"Hey Dad! What's up?" "Rivers of blood!"

What Did You Do in the War, Dad?

By DOUGLAS WOLK

“YOU’LL NEVER KNOW”

Book 1: “A Good and Decent Man.”

Written and illustrated by C. Tyler

Unpaged. Fantagraphics Books. $24.99

What happened to Carol Tyler’s father as a staff sergeant in the Army during World War II wasn’t unusual. As she puts it in this remarkable memoir, “ ‘You’ll Never Know,’ ” he’s “a member of a huge, exclusive community”: 16 million American soldiers went off to war, and the ones who came back got on with their lives, or tried to. For nearly 60 years, he didn’t talk about the war, even with his family. A proud, resourceful blue-collar craftsman, he could be taciturn and irritable; the relics of his military service in his garage fell into “the category of ‘leave it the hell alone’ or ‘it’s none of your goddamn business.’ ” As Tyler spells out on one page, rebus-style, “not all scars are visible.”

Then, one day in 2002, he called his daughter and opened up. (Tyler’s rendition of the phone call that set this book in motion: “Hey, Dad! What’s up?” “Rivers of blood!”) She captured a few hours of his recollections on videotape, although he clammed up again when he got to the subject of Italy, where something awful apparently happened. As this volume (the first of three) ends, we still don’t know what it was, although her art and his fading memory are circling warily around it. The tent poles of this book, subtitled “ ‘A Good and Decent Man,’ ” are two brief sequences of an “Army scrapbook” Tyler made for him — not the photos he’s held on to for decades, but sepia-toned cartoons, annotated with entertaining bits of his narration. He slept on a gun turret to avoid snakes; he set up a shower in the North African desert and was delighted that a sheik’s “harum” used it.

Still, the book is less about his experiences in the Army than everything that radiated out from them: the way they shaped the rest of his life, as well as his wife’s and daughter’s and granddaughter’s lives. One resonance of the title is the World War II-era song of the same name; in part, this is a portrait of his 60-year romance with Tyler’s mother. Another is that, as the author puts it, “you would never know” what had happened to him from the postwar life he constructed — the war may be the central fact of his psychological makeup, but he tried, with some success, to bury it “under tons of mental concrete.”

When her father told her his story, Tyler’s own life was in flux: as we see in the book, her husband, the underground cartoonist Justin Green, had recently left her for a former baby sitter — although he was thinking about coming back — and she had moved from California to Ohio with their teenage daughter, Julia. (The book’s acknowledgments include thanks to “Justin and Julia Green for support and for keeping it interesting.”) It’s easy to see echoes of her father’s dedication and grudging optimism, as well as his capacity for sublimating painful feelings in endless craft and construction projects, in what Tyler shows us of her open-hearted relationships with all of them and her stoic perseverance in dealing with her own downturns.

“ ‘You’ll Never Know’ ” unfolds like a rambling reminiscence, except without the boring parts. It skitters around in time, every observation setting off another memory or meditation or visual flourish. Tyler’s artwork flutters between representation, fantasy and symbolism, sometimes even in the same panel, but her stylistic virtuosity is a steadfast guide through her chronology’s loops and pivots. On one page, she shows us an imagined scene in her family’s backyard in the early ’50s — kids playing in buckets of water, her mother hanging up a towel reading “Always Do Your Best,” a TV set and a pair of pedal pushers floating in midair — then carefully annotates the anachronisms. She draws her father as a sturdy young man in an Army helmet and as a grouchy retiree in a trucker’s cap, but also as a little boy in church with a halo floating over his horns, as a fox seeking out a peach labeled “Mom,” and as a tree trying to teach fortitude to its fragile sapling of a daughter.

