Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  Weeks later, I was still sitting on my stool in radio repair class. No one expected me to learn. I was expected to just sit. It was as if my breakdown hadn’t happened. It was as if Mr. Hoover had never happened, as if time had reversed itself or was frozen, and each day began just as in the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. I waited, and that’s all I did, each day, starting from scratch. Not a word about my transfer. No message from Mr. Hoover. Did I make him up? I couldn’t have made him up, because my letter from Mr. Couse was no longer in my footlocker. Mr. Hoover had it.

  I had taken that letter over at seven-thirty the morning after my interview, hopes high, cautiously happy. I slipped it under Mr. Hoover’s locked door, his name scrawled on it. This letter from Mr. Couse from the Signal Corps Publications Agency. Without it, I couldn’t prove that I was needed in New Jersey. I couldn’t even prove it existed. They might deny that there was a letter. Then they wouldn’t have a reason to transfer me to Fort Monmouth, would just send me as a rifleman to Korea. Didn’t I say to the lieutenant that I wasn’t afraid to go to Korea? That I was trained in the M–1? I thought I was clever. Stupid, fucking jerk!

  Each morning I woke with a sense of doom on hold. I knew as much about my immediate future as I knew about repairing radios. The lesson of life was that there was no lesson. You had to take the same class over and over in order to find out that what you didn’t learn yesterday you would not learn today. What didn’t happen yesterday won’t happen today. Ciphering my way through limbo at a long table with other recruits coming and going, promoted as radio repairmen, sent out into God knows where to risk life and limb.

  And I risked nothing but my sanity, which I’d lost long ago, marking time at a desk with a broken radio that signaled my dwindling confidence. I was living testament to the immutability of army logic. An embarrassment to the service—how could they give me what I wanted? It would be a reward for my screwing up. I couldn’t be rewarded for proving to them that I was the wrong man in the wrong place and it was their fault for putting me there. If they put me where I belonged in Fort Monmouth, they would be admitting their mistake. And even worse, they had let someone who didn’t go through the chain of command get away with it. Every other punk who wanted out of an assignment might be inspired by my example. You can’t run an army that way. I imagined and feared that they were going to make an example of me. I made up conversations that they were having about me, and listened in on them: “Our best bet might be to send him to Korea as a rifleman.”

  “But how can you trust someone like that to shoot at the enemy and not our own men?”

  I waited in my limbo at radio repair. The stammer I had learned in basic training got worse. Words became one more burden to bear. Time had extended into a vacuum, and I didn’t have the words to fill it or make it go away. And so went the month of September.

  How awful it is when you think you have won and no one will recognize the fact. It was particularly hard on me because I was a coward. But I was a stubborn coward. If they weren’t going to let me win, then I was determined not to let them win either. I had one goal, and one goal only: to sit on my stool and outlast the bastards.

  And then, on October 1, 1951, my transfer to Fort Monmouth came through. Orders were cut. I was to fly to New York on October 3 and report for duty on October 4.

  So there I was, at the airport in Atlanta, waiting for a plane to fly me to LaGuardia. I’d spend the night at home in the Bronx and the next day take a bus to Fort Monmouth, and all I was thinking was, “I won, where’s the pleasure?” The long three-and-a-half-week wait for the transfer had taken all the joy out of my triumph. The army had both given me what I wanted and found a way to ruin it for me. Any second now I expected to hear my name called out on the airport intercom: “Private Feiffer, report immediately back to your hellhole.” Instead of a sense of triumph, I felt like I was standing in the middle of a minefield.

  A baseball game was in progress on a ten-inch black-and-white screen in a nearby airport bar. The Brooklyn Dodgers against the New York Giants in the final playoff for the National League pennant. Two neighborhood teams, one from Manhattan, one from Brooklyn, had made it onto Southland television. And so tense and exciting was the game that not a Southern soul was moving. Even in my punch-drunk state of mind I understood my obligation to metaphorize this moment into myth.

