Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  Ed and I could not stop talking on our daily two-hour walks through Central Park about how language in comics either did or did not do the job. And why did it, why did it not? He was as unlikely a friend as I was ever to find. An authentic vagabond. But after only a few months on the job, he announced his restlessness and promptly disappeared. Six- or eight- or twenty-page letters started arriving, fat in bulk and content, making him more present than ever. He wrote in longhand in block comic book lettering from small industrial towns in the Midwest where he had hitchhiked and got himself hired on the assembly line as a machinist, making spare automobile parts. I, who feared leaving home and couldn’t drive and thought it unlikely that I would ever learn, read these precise proletarian tomes on assembling an automobile, and stark, forlorn descriptions of boardinghouse living.

  Occasionally Ed wrote about women he was attracted to or dated, but not like my Bronx friends talking about girls. Ed’s approach was that of his own recording secretary, simply stating the facts. Whether about a woman or a factory part, he wrote plainly yet colorfully, often wittily, with descriptions of men and women on the line, in cafeterias and bars, guiding me through the un-Bronx universe of Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana.

  And then, after a few months, he was back in New York and we resumed our walks through Central Park. Ed enjoyed chatting about my contradictory qualities, my neurotic ups and downs. He spotted, appraised, and made fun of my innate cautiousness. But I found his criticism enhanced my stature. Where others seemed to make it their job to tear me down, Ed made it his to turn me into a special case, an embryonic talent to keep one’s eye on. Before I was remotely capable of accomplishing anything, Ed had begun to compose my clippings.

  How could we avoid becoming best friends? And when he once again vanished, I would receive these fantastic future great writer’s letters that I saved and filed away by the dozens. Intimate conversations on paper. I felt honored to have his trust. His life was so different from mine, his background, his experience, his ambitions. And yet, like Hemingway’s Nick Adams, I felt that the less we had in common was more. Our differences enhanced our friendship, adding a closeness that I never felt with my neighborhood friends. A lingering affection lasted between us for all the many years after we stopped seeing and mainly stopped speaking to each other.

  Ed McLean, 1948

  THEATER

  My mother gave every impression of loving theater, but she never took us to a play. I recall going downtown with my parents to the mythic Depression movie houses—Radio City Music Hall, the Roxy, the Capitol, the Paramount—but I have no memory of this culture maven escorting us into the Shubert or the Biltmore or the Broadhurst or the Morosco. How come? Seats were cheap in those years, especially the farther up you went in the balcony, and I have no doubt that this was an experience she would have reveled in.

  It seems that my mother inspired in us a love for a form we learned about entirely from secondhand sources—radio plays featuring Broadway stars (Mom’s favorites being the two Helens, Hayes and Mencken); copies of American Theatre and Theatre Arts, glossy periodicals she laid out on the coffee table in the living room; and the then-named Drama section of the Sunday New York Times. It was my mother who introduced me to the art of Al Hirschfeld, whose wit, grace, and energy transformed every front page of the Drama section into an opening night.

  My mother was knowledgeable about theater. She regularly entertained the family with songs, ditties, cute little dance steps culled from vaudeville shows and stage musicals ranging from the Gay Nineties (“I’m sorry I can’t marry you today, my wife won’t let me”) to the 1920s (“Me and my shadow, we’re walking down the avenyooo”). Through her, I became knowledgeable. I learned to drop playwrights’ names like Maxwell Anderson, Sidney Kingsley, and Elmer Rice with almost as much familiarity as I could drop the names of Roy Crane, E. C. Segar, and Milton Caniff All this because of a woman who sang and danced a great game at home but never once walked her children down the aisle of a theater in the Great White Way.

  My habitual response to my ignorance in this matter and others is to make up an explanation—that is, if I don’t know the truth, I script it, then revise it, until I have a story line, a motive for things I don’t know or don’t understand, and then in the course of very little time I come to accept my story line as fact.

