Our Eddie: How to Be an Artist (Craig Responds)

Hey, go read Charles first.

Re-reading and writing about Eddie Campbell's graphic novels reminds me how dense and complicated the books are. In my post on The King Canute Crowd, I mentioned a panel where Campbell drew himself arm-wresting with Alan Moore, with both men spouting their primary influences:

While writing that post, I remembered that panel from Campbell's interview in The Comics Journal #145 (October 1991), but I forgot about that panel's subsequent appearance in How to Be an Artist, page 38, where it represents Campbell's deepening  friendship and artistic collaboration with Moore (and  captures an occasion where both men "tape a conversation for Escape"). I've learned to never underestimate Eddie. His art is shot through with details, reoccurrences, motifs, characters and themes that rise above individual books and cut across his entire oeuvre; maybe Campbell's life is the work of art, and the books are the tracks of his passage (Garooga!), and it's a stupid critic who reaches conclusions before the life and art are done.

Still, though, let me be stupid for a bit and address one of Charles' observations.

CH writes that the tone of How to Be an Artist is "tough to place," and that the book is a patchwork of various genres: literary autobiography, cartoon narrative, a history of the Tundra madness of the early '90s, etc. Yet despite the book's patchwork quality, I'd argue that it's an almost perfect example of what author and critic Phillip Lopate calls the personal essay. I first stumbled onto Lopate and the personal essay genre in Totally, Tenderly, Tragically (1998), a collection of Lopate's writing about film--and, incidentally, a compulsively readable and far-ranging book, one I highly recommend. In Totally, there's an article called "In Search of the Centaur: the Essay-Film," where Lopate ponders this question: are there any filmmakers who follow--and translate into cinema--the essayistic approach of prose writers like Montaigne, Hazlitt and E.B. White? (Lopate's answer: Chris Marker is the film medium's only true essayist.) At the beginning of "In Search of the Centaur," Lopate offers this thumbnail definition of the essay:

It is easier to list the essay's practitioners than to fix a definition of its protean form. "A short literary composition on a single subject, usually presenting the personal views of the author," says the American Heritage Dictionary. While I defy anyone to boil down Montaigne's rambling late essays to a single subject or characterize them as short, I do agree that the essay offers personal views. That's not to say it is always first-person  or autobiographical, but it tracks a person's thoughts as he or she tries to work out some mental knot, however various its strands. An essay is a search to find out what one thinks about something. (281)

After Totally, I read The Art of the Personal Essay (1994), a massive anthology edited and introduced by Lopate, and designed to identify a canon of writers in the essay tradition. In his introduction to Art, Lopate defines in detail what makes the genre of the personal essay, and his definition fits Campbell to the proverbial "T." Let's briefly summarize the traits of the personal essay, then, and see if How to Be an Artist fits into the genre or not. According to Lopate, the dominant traits of the personal essay are the following: 

The essay charts the author's feelings and thoughts about a subject or idea. The essay can be about anything, though Lopate identifies a few common rhetorical strategies in the genre, including a tendency to focus on "littleness"--on self-belittlement, on small topics, on the comic deflation of elevated social status. How to Be an Artist is Campbell's idiosyncratic take on the history of the graphic novel, a subject T.S. Eliot would find inherently small in comparison with the study of so-called "real" literature, and Campbell's vacillation between criticism and autobiography keeps us rooted in both macro- and micro-contexts. (As Charles notes, How to Be and Artist mixes Campbell's musings towards a cartooning canon--the litany of great comic strippers in chapter six, his list of great graphic novels circa 2001 in chapter fourteen--with scenes charting his evolving relationship with his future wife Anne.) In addition, one of Campbell's favorite games is puncturing pomposity: a digression on pages 60 and 61 celebrates the humorous subversion of "the fart in the public library," and Campbell loves this kind of humor so much that he briefly flirts with writing a history of comedy, the first two installments of which appeared in his short-lived solo comic Egomania.

The author communicates in a conversational mode, using direct and informal language to establish an intimate rapport between him/herself and a reader. When reading a personal essay, we should feel that we are “eavesdropping on a mind in solitude. He chatters, pen in hand, and keeps putting questions to himself when the essay threatens to flag” (xxiv). We expect the author to talk about him/herself and his/her chosen subject as honestly, fairly and deeply as possible; we watch the essayist strip away both personal and intellectual illusions, a process which can endear the author to our hearts. As Lopate writes, “the spectacle of baring the naked soul is meant to awaken the sympathy of the reader, who is apt to forgive the essayist’s self-absorption in return for the warmth of his or her candor” (xxvi). Having read Graffiti Kitchen before How to Be an Artist--and after reading about Eddie's willingness to ball the mother of the girl he loves--I knew that Campbell was both self-absorbed and a straight talker. And as Charles notes, Campbell names names, hashing out the gossip surrounding the collapse of Big Numbers and talking frankly about Steve Bissette's cartoonist's block (which, I gather from a few acrimonious message board postings, has strained the friendship between Steve and Eddie). Like another would-be comics essayist, Harvey Pekar, Campbell is dear to us because he makes himself and others look foolish, flawed, silly.

The tone struck by the essayist tends to be cheeky and ironic, with the essayist assuming a detached position, representing him/herself as a loafer or retiree, "inactive and tangential to the marketplace" (xxxiii). Part of the essayist's marginal status is determined by his/her interests; rather than keeping up with new trends, the essayist is more interested in the past and what is perceived to have endured. A central contrast in How to Be an Artist is between the cartooning giants of the past and the latter-day foment of young cartoonists, scrambling to distribute their Xeroxed zines and get an occasional half-page in a national magazine. Campbell shows himself as one of those callow young upstarts, but it's graphic novels like How to Be an Artist--personal and detached and historically significant all at once--that have begun to earn him a place in comic's pantheon...third bench from the right, next to Alex Kotsky, his face partially obscured in the photograph by Milton Caniff's big head.   

