Vertigo (wordless novel)

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Vertigo is a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985), published in 1937. It is Ward’s longest and is often considered his masterpiece. The story is told in three intertwined parts about how the Great Depression affects three people: a young woman, an elderly man, and a young man.

The Girl
A musically talented young woman has a hopeful future and becomes engaged. As the Depression deepens, her fiancé leaves and stops contacting her. Her father loses his job at the Eagle Corporation of America and, overwhelmed by debt, shoots himself; the couple is evicted and loses everything.

An Elderly Gentleman
A sick, wealthy old capitalist watches his business get bleaker. He cuts workers’ wages and uses armed force to keep unions down. As he grows weaker, doctors try to cure him. While he recovers, his associates tell him profits are rising again.

The Boy
The son stands up to his abusive father, leaves home, and plans to marry the Girl. He goes looking for work but returns to find her evicted and too ashamed to contact him. His job search becomes more desperate, and he even considers crime. He does manage to earn a little money by donating blood to the Elderly Gentleman.

Ward’s aim was to show “impersonal social forces” by focusing on the people whose actions create them. The work is rich with symbols, such as a rose, and uses a highly detailed, realistic style. Pages have no borders and each image is one panel, varying in size. Vertigo uses about 230 wood engravings, making it Ward’s most complex wordless novel. It was two years in the making, with many blocks discarded along the way.

Ward’s background and influence
Ward grew up in Chicago in a family active in social justice (his father, Harry F. Ward, was a minister and ACLU leader). He studied wood engraving in Europe and was influenced by German wordless novels like Frans Masereel’s The Sun and Otto Nückel’s Destiny. Vertigo followed his earlier wordless works, including Gods’ Man (1929) and Song Without Words (1936).

Publication and reception
Random House released Vertigo in 1937. It did not see another print for more than seventy years, until reissues by Dover (2009) and Library of America (2010) made it widely available again. Rutgers University holds the original woodblocks, and mounted an exhibition of them in 2003. Critics praised Vertigo for expanding the possibilities of visual storytelling, though some noted the small size of the woodblocks could affect readability. The work is often regarded as a Depression-era landmark; Art Spiegelman called it a key book of the era.

Later years
Vertigo was the last wordless novel Ward completed. In 1940 he began another, Hymn for the Night, but abandoned it because the story felt too distant from his own experience. He then focused on stand-alone prints and book illustration for the rest of his career, including collaborations with his wife, writer May McNeer. Ward did attempt another wordless project in the late 1970s, but it remained unfinished when he died in 1985. An exhibition of the original blocks at Rutgers in 2003 showcased many pieces Ward had discarded during creation.