Harvey Pekar in the Hot Press Interview

Harvey Pekar’s life has changed dramatically since the cult indie film, American Splendour, sent him hurtling to the forefront of underground culture earlier this year.

Previously, Pekar had made a name for himself on the alternative comics circuit throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, having his sharply observed tales of everyday life illustrated by an array of legendary artists, most notably his long-standing friend and Fritz The Cat creator, Robert Crumb.

However, despite several awards, plaudits from comic book heavyweights like Alan Moore and numerous appearances on The David Letterman Show (which infamously culminated in a bust-up between Pekar and the show’s presenter), the writer, by his own admission, remained a largely obscure, forgotten figure on the fringes of alternative culture.

The turnaround in Pekar’s life occurred when film-making team Shari Springer-Bergman and Robert Pulcini announced their intention to turn his long-running comics series American Splendour into a movie. Although previous attempts had been made to finance a film version of Pekar’s work (by Jonathan Demme, among others), the presence of Ang Lee associate Ted Hope as producer finally allowed for the Cleveland native’s anthology to be exposed to a wider audience.

Pekar has certainly reaped the benefits; inundated with requests to appear at festivals, book signings and public speaking engagements since the film was released, his wife Joyce arranged for a series of foreign trips to be placed in sequential order, allowing the much in-demand couple to take off on a world tour during the summer.

I met up with Pekar on the Irish leg of his global jaunt, at the Murphy’s Cat Laughs Festival in Kilkenny. Although an enthusiastic, loquacious speaker, his oft-remarked upon neurosis was nonetheless still very much in evidence, as he fretted to Hot Press that all the attention was no more than a passing a fad. Given that Pekar spent the best part of 30 years working as a file clerk in a Cleveland hospital to subsidise his writing habit, he perhaps has legitimate grounds for concern.

Still, American Splendour is such a superb movie, and Pekar such a riveting character, it’s hard to imagine he’ll ever need to trade on anything other than his writing ability and remarkable erudition from here on in.

PAUL NOLAN: Why did you remain based in Cleveland throughout your writing career?

HARVEY PEKAR: I could never make enough money. There are an awful lot of excellent underground cartoonists who have never been able to support themselves from their own projects. Some of them I guess have picked up commercial illustration jobs on the side; I suppose everybody has their own story. But it’s a real struggle to get by on an alternative cartoonist’s income. I worked for the federal government for 37 years and I’ve got a pension, but it’s not enough to take care of Joyce and my kid. So I’m trying to fill in the gaps by doing comics - well, I actually wanna do ‘em - but my comics never actually sold very well, until the tie-in edition that came out when the movie was released.

But it’s funny, you know. Ever since the film came out, I’ve been reading all these articles about myself, with phrases like, “Harvey Pekar, the great cult cartoonist”, “Harvey Pekar, the legendary figure of underground comics”. And the fact is, outside of certain very select alternative circles, before the movie came out, I wasn’t known at all! But the movie has helped my profile hugely. I’m getting a lot of requests for public speaking, festivals etc, and I managed to hook up with this real good guy in the States who’s got me a lot of college speaking jobs. Plus I’ve got a nice book deal with Valentine now. But I’m worried about how long all this is gonna last. Maybe I’ll have my twelve months of fame and then things will go back to the way they were before!

Well, the exposure provided by a movie usually has a long-lasting effect. For instance, Terry Zwigoff’s documentary on Robert Crumb was released in 1995, but I didn’t see it until Christmas 2001, when I was 19.

Well, there’s a lot of controversy about how much a movie will effect the sales of a book. In some cases, there hasn’t actually been that remarkable an increase. For instance, although this wasn’t exactly what we were talking about, when I went on The David Letterman Show, I really thought that my sales would improve. Maybe not improve tremendously, but I honestly felt that there would be a significant increase, that I’d be selling 10,000 books a year instead of 3000, or something along those lines. But that never happened, the sales more or less stayed at the same level.

