The Big Con

Tomorrow morning I'm driving to San Diego to attend Comic Con International. This will be my 25th straight year there.

      The first time I was in my mid-20s, my first book had just come out, and I was researching my second, a history of '60s comics. I was also a rabid young comics fan, thrilled at the new directions the medium was taking in the '80s. Over the subsequent years I went back as an upstart comics writer networking like crazy, as one of the most prominent writers in the business locked into one signing or panel after another, as a burned-out comics writer bitching and moaning about the business, as a former comics writer skirting along the edges, and most recently as a comics historian honored by a small core of long-time fans but unknown to all the new fans in the field. And in the last couple of years I've started to meet young writers and artists who wanted to shake my hand because they'd "grown up on your comics, Mr. Jones."

      I've gone there umarried, married but no kid, with a baby, with a little kid who wanted to look at toys, in various states of marital break-up and reconciliation; this year I'll be there with a 15-year-old son. I've been there too broke to buy the comics I wanted, able to buy huge stacks of the things, loaded with cash but not wanting anything, and broke again.

     I've seen the convention change too, from a few thousand fans—mostly actual comics fans, and of the old nerdy school of hard-core collectors before comics got cool—in the dumpy old downtown convention to 120,000 people filling and overfilling the jet-hangar-sized center on the harbor. I've seen comics fans and creators become hipper, slimmer, more attractive, more ethnically varied, and more likely to be female, as I've seen the comics themselves pushed to the edges of the convention by the movies, TV shows, cartoons, video games, and collectible toys that have become the heart of the convention. I've seen the Klingons, Imperial Storm Troopers, superheroes, and other costumed oddballs come back every year but every year vanish deeper into the crowds of families in t-shirts and shorts. I've seen my generation of young turks become middle-aged veterans, seen the middle-aged veterans I admired become old-timers, seen the old-timers of another day become fewer and fewer.

      I can chart the course of half my life by just recalling each of those 25 sets of four days in the summer in San Diego. And this year, as most years, I go there in an interesting place, my career unfixed, opportunities open and closing like Venus fly-trap lips. I'm pushing these on-line humor books, wrestling with the nonfiction book that's given me the most trouble of any project in my life, and talking up the screenplay I've written about the early days of the comics business, which I know is a good piece of work—but which I'll also have to admit is trapped in a legal and financial dispute of the producer's.

      I never know how I'll feel about any of this as I talk to other writers there or as I think about it on the way home. I never know who I'll meet, either, because as the Con grows amoeba-like it slurps up more and more chunks of the culture outside it. I've just learned that several of my "real novelist" acquaintances will be there this year.

      So I'm going to let my Sisyphean obligation roll to the bottom of the hill and sit there for a week. This is no time to let my view of life be blocked by a big rock. I'm going to let my head empty out in the liminal state of the long I-5 drive. Then I'll plunge in, eyes and ears open, and find out who I am this year.

Collaboration

I think one reason I'm having trouble surrendering myself to this book is that I'm just burned out on the loneliness of the writing life. When I was a kid I was really isolated and had a lot of social anxiety, so pulling into myself and making things up was a great comfort. This, obviously, had a great deal to do with my decision to devote my life to writing.

      I climbed out of my hole in my early twenties, and as part of that started collaborating with another young writer, Will Jacobs, on humor books, light mysteries, fan-boy non-fiction and comic books. That was a true joy: We'd spend days at each other's houses, brainstorm and plot together, go off and write separate chunks and pass them back and forth, and read a lot of our stuff to our friends. Books got written, but it seemed to happen through play. And when I began to move back to solo writing, the doors I'd opened with Will led me into other collaborative work: comic books, where most of my artists and editors wanted to be real creative partners, and screenplays for hire, where regular meetings with eager young development execs punctuated the stretches of solitary work.

      At first it was a relief when I started carving out time to write my own books. Days of uninterrupted thought! The freedom to make huge structural changes without having to persuade an editor! I even took some comfort in retreating back to the solitude that had gotten me through anxious times as a kid. And even then there continued to be collaborative efforts. In researching Killing Monsters I did storytelling workshops with kids in classrooms, about as far from a quiet, lonely experience as I could get.

      Then, before I'd even started the writing in earnest, I began getting invitations to speak at conferences on media and child development, and I found myself part of a sprawling international conversation. Men of Tomorrow required a tremendous amount of face-to-face interviewing and regular email conversations with other comics historians. Big parts of that book felt like massive multi-player collaborations.

      But The Undressing of America, set further in the past (the heart of the story is the 1920s, and the principals were nearly all dead by the end of the '50s), allows for a great deal less interviewing. Although there are other students of the tabloids, the confessional magazines, and old health crusades, there is no vibrant subculture constantly arguing the details. There's a lot of library research, and I do like library research—but dear God! To fly to New York and walk through midtown and spend the day in that windowless room with those effing microfilm machines (whrrr—klak—whrrr—klak) when I could be out drinking coffee with my snappy Manhattan friends or looking at the spring light flashing on the Empire State Building? Whose idea was that?

