The Disappointment Artist

by Jonathan Lethem

  Contemplation of the life of a site like Hoyt-Schermerhorn becomes, in the end, tidal. The lapping of human moments forms a pulse or current, like the lapping of trains through the underground tunnels, or like the Doppler-effect fading of the certain memories from the planet, as they’re recalled for the penultimate time, and then the last: When will the last person to have purchased panty hose or a razor at Loeser’s or Namm’s pass from the earth? When will the last of those three hundred who rocked the train car off the boy’s pinned leg, or the last of those four hundred Negro boycotters, be gone?

  A white kid raised inside the liberal sentiments of a middle-class family yet living in an area fringed with crime and poverty met a choice. It was possible to identify with and assimilate to the harsher truths of the street, and so toughen, somewhat, to fear. Alternately, a kid could carry his parents’ sensitivities, and standards, with him, out-of-doors. The price was obvious. Most of us, whether we ended in one camp or another, wavered. I was a “good” kid, and a bullied one, yet I recall dozens of moments when I slid briefly across the separation line. Once, on a basketball court, I allowed myself to meld into a crowd of Puerto Rican kids, with whom I’d been playing, as they briefly halted the game to harass and threaten a single Asian man, a gay man, off a neighboring court. I wasn’t violent; the incident hardly was. But the man was the boyfriend of a pal of my mother’s, and I’d been a guest in their elegant town house. When my mother’s friend, a gay man considerably huskier than his young lover, returned to the court with a baseball bat and, bellowing, sent us scurrying from our game, his eyes met mine and I was disgraced, wrenched between concurrent selves.

  The moment was precursor to a worse one. This was the summer between high school and college, which is to say the verge of my escape from Brooklyn for the first time. I’ve come to understand how fraught that moment was for me, as I considered or refused to consider what I was involuntarily carrying with me out of my childhood environment. My girlfriend was from upstate New York, but lived in my city, my neighborhood, for that summer before we both embarked to college. She worked nights as a waitress in Manhattan and rode the A train in and out of Hoyt-Schermerhorn. She was frightened, as she perhaps should have been, to walk the several blocks home from that station after eleven, and so I’d promised always to meet her. I often lightly mocked her fear—but that bit of overcompensation, lousy as it sounds, wasn’t my crime.

  My crime was this: one night, going to the station to pick her up, I impulsively waited in shadow by the entrance instead of making myself visible. I had no plan. I was fooling around. She paused and looked for me, just for a moment, plainly afraid to stand there waiting alone, as she absolutely should have been: it was a different thing to walk swiftly home than it was to linger. I could have stepped forward easily, but instead, frozen in my stupid jape, I only watched her. And then, as she began walking home without me, I followed.

  I was certain she’d turn and see me, and that it would be oddly funny, but she never did. She was afraid to turn to see whose footsteps followed her, of course. I trailed her home, compounding my mistake with each accelerating footstep, until I at last overtook her just outside the door. While I tried to explain, she trembled, in fear which converted immediately, and rightly, to rage. Denial has covered any recollection of my words by now, but I know they were hopelessly inadequate to repair what I’d told myself was a harmless joke—though I was walking behind her I’d still been protecting her, hadn’t I?—and was actually such a cruel joke it wasn’t a joke at all. I’d hardly claim to be Patty Hearst, but there was a touch of the Stockholm syndrome in my behavior. I was bestowing on another a trace, or more than a trace, of the fear I’d absorbed for years.

  The glamour of Abraham and Straus, for so long the one survivor among Brooklyn’s great stores, has evaporated. A&S’s carcass houses a Macy’s now, with a small plaque on its Hoyt Street side commemorating the history of A&S, if you want to seek it out. Me, I don’t have the heart to go inside the Macy’s to see what remains of A&S’s Art Deco elevators—let it remain the place where I first met Santa, where I used to buy wheat-backed pennies to fill out holes in my penny collection, and thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles.

  Not that those memories would likely be diminished by a visit. Perhaps, instead, I’m afraid of their intensification. Every time I pass through Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s Bond Street corridor, past Loeser’s tile “L” and bricked-up windows, I recall the first time I saw them, and the start of my lifelong romance, a New Yorker’s typical romance with our limitless secret neighborhood, the one running beneath all the others. This was my first subway memory, here: the passage, those windows. Nothing subsequent, not thousands of high-school days, not The Warriors nor my own feeble crimes, can displace this memory’s primacy, or fade its color. I held my mother’s hand. I was being taken to her office, in Manhattan. Perhaps it was a day off from school, I don’t know. I rode the subway for the first time I can recall, but I don’t remember the train. I remember the station.

