How fortunate that my first parasocial relationship, as they’re now called, was with a genius. I encountered Robert Crumb’s work at the age of 8 or 9, when his comics could be found — lurking and sweating — in the “Counterculture” section of my local used-book store in San Francisco. Frightening stuff for a kid. Titillating, too. But “Counterculture” was crammed with scary and spicy material. Only Crumb’s work, specifically the autobiographical comics, wormed under my skin.
The worming occurred, I understood much later, because of the material’s intimacy. Few artists have the technical ability, desire, intellect and courage (or berserk compulsion) to render their souls legible on a page — not to mention their kinks, agonies, protruding Adam’s apple and sub-ramrod posture. What I was sensing in my bookstore adventures with Crumb was an early glimmer of what it might mean to truly know a person, with all the joy and terror that such knowing entails. It hardly mattered that I would never meet the man.
Except, 30 years later, I did. One morning in April an elegant figure in a fedora strolled up Avenue A in the East Village. He was instantly recognizable for his spidery hands and Coke-bottle glasses. With him was the author and curator Dan Nadel, who has written “Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life,” a superb biography of an artist who, starting in the 1960s, changed the shape of comics in every decade that followed. Nothing escaped the penetrating eye of Crumb, whose work took on liberal hypocrisy, sexual and racial violence, Christianity, drugs, the C.I.A., existential distress, love, consumerism and death.
To help promote the book Crumb had flown over from France, where he has lived since 1991 in a house that his late wife, the influential artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, found for the family.
We met at the restaurant Superiority Burger, where the artist and his biographer slouched in a red booth and deplored the state of modern pants.
“Modern pants are stingily designed,” Crumb, 81, griped. “They have a low waistline and a high crotch, so your junk is all bunched up in there. Are they supposed to be sexy or what?”
“It’s a complicated thing, getting dressed,” Nadel said.
Crumb: “It shouldn’t be, but it is.”
“You want to look like an adult.”
“A dignified adult,” Crumb said. “People these days wear untucked T-shirts with some stupid logo on it and shorts and sneakers. Clown outfits. They look like idiots. Fools. You can’t look intelligent in an outfit like that.”
“Tell that to Zuckerberg,” Nadel said. They chuckled.
In person, as on the page, Crumb has a charmingly rude ’tude and a steel-trap mind.
By the time Nadel conceived of the biography, other writers had been circling, but none had the encyclopedic knowledge of comics history required for the job. “When Dan came forward, he already knew all that stuff,” Crumb said.
Still, the six-year process had a slow start. Nadel wrote a letter to Crumb on stationery and mailed it off. No response. A few months later, he followed up by email. A reply came: If Nadel was serious about the project, he had to come to France. In the days before traveling, Nadel grew so nervous he choked on a piece of lamb and wound up in the emergency room. The trip was postponed.
Eventually he made it to Crumb’s village in southern France. The two had dinner, played records and came to an agreement the following morning: Nadel could write the biography under the condition that he address the (plentiful) charges of sexism and racism against the artist’s work head-on, as Crumb had no interest in brooking a hagiography.
Unlike paintings or novels, comics hit the beholder with a double whammy of visual and verbal expression, and the result can electrify as swiftly as it can alienate. Over the decades, many have been alienated by Crumb, whose Dürer-level hand is attached to a mind that rages and leers as often as it probes and theorizes.
Part of Nadel’s motivation, he said, was to contextualize a figure who had zigzagged from the margins to the mainstream and back. “There was this idea that Crumb was a bad boy breaking all the rules of the form,” he said. “Actually he’s a traditionalist who figured out a way to use the language of comics to say entirely new things — to deal with adulthood in America in a frank and confrontational way, while maintaining unbelievable formal rigor.”
To write the book, Nadel submerged himself in a colossal archive. Because Crumb doesn’t own a computer or smartphone, he reads email on printouts provided by his assistant, Maggie. He then composes a response by hand, which Maggie types and sends. Hard copies of both messages are then filed in boxes. Nadel estimated that he had read between 3,000 and 4,000 pages of correspondence alone.
“You buried me in paper,” Nadel said over coffee and French fries. “I didn’t know how I’d swim through it all.”
“What amazes me is that you did.”
After lunch the two went for a walk. Despite earlier flirtations with spring, the temperature had sunk to 34 degrees and New York’s organisms were suffering from confusion: The daffodils drooped, the humans shivered in light jackets and only one of dozens of cherry blossom trees in the neighborhood had mustered itself into bloom.
On East Fifth Street Crumb spotted a faux-African statue buried in a heap of trash bags. He strolled into the rubbish and lifted the statue, brushing away coffee grounds and a lemon peel. “This is so wacky,” he said in delight, tucking the statue under his arm.
Next on the itinerary was a visit to the apartment of Crumb’s friend and bandmate John Heneghan, who is a collector of rare 78s. Heneghan answered the door with his wife, Eden Brower, who sings and plays ukulele and guitar in Eden & John’s East River String Band, along with Crumb and other guests.
“I found this on the street,” Crumb announced, presenting the statue as a house gift. It was admired and displayed in the apartment kitchen.
The three men and Brower, who wore an ethereal pink skirt, settled into the living room and stared down Heneghan’s collection of records: rows and rows of fragile discs in brown sleeves, all neatly labeled and arranged beneath portraits of bluesmen by Crumb.
They played Daddy Stovepipe, the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, Gus Cannon, Bradley Kincaid. Crumb closed his eyes and hummed along, knees bouncing, ecstatic in aural submission.
It was time for the journalist to see herself out, leaving the aficionados to their mournful jug tones and melodic plaints. Earlier in the day Crumb had confessed bafflement toward the ongoing interest of the media, or biographers for that matter, in his life.
“There’s no more public person than me,” he said, alluding to decades of radiological self-exposure. “Everyone knows more than they care to know about my private life.”
“Why did you agree to let me do this book?” Nadel asked.
Crumb thought about it for a moment, worrying the fabric on his fine trousers.
“I guess I felt sorry for you,” he decided. They both cracked up.
Molly Young is a book critic for The Times and a contributing writer for The Times Magazine.
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