Comments

[Ben Towle]

I just did a quick read-through of both posts, so I may have missed it, but did neither of you touch on the book's being written with second person narration? This seems to me to be the book's most unusual formal feature, and one which I found a bit off-putting actually; although, I'm generally a big fan of Campbell's work.

[CharlesWHatfield]

Good point, Ben, neither Craig nor I talked about the book's use of second-person narration, something that I found bemusing when I first began to read the book but that quickly became like second nature to me.

It's an unusual voice to write the book in: not only second-person but also future tense! Yet this makes sense to me because (a) Campbell is trying to bring a sense of lived-in urgency to what might be viewed as a strictly historical account; and (b) he is enacting that disjunction so common in autobiography between the older, more jaded persona of the author (as author) in the present and the younger, more naive persona of the author (as character) in the past. Eddie's autobio work has always been very self-conscious about its positioning of the author vis-a-vis himself as character.

To me the second-person narration is another distancing device, comparable to Campbell's use of "Alec MacGarry" as a surrogate.

[Ben Towle]

"...he is enacting that disjunction so common in autobiography between the older, more jaded persona of the author (as author) in the present and the younger, more naive persona of the author (as character)..."

I guess that depends on who you take the "you" to be referring to: the younger Eddie depicted in the book, or you-the-reader. I my case, as I read the book, I kept instinctively saying aloud, "No, no I really WON'T do that!" a lot.

[CharlesWHatfield]

Ben,

Ha! That's pretty funny, actually. But, yeah, there's something rather aggressive about the second-person voice, like a finger pointing at you.

Obviously, stories written wholly in the second person are rare, though not so very rare as one might think. Writer Dennis Schofield's site, "Second Person Fiction," offers, among other things, his entire dissertaton on this topic:

http://members.westnet.com.au/emmas/2p

Note that Schofield's preferred graphic is indeed of a hand pointing at "you." (How accusatory!)

Playing with voice is one the tics of autobiography: Henry Adams, for example, wrote his in third person (with a self-critical irony that ain't too far from Eddie's neighborhood).

[DerikB]

Ohhhh. Thanks for pointing that out Ben. Perfect for something I've been planning on the "second person" in comics.

[Leigh Walton]

Great reflections, guys. Can't wait for more. In a very real way it was Eddie's comics that caused the creation of Top Shelf, so I bear an interesting debt to him professionally as well as the impact his work has had personally.

Upon reading HOW TO BE AN ARTIST (my first Campbell outside of skimming FROM HELL), though, I really had no idea what to expect. I remember taking the title quite literally, which left me (like Ben) with the impression that the author was speaking broadly -- spelling out exactly the process by which every artist becomes an artist. Which is a bit silly, considering how absurdly specific the book gets. But then maybe it IS an authentic representation of that process: the names change, but the song remains the same?

Seeing how much you guys are getting out of ALEC is encouraging; I imagine that it will continue to mean more to me as I age. At the moment I'm just thinking: How lucky is Eddie Campbell, to have his very own Eddie Campbell following him around and recording the story of his life! We should all be so lucky.

[Marco Milone]

Good point!

[CharlesWHatfield]

Leigh, it's great to hear from you again, thanks!

I have to say, I think going straight from FROM HELL to HOW TO BE AN ARTIST would be pretty disorienting! IIRC, my first exposure to Eddie's work was DEADFACE: DOING THE ISLANDS WITH BACCHUS (in pamphlet form, 1991), and from there FROM HELL (in pamphlet form). At least that's how I remember it: I know that by the time of FROM HELL I already had a sense that Eddie was an artist whose interest in history could compete with Moore's. My first reading of "Alec" was, I think, GRAFFITI KITCHEN, in the old Tundra edition (1993). I guess for me KITCHEN has always been the "template" for the Alec stuff.

It's odd, reading Eddie's work, the gathering of so many years, out of order.

BTW, I haven't forgotten your input on Martinson's TONOHARU; I appreciated your thoughtful take there, even though I was inclined to disagree, or at least to be pretty skeptical (with the exception of Ware, I find my tastes veering away from the neatly formalistic and toward the wild 'n' wooly these days). It's nice to know that you're with us, reading along.

Hey, I'll be at CCI in a couple of weeks, so I hope to track you down via the Top Shelf booth and greet you in person.

[Leigh Walton]

Hey Charles,

It looks like we missed each other at ALA! I wanted to check out the wordless comics panel (Top Shelf has published quite a few, from Owly to Fox Bunny Funny to some of the stuff on TS2.0), but couldn't get away from the booth. Luckily Comicon will give us another chance to meet up!

Also, we're starting to get VERY excited about the new ALEC edition (http://www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog.php?type=2). Eddie has been working on this book for years and it's going to be a beauty. Let's see if we can't get him into the canon where he belongs!

[CharlesWHatfield]

Hey, Eddie's already in the canon. You just gotta ask the right people. :)

Seriously, sorry to have missed you at ALA. Damn, I didn't have the good sense to ask who was manning the Top Shelf booth, and in all the hurry...

I *will* look you up at CCI!

[CharlesWHatfield]

There's a brief comment above by one Marco Milone, and I'd love to hear more from him, because he runs a cool website called Mellart, which aims "to promote experimental and underground culture in its various visual forms: animation, art, cinema and comics" (http://www.mellart.com is the URL).

I went there tonight and watched a short film by John Canemaker!

Marco, are you there? I gather you are a comics journalist from Palermo, sì?