      Fellow writers can be a huge comfort. Being able to talk about all this with my pals at the Writers Grotto has kept me sane and gotten me through some of the worst resistance on the book. But here's a perverse twist: When I'm having trouble with the writing, I find it hard to show up at the Grotto. Or at least be open about what I'm going through. Part of it's that I don't want to be the whiner in the room. And part of it, as my cohort Jennine Lanouette helped me see recently, is that I punish myself by isolating. I get down on myself, feel like other people don't want to hear about this shit, tell myself I'm better off just staying home and working at the kitchen table where at least I have my dog to keep me company, and so I hold myself in that juvenile space where I resent the book and resist entering it. (I'm at my kitchen table, not the Grotto, as I write this.) It's easiest for me to be at the Grotto when I'm washing dishes after a party or leading a meeting of the goal-support group some of us have formed. Collaborative efforts again.

      No shock, then, that I seized on the chance to start collaborating with Will on humor again. Or that I find it easier to blog about writing my book, with the payoff of quick comments from other people, or at least being able to imagine readers out there the instant I hit "Publish Post." And I make comments on other people's blogs, post other writers' humor pieces on our Friends of Will and Gerry blog, and...collaborate with the blogosphere.

      So here's the big thing for me: For 35 years I've been running on the unexamined assumption that I'm basically a loner who should be happiest when he's producing personal work in solitude. In fact, I think I'm a lover of people and a natural collaborator with some moderate social phobias who got set on the wrong path when my mom—in her alcohol-muddied anxieties—pulled me out of the world at a crucial moment. And who has been able to ignore that disconnect because most of my writing career has, in fact, been far from solitary. The idea that I would someday be a Real Writer (which in my mind has meant the generation of work from some lonely internal singularity) has sat there like a vision of manifest destiny. But really: It ain't me.

      This is a good book I'm writing, and I believe that the people I'm writing about deserve to have their stories told. I think it will add something to our understanding of how we as a culture got where we are. And suddenly I realize I'm doing it a disservice by making it "my book." How do I get it out of my head? How do I make it into a collaboration? And with whom?

The Anonymous Writer

I said a few posts ago that most of my professional writing so far has spared me a lot of critical scrutiny as a writer. I've sold my non-fiction mainly on my knowledge of the subject matter, thus taking the spotlight off the writing itself. Writing comic books I can hide behind artists and established characters. But with this book, about subjects that few people are aware of, I'm really forced to present myself as a "writer," to succeed or fail on my ability to capture and hold readers through my narrative. This is the first book I've sold because an editor wanted to work with me and my literary voice as opposed to a subject matter.

      That led me to think that my challenge here was to deliver a powerful enough voice and authorial presence to justify the book. To put me at the center of the process, demanding attention as me and then delivering a strong enough authorial presence to justify the attention. But now I'm starting to wonder if I don't have it backwards.

      My thinking's been shifting since I spent the past weekend at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Friday night I saw Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother. Saturday it was William Desmond Taylor's Soul of Youth, René Clair's Les Deux Timides, Carl Maria von Dreyer's Mikäel, and Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs, with Conrad Veidt. Then four more on Sunday: Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Coleen Moore in Her Wild Oat, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Jujiro, and the King Vidor/Marion Davies/Marie Dressler The Patsy. Movies ranging from the good to the incomparable, with superb live music and a Castro Theater full of joyous worshippers. The effect of the whole was transcendent.

      The emphasis of the introductory speeches and the program notes was almost entirely on the directors and actors, with occasional mentions of cinematographers, producers, and studios. Almost never was a writer mentioned, and yet silent movies had writers. Between the desire of Universal Pictures executives to adapt Victor Hugo's L'Homme Qui Rit and the astonishing on-film work of Paul Leni and Conrad Veidt lay a writing process, no doubt hard and chaotic and hair-pullingly fraught, during which at least four scenarists had to chop a sprawling, wordy, twelve-volume novel down to about a hundred pages of visual continuity. Events had to be cut, rearranged, stripped down, and invented. Image and movement had to be substituted for conversations and exposition. Characters had to be sharpened to points of light. And then, to convey the information that only words could carry, a fifth writer was brought in to script the intertitles, in each of which a transition had to be carried or a backstory evoked in a third as many words as a typical Hugo sentence. A great silent movie was also, usually, a writerly triumph.

      But of the five writers on The Man Who Laughs, I'd heard of none of them. And I know a fair amount about old Hollywood, too. Only one of the five, whose name I can't remember now, got credit on screen.

