An Andy Capp for Ginsberg enthusiasts

THE ARTS: Donald Clarke encounters the singular brand of pessimism of Harvey Pekar, the oddball subject of new film 'American Splendor'

Harvey Pekar, American Everyman and professional Eeyore, is depressed. "A lot of people have said to me: 'You're crazy. You should be happy,' " he says. " 'You're doing great. Your picture is all over the papers. You have a hit movie.' But, you know, I am always two steps ahead. Even if it does all work out I am still going to die some day. What's going to come of all the stuff I accomplished when I die? It's all going to vanish."

For more than a quarter of a century, Pekar, now 63, has been expressing his singular brand of pessimism through American Splendor, an underground comic, originally self-published, that follows his life as filing clerk, jazz fan, cancer survivor and husband. Andy Capp for Ginsberg enthusiasts, the comic has slowly developed into a mighty chronicle of the sort of ordinary life that is usually ignored by both pop culture and the higher arts. "People in comics had been writing about superheroes and all that stuff," he says. "Nobody had been writing about real life. And what I mean by ordinary life isn't even covered much by prose writers."

Although greatly admired by a hard core of enthusiasts, American Splendor had, despite Harvey's brief celebrity as a guest on Late Show With David Letterman, the CBS chat show, never much troubled the mainstream. That has all changed with the release of a superb film adaptation directed by the distinguished documentarists Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at last year's Sundance festival, the picture stars Paul Giamatti as the acerbic Harvey and Hope Davis as his wife, Joyce Brabner, but also includes contributions from some of the real people who inspired the film's characters, including Pekar himself.

As a result, I feel I know the author already. Do I? "Well, I apparently come over as more of a curmudgeon than I really am," he says. "Curmudgeon: I've heard that a million times. I think I have more of a sense of humour about myself than has been suggested."

The film, with which he is mostly happy, necessarily conflates some incidents and plays around with the order of events, but I take the original comic to be an accurate representation of his life. Or are there lies in there? "I think I portray myself pretty accurately. What is the point of self-aggrandising autobiography? I am pretty much as I seem in the book. I don't think I'll surprise you too much."

But before seeing the film it would be difficult to know what to expect from him. Since the first issue, drawn by the great Robert Crumb, was published, in 1976, Pekar's appearance in American Splendor has changed subtly from month to month, depending on which artist was wielding the pencils. The real Harvey is a droopy, hangdog figure, with a bald patch partially covered by a wispy confusion of lank hair that might be a comb-over but more likely fell that way by accident.

Raised in the Ohio city of Cleveland, Pekar, whose intention was always to be a writer, worked as a filing clerk in a local hospital for close to 40 years before his retirement, last year. He had already begun writing jazz and book reviews when he showed Crumb, doyen of the underground comic scene, his ideas for American Splendor. "I was amazed when he said he'd draw it," Pekar says. "I wasn't expecting that. I wasn't being cute. I just wanted him to tell me if it was viable or not."

The comic that resulted, featuring stories such as Roller Coaster To Nowhere and Standing Behind Old Jewish Ladies In Supermarket Lines, is a dry, blackly humorous piece of work. Much of the action focuses on his peculiar workmates, most memorably Toby Radloff, a self-declared nerd who speaks in a grating monotone. How did they take it? "I am not on speaking terms with the ones that I'm not kind about," he says. "The ones that I am on good terms with, they just want to be in the book. For most people, being in a book or having your picture in the paper or being on TV is a big thing. It doesn't get any better than that for some people. So they would ask me: 'How come I'm not in this issue?' "

But what about his friend Radloff, who is shown eulogising the lowbrow high-school comedy Revenge Of The Nerds, a film he feels represents his people's struggle against oppression? "Toby is a special case. I think he may be borderline autistic. But I talked to him and explained I wasn't showing him disrespect. He says that people are laughing with him, not at him, but, sadly, I know that isn't always true. But he's had a real hard life, and it was a real pleasure for him to get in print. He is probably enjoying the success of this movie as much as anybody."

Were people laughing at or with Pekar himself when he appeared on the Letterman show? The film shows his wife, who clearly believes her husband is being used, watching the broadcast in disgust. "Of course I was being used," he says. "I knew I was there to get laughs, and the easiest way to do that was to be this caricature of a Cleveland working man. I obviously did it too well, because that's all they wanted me to do. They kept bringing me back. What really disappointed me was that the sales of the comic didn't go up. That was the only reason I went on."

But didn't that change the nature of the comic book? Surely he was no longer an ordinary guy; he was a minor celebrity. "Not in Cleveland. Cleveland is a working man's town; nobody cared who I was. Even doctors and lawyers don't care about the arts there. I have kept my name in the phone book and never received a crank call. That's Cleveland."

Pekar's spiky relationship with his wife is at the heart of both film and comic. A huge fan of American Splendor, Brabner wrote long letters to its author, and long before they ever met they had become friends. Within hours of their first meeting the two dishevelled outsiders had decided to marry. When Pekar speaks about Brabner he adopts the long-suffering tone of the henpecked husband in a dated sitcom. What did she make of her portrayal by Hope Davis? "Oh God, what does she think of it? She gets real mad about little things that she thinks are wrong. But Hope did a real nice job of showing my wife at her most supportive. She's not like that all the time." The film suggests it was Brabner who urged Pekar to turn his experiences fighting cancer in the early 1990s into the graphic novel Our Cancer Year (a winner of the National Book Award), but he remembers things differently.

A searing, brutal piece of work, the book is not one of those cancer diaries that tries to portray illness as an enriching experience. Oprah Winfrey is not likely to invite Pekar on her show to explain why his suffering has made him a warmer, kinder fellow. "Yeah, I didn't particularly want to do that," he says. "But I don't know. It may have made it easier for me to put up with hard things and disappointments when I measure them against the experience of having cancer. But I could have well done without it. I didn't want anybody to think that having cancer would make you a better person."

Ironically, considering the author's pessimistic world view, the film has something like a happy ending. As the credits roll, Pekar's cancer is in remission and he and his wife have begun caring for a young girl, Danielle, from a troubled background. "At that point in my life things were going pretty well," he says before introducing a characteristic qualification. "Not that things were great or anything. But in the 1990s I was making enough money between my freelance writing and civil-service job to take care of Joyce and Danielle. But I know it isn't any sort of permanent happy ending, because I am full of anxiety again now."

Sadly, Pekar was diagnosed with cancer again in 2002, although it is once again in remission. He also owns up to suffering from serious depression from time to time. That depression contains bad news for all of us; rather than just being a symptom of the way he is wired, it seems to result from his discovery of a terrible aspect of the human condition: even if things seem fine now, you're still going to die. It is not a world view that fits in with the European caricature of the US as a nation of incurable optimists.

"Oh, I know where my pessimism comes from," he says. "My parents were Jews from Poland, and they had been treated real badly by the Polish even before the Germans arrived. My mother was always telling me that just because things are great now doesn't mean it's going to last. That's a real Jewish pessimism. It doesn't come from the US, that's for sure."