i
If you are thinking of a gift for someone recovering from open heart surgery, keep in mind that it would be weeks before he could lift Chris Ware’s Monograph (Rizzoli. 2017). In fact, this nearly nine-pound unbouncing baby, which stretches an unwieldy 18-by-13-inches, may not make a good choice for anyone inclined to reading while lying in bed. Lose grip for an instant; you risk a flattened nose or punctured spleen.
Though none of his earlier works needed similar “Customer Warning” labels, Ware has never been overly reader friendly. Even in his formative “Acme Novelty Library” days, I often abandoned entire two-page spreads because no matter what effort I put into adjusting my bi-focals, his type size selection seemed to parachute-drop me into the most impenetrable jungles of an optometrist’s vision-testing charts.
Ware was raised, fatherless, in the midwest. While he reports a “happy,” “contented” childhood, his characters tend to confine their experiences to those within a safe walking distance of dismal big city apartments or tidy suburban lawns and to exude feelings generally capturable by 20 shades of gray – self-pity, misery, and despair. Still, his readers benefit from surprising moments of humor, tenderness and compassion and even more startling flights of fantasy, time-shift and surprise. The magic of creativity causes the mundane and dreary to sparkle.
Ware is virtually unmatched in his ability to transform the hundrum of page composition into wonderland. The tracking of his thoughts and his characters’ adventures becomes a fun ride of unanticipated possibilities for those of us with more boxed-in imaginations. We spin and whirl and chuckle. Once in a while he plunks an entire mini-comic in the middle of a page like a prize inside Crackerjacks.
Monograph, a retrospective look at Ware’s life and career, takes self-deprecation for someone so honored to an almost oh-come-off-it! level. (I mean, you think Mr. Potatohead would get a book so freaking humongous?) “Why,” he wonders, “would a writer of (Zadie Smith’s) caliber, intelligence and humanity… bother to give me the time of day.” “I awoke every day,” he writes, “with a paralyzing pain of panic, fear and death.” He notes his “overwhelming self-doubt,” “stupid” mistakes, “embarrassing words,” “stories so bad there’s no rescuing them,” “lack of knowledge, artistic sophistication and inadequate understanding of how the world actually works.” At the same time he fills 275-pages with the drawings, comics, dolls, toys, dioramas, flip books, store signs, “New Yorker” covers, sheet music, storefront designs, sketch books, teaching materials – works of paper, wood, canvas, clay, brass, and glass – that establish him as one of the major creators of his time. He has ventured into animation, film, opera, radio, and TV. And he mentions a happy marriage, proud parenthood, and solid relationship with friends and colleagues that might be expected to ripple hope across any gloomy pond. Still, he writes, “death may be the single greatest thing that ever happens to us.”
Well, it certainly seems to last the longest.
For me, who is, as I often offer as a disclaimer, “a word guy, not a picture guy,” Monograph is most rewarding when Ware delineates his thinking about his preferred art form. In these passages, he shows an interest in connection, a “We’re-all-in-this” humanity, that might otherwise have been overlooked. Comics, he writes, represent “the way we remember life itself,” words and pictures occurring to us at the same time, duplicating “memory and consciousness,” “recomposing our lives from ever-decomposing pieces and stories.” “(U)ltimately, we’re all working on our own graphic novels of our lives…,” he says, “trying to understand, feel through and hopefully empathize with others as well as with ourselves.”
That is a generous thought. Ware seems a nice fellow. One can be glad for his success and thankful he has been able to pursue and document his vision.
Even if it might smack us on the nose.
ii
Heather Ann Thompson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Water (Pantheon. 2016), a history of the rebellion at Attica Prison in 1971, holds “weight” of a different nature.
Thompson is a dogged researcher, who unearthed condemnatory material which the State of New York had buried for decades – and reburied after her discovery. She is also a committed partisan, who does not hide behind “objectivity” to keep the conclusions she has drawn from the page. In fact, she swings them like a mace. Her story is of pestilential racism, sadistic cruelty, and governmental – indeed societal – moral rot.
There were times I wished Thompson was less reliant on adverbs and adjectives, more interested in character development, more adept (especially when her narrative moves into courtrooms) at rendering scenes dramatically. But then I put these wishes aside. They were, I thought, motivated by a desire to see the other side to the story presented; but, really, was there another side? The one she documented was so compelling and complete. Shock and outrage overwhelmed all.