  My mother understood the Depression to be a personal humiliation, a traumatic shift in status from up-and-coming career woman to impoverished family breadwinner. She was not a social thinker or a political thinker. If the Feiffers were poor—and when she looked around she could see that among her relatives and former friends it was we who had fallen the farthest—the blame belonged less to our national calamity than to my father and his string of business failures. His brothers and his sister managed not at all badly during the Depression. They were in real estate and the jewelry business and men’s wear. All were doing well, one was rich. But Dave Feiffer had never done well. He opened and closed men’s shops in New York, then New Jersey, then New York. Location did not affect his bad luck—or his acumen, which was not for business.

  My mother, by nature not an uncritical admirer of men, should never have married. Men didn’t really interest her, except impersonally, the ones she read about in the newspapers: artists, writers, celebrities, men of wealth, socialites … She had no interest in sex and not that much interest in children. But she certainly tended to us. She did her job. One of my mother’s great stores of pride was that she did her job. As men did not do theirs. Men fell down on the job. Men drank. Men were weak. Men could not be trusted.

  My mother married my father not out of love—I’m sure she liked him all right, he was a kind and gentle man—but because she was a nice Jewish girl and nice Jewish girls married. Nice Jewish girls may have had jobs, but they didn’t have careers. Jobs were what you gave up when you married a nice Jewish man, a provider. Her family picked my father as a provider. A bad choice. Of the two, the way it turned out, my mother ended up the provider.

  She was past thirty when she agreed to marry Dave Feiffer. The admonition from her mother surely went like this: “You’re not getting any younger. Your sisters are all married. Also your brother. Already you’re almost too old to have children. What are you doing with your life, Rhoda?” My mother was in awe of her mother, my grandmother whom I never met. She prided herself on being an obedient child. She boasted about it to us, obedience as a prime virtue. That she never got enough of it from her children was one of her many sources of sorrow.

  She stood out from all the women in our Bronx neighborhood, and this was still true in her later years, long after her aspirations had dwindled into blame and bitterness. She dressed like an Upper East Side lady, not a Bronx housewife. She spoke in accentless English, in a voice that resonated class, no hint of Richmond, Virginia, or the South that she had been brought up in. Her voice alone was enough to levitate her above the nasally abrasive Bronx and European accents that were the norm for our neighborhood. She sounded superior to even her own children. To my ears she sounded like the American I wanted to be but was not. Articulation like hers you got from radio announcers: Ken Carpenter, who announced for Bing Crosby; Don Wilson, who announced for Jack Benny; Jimmy Wallington, Harry von Zell. These voices, like my mother’s, resonated of belonging. What they belonged to was a club that let you in only if you had that certain sound. A sound that denoted Americanness. The way I sounded, I could never be a member. And my father? Forget it! My father spoke with the inflections of a Polish Jew. His vs came out as ws and his ws came out as vs, as in “I fought in Vorld Var Vun. I am a weteran.”

  The Feiffers and Davises (my mother’s family) had known each other in Poland before both families migrated to the United States, the Feiffers to Yorkville in Manhattan’s East Eighties, the Davises to Richmond, Virginia, where my mother was the subject of mockery and humiliation because of her immigrant mannerisms and accent.

  Determination and a gift for mimicry cured her of both. By th
e age of fifteen, when her tailor father resettled them all in Yorkville, a block away from the Feiffers, she acted and sounded like a born and bred true-blue American. Now it was everyone around her, including her new boyfriend, Dave Feiffer, who seemed foreign.

  By sixteen, my mother imagined for herself a future of fun and games and genteel bohemian living as a fashion designer. Sex and drink she saw as human frailties and had little use for. Men were kept at a courteous distance, useful as contacts, courtly as escorts. She was perky, witty, vivacious. People were drawn to her. Dave doted on her.

  She thought she could control him, which had to be a primary reason for agreeing to the marriage. But control loses its appeal when your husband is deficient in feedback and strong on passivity. He couldn’t hold a job or keep a business going, and, as she let out one day, walked off with $5,000 of her single-girl savings. To do what? Drink? Carouse? “The stories I could tell you, but you’re not old enough.”

