Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (27 page)

But what if you were at once there and not there? What of the children who themselves either saw nothing firsthand or understood nothing of what they saw, but who nonetheless grew up absorbing war, absorbing Holocaust, as their sole diet of childhood, whether they were living securely in another country or somehow shielded at home? We have no statistics for measuring such a group, but it must be a staggering population. In phrasing it this way, I am trying to sketch something of the horrid dimensions of this issue: how far war goes, temporally; how many victims it claims, even long after it is over; how the concentric circles never stop spreading, as if all wars, even the most primitive ones fought with swords and arrows, are actually, ultimately, nuclear events, toxic events, leaving a radioactive legacy that is generational in character, that has a half-life that can continue almost forever.

That is not all. As we have seen so often in this study, much that we think we know appears Other when reflected and refracted through the eyes and hearts of children. Not only are children stamped—sometimes stamped out—by the upheavals of history and calamity, but they are often our most shocking guides to the horrors of the past, because their vantage point brings home to us, as nothing else can, the human cost of events that are all too easily defanged when presented to us as the cold data of our chronicles and archives. They teach us how to see.

With this remark, I wish now to fast-forward to a later age, in order to explore two narratives dealing with massive destruction—the Holocaust and 9/11—and focusing on a child’s effort to come to terms with the incomprehensible, whether it be the genocidal events suffered long ago by one’s parents or the disappearance of a father in the World Trade Center.
To come to terms:
that is precisely what Art Spiegelman has done in
Maus
by creating a new language altogether—a graphic visual language of remarkable eloquence—to convey what he inherited and what he made of it for us to see. I think that
Maus
is stunningly successful on just that front: as a new optic, as a privileged medium for conveying with unprecedented pathos what it means when the parents’ world is racked by convulsions and the child picks up the pieces long afterward.

Art Spiegelman’s two volumes of
Maus
, published in their entirety in 1986 and 1991, created the moment when many of us realized that this so-called children’s genre was capable of a pathos and ethicopolitical payload that traditional prose fiction could not easily match. Spiegelman, albeit American-born, is a child of the Holocaust, and it is the determining event of his life. What is darkly beautiful here is that it ultimately drove him to find a mode of expression that would somehow convert this corrosive legacy into something luminous and heart-wrenching for readers throughout the world who had no connection at all with the six million Jews who died.

This did not happen easily or quickly. In fact, Spiegelman himself—Artie, as he is called in the books—rarely appears textually as a child but rather as a young married man with a most difficult father. About the child’s own experiences, we get very little other than a tiny prologue dated 1958, taking place in Rego Park, New York, where young Artie is playing with his friends Howie and Steve, only to be left behind when his skate comes loose; it does not take more to hurt a child, and he goes sobbing home to his father, Vladek, who informs him that the test of real friendship would be to lock them together in a room with no food for a week, and “THEN you could see what it is, friends.” And with that the prologue closes. When we turn to the opening chapter, little Artie has disappeared: he is now grown-up Artie, who has come to get from Vladek the story of his life.

Yet the truth is that Artie is still working through these issues, all during childhood, all during adulthood, and probably right on through his life today and continuing on to his future death. There are many reminders in the text that these matters do not admit of closure. This is not happy news, and it suggests that all the child stories discussed in this book—the material of growing up—are inevitably positioned on a temporal treadmill that moves right through life, mocking any clean boundary lines. Perhaps we never stop growing up. Contrary to all calendar proofs of birth and death, the old continue to inhabit the young, the young remain inscribed in the lives of the old, and each group seems to go through its paces forever. My mother saw me as a child up to her dying day (when I was in my sixties), and my grown-up children still live for me as infants. (How I live for and inside them is not for me to know, but it surely exists.) But catastrophe marks its victims still more profoundly: parents never heal from it, and children are forever processing the results. The wreckage can play out over entire generations.