I’ve tried to think of a single example of worse Americans-rendered-upon-Americans horror in my lifetime and come up short. (According to Wikipedia, since the Civil War, body count-wise, Attica was topped only by a massacre of coal miners in the 1920s.) From her description of the toxic conditions under which the inmates lived, through the obscenely unnecessary homicidal assault upon them, when troopers killed 33 prisoners and nine of their hostages, to the extermination-camp quality tortures inflicted upon the survivors, all subsequently blanketed by the intrigues, cover-ups, and betrayals designed to smother truth in its crib, Thompson piles horror upon horror and layers darkness within darkness.
As for “justice”… After this read, one spits the word. The mind reels. The body sickens. Maybe the worst part comes when Thompson carries her story to the present day. Blatant lies voiced by authorities and rebroadcast by the media about non-existent “prisoner barbarism” at Attica fueled, what Thompson terms, “an anti-civil-rights and anti-rehabilitation ethos.” Being “tough-on-crime” became as necessary to candidates for public office as deep-pocketed donors. The result has been more prisons built, more people imprisoned, greater mandatory sentences, increased capital crimes, less legal assistance for the entrapped. The United States, with five percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of the world’s prison inmates. (By 2000, New York state alone had six times as many people in prison as it had in 1971.) Eighteen percent of federal inmates – and seven percent of state inmates – are in for-profit prisons where, one presumes, owners maximize profits by reducing expenses in areas like food, lodging and health care, – and not doing much by way of rehabilitation or retraining so they can keep their client pool full of bodies.
iii
General Oliver Otis Howard (1830 – 1909) was a devout Christian and ardent foe of slavery. After the Civil War, in which his service to the Union cost him an arm at the Battle of Seven Pines, he headed the Freedmen’s Bureau and founded and was the first president of Howard University.
But throughout the summer and fall of 1887, Howard led 1500-2000 well-supplied, heavily armed troops 1100 miles, across what-is-now Oregon into what-is-now Montana, in pursuit of 250 less well-equipped Nez Perce warriors, half of whom his soldiers killed, and 500 women and children, many of whom they also slew, in order to herd them onto a reservation designed to extinguish their way of life and culture.
Howard also warred, with the same end in mind, against the Apache, Bannock, Modoc, Paiute, and Seminole peoples, and, reading William T. Vollman’s knock-out novel The Dying Grass (Viking. 2015), I wondered when Native Americans would demand his university remove his name.
xxx
Vollman is 58. He lives in Sacramento with his wife, a radiation oncologist, and daughter, a Cornell English/biology major. His oeuvre leaves one wobbling in awe and gibbering in amazement.
Vollman’s 800-page novel about Stalingrad won a National Book Award. His 3300-page book on violence required researched in Cambodia, Somalia and Iraq. His treatise on Noh Theater took him to Japan. He has written (and practiced) cross-dressing. He has written a trilogy on prostitution, for which he risked unprotected sex with Bangkok whores. He has written more than two dozen books, some accompanied by his own drawings: non-fiction, novels, poetry, short stories, volumes for collectors-only, despite distractions such as developing carpal tunnel syndrome from prolonged keyboarding, dodging fire from a Bosnian sniper, sleeping nights in a Seattle tent city, and being investigated by the FBI when suspected of being the Unabomber.
His recently completed two-volume work on climate change concludes, We’re fucked.
I am tempted to spend the rest of my life reading nothing but Vollman.
Grass, the fifth in a projected seven-volume history of North America, could probably be profitably read in conjunction with a conventional history of the Nez Perce War. But here is a partial list of what Vollman, standing alone, achieved.
He recounts the war in chronological but oblique fashion, engaging the brain to grip the content, when familiarity might allow it to slip away.
He shifts his attention between the U.S. forces and the Nez Perce, retaining a third-person voice but registering the difference in consciousness between both peoples by shifts of tone which allow an appreciation of each.
Within each segment of his narrative, he transitions from speaker to speaker without directly indicating who is speaking – which is cool – again challenging and rewarding the vigilant reader. Frequently, through indentations of lines and/or paragraphs, he overlaps scenes/actions to split screen effect, popping lights on in the brain when connections are made and puzzles solved.