  I was never old enough. Not at thirteen, not at thirty. The dropped hints of his perfidy, plus my father’s inability to mount any defense but silence, left him in a state of isolation in our household. Not much status but amiable. When I went to him with a request, he said, “Ask your mother.” He was more of a presence to my sisters, but I saw him as a sweet, gentle, generally remote man reading in an armchair in the living room, little more than a tenant in the house, with opinions but no authority.

  He was always reading but seldom said much about the books, beyond mentioning their titles. He loved Victor Hugo, especially Les Misérables, but also The Man Who Laughed. He thought Les Misérables was one of the finest novels ever written, and urged it upon me. So I avoided reading it, holding out until my midtwenties, at which age it didn’t seem all that good. I confided this to my father, and he responded, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re full of hot air.”

  That was how he and I conversed across the years. In my teens, he turned out to be right about me. I didn’t know what I was talking about or how to get out a complicated thought without the words tumbling over one another ass-backwards. My mother and sister Mimi were the talkers. I knew how to wisecrack—that was the role I played. Funny Guy. I made them laugh. I learned how from radio and movies: Fibber McGee and Jack Benny and Bob Hope and Charlie McCarthy, a ventriloquist’s dummy who was funnier than I was.

  But I learned fast and was narrowing the gap between Charlie and me. Except the dummy was better spoken. If it wasn’t a wisecrack, I was hard put to come up with a coherent sentence. Language had not yet found roots in me. I depended on laughs.

  I read, I enjoyed reading. But I started out as a slow and truculent reader. The printed word was a threat and a mockery until I was almost seven. What was the big deal about reading when there were radio serials to listen to? Jack Armstrong, Don Winslow, Mandrake, Orphan Annie, and, if one’s taste verged toward the literary, Nila Mack’s Let’s Pretend, which dramatized fairy tales with flair and wit. When I was five and six my father worked patiently on my reading skills. He held up flash cards with simple words on them: H-O-U-S-E and B-R-E-A-D, words whose authenticity I refused to acknowledge. “Why does B-R-E-A-D have to spell bread? Who says so? Why can’t D-W-P-X spell bread?” I thought I was being sold a bill of goods and I wasn’t going to fall for it.

  Letters on a page stared out at me as hostile gibberish. I came from a family of readers—my mother quoted Emerson, for God’s sake, and Mimi read everything in sight, including the backs of cereal boxes. She even talked of becoming a writer, which meant she not only read, she spelled, which was more than I could do with B-R-E-A-D.

  My father’s patience had its limits. I had him stymied. So he gave up on me, a pragmatic decision that led to a lifetime habit. “I can’t do a thing with that boy,” he said, more times than I can count (which I couldn’t do that well either).

  If it hadn’t been for my love of comics, I might have held out for who knows how long. The truth was that reading was the unknown and I was not good with the unknown. Adventure was not to be found in this boy’s soul. Risking the unknown frightened me, and fear had me dig in my heels. I didn’t seem or act frightened, just stubborn. But I was terrified. Terror was a staple of my youth. My gut response to the axiom that connects risk to growth—“You have to walk before you can run”—was “Who says I have to do either?”

  My litigious front was a coverup for my certain knowledge that knowledge meant death. And it was only comics that could make me risk death. Only comics led me to recognize reading as something more than a curse, which, like sports, I was never going to be any good at.

  The grim and practical truth was that comics were words and pictures. To understand Segar’s Popeye or Crane’s Wash Tubbs or Raymond’s Flash Gordon or Foster’s Tarzan, I had to swallow my fear and cede my principles to the grown-ups and their miserable world of rules and regulations. From my mother at the top of the pyramid to my kindergarten and first-grade teachers, I had already endured too many assaults on my fragile identity.

  I wasn’t meant for school. I had to be dragged off to kindergarten, and eight years later, each morning I had to drag myself off to high school, never without the same sense of dread that had been dogging me since first grade. I’m sure I must have had good days, but I remember none of them. There had to have been at least one good teacher, but if so I can’t come up with a name. Yes, I can. Three or four: there was Mrs. Karow, my open-air-class teacher at P.S. 77; Max Wilkes, my high school art teacher; and Max “Sunshine” Taub, who taught me math by making jokes. But they left no mark that in any way lightened the load I carried as I made my way from 1235 Stratford Avenue to P.S. 77 three blocks away, and later, across the street, to James Monroe High School.

