In the Beginning

Harold Bloom’s review of R. Crumb’s illustrated Genesis has something deeply honest about it, and something deeply dishonest. Bloom’s a brilliant Shakespearean, not the most obvious candidate to criticize (or appreciate) a book of Biblical comix by a tacky countercultural icon. But since Crumb took Genesis seriously — he says he failed to draw even one successful chapter in snarky comix mode, so he approached the whole book as a straight illustration job — the NYRB took Crumb seriously enough to assign Bloom as a critic.

The result is stodgy but interesting. Bloom doesn’t like Crumb and gets away from him as quickly as possible. “Staring at the women and men of Crumb’s Genesis,” he writes, “I dimly recall someone showing me an issue of Mad magazine.” He goes on to recall his ongoing reverence for both the Bible and for Thomas Mann, who wrote his own version of Old Testament events in Joseph and His Brothers.

He says the “central literary character in Genesis” is Yahweh, a character as believable and rich as Falstaff, Hamlet, or Don Quixote. He names the Old Testament’s nameless narrator the “Yahwist,” and goes on to explain what other interpreters of the Bible got right. “Mann’s triumph is his Jacob, who is very close to the Yahwist’s original and in Mann as in Genesis rather close to Yahweh himself.” He spends almost the whole review not mentioning Crumb. But he says the women in the Crumb book “are so dreadful that I am made unhappy.”

The Yahwist and Mann alike emphasize the beauty of Rachel and her son Joseph, which clashes with Crumb’s visual imagination, but disarmingly Crumb says: ‘I’m not very good at drawing attractive women actually.’

I’ll believe that Crumb’s women are a problem in this whole Genesis project. I also believe Bloom when he says Crumb hasn’t immersed himself enough in Genesis to interpret it half as profoundly as other artists, like Mann. But it is a strange criticism from a man who barely immerses himself in the book he was asked to review.

Apart from this dishonesty, Bloom writes one paragraph of praise that will strike most Crumb fans as the whole reason to have the book:

... his position toward the story is very refreshing. He is free of stale pieties and he properly has no use for the Priestly sentiments preserved in Genesis. The moral insanity of making divine justice an excuse for human suffering is alien to Crumb. Whatever aesthetic unease I feel in regard to his women is more than answered by his healthy wariness of Yahweh, a sanity I attribute to his graphic exuberance.

     posted 4 December 2009 by Michael Scott Moore

  1. ‘I’m not very good at drawing attractive women actually.’

    Charlie Brown couldn’t draw hands.

    Oldest cartoon line of a generation. After Lucy does all of her anlaysis (it goes on for five strips) of why all the people have their hands behind their backs, he says: “I just can’t draw hands.” Crumb’s answer is really clever, funny, and smart. And I want to believe a testament to that final Friday punchline in a Peanuts strip.

    It does make me want to see the actual book.

    — e    Dec 5, 01:37 pm    #

  2. p.s. Also reminds me of a comic who once riffed on “How did Adam and Eve figure it out? I mean, I get it, but I’m sitting here in confirmation class and it would be nice to have pictures with some detail. Just so I can tell my friends so they convert, and then prove it with my stash of Playboys and the cartoons. They’d never believe it, othwerwise. A man and a woman figured that out with NOTHING. Did God deliver them with assembly instructions?”
    —Or something like that.

    — e    Dec 5, 01:58 pm    #

  3. The old “you didn’t deliver the book I wanted to read so I’m going to ignore the book you did deliver” ploy. Sheesh. It’s also very difficult for the New York crowd (whether physically located there or not) to admit that some striking advances in narrative have occurred in the past 40 years via graphic means. Here in France, where adult-aimed comics (bandes dessinées) are perfectly normal and accepted as literature (when they deserve it) this isn’t news. But I don’t expect to open the NYRB and see, say, a decent discussion of the oeuvre of the Hernandez Brothers. A shame.

    — Ed Ward    Dec 5, 03:10 pm    #

  4. Why do the women have to be conventionally attractive and feminine?

    I can think of plenty of artists whose women are neither.

    — Bowleserised    Dec 7, 12:14 pm    #

  5. Yeah, I had a Bad Critics’ Night the other night: read Bloom’s review, which is just as you pegged it, then went on to a New Yorker roundup of Richard Powers’ work, extremely negative (although with some very legit beefs), which managed to neglect his best book, The Time of Our Singing, because it didn’t fit the stereotype the critic was trying to erect. Grrrr. The U.S. needs another magazine for brainy folk, and I’m afraid McSweeney’s isn’t cutting it.

