Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  The problem was the present editor in chief of the paper, successor to my sister Mimi, her friend. He had been to our house, I thought he liked me. He may have liked me, but…“You’re not quite ready,” he said. Friendly enough. He smiled. “Not quite ready.” I left his office, burning with shame. “Not quite ready?” You will rot in hell, you bastard, before I am quite ready to submit a cartoon to your lousy, stinking newspaper!

  That pledge I stood by until halfway through my junior year, when Monroe’s star actor, the biggest of big shots, who miraculously befriended me, found me entertaining, fun to kibbitz with in the hallways, and treated me, although he was stellar and I a nonentity, as a colleague and confidant. He laughed at my jokes and, best of all, admired my cartoons. Myron Moskowitz. The best thing he had going for him, in those middle-forties war years, was that when he was on stage and one listened to him without looking, he sounded spookily like John Garfield. And to semi-stagestruck Jewish boys in the Bronx, John Garfield was God.

  Moskowitz already walked with a showbiz slouch. It was easy to see him as a star, easy to imagine him wearing his coat loosely draped over his shoulders, sleeves empty. So when he put our friendship on the line over the issue of my cartoons, I had no choice but to react. One day in a second-floor hallway when I was pretending to do my job as hall monitor, I ran into him, and after a few minutes’ kibbitz, he put a hand on my shoulder. “Julie,” he said, “I’m a big shot. All my friends are big shots. You can’t be my friend anymore until you’re a big shot. Go back to the Monroe Mirror.”

  I went back. I couldn’t put at risk my one big-shot friendship. This time there was a different editor. Or maybe after two years, I was ready. In any case, the next week and every week after, I was in the paper. Big shot.

  Monroe Mirror, circa 1945

  IDOL

  There I was.

  In his office.

  Sixteen and a half and scared shitless. I couldn’t believe my nerve.

  Will Eisner.

  I had looked him up in the Manhattan directory, I, who tried never to look anything up. Just out of high school, turned down by NYU and Cooper Union, the only colleges I had applied to, I needed an interim summer job while figuring out a direction, perhaps even a plan, possibly a future. Was I too young to have a career?

  Where was I going? By what means? With how much will? How little courage? How much desperation?

  Thirty-seven Wall Street turned out to be where I was going. Eisner’s studio was listed, to my utter disbelief, in the phone book, this larger-than-life innovator of comic book art, creator of Espionage, starring Black X, Hawks of the Seas—both childhood favorites that influenced my early attempts—and now author of The Spirit, a noirish eight-page feature that was the mainstay of a sixteen-page comic book supplement folded into the broadsheet-sized Sunday comics. The Spirit was unlike anything I or anyone else had ever seen before, and it quickly became a favorite that I followed as devotedly as I followed Terry and the Pirates, Li’l Abner, Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant, Abbie an’ Slats, Tarzan …

  And here I was, in his office, with a portfolio of sample art I’d brought to show him. Will Eisner! He was going to look at my samples. Where did I get the nerve to show him my samples?

  Miles away from where I stood at the door, tucked in a corner of the darkened outer office, Eisner sat, spotlighted by a draftsman’s gooseneck lamp screwed to his drawing table. He was bent over a drawing, a No. 2 sable brush in his hand, an apparition spinning magic.

  Eisner, like me, was from the Bronx and had brought the Bronx with him to The Spirit. His art crawled with Depression-era urban imagery, his drawing dark and clotted and often ungainly. Grotesque and bulky figures fighting it out in heavyweight balletic violence, the action lifelike, despite its distortions. One felt force behind punches, the physical damage absorbed by combatants. Elevated subway tracks over slimy, puddled, scrap-strewn streets. Filth and decay and sound effects, in graphic detail. You could hear and smell the city.

  He looked up from his drawing table quizzically. Quizzical was one of his frequent expressions, as if preparing himself for surprises not necessarily to his liking. It was a Bronx-Jewish expression, and Eisner presented a familiar, attractive, balding, thirtyish face to me. He seemed almost pleased by the interruption. One look at me told him that I wasn’t going to take much of his time.