Thus, when I took what some people felt was a self-destructive course of action on Letterman’s show - by forcing topics on him that he really didn’t want to talk about, such as General Electric’s ownership of the network he was appearing on - I actually wasn’t that bothered by the fallout. For me to continue doing what Letterman wanted me to do, which was to behave like a parody of a blue-collar worker from Cleveland, there had to at least be some kind of pay-off. And in the end there wasn’t any.

Did you feel at that point in the mid 80s that underground culture was being co-opted and watered down by the mainstream? At one point, your friend Toby, who’s a borderline autistic, was asked to appear in a promotional slot for MTV. Were you ever concerned that there was a level of exploitation going on?

Let’s face it, the reason that Toby is on TV at all is because he’s a real odd character. And I think he’s a real odd character because he’s a high functioning autistic person - not that he’s ever been diagnosed by a doctor, because he doesn’t go to doctors. He can hold down a job and relate to people, but on the other hand he talks in a real loud monotone, and he doesn’t understand a lot of stuff that you say to him. If you try and kid around with him about stuff, he doesn’t get it; he takes you literally. And I don’t think MTV treated him respectfully, because they had him doing stuff that he doesn’t normally do, like sitting out in the backyard doing the twist in bermuda shorts and a big pair of goofy sunglasses.

But it’s real hard to know how to treat a guy like Toby, because some people are always going to be laughing at him. Toby has sort of deluded himself into thinking that any kind of attention is good and that people are always on his side. I mean, I would always give him approval over any of the scripts I’d write about him, but he never objected to anything, he was just happy to see his name in print. I think Toby could stir things up in a really interesting way if he went on something like Letterman’s show. Some people would probably think it was okay and then other people would probably feel it was blatant exploitation. And as a matter of fact, Letterman wouldn’t touch him for that reason.

I actually think he if was cast intelligently by a Hollywood director, there are certain parts he could play real well. But most of the stuff he’s done so far has just been no-budget shlock horror stuff. One movie he did was called Killer Nerd. The sequel was Bride Of Killer Nerd. And there’s a documentary being made about him now as well. Overall, it’s a very tricky area ‘cause he’s such a unique individual.

When you had your infamous outburst on Letterman’s show, were you genuinely angry at GE’s track record or were just trying to antagonise him personally?

It was both. I’m interested in politics, and I had known of GE’s history for a long time before I came on the show and talked about it. But, you know, they say every man has his price. Maybe if I’d been treated with a little more respect and the knock-on effect in terms of sales had been better, I wouldn’t have been so completely indifferent to my fate on the show. But it became clear to me pretty soon that just being on TV wasn’t enough for me. It’s like advertising; if the sales aren’t improving then you just quit advertising.

And I was just being looked upon as another freak from the margins of society, as a Toby, and I didn’t like that. I mean, I like to be funny, and I can understand Letterman wanting to present a certain aspect of my character in a humourous way. But, you know, I’m also a pretty scholarly guy. In fact, a while back I did a very in-depth thesis on the origins of stream-of-consciousness writing. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about how that style of writing began. In the nineteenth century, there were French authors, like Edward Dujardin - who James Joyce always cited as one of his primary influences - who were writing impressionistic prose poetry that could be considered stream of consciousness writing. Even Charles Dickens’ opening to Bleak House is grammatically very unorthodox. And then guys like Joyce and Arthur Schnitzler took it further.

You’re a big admirer of Joyce, aren’t you?
Oh, definitely. But I’ll tell you an interesting thing about Joyce. A guy who was hanging around with Baudelaire in the late 1800s was the great Irish novelist and failed painter - he actually went to France to get involved in the painting scene - George Moore. And around that time, Moore started picking up on that prose poetry style and would use stream of consciousness passages in his work. Maybe not over a whole book, but it was a writing technique that would crop up in his stuff quite regularly. Then he got into something else beyond that, what he called the “melodic line” style of writing. I mean, he’d write these lines that just would go on forever.

