what Poland had been and what Auschwitz had been...
...This includes things like The Twist of Fate, a television show about a Nazi who had his face surgically altered in order to pass as a Jew...
...The technology made it possible—all of a sudden, there was cheap short-run offset printing...
...Theodore Adorno said, "There can be no art after the Holocaust...
...Spiegelman: "Well, I tried to draw noble stallions, but I don't draw very well and pigs are easier to draw...
...I grew up wanting to draw comics...
...There are some Poles who saved my parents' lives and who were very kind, and there were some who were swine...
...And that kept it at a peculiar distance...
...The first part is that many writers started out as secret closet cartoonists...
...And that looks fairly benign in some bizarre way...
...The reviews I haven't had translated yet, but I've been told they are very respectful, very Germanically correct, and very cautious...
...I don't like the notion of pegging too much of one's life on one event...
...No more so than before...
...He said, "Do you realize that it is a terrible insult to call a Pole a pig...
...Therefore, I was terrible at baseball, which is a bad thing to have happen to you if you're a boy growing up in America...
...It stretched as far as the eye could see in any given direction...
...Spiegelman: No, but it has its pleasures...
...But it hasn't been that hard for me to make money...
...I'm just trying to work out my relationships and it leads me inexorably to this cremation pit...
...So I hesitate to peg too much on this...
...But it was all rather sublimated...
...Okay, at first, I wanted to draw syndicated comic strips, and then that changed...
...That's why the chapter about talking with this shrink who is another Holocaust survivor was so useful...
...You are saying, "Am I worthy of all this praise...
...In fact, Maus has been going on since 1980 in Raw magazine, and the people reading it weren't saying, "My God, this is somebody making serious comics...
...Q: Because it's your autobiography...
...They were about my masturbatory fantasies...
...it's something modest, it's a comic strip—a medium that has a history of being without pretensions or aspirations to art...
...What you have there is much different: It's the remains of what had been there...
...Spiegelman: About ten hours a day working on Maus...
...But in the frames where I am talking to my shrink, I have him wear this little mask of my father...
...As a sign that life is not all somber remembrance, his baby daughter could be heard crying in the background...
...And perhaps if there can be no art about the Holocaust, then there may at least be comic strips...
...What the forty-one-year-old Spiegelman has done is the seemingly impossible: He has fused the novel and the cartoon to tell tragic-true tales of his parents' experience in World War II...
...As they say, there's no business like Shoah business...
...That's the heart of it...
...Very early on, I hooked up with Tops bubble gum, when I was still in high school...
...You're not steered there...
...But I knew a number of people my age whose parents went through the same stuff...
...Probably...
...Thur-ber was someone who worked both areas, as was Thackeray...
...And then he survived and then came the state of Israel"— anything like that...
...I think there's a horizon line I've finally approached: This is a book with a shape...
...That made me realize I could make something happen with a pencil and paper...
...But what you're asking about is the very reason I've started the second chapter of my book with me at a drawing table mounted on top of a giant pile of corpses...
...I showed them some cartoons, and they said, "These are pretty weird and interesting, but can you do some more stuff about sex and dope...
...It's not just that he's the father I might have chosen...
...As the cartoonist drew it, the elder Spiegelmans became the victims of the Nazis and Artie grew to be the victim of his parents...
...in the 1950s and serves as an interesting counterweight to Spiegelman's Old World traumas...
...It's definitely a mark, but it's not the only event...
...And the stables themselves were made of wood, so when the buildings were burned down and the wood taken away, all that remained was these chimney posts, each one representing a place where hundreds of people were at any given time...
...I'm not trying to exploit the Holocaust...
...I thought they were a fact of the world...
...It is relatively poorly marked...
...It makes one feel the story at some level, ultimately, of the living coming out of the ashes of the dead...
...Deitch's piece, for instance, concerns his experiences growing up a red-diaper baby Claudia Dreifus is a free-lance writer in New York City...
...Q: Have you made a place for it in your life...
...Is this an entertainment, a diversion, built on what happened to people in the War...
...These kinds of exploitations of the Holocaust I call "Holokitsch...
...Q: But this is also a trait of children of Holocaust survivors...
...One thing that was merciful, as far as I can see, was that I was able to have a baby girl...
