The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (87 page)

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I am indebted to Will Eisner, to Stan Lee, and in particular to the late Gil Kane for sharing their reminiscences of the Golden Age, and also to Dick Ayers, Sheldon Moldoff, Martin "Green Lantern" Nodell, and to Marv Wolfman and Lauren Shuler Donner for providing introductions to some of those brilliant creators. Thanks also to Richard Bensam and Peter Wallace for their expert judgments. Roger Angell, Kenneth Turan, Cy Voris, Rosemary Graham, Louis B. Jones, Lee Skirboll, and the heroic Douglas Stumpf all kindly gave me the benefit of their generosity and intelligence by reading drafts or portions of this book along the way. I'm grateful as well to Eugene Feingold, Ricki Waldman, Kenneth Turan, and Robert Chabon for their memories of New York childhoods; to Russell Petrocelli, group rail-trip coordinator of N.J. Transit; and to the past and present members of the Kirby Mailing List (http://fantasty.com/ kirby-l).

I would like to thank the MacDowell Colony for providing the magical gifts of space, time, and quiet, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund for its support.

The research for this novel was undertaken primarily at the Doheny Memorial Library at U.S.C., the U.C.L.A. College Library, the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley, the McHenry Library at U.C. Santa Cruz, and the New-York Historical Society.

I have tried to respect history and geography wherever doing so served my purposes as a novelist, but wherever it did not I have, cheerfully or with regret, ignored them.

I have relied on the prior labor of many writers here, but above all on that of the collective authors of the 1959 W.P.A.
New York City Guide
(John Cheever and Richard Wright among them), and on the work of E. J. Kahn, Jr., Brendan Gill, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, St. Clair McKelway, and all the other great urban portraitists, many of them anonymous, who never failed me when I went searching for their lost city in dusty old bound back issues of
The New Yorker.
Other helpful or indispensable books were:
Letters from Prague: 1939-1941,
compiled by Raya Czerner Schapiro and Helga Czerner Weinberg,
The Nightmare of Reason,
by Ernst Pawel, and
Elder of the Jews,
by Ruth Bondy;
The World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1941
edited by E. Eastman Irvine,
No Ordinary Time,
by Doris Kearns Goodwin,
The Glory and the Dream,
by William Manchester,
The Lost World of the Fair,
by David Gelernter, and
Delivered from Evil,
by Robert Leckie;
The Secrets of Houdini,
by J. C. Cannell,
Blackstone's Modern Card Tricks,
by Harry Blackstone,
Professional Magic Made Easy,
by Bruce Elliott,
Houdini on Magic,
by Harry Houdini,
Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls,
by William Lindsay Gresham, and
Houdini!!!,
by Kenneth Silverman;
Little America
and
Discovery,
both by Richard E. Byrd,
A History of Antarctic Science,
by G. E. Fogg,
The White Continent,
by Thomas R. Henry,
Quest for a Continent,
by Walter Sullivan, and
Antarctic Night,
by Jack Bursey;
New York Panorama,
by the Federal Writers' Project of the W.P.A.,
The Empire State Building,
by John Tauranac,
The Gay Metropolis, 1940-1996,
by Charles Raiser, and
The Encyclopedia of New York City,
edited by Kenneth T. Jackson;
The Great Comic Book Heroes,
by Jules Feiffer,
All in Color for a Dime,
by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson,
The Great Comic Book Artists
and
Great History of Comic Books,
both by Ron Goulart,
Superhero Comics of the Golden Age: The Illustrated History,
by Mike Benton,
The Art of the Comic Book,
by Robert C. Harvey, and
The Comic Book Makers,
by Joe Simon with Jim Simon;
On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism,
by Gershom Scholem, and
Gates to the Old City,
by Raphael Patai;
The Big Broadcast,
by Frank Buxton and Bill Owen,
Don't Touch That Dial,
by J. Fred MacDonald, and
The Book of Practical Radio,
by John Scott-Taggart; as well as the following sites on the World Wide Web: Michael Norwitz's
Lev Gleason's Comic House
(http://www.angelfire.com/ mn/blaklion/index.html), Bob Ring's
Houdini Tribute
(http://www. houdinitribute.com), and Peter Bacon Hales's
Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb
(http://www.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown/ index.html).

I have sought to meet the high standards of the amazing Mary Evans for nearly fifteen years, and only to the extent that it meets them can I be satisfied with this work. Kate Medina blessed this voyage when I had no more than a fictitious map to steer by, and lashed me to the wheel when the seas turned rough. I am grateful to Scott Rudin, for his patience and faith, to Tanya McKinnon, Benjamin Dreyer, E. Beth Thomas, Meaghan Rady, Frankie Jones, Alexa Cassanos, and Paula Shuster. And, everlastingly, to Ayelet Waldman, for inspiring, nurturing, and ensuring, in a thousand ways, every single word of this novel, down to the very last period.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the deep debt I owe in this and everything else I've ever written to the work of the late Jack Kirby, the Ring of Comics.

