A candle for the creative everydayness of Harvey Pekar

Harvey Pekar became internationally famous for living a humdrum life.

But the truth is that Pekar, who died early Monday morning, July 12, at his Cleveland Heights, Ohio, home, was a highly unusual person whose life — working-class-ordinary though it appeared – became extraordinary because he made it so. And he made it so simply by imagining it as a comic-book story.

Like most intially simple creative inspirations, Pekar’s American Splendor series and the personal experiences, feelings and thoughts that it recounted required a lot of grinding work and suffering of various degrees to turn it into a success. In other words, Pekar had to live, sometimes precariously, and artistically translate his outwardly dull existence as a file clerk in a grimy, rundown American Rust Belt city into a tale all of us humans could recognize in some way as our own.  

That was a pretty skillful bit of artistry and entrepreneurship for a man of slightly odd appearance, crabbed and difficult nature, peculiar domestic habits, and a profound, scholarly passion for jazz that gave him a professional sideline as a free-lance music critic. Nothing about Pekar suggested the typical or the expected. He fit no stereotype at all: From salt-of-the-earth lunch-pail laborer to romantically impoverished artiste, he was miscast in every standard role.

I interviewed him once for a 2004 Plain Dealer story about the New York musical, Brooklyn – a play written by creative former street person Mark Schoenfeld and partner Barri McPherson about other creative street people – whose history Pekar and artists Gary and Laura Dumm had been commissioned by the New York Times to relate in American Splendor style  to illustrate a newspaper article about the show. Pekar lived with his wife, Joyce Brabner, and their adopted daughter Danielle in a small house that, like him, looked somewhat drab and unkempt on the outside, but  was really something else inside.

In fact, it looked as if a cyclone had blown through it: Every surface — floor, furniture, counters, mantel — was inundated, buried, under layers of paper, used dishes, cat food, clothes, utensils … just endless stuff comprising a mess so deep and so entire that the Cat in the Hat could not have  removed it even with his multi-handed clean-up vehicle. Pekar had considerately excavated one of the drifts to clear a small wooden chair of debris and I sat in it, a tiny inhabited island in a sea of refuse, and asked him questions about his work and life.

Not ordinary. And Pekar himself — a short, shabby, balding man with huge brown eyes that relentlessly fixed like a pair of dark searchlights on whatever met his gaze – was a gnome of rare intensity, somehow embodying cynical, bitter disappointment, irascibility and a shy, rather sweet kind of pride that surfaced in the moments when he spoke of his own work and the jazz he loved.  

He was 70 when he died. His work was renowned — had been adapted to the stage twice and also to the screen in the film American Splendor starring Paul Giamatti as Pekar — and so was he, as all the Letterman appearances and news coverage attest. He was also just Harvey, a local curmudgeon whose calls to The Plain Dealer’s arts department always produced wry smiles. 

What more proof do we need that creativity can make the remarkable out of the quotidien?