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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Get Lit Celebrates the 25th Anniversary of 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay'
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A
You are listening to all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, the Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. To celebrate the anniversary, we hosted an extra special get lit event which included special live performances from the operatic adaptation of the novel, which is running now at the Metropolitan Opera. You'll hear more of that later this hour. But first, let's talk about the novel. Set in New York in the midst of World War II, the story follows two cousins who create a beloved comic book hero. Sammy Clayman is a smart, brash kid with a lot of big ideas, but his artistic skills aren't good enough to create a comic book. Then comes his cousin, Joseph Cavalier. Joe has escaped from Prague as German forces begin rounding up Jewish residents. He arrives in New York determined to rescue the rest of his family. And to do that, he'll need money. That's when Sam hatches a brilliant plan. Joe is an excellent artist. Sam is full of ideas. Together they create the Escapist, a superhero dedicated to helping people around the world escape from from chains of bondage. Plus, he beats up Hitler. As the popularity of the comic explodes, Joe and Sammy find themselves making a lot of money, though not as much as they are truly owed. They both fall in love. Joe begins to plan to bring his family to America. Sam thinks maybe he'll try to make it in Hollywood. But despite the name of their comic book, Joe and Sammy can't escape the harsh realities of the war and antisemitism or of homophobia. Michael Chabon joined us for an extra special get lit with all of it book club event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. Here's my conversation with Michael Chabon. September 19, 2000, the book comes out.
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B
Yes.
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A
Been a pretty good year. You had Wonder Boys come out as a movie, right?
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B
That's right, yeah.
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A
Around the same time. What was going on with you personally at that time in your life?
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B
It was a challenging. It was published at the sort of end of a challenging period in the life of my family. We had been through some stuff. I had worked really hard for a long time on this thing that, you know, everything looks foreign, ordained in hindsight. But I had gotten so many puzzled, discouraged, discouraging kind of reactions whenever I tried to summarize what it was about at dinner table conversations. You'd go out with people and like, so what's your book about? And you know, it's in 2000, we hadn't had Any Oscar winning superhero movies, you know, like black panther, we hadn't had. The whole Marvel comics universe sort of has completely transformed everyone's idea of not so much what superheroes are, but who they're for and the size of the audience that now takes an interest in superheroes and to still a lesser degree, but still comic books generally. And we hadn't had the whole graphic novel explosion. It was sort of just getting going in earnest when cavalier and clay came out. It was at the same time that Chris ware and Dan clowes, who are kind of two of the leading engines for the explosion, published books right at that same moment. So when I would tell people, you know, I'm working on this book about two guys who go into the comic book business in new York and create a superhero, it was a conversation killer. And I got a lot of, like, pitying remarks. I mean, try. I mean, I'm trying to think, like, try to imagine if somebody told you they were writing a novel about, like, pokemon or something like that. Like, it was that people just thought, like, what a waste of time. How long have you been working on this book? And so.
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A
Well, how long were you working on this?
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B
Five years.
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A
Big fat book.
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B
Yes, I know.
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A
Five years.
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B
I know. Five years.
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A
Where did you write it? How did you write it? Day by day? Did you pick a certain number of hours a day?
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B
You know, I mean, I work every day, so I. Or at least I try to. And I try to get a thousand words a day, day in, day out, as much as possible. And that helps a little because you have to. I mean, it's even shorter. Novels are still full of words. And like. So you just have to. If you, you know, you want to get to 40,000 words, 50,000 words, that's sort of a smaller, shorter novel still. That's a lot of thousand word days. And I tried to reassure myself while I was working on it that I was telling a story that was both a personal story, but also an American story that was about a really fascinating period in American history that was set in the world's greatest city at the time, where, in my opinion, it was kind of reaching its peak of greatness culturally. And all the innovations in music and theater and in ways of organizing society, where all these experiments were being conducted in New York city at the time. You know, some of them successful and some not. But it was time of such ferment. I just thought, like, it's not just about gonna be just about you guys. I hope that's not how people see it. But on the other hand, also, I didn't know what I was doing either, because I had never written a book that was set in another time period, a period I didn't live in. And at that time, 25 years ago, there were still a lot of people around who were sort of more or less the same age as my characters, or maybe, like, a little younger, but had grown up in the same. In the world. I was trying to persuade people I knew anything about. And I was very nervous about those people reading the book and people who had grown up in Brooklyn in the 1930s and 40s, people who remembered the popular culture and what it was like just to walk down the street or, you know. And I was very nervous because I was, in a sense, lying.
