The Other Crumb
KönigPrüße
Still in the shadows, an artist in his own right
- Edward Guthmann
Tuesday, October 3, 2006
Judging by his appearance in "Crumb," Terry Zwigoff's 1995 documentary
about an artistic and deeply troubled family, Maxon Crumb didn't seem
long for this world. The younger brother of underground cartoonist
Robert Crumb was filmed in his seedy hotel room, sitting on a bed of
nails and begging for money on San Francisco sidewalks. He looked
haunted, spiritually ransacked -- done in by the family abuse that drove
his oldest brother, Charles, to suicide.
[Podcast: Edward Guthmann with Maxon Crumb. ]
Twelve years later, Maxon Crumb still resides in the same Sixth Street
dump, and still maintains an extreme spartan diet -- "only plant food"
-- and an ascetic spiritual practice that includes long, holy-man treks
to Bolinas Ridge, where he sits in lotus position for 12 hours at a
time. But in the years since "Crumb" was released, he is no longer
dependent on government assistance and has stopped panhandling and
started supporting himself with his art. His paintings -- more
intricate, surreal and disturbing than Robert's antic work -- sell for
as much as $3,200; his ink drawings go for $1,200.
His personal life is also enriched. Once a recluse, Crumb, 61, has a
close kinship with Yannick Ingey, a shy, birdlike French woman whom he
met when they were both panhandling downtown. Although it's "platonic,"
Crumb says, he spends several nights a week at her tiny, Zen-like Geary
Street apartment and credits her with nursing him to health after he was
hospitalized in 1994 for vitamin deficiency.
Yannick brings him "balance," Crumb says. "It just makes life more
smooth." And Yannick, who is unemployed and has the face of a careworn
mother in a Dorothea Lange Dust Bowl photo, says Crumb does the same for
her. "His simplicity," she says when I ask her what makes Crumb unique.
"His goodness and intelligence. ... His remoteness from the madness."
But if all this suggests that Crumb's rough edges are buffed to a warm
glow, or that the raging madman we saw in "Crumb" now radiates a guru's
placidity, that's not quite accurate. True, he no longer sits on cold
sidewalks with a beggar's bowl in front of him. He keeps his bed of
nails at home, but uses it rarely. And it's been years, Crumb says,
since he grabbed or physically harassed women in public.
In "Crumb," he told of following a young woman into a store in the
Marina district and, in a self-propelling fever of lust, pulling down
her "obscenely brief shorts" to reveal buttocks "like a ripe peach."
Today, he dismisses that behavior as "outrageous" and "bestial" -- but
says he didn't feel embarrassed to see himself discussing it on film. It
was a function, he says, of coping with celibacy. Every three weeks,
Maxon Crumb swallows a long strip of purification cloth, a kriya (yogic
discipline) that alleviates his chronic stomach pain. That pain, he
says, is the legacy of his father who, while stationed in Shanghai in
1938, shot a beggar in the stomach. In Crumb's mind, that event
triggered a karmic chain that still plays out in his troubled stomach.
Maxon Crumb will never live a life of convention. He says he's been
celibate "since the mid-'70s" and remains so "by necessity" -- because
sex triggers the epileptic seizures that began when he was in sixth
grade. Crumb is a man who lives on a precipice between conscious thought
and fierce, bedeviling dreams; who uses his art, as the formerly abused
child is wont to do, to confront the darker impulses in human nature.
Crumb's first published book, "HardCore Mother," released by CityZen
Books in 2000, is a sexual horror story of mother-daughter incest and
sadism. Illustrated with Crumb's surreal ink drawings, the book treads a
mindscape similar to Edgar Allen Poe or David Lynch: mad, unrestrained,
emotionally violent. The work of an artist scraping at the bone of his
existence.
"I got two reactions," he says of the book. "A lot of people really got
behind the subject matter. And other people were totally outraged by it.
It just steps over a line for certain people -- and then they're just
gone."
There's a fearlessness in Crumb, similar to his brother Robert, that
compels him to expose his id, his sexual fears and fantasies, with no
concern for the marketplace. The bottom line is that Maxon Crumb is a
very odd guy with no desire -- or ability -- to duplicate the patterns
of existence and thought that most of us call "normal."
That is what makes him fascinating, and that is what makes him
maddening. Conversation with Crumb is erratic, nonlinear. He'll speak to
a question but quickly slip into a tangent or philosophical rant.
Italicized with nervous gestures and shakes of the head, his words issue
forth in a crazy rush.