  The Giants had come from thirteen and a half games back to draw even with the Dodgers, an amazing feat that captured the hearts and imaginations of all baseball fans except, of course, Dodger fans. I wasn’t a Dodger fan; my sister Mimi was. She had to be. Jackie Robinson was a Dodger. Robinson had come out of the Negro Leagues to be the first black player to make it in the majors. The Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, had been proselytizing to get Robinson on the Dodgers years before most white-run newspapers were willing to acknowledge his existence. It was the politics of civil rights that made Mimi a Dodger fan. My fandom was apolitical, in that I didn’t care about color. I cared about which team was biggest and strongest because I was smallest and weakest. Therefore I was a Yankee fan.

  The Yankees were the closest thing to superheroes outside of comics. They hit lots of home runs. I loved home runs. I, whose best effort was to hit a ground ball that slipped into the infield for a hit because of bad fielding, identified my heart and mind with the Joe DiMaggios and Charlie Kellers and Tommy Henrichs of the Yankees, the class sluggers of Major League baseball. But this was not the American League pennant race, it was the National League, and in the National League, the closest to a Yankee-style ball club was the Giants. And the Giants had a black player too, arguably more skilled than Jackie Robinson: Willie Mays. So I cast my lot with the Giants, who had come out of nowhere, thirteen and a half games back, to make a pennant race out of a walkaway. It didn’t look good for the Giants, my side—but I was used to that. The Giants were behind in the last of the ninth, 4 to 2. One man out, two men on, and Bobby Thomson coming to bat. The great Brooklyn pitcher Ralph Branca had come on in relief to pitch to Thomson. Our plane, no other plane at Atlanta airport, no plane on the Eastern Seaboard was taking off until Branca pitched to Bobby Thomson and, if necessary, Willie Mays, up next.

  So here was what my life had come to. On this, my day of transfer, I expected an MP to tap me on the shoulder at any second and tell me that I had to go back to radio repair school. All that remained of my tenuous ties to optimism was what Thomson was about to do at bat or, if Thomson failed to get a hit and did not bounce into a double play, Willie Mays.

  You had to be there. But, of course, you weren’t and I was: the shout of Russ Hodges, the Giants announcer as Bobby Thomson swung for the seats: “There’s a long drive.” A pause. “It’s gonna be.” Pause. And Russ Hodges, who had ties to my Yankee background because some years earlier he had worked with Mel Allen announcing Yankee games, shouted—no, bellowed—over a screaming crowd: “THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!”

  In the opening chapter of Underworld, this is how Don DeLillo writes of this: “This is how the crowd enters the game. The repeated … force of some abject faith, a desperate sort of will toward magic and accident.”

  We passengers and flight crew boarded the American Airlines flight for LaGuardia, all of us looking at one another, stunned. By pure luck, we had become part of history. We, who were not on the playing field, who were not in the Polo Grounds, had entered the game. Our collective act of will toward magic and accident—how could you not help wondering if it didn’t work? The act of will that led me out of Camp Gordon onto that tarmac …

  An hour later, our flight made a stop in Washington, D.C., to pick up and discharge passengers. Only an hour had passed, but new passengers were coming aboard and all of them seemed to be carrying copies of a Washington Post extra with headlines screaming, “THOMSON BEATS DODGERS. GIANTS WIN PENNANT.”

  So it was in print. It must be official. It happened. So other thi
ngs could happen. Anything could happen. I quote a joke told me by a friend, Will Campbell of Mount Juliet, Tennessee, a town I had never heard of before my time in the south. A boy is promised by his father that a special present awaits him behind a closed door. He opens the door and what does he find but a room full of shit. And the boy says, “There has to be a pony in here somewhere.”

  PONY

  Munro, the forty-five-page cartoon narrative that was to determine the direction of my work and my life over the next fifty years, came to me as an idea in company formation at Fort Monmouth. It, and the cartoons that followed, secured for me the reputation to do what I liked, the way I liked. It allowed me the freedom to treat my career as a series of mood swings, shuttling back and forth from relationship cartoons to political cartoons to writing plays, novels, screenplays, dancer watercolors, children’s books, and this memoir. Wandering into seductive and scary neighborhoods and getting lost, just as I did in real life, circling around with no sense of where I was headed, just as in real life, until I discovered a way out and the way home.

