by Spitz, Marc
Like many Salinger characters, the real Anne came from privilege. Her father, Otto, was a German businessman who moved his family from Frankfurt to Holland when the Nazis first rose to power in the early 1930s, convinced, incorrectly, that Hitler would never invade there. Anne and her older sister Margot attempted to maintain a normal life, attending a Montessori school in Amsterdam and preserving a plucky, dreamy outlook even as the Nazis took over the Netherlands and, one by one, they lost the freedoms that meant everything to a teenager. Otto was all the while making provisions for an even worse fate, converting his office into a two-story secret annex where his family might wait out the war and avoid the fate of those rumored to have been carted off to the extermination camps in Poland and Germany. When Margot received a call-up letter to report to a transport camp, bound for hard labor or worse, the family acted. With the help of Miep Gies, a loyal employee, the Franks and their friends the van Daans moved behind a secret bookcase and hid there for nearly three years, waiting for their city to be liberated by the Allies. Anne, who would today be considered either a gifted or a problem child, altered her “spicy” personality not one bit during these horrid circumstances, and this makes her heroic—but what truly separates her is her life of the mind, recorded in the red cloth diary she received as a present on her thirteenth birthday, June 12, 1942.
It was almost as if her father had a premonition that she would need it, and it was quickly put to use. Anne would tell the diary, addressed as “Kitty” after a character in one of her favorite young-adult fiction series, things she could not say to anyone else, not even her older sister. She contemplated the idea of adulthood, she railed against the cruelty of the Nazi thugs, she confessed survivor’s guilt—knowing that many of her Jewish schoolmates were now in camps—and, like most teenage girls, she complained about her mother. She also dreamed: of going to Switzerland, where Jews were still free, to skate, and perhaps on to America—to Hollywood to become a great journalist or writer. She wrote and rewrote the diary with an eye toward freedom while under the constant threat of discovery; every day until six P.M., the Franks, the van Daans, and their late-joining exile, the dentist Mr. Dussel, had to be silent. At night they were free to chat, listen to the radio, observe their holidays, and share hopes of liberation: what they missed, what they would do when permitted to leave. “I don’t know if anything will ever feel normal again,” Margot says in the theatrical version.
But there’s normal teenage love. Anne Frank, thirteen when she entered the annex, developed feelings for the van Daans’ teenage son, Peter. The Nazis could not deprive her of these feelings. Anne refused to be deprived of much, despite her circumstances, and even in the camps she fought, hanging on until one month before the British liberated them.
Gies, of course, saved the diary after the Nazis who discovered the annex looted it for anything superficially valuable. She never read it until she was sure of Anne’s fate. After that she turned it over to Otto, the only annex dweller to survive the camps. Otto was not sure he should publish it, but by 1947, convinced his daughter was somehow alive inside the book, he began sharing it with publishers. By the early 1950s it was a best seller and a hit Broadway play, later adapted as an acclaimed film by director George Stevens. Anne’s visage, the dark hair and eyes, the bangs, the neat dresses and eager, hopeful, clearly intelligent expressions, fostered a sense of survivor’s guilt in boomers who were not even born during her lifetime. If you read Frank’s diary, or reread it, it has little of the melodrama that the play and the film bring. Anne was a gifted writer, an observer and a brave confessor or self-confessor, not an actress. “My head is haunted by so many wishes and thoughts . . .” she wrote. “I’m really not as conceited as so many people seem to think. I know my own faults and shortcomings better than everyone . . .” There’s a little bit of Anne Frank in every modern teenager, and vice versa. To do her justice pop culturally would require something equally raw and young. She did not live to see the dawn of rock and roll, only a few years away, but rock and roll would do right by her.
