For some years I've wondered: what kind of child was Frederic Wertham? There are no official biographies of the man who "nearly killed the comics industry." Even the friendliest overview of the psychiatrist's career, Bart Beaty's 2005 FREDERIC WERTHAM AND THE CRITIQUE OF MASS CULTURE, contained no more information than Wikipedia: born in 1895 and raised by middle-class Jewish parents in Nuremberg, Germany, moved to the US in 1922 to pursue his psychiatric career. Of the childhood of the doctor who became famous for analyzing the fantasies of children, there was nothing to say if he had problems as a Jewish child in pre-Weimar Germany, or if he ever read German translations of pulp characters like Nick Carter or the (fictionalized) Buffalo Bill.
But thanks to the graphic novel DOCTOR WERTHLESS by writer Harold Schechter and artist Eric Powell, it's clear that Frederic Wertham's psychological past probably will never be plumbed. Schechter and Powell's biography-- admittedly also "fictionalized," though only in the sense of creating imagined dialogue for real-life persons-- establishes that Wertham never publicly discussed his early life. He also became estranged from the rest of his family even before moving to America, so like many other Euro-expatriates, the US was the place where Wertham re-invented himself.
And yet, that reinvention had almost nothing to with American popular culture, much less comic books, which did not become a mass medium until the late 1930s and didn't excite Wertham's attention until the late 1940s. He gained celebrity from his somewhat lurid studies of the serial murderers Albert Fish and Robert Irwin, whose crimes dominate the first half of WERTHLESS. Here I'll note that readers may need strong stomachs to tolerate the detailed descriptions of their many perfidies. And yet those details are important to understanding Wertham's career.
WERTHLESS is careful to show that according to what records we have, Wertham was generally empathetic toward all of his patients. And this empathy is key to understanding how the doctor could treat the iniquities of an Albert Fish with clinical dispassion: to Wertham, Fish was simply sick. The source of the sickness lay outside the patient, though the labeling of that contagion would not take place until Wertham tapped into the postwar mania linking juvenile delinquency to popular culture. Other pundits of the period went after popular culture in general, but comic books became Wertham's Great White Whale; a virus he could imagine stamping out.
Despite Schechter and Powell's (correct) negative assessment of the doctor's search for easy solutions, the authors are careful to show the positive aspects of his empathy. For about a decade Wertham donated his expertise to a low-cost psychiatric clinic in Harlem, and he gave valuable court testimony that led to the downfall of "separate but equal" segregation. The authors pass a little rapidly over his association with the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but it's possible the doctor was simply fooled by their pose of innocence. Though Wertham as drawn by Powell looks unprepossessing, he had assorted minor encounters with a smattering of celebrities-- Al Capp, Richard Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, and James Lipton-- so it would seem that Wertham possessed some charisma in addition to his empathy. Indeed, celebrity-spotting is one of the pleasures of WERTHLESS.
Yet in both the first and last pages, Schechter and Powell make clear their disagreement with Wertham's "belief that brutal aggression was not innate in human nature but [was] the product of social and environmental forces." Wertham opposed the execution of Albert Fish because, being insane, Fish was not responsible for the many people he murdered. Yet in Wertham's 1954 alarmist screed SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, the psychiatrist excoriated comic book creators as being responsible for crimes and murders, even though he never cited a single case proving that any comics story had engendered a crime. To all of those artists and editors, Wertham attributed aberrant motives for "seducing" children-- and since none of the creators were clinically insane, Wertham could condemn them absolutely as he could not morally condemn serial killers. The accumulation of knowledge about serial murderers was supposedly valuable enough to justify preserving their lives in asylums for study, even when it was clear that the killers took immense pleasure in their acts. Readers' pleasure in fictional depictions of violence and sex, however, was something for which Wertham could not or would not allow any justification. Eric Powell redraws several of the scandalous comics-images Wertham reproduced in SEDUCTION, the better to boost his crusade and to sell his book.
Wertham never overtly retracted his opposition to fictional violence, though Schechter and Powell present a curious incident that may have been spun partly from their imaginations. It's a fact that in 1957, artist Wally Wood-- one of the artists Wertham criticized for horror-comics-- produced a satire of Wertham, "Doctor Werthless," for MAD Magazine. It may be the fantasy of the two biographers that Wertham framed the cartoon strip and kept it on his wall. If that is not just a fantasy, it could indicate an indirect admission of his biggest error. But the biographers also indicate that one of the last things Wertham wrote before his death in November 1981 was a response to a correspondent posing the question as to whether Wally Wood had "produced monsters"-- and Wertham answered in the negative. Wertham did not live a worthless life. But the crusade for which he's best known, and all the skewed data he used to support that jeremiad-- those truly are without worth.
No comments:
Post a Comment