  Identifying with Your Parents, or The Return of the King

  “But Reed, what about the baby?!?”

  In the mid-seventies I had two friends who were into Marvel Comics. Karl, whose parents were divorced, and Luke, whose parents were among the most stable I knew. My parents were something in between: separated, or separating, sometimes living together and sometimes apart, and each of them with lovers.

  I would never have been able to name that difference in 1975, however, let alone account for how it felt. The difference I understood was this: Luke had an older brother, Peter, whom both Luke and I idealized in absentia. Peter had left behind a collection of sixties Marvel comic books, in sacrosanct box files. These included a nearly complete run of The Fantastic Four, the famous 102 issues drawn by Jack Kirby and scripted by Stan Lee, a defining artifact (I now know) of the “Silver Age of Comics.”

  Luke was precocious, worldly, full of a satirical brilliance I didn’t always understand but pretended to, as I pretended to understand his frequent references to “Aunt Petunia” and the “Negative Zone” and the “Baxter Building.” He was disdainful of childish pursuits and disdainful of my early curiosity about sex (I didn’t catch the contradiction in this until later).

  Luke didn’t buy new comics so much as he read and reread old ones. Luke’s favorite comic-book artist was Jack Kirby.

  Karl was precocious, secretive, and rebellious, full of intimations of fireworks and drugs and petty thievery that frightened and thrilled me. He was curious about sex, and unaware of or uninterested in the early history of Marvel superheroes. For him Marvel began with the hip, outsiderish loner heroes of the seventies—Ghost Rider, Luke Cage, Warlock, Iron Fist. His favorite comic-book artist was John Byrne.

  Karl got in trouble a lot. Luke didn’t.

  Though all three of us lived in rough parts of Brooklyn, Karl and I went to public school together, close to a housing project, while Luke went to Saint Ann’s School, safe in moneyed Brooklyn Heights. It was this, I’m certain, that tipped my allegiance to Karl in those years. Karl and I, in our school days, had been forced to adopt a stance of endurance and shame together, a Kabuki of cringing postures in response to a world of systematic bullying. That was a situation I could no more have explained to Luke than to my parents. Karl and I never discussed it either, but we knew it was shared.

  In 1976 Marvel announced, with what seemed to Karl and me great fanfare, the return of Jack Kirby, the “King” of Comics, as an artist-writer—a full “auteur”—on a series of Marvel titles. The announcement wasn’t a question of press conferences, mind you, or advertisements in other media, only sensational reports on the Bullpen Bulletins pages of Marvel Comics themselves, the CNN of our little befogged minds at the time. Kirby was the famed creator or co-creator of a vast collection of classic Marvel characters: the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Silver Surfer, Doctor Doom, the Inhumans. In a shadowy earlier career (as captives within the Marvel hype machine, Karl and I had bought into
a view that nothing really existed before 1962) Kirby was also the creator of Captain America—his career reached into what was for us the prehistory of comics. The notion that he was about to reclaim his territory was rich and disturbing. In fact, what he would turn out to bring to Marvel was a paradoxical combination: clunkily old-fashioned virtues that had been outmoded, if not surpassed, by subsequent Marvel artists, together with a baroque and nearly opaque futuristic sensibility that would leave most readers chilled, largely alienated from what he was trying to do. Later I’d learn that Kirby’s return created rifts in the ranks of the younger Marvel writers and artists, who resented the creative autonomy he’d been granted and found the results laughable. At the time all I knew was that Kirby’s return created a rift between myself and Karl.