Tyler has been drawing comics on and off since the 1980s; her 2005 collection of short pieces is aptly titled “Late Bloomer.” She was a painter before she was a cartoonist, though, and she’s adapted some painterly techniques to comics, even beyond her magisterial sense of color (she drew this project with 53 custom-mixed inks). Every panel is lush with visual and psychological detail. Her swooping ink lines have the fluidity and force of paint, and she treats the borders of her pages and images as frames, sometimes solid and unassuming but more often decorative or permeable or even broken. In one sequence, a despondent Tyler falls through the base of a panel and onto the bottom of the page, only to be scolded by her father in his easy chair (“Whaddya think you’re layin’ on!! Get up!!!”) and an imaginary elf that we’ve earlier seen telling him to “keep your feelings secret!”

He does, for the most part. But it’s only in the final few pages of this volume that we fully understand what that has cost him and his family. As autumn turns to winter, a gust of wind that steals his hat becomes Hitler in his aging mind. Meanwhile, Tyler imagines herself stumbling into the “rivers of blood” that her father saw in “It’ly”; as she researches what might have happened to him, he explodes with fury over his delusion that she’s stolen the Army pictures he loaned her.

It’s impossible not to compare “ ‘You’ll Never Know’ ” with Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” the first great graphic novel about what happened to a cartoonist’s father during World War II. They’re very different sorts of books, though, in both their means and their ends. “Maus” is largely Vladek Spiegelman’s own testimony amplified by the book’s abject, minimal style and the allegory of its cat-and-mouse imagery, and is only secondarily about its creator’s relationship with his father and his struggle with the enormity of his topic. Tyler’s book is a vivid, affecting, eccentrically stylish frame built around a terrible silence.

Douglas Wolk is the author of “Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean.” He writes frequently about comics for The Times.

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I have only come to understand - dimly - in recent years how profound an effect my father's service in WWII has had on our family. His was the first company into Hiroshima after the bomb dropped. His unit in the Pacific suffered over 50% casualties.

He told me [shortly before his death last fall] about one of his good friends, who was island hopping with him. This kid had been Dad's lab partner in High School Chemistry. "Smartest guy I ever met," said Dad. "He became convinced that he was unkillable, that no Jap would ever kill him." Dad tried to talk to him as a friend. But the delusion persisted. Then, one night on patrol, this kid was killed. I asked dad how old he was then and he said, "19."

I think of all his restless habits -- humming to himself under his breath, tapping his hands constantly, pacing, so many habits that betrayed his inner anxiety and unease.

Most of his life he just outran the ghosts, but the ghosts [and the alcohol] ultimately changed him. During his last years, he spoke at length about the war -- after a lifetime of never mentioning it. It occurred to me during several of those conversations that "Rivers of blood!" had always been present to him, but not named or acknowledged.

Our last conversation before his death was unpleasant, and I wrote him an angry letter which a wise friend counseled me not to send. He died within the week. So there was the incompleteness that had always been between us. There was no neat tidying up our loose ends as father and daughter.

But I remind myself when I get morose , when I let myself brood over our fucked up relationship, that I really can't know what his inner world was like. What it would be like to live with PTSD or it's equivalent.

Not all questions have answers. Or, as some might say:

Your difficulties are not obstacles on the spiritual path, they are the path. --Ezra Bayda

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SEE ALSO:

THE WALL WITHIN:

"Delivered at the commencement of the National Salute II in Washington, D.C. on November 10, 1984, as part of the official activities prior to the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial ("The Wall) as a national monument. It honors the personal list of love and loss that each American has marked in his/her heart. Poem entered into the Congressional, January 30, 1985." Johnny's Song: Poetry of a Vietnam Veteran. Steve Mason. (May 1986). Bantam Books.



Most real men

hanging tough
in their early forties
would like the rest of us to think
they could really handle one more war
and two more women.
But I know better.
You have no more lies to tell.
I have no more dreams to believe.

I have seen it in your face
I am sure you have noticed it
in mine;
at the unutterable,
unalterable truth of our war.


The eye sees
what the mind believes.
And all that I know of war,
all that I have heard of peace,
has me looking over my shoulder
for that one bullet
which still has my name on it--
circling
round and round the globe
waiting and circling
circling and waiting
until I break from cover
and it takes its best, last shot.
In the absence of Time,
the accuracy of guilt is assured.
It is a cosmic marksman.

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