...And that gave us common ground...
...I would give away this comic strip...
...She had very rudimentary drawing skills and she would play this game when there wasn't anything else to do...
...At the East Village Other, he produced irreverent cartoon strips with such marvelous madman colleagues as R. Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Yossarian, and Gilbert Shelton...
...This is true...
...I was surrounding myself with people whose concerns overlapped that, who were fascinated by making comics, and they were making comics seriously...
...So I had all that—and then to have something good happen, based on work that depicts that scale of suffering and that area of one's own life as a child of people who have endured it...
...Spiegelman's first book, Maus, published by Pantheon, told the story of how Vladek and Anya Spiegelman scraped through the barbarism that was Nazi-occupied Poland and somehow managed to survive...
...I got hit in the head a lot by baseballs and usually threw them down the foul line...
...I would say my life was intimately affected by it...
...Q: Comics are thought of as a low-brow, non-literate form of entertainment...
...I've met other people who are at least as crazy as I am, who are twelfth-generation Americans...
...Q: In the 1960s, the underground comic movement developed...
...I was just doing what I needed to do...
...He has a clearer-eyed picture of what it was he went through than my father did...
...Maus has been a very arduous long-term project...
...I understand that it obviously had a profound effect on me...
...Q: A lot of people had crazy parents, with or without World War II happening to them...
...At that point, I stopped wanting to be a fireman, a policeman, or a cowboy—and opted for cartoonist...
...More personally, the way I started drawing comics...
...Spiegelman: Well, yeah, I suppose...
...Spiegelman: Shocking...
...Maybe that's part of my legacy from my father, I don't know...
...There are a number of ways to slice me...
...So I could sit around in a group of people whose mothers committed suicide...
...Q: It's very honest...
...Was that a tough one to ask yourself...
...That relationship has lasted a good twenty-three years so far...
...More Raw really...
...Q: You didn't romanticize your parents...
...Spiegelman: I certainly was very aware of Father Knows Best, and that wasn't my Dad...
...Bad Taste...
...When I wanted to get my visa for this film, there were a lot of raised eyebrows...
...Everybody is going to know it's great...
...And yet each Poland has its own area of perverse fascination...
...She was already suicidal before the war...
...Maus was the pictorial saga of a son trying to understand the blackness of his parents' lives...
...And very unjustly...
...There was a time when I looked at comics and it was like looking at trees or clouds...
...Spiegelman: I have no idea what the generalized response was...
...But when it actually happened, an old underground cartooning buddy of mine, Willie Murphy, said, "Cartoonists are more prepared for failure than success...
...Meanwhile, Artie Spiegelman keeps producing the next chapters of Maus, which has metamorphosed into a decade-long project in autobiography, psychotherapy, and high-class doodling...
...They did not want to produce high art, just the stuff they'd liked reading as kids—though, in true 1960s style, they wanted to make it all dirty and funny...
...So I remember going down to the East Village Other for their first few issues...
...That remained true...
...I've felt uncomfortable at functions and events I've attended that are classified as "second generation...
...I was already making comics for a living when I was in high school, and I knew I had a certain professional competency...
...It's worse than it even sounds in English...
...People have come up to me and said, "I've really enjoyed Maus," and then they catch themselves...
...One thing I enjoyed doing was flyers—one-page comic strips that didn't have any message on them...
...The second chapter of Maus begins with what happens when the first comes out and is so successful...
...So yes, certain images cropped up and were disturbing and weren't publicly spoken of...
...Some of them went through that background, but most of them didn't...
...I can use the Holocaust as some kind of common denominator...
...So all that one sees is lots of chimneys—not the chimneys of the crematoria, but the chimneys of the horse stables that all those people were crowded into...
...Spiegelman: Well, I think people were very troubled by the ending of Maus, and that was good...
...Cj: How do Germans like Maus...
...What was that like for you...
...To what extent am I a child of history—or theirs...
...There's a kind of shock in people's minds when they hear that this story is a comic strip—"Somebody did a comic strip about the Holocaust...
...One thing that becomes very clear in Shoah is that there is a Poland now and a Poland then—and they end up superimposing themselves on each other in eerie ways...
...Q: You were stunned by the success of Maus...