Though the outcome of this war is well-known, Chief Joseph’s actual roll in it was news to me. So was the likelihood that his famous-enough-for-wall-posters “I will fight no more forever” speech benefitted from the revisionary skills of its interpreters. And though Vollman inclines one to side with the Nez Perce, he provides a sense of inevitability that tempers their tragedy. This was a clash of civilizations, and when civilizations clash, the one with less guns and fewer numbers is doomed. (And with tribes murdering, enslaving, and desecrating each other’s dead, one may not become entirely weepy at the outcome.)
xxx
This narrative runs 1200 pages, including a whatever-happened-to conclusion that encompasses individuals – at least one of whom, I noted with amazement, still lived when I was born – tribes, territories, flora, and fauna. It is rendered in prose that is fresh, brilliant, and artful. The dialogue is crisp and distinctive, speaker-by-speaker.
The description of terrain is especially notable for its ability to invoke sense-of-place and enhance the drama which plays upon it. (Vollman explains that he sought to capture the “effects of specific landscapes on consciousness.” If he visited a scene when the weather was not like that at the time of his narrative’s action, he revisited it when conditions were more similar in order to stoke his conjecture with accuracy.)
Following this narrative come 140 pages of appendices, jaw-dropping in their range and comprehensiveness, any of which may be conveniently referred to as one reads the text. These include a time line from the arrival of the Nez Perce in North America, circa 8000 B.C – skipping quickly to 1805 when they meet Lewis and Clark – through 1995; a list of personal names, with encapsulated bio (About Asleep, a 14-year-old, who would grow up to succeed Joseph as Chief, through Young White Buck, a nine-year-old, who survived a battle which wounded him and killed his mother and sister); a catalog of “Orders, Isms, Nations, Professions, Hierarchies, Divisions, Races, Shamans, Tribes and Monsters” (Acbadades, “The One Divine Being,” to Wyakin, an “invulnerability” “achieved though… fasting and sleeplessness”); a list of places (Ah-ki-me-kun-scoo, near Lewiston, Montana, to the Yellow Stone (now Yellowstone) River) a brief list of reference texts, with judgmental comments upon them by Vollman; an equally brief “Glossary of Calendars, Currencies, Forms, Legalisms and Measures” (“Abstract D,” an army inventory, to “Towering Plants,” the Nez Perce “equivalent to April”); a “General Glossary,” explaining, among other things, what “words” Vollman has utilized to replicate sounds, including laughter (“Ahaha”), mosquitoes (“Wa-wa”, and skeletons moving (“Qiqaw”); general notes about the languages spoken by participants in the story; and finally an invaluable compendium of “Sources.”
These “Sources” both enrich the text and offer valuable insights into Vollman’s creative process. He explains that his goal was a “Symbolic History,” “an account of origins and metamorphoses which is often untrue based on the literal facts as we know them, but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth…” His imagination, he hoped, would “help a reader feel not that this was precisely how it was but simply that the situation was all too real, as were the various motives.” (Now, as a writer – and former attorney – I too have developed an open-hearted view of “truth”; but I wished Vollman had elaborated on how a situation and motives can be “too real,” so that “untruths” become necessary to establish “precisely” what they were like. e-mailed this question to a friend of Vollman’s for forwarding, but received no reply.)
No matter. “Sources” provides information on a chapter-by-chapter – or section-by-section – or page-by-page – basis, depending on how often a reader wishes to refer to them. They credit the books, diaries, letters, newspapers, speeches, pamphlets, photographs, and governement reports Vollman drew from. He credits the libraries he visited, from Maine to Washington state. He tells us what trails he hiked and rifles he test-fired. He tells us what he abridged, altered, assumed, omitted, reasoned, manufactured, and imagined.
xxx
Time – and the criteria embraced by the generations within its pockets – determine greatness. Thy Dying Grass, with its technical mastery, voluminous knowledge, intellectual heft, and moral strength, seems as fine a candidate as any to me. It is inspiring to see what daring and commitment can achieve when so much around it – social, political, culturally – seems to sink in shit
Now that I’ve rooted Bob Dylan into a Nobel Prize, I’m throwing my support to Vollman.