  Kirby hadn’t been inactive in the interlude between his classic sixties work for Marvel and his mid-seventies return. He’d been in exile at DC, Marvel’s older, more august and square rival. In the sixties, DC, despite its stewardship of Batman and Superman, had lost much ground to Marvel—due to Kirby and Lee’s great creations, of course. Then, after Kirby’s relationship with Stan Lee had become aggrieved, DC plucked him away, and handed him, for a while, full creative control of an epic series of Kirby-created titles called The New Gods. In doing so, they’d gotten more, and other, than they’d bargained for—The New Gods comics were massively ambitious, and massively arcane. Though acclaimed by some as masterworks, they never found much traction with the readership. The reason for their commercial failure is pretty specific. The comics were hard to relate to. While Kirby’s most “cosmic” creations at Marvel— Galactus, the Silver Surfer, the Inhumans, etc.—were always bound to human-scale stories by their relationships to prosaic earthly characters— that is, for the most part, the homely and squabbling Fantastic Four themselves—at DC he created a pantheon of gods but didn’t bother with the humans. Similarly, at Marvel his all-powerful monster-strongman types—Hulk, Thing, and, in another sense, Thor—all had fragile human identities to protect or mourn. At DC, Kirby seemed to have flown off into his own cosmic realms of superheroes and supervillains without any important human counterparts or identities. The feet of his work never touched the ground. The results were impressive, and quite boring.

  What he unveiled on his return to Marvel was more of the very same, in two new venues: The Eternals, which introduced another dualistic pantheon of battling gods, and 2001, ostensibly based on Kubrick’s film. Each of these series indulged Kirby’s most abstracted work in his most high-flown cosmic register. Each introduced dozens of colorful but remote characters, and each abandoned or distended traditional story-telling to such a degree that the audience—I mean me and Karl—was mostly baffled.

  Studying Jack Kirby now, I’m bewildered that one man can encompass such contradictory things. By contradictory I don’t mean his diversity of accomplishments in so many different eras of comics history—his creation, with Joe Simon, of the patriotic anti-Nazi type of superhero in Captain America; his creation, also with Simon, of the basic mold for the “romance” comic; his dominance in the “movie-monster” style of comics that preceded the explosion of inventions at Marvel; that selfsame explosion, which includes at least a share in the invention of both the “star” supervillain (Doctor Doom) and the ambivalent antiheroic type (whether craggily pathetic à la the Hulk or handsomely tormented à la Silver Surfer and Black Bolt); the psychedelic majesty (however thwarted) of the New Gods work at DC. Those aren’t contradictory, only boggling in the sense that the accomplishments of a Picasso or a Dylan or a Shakespeare are boggling. By contradictory I mean the fact that in that DC work and then especially in the return to Marvel, Jack Kirby, the greatest innovator in the history of comics, gradually turned into a kind of primitivist genius, disdained as incompetent by much of the audience, but revered by a cult of aficionados somewhat in the manner of an “outsider artist.” As his work spun off into abstraction, his human bodies more and more machinelike, his machines more and more molecular and atomic (when they didn’t resemble vast sculptures of mouse-gnawed cheese), Kirby became greatly awful, a kind of disastrous genius uncontainable in the form he himself had innovated. It’s as though Picasso had, after 1950, become Adolf Wolfli, or John Ford had ended up as John Cassavetes. Or if Robert Crumb turned into his obsessive mad-genius brother, Charles Crumb. Or if Chuck Berry evolved into Sun Ra.

  Speaking of Chuck Berry, there’s something about my childhood that I’ve never been able to explain, but I want to attempt to now. I suffered a kind of nerdish fever for authenticity and origins of all kinds, one which led me into some very strange cultural places. The notion of “influence” compelled me, at irrational depths of my being. Any time I heard mention that, say, David Bowie was only really imitating Anthony Newley, I immediately lost interest in David Bowie and went looking for the source, sometimes with the pitiable results that the example suggests. So I was always moving backward through time, and though I was born in 1964 and came to cultural consciousness some time around 1970 or 1971, I particularly adored the culture of the fifties and early sixties: Ernie Kovacs, The Twilight Zone, the British Invasion, Lenny Bruce, the Beat writers, film noir, etc. I tended to identify with my parents’ taste in things, and with the tastes of my parents’ friends, more than with the supposed cultural tokens of my own generation. It was with Luke, in fact, that I went to see a Ralph Bakshi film called Heavy Traffic, which contains an unforgettable animated sequence that accompanies and illustrates with crude (and porny) drawings the Chuck Berry song “Maybelline.” Thanks to the film I fell in love with Chuck Berry, and while every kid in freshman year of high school was defining their identity according to whether they liked (A) Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd and the Doors or (B) the Clash and the Specials and Bad Brains or (C) Cheap Trick and the Cars and Blondie, I was looking into (Z) Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. It’s a commonplace, of course, that we seventies kids were doomed to glance backward, out of our impoverished world of Paul McCartney and Wings, to the era of the Beatles—but I was the only twelve-year-old I’ve ever known who got into an extended argument with his own mother about whether the Beatles were better before or after Sgt. Pepper—my mother on the side of “I Am the Walrus,” me on the side of “Drive My Car.”

