Harvey Pekar, 1939-2010

The first profile I ever wrote -- this would have been 1992, give or take, and I didn't actually think of it as a "profile" so much as an essay where I'd done some interviewing -- was about Harvey Pekar, whose anthology of American Splendor cartoons I had discovered in Austin a few years earlier while shelving books at the Undergraduate Library. I interviewed him by phone and laboriously transcribed the tape recording, then worked it up into a piece of two or three thousand words.

The tape is long lost, and it woud take some digging to unearth the article, which appeared in a small magazine and was later reprinted by one in England. We stayed in touch for a short time after that. One of the things stressed on in the piece (if memory serves) was Harvey's penchant for immersing himself in a given author -- systematically reading everything he could find. He was similarly thoroughgoing, not to say obsessive, about jazz. At one point, I photocopied a scarce book by Lewis Lewisohn for him from the Library of Congress (where I was working at the time) and also persuaded him to give an article about John Zorn he had written to the little magazine that had published my profile. Someone should consider issuing a collection of his essays and critical writings.

At some point we fell out of touch -- though of course it was always possible to find out about his life by catching up with his work from time to time.

He was, in all his cantankerousness and independence of spirit, an inspiration to me. Perhaps more so now than 18 years ago, actually. His political radicalism was deep and stubborn and very, very American. You can't picture him joining a Marxist party, by any means, but he had the courage of his convictions, and an indifference to seeming any better than he was. He was not a friend, by any means, but I do think of him as a comrade.

Harvey Pekar, Presente!

UPDATE:  Piece by Jeet Heer