  I hated learning. I hated doing anything anyone else’s way but my own—and my way was not to do it at all. I hated the grown-up world of joyless rules and regulations, where art appreciation classes turned art into algebra, formulaic and funless, and required reading turned literature into the pleasureless pursuit of what was termed “comprehension,” which meant “We don’t expect you to like books. We, your teachers don’t like them either. But if you don’t read, you can’t get a job, so we make you read writers we, ourselves, would never read a line of if we didn’t have to teach you, and we resent it so much we pass on our dislike to you.”

  But learning to read could actually be fun if it was a comic strip. Words were less fear-inducing, hand lettered as they were, inside scalloped balloons. Not printed in cold, heartless type that spread like an ant infestation over a page.

  Comics gave me motivation. After my stubborn and principled stand that drove my father to throw down the flash cards, leave the room, leave the house, go to the bar under the El down the block, I relented. Gibberish rearranged itself into discernible patterns. And I understood them. I could place them in an order that I came to recognize as a sentence. In comics, sentences ended not with periods but with exclamation points. I was beginning to find this interesting, the business of words making sentences and how you made sense of them by way of punctuation: commas, dashes, three dots, as in “What th …” or “You can’t get away with th …”

  Interrupting a word in the middle, not letting it finish, in a sense abusing or overthrowing or undermining the sentence, this was of great interest to me. Not only was I becoming a reader, I was becoming a reader with an agenda. Who says it has to be done this way, when it can be done that way or another way or any way I want? Because I understand how the system works now—at age seven and a half—which means, if I have a mind to, I can redesign it.

  While I projected a meek and mild exterior, Clark Kent as a boy, my interior vision cast me as Superchild: smaller and weaker than other boys my age but, if the truth were to be told, more powerful (but not a bully), more ambitious (but self-effacing), more imaginative (but operationally passive), more in charge than all the grown-ups tied together (which was exactly my plan).

  Unfortunately, this plan had to be periodically
revised, modified, and scaled down because of my soul-numbing, semicomatose passivity. Years later I was to recognize myself in Herb Gardner’s classic cartoon of two men sunk in their chairs, feet up on a café table, and one of them saying: “Next week we’ve got to get organized.”

  Whatever my fantasies of self, they rose or fell depending on the facial expressions of my mother or a word or two from her. She was the enabler or censor of my dreams. Her praise of one of my comics pages filled me to excess. A raised eyebrow, a hooded eye, a down-turned mouth because I wanted to finish a drawing before I dried the dishes—“Two minutes more, Ma!”

  “Why are you doing this to me, Sonny Boy?” This could give me cramps.

  She singled me out as her knight errant and confidant, briefing me, tirelessly, on the hardships of her working life, the broken promises, the bad faith. She lectured me on who and what I must become: a successor to one of the great men about whom she found no shortage of articles in newspapers and magazines. Every one of them self-made: Bernarr Macfadden, the body-building publisher who parachuted out of an airplane at the age of eighty; Bernard Shaw, the bitingly brilliant Irish playwright and world-renowned wit; Bernard Baruch, the elderly elder statesman who gave advice to presidents while sitting on a park bench.

  Repeated mention of these names in her insistent, lesson-giving drone made me want to escape the planet, run off to sea, look away from my mother—which I was not allowed to do while she was speaking.

  “Am I boring you, Sonny Boy?”

  “No, Ma.”

  Was it any wonder that years later when I sought to create a character who represented me at my wimpiest the name I came up with was Bernard?

  Our near impoverishment was her constant shame. Living hand to mouth, unlike others on either side of the family or her friends (former friends now), working girls, artists with whom she used to gab and sing songs and party—every one of them dropped as our income vanished. Our family floated on my mother’s buried river of shame, which could run quietly for weeks, lulling us, only to suddenly flood over and threaten us with drowning. My mother was the river’s source, and she was the dike that held it back. You could take the temperature of our household by the magnetic charges off her presence when she entered a room.