As with Elie Weisel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, The Diary of a Young Girl has been assigned reading to middle and high school students in America for decades. It is the kind of book that many did awkward and sometimes hasty reports on, as, let’s face it, these books were downers. Academia and ten million obligatory book reports might have snuffed all the roiling youth and urgency of The Diary of a Young Girl if Anne had not been recontextualized as an Indie hero in 1998. Neutral Milk Hotel, the moniker that Louisianan Jeff Mangum and later his band had recorded and toured under since the mid-1990s, somehow returned real youthful emotion to The Diary. Overnight, Neutral Milk’s second and final album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea seemed to remind us that this is a raw read. Loosely based on Mangum’s readings of Frank’s diary, it’s the product of urgency and confusion, less a concept album than a kind of diffident yet primal scream. When Mangum opened his throat and bared his own emotions, channeling Frank, sometimes directly (in “Holland, 1945”) and sometimes abstractly (in “Two-Headed Boy”), it was as if a few hundred thousand teenagers awoke from a teacher-cast trance. Mangum’s rendering was so unadorned and nervy that it put off many “cool” listeners even as it fast became the favorite album of all time for others. “Aeroplane doesn’t have the near-consensus of top-shelf 90s rock artifacts like, say, [My Bloody Valentine’s] Loveless, [Radiohead’s] OK Computer, or [Pavement’s] Slanted and Enchanted. These records are varied, of course, different in many ways. But in one key respect Aeroplane stands apart: This album is not cool,” Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson wrote when Domino Records reissued the by-then classic album in 2005. While it didn’t chart in its initial run, like so many cult classics it has sold steadily toward gold certification and is now a routine figure on various best-ever lists, and even inspired an all-ukulele version (courtesy of Neutral Uke Hotel). In 2013 Neutral Milk reunited for a tour that proved to be an instant sellout, playing for plenty of fans who were not even born when the album first appeared in ’98. It’s a pre-Emo burst of undiluted (and again, unselfconsciously nonmasculine) emotion: pain, joy, and hope. Musically it’s got both a vast and a handmade quality that would, a decade later, deeply influence improbable arena rockers like Arcade Fire and Mumford and Sons.
Aeroplane is an album about childhood made by childhood friends who remembered it. The band members began their semiprofessional career recording onto cassettes and decorating them by hand. Even with the attention, the process remained messy and the sound unruly, for all its stately bits with French horns, trumpets, and tubas. When you are a child, love is almost never in enough supply, and as you grow older, it’s almost always unrequited at least once. Aeroplane captures this feeling so well, it becomes a kind of balm. Mangum is literally in love with a ghost resembling Frank (one, according to writer Kim Cooper’s 33 1/3 series study of Aeroplane, that he actually saw while visiting the Musée Mécanique, a showroom full of vintage arcade and carnival contraptions on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco).
“The only girl I’ve ever loved,” Mangum sings in “Holland, 1945,” perhaps the most famous song on the iconic album, “was born with roses in her eyes . . . Now she’s a little boy in Spain playing pianos filled with flames.” It’s whimsical and heartbreaking, dark and hopeful at once. Anne lives in the diary . . . and in Spain, and clearly in Mangum’s too-open heart. “I love you, Jesus Christ,” he wails over jarring power chords on the album’s second track, “King of Carrot Flowers, Pts. 2–3.” The album tackles fumbling teen sexuality and the mystery of existence itself (“How strange it is to be anything at all . . .”). Again and again, however, he returns to the ghost of Frank, as if straining to bring her back to life. Elsewhere he sings, “And she was born in a bottle rocket, 1929”—the year Anne Frank was born—“I know that she will live forever. She won’t ever die.”
Mangum has rarely given interviews, and his lost decade and a half after Aeroplane has only heightened his
myth, giving him a kind of Syd Barrett–like holy hermit status. Gasps were audible when it was announced that he would perform a series of solo dates in 2011, leading up to the inevitable full Neutral Milk Hotel tour. His reluctance to deconstruct his own music might come down to a lack of conclusion. If any modern rock star seems like a vessel for a spirit, it’s Mangum. “The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it’ll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I’m telling,” he told Pitchfork in 2008.
Mangum’s homage to The Diary of a Young Girl was not the only work in the Twee canon to explain the choking, almost unfathomable cruelty of the Holocaust to the young and the cool. More than a decade before that record, there was Maus. The Diary began what would become a half century’s work in progress of explaining the Holocaust to children.
