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And so, dear readers, we come to the end of the illustrious story of Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay. Kavalier comes back! He and Rosa rekindle their romance; older, wiser, and calmer! Tommy confirms the truth about his real father! Joe buys Empire Comics and comes to terms with his family’s death! Sammy goes out to Los Angeles and signs the name “Kavalier and Clay”, thus cementing the powerful dream he and Joe set out to pursue so many years ago!
The hearings of the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1954 would put a damper on the comic book world for several years, thanks in large part, to the book Chabon mentioned, The Seduction of the Innocent by Frederic Werthem, which I highly suggest you look at in the Mill Vallley Public Library for a truly fascinating throwback to some of the concerns that arose surrounding this art form. (The Mill Valley Library will feature a display on many of the books discussed in Werthem’s book, so keep your eyes peeled!) Sammy’s take on the matter, after being ousted on national television as a “subersive” homosexual whose story lines always involved a sidekick who must surely have been proof of the author’s gay tendencies with the horrific side-affect of turning all the American, comic-book-reading youth gay is, “Dr. Frederic Werthem was an idiot; it was obvious that Batman was not intended consciously or unconsciously to play Robin’s corrupter: he was meant to stand in for his father, and by extension for the absent, indifferent, vanishing fathers of the comic-book-reading boys of America” (631). Which may make one wonder if, in large part, besides the theme of escapism and imagination, besides the story of the dawning of Comic Books against the backdrop of a horrific war, this story is ultimately about family and hope.
Final thoughts? Reactions?
What a lot has happened since we left off with our last entry! We watched Joe barely escape death at his army station in the Antarctic, only to find himself trapped with the half-crazed Shannenhouse and news that the Germans had landed close to 10 miles to their base. Then there’s the perilous flight which terminates, just as Shannenhouse’s appendix does, in a burst (of snow), and Joe still manages to scramble out alive. Confronted by the young German geologist, there’s a tragic struggle. We see this brief chapter in the life of Joe Kavalier through the eyes of the other, the German, which was an interesting change of style. As the life dies out of the German, the narration seemlessly transitions back to Joe’s point of view. Stylistically speaking, it was beautifully done.
Then, Joe comes home, and we depart from him for a bit to catch up with Sammy, Tommy, and Rosa. We see Sammy, awkwardly struggling to fulfill the role of father, and his wife, Rosa, making a name for herself in the comic business by honing her meticulous precision and drawing skills, and Tommy, clever and more like his real father than he knows. Finally, after meeting with Tommy in secret and the Escapist stunt, all three are reunited. The reunion was well done: it wasn’t overly emotional or sentimental, but it felt good to witness the familiarity between Rosa and Joe, especially after all that Joe (and, no doubt, Rosa) has been through. The companionship between all four of them is still there.
But questions arise: where is Rosa going the day she meets Tommy in the train as he’s off to visit Joe? Rosa’s wearing a perfume that Tommy knows she hasn’t worn in forever, and rather than blowing up at him, hugs him and thanks him, perhaps for stopping her from doing something she would later regret (an affair?).
Why does Joe jump? Does he go through with the stunt as a favor to Tommy? Is he so utterly confused and forlorn about what to do with what he cannot fix that he no longer cares?
What does it mean that the Golem comes back into the story? (Recall that in Joe’s little closet, Sammy and Tommy found numerous drawings of the Golem.)
How will it end? Tune in next week, faithful reader, for the final installment of our epic adventure as we come to the final act (presumably) of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
For a moment Joe wavered there, soaking wet, looking slowly across the two hundred faces ranged in an anxious and wondering ring around him. His face was twisted in an expression that most of the guests would later characterize as shame but that others, Stanley Konigsberg among them, saw as a terrible, inexplicable anger. (pg 399-400)
How could he begin to say how happy he had been, this last month or so, in the radiant focus of Bacon’s regard, how mistaken Bacon was in wasting that regard on him. No one as beautiful, as charming and poised and physically grand, as Bacon could possibly taken an interest in him. (pg 407)
These sections of Kavalier and Clay (pages 360-440 and 440-500) are a fulcrum, a pivot point, a crossroads around which the possible paths of their futures lay spread out like spokes on a bike wheel, sign posts arrowing off in different directions. Down one way Thomas lands in New York and becomes the third member of a rapidly growing family in a swanky new apartment. Down another he drowns, killed by emotionless Nazis, another nameless body in another grim news story, leaving Josef alone, an escapist with no way out. Or he could run, an art he has by this point mastered, abandon his superhero mask and Clark Kent glasses and disappear into tundraed wasteland of loneliness, the only place on earth the machinations of war hasn’t crushed.
Sammy has his own crossroads. One leads him off to California to live in debauchery and ecstasy through the Golden Age of Hollywood. Or he could turn down the dark and rugged path that leaves him half-dead in an alley, broken, abused, and without recourse, an unwitting harbinger of Stonewall and Harvey Milk. A third path leaves him trapped in a marriage forged not out of love but from of duty and respect, a life as a failing Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, his secret identity locked away in a closet, drowning in mothballs and failed attempts to forget.
By the start of Part VI, The League of the Golden Key, both men have made their choices, selected a path and run helter-skelter down its rocky, fragmented terrain. Soon enough they found the narrow road constricting, suffocating, empty, but, rather than turn back and start again they kept walking, accepting the journey without a thought about the destination. Sometimes the trees would thin and they would get glimpses of each other, their paths momentarily angling toward each other before veering sharply in the other direction. When Sammy begins to suspect that Joe is the masked marauder threatening to turn himself into a Jackson Pollack painting on 5th Avenue the trees part, the ferns thin out, the gravel smoothes, and the two journeymen begin to realize just how parallel their paths really were. The man in the dinner jacket falling through the air, his parachute just out of arms’ reach isn’t oblivious to his impending death. He knows the consequences of his decision to fall from the plane, but it is the path he chose and he will follow it through until the end.
-AxB
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