Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [150]
And what, he wondered, was the truth? As he pointed out in an interview with journalist Shawna Ervin-Gore, his relationship with his mother and father had changed significantly over the years. He’d gone through periods when he was very angry with them and saw them in a negative light, only to soften in later years when his own experiences added texture and color to what had at one time seemed very black and white. Furthermore, Sam and Fannie were remembered in different ways by each of their children, as Eisner discovered after the publication of To the Heart of the Storm. “When I showed the finished book to my brother,” Eisner recalled, “he said to me, ‘I don’t remember Mom and Dad like that.’ And when I showed it to my sister, who is thirteen years younger than I am, she said she remembered them the way I did.”
To get around some of these concerns, Eisner decided to narrate the story of his youth through a series of extended flashbacks. He opened To the Heart of the Storm with Willie, his protagonist, sitting on a train in his army uniform, talking with two other draftees on their way to basic training. One of his two fellow inductees is the Catholic editor of a Turkish-American newspaper in Brooklyn, the other a redneck southerner whose coarse opinions immediately send Willie into meditations about his childhood and the bigotry he’d seen. As a literary device, the flashbacks work effectively: Willie’s memories are selective, reliable but not necessarily complete. These impressions, the diamond-hard truths of what remained with him over the years, are what matter most.
To the Heart of the Storm was a masterwork, comparable to, or even surpassing, the excellence of A Contract with God or A Life Force. But as Eisner’s correspondence with Dave Schreiner indicates, the writing did not come easily. Schreiner, by now totally frank with Eisner about his work, was immediately impressed with the rough dummy of the book, but he had serious issues with it as well.
“I think it’s your most powerful work to date,” he wrote to Eisner in July 1989, “and if it were published as is, it would probably be all right. I see no need for you to feel apprehensive about it. It is intense, and rightfully so. It is your perspective on your early life, and in a novel, you get to call ’em as you see ’em.”
Schreiner went on to offer detailed criticism of what he perceived to be the technical and editorial flaws of the book. He had serious reservations with the balance of the book’s characters, who, he felt, “on the whole … [were] either Jewish or anti-Semitic.” It would work better, he suggested, if the characters were further fleshed out. “It would perhaps be a bit more authentic if you could humanize these characters a little more. Add a little grey, perhaps, to the black and white. In a good novel, the reader is given a hopefully complete picture of a human being, good and bad, and draws an overall judgment of that character from the picture drawn in the book.”
One of Schreiner’s strongest objections was to Eisner’s working title: A Journey to a Far-Off Thunder. The title, he told Eisner, fit the book, but it wasn’t the best from a marketing standpoint. “Would you consider thinking of a short and punchy main title, and using the Journey line as a subtitle?”
Eisner considered Schreiner’s suggestions, made some revisions, especially on the characters, and submitted a new draft to Schreiner. While conceding that the characters in the new version were more nuanced than in the previous version, Schreiner still wasn’t satisfied. “Ambiguity and ambivalence—this is what can make good books,” he wrote, exhorting Eisner to take it even further. In addition, he gently prodded Eisner toward using