Inserted within the larger saga of Vladek’s Holocaust experience is a story within a story entitled “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” an actual graphic text published by Spiegelman in 1972, depicting Anja, the mother’s, suicide as well as the boatload of guilt and rage experienced by Art, the “failed” son released from the state mental hospital, spewing considerable venom as response to the family he inherited. These few pages are in a 1960s graphic style utterly unlike that of
Maus
, and we learn (in sweet postmodern fashion as the book mirrors its own processes) that Vladek has in fact discovered this early published expression of Art’s views. But what most stamps this little vignette is the affective material at its core: the last living image of Anja as a disheveled woman coming into her son’s bedroom late at night, asking him, “Artie … you … still … love … me … don’t you?” Turned away to the wall, unwilling to look her in the face, full of resentment, the son utters the last words his mother will ever hear from him: “Sure, Ma!”

I don’t think it excessive to say that the origin of
Maus
lies as much in this little episode as it does in the “grander” tableau of Vladek’s experiences in Poland and Auschwitz. Not unlike Stephen Dedalus, whose pride prevented him from praying at his mother’s deathbed and who periodically chokes on this throughout James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, Artie himself is a bleeding figure, haunted by his own transgressions, even if he subtitled his first volume
My Father Bleeds History
and presented himself as intact. Do all of us bleed history? Is that perhaps the truest image of history’s hold on us: that it lies in our blood, that it is unstillable, that it makes its liquid way out all through our lives? Arguably the sharpest exchange of the book is when Artie, learning that Vladek has actually burned Anja’s diaries (which would have been the sources he needs for his book, as well as perhaps the forgiveness he needs even more for his peace and sanity), mutters to himself his judgment of his father upon exit: “Murderer.” It’s a word that has a funny, almost surreal ring to it, given what Vladek has gone through.

But in a crucial artistic sense, this inserted story of young Artie is stillborn, because the larger testimony, the testimony of a convulsive moment in human history that subtends this young man’s relation to both mother and father, moves from parental background to something far more vital: a historical catastrophe that needs a child’s vision to bring it to life. This narrative can assume its proper proportions (and liberate its child captive) only when Spiegelman creates
Maus
, when Spiegelman realizes that his inherited story of genocide mandates a radical graphic strategy: namely, to see all the players as different species: the Jews as mice, the Germans as cats, the Poles as pigs, the Americans as dogs, the French as frogs. Perhaps taking his cues from Orwell, with a malicious salute to Disney, Spiegelman has found a way of saying/showing the pseudo-speciation that finances systemic slaughter. And he has used a child’s palette to do so. One is stunned by the primitive eloquence of Spiegelman’s animal farm: we repeatedly see German cats and Polish pigs brutalizing Jewish mice, hitting them, kicking them, shooting them, burning them, gassing them, hanging them—indeed, treating them like vermin, like a lower species. I actually think the horrors of this moment in history come through to us more keenly and laceratingly because of the animal figures, as if we were obliged to recognize that notions such as morality, kindness, dignity, and respect had no play in the animal kingdom and were perhaps always quaint fictions in the human kingdom.

Thus Art the child does what few children ever accomplish: he takes the measure of his father’s life because it is key to his own existence. This is not easy. In fact, Vladek is impossible to live with: he is hard on Mala, his second wife (also from the camps), and he has been permanently shaped—deformed?—by his experiences. Physically a wreck (diabetes, two earlier heart attacks, popping pills incessantly, afflicted by glaucoma and cataracts, spending a good bit of time on his exercise machine so that his circulation will let him sleep), Vladek is quite recognizable as a survivor with tics: he wastes nothing, saves on wooden matches, cannot spend a dime (although he has substantial funds in the bank), refuses to pay for household help, is ingenious at getting bargains and never paying extra; he seems even to Mala (who comes from the same background) a monster who cares more about things than people. His son, Artie, remembers being forced to clean his plate, muses that his father is a caricature of the miserly Jew. (And he’s racist to boot.) Perhaps all of us know of older people like this—or at least
knew
them. My (long-deceased) Yiddish-speaking grandmother from Poland who fled from there in 1907 had a number of Vladek’s traits, and I can scarcely claim that they endeared her to me.