  The sample art I showed him was of a comic book story called Adam’s Atom, an act of collaboration penciled and inked by me and written by Dave Kaplan, the editor of the Monroe Mirror. It was not a happy collaboration. Kaplan was an aggressive, hawk-faced reporter-editor whose mother claimed she had connections to the publisher of a local Bronx paper that would be eager to run my cartoons if her son David wrote scripts for them. Grimly, I bit the bullet and agreed. My sister had a point about my opportunism.

  I hated the idea of illustrating someone else’s scripts; I didn’t think of the words and pictures in comics as separate entities. My love for the medium had a lot to do with the words and pictures existing as a single unit. The best strips, it seemed to me, were written and drawn by the same artists: Milton Caniff wrote his Terry and the Pirates, Roy Crane wrote his Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, and Eisner was the auteur, in every respect, of The Spirit and, for that matter, of every other comic he had drawn. And by the time I got to him, he had drawn hundreds.

  I could easily identify the work of the better-known and most of the lesser-known cartoonists. My eye, from six or seven, instantly understood comics’ body language: the style in which Eisner or Raymond or Hogarth or Crane or Caniff posed and executed the human figure. Eisner’s men, save for his heroes, weighed heavy on the page, black, choppy folds on rumpled suits, hammerlike shoes with thick soles, heads carved from stone. Sometimes he signed his name “Rensie” (Eisner spelled backwards), sometimes it was Will Erwin. He operated under many names. Like a superhero, which he truly was to me, he liked to cloak his identity. But I was never fooled. I was Javert the boy detective, and Eisner was not going to escape my embrace.

  I had fallen in love with him by six with Muss ’Em Up, a hard-boiled cop feature that, believe you me, didn’t go in for coddling criminals. I collected everything that I could get my hands on from that point on. Hawks of the Seas, his swashbuckler. Espionage, starring Black X, his spy thriller … With every new comic book feature, he grew better and I grew more infatuated. I dreamed that someday I’d get to meet him, and here I was, where I was meant to be.

  Eisner smiled to put me at my ease. It didn’t work. He invited me over to look at the art on his table. He was inking penciled heads, some completed, others just features, no outlines. The remainder of the penciled figures and backgrounds he left untouched. So this was how it was done. “Let’s have a look at what you have,” he said.

  I slipped him my samples. Puffing on his pipe, he went through the six pages, giving them a glance and a half. He said they stank.

  Now, I understood on entering his office that my drawing was not on Eisner’s level (yet) or on the level of the assistants he employed. But what Eisner couldn’t possibly know and I clearly understood was (1) okay, I’m not really that good yet and (2) I am on my way to greatness.

  So hearing him say my work stank took a little getting used to. I absorb bad news when I first hear it as if it doesn’t matter. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. I’m fine, you’re fine, we’re all fine. I did not react to Eisner’s harsh judgment. Rather, I reacted as if he hadn’t said anything.

  I dropped myself as the subject (a nonstarter) and engaged him on the subject of himself. I talked knowledgeably and in detail about various of his cartoons over the years. It became instantly clear that this kid who walked in anonymously was not just any run-of-the-mill, talentless job seeker. This talentless job seeker happened to be an expert on Will Eisner. I knew more about his career than any of the far more proficient men lettering, inking, and rendering backgrounds in the next room. To them, The Spirit was nothing more than a job. Eisner immediately unde
rstood that for me, on the other hand, working for him would be like entering the priesthood. How could he resist? He hired me as a groupie.

  Immediately after, hired by Eisner for five half days a week with no pay, I took the subway to the Bronx, dizzy with triumph. I vividly remember what it felt like to get off the train and walk the one block to 1235 Stratford. I was exhilarated to the point of terror. This was by far the best thing that had ever happened to me. I couldn’t wait to announce the news to my mother. But I was sure I wouldn’t make it home. Nothing this good could happen without inspiring some awful event as payback. And now I had a dream job, I was going to be Will Eisner’s assistant, hired by my hero! I had to be punished. A brick was going to fall off a roof and kill me before I had a chance to tell this great news to my mother.