By the 1980s, comic books, so prized by the young, were transitioning to “graphic novels,” tackling horror in a personal and respectful manner. Art Spiegelman’s Maus and sequel Maus II were the results of the author’s extensive personal and historical research of the Holocaust. “I had no interest in doing something like ‘Captain America liberates Treblinka,’” Spiegelman has said. The child of survivors who sometimes woke up screaming, Spiegelman was never in Auschwitz himself, but it haunted him just the same. His family, after relocating to New York City, socialized with fellow survivors.
In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Spiegelman found himself a key figure of the alternative comics movement as an editor of RAW, a paperback publication that would showcase the talents of other sophisticated but young “comix” artists like Gary Panter, Kaz, Lynda Barry, Bill Griffith, and Charles Burns and forever remove the art form from the category of easily dismissed juvenilia. An avid reader of Kafka, Spiegelman was not interested in the bawdiness and crudeness that marked many of the style’s works. The teen-aimed Heavy Metal and the like, with giant-breasted women, and even the work of celebrated 1960s cartoonist R. Crumb seemed limited, despite their loyal fan bases. Why couldn’t a comic book tackle a serious theme, like racism? Different animals as factions, sometimes violently opposed to each other, was something already hardwired into every child who ever sat in front of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Using such a trope might be one of the only ways to make any sense of the attempted eradication of the European Jews. Spiegelman’s mother committed suicide in the late ’60s, but his father was still alive. Via a series of interviews, which are depicted in the books along with flashbacks to Nazi atrocities in Poland, Spiegelman accomplishes something that scholars and documentarians had sometimes failed to do: made the Holocaust something pop-culturally accessible.
His anthropomorphized mice (Jews), cats (Nazis), pigs (Poles), and dogs (American soldiers) are so complex and fully realized that when the author’s father, Vladek, was shown the work, “he never noticed that I was using cats and mice.” Although it employs comic-book panels, thought bubbles, and black-and-white artwork, Maus feels more like a film, with cinematic devices and a tension that’s palpable as the Nazi cats rise to power. Readers who might not have ever read Elie Wiesel or even Anne Frank found themselves weeping over the image of a gasping or grimacing rodent.
America lost nearly half a million souls in World War II, but while Pearl Harbor was attacked, none of our cities were destroyed and our factories—ginned up by the war machine—were continuously booming. So were the babies. A new age of prosperity was upon us, but our kids were not all right.
At their most well-adjusted, 1950s kids, fictional and not, used fantasy and whimsy as a middle finger to often-absent parents struck dumb by the Depression and the war. Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight’s Eloise is one of the feistier, more aggressive of these ’50s kids, possibly due to her urban sophistication and privilege.
“Here’s what I like to do,” Eloise explains, “pretend. Sometimes I am a mother with 40 children. Sometimes I am a giant with fire coming out of my hair. Sometimes I get terribly sick and have to be waited on.” Eloise’s real parents are scarce: traveling, uninterested, aloof.
“I find that book to be tragically sad,” says writer and actor John Hodgman. “It’s about a daughter who’s been abandoned by her mother and is being raised in a hotel. There is obviously something glamorous and enticing to any children’s story when a child is sent out into the world on their own—children love to read about that—but there’s something about Eloise’s particular mania and verbosity. I feel like she’s filling up time so that she doesn’t stop and realize that her mommy abandoned her.”
Eloise is a brat, and a braggart (“My mother knows Coco Chanel”), and possibly, as Hodgman suggests, secretly miserable, but she was also among the first to inspire rebellion in young girls of the modern era, in part because of the life of her mind, and in part because she is a latchkey kid . . . albeit with room service, making her the envy of latchkey kids in suburbs everywhere.
The late 1950s saw another oddball Twee heroine in the form of dark and dotty Holly Golightly. She was the creation of the precocious Truman Capote, himself a Twee touchstone.
