Cartooning is largely the province of the shy loner. That was certainly true for me, during the decade or so, beginning when I was eight years old, that I aspired to be a professional comic-book writer and illustrator. Shyness is no crime, but it can present a large obstacle to getting what one wants in life. An intriguing chicken-or-the-egg question about cartoonists might be: are they shy people attracted to imagining and illustrating alternate worlds as a way of creating what they only dream about in the worlds they inhabit, or does cartooning, a solitary pursuit, make people less social beings? Whatever the answer with regard to me, I felt what is often called the shock of recognition, saw a reflection of my own well-mannered but antisocial younger self, when I read this passage by another ex-would-be cartoonist and comic-book fan, John Updike, in his beautiful collection of memoirs, Self-Consciousness: “If I’m nice and good, you’ll leave me alone to read my comic books.”
I imagine the “you’ll” in that passage to refer to adult relatives and family friends, of whom there was no shortage in my own case: they were the aunts and uncles who lived in very close proximity to the house in Washington, D.C., where I grew up. The memory of their collective presence is a warm and pleasant one, but one of my regrets is that I did not get to know them better as individuals—particularly the two uncles who lived closest, good-hearted but rough-hewn, country-raised men, exemplars of rural self-sufficiency whose like, in this age of MapQuest, weather.com, and Internet grocery shopping, seems increasingly rare. There was the boisterous Uncle Manson, of the sudden and startling rooster-like laugh and bone-jarring backslaps; there was the smaller, quieter, darker-skinned Uncle Nay, of the manliness that was almost shaming—the more so because he never consciously projected it: it emanated, rather, from the extreme competence he brought to everything from fixing his car to building his back porch, tasks at which he shrugged off the occasional accident, continuing to work as blood dripped from his arm. In retrospect they were compelling figures, but in the 1970s I was much more interested in drawing than in asking my uncles questions about their days as young men in the sticks of Virginia.
There was one social aspect of my cartooning days, though, owing to the placement of the drafting table I received one Christmas. Rather than in my shoebox of a bedroom, where it wouldn’t have begun to fit, the table —the greatest gift I ever got as a boy—went against the partial wall separating our family’s living room and dining room. There, I had a view (albeit sideways) of our TV and could talk with my mother, grandmother, and sisters as I drew; I have very fond memories of doing so.
And if shyness is a trait common to many cartoonists, so is another, seemingly opposite one: a desire for control. As a child I had an aversion to what is now called imaginative play when it involved other children; the whole point, to me, was to exercise my creativity, not have it thwarted or compromised by some stupid kid from around the corner. At my desk, with my pen, pencil, markers, ruler, and thick white paper, I was in command. And when I drew the superhero who was my alter-ego, I gave him—i.e., myself—what in all my shyness I didn’t have: a girlfriend. She was as pretty as my limited skills could make her. Her name was Laura.
Unbeknownst to me then, Laura was also the name of a famous 1944 movie, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Gene Tierney as the title character, a beautiful and virtuous young ad executive. Dana Andrews plays the brave, laconic Lieutenant Mark McPherson, who steps in to investigate Laura’s apparent murder. In doing so he meets the men in her life: Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), a cultured, pompous columnist and radio commentator, and Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), a man smooth to the point of being slippery, who by his own account doesn’t know “a lot about anything” but knows “a little bit about practically everything” —a “vague sort of a fellow,” as McPherson calls him to his face, who had no visible means of support until Laura gave him a job at her agency. The more McPherson learns about Laura, and the more he gazes at the portrait of her, painted by yet another of her suitors, the more he falls in love with her. Meanwhile, his investigation appears to go nowhere. In one scene, alone in Laura’s apartment with a view of her portrait, McPherson is a surrogate for many an adult: adrift, melancholy, with no clear goal beyond what life and his own lousy timing have conspired to place beyond his reach.
Sitting in Laura’s chair, McPherson has a drink and falls into a light sleep, one that, in my interpretation, comprises the rest of the movie. The word “dream” is spoken several times in Laura; Lydecker asks McPherson at one point, “Have you ever dreamed of Laura as your wife?” He has, and he does. McPherson has not been asleep long when Laura returns and finds him; she has been away at her country house and only now hears the reports of her death. (It turns out that the face-disfiguring shotgun blast thought to have killed Laura in her home actually took the life of another woman, when Laura wasn’t there.) With Laura before him in the flesh, McPherson has a fair chance to compete against his rivals for her affections, to pit his inner qualities against these more talkative fellows, whose other advantage was having met Laura in time. McPherson, in effect, cheats time—a powerless element in the world of dreams, in which the what of our fears and desires trumps the when. (During the movie’s climax another errant shotgun blast destroys a hall clock, killing time.) Laura is a story of winning some semblance of what you otherwise cannot have through the power of imagination, of dreams.
Laura‘s memorable musical score was composed by David Raksin. In 1950 the great jazz alto saxophonist Charlie (“Bird”) Parker recorded a highly popular version of it. In a way Bird seems the musician least likely to have taken on the score of that movie, with its theme of hopeless longing; he was a man who let nothing—not timing, certainly not shyness —come between him and what he wanted. For Bird, no desire was too large or small to indulge, and no time was wrong to indulge it, whether the desire involved sex (many and amazing are the stories); money (which he sometimes got by cheerfully cheating the members of the bands he led, and which he just as cheerfully shared with others); drugs (only alcohol got in the way of his heroin addiction); or food (one night, in a club packed with people waiting to hear Bird play, the club’s manager found the saxophonist in the kitchen eating sandwiches and pleaded almost tearfully with him to go on stage—to which Bird replied, “Man, why don’t you try one of these sandwiches? They’re crazy”). At about the time he recorded “Laura,” Bird began living with Chan Richardson, the last of his four wives. To put it another way, romantic notions about women glimpsed across a great divide were not the stuff of his life. Surprisingly, then, Bird’s version of “Laura,” available on Charlie Parker with Strings and elsewhere, retains the wistfulness of the original. Unlike other Bird recordings—even others of his ballads—his “Laura” does not find him jumping chords like a hurdler or producing cascades of sixteenth- and thirty-second-notes; he plays it almost as straight melody, putting no intellectual distance between himself and the tune’s theme of melancholy. It is as if Bird, the man who took whatever he wanted, reached down to find an object of longing of his own, or as if he discovered something pure and deeply human, something inevitable, in longing itself.
In 1992 I married Laura, whose name turned out to be Amy. This past Christmas Amy’s present to me was an easel. I long ago gave up drawing comics, but I’ve flirted with paint from time to time over the years, and recently I’ve become enamored of it. I’ve produced still lifes, landscapes, and paintings of real and imaginary people; I’m just good enough to be able to enjoy it. (A guy I was once friends with, looking at a painting of mine, put it this way: “You’re no Degas, but you’ve got a touch.”) Sitting at the easel in my Brooklyn apartment, as I once sat at my drafting table, I come closer than I ever thought I would again to the joy of producing visual work that I knew as a teenager. And the social element is there again: I like nothing better than working on a painting while Amy and the girls are in the room chatting with me, maybe watching the Mets on TV, maybe indulging me by listening to a Charlie Parker record. Some things, of course, are gone forever. Maybe that is why the real-life people whose likenesses I have tried to capture include Uncle Nay and Uncle Manson. I am like McPherson, whose dream of knowing another is crushed by his own wretched timing. A picture is the best I can do.
Clifford Thompson’s first novel, Signifying Nothing, is available through Amazon and other online booksellers. His blog is at www.tellcliff.com.