Yet one look at Vladek-maus utterly dispels the view I’ve sketched. He looks pretty good, right to the end, pills, exercise machines and all. Spiegelman’s mouse figures are wonderfully immune to the ravages of time. They can be unbearably eloquent figures of torture and suffering, as we see in a number of hallucinatory frames of hanged mice, shrieking mice, mice undergoing virtual crucifixion. But mouse faces have little register. Vladek looks good. And he was good: physically good, so good that he survived (survived what killed most people) and is now able to tell the tale to his uncomprehending son. Hence we start with a vital Vladek, called “the sheik,” a Valentino-maus, attractive to women, good with his hands, supple, a quick study, a quick tongue, able to withstand punishment, really quite an Odyssean figure. The two volumes follow him—via his storytelling to Artie—through all the ghastly chapters of his hellish life (right on through Auschwitz), and we see him come through again and again. He is Homeric, even if in mouse form: wily, resourceful, cunning. (Small wonder that his son feels throughout his life that he cannot compete with him; or that the only commensurate countermove is the one we see happening textually: the son creates the images of the father’s tale. Shades of Kafka.)

The dance between Vladek and the nightmare of history that befalls him—the coming of Hitler, the persecution of the Jews, the countless close escapes from death, the internment at Auschwitz, all bathed within a richly articulated family story of in-laws and cousins and friends—coexists with a second, less overt but no-less-central dance, that between teller and scribe, father and son. Artie, who could not say more than “Sure, Ma” to his about-to-die mother, creates for us the full-blown life of Vladek, finds images for Vladek’s words, offers us a man in his prime whom the son never knew, paints a portrait of survival. Yes, Vladek is in many respects impossible to live with, but there is the rub: this is what his life has made of him. Spiegelman remains wonderfully honest here, reminding us that survivors are an almost impossible species in themselves, and Artie’s grudging tone, his impatience with Vladek, his repeated sense of being put upon, all this endows this story with considerable integrity.

And muscularity. The saga of the past has no pills or exercise machines in sight. Vladek had to be a man for all seasons—agile, observant, good at hiding, quick-tongued, a wearer of masks, a speaker of languages, an unyielding survivor of starvation and typhus and much else—and one comes out of this book with a terrifying sense of what it took not to die, of how many skills and how much tenacity it required not to go under or to be broken beyond measure. But the muscularity goes beyond this. There is a narrative and pictorial generosity of the first rank here, as Vladek goes through his marathon in Hell. Other writers would have given us the roiling psychological depths of this story, its cargo of sound and fury. Spiegelman does something just as fine: in his maus figures he shows us not only the crucifixion scenario we know but also the canny moves of life as it opposes death, and he makes us see how smart life is, how cued we are to living, how the forces of destiny are lodged inside the little creatures as well as in the great death machines that seek to exterminate them.

But he also shows us, utterly without fanfare, what cannot be borne: his cousin Tosha, who, in the face of the gas chambers, elected to poison herself and the three children in her care, one of them being Richieu Spiegelman, Artie’s older brother, the other dead corpse (along with Anja) that “finances” this story, by haunting those who survived with its awful legacy.

Many of these frames are surpassingly eloquent in juxtaposing survival with horror, as in the image of Vladek sitting by the window with little Richieu playing with dolls, but all of them dwarfed by the huge, distorted visages of the hanged mice, twisting on the gallows on Modrzejowska Street, there to advertise German policy, sowing terror in Vladek, for he can’t stop thinking that they may have informed on him before dying, that he may be the next to go. We realize that the graphic frame can have the same reach as Faulknerian italics or a Joycean/Woolfian stream of consciousness, for it can convey the traffic between event and soul without ever pronouncing any of the big words. In like manner,
Maus
shows us the brittleness of morality, the ways in which virtue requires material support if it is to be real, so that friendship and help must be lubricated by money and food if they are to be reliable, and they may not be reliable even then, as so many Jews seeking assistance from “friends” learned to their horror. Artie the American son is repeatedly dumbfounded by Vladek’s unillusioned equanimity, as if paying and bribing people to help you stay alive were the most obvious thing in the world, something Vladek seems almost to have been born knowing. It is an education in survival. There was no Vautrin, no Bledsoe, no mentor or wise man in sight to steer Vladek: just grit, a father’s grit being imagined by his son.