    — Ed Ward    Dec 7, 03:07 pm    #

  6. Well, if the woman’s meant to be a stunning beauty, the artist should be able to render it, conventionally or unconventionally. I’d believe Crumb can’t. But I haven’t seen his book yet.

    @Ed: No, McSweeney’s isn’t.

    — Mike    Dec 7, 03:38 pm    #

  7. You’d be hard pressed to get a stodgier reviewer than Bloom, so I guess he feels pretty fancy granting graphic novels some respect as legit lit—about 20 years after the fact—though I can’t really confirm that as his review is pay-walled. Even the NYT has a “graphic books” bestseller list now, for crying out loud. If Bloom tries to get away from Crumb as soon as possible, it’s pretty clear from his strained reference to Mad magazine that he has zero clue about the significance of Robert Crumb. I always thought that Crumb intentionally exaggerated his female figures as over-sexual-but-unattractive as a commentary on objectification. In comix or comics, this is pretty advanced, even today, when women are stilll routinely sexually objectified, even when (or because) they’re action heroes. Funny you mention McSweeney’s, Ed, because this month’s (McSweeney’s-owned) Believer mag has a pretty good interview with his wife, who’s also a comic artist as well as a “regular” artist. She draws her women even harsher than her husband does. The interview is also only excerpted online, but I can scan+post it for anyone who wants to read it.

    @Ed, how about Harper’s?

    — Ben    Dec 7, 06:46 pm    #

  8. Does the Bible say Eve is beautiful?

    — Bowleserised    Dec 7, 08:28 pm    #

  9. @B: I don’t think so, which means there he’s off the hook. I’m just giving Bloom the benefit of the doubt on this because Crumb himself has said the same thing.

    — Mike    Dec 8, 12:10 am    #

  10. @Ben: Sorry, your comment got eaten temporarily. Bloom might have a very good idea who Crumb is and still have too much dignity to give a damn. His generation of critics can pretend the ‘60s never happened, which is not our prerogative.

    — Mike    Dec 8, 12:25 am    #

  11. Also, if Ben’s right that the harsh look of Crumb’s women is a comment on objectification, I suspect it’s a comment on his own tendency to objectify. Makes good satire, but still. A little detachment would free his style.

    — Mike    Dec 8, 12:39 am    #

  12. You’re probably quite right on that last point. Crumb’s an odd cookie who’s got loads of issues to work out. And if it weren’t for comix, he’d probably have ended up just another raving lunatic on the fringe of the fringe of society. He was ambivalent about the 60s zeitgeist, though, and, like Dylan, was embraced as an icon even when the icon couldn’t really care less—was even quite hostile to the embracers, also like Dylan. After all, Crumb’s most famous hippie, Mr. Natural, was pure satire.

    Dunno about this Genesis yet, but I can say his Yahweh looks totally awesome. And I’m using that word in the Christian-appropriate sense.

    — Ben    Dec 8, 02:03 pm    #

  13. @Ben: Harper’s doesn’t seem to me to have the breadth of vision I’m looking for, although it’s probably the closest candidate. I do think—which is why I mentioned McSweeney’s—that a younger mind-set is called for here. Not going to happen: at least for the moment, print magazines are dead. I don’t think this will always be the case, but that’s what’s happening now.

    As for Crumb’s “beautiful” women, let’s remember that Eve was the most beautiful woman on earth for a while, although somehow her two surviving sons found women to marry. (Where’d they come from?) Crumb is capable of drawing people with some accuracy, as his sketchbooks show, and as some of the pieces that’ve wound up in the New Yorker over the past few years show, but they have to be observable, ie, around for him to use them as models, and my guess is there weren’t many models either in the village near here where he and Aline live nor in the little shepherd’s cottage he rented to use as the studio while he was doing this. His imagination has always shorted his graphic skills for his narrative skills, which has been fine with me, but when he’s working with someone else’s narrative, as he is here, that might not make for his finest drawing.

    Anyway, I definitely want a copy of this, and am hoping one of the BD stores here has the English version.

    — Ed Ward    Dec 8, 02:45 pm    #

  14. > As for Crumb’s “beautiful” women, let’s remember that Eve was the most beautiful woman on earth for a while

    Yes, but that’s just where B. is right. Standards were undeveloped.

    Here’s the future of magazines, probably.

    — Mike    Dec 8, 08:14 pm    #

  15. Eve was probably the most beautiful of apes, at least.

    — Ben    Dec 10, 12:05 am    #