The Quitter

I first learned about Harvey Pekar in a New York Times Sunday Book Review dated May 11th, 1986. The reviewer, David Rosenthal, summed up Pekar’s debut work, “American Splendor: the life and times of Harvey Pekar”, as follows:

Mr. Pekar’s work has been compared by literary critics to Chekhov’s and Dostoyevsky’s, and it is easy to see why. His stories, as he puts it, are about “the cosmic and the ordinary,” about the working stiff’s search for love and transcendence, the bleak reality of life in a hard town and the reflections of a volatile, passionate sensibility that vibrates with everything around it.

Unlike Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, Pekar’s medium was the comic book, which made it even more imperative for me to track down. Like many baby boomers (technically speaking, I am a pre-baby boomer since I was born before the end of the war), comic books were as central to my early childhood as the Internet and video games are to today’s kids. Each new issue of Mad Magazine was a major event. I would pick up the latest copy from Abe’s Candy Store in Woodridge, New York and rush home to devour it. Next I would call a fellow 11 year old, who was hip enough to get Mad Magazine’s subversive sense of humor, and discuss it as if it were the latest Woody Allen movie (in the 70s, to be sure.)

From that time onwards, I have bought every book published by Harvey Pekar, but somehow managed to bypass “The Quitter”, a 2005 comic book that can best be described as a coming-of-age work in the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” genre. The comparison to James Joyce is intentional, since I am convinced that on its own terms “The Quitter” is a work that deserves as much acclaim.

For those whose knowledge of Harvey Pekar is based on “American Splendor”, the 2003 movie based on his books or the books themselves, “The Quitter” fills in the background on how he came to the point of launching a career in a genre that he would eventually dominate as a grand master. The irony is that his background would lead you to believe that he would never master this art, let alone the basic tasks of survival in a society that is characterized by its ability to grind people into dust. The title “The Quitter” alludes to Pekar’s tendency to quit various challenges before they got the best of him, ranging from a high school football team to college. Thank god for his willingness to not let writing get the best of him.

Harvey Pekar’s parents were Eastern European immigrants who settled in a working-class neighborhood in Cleveland. His father ran a small grocery store on more or less the same basis as my father’s fruit and vegetable store in the Borscht Belt in upstate New York. He put in long hours and trudged home each night to prepare himself for the next day. His father’s main interest, besides running the store, was religion. That was true as well for my own father besides playing poker with the other shopkeepers in Woodridge until my mother made him stop. Harvey’s mom was sympathetic to the Communist Party and even recruited the 9 year old Harvey to pass out campaign brochures for Henry Wallace in 1948.

As should be obvious, I feel a great deal of identification with Harvey’s early years-particularly with one incident that I went through in my own way. At a certain point, the Pekars decided to move to Shaker Heights, a Cleveland suburb that was a step up from the hard scrabble neighborhood they had been living in. His father, who did not own a car, came to pick him up from school in an old truck much to Harvey’s embarrassment:

One summer, when I was about 12 or 13 years old, my mother wrangled tickets to see the legendary Jewish tenor Richard Tucker perform at the Concord Hotel. She brought me and her mother in the family car, a 1952 Studebaker that not only looked like crap but was burning oil. When we arrived at the entrance to the Concord, the fanciest hotel in the Catskills, you could see a plume of smoke trailing the car for about 50 feet. My mom turned the key over to a valet who I heard make some wisecrack about the jalopy to the other valets. Meanwhile, the guests at the hotel out for an evening stroll in their mink stoles stared at us as if we were from another planet. It did not help that my deaf grandma spoke so loud that you could hear her from the next county. All I wanted to do is put as much distance as I could from these yokels as I could. Now at the age of 64 I feel somehow proud of the fact that appearances meant nothing to my mother. Plus, Richard Tucker was in great form that night.

If Harvey Pekar’s “The Quitter” was about nothing except his own coming of age, it would be worth the price since his story is so compelling. But beyond the Pekar story is the story of the development of an alternative culture that was bubbling up in Cleveland in the early 60s just as it was everywhere in America. Young people were bored and alienated by mainstream culture and were looking for something different. Harvey got turned on to jazz and began writing for a prestigious magazine at the age of 19, making him a local hero in his neighborhood. He also made a pilgrimage to New York City to seek out the beat generation, which by this time was much more of a tourist attraction than a happening scene. All in all, his spiritual and artistic growth was shaped by the same social forces that affected an entire generation, me included. If you are at all interested in finding out about the emergence the new political and cultural movements that came to a head in the 1960s, “The Quitter” is essential reading as well as a delight to read page after page. “The Quitter” is available from amazon.com.