[1]
^[1]
The still-fresh memory of Harry Houdini in the American mind thirteen years after his death—of his myth, his mysterious abilities, his physique, his feats, his dedicated hunting down and exposure of frauds and cheats - is a neglected source of the superhero idea in general; an argument in its favor, as it were.

[2]
^[2]
In 1998, the New York branch of Sotheby's offered a rare copy of
Amazing Midget Radio Comics
#1 in Very Good condition. The minimum bid was fixed at ten thousand dollars. Its staples were shiny, its corners sharp, its pages white as piano keys. The cover had a long transverse crease, but after more than half a century—three generations removed now from that jittery year in that brutal yet innocent city—the joy and rage incarnate in the knockout Kavalier punch still startled. It sold, after lively bidding, for $42,200.

[3]
^[3]
"Fighting Fascism in His Underwear," issue of August 17, 1940.

[4]
^[4]
Frege, a socialist, an alpine skier, and, like Love, a Rhodes scholar (they had met at Trinity College), was stripped of his title as German national downhill champion and sentenced to Dachau for "soliciting an act of depravity" in the Munich
Bahnhof.

[5]
^[5]
This legendary library of self-mortification was lost, and widely considered apocryphal, until 1993, when one of its volumes,
Racy Attorney
#23, turned up at an IKEA store in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where it was mutely serving as a dignified-looking stage property on a floor-model "Hjorp" wall unit. It is signed by the author and bears the probably spurious but fascinating inscription
To my pal Dick Nixon.

[6]
^[6]
Two weeks after Kahn's piece appeared in
The New Yorker,
giving some particulars of Josef Kavalier and of his family's plight, Kahn forwarded to Joe a check for twelve dollars, one for ten, and a letter from a Mrs. F. Bernhard of East Ninety-sixth Street, offering to feed him a home-cooked meal of schnitzel and knodelen. It is probable that Joe never took her up on the offer. Records indicate, however, that the checks were cashed.

[7]
^[7]
It was probably just as well. The man was Max Ernst, not merely an artist whose work Joe admired but a committed anti-fascist, public enemy of the Nazis, and fellow exile.

[8]
^[8]
Radio, All Doll,
and
Freedom.

[9]
^[9]
The Freedoms, whose sales, during the war years, came to rival those of the Escapist himself, were four teenage boys, Kid Einstein, Knuckleduster (known affectionately as "Knuck") O'Toole, Tommy Gunn, and Mumbles, a reformed gang of "Dead-End Hooligans" who had abandoned street fighting and pinked derbies in favor of the Axis menace and matching suits of tricolor long underwear.

[10]
^[10]
Thirty years later, when this work was first reprinted,
The Weird Worlds of Luna Moth
(Nostalgia Press, 1970; second edition, Pure Imagination, 1996) quickly became a head-shop bestseller.

[11]
^[11]
Lost.

[12]
^[12]
Gargantua and Pantagruel,
and possibly
Vathek.

[13]
^[13]
Sammy liked to tell a story about a hungry young artist named Roy Lichtenstein who had once wandered into his office at Pharaoh looking for a job. There is no evidence, however, that the story is true.

[14]
^[14]
The Paris Bridge-Leap of 1921: A Memoir of Hardeen,
New York; privately printed, 1935. Now in the collection of Prof. Kenneth Silverman.

[15]
^[15]
Les Organes du Facteur moved to Fifty-seventh Street after the war, three doors down from Carnegie Hall, an inexorable journey uptown and into cultural irrelevance in the last moments before Surrealism was overwhelmed by the surging tribes of Action, Beat, and Pop.

[16]
^[16]
In his excellent
The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History.

[17]
^[17]
Among some dozen she is believed to have employed over the years.

[18]
^[18]
"A person of unprecedented physical prowess dedicated to acts of derring-do in the public interest."

[19]
^[19]
The Escapist,
starring a young Peter Graves in the title role, 1951-53.

[20]
^[20]
At this time in the history of comic books, it was a mark of only the most successful heroes that they had a secret lair. Superman had his Fortress of Solitude, Batman his Batcave, the Blackhawks their windswept Blackhawk Island, and the Escapist his posh digs under the boards of the Empire Palace. These redoubts would be depicted, from time to time, in panels mat showed detailed cutaway diagrams of the secret lair, each 3-D Televisor Screen, Retractable Helipad, Trophy Room, and Rogue's Gallery carefully labeled with arrows. Only one of these cross-section plans was ever published for the Keyhole, a special two-page drawing in the centerfold of
Escapist Adventures
#46.