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Your Vigor for Life Appalls Me is about as interesting a look at Robert Crumb as you’re likely to get. In his interviews he is frequently contrary and argumentative just for the sake of maintaining his reputation as a difficult artist, etc. Here in these letters he is a much more appealing and interesting person than I had expected. The bulk of these letters were written between the years 1958 and 1964 when Crumb was between the ages of 16 and 21 so any expectation that there would be a lot of interesting correspondence dealing with his success and frustrations during the early to mid seventies is not met. But what you get in these early letters are Crumb’s thoughts during his coming of age as a cartoonist. These letters are Robert’s side of the correspondence he kept up with two of his comic book geek friends Mike Britt and Marty Pahls. At some point Crumb became roommates with Pahls and later on Pahls married his sister so it is not surprising that the volume of letters would drop off, but judging from the tone and length of some of the letters I get the feeling that the quality of the correspondence may have been kind of one sided and probably would have tapered off anyway.

I was continually surprised at Crumb’s gentleness and at how much pleasure he takes in simple things like old time string bands and funny animal comics from the forties. It is a little hard sometimes to reconcile all of the different things we find interesting and amusing, but it is especially hard for me to picture the fellow who drew Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural being in awe of Carl Barks duck stories. But there you have it in a nutshell, the guy who was associated with psychedelic music and drugs got off on musicians like Fats Waller and Guy Lombardo while he was drawing some of the most ground breaking comics of all time.

Aside from being generally surprised at the likeability of the young Crumb, I was also impressed with the way he quietly assumed the dominant role among the Crumb brothers. After having watched the Crumb documentary and seeing how mental illness devastated Charles Crumb it isn’t surprising that Robert would have had a responsibility to fulfill the role of the older and wiser brother, but it is surprising to me that this was something that he recognized so early.

This book probably is not going to appeal to the casual fan of Robert Crumb, but aside from his devout fans I think it will be of interest to any young person who is struggling with fitting in. Robert Crumb’s success at overcoming the constrictions of middle class expectations and prejudices is really his greatest legacy. It isn’t just that he survived being a lonely geek, he created one of the most revolutionary bodies of art in the history of the medium and he did it strictly through his own determination.

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