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A
What was the first seed for the book?
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B
I had a large comic book collection as a kid, and it got as large as it did because my father, who did grow up in Brooklyn, he was born in 38, was a big comic book reader as a kid. And when he had a child that was of an age to read comic books, he started to buy them again, and he would read them all first and then give them to me. So comics were something that we shared, and I had this pretty big collection. I sold it to another kid I knew when I was about 16 years old. But I saved this one box, and they were the comics that were written and drawn by a guy named Jack Kirby, who was one of the greatest comic book artists, creators of all time. And he was my favorite. And I just couldn't bear it apart with those books. So I kept them and I taped this box up, and I never opened it. But I moved many times as I got older, and I always took it with me. And then one day we were moving, and I was trying to waste time, and I just opened the box up. And the smell of old comic books, if you know, it is just this really rich, evocative. It smells like the past. It's like the smell of memory. And I just this. It came out of the box, and I just had this feeling of, like, there's a novel in this box somewhere in this smell. Like there's something about the past that I'm gonna write that has to do with comic books, but I don't know what yet. And then a little time, not very much time went by, and I went to the doctor's office or dentist's office or something, and they had a Smithsonian, you know, old Smithsonian magazines on the table. That was back when there were magazines. And I picked one Up. And they had an article in it about these two young guys, Jewish guys from Cleveland, Ohio, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who created this character of Superman. It was like a very Smithsonian magazine kind of article. And part of the story was. And it was a story that I knew I remembered, but that they had sold the rights for Superman to what is now DC Comics for $110 or something like that. Right. And just that is when it clicked for me. And I was like, oh, that's what I'm going to write about. I'm going to write about two guys who invent a successful superhero, and I'm going to set it in that time period. And but for Wendy Wood, it was really about. As I mentioned, my dad was a big comics reader, grew up in New York. And like a lot of people who grew up in Brooklyn at that time especially, he would just regale me throughout my whole childhood with stories and memories of, you know, you guys, know, like, Charlotte Russes and. And like, you know, going to the movies and the. All day on Saturday with the matinees with the full program and, you know, two cartoons and a short subject and a newsreel and then two movies, the A picture and the B picture. And the whole thing cost you. Tell me if you. If you know, it's a quarter. Okay, so, you know, like all of. And so the world.
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A
What did that mean to. That your dad had given you that?
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B
Well, it was his childhood, and he always made it sound so wonderful and delightful and like the radio programs that he grew up listening to and their theme songs that he would whistle for me or, you know, or like the Shadow, you know, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The shadow knows. And that whole world was. He would. He evoked that world of his childhood for me throughout my whole childhood. So that there was a kind of connection there. And the connection was comic books. Because not only did he buy me comics and read them and then give them to me, but at this time in the 1970s, the early 70s, especially at DC Comics, they were doing this thing where they would have 80 or 100 page comic books for only 25 cents, but only the first story would be new. And then they would have to pad it out to get to the thing. And what they would pad them out with were reprinted stories from my dad's childhood. So I was literally reading the same comic books that he had read. And that completed that sort of continuity or the continuum between his childhood and my childhood. So that. That's where I went when I thought, okay, I didn't go to Cleveland, where Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were from. That would have been an interesting way to go. But I went to Brooklyn. You know, I went into the world. And so for me, it was always really in large part about time travel. Like, just like I couldn't, as a little K, would want to wish I could go back and see what he was talking about or eat a charlotte russe or whatever it was. And I couldn't ever do that. But in this, by writing this book, I was able to sort of travel into that past.
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A
Whose voice came to you more easily? Sam or Joe?
