Theater of Cruelty

by Ian Buruma

  Hughes sees affinities between Crumb and Brueghel because Crumb “gives you that tremendous kind of impaction of lusting, suffering, crazed humanity in all sorts of desired gargoyle-like allegorical forms.” Probably so. But then so does Bosch, or Goya, or Picasso, or, for that matter, the Marx Brothers. Although it is good that a critic of fine art recognizes a master of comics, the comparison doesn’t quite explain the eccentric nature of Crumb’s talent.

  Crumb himself, though highly aware of artistic traditions, does not make the same claims for himself. In fact, he slyly lampoons them. Perhaps in response to Hughes, he drew a picture of himself in a seventeenth-century painter’s smock, gazing at a distinctly twentieth-century urban American skyline, saying, “Broigul I ain’t … let’s face it.” At the end of The R. Crumb Handbook is another self-portrait of the artist, looking more than a little crazed, pen poised over paper, and a glass of something at hand. It is entitled: “R. Crumb’s Universe of Art.” On the right is a list called “Fine Art!” and on the left are “Cartoonists” and “Illustrators.” Among the cartoonists/illustrators are Harvey Kurtzman, Wallace Wood, Thomas Nast, Crumb’s brother Charles, and Crumb’s wife Aline Kaminski Crumb. The fine artists include Bosch, Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Daumier, Hogarth, James Gillray, Van Gogh, Edward Hopper, and George Grosz.

  Crumb greatly admires all these people. He has said so on many occasions. But the selection is interesting. It is not immediately clear where he would place himself. Perhaps in both categories. Or maybe such groupings are arbitrary anyway, but then, why bother making them? Cartoonists like Kurtzman and Nast, not to mention his own brother Charles, are often mentioned by Crumb as major influences on his work. Then so are Hogarth and Gillray. Grosz, too, regarded Hogarth as a model. He once told the diplomat and art collector Harry Kessler that he wanted to be “the German Hogarth.” Kessler wrote that Grosz loathed abstract painting and “the pointlessness of painting as practised so far.” Art for art’s sake didn’t interest him, at least in his Berlin years. He wanted art to be didactic, active, political, like Hogarth or religious art, a function “lost in the nineteenth century.”3

  I’m not sure what Crumb would make of this. But his graffiti-like cartoons of animal greed and cruel lust in twentieth-century America are closer in spirit to Grosz than any other artist I can think of. Like Grosz, Crumb is a born satirist who brandishes his pencil like a stiletto. But he is funnier than the German artist, and wackier. Grosz, quite a pornographer himself, shared Crumb’s love of sturdy female posteriors. And like Crumb, the artist himself usually played a leading part in his pictorial fantasies. But none of Grosz’s pictures shows quite the same high spirits of Crumb, the triumphant nerd conquering those hordes of willing Amazons. Grosz wallowed in obscenity; erotic pleasure came with a certain amount of disgust; one may indeed have fed the other. In comparison, Crumb’s orgies look almost innocent.

  Probably neither “fine art” nor “illustration” is an apt description for the type of art in which both Grosz and Crumb excelled. And there is nothing wrong with that. Such classifications are for critics, not artists. But the artist can make it a problem when, flattered by admirers, or stung by critics, or just out of boredom, he tries too hard to become a “fine artist.”

  Henri Cartier-Bresson was a photographic genius, but nothing more than a skillful draftsman. Yet he gave up the former to pursue the latter. Grosz’s venomous drawings of Weimar Berlin are unforgettable. His pretty watercolor pictures of New York are not. Yet there he was—not entirely by choice, it’s true—a mediocre fine artist in the United States. R. Crumb now lives in the south of France, by all accounts, including his own, a contented family man, far away from the urban blight of the US that enraged and inspired him.

  He still draws cartoons of his personal quirks and anxieties, and pictures of things he enjoys: athletic girls, old-time jazz and blues players, his wife Aline, dinners with family and friends. Like Robert Hughes, he disdains much of what passes for fine art in the market today. Interviewed by Hughes at the New York Public Library in April 2005, Crumb expressed his annoyance about an Andy Warhol silkscreen going for a fortune, while he spends hours, even days, slaving to get a drawing just right.4 It also irritates him that he is still stuck with the reputation of “a Sixties man.” He regards the work of that period as “too sloppy,” and wishes he had spent more time on his draftsmanship.