     Sometimes you'll hear a spiritual writer speak of writing not for personal glory but for God. Those silent movie writers were doing that, in a sense, although the gods they were giving expression to were Paul Leni and Conrad Veidt and Olga Baclanova and "Uncle Carl" Laemmle's Universal Picture Corp. Their motives were scarcely holy, of course, but what they asked of their talents was the same: They turned their writing not toward expressing themselves or calling attention to themselves but toward making a larger project work. They directed their art through others because it was through those others, those actors, those crew people, that the story would be revealed.

      All of which puts my own past work in perspective. Whether I was subsumed in a collaboration with cartoonists or serving as the vessel for some non-fiction subject matter to find its way to the readers interested in it, my relative anonymity was a gift to the project. I was far more useful leading the readers attention away from me instead of toward me. So now I'm thinking that even in this book, in which the author and his skills and his voice are so much more important than in past work, I might still do best to make sure that the process is not about me. Maybe the best thing I can do is forget not only about the readers' eyes on me. Let go of both the fear of not living up to critical expectations and the hope of receiving critical accolades. Be just a conduit for the story and for the immortality of the people I write about.

But what's this book ABOUT?

My friend Todd Oppenheimer at the Writers' Grotto asked me that the other day. Todd and I are in a sort of mutual support group that meets every two weeks to set and compare personal writing goals. "You've been talking about this book for a while," he said, "but you always call it just 'the FSG book.' You've never said what it's about."



      I had two reactions to this. My first was, "Screw you, Todd." That's the one I didn't say.

The one I said was, "That's a really good question, Todd. Thanks for asking that." Then I explained that although I was very clear on the subject matter and the central characters of my narrative, I felt I was still in the process of zeroing in on the major points I wanted to make and the specific focus of the story, and so I was still wrestling with issues of timeline, entry point, structure, voice, and point of view. As a result of this, I was still uncertain about my title—I'd gone through True Story, American Madness, and Mad Fortune on the way to The Undressing of America—and so tended to refer to it as simply "the FSG book." But now that Todd led me to think about it, I saw how that vagueness only compounded the problem of writing chapters that I could commit to well enough to send my editor, and how referring to it in terms of the publisher that was waiting for it only kept me locked in thinking of it as an unfulfilled obligation rather than a book unto itself.


      So I made a resolution, right there talking to Todd, that I would settle on The Undressing of America as a working title, at least, and refer to it by that. (It helped that I'd already run it by my editor and he liked it.) That's why I chose the name of the book as the name of this blog, so that every time I came here to write about it I would be engaging with the book itself at least nominatively, instead of some new, separate entity like "It Sure Is Hard to Write a Book" or "The Agony of Being Me" or "Out of Sheer Pique." And I told Todd what I knew for sure about what the book was about. Not so fully or so neatly as this, but in essence:



      In 1919, a husband and wife team named Bernarr and Mary Macfadden published a magazine that transformed American culture. It was called True Story, and although few remember it now, and cultural historians are inclined to give it a passing nod at best, it became the best-selling and most widely imitated magazine of the 1920s, upended publishers' perceptions of what the public wanted to read, shifted the relationship between media "producer" and "consumer" forever, and discovered a vast new market among young women negotiating a changing moral climate. And it accomplished more than any other enterprise to shatter the culture of Victorian concealment and usher us into a "culture of the explicit," a culture that still shapes our public discourse, in which increasingly frank confessions of our private emotional struggles become essential threads in our social fabric: guides to living, subjects for bonding, moral crucibles, self identifiers, class identifiers, entertainment, titillation, grist for outrage, commodities. True Story's immediate descendants were the tabloids, true crime stories, celebrity gossip rags, "women's issues" magazines, and the mainstreaming of soft-core pornography (and the Macfaddens published all of those in their earliest days). Its longer-term descendants include almost everything we lump under "reality media."


      Bernarr and Mary Macfadden themselves had hardly any idea what they were doing. He grew up an abused, neglected, and sickly farm boy in the 19th century Ozarks who discovered body building and turned himself through sheer will and desperation (desperation to be something, to be noticed, to have power over his life, to drive away the illness that take his parents from him as a child) into a paragon of health and strength. He knocked around the carnival circuits of mid-America for years as a strongman and a professional wrestler before he went to the 1893 Chicago world's fair (the "White City" fair) and saw people making a killing on the new "fitness" fad. Over the next decade, Bernarr made a modest success of himself selling exercise gadgets, running health farms for rich hypochondriacs, opening health-food restaurants, and publishing Physical Culture, the first magazine to call attention to body building as a pursuit and a subculture and the first to demonstrate that you could sell a lot of magazines with pictures of nearly naked men and women if you did so to demonstrate exercises. He reached the second tier among health gurus, grinding out book after book on his self-generated ideas for health and happiness, rejecting traditional medicine, and getting himself on the AMA's enemies list
.