Like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses.
Exactly. But Moore was pretty unique in his use of these long sentences, and I think he had an influence on Joyce, but Joyce wouldn’t acknowledge it! Joyce didn’t like Moore, and Moore was not a likeable guy. He was kinda snobbish and supercilious towards his contemporaries. But the point is that Joyce could have taken his cue from any number of sources. Obviously, he developed it and eventually took it far beyond where it had been before, but there were writers experimenting with these ideas beforehand. Schnitzler being quite a significant one.

These are very interesting connections you’ve made. When I first saw John Houston’s adaptation of The Dead, I mentioned in a letter to a friend that it reminded me hugely of Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, which Stanley Kubrick made into Eyes Wide Shut. I subsequently discovered that when Kubrick first set about adapting Schnitzler’s story, he thought about setting it in Dublin in the 1920s, since he saw parallels with James Joyce.

Wow. I did not know that. But this is the kind of stuff I worked my ass off on, and I come with up with stuff that I can’t find any place, so I’m thinking this might even be original research. I mean, I didn’t get it from anybody, I just had to go out and dig around and put the pieces together myself. I’ve had some articles published about it, but not for prestigious academic journals, just for a few small-scale, independently published literary magazines. Maybe I should think about getting those articles into wider circulation.

Was Crumb influenced by those stream of consciousness writers?
Not directly, no. He doesn’t read real highbrow books or arty stuff like Schnitzler. That would have been just too obscure for his tastes. And as for Joyce…Crumb, even though his work contains avant garde elements, he himself doesn’t really enjoy that stuff. He has a band called The Cheap Suit Serenaders, and their music is largely comprised of old folk, string band numbers and early pop material. Crumb might have picked up some of that stuff from the beats, guys like Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs, who were interested in experimental literature. But it wasn’t until much later on in his career that he met those guys. He didn’t meet them on the way up. On the way up he was in Cleveland!

Visually, who was he taking his cues from?
He was taking his cue from a whole range of guys, the most modern of which were the Mad cartoonists. Mad magazine exerted a tremendous influence on early underground cartooning. And he also liked these comic-strip writers who were real down-to-earth and funny, like L.Z. Seeger, the guy who did Popeye. And the guy who did Barney Google, I forget his name. But I think he also was influenced by his contemporaries in the underground scene, particularly the artists who were really breaking those long-established sexual taboos.

I remember when I first got to know Crumb, he was working on a piece called The Big Yum Yum book, which didn’t actually get published until much later on, when he was getting offers from The Rolling Stones to design record covers and what have you. But I’m pretty sure he did say that he was influenced by Captain Piss-Gums And His Pervert Pirates, a pretty wild sex comedy made by some guys who worked for Zap. Because those were the artists who were really breaking new ground in terms of sexual content.

Do you think Fritz The Cat, perhaps Crumb’s most notorious work, was the apotheosis of his obsession with overtly sexual content?
Yeah, probably. Crumb was really fascinated with contemporary bohemian lifestyles, and I think Fritz The Cat was satirising those people he was hanging out with to a certain extent. You see, the thing to remember about Crumb is that at the beginning, having made his entrée into the world of the sixties counter-culture, he was very much an outsider looking in, because physically, he was just such an oddity, so goofy-looking. I mean, people would laugh at him! And the first time he ever got laid was to a woman he was going to marry and so on. So for this weirdo outsider artist type to suddenly find himself hanging out with these dashing beat authors, he really got a kick out of them. And he obviously thought that whole milieu was pretty fertile ground for his own work.

In Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary about Crumb, it was extraordinary to note that his brothers were, if anything, even more dysfunctional than he was. Did you ever meet them?

Yeah, Max I met once. Max was in San Francisco, he was sort of a Zen street artist. He would swallow ropes of cloth to clean out his system, or he’d lower rope into his mouth and it would come out of his ass. And he had some pretty alarming psycho-sexual shit going on his head, like he’d follow women he didn’t know around shopping malls and so forth. Charles just couldn’t handle life after high-school, he holed up with his books in a room in his mother’s house, and that was it. He went on disability welfare when he was young man and stayed on it. And in the end he committed suicide. It’s an incredibly sad story.