  And yet perhaps those “sloppy” cartoons, dashed off in a haze of dope and LSD to be printed in cheap underground papers (Zap Comix, Snatch, Big Ass Comics, The East Village Other), were his best work. Some artists can produce great work from their own heads, whatever the time and place. Most cartoonists and illustrators need a subject or a milieu to inspire them. Crumb, to be at his creative peak, may have needed the edge of 1960s America, just as Grosz needed the rich brutality of Weimar Berlin. There is no shame in this. Crumb is undoubtedly a great artist. The question is what made him so great.

  One of three sons and two daughters of a taciturn marine sergeant prone to sudden acts of violence (he smashed Crumb’s collarbone when the boy was only five) and a devout Catholic mother on amphetamines, Crumb grew up around military bases in Philadelphia and Oceanside, California, and later in Milford, Delaware. His parents, in his words, had “never cracked a book.” Fine arts museums were unheard of. Crumb, like his brothers, soaked up the TV and comics culture of the 1950s: Howdy Doody, Donald Duck, Roy Rogers, Little Lulu, and the like. While on LSD in the 1960s, Crumb thought of his mind as “a garbage receptacle of mass media images and input. I spent my whole childhood absorbing so much crap that my personality and mind are saturated with it. God only knows if that affects you physically!”

  Millions of Americans were exposed to the same things. Most of them went on to lead unremarkable lives. The Crumb brothers became very strange indeed. Charles, the eldest, was a precocious author of comic strips, who pressed his younger brother into following the same obsession. As an adult, Charles barely ever left the family house, didn’t bother to wash, got seriously depressed, and finally killed himself. Max, the youngest, has lived in a San Francisco flophouse for more than two decades, where he impales himself on beds of nails and draws pictures of naked young girls. Robert is the only one who “made it,” in a more or less conventional sense.

  His artistic gift was clear early on, even though his high school art teachers failed to see the point of the homemade comics he produced with Charles, full of bosomy female vampires. In 1962, Robert left for Cleveland, Ohio, where he found work drawing cute anniversary cards for American Greetings. It was a respectable nine-to-five job, with a strict dress code. He married a local girl. A housing loan could be arranged through the parents-in-law. In 1967, he realized that it was all a mistake and made for San Francisco, inspired, like so many of his age, by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. And besides: “I wanted to fuck a lot of girls, and in fact, ultimately, I got my share.”

  Although Crumb took LSD and spoke the lingo of Haight-Ashbury, he was, on the surface, far from being a typical 1960s man. As far as he was concerned, rock and roll lost its interest as soon as middle-class white kids began to play it. All those doodling guitar solos of acid-rock stars were unbearable to him. Crumb much preferred old blues and jazz, and became a voracious collector of 78 rpm records. In dress, too, Crumb was not quite a man of his time. While others wore kaftans and beads, Crumb stuck to dapper jackets, porkpie hats, and slacks, like a jazzman of the 1950s. If there is one mood, apart from lust, that defines Crumb’s work, it is nostalgia. But in fact this was also very much a feature of 1960s culture.

  A great deal of rock music of the 1960s and early 1970s was soaked in nostalgia for a preindustrial Americana. There was, in an age of extraordinary mass-produced affluence, a deep longing for the handmade, the artisanal, the simple good life. “Plastic” was a general term of abuse for anything in the modern world that was deemed to be hateful: suburban mod coms, TV personalities, and so on. Country rockers, folk singers, tie-dye weavers, a
nd other enthusiasts of the organic and the “real” imitated the styles of an earlier, rougher, more rustic or proletarian culture. Bob Dylan, in his first steps to stardom, pretended to be a hobo. The Rolling Stones, nice suburban English boys all, pretended to be Edwardian rakes or black men from the Deep South. Crumb adopted the comic style of pre-war funny papers.

