Remembering Dirk Zimmer
By Larry Bograd -- Publishers Weekly, 12/18/2008
Illustrator Dirk Zimmer passed away in September. His longtime friend, author Larry Bograd, offers a tribute.
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Dirk Zimmer, circa 1982. |
I first learned of Dirk Zimmer in spring of 1978 through the New York Times, when a spot illustration of his 
accompanied a Wednesday food section recipe. Barely bigger than a postage stamp, it was packed with humor, skill (notice the drawing breaking frame), fertile references (the dancing sausages out of early Disney Silly Symphonies, the oval portrait of Mama like a jar label hung from a nail, the cup and saucer and spoon about to fall from the table, the map curling from the wall like a theatrical drop as if there weren’t sufficient culinary clues already), and the sort-of cat observing the whole human fuss. At the time, fresh from a graduate writing program, I had my first job in New York publishing. After months of dwindling savings and rejection from the leading book houses I finally found employment at Harvey House, a children’s line barely surviving by marketing titles to school and library wholesalers.
Our staff (the owner/publisher and me) was on the lookout for new (work-for-peanuts) talent; eager to see my name in print, I suggested I write a story with this Dirk Zimmer fellow in mind and then bring him in for a meeting. Having recently emigrated from Germany, Dirk spoke little English at the time, clearly frustrated by the simplistic phases he could put together, but the rough dummy he apologetically bought in soared so beyond my imagination and expectations that it qualified as an epiphany. We accepted a $1,000 flat fee—I insisted that Dirk get three-quarters—and our careers were launched.
Thus began a collaboration and friendship, beginning with Felix in the Attic (Harvey House, 1978), about a boy who’s locked in the attic and creates sufficiency with the few things at his disposal. Amazingly, given that this rapidograph-and-ink picture book did not have a trade (retail bookstore) edition and received vitriolic reviews protesting that we had created a treatise on child abuse, it was picked as a Best Book of the Year by Bank Street College, winning its Irma Simonton Black Award, followed by a short nod from the New York Times (May 29, 1979), which called Felix “a dourly offbeat story.”
I had just turned 26; not bad for a Jewish kid from Denver who’d only attended public schools—I was ecstatic at being called dourly offbeat. Dirk, 10 years older, had been born in Hamburg in 1944. His father had served in Hitler’s army and his mother and sister still lived in Germany. Dirk’s father died young (as did mine), freeing Dirk to study painting in Berlin and join the hyper-theoretical, anarchistic bohemians who, if they inherited money, ended up in academic positions and, if they came from the poor or working class, learned early how to enjoy a Spartan existence.
We made an odd pair perhaps, our respective daily isolation alleviated by meeting for drinks at Puffy’s Tavern (when Tribeca was adventuresome) or Elsie’s Okey-Dokey bar in Yorktown. Inevitably I paid, because Dirk lived perpetually broke. I always sent him home with $20, imploring him to spend it on groceries; instead, when I called the next morning to make certain he’d made it back to his cheap, illegally-occupied room at 29 John Street (a Wall Street office not zoned for residential use), he inevitably apologized for spending my cash buying drinks for strangers in some vodka joint on his way home.
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Dirk Zimmer (l.) and |
We were together at an Upper West Side tenement party, intellectuals too stoned or drunk to locate their libidos, and I found Dirk cornered in the galley kitchen, backed against an ancient Frigidaire by a bearded bully of a Zionist hoping to cap his evening by punching out a Kraut refusing to apologize for the Holocaust, until Dirk disarmed the situation by saying, “I hate being a German. If I could change that, I would.” Dirk wasn’t being an anti-nationalist; he rejected cruelty in any form.
He was gentle to everyone but himself. No drawing was ever good enough, even after spending days on endless cross-hatches or the most subtle color washes. His ideas were “all shit.” That, with his drinking, may explain why he missed the deadlines set by indulgent and adoring children’s book editors, and why, rather than be forced to make a living, he spent his days reading science fiction—only, in his judgment, “true” science fiction, meaning little published since Lem’s Solaris (1961) and Dick’s The Crack in Space (1966). Rather than create the sort of illustrations that had gotten him assignments, he experimented with new techniques (scissoring silhouettes from black paper, cutting stamps from wood or potatoes); anything to bring challenge to graphically treating the spooky stories and recycled folktales that art directors pigeonholed him with). Frankly, he spent most of his time keeping a fabulous series of sketchbooks loaded with alien personalities he couldn’t explicate and stories he never completed.
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Zimmer and Bograd, also 1980. |
Both of us had backed into children’s books and yet, although he never married (except for a green card in that tried-and-true immigrant tradition) and never fathered, Dirk related to and respected young people’s wonder and helplessness. After our initial luck and then failing to earn back our advances, he and I worked on a number of books we couldn’t place. About Little Peter who wishes only to “fall into the sky” and visit places only imagined. About woodland creatures, some real, some out of Dirk’s mental menagerie, that start a newspaper, passed from beak to claw samizdat-style, to protest the intrusion of humans. We wanted careers, though—mostly—never took each other too seriously.
By the mid-1980s, Dirk had moved up the Hudson, finding sobriety and a reclusiveness he readily stopped when company called. I moved back to Colorado and our friendship became an increasingly occasional visit or phone call. The last time I saw him was five years ago when my wife Coleen and I brought our family east so our eldest daughter could look at colleges. We bought him a meal and he showed us a horse grazing a neighbor’s field.
Life pushes life, and now my gentle, talented friend is done creating. When I think of his final moments alone on a country road (he was struck by a motorist while walking in the rain and died five days later), I recall the ending of another great German-speaking artist Dirk introduced to me: the writer Robert Walser. Like Dirk, Walser was a lover of long, meditative strolls. On Christmas Day in 1956, Walser had a fatal heart attack. A group of children found him lying like a snow angel in a field. Perhaps, like Dirk half a century later, he was waiting to fall into the sky.
Larry Bograd is the author of more than a dozen books for young readers, and began his career collaborating with Dirk Zimmer. He recently completed a documentary film about spirituals, called I Can Tell the World, and is writing a memoir.
