The Making of ‘Maus’

The richly rewarding 25th-anniversary volume METAMAUS (Pantheon, $35) reveals just how history has repeated itself for Art Spiegelman. Vladek survived the Holocaust only to have a son with whom he never truly made peace: “My anger against him was so free-floating and easy to access,” Spiegelman explains, that “it was just our leitmotif.” Art survived Vladek but still struggles to come to terms with the legacy of his own creation. “The success of ‘Maus’ called my bluff,” he says ruefully. “O.K., O.K.! So you’re a genius! So now what?!” In the aftermath of his book’s success, he admits, he has mostly been “trying to wriggle out from under my own achievement.”

“MetaMaus” consists primarily of an expansive, fascinating interview with Spiegelman conducted by Hillary Chute, a scholar of contemporary comics who teaches at the University of Chicago. The beautifully designed hardcover also includes abundant archival material, conversations with Spiegelman’s wife (Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker’s art editor) and children, and transcripts of his original sessions with Vladek. (For the true completist, an accompanying DVD offers audio recordings of those interviews, together with reproductions of Spiegelman’s notebooks, over 7,000 additional drawings, insightful essays by Chute and Lawrence Weschler, and an annotated electronic copy of the complete “Maus.”)

Exhaustive? Sure. But few works of literature published in the past quarter-century bear scrutiny and analysis as well as “Maus,” a complicated, thorny book that became a landmark simultaneously in the disparate worlds of memoir, comics and Holocaust history. Not that you’ll find Spiegelman spending much time considering his book’s place in the literary canon; he and Chute, thankfully, concentrate mostly on the book’s long gestation, beginning in the early 1970s with a three-page comic Spiegelman drew for a San Francisco underground-comix book and ending with the publication of “Maus II,” in 1991. (The 25th anniversary is dated to the first volume’s publication in book form, in 1986.)

Spiegelman recalls the struggles of researching “Maus” at a time before scholarship was widely available to a mass audience. Pre-Internet, he depended on his parents’ collection of pamphlets written and drawn by survivors, and on research visits to Poland. On his second trip to Birkenau, in 1987, Spiegelman was baffled to find a perfectly preserved barracks where once there had been only rubble; it turned out to be a re-creation built for a Holocaust movie, left standing by Polish authorities because it looked accurate. He admits he was jealous of the moviemakers’ unlimited resources, when “every scrap of information I needed for ‘Maus’ was so hard-won.” Later, just selling the book to publishers was a challenge; “MetaMaus” reprints a revealing collection of rejection letters that will surely pain their authors, some of whom still work in publishing today.

When the book came out, of course, it was a rousing success — critically and commercially — although Spiegelman also remembers the responses that were less than understanding, at home and abroad. “Don’t you think that a comic book about Auschwitz is in bad taste?” one angry reporter asked him when the book was published in Germany. “No,” Spiegelman replied, “I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.”

“MetaMaus” is full of such unexpected details, many of them quite touching. I was overwhelmed by a simple Spiegelman family tree, packed with 85 Old World names. On the next two pages, the same genealogy is displayed as it existed immediately after World War II; it contains 13 names and 72 empty spaces. (Among the lost: Art’s “phantom brother,” Richieu, who died in 1943, four years before Art was born.)

This book also serves as a master class on the making and reading of comics, highlighted by Spiegelman’s close analyses of dozens of important points in the text. Especially instructive are his observations about the story’s bittersweet final page — a happy ending that isn’t truly happy, made of six perfectly paced panels, a tombstone and a signature. The last frame encapsulates in one simple moment the artfulness behind the tale we’ve just read, and the uneasy combination of filial pride and anger that flowed through “Maus” and flows through “MetaMaus” as well. “I’m tired from talking, Richieu,” the elderly Vladek Spiegelman says to his son Art, turning over in his bed, “and it’s enough stories for now.”