  Like Dylan, however, he transformed the style of a bygone era into something rather different and personal. Both artists reworked popular, even proletarian arts and came up with something that could be played at Carnegie Hall or pinned on the walls of a fine arts museum. This was not because they felt superior to the popular artists whom they admired. Crumb certainly didn’t use the techniques of a fine artist. On the contrary, it was more that, like Dylan, he used a popular idiom to express feelings and ideas normally reserved for more sophisticated forms, such as poetry or the novel. Sexuality, autobiography, and political rage were not things that comic book artists dealt with before Crumb came along.

  One exception, possibly, was Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of Mad magazine, whom Crumb idolized. Kurtzman broke the mold of heroic war pictures with Two-Fisted Tales, his comic strip about the horrors of the Korean War. And there was a lot of soft-core sex in his Little Annie Fanny cartoons for Playboy. But these, done in cooperation with such cartoonists as Will Elder, were not nearly as personal as Crumb’s work, or as bold.

  Crumb used comics in the way certain art photographers used photos, as a kind of confessional journal of his own life, especially his erotic life. In a sense, his medium is richer in possibilities, for although a photographer can express his or her feelings in pictures, it is very difficult to express an inner life. We know from the photographs of Nan Goldin, say, what her friends look like, how they loved, and how some died. We know about her own love life. We get the pictures of her milieu. What we don’t get to see are her most intimate anxieties and fantasies.

  Like the anxieties and fantasies of most people, Crumb’s aren’t always pretty. As is doubtless true of many men, his sexual desires contain a great deal of aggression, even perversity. Maybe the urge to jump on the backs of Amazons in tight jeans and ride them like horses is somewhat specialized, but no more so than many urges of l’homme moyen sensuel. Crumb is certainly not alone in raging against his slavery to sexual desire, as well as celebrating it, or against the female sex that tempts, torments, and delights him. Nor is he immune to racial prejudice, or misanthropy, or pet hatreds, not least of himself.

  In The Many Faces of R. Crumb, an autobiographical comic published in 1972, the self-mocking artist goes through a variety of changes: “Crumb the long-suffering patient artist-saint,” or “Crumb the cruel, calculating, cold-hearted fascist creep,” or “Crumb the misanthropic, reclusive crank,” or “media superstar, monumental egotist and self-centered SOB,” or “sex-crazed fiend and pervert,” and so on. Until in the last picture, he gives us a melancholy wave from his desk, a pen in his left hand, a half-finished comic strip in front of him: “The enigmatic, elusive man of mystery. Who is this Crumb?—It all depends on the mood I’m in!!”

  It is possible that Crumb’s comic character appeals mostly to fellow nerds, and that, as John Leonard once put it, “pop nostalgia clings like a kudzu weed to everyone who ever grew up feeling alien-freaky—i.e., all of us who somehow knew we were born to die uncool.”5 But I think that is too narrow a view. All comic characters, from Don Quixote to Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen, are losers of a kind. One reason we love them is that it is always comforting to know there are people worse off than we are. But also because there is a loser in all of us. It’s just that few people have the courage or genius to turn their least attractive features into art.

  To call Crumb a misogynist or a racist is to miss the point. By exposing violent impulses in himself and the society around him, he does not advocate or glorify violence. A man can be a perfectly decent human being and still harbor all kinds of feelings and thoughts that would not pass scrutiny. To be civilized is to keep such instincts under control. Crumb simply shows that he, and by extension all of us, are made of many parts, some of them not so nice. “I was just being a punk,” he said about his work in the 1960s, “putting down on paper all these messy parts of the culture we internalize and keep quiet about.” Here, too, Grosz comes to mind. As his pornographic drawings show quite clearly, Grosz was as lecherous as the porcine plutocrats he satirized so savagely. But his best work, of the 1920s, also reveals what happens when our basest instincts become political. That is when civilization breaks down. I think it was Jean Genet who once said that Nazi Germany didn’t interest him because sadism was no longer subversive but had been institutionalized.

  The danger of turning your life into an artistic chronicle is that success can lead to mannerism. What was once a refreshing kind of honesty becomes a shtick, repeated over and over, becoming slicker and slicker, losing all spontaneity along the way. This, to his credit, has not quite happened to Crumb. As soon as his public image hardened into celebrity, he moved to the relative obscurity of the south of France. His newer work, including his self-mocking cartoons about being exhibited in museums, is still personal and honest, but it has lost a certain edge. Crumb himself observed that “most cartoonists have about a ten-year run of inspiration or creativity.”