In the first of three visits I paid to his tiny room at the Winsor Hotel
on Sixth Street, Crumb was sitting on the dirty woven mat on his floor
-- he has no furniture -- and explaining how art and money exist for him
on separate tracks. While the first feeds his spirit and intellect and
supplies his life force, the second barely holds his interest.
"Money is vague if you're poor," he says. He doesn't know what he earns
year to year, and insists he's never made as much from his art as he did
from the SSI (Supplemental Security Income) payments he received for 20
years.
Malcolm Whyte, an art dealer who has sold Crumb's work for 10 years,
says Crumb has never made more than $15,000 in a year. For several
years, Crumb says, "I was doing a little over $6,000 a year." Breaking
free of government assistance was a good move, "but I don't know if the
way I'm living would be less socially acceptable or less understood by
most people than if I was actually on welfare."
On the floor, propped up by a pair of bricks, is a painting commissioned
by a Connecticut couple who admire Crumb's work. Both figures are
exaggerated, in a comic, grotesque way, by buck teeth and craning necks.
The man is broad-chested and formidable and holds the woman in his hand
like a pencil. She is naked, with one marionette-like arm upraised. Her
aureolas are surrounded by concentric circles so that her breasts
resemble marksmanship targets.
Each work takes weeks, perhaps months to complete, "depending on the
depth of the project," Crumb says. During that time, he'll go into a
creative fugue and sometimes stop eating altogether. The world drops
away. The making of art eclipses every mundane concern.
"I know it's absolutely ridiculous," Crumb says at one point. "I could
be making thousands more. ... It's not so much that I produce real
slowly. (But) you can see the detail of my work, which obviously takes
more time."
As Crumb works on the portrait of the Connecticut couple and Chronicle
photographer Michael Macor shoots him, an anguished voice reaches the
fourth-floor room from the alley below. A man is threatening to kill
another man, but Crumb, who probably hears similar imprecations daily,
works steadily and calmly, impervious to the shouting.
His room at the Winsor Hotel, home for the past 26 years, is filthy. The
plaster is coming down in sheets, and layers of dust and grease cover
the floor. Books on poetry, art and computer programming sit in piles;
so does his collection of meditation audiocassettes. There's a clunky
Underwood typewriter; various computer parts; a monk-like arrangement of
food (half an avocado, ginger root), bowls and dirty silverware.
It's the home of someone unencumbered by the material. Crumb, who enjoys
the opportunity to talk, is wearing Army camouflage jeans and a loose
green shirt, unbuttoned. He's got a billy goat's patch of hair on his
chin and neck. Several teeth are missing from the left side of his
mouth, the result of a dental bridge that didn't fit and an extreme fear
of dentists that followed. Crumb says he's still close to his brother
Robert, who in 1992 moved to the south of France with his wife, Aline,
and daughter, Sophie. The older Crumb, who captured the hippie zeitgeist
with his trippy, LSD-inspired Zap Comix in the mid-'60s, stills visits
California occasionally and stays in contact with his brother. But
Maxon, who has a fear of flying, has never been to France.
"I have a very strong affection for Robert," he says. A strong rivalry
persists, but during the '70s and '80s, when Robert still lived in
California, "he was the only person in my life that I was still in
contact with. Separation from him kind of gives me some disconcert on
that point."
Most of Crumb's family is gone: His father, Charles Sr., a former Marine
who beat and emotionally terrorized his sons, died in 1982. His mother,
Beatrice, who in "Crumb" is seen living a hermit's existence with her
son Charles, died in 1997. Younger sister Sandra, who declined to be
interviewed for "Crumb," died of liver cancer in 1998. The most tragic
of all, Charles Jr., never moved out of his parents' home. Unemployed,
haunted by "homosexual pedophiliac tendencies" -- his own words --
Charles ended decades of depression when he killed himself in 1992.
Robert, Maxon and their older sister, Carol, survive. The family's
dysfunction, illustrated so heartbreakingly in "Crumb," continues to
shape Maxon's life. In his introduction to the 1995 collection, "Crumb
Family Comics," he wrote, "I have to continue indefinitely as a socially
misfitted, god-mad, brooding ascetic and celibate, starving and street
begging, eating a cloth string for meat and sitting on a bed of nails."
When I read that quote back to him, he says the description still fits,
except for the street begging. His childhood wounded him, but it gave
him a sensitivity and a way of seeing -- a spot of genius -- that he
wouldn't otherwise have.
To hear excerpts of Edward Guthmann's interview with Maxon Crumb, listen
to the podcast at sfgate.com/podcasts.
E-mail Edward Guthmann at egut...@sfchronicle.com.
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URL:
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