Was your own upbringing as dysfunctional as Crumb’s?
No, not really, no. But at the same time, I don’t think I was brought up in an especially healthy way. My parents were Polish-Jewish immigrants, and although they were trying to do their best for me, they were trying to preserve that Polish-Jewish lifestyle in America, and that’s pretty damn hard to do. So they sent me to Hebrew school and all that kind of stuff, but I couldn’t stand it, I hated it. And as soon as I got my Bar Mitzvah, wild horses couldn’t drag me back into it.

Rick Moody, the author of The Ice Storm, once said in an interview that he constantly attempts to “extract great drama from everyday events”. Do you aspire to doing something similar in your own work?

Yeah, sure. Because I think everybody’s living a great drama. It’s just that the lives of some people, like movie stars, are more publicised than others, and I think people tend to sell themselves short, to the extent that they get a huge thrill when their picture gets in the paper sometimes and stuff like that.

As far as I can see, one of the main messages of the mainstream culture these days is, “Celebrities are so amazing and you are so banal”.
That’s exactly right, and I was reacting against that. What I was trying to do with American Splendour and these other comics was to write stories about everyday life that other people could identify with. I was hoping that I’d have fans coming out of the woodwork saying, “Finally! A writer that speaks to me!” And I’ve had letters from people saying, “I went through this experience or that experience, and I’m really glad you wrote about it.” Especially that book that my wife and I wrote about my struggle with cancer, I had a lot of feedback about that. But, you know, not enough.

One author your writing reminds me hugely of, who’s never mentioned in connection with your work, is Flaubert.
Yeah, he’s definitely an influence. Flaubert maybe slightly preceded that school of naturalist writers who really fed into my work, but he made a very good impression on me, I loved his books. He was one of the greatest novelists of the last few centuries. I sort of look upon Flaubert, Balzac and Zola as being in a tradition of writing that really, really struck a chord with me.

Whenever I talk to writers about Flaubert, the one novel everybody loves is Sentimental Education. Like, if there’s a better novel written about the disappointments you encounter as you grow into adulthood, I haven’t read it!
Yeah. And you know something? Sentimental Education is probably my favourite too. Madame Bovary is also a great book, but I don’t think it quite has the scope or the substance of Sentimental Education.

Although certain comic book artists, such as Daniel Clowes, the author of Ghost World, have drawn on your work and perhaps developed the themes further, for the most part, comics haven’t really grown as a medium over the past twenty years. I was reading a book about Alan Moore recently, and it was remarked that you could go on watching one classic film a week for the rest of your life and die before you see them all, whereas there is a very, very small canon of truly classic comics and graphic novels. Are you disappointed by that state of affairs?
(Suddenly) Moore! He actually illustrated a story of mine once, it was in American Splendour number 14 or 15. It was about an old Jewish guy at work called Bob Wachsman, who used to tell these corny old jokes all the time and just break up laughing over them. And the story Moore illustrated was basically Wachsman telling the joke, breaking up laughing, and me standing there, sort of going, “What the hell are you talking about?” (Laughing) Hardly anybody else ever got the jokes!

My wife actually had some contact with Moore at the time because she was doing political comics, and Moore was real interested in political stuff. It turned out that he liked my work, and so we got together and collaborated on one of my stories. Last time I heard, he was still waiting on me to give him another one to do!

He’s one of the few guys around really pushing the medium though, isn’t he?
Yeah, I’ve been very disappointed with how comics have progressed. The whole underground movement has been just been so marginalised. I mean, the main thing is just to do the work, but beyond that, you’d like to make a little money and get some kind of respect. Otherwise, where’s the incentive? I mean, being a comics writer has impacted positively on my life, no question, but not to extent it has for the guys who write this crap for Marvel and DC, like Frank Miller, who are almost like big celebrities.
I really can’t explain why underground comics haven’t flourished in the way some other art-forms have. People say, “Well, in the 60s, it was being supported by the counter-culture”, but so were music and books, and today alternative music is like this really big deal, and literary works are held in very high esteem. I think the biggest potential audience for alternative comics is the general reading audience, rather than the comic book store patrons.