  Like a certain kind of Romantic poet, the confessional artist as an angry young man can burn himself out quickly. In the case of Crumb, it is not just that he has found bourgeois comfort with his wife Aline. He may be striving too hard for a kind of respectability, trying to shake off his role as a punk. One of his mature works is an illustrated introduction to the stories of Franz Kafka, reissued in 2004 as R. Crumb’s Kafka.6 One can see why Crumb would be a natural artist to illustrate Kafka, the nerdish, neurotic artist par excellence. For a Catholic army brat, Crumb seems to have a remarkable affinity with Jews—he married two Jewish women. Aline, herself a considerable cartoonist, is usually depicted as a lewd version of Barbra Streisand.

  Yet the connection with Kafka doesn’t really come off. Crumb is too respectful of Kafka, perhaps, or maybe a cartoon version of Kafka was not a good idea anyway. Although much more sophisticated, the book still seems too much like those Illustrated Classics that many people of my generation, including myself, were discouraged from reading by parents who worried about our literary development. Crumb’s comic drawing simply doesn’t match Kafka’s literary style. The book does them both a disservice.

  Nor am I sure that pinning pages from Zap Comix onto a museum wall is the best way to show off Crumb’s work. Instead of elevating his art by tearing it out of the comic book and putting it in a museum, it somehow diminishes it. Crumb recognizes this. He told Hughes that his drawings were “done for print … the finished thing is the printed thing.” Crumb is at his least interesting when he forgets this. His pen portraits of women and family life are funny and well executed. They are just not as interesting as the rougher, wilder comics.

  Of course, one has to be careful with this line of criticism, lest one sound like Philip Larkin complaining that black American jazz musicians lost their primitive appeal when Miles Davis and Charlie Parker started experimenting with bebop and cool jazz. It is not that genres have to be strictly separated, or that photographers or jazz musicians or cartoonists cannot produce great works of art. Nor is it a matter of crude ranking. A great cartoon or photograph is far superior to a mediocre oil painting, just as Paul McCartney’s pop songs are vastly better than his Liverpool Oratorio. Crossing boundaries of genre only works if the new departure matches the artist’s particular talent. Davis and Parker weren’t Dixieland musicians trying to be pretentious; they did what they were good at.

  Crumb deserves great credit for daring to experiment, for trying different things. His later work—the portraits, the illustrated Kafka, the pictures of his domestic life—cannot simply be dismissed as the doodling of a tired old man. He never stopped trying to stretch the boundaries of the cartoonist’s art, formally as well a
s in content. But he is not a great draftsman, and the content of his most recent work is not as surprising and powerful as it once was. Sometimes, as his beloved blues recordings so amply show, artists produce the best results when they draw strength from the limits of the forms they have chosen.

  1 R. Crumb and Peter Poplaski, The R. Crumb Handbook (MQ Publications, 2005).

  2 Hughes said this in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary Crumb.

  3 Count Harry Kessler, The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan, 1918–1937 (Grove, 1999), p. 64.

  4 The transcript from the “Live at the NYPL” program is available at www.nypl.org.

  5 “Welcome to New Dork,” The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2005.

  6 Written by David Zane Mairowitz, and published by ibooks.

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  OBSESSIONS IN TOKYO

  MISHIMA YUKIO’S SUICIDE in 1970 was a messy affair. First he plunged a short sword into his stomach, then a handsome young man from his private militia tried to cut off his head with a samurai blade and botched it three times before another follower completed the job. One way of looking at this bloody event is as a piece of performance art. Mishima had made sure the press would be there, at the Ichigaya military base in Tokyo, to record his call for an imperial restoration before he committed suicide. Mishima had asked a close friend at NHK, the national broadcasting company, whether the TV station might be interested in a live broadcast of his ritual disembowelment. The friend took this as one of Mishima’s morbid jests. It wasn’t.

  Death had long been an artistic obsession of Mishima’s. In 1966, he directed a short film, Patriotism, in which he played the part of a young army officer in the 1930s committing seppuku (only foreigners say hara-kiri) to the music of Wagner’s Liebestod.