Paul Buhle: The Comic Monger
Which story do you feel most connected to and why?
So many of the stories in the Working adaptation go straight to my heart, I’d be hard-pressed to say which mean the most to me. Among the most unique and interesting, the farm worker story drawn by Dylan Miner, a Métis (from Michigan) who is also a protégé of Carlos Cortez, the late great woodblock artist /poet of the WWI; the jazz drawings by African American artist Lance Tooks; the “Hooker” drawing by Sabrina Jones (this one may have gotten the book taken out of Young Adult school curricula as too daring); and the deeply textured drawings of Sharon Rudahl. But the others are great, too. Each artist seemed to get what Studs was driving at, the real character of the interviewee.
Has working on the graphic adaptation inspired you to do something “Terkelesque”?
My own oral history fieldwork is probably finished. But then, I believed it was finished several times, before something prompted me back to work again. Around 1990, I learned that most of the victims of the Hollywood blacklist, by this time around 80 years old, had never been interviewed. So I set out to interview scriptwriters, mostly, as they reached the end of their lives. It was a tremendous pleasure, and several books came out of that series of interviews. Some of them had written my favorite films and television shows of childhood, though mostly under pseudonyms, while on the run from the FBI.
I decided to launch the Oral History of the American Left to reach real old-timers, and the ones most fascinating to me were octogenarians born abroad. As it turned out, a high percentage were Jewish, and of those, the most intriguing were old-timers who were the last generation of secular-radical Yiddish speakers, among them every type on the Left, although more of them former Communists than anything else.
Some gave me books left behind by late husbands or wives, in Yiddish. Although a mediocre German student, I decided to learn the language and I still enjoy reading, struggling with it, and occasionally translating poetry from it.
This Yiddish lore was also my clue, in a way, to the Jewish comic artists that I began writing about frequently during the 1990s, including Ben Katchor and Art Spiegelman. And the source of the anthology almost finished, Yiddishland, due for publication in spring 2011.
And you’re creating new comic art volumes as well?
Three biographies by three artists (on anarchist Emma Goldman, dancer Isadora Duncan and revolutionary Che Guevara, respectively) and three archival volumes: Jews and American Comics, The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, and Comics in Wisconsin.
Just ahead, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (art by Sabrina Jones), Yiddishland (many artists), and History’s Robin Hood (collages and comics). I hope to do a volume titled Bohemians and Free Lovers, going back to Paris of the 1850s. That one, among others, awaits a publisher’s commitment.
After all your study of Terkel, can you draw any conclusions for us about what work means to us as individuals?
Work until the 1980s was, at the blue-collar end but also much white-collar work, badly paid but slowly paced. Harvey said about his own decades at the VA that it was a “great job” because he never took any worries home at night. Also, he wasn’t too closely supervised, he moved around the hospital mostly, got his work done, but could do so without pushing himself much. Since then, work has become better paid but far more intense, and far more often extended into post-working hours.
