The Tennessee Waltz
On the dance floor with Art Spiegelman
Last evening, I spent an hour in a Tulsa hotel ballroom with graphic novelist and cartoonist Art Spiegelman.
If you’re not familiar with his work, Spiegelman’s illustrated history about his Holocaust-surviving parents and the suicide of his mother, Maus, is considered the breakthrough graphic novel—the book that made graphic novels prestigious enough for college English Dept. curricula, when the serialized collection was released in 1991.
It’s an animal allegory: Jews are mice, Nazis and collaborators are cats or pigs.
In 2022, the McMinn County school board voted to ban Maus in Tennessee. Hence the title of Art Spiegelman’s latest work, “Tennessee Waltz.”
It’s not a book, but Spiegelman’s illustration graces the cover of Switchyard, the University of Tulsa’s new biannual magazine. Switchyard is also the name of TU’s annual “national festival of music, art, and ideas,” currently being attended by Yours Truly.
On the way out the hotel sliding doors, after Art dropped his bag, then went back inside to retrieve something he’d forgotten, I asked the editor of Switchyard: why the “Tennessee Waltz?”
“The Tennessee Waltz” is a saccharine country ballad popularized by Patti Page—most famous for singing “(How Much is) That Doggie in the Window?”—the song Tom Petty et al have cited as the last gasp of sappy American pop. The type of Eisenhower-era tripe whose death rattle was finally drowned-out by the rise of Elvis Presley and rock & roll.
Why would an underground comix artist invoke such a sappy name?
Ted Genoways, the Switchyard editor who moderated last night’s convo with Art Spiegelman, was also serving as Art’s de facto caretaker (Spiegelman was spry, quick and witty—but he’s also a septuagenarian who flew in from NYC that morning, was operating on three hours sleep, vaping and drinking Diet Coke to stay alert on stage).
While we waited for Spiegelman to return, Genoways told me the name was Art’s idea.
In the song, Patti Page takes her boyfriend to a dance, introduces him to an old friend, who then waltzes off with her lover. It’s a tale of remorse and regret—a break-up song: “I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz.”
I suggested maybe this was the inspiration: the Tennessee school board stole Art Spiegelman’s baby, Maus.
“Well, yeah, I think that probably had something to do with it,” Genoways said. “And it happened in Tennessee.” I added that Patti Page’s song was written and covered by others, including an R&B version by Erskine Hawkins, and Patti Page “stole” it from them in turn.
According to Spiegelman, in 2022, he stopped illustrating—"a very dark time in America.” He turned to watercoloring, which eventually became a form of “pareidolia”—the human psychological tendency to impose meaning on an otherwise nebulous image. Like the Rorschach inkblot test, or cloud-sighting.
In a moment of turmoil, while his book was banned and America was in shambles, Art was subconsciously inspired by a “scribble game” he played with his mother before she committed suicide when he was 20 years old. One of them would sketch a scribble, the other would be reminded of something by it, and turn into a finalized image.
From watercolor, pareidolia and Freudian memories, Spiegelman somehow found his way back to illustration with the “Tennessee Waltz.”
In 2022, Art said, school board censorship was mostly concerned with “LGBTQI-ABCDEFG” and Critical Race Theory bans. He wondered, “Why Maus?”
For one thing, he mused, even in today’s climate—with rising anti-Semitism and the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in 2018—most people still agree that Nazis and the Holocaust are bad. But why ban a book that illustrates that atrocity? (The school board cited nudity, foul language, and the depiction of suicide.)
Art pointed out that in 1933, gay culture in Berlin was the first to be targeted by the Nazis for elimination, before the Jews. Was the Maus ban some sort of inverted, acceptable substitute for other groups—because it depicted his father’s memories of the Holocaust—excusable as a ban on Nazis and Swastikas?
It didn’t really make sense…
Spiegelman “never wanted to be the Elie Wiesel of comic books” (the Auschwitz survivor who wrote Night). He rejected The Holocaust Museum’s request to exhibit Maus, on the grounds that it was a personal memoir by someone who hadn’t experienced the Holocaust himself, not an historical artifact. Yet, it seems to be the emblem of that history to McMinn County. Or its denial in Tennessee.
It isn’t the first time Spiegelman’s work has been banned from school libraries. His Garbage Pail Kids send-up of the popular Cabbage Patch Kids collector cards was similarly deemed inappropriate for American youth.
Underground comix like Spiegelman’s and R. Crumb’s from the 1950s-1970s were often banned—for sexuality, profanity, drug use, etc.
One of Art’s underground comix was presented as a “censorship version,” where giant phalluses and genitalia were blacked-out with censor strips. Readers were jokingly asked to “send proof of age” and “we’ll mail you an uncensored version” with the blackout strips removed.
Spiegelman’s early inspirations also included “Horror comics” of the 1950s, which were similarly banned, and burned.
The moderator—Switchyard editor Ted Genoways—began by telling Spiegelman that he had discovered Maus and George Orwell’s Animal Farm around the same time, after he moved and switched to a new school, “literally on the edge of a cornfield,” in podunk Nebraska. Culturally alienated, these books opened up a world.
Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell’s animal allegory of Soviet communism—which as I discussed here—was promoted in the U.S. and suppressed in the Eastern Bloc as well as England.
It was also one of Maus’ primary influences, Spiegelman said.
The other was Franz Kafka’s Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk (1924). (The English translation appeared around the same time as Animal Farm, in 1942.)
Kafka’s Josephine is a singing mouse, whose mouse folk treat her like a combination pop diva, shaman, and sacrificial scapegoat. It’s a great exposition of the historical overlap between these figures, told through animal allegory.
