David Beronä, In Memory

It is with tremendous sadness that I share news I received this morning from my friend David Beronä's family: David passed away peacefully at home last night. He'd been fighting a brain tumor for about a year and a half, and so while the news is not quite a surprise, it is a blow.

[Update: Here's David's official obituary.]

I interviewed David for Colleen Lindsay's blog The Swivet in 2009, where we talked about his Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels, which had recently been published by Abrams. I knew very little about graphic narratives before meeting David, and he gave me an extraordinary education over the years, as his knowledge was vast and his passion was thrilling.

Eric Schaller and I had the honor of publishing what David told us was the last piece of writing that he completed before getting sick, the essay "Franz Masereel's Picture Books Against War", which appeared in last year's issue of our magazine The Revelator. David, Eric, and I did a bunch of work together, beginning with the Illustrating VanderMeer exhibit at Plymouth State University, where, until he got sick, David was Dean of Library and Academic Support Services.

The last time I saw David was at a retirement reception for him where the University dedicated a gallery wall of the library in his name. It was a bittersweet moment — so nice to see David being celebrated, so sad to have to say goodbye. Soon, he and his wife moved to Ohio to be closer to David's family. I didn't do a good job of keeping in touch, though I've thought of David frequently since he moved (which is no excuse for not being a better friend, but is the truth).

This past term, my last term of classes as a PhD student, I took a marvelous seminar on graphic narratives, and so David was constantly on my mind, and again and again I found myself returning to things he'd taught me, writers and artists whose work he'd introduced me to, ideas he had shared. I presented at the Dartmouth Illustration, Comics, and Animation Conference, a conference David always attended when he could. That I had any confidence at all presenting in front of a bunch of comics scholars and enthusiasts was very much because I'd been able to talk about so much with David over the years. It would have been fun to have been there with him.

In the short notes he was able to send out to friends after beginning treatment, written against the aphasia the tumor imposed, David exhorted us to cherish our health, and especially our brains. (His life had changed completely over the course of a single weekend.) He spoke of the anger he felt at first when he realized how much he'd lost, and then the peace he found in accepting the vagaries of life, the good and bad, the love of friends and family, the little things and the everyday moments — the things that, in the end, linger longest. (The irony was, I'm sure, not lost on him that he was a man who'd written much about wordless books, and then had lost his words.) He returned to painting, and he was glad to find a good comics shop in the town he moved to in Ohio. He went for long walks in the woods. He spent his last year with family, and he knew that he had friends around the country and, indeed, around the world who were thinking of him.

He lives on in the knowledge he shared with us and the joy that he inspired. My life has been tremendously enriched by all he taught me, but, more than any of that, what I will carry as a memory of him forever is the memory of his smile. He never lost some of the wonder of childhood, and you could see it in his smile.

It's hard to smile today, but for David, I will try.

Lynd Ward, from God's Man

The Revelator: The Bookworm Issue

The latest issue of that venerable, mercurial, deeply occasional magazine THE REVELATOR is now available online for your perusal. It is filled with nothing but THE TRUTH AND ALL!

The contents of this issue are so vast, variable, and vivacious that I can't even begin to summarize them here. There are excursions into history, into imagery, and into liquor. We attend the tale of a young man reading science fiction in Kenya. We discover the secret life of Elo­dia Har­win­ton, about whom I am sure you have heard much (but never this much!). For those of you who do not like words, there are not only some videos, but a wordless book(let) by the great Frans Masereel. And do not forget the Revelations, in which many secrets, some of them clearly obscene and pornographic, revealed!

Resist not, o mortal! Surrender yourself to the siren call of The Revelator today!

Written Words on Wordless Ward

I remember when I spoke with Lynd Ward’s two daughters that both Nanda and Robin told me that they constantly asked their father what his wordless books meant and Lynd always replied with the same answer: "It means exactly what you think it means." And that is really the attraction of these books -- we bring so much of our own personal experiences to reading pictures because the language of pictures has, what I like to call, a "private declension" that only each of us can understand -- a secret smirk or a haunting remembrance from our private association to an image.

--David A. Beronä

The release of The Library of America's gorgeous two-volume collection of Lynd Ward's wordless novels has led to some fascinating and thoughtful reviews. I just noticed that Scott Esposito did a quick roundup, and so I thought I'd add to what he'd collected, since I find Ward's work endlessly fascinating.

William T. Vollmann, Bookforum:

What makes a Ward picture Wardian is its intuitive, partially spontaneous quality, which shines through increasingly if you scan the six novels in chronological order. At the beginning they look very much like the woodcuts they are, with all of that medium's chiseled constraint. In time, they come to resemble lithographs. The lines grow more fluid, the shapes more volumetric.

John Lingan, The Quarterly Conversation:

One reason why Ward’s novels are so uniquely powerful and engrossing is that their plots and messages are in perfect alignment with the obvious “battle of wills” that it took to make them. Particularly from Wild Pilgrimage, his third novel, onward, you can nearly see the artist’s triceps tensing to carve the stunning cross-hatch patterns that grant his wordless panels such physical and emotional depth. You can perceive the immense, sustained concentration that it took to imagine entire narratives and a motionless means of animating them, as well as the sweat-inducing balance of physical pressure and painterly delicateness necessary to displace little spools of wood shavings in search of a precise facial expression or shoulder slump.