Even as a child, Capote dressed like a small man in vests and ties and fancied himself a sort of exceptional creature, not straight, not gay, but simply unique. He is, of course, the model for Scout’s best friend, Dill, in the classic To Kill a Mockingbird, written by Capote’s great confidante Harper Lee. Capote began writing seriously at just eight, although he did poorly in his organized classes. As he grew up, Capote continued to affect a sort of untamable “prodigy chic,” often portraying himself as much younger and more boyish than he actually was in an effort to inspire wonder over his already highly sophisticated and detailed writing. He also never let go of his Southern Gothic affectations, despite having left the south for the private schools of the northeast after his mother remarried a wealthy businessman, Joe Capote (Truman took his name). “When he was sixteen, he looked ten,” Phoebe Pierce Vreeland later told Capote biographer George Plimpton. “When he was thirty, he looked eighteen.” With his “butterscotch hair” and smooth cheeks; his high, amused, ambiguous speaking voice; and tiny stature, Capote was often referred to in superhuman terms: sometimes an angel, other times a troll. “Truman remained a child all his life,” his onetime schoolmaster Clarence Bruner-Smith opined to Plimpton. It’s as if a Seussian rascal had come to life; Capote was the cat in the hat.
His author photo, submitted for his first collection, the celebrated Other Voices, Other Rooms, is iconic, his bedroom eyes and jutting lower lip suggesting some kind of carnal or postcoital trance. He was just twenty-three when that book was published in 1948. The following year he was shot by famed artist and photographer Cecil Beaton midleap like a Peter Pan made flesh. Twee band the Smiths would later use that image on the sleeve of their 1986 single “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side.” There’s also an Irving Penn shot that depicts Capote wrapped in a tweed overcoat that seems several sizes too big and gives him even more of the air of a gifted, puckish man-child. By the 1950s he was a celebrated New Yorker contributor, all the while drinking and regaling in various salons and saloons with his socialites, the Swans. Capote’s most iconic creation, however, was war scarred and haunted, just like Seymour Glass, despite answering to the buoyant moniker of her own choosing.
In the novella—but not in the more famous film, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard—Holly is a “working girl,” just eighteen and fled from an unhappy hillbilly marriage. In New York City she cuts her hair, adopts an elegant style (pearls, black dresses), and smokes cigarettes as “ugly old men” file conspicuously in and out of her Upper East Side brownstone (the keys to which she is frequently losing). Golightly confides that she is a frequent sufferer of an ailment she calls “the mean reds” (we later learn that much of this has to do with the combat death of her brother) and that the only place that can provide any relief for her is Tiffany and Co., the iconic jewelry store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
“The mean reds are horrible,” Holly says. “You’re afr
aid and you sweat like hell but you don’t know what you’re afraid of.” When she has the “mean reds” she gets into a cab and goes to the celebrated and expensive Tiffany and Co., not for the jewelry or the proximity to the soon-to-be-wedded or expecting parents, but rather for the “calm, the quiet and the proud look of it. If I could find a real life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.”
Holly calls her cat simply “Cat.” She is also not who she claims to be; self-invented as “Holly Golightly,” and her beauty and sadness and pluck in the face of urban decay have made her yet another Twee heroine of the postwar age.
Among the last great postwar and pre-rock Twee heroes, James Dean barely fought his mean reds at all. He just sort of gave in to them. Dean was, of course, a real-life lost farm boy out of Indiana, but as with Anne Frank, his time on earth (twenty-four years, thanks to a wrecked Porsche Spyder somewhere out on route 466 on September 30, 1955) was so short and has been so mythologized that it’s easy to see him as a fictional character too—a sort of boy doll with his big ears, bed head, swollen lower lip, and sad dark and darting eyes.
In film, Dean did not wear leather à la Marlon Brando’s Johnny in The Wild One. Brando was solid and slick, a hunk like Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas, and the other major stars of the 1950s. Dean was androgynous and unsure, his sexuality a constant matter of debate (like Capote, he is a Smiths cover star and Morrissey obsession), and his relationship with both his real-life family and his surrogate city family of struggling actors (his mother died when he was nine; his father was aloof) amounted to one constant and fruitless search for love and acceptance.