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B
They just. They come at the same time, presented themselves. Like, I did have to figure out how poorly or well I wanted Joe to be able to speak English. And I probably started out with him as an immigrant, you know, from. From Prague. And I probably started out with him speaking it less well, which probably felt more realistic. And then I got irritated with the limitations of having somebody that couldn't speak English that well or like, you can get comedy out of it up to a point, but then when you really need him to be able to say something meaningful or expressive or just simply informative, it's annoying if you have to think like, how. Well, if he can't conjugate in the past and whatever. So at some point, I just decided he'd had. I used sort of the Vladimir and Bokoff solution that he had had a governess who was English speaking when he and his brother were kids. So he had learned English as a child. And so that's why his English isn't perfect. But he speaks pretty well when he gets there, and then he learns quickly and his English improves to a point, but it's never perfect. And then I was able to have fun with his. With his, you know, his misstatements and broken English at certain moments. It was. For me, it was amusing. So he. Maybe he took a little longer in that way.
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A
In your acknowledgments, you thanked Stan Lee for his insights into the golden age of comic books. What was something he told you about that period of time that you. You needed to work into your book?
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B
Well, I mean, it was so. It was. I think it was entertaining for him and for the. I found my way. I know. It was so funny when the book came out. Once the book came out and people read it, at that point, I could have found my way to every single surviving veteran of comic books from that period, because I think I literally met all of them within the five Years or so after the book came out, before they started to pass and. But when I started, I didn't know anybody. I didn't know anyone in that world. I knew one movie producer, Lauren Schuller Donner, who was a producer on the early on the X Men movies. And I had met her through, working on, trying to. We tried to make a different project together, but because I knew her and she had that Marvel connection, she was my conduit. And she got me on the phone with Stan and she got me on the phone with this man, Gil Kane, who was a great comic book artist who started out in that period and Will Eisner and one other person. I'm blanking on who it was, but when I approached each of them, I went to see Gil Kane because he lived in LA and I was living in la, went over to his apartment. I didn't ask them all that much about like, how'd you come up with this character? How'd you come up with that character? Like, that's the part I could imagine, I can imagine how you would come up with the character. But so I would ask them things like, you know, what, what did you do for. What was the best cheap date? Like, what would you do for a date? You didn't have that much money in New York City in 1940. Like, and so to answer your question, like, I asked that to Stan and he said the best cheap day in New York City was for the price of bus fare. You. They have these open top double decker buses that went up and down fifth Avenue and you could sit on the top deck of these New York City bus, not some special tour bus or something, and ride all the way up Park Avenue or whatever. And, and, and on a beautiful evening with your arm around your girl and you're looking up at the buildings and like that was the best. I mean, I think. I'm not sure I was able to work it in to the book as a fully developed scene. There's a reference is made to it and I just would say, like when you were at work in the bullpen with all the other guys around, did everybody smoke? Did nobody smoke? If everybody smoked, which is what they all said then, was there smoke everywhere? Yeah, there was. There was like this pall of smoke just hanging over the whole room all the time. And you know, they had fans going in the summertime that didn't help. And it was hot. You have to remember, like, this is no, there's a world without air conditioning. You know, this is. And they. And I Think it was fun for them because usually at that point in their careers, they were used to being asked more sort of like, so how'd you come up with this character? Whatever. And so for me to be asking them questions about what kind of. What brand of pants did you buy? Like, just weird little details. But I felt like I was going to need these things because there are a lot of things, especially when I was starting, there really was not much in the way of. And of an Internet at the time. Like, I think there was. Alta Vista was like a search engine, whatever that was. And so, you know, to be able to. Now, if you want to say what were the 10 most popular brands of men's trousers in 1940, that'd be easy, right? But at the time, I didn't have any real easy way of finding that kind of thing out, aside from asking people who were there. I remembered. So he was. Stan was a total jet. And he was so kind to me. And I saw him a few times over the years after at various sort of, like, movie Marvel kind of things. I wrote a draft. I wrote a draft of the Spider Man 2 movie. And so, like, I saw him at the premiere for that and a couple other things. And every time he just would, like, come on over. He's like, michael, congratulations. And just. He was a jet. He was a total jet. They were all. And Will Eisner, too, who was one of the great, greatest artists who ever put pencil to paper in the comic book field. Just technically, he was an innovator. He was incredibly gifted draftsman, and he was. So I got an hour out of him at a WonderCon, a comic book convention in Oakland, California, and he sat down with me for an hour. I asked him, do you think, like, I notice it's obvious a lot of the early. A lot of your cohort, these young guys who go into the field at this time were Jews. Why? Like, what do you think the explanation is? And he's like, well, you know, if you wanted to make your living with a pen or pencil, and you wanted. The top was commercial