  The brick that fell was my mother. “Sonny Boy, let me understand, you took a job for nothing? What kind of job is that?” is what she said when I burst in with my news. “You’re a wonderful boy, Sonny, and you’ll have other opportunities, but you have to call him up and tell him you’ve thought it over and tell him politely no. The man is taking advantage of you.”

  My mother, direct as always, delivered her hard-earned truths no matter how much they hurt. Always trying to teach, she never failed to fail me.

  This was much worse than Eisner’s telling me my work stank. Outside the house, I had my defenses. I was able to rise to Eisner’s put-down. I managed to use my judo to turn his insult into a job offer. But I had no defense against my mother.

  Although I couldn’t stand up to her, I could lie. I agreed to quit. A lie. I said I would call Eisner tomorrow. A lie. The next afternoon, when she had returned home from selling sketches to fashion design houses on Seventh Avenue, I told her that I had gone downtown to see Eisner to get a better deal or turn down the job. Faced with my firmness, Eisner caved in and offered me ten dollars a week. Not much, but it was something. Every word was untrue. “Sonny Boy, I’m very proud of you,” my mother said. And, through her exhaustion, I could see that she was happy. She was happiest when she taught and I learned.

  STOMACHACHE

  My long siege of stomachaches began during my second year at Eisner’s and hit hard and often from then on. They struck in unexpected spasms of sudden force that hung on for minutes or longer and eased with grudging slowness, as if they didn’t want me to think that they were coming back. These attacks came to a mortifying end one day in 1947.

  By then, Eisner had moved his studio from Wall Street to 90 West Street, overlooking the Hudson River. When I raised my head from my drawing board and looked a little to my left, out the window was a vista view of the Hudson: tugboats, double-deck car ferries, tour boats, ocean liners, including the two Cunard Queens, Elizabeth and Mary, and close upon them, so close it was surprising, the Statue of Liberty, her torch held high in a personal salute to me: “Give me your inspired but unsure, your muddled lads and lasses yearning to breathe free … and rich … and famous … very famous.”

  Her prayer was a mockery to me, crouched over my drawing table with my gut-curdling stomachaches, ramming the tilted edge of the table into my midsection to ease the pain or, if not that, to abuse it into submission.

  Abe Kanegson, Eisner’s lettering man, seated to my right, asked what was wrong. Abe was the left intellectual of the office, which also included Marilyn Mercer, Eisner’s business assistant and secretary, and Jerry Grandinetti, Eisner’s background man. I enjoyed an active and bantering relationship with my boss and the others in the studio, but I was closest to Abe, with whom I had developed a big brother-kid brother relationship. Abe played utility infielder at the office: he lettered, he inked backgrounds, he finished inking Eisner’s half-finished figures. And he came from the Bronx, actually no more than four blocks away, on East 172nd Street, a block from James Monroe High School. He was five years older than I, big, burly, very hairy, a dark, wry, sardonic Russian Jew who lumbered as he walked. A strong presence but oddly, for all his impressiveness, without charisma. Maybe it was the stutter. Abe had a quick mind and wit and forceful opinions expressed in a rumbling, resonant baritone undermined by the worst stutter I had ever heard.

  His sentences came out in tortured fragments, his brilliance log-jammed by an unsayable b or d or f or m. I’d sit next to him at my drawing table and pretend not to notice his struggle. I had to restrain myself not to complete words for him, although I was dying to. I knew it would be an unforgivable intrusion and, in any case, what Abe had to say was often worth waiting for. So I acted as if I weren’t screaming inside my head, “Finish! Finish! Finish the sentence, goddammit!”

  I looked up to Abe. He was a Communist or fellow traveler (I never asked, he never told) to whom I awarded more credibility than to my sister Mimi because he didn’t beat up on me. Abe didn’t accuse me of being an “opportunist” or “indecisive,” nor was he trying to change me into the protégé Red that was Mimi’s ambition for me. My sense was that Abe was more interested in prodding/goading me into becoming a better and more serious cartoonist, the cartoonist that I liked to pretend I already was.

  He nudged and wisecracked me out of my defenses, layer upon layer. He took pride, I think, in playing therapist, outsmarting me with ease and even, with his stutter, outtalking my evasive attempts to change the subject.

