- - - - Copyright The Commonwealth Club of California, 2003
- - - - Good Lit: Michael Chabon in Conversation - October 9, 2001 - - - - In conversation with Barbara Lane, Director, Commonwealth Club Book Awards Barbara Lane: Talk a little bit about the story of the golem, which is central to this novel. Michael Chabon: The golem is a character out of Jewish folklore, a myth that dates back thousands of years, before the time of Christ. The most famous legend is the one that deals with the golem of Prague, who was made by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel. There were lots of other stories about different rabbis making golems, but for some reason, this is the one that caught the imagination, not just of Jewish listeners over the centuries, but of novelists. A lot has been written about the golem of Prague; films have been made about this artificial man, formed from river clay, who is brought to life by spells and incantations. In some stories, he's made merely to be a servant, to help clean up around the synagogue on Friday nights, to do menial jobs that somebody with a soul and brain would not want to do. In others, he's made to be a protector of the Jews of the Prague ghetto. That is the version I'm most interested in, because I see those stories of creating a defender as a possible antecedent for the idea of the superhero. It was that aspect of it that first excited me. Comic books fought the Second World War. I knew the Jewishness of the two characters was going to be important. Somehow, I decided to have Joe Kavalier be a refugee from a country that was occupied by the Nazis. In 1939, there was the annexation of Austria and then Czechoslovakia. Then, in September, we got the invasion of Poland that started the war. I'd been to Prague, so I chose Prague. He just gets off the boat, more or less. He shows up in New York, and the day he gets there, his crazy cousin says, "We're going into the comic book business, and since you can draw, you can draw my Superman." Joe has no idea what Superman is, what a superhero is, or even what a comic book is. So when he's asked to draw a superhero, the only thing he can think of is a golem. When I was writing that, I began to feel that there was going to be more to this book than just superheroes, that somehow it was going to tie into a lot of other stuff having to do with Jewish folklore. Lane: Did you ever discover why so many of the early comic book creators were Jewish? Chabon: That was one of my main questions when I started writing, one of the things that I thought I might answer for myself. It's very striking; it's an inescapable thing to notice, once you start doing research. Just to cite the most famous examples: Superman was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, two Jewish kids from Cleveland; Batman was created mostly by Bob Kane, with help from Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson, who were Jewish; Captain America was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. So it was very apparent to me that something was happening. I had a very key experience early on in the writing of the book. I was living in Los Angeles and flew up to Oakland to attend WonderCon, a big comic book convention held every year. One of the guests was going to be Will Eisner, one of the greatest comic book artists ever. He's in his early or mid-80s and still working. One of the first questions I asked him was the question you just asked me: Why do you think, along with yourself, so many of the early comic book creators were Jews? He gave me what I think is the right answer. New York was the center of the publishing business and also the comic book and pulp magazine business. The population of New York was fairly heavily Jewish. If you were a young, Jewish kid and wanted to make your living drawing, if you had an artistic ability and wanted to try to make money with your pen, you didn't have that many options available to you. The really well-paying, prestigious fields of commercial art, illustration, and advertising art were closed. You wouldn't get hired at the advertising agencies, but you could get hired by the comic book business. All these kids who thought they could draw, many of whom were somewhat mistaken in that judgment, were taken here. A lot of the comic book companies and pulp publishers were Jewish-owned businesses. In many cases, it was a familial thing. Stan Lee, the famous Marvel Comics impresario whose name was originally Stanley Lieber, was the nephew of Martin Goodman, the owner of what later became Marvel Comics. It was an economic, demographic thing. But Eisner paused after he gave me that answer and said, "You know, I've often wondered if there wasn't something else at work, if there wasn't some other explanation. We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems," which became the epigraph for this novel. He said that we have this narrative history of trying to come up with ways of solving the problems of the world through various kinds of mystical means, such as the golem. Lane: Another person who inspired him - and you mention him in the afterwards to the book - is Jack Kirby, who did Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk. Can you talk about his influence? Chabon: Jack Kirby revolutionized comics twice in his career - first, in the 1940s by creating Captain America with his partner Joe Simon. Kirby was young when he started in comics -about 17. He was poorly educated - self-educated in the way that a lot of New York kids tended to be in this period, and the way that Sam Clay is in my book. He had this bursting, dynamic drawing style; it looked like his characters were barely contained by the panels. When someone got punched in a Jack Kirby comic, they came flying out of the panel. A lot of violence, but an almost pugnacious, New York kind of violence. Then, he did it all over again in the 1960s, participating in the Marvel Comics revolution with Stan Lee. The idea of collaboration was always at the heart of comics - another thing I really wanted to write about in this novel. The best-known characters are probably the Fantastic Four, taking comics into a completely different realm. They aimed them at a much older readership - college students - and it was very successful. Kirby's imagination was allowed to