      It wasn't the AMA that drove him to the edge of bankruptcy and forced him to flee the country. It was the censors, led by the great "social purifier" himself, Anthony Comstock, who had developed a special enmity for Macfadden. When Physical Culture ran a serialized novel dramatizing the causes and costs of venereal disease, Bernarr was convicted of peddling pornography, and when he fought back he became a cause celebre, an opponent of the early 20th Century equivalent of "abstinence only" sex education, the mad idea that is always held up by cultural conservatives that we would not have any moral or sexual problems if we just never talked about them. In the end, the President himself pardoned him, but the opponents of sexual discussions would not relent, and in 1912 Macfadden fled to England.



      There, at the age of forty-five, he met and pursued and married a nineteen-year-old amateur swimming champion named Mary Williamson. He won her by staging a pageant called "Britain's Perfect Woman," promising a glorious tour of England to the winner, knowing full well that his object was to secure a young bride who would bear him heirs, a "Phyical Culture Family" to promote his program for achieving perfect health. Mary herself was a young woman of simple goals, a carpet-mill worker, a Yorkshire lass who just wanted to swim, enjoy the days, and raise a family. She was lonely, too, having been kept house-bound by illness for much of her childhood, and susceptible to a man who seemed to need her every minute, who told her how to live her life, who spoke of the crusade they would lead to restore mankind to health, who was sexually insatiable, who wanted to be her father and lover at once.



      The Macfaddens had just begun to build their new life in England when the Great War came. They retreated back to America, back to poverty and trouble. Bernarr tried every trick he could to boost the sales of Physical Culture, to launch a new health farm, to invent a new exercise gadget that would make him rich. Everything backfired. Then Mary had her idea.

      Physical Culture published letters from Macfadden's followers in which they described their own struggles with illness and triumphant returns to health. Mary help select and edit the letters, and she knew very well that young women like herself would be most interested in those that veered into moral and marital and emotional issues as well. No other twenty-five year old, lower-middle-class woman in the world was in a position to create a new magazine, and perhaps no one else could have imagined True Story.

       It was an instant success. Within a few years it had turned the Macfaddens into milloinaires and inspired Bernarr to go head-to-head with William Randolph Hearst for mastery of the newsstands.

 Then everything began to change. A new figure entered Bernarr's life, an amateur stage magician and crime novelist named Fulton Oursler who began to whisper things in Bernarr's ear that Mary didn't like. Bernarr came to see himself as man's salvation and diverted his resources to a man run for the presidency. And there was the terrible thing that befell the Macfaddens' baby son, thanks to Bernarr's devotion to his own odd health precepts....



      By the time I'd reached that point in my quick summary of all this to Todd, he was nodding enthusiastically. "It sounds like a great story," he said. "And it sounds like just the sort of thing you'd do well, like it's right in line with your interests and your strengths." I thanked him for that. It did sound like a compelling book when I described it, and the decisions about what to include and how to present them didn't seem so daunting after all. Then Todd asked, "But what's the 'ah-ha' of the book? What is it that's going to make it stand out, that's going to get you the NPR interviews, the reviews, the attention that a book needs to get anywhere these days?"



      And I thought: "Screw you, Todd."

Sisyphus Rocks

A Facebook friend was comparing herself to Sisyphus this morning, which got me thinking about the old stone-roller's dilemma. You know the myth: the arrogant king whom the gods punished by making him roll a huge stone to the top of a hill, only to have it slip away from him right at the crest and roll all the way back to the bottom every time. Anyone who's ever tried to write a book can identify. I've thought about old Sis a few times myself while pushing The Undressing of America toward completion.

      But today something new occurred to me. What turns Sisyphus's task into torture? The disappointment and frustration of seeing the rock roll back down the hills, right? So his problem is the expectation that one of these times, maybe this time, he's actually going to get it to the top. But what if he changes his attitude? What if Sisyphus says to himself, "Okay. This is what I'm doing with my eternal life. This is who I am. I push a rock." Maybe then he could start to enjoy it. You know: fresh air, exercise, the feel of the rough stone against his palms, the smell of the loam as the boulder's weight breaks the soil beneath it, the regular break when the rock rolls back down, the pleasant walk to the bottom to start over again. And no worries about what he's going to do next. After all, it's not the destination that counts, right? It's the journey.
      

      So starting tomorrow, I'm reinterpreting the Sisyphean challenge of writing my book. After all, as Olympian punishments go, this one's pretty sweet. I'm not a bodiless shade drifting through a lightless limbo. I'm not being tantalized by food that's snatched away. I get to wake up every morning and push my rock, and if I don't get all worked up over how it's all supposed to come out, what's not to like? If Sisyphus has learned any wisdom and humility in all those centuries in Tantalus, I'll bet he's pretty grateful to the gods for the assignment. Am I supposed to rage against the job they've given me? What's that but arrogance?