...But I have as much in common with certain people who are involved in the struggle to express themselves through comics as I have with people who are just trying to live their lives because their parents were "that way...
...Q: How do the Poles feel about Maus...
...Because I don't ask to be any different than I am...
...Is there an easy alternative other than silence, which would not be efficacious because it would probably just be dead silence rather than profound silence...
...Art Spiegelman: I wasn't prepared for it...
...Spiegelman: Yes...
...I don't believe this is the only thing I will work on in the sense that, in two years, I will have more "present" to deal with...
...Q: Did you feel out of sync with 1950s Queens in a way that other people did not...
...At some point, I learned that there are people who draw these things I was looking at...
...Did you ever manage that...
...One time, at the end of one meeting, there was an announcement about a Second Generation Singles Dance...
...In another incarnation, John Updike would have been doing comics...
...And yet they were all in one way or another serious...
...I feel ultimately that I have no choice...
...They gave me access to a lot of people...
...It has a shape...
...She was recently presented with the Simon Rockower Award for Dis-tingished Commentary and Excellence in Jewish Journalism...
...It made me wonder, "Is this an exploitation of the dead...
...But it never occurred to me to deal with my life in any other way than how it was...
...Q: Is he the father you might have chosen...
...And all of a sudden, people are saying you're Kafka...
...The reason he said that is, anything that is beautiful, elegant, that gives aesthetic pleasure, is in some ways defiling...
...Q: When we talked last year, you were just leaving for Poland-going to the place of your parents' nightmare, your older brother's death, Auschwitz...
...So self-publishing was an organic part of making cartoons to me—from the very get-go...
...Spiegelman: When I was in junior high school, I met some people who later became, like myself, that first generation of underground cartoonists—like Jay Lynch, Skip Williamson...
...It's a little observation about the psychoanalytic process...
...I've got an outlined version, though the outlines of the outline keep shifting...
...Maus II tells what happened to Spiegelman after he became internationally renowned for publishing a comic book about the Holocaust...
...And the implications of commercial success didn't even occur to me...
...Q: Everyone I know who's made that journey has had bad dreams afterward...
...My ultimate conclusion is that people are the way they are, only more so for having gone through what they went through...
...I suspect it was there for you every day of your childhood...
...I mean, it's one thing to sit around drawing on a pile of corpses, and maybe it's another thing to try to get a heavy date on the basis of that particular common interest...
...The crew helped me find my parents' house in Sosnievic...
...You had the courage to ask, "Were my problems with my parents problems I might have had even without Hitler...
...It's selling well...
...There are differences and I'm enjoying those differences...
...Spiegelman spoke with The Progressive at his Soho loft on a recent afternoon...
...For that crowd, the simple symbols of a comic book were the road to satire and liberation...
...One way or another, Tops was always a safety net for me...
...When working on the book, I didn't think, "Oh, God, this is great...
...By the time Nadia was born, I was absolutely convinced we were going to have a little boy...
...We were all working for the same little magazines...
...I pointed out that, in the book, there are Jews who act admirably—but there are many Jews in the book who don't...
...But this particular serious comic-maker was moving in this particular direction...
...Q: Did you ever expect to make a living at this...
...Happy ending time again...
...It was one of the only places I've ever walked where one really does believe in ghosts...
...Then there's a biological deficiency I have: I only have one eye that works well...
...The new chapters are a meditation on fame and success on top of tragedy...
...That's serious...
...Q: What's next...
...I wanted to provide some kind of blockage to that kind of transference...
...It's paved...
...Spiegelman: I don't know if it's clear from my drawings...
...But you can walk there, and we did...
...Spiegelman: That's probably true...
...Spiegelman: Yes...
...This is for people wanting a "nice" Holocaust story...
...But it won't necessarily be to draw little mice and little cat heads for the rest of my days...
...Q: But Maus isn't beautiful...
...And that was frightening...
...Maybe it's one of those cases of fools rushing in where wise folks fear to tread...
...Q: We are not a culture that takes comics seriously...
...In literary circles, he was hailed as the new Kafka, the first true Second Generation artist...
...So, although it was never a topic of conversation, I was aware that I wasn't unique...
...That usually led to cartoon drawings...
...Spiegelmant One of the reasons I wasn't ready for the response to Maus is that I was living in a world where comics were being made seriously and taken seriously...