  I identified with my parents in other, murkier, and more emotional ways, of course. Not that those are separable from the cultural stuff. Put simply, I was in fearful denial of my own childish neediness. I wished to be an adult in order to be forever spared sympathy or condescension, which reminded me too starkly of my helplessness.

  At the moment in my childhood I’m describing now, bodies were beginning to change, and the exact degree and nature of their changes provided psychological opportunities, and thwarted others. Karl at thirteen grew tall, handsome, and dangerously effective at cutting an adult profile. Luke and I each stayed, for the moment, small and childlike.

  Karl identified, as I’ve said, with Marvel’s existential loners: the Vision, Warlock, Ghost Rider, etc. By becoming tall and rebellious—he’d begun to write graffiti, smoke pot, fail in school, all pursuits I’d only barely flirted with—he’d eluded childishness by a bodily rejection of it, and by rejecting obedience. The cost was exile from continuity with what was attractive in our parents’ worlds, of course. That cost didn’t impress Karl, not at that moment anyway.

  So here was how, for a time, I tilted back to Luke: he and I were partnered in a more baroque strategy, of rejecting childishness by identifying with our parents, and by sneering at rebellion as childish. As paltry new teenagers we adopted a “you can’t fire me, I quit” position.

  But Marvel was implicated in my yearning backward—ours, I should say: mine, Luke’s, even Karl’s. By the time of Kirby’s return, the comics-world discourse around Marvel’s greatness was explicitly nostalgic. Any counterargument, based on a typically American myth of progress, that our contemporary comics might be even more wonderful, was everywhere undermined by a pining for the heyday of the s
ixties. This was accomplished most prominently in Stan Lee’s two enormously popular trade paperbacks: Origins and Son of Origins , which reproduced and burnished the creation myths of the great sixties characters. The odor of grandeur, not to mention sanctimony, that clung to any discussion of the Silver Age boom was impossible to clear from one’s nostrils after reading the Origins books. There wasn’t any way to imagine that the first issues of Iron Fist or Deathlok the Demolisher would ever be collected in equally biblical compendia. Nostalgia was further propagated in Marvel’s reprint titles: Marvel Tales, which offered rewarmed Spider-Mans, and the too-aptly-titled Marvel’s Greatest Comics, which put forward—you guessed it—the Kirby-Lee run of Fantastic Fours. This was somewhat akin to Paul McCartney and Wings playing covers of Beatles songs on Wings over America. We seventies kids couldn’t have been issued a clearer message: we’d missed the party.

  Speaking of the Beatles (that is, famous sixties culture breakups and their seventies legacies), I ought to give at least a moment to the whole question of the Lee-Kirby authorship controversy. In a nutshell, in the Origins books, Lee notoriously undersold the contributions of his artist collaborators—that is to say, mostly Kirby, but also Steve Ditko, the penciler of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. Later, in a dispute over the ownership of Kirby’s artwork—the actual drawn pages—Kirby was given extensive chances to play a grouchy old David against Marvel’s corporate Goliath, and the comics world rallied around him. He also made public claim to being the sole author of the great characters that had made the Kirby-Lee partnership famous: the Fantastic Four and all their sublime villains and supporting cast, Hulk, Thor, Silver Surfer, etc. (He even once threw in Spider-Man for good measure.) Lee and Kirby were a kind of Lennon-McCartney partnership, in several senses: Kirby, like Lennon, the raw visionary, with Lee, like McCartney, providing sweetness and polish, as well as a sense that the audience’s hunger for “hooks”—in the form of soap-operatic situations involving romance and family drama, young human characters with ungodlike flaws, gently humorous asides, etc.—shouldn’t be undernourished. And, after the breakup, it was Kirby, like Lennon, whom the audience tended to want to credit as the greater genius, and Lee, like McCartney, who took on an aura of the shallow and crafty businessman.