  And the way out might never have been found if I hadn’t been drafted. And hated every minute of it.

  But I write this as I near eighty, and I discovered long ago that age has made me stupid. It’s possible that I don’t know what I’m talking about. My father always said to me in argument, “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” It angered me, this automatic put-down, because I saw it as his way of not responding to the point I was making. And I was right. And so was my father. Many times when I was most vehement in our arguments I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  I make up knowledge by the same method that I make up cartoons and stories and dramatic scenes: by committing myself without any sure sense of what comes next until it comes next and keeps on coming, right or wrong. One thought or idea follows another, leading I don’t know where until, moments later, it dawns on me that I know where I’m headed, and it’s the right place. A half page earlier I might not have known. Once I finish the piece of work, I give it and me a break. At an appropriate time, I take it out, look it over, begin again.

  The first time I worked this way, not knowing it was my method, I happened to be sitting at my desk at the Signal Corps Publications Agency, two months on the job. Bored with the routine of touching up photographs, I took out a sheet of paper and began playing with the idea of a four-year-old kid getting drafted by mistake. It was to be a cartoon in the form of a children’s book. A good idea, but what happens after he’s drafted? I took long walks around the post, talking out loud to myself, asking but not getting answers: “What am I doing? Where am I going?” Questions I still ask.

  Munro was a departure from the stunted single-panel cartoons I had been experimenting with since early basic training. I had tried a series called Army Types, contorted single figures inside a panel, expressing their psychic regrets about the military. It was drawn in a clean, thick and thin brush line and looked a little like the semi-surreal New Yorker panels of Abner Dean, who drew full-page panels of naked men and women with one-line captions instead of dialogue. Or that’s how I remember it. Dean was influenced by the inroads psychoanalysis was making into the urban consciousness. And so were we all. So I was very open to his approach and wanted to try my own variation. I had also begun to notice the more radical innovations of Saul Steinberg and William Steig.

  Although I had been an admirer of The New Yorker since childhood, the magazine had never played a part in how I worked or thought about work. It certainly played no part in my ambitions. I was, heart and soul, a newspaper strip man, four panels daily and ten to twelve color panels on Sunday was my fancy, my dream of glory.

  That dream was to join the ranks of Milton Caniff, Roy Crane, Will Eisner, Alex Raymond, Walt Kelly, Al Capp, and Crockett Johnson. If I could have turned myself into any one of them, I would have been overjoyed. But as much as I loved the work of Peter Arno, Charles Addams, Whitney Darrow, George Price, Helen Hokinson, Gluyas Williams, Alan Dunn, Sam Cobean, Frank Modell, and other New Yorker regulars, I could not imagine myself appearing in their magazine.

  “Army Types,” 1951

  “You meet us halfway, we’ll meet you halfway.”

  Company Formation

  “I hate everything except Mozart.”

  I had mastered the rules of the daily comic strip (or so I was convinced), its four-panel layouts, three panels acting as building blocks for a last-panel payoff. But the single-panel cartoon—whether in The New Yorker or Collier’s or the Saturday Evening Post, or in the editorial art of Herblock and Bill Mauldin—was a mystery to me in terms of execution. I didn’t know how to think in a single shot. And every time I tried, not only did I fail, but often, much too often, I didn’t have an opinion on whether the cartoon was any good or not. I needed to be told. Friends like Ed McLean would have to look at my work and tell me: That’s okay, not bad, needs work, stinks, no, that’s really good. I couldn’t tell. They all seemed—the good or the mediocre—pretty much the same to me.

  And if the day came that I mastered the form, how could I ever hope to match Peter Arno’s “Man in the Shower” cartoon, which happened to be on the first page of a Christmas New Yorker collection that Mimi gave me as a present. I must have laughed for ten minutes. I studied the cartoon, trying to understand what it was that caused this outburst. No caption, just this naked man floating upside down in a stall shower filled to the top with water, frantically pointing out the door handle to his alarmed wife standing in the bathroom door in her robe.