...Actually, that invests it with a certain lack of hubris...
...So, to me, it was very natural...
...So when other kids were out playing baseball, I'd make a beeline for drawing tables and libraries...
...He took it without rancor...
...Spiegelman: Let me answer in two parts...
...And that went over fairly well...
...So in that first trip, I spent a lot of time in Auschwitz I, which was a rather sanitized place, set up like a museum or a world's-fair display...
...How did you get into it...
...At a certain point, it became very clear that I could and would...
...Is that in some way disrespectful of the dead...
...Is there anything like that in your background...
...Nevertheless, it's a finite project and I don't know where I'll go next...
...Spiegelman: I would have felt that that was a lie, and this whole project is an attempt to excavate truths...
...The first time I went, we went to Auschwitz I, which is where my father was incarcerated...
...These are just people wearing masks...
...And then I came back and started working for EVO later...
...On the other hand, I think these events are a crucible of Western civilization, that things changed, and that the extent of the change and the implications of the change in terms of civilization haven't been realized...
...The result was the need to compensate elsewhere...
...Spiegelman: More Maus...
...It's not part of the museum of Auschwitz per se...
...But then I kept my mouth flapping and said, "Considering the relationship between Poles and Jews for the last few hundred years, it seemed appropriate to use a non-Kosher animal...
...I was already doing it when I was a little kid...
...In Maus, you asked, "Did the war make them crazy, or were they that way in the first place...
...The first editions of Vanity Fair had his drawings in them...
...In addition to the rest of Art Spiegelman's story, Raw contains some of the best of the recent output of top underground cartoonists—Kim Deitch, Edward Sorel, Krystine Kryttre, -Gary Panter, Charles Burns...
...It's got trees...
...Other people's comics may have been funnier, and other people's serious comics may have been working on a smaller canvas and not having to include the central trauma of the Twentieth Century...
...And what happened, what made it all possible, was that the underground newspapers started...
...I have no idea how long it will really take...
...Making the story more interesting—and controversial—is Spiegelman's use of animal allegory...
...It was natural for them to use cartoon drawings in their papers...
...It is an aesthetic creation...
...It deadens it—a kind of ritualizing of little galvanic-response images...
...Q: Gabriel Garcia Marquez once told me he began his writing by making cartoons out of the fabulist stories his grandmother used to tell him...
...But I certainly exempt Shoah from this criticism...
...It made the underground newspapers themselves possible...
...I actually had to go down to Washington and talk to the press attache and explain why I drew the Poles as pigs...
...THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Art Spiegelman 'If there can be no art about the Holocaust, there may at least be comic strips' BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS In the world of art, in the world of literature, Art Spiegelman is known as one of the more interesting characters around...
...And the same is true of the Poles...
...In the same way, novels were once associated with semiliteracy...
...Including by people who were touched by it...
...These aren't my metaphors...
...We found people who remembered my family...
...So I went to college...
...Spiegelman: Probably in that same era...
...I was more prepared for failure than success...
...Q: Do you think one can get overwhelmed with this subject...
...I wrote humor cards and stickers to drawings, package design...
...In terms of learning about sex and drugs, it was ideal—SUNY-Binghamton...
...And we did it a lot...
...There's also the fact that my mother committed suicide...
...Spiegelman: I don't know if I was scarred by it...
...It was a very interesting, for me, effective, one-to-one kind of distribution process...
...One certainly can get too much into it when coming up with a good plot for a TV movie...
...On the other hand, it leaves me with a responsibility and it leaves me wanting to make a work that's humble...
...And then in the back is the rubble of where the killing apparatus was...
...I've been saying it would take me two years to do ever since I started in 1978...
...It felt like every step was walking on ashes...
...And yet, I felt rather suspicious of the whole notion of a second-generation movement that wore that as a primary cause of its disaffection...
...Certainly, I'm constantly trying to keep from doing that...
...But Nadia allows a kind of wonderful newness...
...Spiegelman: No...
...One thing that scared the pants off of me was the idea that I might have a baby boy...
...They were unsavory...
...Spiegelman: Yes and no...
...It's not an opera about the Holocaust...
Vol. 53 • November 1989 • No. 11