roam completely wild, creating these incredible pantheons of cosmic superheroes the size of planets. I'm always fascinated by the image of an artist who lives this very mundane existence. Jack Kirby lived most of his life first on Long Island, then out in Thousand Oaks in the San Fernando Valley. He was this small, drab looking man. You never would have looked at him twice, but every night he went out to his studio and sent his imagination voyaging out into the universe and created characters like Galactus, the big devourer of worlds. The image of this person voyaging through the cosmos of his own imagination while everyone else is asleep is a potent one for me. Lane: You mentioned that comic books have always played a role in war. In the Second World War, didn't they have a jingoistic nature? Chabon: Absolutely. Comic books went to war before the United States did. Captain America dates from, I believe, May 1941. No villain was up to Superman. Kryptonite, in a way, is a substitute for Hitler, because Hitler was the ultimate villain. They fought the Japanese and demonized them, but this was what superheroes were made for. Comic book covers from the period are superheroes punching out U-boats, and tying anti-aircraft guns into knots. You have to remember that for the first several years of the war, it wasn't going that well; it looked as though there was a good chance that the Allies might not win. There was a lot of very violent, potent, wish fulfillment going on there, and it did get expressed in very unattractive jingoistic, racially-offensive ways. Lane: The flip side of that is that the comics were actually investigated by the feds; you have a scene about that towards the end of the book. Chabon: Comic books never pleased adults. Even when they were fighting in the Second World War, that didn't get anywhere with the teachers and parents of America. It was still this forbidden, trashy kind of literature. The comics of the time - for all that they were toeing the standard line about being a good American and turning in your neighbors if you thought they might be Nazi spies - were being burned and banned. Lane: The other thing that emerges as a theme in this book, and you've alluded to it already, is the idea of escape. Your comic book character is named The Escapist. We have the escape out of Prague. Everybody in this novel needs to escape from something. Chabon: Well, it was accidental. Theme is the last thing I worry about when I'm writing. I start with character and setting, and I try to figure out my story as quickly as I can. I actually pay no attention to theme at all during the first full draft of the novel. I had at some point decided to make Joe study escape artistry, and there were other little bits about the theme of escape, but I wasn't aware of them at all. I didn't notice them until I sat down with a first draft and read through it. At that point, I said to myself, What is this book about, besides being about Sammy, Joe, and comics? If you're paying attention, as a writer, to language and your characters and trying to see them in your imagination and know what they would be doing at a given moment, theme just emerges organically. At some point, you have to stop and gather up that residue. That's the point at which I noticed that there was a lot to do with escape in the book. Comics have always been condemned as escapism. I wondered if there was some connection between escapism and literature, and it all just clicked into place. That's when you know it's working well, when that stuff starts happening and you didn't really try to make it happen. Lane: People look at you, publishing your first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which was actually a master's thesis, at the age of 24, and think you've never failed. In fact, you did have a huge failure of a sort, although you turned it into a success. Tell us about the experience of Fountain City. Chabon: I suppose that's an example of this method I just described not working. I started to write this novel around the time the first book was published. I thought it was going to be about architecture and an architect. There was a movement just beginning then in architecture called the "new urbanist" movement - the idea of restoring identity to the American city. If you're building a new housing unit, it dictates that you shouldn't try to build a suburban tract house, but actually craft a city with a downtown, a place where people can live and work. That was in the air in the late '80s; it interested me because I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, which had very much a utopian urban design scheme of the late 1960s - the idea of creating a perfect community, one that would be racially integrated. So, I just started to write about a guy that was doing something like this. I thought it was going to be this little, slender book, maybe 225 pages. Five and a half years later, I found myself with an 800-plus page monster - to use Spalding Gray's phrase, a monster in a box - and somehow or another, baseball, French cooking, eco-terrorism, the plan that some religious Jews have to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, and a lot of other things had all worked themselves into this thing. I allowed that organic process of just seeing what happens. Maybe one problem was that I never sat down and asked myself what this book was about. You might think that was sort of an obvious question that a writer would want to ask himself, but I think it eluded me. Lane: You dumped Fountain City on the sly when your wife told you that she was going to take some days off to study for her bar exam. You snuck down to the basement and started a new book. Chabon: I was about to start the ninth draft of this novel. I was so sick and tired of it. I didn't know how I was going to fix it or even what was really wrong with it. My then-fiancée said that she was going to take the bar six months earlier than she originally thought, so she wasn't going to see me for six weeks.That night I made this decision. I decided to keep it a secret. The first night I think I wrote 12 pages. I had 25 pages in three days. I had 75 pages in two weeks. I hit on the voice of Grady Tripp, the narrator of that novel, instantly, as if he was waiting there for me to get to him. I never went