Art Spiegelman shattered the conventions of comic books and Holocaust literature with the publication of “Maus,” a graphic novel that depicted the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice and won a Pulitzer Prize.
Now, 25 years after the publication of the first “Maus” volume, Spiegelman allows us to glimpse the origins, making and enduring impact of his courageous masterpiece in “MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus.”
“MetaMaus” draws on four years of interviews by University of Chicago English professor Hillary Chute and what Spiegelman calls “my rat’s nest of files, archives, artwork, notebooks, journals, books and dirty laundry.”
The result is an eye-catching and highly kinetic book-and-DVD package of art and text, conversation and reminiscence, photos, drawings and audio clips. It was published last month.
“Why comics?” asks an unseen interlocutor in one cartoon panel. “Why mice?!” “Why the Holocaust?!”
The author, depicting himself as a skeleton in a mouse mask, answers: “Yikes!” And then adds: “… Or to quote my forefathers: Oy!”
Spiegelman reveals that he discovered the Holocaust at the age of 13 when, while searching for “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in his mother’s book collection, he happened upon “Minister of Death: The Adolf Eichmann Story.”
His parents reluctantly revealed their own experiences as survivors of the Holocaust, and his mother later took her own life, but he succeeded in extracting the real-life story that is played out in “Maus.”
The theme of his reminiscences is the restless search for a safe place in which to encounter his parents and their horrific experiences and, at the same time, a way to define himself as an artist and a writer.
“The irony is … that the safety zone in my relationship with my father took place in discussing the moments when he was least safe, where there were just such
high stakes and disaster everywhere,” Spiegelman explains in the book, which includes transcripts of his interviews with Chute.
He adds that his impulse to become a cartoonist “had something to do with finding a zone that was not my parent’s zone. It was my assimilation into the American culture that was closed to my parents, and it gave me a zone of safety from them.”
Spiegelman took risks in using the tools of a cartoonist to depict the events of the Holocaust, and he is candid about discussing them, as well as his own motives for doing so.
“I didn’t think in terms of making a text about the Holocaust,” he explains. “The book was a text about my … my struggle, ‘mein kampf.’ And, within that context, I was just trying to tell the story without falling into the two pits on either side of the project: either coming off as a cynical wisenheimer about something that had genuine enormity, or being sentimental, a form of trivialization on the other side of that road.”
The impact of “MetaMaus” owes much to the artifacts that are displayed on its pages — bar mitzvah photos, early sketches from “Maus” and the source material in his original research, among much else. He also reproduces the rejection letters he received from some of America’s most important agents and publishers, most of whom managed to miss the point of the book in ways that should embarrass them.
“It was very clever and funny,” wrote one famous figure, then at Knopf, “but right now we are publishing several comic strip-cartoon books, and I think it is too soon to take on another one.”
Spiegelman landed with Pantheon, but even there, the editor feared a backlash from the Jewish community and recommended that he “move to the country for a while and lie low.” But it turned out that U.S. readers — if not those in Israel — were ready for a Holocaust comic book.
“If anything, I guess my fellow American diasporists could accept the self-deprecating image of Jews as cute, fuzzy rodents,” he observes. “But I think that one of the reasons Israelis were never quite comfortable with the book is that the image of mice contains the stereotype of Jews as pathetic and defenseless creatures.”
The author acknowledges that the critical and financial success of “Maus” changed his own life, but he also discloses the moral burden that came with the honors and the royalty checks: “I’d incurred an obligation to the dead.”
In “MetaMaus,” he has discharged that obligation and, at the same time, he has enriched our experience of his important work in a rare and significant way.
“MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus” (300 pages, Pantheon, $35)