Harvey and Tuli

Harvey and Tuli

Michael Kazin: Harvey and Tuli

It made sense, somehow, that Harvey Pekar and Tuli Kupferberg died on the same day and that their obits shared the same page in the New York Times. Both the comic book genius who couldn?t draw and the rock star who couldn?t really sing were secular Jews (raised by Yiddish-speaking parents) and avatars of the best kind of cultural insurgency.

With the help of illustrators like the incomparable R. Crumb, Pekar created profound, surprisingly popular art which illustrated Thoreau?s sad truth that ?the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.? Harvey was cantankerous, self-loathing, sardonically funny, and a romantic leftist. In American Splendor, he managed to make life as a file clerk in Cleveland seem as complex and memorable as that of any anti-hero in modern fiction. In one three-page vignette, ?Hypothetical Quandary,? drawn by Crumb in 1984, Harvey trudges to his car on a dreary Sunday morning and drives to a nearby bakery. He is obsessed with his failure to find a publisher. ?It?d be nice not to have to get up ev?ry morning and go to work, to be able to read or work on stories and articles whenever I felt like it,? he muses. But he wonders if his ?writing would suffer?: ?I?d be alienated but I wouldn?t think I had the right to feel bad about it.? Harvey consoles himself – ?I?m not gonna become a mellow man over night no matter what happens.? Crumb draws him glancing down the street, as a sad-eyed woman walks by on the sidewalk. In the penultimate frame, Harvey leans over to smell the fresh loaf of rye he has just purchased. Then he trudges back to his car, a small triumph creasing his face.

This is the kind of story that made Pekar famous and, one assumes, persuaded Paul Giamatti to play him in the 2003 film based on his work. But, in recent years, Harvey spent some of his time writing scripts for book-length comics about America?s radical history, edited by Paul Buhle, his good friend (and mine). These productions ? about Students for a Democratic Society, The Beats, and Studs Terkel?s Working ? illuminate subjects that few people under forty know much about. Perhaps they will help stir up a new kind of new left, one able to give voice to that Thoreauvian silent majority.

Tuli Kupferberg was not a quiet man, and whatever desperation he felt he translated into wild, brilliant, often hilarious lyrics and poems. Track down, if you can, a copy of 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft, a slim wonder published in 1966. A few sample entries:

• Grope J. Edgar Hoover in the silent halls of Congress.
• Get thee to a nunnery.
• Fly to the moon and refuse to come home.
• Die.
• Become Secretary of Defense.
• Become Secretary of State.

During the summer of 1967, I happened to be dating a woman who sold tickets for Fugs? performances at the ragged Players Theater on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Tourists may have been there to hear scandalous songs with titles like ?Coca-Cola Douche? and a lyric about a farmboy who promises to give up his nightime dalliances with heifers for the love of ?Clara June.? But I kept coming (I did get free tickets) to hear songs like Kill for Peace and Morning, Morning, which Tuli sang, in a screechy voice and occasionally off tune. How many people could write, in the same year, both a searing, blunt lyric about the murderous hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, and this:

Morning morning
Feel so lonesome in the morning
Morning morning
Morning brings me grief
Sunshine sunshine
Sunshine laughs upon my face
& the glory of the growing
Puts me in my running place
Evening evening
Feel so lonesome in the evening
Evening evening
Evening brings me grief
Moonshine moonshine
Moonshine drugs the hills with grace
& the secret of the shining
Seeks to break my simple face

The Richie Havens version will break your heart. Around the same time, Tuli also wrote ?Nothing??at once the plainest and most eloquent testament of alienation I have ever heard or read.

Nearly every photo of Tuli Kupferberg shows him with a delicious smile on his face, his long and stringy hair flying around his head; while Harvey Pekar was a celebrated, short-haired grump. When he was young, Tuli tried to kill himself by jumping off the Manhattan Bridge. His friend Allen Ginsberg wrote about this in “Howl,” mistaking it for the Brooklyn Bridge. Tuli said he did it because he was afraid he had lost the ability to love. The young Harvey doubted if anyone would ever find him loveable. Fortunately, both men?s fears proved groundless, and we got to enjoy their feats of perceptive rebellion. American splendor, indeed.

Images, left to right: Harvey Pekar (Davidkphoto/Wikimedia Commons), Tuli Kupferberg (lippemanufacturing/Flickr Commons).