Given the non-sensational nature of the subject matter, were you surprised when producers starting expressing an interest in turning American Splendour into a movie?
Well, I was initially surprised when people started contacting me around 1980. Jonathan Demme contacted me about doing a movie based on my work. But then, you know, other people got in touch over the years, but no one could ever get the money to finance the film. So when the guy who produced The Ice Storm, Ted Hope, called me up, I thought, “well, yeah, that’s nice, a lot of people are interested in my work until they try and get money for it and they can’t raise a nickle.” But this time things actually fell into place, and it turned out that it was one of the best things that ever happened to me, career-wise. That and Robert Crumb volunteering to illustrate my work in the sixties, which gave me a tremendous advantage over a lot of my contemporaries.
I thought the film-makers, Shari Springer-Bergman and Robert Pulcini, were very shrewd in the way the went about adapting the comic. The mix of fictional characters and their real-life counter-parts, in particular, was very clever.
Yeah, I thought the way they did it was pretty innovative. I like the fact that they mix genres, and I like that they in some cases had multiple casting of characters. Like, for example, with me being played by myself, and by Paul Giamatti, and by a little kid when I was very young. And having the animated styles and the original footage from Letterman on there too. Actually, Shari and Robert were telling me that they were influenced by the fact that I was drawn by a number of different artists, so that when people see me in the comic it’s nearly always a different interpretation from a different angle. And they wanted to capture the cinematic equivalent of that, so they had me played by a variety of actors.
There’s a remarkable scene in the movie that occurs shortly after you’ve been diagnosed with cancer. Giamatti is walking into his bedroom in the middle of the night, slightly dazed, and just before he collapses, he says to Joyce, “Am I really me or am I just a character in a comic book? If I die, will that character go on without me?”
That actually happened, it was a kind of hallucinatory comment that I made when I was on chemotherapy. I came out of the bathroom in the middle of the night, I was walking along naked and just before I collapsed, I asked my wife if I was a real person or just a character in a comic book. I agree that it’s a striking scene, but that comment just came out of my sub-conscious, I’ve no idea what inspired it or what prompted me to say it.
Was there ever a chance you could have died when you were suffering from cancer?
Well, you never know, but I never got into any serious trouble. I mean, things always went well, y’know? But I actually got cancer a second time, I got a re-occurrence a few weeks after they stopped shooting the movie. Thankfully, the treatment went well again. I’ve never been incapacitated to the point where I couldn’t get out of bed or anything like that.

Did the illness have a profound impact on your life or was it something you just had to deal with?
I guess it probably depressed me. Everything else was depressing me and that just depressed me some more! But I don’t know if it had a profound impact on my life, it was something I just had to get through. It wasn’t something that I really thought about too much. I don’t know that much about alternative medicine, and there were buddies of mine telling me to take dope or do this or do that. But I don’t really put much stock in that stuff. From working in the hospital, I knew that people could get cured using the regular treatment. Maybe it’s kind of crude by the standards that’ll eventually evolve, but it’s still effective. So my attitude was, just do the chemotherapy and let the chips fall where they may.
If you could go back and offer your 21 year old self some advice, what life experience would you impart?
I don’t think I learned anything that would turn anyone’s head around, since I had very limited choices in my life. I was a flunkey because I had a hang-up with certain kinds of learning, like mathematics or any mechanical kind of stuff. I could only do real simple stuff like clerical work, so that’s why I did what I did, it wasn’t out of any great love for the job. And also I liked the fact that I didn’t have to take the work home and worry about it.
But to this day, I can’t work a computer really well. I’ve got to get my kid to get into for me and then I can type my article out, going two fingers at a time! But then, you know, my daughter also has to send it out, and it’s really a drag. I mean, I hate computers, just like I hate cell-phones, because they’re always breaking down or there’s some kind of malfunction. (Laughs) I guess I look back nostalgically on a simpler time.