(This story ran in Denver Post in 2003)
By Steven Rosen
LOS ANGELES – Harvey Pekar is a very funny fellow, right?
Well, yes and no. As depicted in the new “American Splendor,” he is a crabby, tragicomic antihero – a balding pessimist and borderline-manic loner constantly struggling to not be a loser at love. He is the ultimate nebbish.
He also self-publishes “American Splendor” comic books about his
life of quietly amusing desperation as a hospital file clerk in
Cleveland, itself a pretty funny place. (In 1969, its Cuyahoga
River actually caught fire – an event immortalized in a satiric
Randy Newman song.)
The movie, from directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini,
is an unusual hybrid of scripted biopic and documentary. While the
real Pekar provides narration and makes occasional screen
appearances to wryly comment on the proceedings, the veteran
character actor Paul Giamatti plays him in the body of the film.
Hope Davis plays his wife.
Giamatti’s portrayal of Pekar is of an often-hilarious glum chum,
wandering through the vast wasteland of pop culture with raised
eyebrows and a strained voice, obsessing over his cranky search for
meaning in a meaningless city – and world.
It’s quite funny and sometimes profound – making “American
Splendor” one of the year’s best movies to date. Winner of the
Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, it has received
subsequent praise and awards at the Cannes and Edinburgh film
festivals.
And yet, in real life, Pekar – like Joe Pesci in “Goodfellas” –
may sometimes be funny, but he’s hardly a joke. He’s more than just
a pessimist; he’s fought serious depression. Since “American
Splendor” was made, he has been hospitalized for the illness,
which followed a recurrence of the cancer he struggled with
earlier. He has earned his cautious attitude toward life.
“I ask myself what the hell do I want from life, and what can I
reasonably expect,” says Pekar during a quiet afternoon private
interview, where he munches on a sandwich in a suite at the Four
Seasons Hotel.
With his bushy eyebrows and gaunt face, he looks a bit like George
McGovern. He wears a T-shirt and jeans, having little patience for
the high-fashion pretensions of one of L.A.’s fanciest hotels. He
is here with his wife Joyce and their foster daughter, 15-year-old
Danielle Batone, on a publicity tour in support of the film.
“I’m now 63 years old, I’ve had cancer twice, I’m more
obsessive-compulsive and more depressed than I ever was before,”
he explains, propping his feet up on a conference table. “I’m
trying to pull out of it, but pull out of it to what? Pull out of
it to give myself a couple more years and then to drop dead?”
Pekar is a man of arts and letters; he sheepishly admits to the
term “intellectual” to describe his many interests and concerns.
A Cleveland native, he is also a self-described lifelong autodidact
- someone who attempts to teach himself by reading others. To some extent, his working-class life has been a means to support
his interest in reading and writing.
Previous marriages failed as he pursued his life’s work. He penned
reviews and cultural criticism before he started to write stories
for comics in 1972, and began publishing “American Splendor” in
1976. (Collaborative artists, especially mentor and friend Robert
Crumb, have drawn the comic’s panels, although Pekar first creates
a “story board” using stick figures.)
Pekar’s seriousness about the worth of his endeavor – of his life –
is one reason why he got so famously mad at David Letterman in the
1980s, when he sensed that the talk-show host was using his guest
appearances as comic relief. “American Splendor” re-creates that
confrontation, partially using archival footage.
Pekar sees himself as an artist, not an oddball. And to him, there
is nobility in that – not derision. Even if he is from Cleveland.
“I always thought that anybody’s life could be the subject of a
great novel,” Pekar says. “And I thought I would write about
myself because I knew myself best. And I wanted to write
autobiographically because it’s a very direct way to write, and I
could also write very easily about my friends, colleagues and my
work, using that style.
“My main literary influences were prose fiction,” he says.
“Among the writers who influenced me were, going all the way back,
a kids’ writer whose writing was very realistic – Eleanor Estes.
She was a prize-winning children’s author who wrote a series of
books about a family during the First World War, the Moffats.
“James Joyce influenced me and Henry Miller – I liked the way he
used the autobiographical form and how freely he used it,” Pekar
says. “And as far as realist writers are concerned, there was
George Ade. He started as a reporter for a Chicago newspaper in the
1890s. He wrote about Chicago growing – all the labor unions, the
black people, the Jews, all kinds of stuff just being missed by all
the other writers of that day.
“Another writer who influenced me was Daniel Fuchs,” Pekar says.
“He wrote three really good novels about the Williamsburg section
of Brooklyn in the early 1930s. It’s sometimes called ‘The
Williamsburg Trilogy.’ And there are a ton of other writers.”
Curiously, Pekar was not influenced by comic books. He becomes
angry when asked if contemporary super-hero comics such as
“X-Men” or “Daredevil” or “The Hulk” qualify as modern
literature or contemporary mythology.
“That’s crap,” he snaps.
His interest in using the comics form started when he met
pioneering underground-comics artist Crumb in 1962. The latter had
moved to Cleveland from Philadelphia to work for a greeting-card
company. Both were record collectors and became friends.
“I had given up on comics since I was 11 years old,” Pekar says.
“I thought there couldn’t be anything good done in the medium.
“But I was wrong,” he says. “They just didn’t have people who
wanted to use them in the right way, or were curious enough to
think of something different to do with them. They didn’t realize
it was as versatile a medium as novels or film or anything else.
“When I first saw Crumb’s work, I started theorizing about what
could be done in comics. He had a graphic novel – it was novel
length – called ‘Big Yum Yum Book’ and it was satirical. And I
thought, ‘Why do you have to limit yourself to the superheroes?”‘
Pekar’s been at it, off and on, since the 1970s, creating comics
that have attracted a devoted following and influenced all the
literary “graphic novelists” who have come since. But he has
never made much money from it, although he’s hoping the film will
change that.
“If I made $3,000 a year on comics I was doing good,” he says.
“I’ve never had any kind of financial success with comics. So far
the interest this film has generated has amazed me. I’m not used to
that.”
Steven Rosen’s e-mail address is srosenone@aol.com.
(Harvey Pekar died this month at age 70.)
(Photo: New Line Cinema)
Taken from this post:
Remembering Harvey Pekar