art, illustration, advertising, you know, the slick magazines doing illustrations for Colliers or the Saturday Evening Post. Like, that was the top top, and they didn't hire Jews, so you had to start at the bottom. And the bottom was comics. Like, there was no lower place to be than comic books. And so that's where we all were. You know, he gave me this kind of, like, socioeconomic explanation. Then he said, now that I think about it, I mean, you know, there maybe there was Something in Jewish tradition, he said, what became the epigraph for the book. We have this history of imaginary solutions to impossible problems like the Golem. And I had just the day before written the Golem into the book for the first time. I still wasn't sure what I was doing with the Golem yet, but I had Joe. He was in Prague. Prague Golem. I was just starting to write the Golem into the story, and then he said the same thing. And I just was like, oh, this is incredible. So that was a gift that he gave me. And then we were done. It was time for him to go back to doing whatever he was meant to be doing at this comic book convention. And I thanked him and I wrote my book and I thanked him in the acknowledgments. And then I met him afterwards at Comic Con in San Diego. And he said, you know, after. After you left, my wife Ann came in. She said, who was that guy that you were just talking to? And I said, fanboy. So I thought that was pretty funny.
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A
You are listening to my conversation with author Michael chabon about the 25th anniversary of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, the Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. It was our September get lit with all of it book club selection. We'll have more with Michael after a quick break. This is all of It. You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue my conversation with author Michael Chabon about his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, the Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. The novel celebrates its 25th anniversary this year and was our choice for our special get lit with all of it book club event. In a bit, you'll hear more about the operatic adaptation of the novel, along with special performances from the stars of the Metropolitan Opera. But first, here's more of my conversation with author Michael Chabon. We learn how Sam and Joe create the escapist. How did you come up with the escapist?
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That was really hard. That was one of the hardest things about writing this book. I went for years, maybe if I took five years to write a book. I went for a full three years with a placeholder superhero that I knew was not good, was not right, was not what I would settle on. But I just, it. I had this talk about impossible problems, insoluble problems. Like I had this, a much harder job than Sammy and Joe have. When Sammy and Joe start, there's Superman and there's Batman. That's it. And then they're sort of the pulp hero characters from pulp magazines that were Sort of the antecedents of the comic book superheroes. So all of the. Everything was wide open to them. Super speed, you know, a magic lantern and, you know, all the. Made out of lightning and, you know, every animal was still untaken. There was no Hawkman yet. There was no, you know, there was no people with the power of elements and radiation and all of these things that like, it was all there. And very quickly most of it got used. And then everything else was an imitation. But I had to come up with something that would be persuasively, convincingly original because I was going to say that it was successful, so it couldn't be lame. It had to be something that when like a 10 year old in 1939 saw it, he'd be like, oh, that looks cool. I'm going to buy this. And it's going to be. It becomes this big success. And that turned out to be really, really difficult. And did you run it by people? No, I just. I kept my shame to myself. I had this character called, I'm gonna come embarrassed after all these years.
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A
Tell me one, tell me one.
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He was called Captain Sunbeam. Okay, I know, I knew it sucked. It was a placeholder. And he had the powers of the sun, which, like, weirdly, actually hasn't been used that many. It's been used for sure. And like, in a way, Superman nowadays has his powers because of yellow sun, red sun, whatever. But anyway, and I just thought, I know I have to fix this. So I think I was at least two and a half years into it and I started a revision. I went back to the beginning of the book. I was aware it had lots of other problems too. And I noticed, like within the first 20, 25 pages, there are two references to Houdini. Just in passing, sort of really. And then I thought, that's funny. Why do I. And then there was maybe a later one somewhere. And I was like, why am I talking about Houdini? And then like, you know, within nanoseconds, it's like escape. Escape escapism. Like comic books are condemned as being escapist. Pure escapist trash. Right? That's the way you condemn something. And I have Joe. And he was there as someone who has escaped. And it just. Everything coalesced. And I thought, okay, there's only ever been one superhero escape artist. It's a character called Mr. Miracle. He was created by Jack Kirby in the 1970s. He was partly inspired by, of course, Houdini or that kind of magic, but also by well known comic book Artist named Jim Steranko, who claimed to have been an escape artist when he was a young man and had a lot of stories about his escape artist adventures. And. But that's it. So I guess I resigned myself. Okay. I'm never going to find the unused but awesome character, but at least I found something that is pretty awesome. Because escape artistry as something I've always been interested in, that has ties thematically to all kinds of things that are going on in this book already. And that has only been used once. So at least it's only been used once. And the kids in 1940 don't know that because Mr. Miracle doesn't come out till 1970. So nobody's gonna be like, hey, this is a ripoff of Mr. Miracle, because they haven't heard of him yet. So. So seemed perfect.