Steven Heller, The New York Times:

I was a young art director for the Op-Ed page of this newspaper when I first read “Gods’ Man” and “Wild Pilgrimage.” In addition to commissioning illustrations, I sometimes used existing artwork by the likes of Francisco de Goya, Thomas Nast, George Grosz and other strong black-and-white conceptualists. Ward joined their ranks. Every image he made had its own integrity. On at least three occasions I took an engraving from the books and paired it with an Op-Ed article — a perfect marriage of text and image. But this was heresy. Ward’s images were designed to be seen in their original contexts, not forced to illuminate arguments that Ward never heard. For the experience of seeing all his wordless books as they were meant to be read, the Library of America set is essential.

Glen Weldon, NPR:

Ward's metaphors are simple, even stark, and he eagerly and unself-consciously commits to them; his most striking images possess an expansive — and occasionally swoony — operatic vigor. Which is why these novels attain the primal, Manichaean impact they do. Collectively, they exist on the line separating the dramatic from the melodramatic, sentiment from sentimentality.

Madeleine Schwartz, The New Yorker.com:

In his introduction to the books, Art Spiegelman comments on the difficulty of interpreting Ward’s "silent" novels. "Rarely was silent film—a direct catalyst for the wordless block—ever as resolutely mute as the woodcut novel; intertitles and musical accompaniment helped transmit its meanings," he writes. But Ward also had a genius for carving human movement, and watching his characters walk through their story lines is a particular joy of his novels. In "Prelude to a Million Years," an artist wanders through the city before his studio burns down (with him inside); in "Wild Pilgrimage," a worker lives a dream sequence in a series of red-and-white prints.

Sarah Boxer, Slate:

Ward's simultaneous love of books and distrust of language is, I think, what makes him historically important. He's the crucial missing link between the graphic novelists of today, Spiegelman included, and the narrative artists of the past, going back to Frans Masereel, Albrecht Dürer, and the muralists who painted Bible stories on church walls in case people couldn't read. 

There's also a long and fascinating piece on Ward in the latest issue of Harper's, but the online version is currently ensconced behind the paywall, available only to subscribers.

Third Bear Carnival: "Finding Sonoria" and "Three Days in a Border Town"

David A. Beronä is Dean of Library and Academic Support Services at Plymouth State University, and author of Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels. He was instrumental in helping to organize last year's "Illustrating VanderMeer" exhibit, and so I thought he might enjoy joining our carnival. David posted this piece as a downloadable document on his website, and I asked him if he wouldn't mind my posting it here as well...

Two Stories from Jeff VanderMeer’s The Third Bear

by David A. Beronä

As part of a reviewing process that my friend Matt Cheney developed, I was part of a group each reading two stories from The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer. I chose the time when I had time travelling on a plane to read these stories. I found that a different setting (I usually read on my porch looking out over the hills in New Hampshire with the sound of birds in the background) physically took me out of my ordinary world, bound by gravity, into a unaccustomed world of different sights and sounds, which worked perfectly when I entered VanderMeer’s highly imaginative world.

In the first story, “Finding Sonoria,” a retired land surveyor, John Crake, discovers a stamp from the Republic of Sonoria from a collection he accumulated as a boy with the hope of traveling one day and discovering these distant countries. However, his stamps and his interest in travel waned as he grew older and settled for less, following a “path of least resistance.” John hires his friend Jim Bolger, an aging private detective down on his luck, to locate the Republic of Sonoria, which does not seem to exist on any map. The stamp and Sonoria become an obsession to each man. Jim, “in his little rotting house,” begins writing an imaginary history of Sonoria while John, “in the Murat Motel,” begins dreaming about Sonoria and finding a personal solace in his dreams that he is unaccustomed to having in reality.  Despite their differences, the two men share “the same world, all because of a stamp.” How both men resolve this imaginary country in their lives raises a personal question how we individually resolve the mediocrity or restricting conditions in our own lives.

Before continuing with the next story, I peeked out the window of the jet I was seated in and saw large fields in the Midwest and small groups of homes and buildings, representing an unknown town. When I sit on my porch reading and a plane passes overhead, I take a moment and think about the people in that plane and sometimes wave, though I doubt if anyone in the plane could see me from that distance.  It does not matter. I continue waving and I guess this action is more for me, claiming my own space, than for anyone else.

In the second story, “Three Days in a Border Town,” VanderMeer skillfully tells a story about a woman who is searching for her lost husband, a farmer named Delorn, who has been captured by a floating City that is “forever moving across the desert.”  With the use of the pronoun, “you,” the reader becomes closely associated with the heroine, a border guard in a small town called Haart; the strange customs in this desert border town; and her search for a “familiar,” which is a manta ray-like creature whose “tube of flesh, the umbilical,” after insertion into a host, reveals visions and knows how to find the City. We are left with uncertainty about the heroine ever finding the City and questions are raised about Delorn’s choice in leaving her. Is this a lifetime quest? The improvableness of her rediscovery of the City and Delorn brought up personal loss in my own life and I counted those losses I accepted without a second thought; those I mourned for an hour, a day, a week, a month or years, and the one that I refuse to accept and am walking aimlessly in my own desert every day.

At that moment, the pilot’s voice interrupted my thoughts on the plane and announced that we were presently flying over Kansas and, at our current distance from the ground, the temperature outside was 60 degrees below zero. I gazed out the window and was suddenly aware of my own vulnerability and the mind-boggling reality of where I was at that moment. It seemed the perfect time to continue reading Jeff VanderMeer!

A Conversation with David Beronä

Over at Colleen Lindsay's digs, The Swivet, I interview David Beronä, who wrote a marvelous book called Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels.

One fun bit of trivia I forgot to mention in the intro to the interview -- before David and I had any knowledge of each other, we were both reviewers for Rain Taxi, and you should definitely check out his review there of one of the most recent wordless books to gain a lot of attention, Shaun Tan's The Arrival.