back. Lane: But you did use the experience of the novel that you couldn't finish for Wonder Boys. Chabon: Grady Tripp had a very different experience than mine in that I did finish Fountain City a number of times, over and over. I never had that thing that Grady did where you're endlessly adding, and when you think you're getting close to the end, you're only a quarter of the way done. What I did draw on from my own experience was the deep mortification and embarrassment of working on the same project for that long a period of time. By the fifth Thanksgiving that rolls around, you're sitting with your family, and they ask about the book almost with dread. Lane: Many people loved the movie, "Wonder Boys", which had a strange marketing campaign. Aren't you working with the same producer for the screenplay of "Kavalier and Clay"? Chabon: Yes, Scott Rudin and Paramount Pictures. When they first told me that they were going to make a movie of Wonder Boys, I asked why. Who do they think will go and see it? I trusted that they knew what they were doing, and they made what I think was a really good movie. It's very well acted and directed, and the script is great. I really enjoyed it, and so did 17 other people. But it was tough; it's hard to sell a movie about a pot-smoking, overweight English professor who carries a dead dog in his trunk and cheats on his wife. They did this great thing of re-marketing it six months after the initial release. They re-released it with a new poster and a new series of commercials on television. It still didn't quite work. I thought they did a fair enough job the first time. It seemed like a tough sell. I hope that's not going to be the same case with this novel. Lane: Armistead Maupin was here recently and we were talking about, with a lot of laughter, how when The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, first came out, Newsweek came out with a story on the new generation of gay writers, among whom you were listed. Armistead was laughing about how it had finally become marketable to be a young, gay writer, because you brought a whole audience with you. Chabon: That was part of the problem, in a way. There was no real attempt by my publishers to define me as anything. There was nothing in the marketing of the book or the press kit that referred to my own sexuality. But, because of the subject, a lot of the readers, and especially the owners of some of the gay and lesbian bookstores around the country, assumed that I was gay, and that's how I was being sold by my publisher. When they found out that I wasn't gay, there was some resentment. It's ironic that being a gay writer can be a marketable thing. The proof of it was that these booksellers actually imagined that my publishers would have passed me off as gay in order to sell more books. That was not the case. Lane: At the time of writing Kavalier and Clay, did you realize that you would become the hero of comic book fans worldwide? How does it feel to have put this marvelous and unsung medium on the historical map? Chabon: I was skeptical that anybody would be interested in hearing about these guys and this world at all. Comic book fans, for all that we love the medium, go cringing into every situation where you talk about comic books. You try to be proud, but it's hard, because the prejudice against them is still so strong. I love the superhero comic books. I think what Jack Kirby did qualifies as genuine art. Lane: Did you see "Chasing Amy"? Chabon: Yes, I love that film. I never thought that I would be viewed as championing an art form, because I had that ambivalence myself. In the course of writing the novel, I came to this inescapable conclusion that some of these guys in the 1940s, and many artists since then, who were genuinely deserving of the name "artist," put as much of their soul and ability into their comic book work as I put into writing novels. I hope that conviction permeates the novel enough to possibly begin to persuade other people, including some who have always been prejudiced against comic books, to take another look and reconsider the art form. We're really behind the curve here in America on comic books. In Europe, comic books are given the status of art without any hesitation whatsoever. It's silly and arbitrary to deny them that status. Lane: You've written two collections of short stories, A Model World and Other Stories and Werewolves in Their Youth. I read somewhere that you got nervous when you wrote short stories. Why is that? Chabon: Failure. It's so easy to blow a short story. It's much harder to blow a novel. Novels I find are a much more forgiving form. You can write a great novel, and it can still have slow parts; look at Anna Karenina. Or, let's talk about the little essay on Napoleon that closes War and Peace. Again, it's not what you want to be reading at that point, but a novel can encompass that stuff. Short stories can't. You start a short story with this sense that you have this pure, simple idea that you're going to sketch out quickly and neatly, and from the first sentence you begin to go awry. You lose that purity. By the time you're five or six pages into it, you often feel like you're writing something totally different from what you thought you started out with. The consciousness of going wrong is always with me when I write short stories. I've grown dissatisfied with my own short stories, to some degree, and with the short stories that I read in magazines. I just feel like I don't know why I'm writing short stories. It's not the form; it's me. I need to find my way back to something. I am germinating a new approach to the short story for myself, but so far not much has come of it, except for one very strange story about a clown-murdering cult that was in The New Yorker. To me, the roots of the short story come out of that kind of fiction. They go back to Edgar Allen Poe, to Balzac, to Kipling. These are writers that wrote what we would now tend to call more genre fiction - horror, detective, mystery, adventure. At the time they were writing, that is what a short story was. There was no genre; that was the genre. I guess I'm trying to work my way back towards that a little bit, and then hopefully toward a more contemporary, modern approach. - - - -
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