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A
Let's go to some questions.
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I'd love to know if you have a personal or familial connection to Prague or the Czech Republic, and whether you think choosing that location for where Joe comes from really influenced his character in the story, or if you think you could have chosen maybe any other Nazi occupied part of Europe.
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I mean, that's a good question. And weirdly, no. I have absolutely no connection that I know of. Honestly, I don't know why I decided to make Joe an immigrant. I have no idea. There weren't, as far as I know. And I never. I never uncovered a pioneering comic book early guy among the first, like, let's say, among the guys who created the first 25 successful comic book superheroes at any one of the publishers. I don't know why I said he was an immigrant. It was just something I.
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That's a good story.
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Something I just said. I just said it. And then I was like, well, from where I knew I wanted there to not to basically only have been Superman at this point. So that's 1938. I needed him to have been an immigrant from a country that was under threat, occupied or invaded, or was Germany itself. Right. Those were my options. Like Germany, bad place to be a Jewish in 1939. Let's say Austria. Anschluss, also bad. And then the next sort of domino that fell was Czechoslovakia. So I went to Prague on my honeymoon. Me. I mean, that would have been like eight years before or whatever when I was writing this book. So I know what Prague looks like. I've been there. I got a strong feeling for it while I was there. I'm just gonna say he's from Prague. It was just this, like, instantaneous chain of decisions. And I was like, great. But it was all just a weird, arbitrary decision that then, in hindsight, looks like it was the magical foreknowledge of where I was going and that I was thematically in control of my book from the start. Just like those references to Houdini that were just sort of sitting there and I wasn't. And meanwhile, there I am with Captain Sunbeam, you know, all these years. So it wasn't on purpose, but on some level, it's really hard not to think that it must have been, or else, why did I do it? Why did I make Joe an immigrant? I don't know.
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I saw you at the opera a few nights ago.
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Yes, I was there.
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What was it like to see your work produce as an opera?
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I mean, it was insane because it's opera. They're doing things that I will never be able to do. Not just with. I mean, as a novelist, not with just the incredible power of characters being able to just simply sing what they're feeling and have it move you instantly like a shot, like an injection of emotion. I can't do that as a novel, as a quote, unquote, realistic novelist, where you're obliged to do things, use things like indirection. And I'm trying to sort of realistically portray how people talk, or what they don't say is often much more important than what they do say. And I have two. I mean, if you compare the scenes in the book where Sammy and Rosa acknowledge Sammy's gayness and what it's going to mean for them to get married without ever acknowledging Sammy's gayness or what it's going to mean. Like they, they. It's all done through the things they don't say to each other, because that's all I can manage as a. It's all going to start to break apart if I try to go to direct. It's good because that's not really how people talk to each other, especially in this particular time period where such things had to be kind of kept. Played very carefully. So. And then, you know, to see it, how powerful it is when it is just being expressed directly. And like, that is a. That was really powerful.
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A
That was my conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon. His novel the Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay turned 25 this year. It was our September get lit with all of it book club selection. Ooh, Gekko. I just love being able to file a claim in under two minutes with the Geico app. Could you sign it? Sign what? The app.
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B
Yeah. Sure.
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A
Oh, it rubbed off the screen when I touched it. Could you sign it again? Anything to help, I suppose.
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B
Get more than just savings. Get more with Geico.
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D
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