But as Spiegelman pointed out, Josephine is also about another type of scapegoat—"it was obviously about the Jews.”
Between the Mouse Folk and Animal Farm, Art Spiegelman derived his idea to represent Jewish Holocaust victims as mice, and Nazis and collaborators as cats and pigs.
There were secondary influences as well, like Mad Magazine’s Mickey Mouse spoof, “Mickey Rodent.”
Mad Magazine’s irreverent tone alerted young Art Spiegelman to the fact that “the whole adult world was lying” to the younger generation, and offered some truth and social commentary through illustrated comedy.
Mad inspired future underground artists like Art. And, he said of this, Mad’s “Beautiful Girl of the Month” cover, the cartoonist Robert Crumb.
He also noted, with irony, that this “Beautiful Girl of the Month” was similar to earlier Nazi depictions of Jews.
Mad’s “Mickey Rodent” was the brainchild of editor Harvey Kurtzman, “a red diaper baby,” in Spiegelman’s words—the child of communist sympathizers. A common political stance, in the heady days of the WWII era, when FDR democrats were often quasi-aligned with Soviet-style socialism—before the general public became hip to the atrocities of America’s wartime ally, Jospeh Stalin.
Through Mad, which began as a comic book and turned into a magazine, Kurtzman’s brainchild became one of the first publications to take on Joseph McCarthy, through satire. It turned McCarthy and the HUAC hearings into a ridiculous “TV show,” in its pages, according to Spiegelman, and inspired him.
Later, a filmmaker friend, Ken Jacobs, showed Art some 1930s minstrel cartoons, and compared them to Mickey Mouse. It gave him an idea, Spiegelman’s “Eureka!” moment, represented in the panels below.
These were part of Spiegelman’s Breakdowns series between 1972-75, comics about cats, rats and minstrelsy, among other things, followed by commentary essays.
Spiegelman called the Breakdowns series “mock racist work,” whose aim was to “detox” the actual racism of earlier minstrel animation. He compares it to the comedy of Lenny Bruce, the way blacks adopted and altered the N-word, or the way 19th c. painters embraced what was supposed to be a pejorative label for their art, “Impressionism.”
I take Art’s point sincerely, and it may even apply to some of the “mock racist work” of R. Crumb—like the image of Janis Joplin in blackface on a certain album cover—but I’m not sure mock racism excuses Crumb’s Angelfood McSpade series. (You can read about that here).
Regardless, it goes to show how convoluted, interrelated, and potentially subversive American pop culture is, going from blackface slave minstrelsy to early racist animation, to mock-racist cartoons, to inspire a graphic novel denouncing the Holocaust.
When Art showed his father, who was eternally reluctant to discuss his horrific past, the first few panels of what would become Maus, the elder Spiegelman and his survivor friends finally opened up, over a game of cards in Spiegelman’s apartment.
They began to discuss the Holocaust.
One of Art’s early frames depicted a Jewish collaborator, or “Kapo”—the prisoners who helped Nazis in the concentration camps, serving as informers or enforcers in exchange for preferential treatment and privileges from their captors.
“I buried that guy,” Art’s father said, pointing to his son’s drawing of the Jewish Kapo. One of his father’s friends killed him, for being a traitor.
In the wake of the eventual success of Maus, and now its banning in Tennessee, Spiegelman has taken to referring to his creation as a burden, “the 500 lb. Mouse.” “Once I got that mask on I never could get it off.”
Part of the reason, perhaps, that he declined Maus's invitation to the Holocaust Museum in D.C.
Now with “Tennessee Waltz,” Spiegelman again attempts to process events that traumatized him.
“Trauma” may be an overused word applied to “trigger warnings” and “harmful speech” in university classrooms—as certain members of FIRE, PEN America, and the provost of TU discussed in an earlier panel on “Freedom of Speech on Campus” here in Tulsa—but I think it applies to the son of Holocaust survivors and maternal suicide.
When Spiegelman’s parents moved to the U.S. after the Holocaust, Art said his family felt comfortable and “accepted by America” at the time.
Between 2016 and 2022, however, that feeling changed. Art became “scared by Trump,” his “anti-Mexican” campaign messages, incipient anti-Semitism, the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in 2018, the “China virus” hysteria and Sinophobia, George Floyd’s murder, and the violent aftermath of Charlottesville’s “Jews will not replace us!” march.
Along with the banning of Maus—it was “a very dark time in America.”
The “Tennessee Waltz” reflects this. Spiegelman’s Rorschach test for the United States in the 2020s. His inkblot image of America. He returned to his mother’s childhood scribble game, Freudian memories, and one of his first drawings as a kid: a self-portrait.
He drew himself as an unformed, black inkblot.
The next morning, I visited the archives of another anti-fascist artist (not “Antifa,” mind you—but people opposed to 1930-40s Fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain)—at the Woody Guthrie Center. Where the works of the man who plastered the words “This Machine Kills Fascists” onto his guitar are housed.
Guthrie was a prolific artist himself. Not merely a songbird, but a novelist, painter, cartoonist, and sketch artist. Here, partially-obscured by protective museum glass, is Woody Guthrie’s self-portrait. It too, is an “inkblot.”
And here is what appears to be another self-portrait of Guthrie’s. An anthropomorphic animal. Difficult to read, but the inscription looks to say “New to Town”—and as a ramblin’ Okie hobo, Guthrie was just that.
Guthrie may have been a stray dog, but his image looks a lot like a mash-up of Art Spiegelman’s cat and Maus, don’t it?
Here at the Switchyard, many tracks cross.
Excellent.