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The Real Secret of Superman's Identity

1976; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chl.0.0705

1543-3374

Alvin Schwartz,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

The Real Secret of Superman's Identity Alvin Schwartz (bio) For about sixteen years, from the beginning of the forties to the mid-fifties, I suffered a peculiar kind of occupational thralldom. But I wasn't entirely aware of it. In fairy tales and legends, there are numerous stories of humans bound into the service of trolls, giants, witches and other demonic and supra-human entities. But in today's rational world, we are scarcely likely to recognize or give credence to such creatures. Consequently, when we are, in a very direct sense, taken over by such a being, we either tend to reduce it to mere psychology1 or deny that it's happening altogether. In my case, as well as that of all my co-workers, we chose the path of denial. It simply never would have occurred to us that we were, to put it bluntly, "being directed." For myself, I thought I was doing nothing more remarkable than making a living by inventing and writing the adventures of a meteorically rising star of popular fiction known as Superman. With sometimes desperate regularity, I used to turn out ten-week stretches of syndicated newspaper continuity as well as respectable quantities of intricately plotted comic book stories featuring the Man of Steel. Apart from the support of a very competent group of editors with whom many of the finer involutions of plot were frequently shaped, I was under the impression that, occupationally, I was a free agent. I was also under the impression that I'd worked my way to the "seventh level" of my occupational hierarchy because, before I got to Superman, I had catalogued the adventures of a lot of other "union suit" characters as we used to call them in the trade. These included Green Lantern, The Flash, Green Arrow, Captain Marvel, Mr. Terrific, Aquaman, then Batman, until finally I was certified to direct the destinies of the most distinguished of them all in the sense that the others were at best secondary elaborations. I was not to understand until long afterwards, however, that it wasn't I, or any of the other writers or the editors, or even the originators, Siegel and Shuster, who directed Superman's destinies. Superman directed his own destinies. All of us were merely his pawns. But the realization seems to be, long after the fact, mine alone. The first stage of awareness came one day in 1948 when the New Yorker sent a reporter by the name of Spencer Klaw to my home. [End Page 117] My first book had just been published and the Times had referred to it as "perhaps the first conscious existentialist novel in America." Mr. Klaw wanted to know how I managed to write both Superman and philosophical novels. "How," he asked, "do you manage to keep the two things apart?" My explanation had a certain spontaneous simplicity. I professed that I had two differently colored workrooms separated by a phone booth. In changing from one type of writing to the other, I just passed through the phone booth and switched suits. That story never made the New Yorker and I lost whatever publicity for my novel the interview might have produced because I hadn't the strength of character to resist improvising that phone booth transformation story. Actually, Mr. Klaw had posed a question that proved to be catalytic. "How did I manage to keep the two things apart?" As I saw it up to that particular moment, my modus operandi as a novelist was precisely the reverse of that of the anonymous biographer of Superman. In the former role, I consciously let the characters take over and lead me. In short, I allowed subliminal or unconscious elements to operate. With Superman, there was a conscious effort to control the character, to mold him to the demands of the plot. But Klaw's question made me reconsider. After he had gone, I began to examine what I really might have told him had I not been overwhelmed by my sudden uprush of levity. And then, unaccountably, I found myself confronting the memory of a previous summer when I happened to be gazing out...