  Why did it continue to be hysterically funny long after the surprise was over? I looked away and looked back, and broke up, and tried to get to the bottom of it. This single image was funnier than some of the great sight gags I’d seen in movies. Arno grabbed you by the shirt front and pulled you into the panel. He was all noise, virility, and charm, not a trace of the whimsy or diffidence we usually associate with the magazine. If Picasso had drawn New Yorker cartoons, they would have looked something like Arno’s.

  Gluyas Williams’s cartoons in the magazine were more my style, but his drawing was tighter and better than anything I could manage. I thought that with hard work, willpower, and skillful copying, I could learn to be Williams. He, too, drew in multipanels, offering silent movie glimpses of life’s minuscule moments. Working in a quiet, gentle manner, with a line light as air, he observed body language with meticulous grace: posture, hand gestures, neck, shoulder, and torso tilts, the angle of a leg; incisive, wordless essays on manners and character and class. His drawings appeared, as well, in the humor collections of Robert Benchley. Twinned together, he and Benchley seemed to me perfect exemplars of self-effacing Gentile wit, eons apart from this self-effacing Jewish boy cartoonist from the Bronx, who, if he got lucky, might someday be invited to the party.

  But I was in no mood to be elegant like Williams. I was in the goddamned army. Elegance was the wrong note—I had anger to express. I found it in the savage grace of Robert Osborn’s heavy brush and charcoal lines in the pages of the New Republic, Fortune, and the New York Times Magazine. Osborn’s line was like an attack dog going for your throat, yet off-puttingly artful. Its artfulness gave his line a beauty that modified its grit without selling it out. Osborn as a cartoonist was able to make use of anger to fuel thought: not a bad role model.

  But the three cartoonists who captured my attention most during my army time had only recently emerged into public consciousness. They were Saul Steinberg, William Steig, and André François. All three changed how we looked at cartoons and how we looked at one another. I practiced trying to be each of them.

  Steinberg’s line, unlike Gluyas Williams’s, was angular, architectural, and barbed. Wit was present in plentitude, but not a hint of the WASP self-effacement that one found in Williams. Steinberg’s line indicted. It was cultural anthropology in cartoon form, playful and judgmental and forgiving, all in one. For a while it seemed that every new Steinberg augured a breakthrough. Language was tur
ned into line, scribbles of insight and rhetoric, single-panel monographs that were philosophical and funny and cultured and painful to look at. He was so smart that he made us feel smarter than we were just because we admired him. His work (and his mind) was not anything I would ever be able to emulate. But nonetheless he led me to try things I wouldn’t have known to try before.

  Saul Steinberg, from The New Yorker, February 12, 1955

  Saul Steinberg, Untitled (detail), 1954-55. Ink on paper. Originally published in The New Yorker, February 12, 1955. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  Drawing for William Steig’s The Agony in the Kindergarten, 1950

  © 1950 William Steig.

  Steig stung from the inside. He was the first cartoonist I came across who effectively translated Freud into humor. His earlier New Yorker cartoons—Small Fry and others—had not been of great interest to me. The art seemed cramped, the gags so-so. I would not have included him among the New Yorker notables, which, in any case, were an overcrowded field. Then in the mid-forties he started publishing books of cartoons rejected by The New Yorker that were revolutionary. I’m not trying for scholarship here, so I can’t be sure of dates or chronology, but for The Lonely Ones and The Agony in the Kindergarten he borrowed from cubism and abstraction to present weird-looking, nerve-jangling creatures who, in poetic and hilarious one-liners, bared our inner selves. So painfully and incisively acute are these drawings that it was as if Dostoyevsky had turned cartoonist.

  Seated at my desk at the Signal Corps Publications Agency, struggling to find my form with Munro, I had these artists in mind, all of whom I considered my masters. They were pointing the way, but their styles weren’t as accessible to me as I thought they should be. My line was not nearly as precise or discerning; it was looser, okay, sloppier. So my discovery of André François, whom I came upon in Punch, was a godsend. François was even sloppier than I was, but he made it work.