  I was a very young nineteen—and didn’t take criticism well. I had more than enough at home. Away from my mother and big sister’s influence, I wanted to be free of constraints, to be myself, with high hopes of finding out who that might be. In Eisner’s studio, I took license to remold myself into a brash, opinionated, and even arrogant Jules. Each day I boarded the Lexington Avenue line at Soundview Avenue, endured the forty-minute subway ride to Fulton Street, confident after two years on the job that I wasn’t going to get lost. Along the way I doffed my outer guise of Bronx wimpishness. By the time I hit the office at 90 West Street, I had changed into my true but secret identity: KnowItAllMan.

  KnowItAllMan didn’t know why he had to have all these stomachaches, or why, at this particular moment, Abe had decided to psychoanalyze him. “You get a lot of these stomachaches,” Abe stuttered maddeningly, as I pulled my drawing table hard into my stomach with the determination of a man trying to slice himself in half. Since he had come to work for Eisner about a year after I arrived, Abe had seen me through this routine a few times a week. What I resented in his casual comment was the stutter, which transformed it, somehow, into a statement fraught with meaning. As if my pain weren’t enough, now I had to try to fathom what he was hinting at.

  “It’s psychosomatic,” Abe said.

  I had heard the word psychosomatic many times—it seemed to be in vogue—but I didn’t know what it meant and it didn’t occur to me to ask. God knows I felt uninformed more hours of the day than not, but I wasn’t going to concede my ignorance to Abe. It wasn’t that long ago that I took it for granted that I was the smartest kid on the block. But then the rest of the block went to college, and I didn’t. They learned the word psychosomatic. Another word they learned that I didn’t know the meaning of was contraceptive, both words casually dropped into conversations by boys and girls my age all the time. And while everyone else on the block understood their meaning, I was mystified. I pretended, nodding my head knowingly as the terms entered into conversation: contraceptive, psychosomatic, contracematic, psychosoceptive … I understood nothing.

  I meant to find out what these words meant. Their heavy-duty significance was so apparent, you’d think I’d rush home to a dictionary. But the thought didn’t occur to me. I hated looking up words, I was dictionary-challenged. I’d take note of words in novels that I didn’t understand, words like chimera. But I almost never got around to looking them up. It took me five years to look up chimera. And the meaning of the word contraceptive became clear to me only when I started buying Trojans to hide in my wallet.

  It was Abe who finally explained what psychosomatic meant. Doubled over my drawing table with unbearable cramps, I
confessed: “I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say this is psychosomatic. What does that mean?”

  Abe stuttered, “It m-m-m-means you hate your m-m-m-m-m-m-mother.”

  What?! Was the man insane? Abe, whose intellect awed me, had just stuttered the most uninformed, idiotic sentence ever spoken to me.

  “That’s ridiculous! I love my mother. I love my mother!!”

  I rushed to her defense. I spoke of how she had suffered to bring up three children during the Depression with a father who couldn’t hold a job; a mother, a career woman up to all hours of the night taking on the responsibilities that others (my father) could not handle—how could I not love my mother? To not love her would be sinful, criminal. Wasn’t it my mother who gave me permission to pursue my dreams? What if she had opposed my becoming a cartoonist, as most Jewish mothers might have been expected to do during these hard times? “A what? A cartoonist?! Get that out of your head, young man! You’re going to be a dentist, an accountant, a shopkeeper!” Abe was smart, certainly smarter than me, but he couldn’t have been more wrong about my mother. I loved my mother. I loved my mother!

  She could have made me go to dental school, but she didn’t. I had classmates who wanted to be writers whose mothers made them go to dental school. Not mine! My father had gone to dental school. He studied to be a technician. Twice in his life. Once as a young man, a promising student, doing well, his hands broke out in an allergic reaction to the chemicals he worked with in his studies. They flaked, they blistered as if burned, they pained him. And when they didn’t hurt, they itched. He applied powders and salves, but nothing worked but the passage of time. Then time ran out and so did his hope for a career in dental technology. He was forced to abandon the one thing he was good at, to go into business, the one thing he was bad at.