Graywolf Press. - Black glasses like Clark Kent: a GIs secret from postwar Japan

BLACK GLASSES LIKE CLARK KENT

Also by Terese Svoboda

Fiction

Tin God

Trailer Girl and Other Stories

A Drink Called Paradise

Cannibal

Poetry

Treason

Mere Mortals

Laughing Africa

All Aberration

Translation

Cleaned the Crocodiles Teeth

BLACK

GLASSES

LIKE

TERESE SVOBODA

Copyright 2008 by Terese Svoboda

Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota; and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art. Significant support has also been provided by the Bush Foundation; Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is funded in part by endowed gifts from the Arsham Ohanessian Charitable Remainder Unitrust and the Ruth Easton Fund of the Edelstein Family Foundation.

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

Minneapolis, MN 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-55597-490-9

Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-045-1

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2008

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007925191

Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

Cover photos: From the collection of Frank Svoboda

Additional art: istockphoto.com

FOR DON

Guilt is always beyond doubt.

FRANZ KAFKA

On TV and in the movies, Clark Kent always came across as a bit of a nuisance, nearly a joke, and smirky phrases like mild-mannered clung to him like iron filings around a funny face. But in an extreme instance of Coleridges willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, Kents boxy black frames, along with his business suit, tie, and day job at the Daily Planet, completed the props of Supermans civilian disguise, though who, really, could have been fooled? In some later versions of the legend, Kents glasses were themselves Kryptonite, fashioned from the spaceship that conveyed Superman to Earth so that the lenses might withstand the terrible force of his solar Heat Vision. Following the puzzling death of George Reeves (recently dramatized in the film Hollywoodland ), and the melancholy fate of Christopher Reeve, any invocation of Superman inevitably summons a clich curse of Superman as readily as Superhero or Man of Steel.

Among novelists, filmmakers, and poets of the skittish, fledgling twenty-first century, classic comics tend to focus the cultural moves earlier generations once located in classical Greek and Roman mythology. My uncle is Superman, Terese Svoboda declares at the outset of Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, her family romance in the guise of a revisionist American historyor is it American history as a revisionist family tragedy? With black Clark Kent glasses, grapefruit-sized biceps, lots of brilliantined thick dark hair, and a solid jaw, six-four and as handsome as all get-out, hes the perfect match for Kryptonite.

Black Glasses Like Clark Kent probes a mystery (from the Greek root to close the mouth or eyes) as Sigmund Freud and Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith and D. W. Winnicott, would have calculated the notion. If the ego, superego, and id of traditional psychological case studies supposedly mimic the three floors in a Viennese bourgeois abode, Svobodas tale instead suggests a fever-dream horror househer multistory structure is all angles, dead ends, ghosts, and trapdoors. As Private Detective Svoboda trails the terrors: What if, for instance, Supermans (or her uncle Dons) disguise is actually a secret that he held on to for almost sixty years? And that secret spirals out from his Nebraska family back to the American occupation of Japan after the Second World War? What if that occupation occasioned an intricate government cover-up of torture and deaths of U.S. soldiers spanning Tokyo to Washington? And this exemplar of the Greatest Generation, this Superman, skids and crashes in 2004 because of what he saw, what he perhaps did, as an MP in the Eighth Army stockade in 1946?

Who tells any war story is what is important, Svoboda observes, that is, who has the authority to tell it, and then when and why. Her telling of her uncles war story fashions a nonfiction montage that rivals those of artists like Hannah Hch, Raoul Hausmann, and George Grosz, at once incandescent and devastating. Uncle Dons earnest voiceon the audio tapes he mailed her as she started this book and in the casual notes he wrote home during the warbumps up against Svobodas own first-person investigations in archives and libraries, online, and in Nakano streets. Her deflected conversations with her father contend with her candid talks with her son, the lost past versus the ongoing present. Everyone performs multiple, shifting rolesSvobodas cousin is Uncle Dons daughter, and his therapist. Svoboda set out believing she was tracking one sort of narrative, then ended up with (and in) another book entirely. All suicides, she writes, produce questions about the story of a life. The questions with this one proliferate with all I dont know about his tapes. I thought I was following a tidy coming-of-age account of a young soldier in postwar Japan. Instead there is this mystery of possible executions, with the site of those executions seven thousand miles away.

As Svoboda didnt choose this book, her mulishness and skillat shadowing her charged materials fall among the vivifying wonders of Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. Everywhere she lodges vivid, unexpected particularsher uncles revelations about the lice in the embroidered dragon quilts he filched from a whorehouse, and the Nebraska settlers who were driven crazy by the solitude that the Homestead Act had forced them into, pioneering one farm every 160 acreseven as she stays alert to terminal ambiguity, even failure. Her search shuttles between an obsessive determination to expose every fact, however obscure or tangential, and a clear-eyed recognition of the void. MPs dont like to keep records, one archivist informs her. I write to the National Personnel Records for my uncles official military papers and discover they burned in the great National Archives fire of 1973, she elsewhere admits. Finally, as she concludes, No document will provide all the details.