Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  I said to him, in an explanation that I improvised as I went along, speaking in a voice that rang with sincerity (and why not—I had years of practice, standing at the bar of justice before my mother): “Larry, the reason clients like what I’m doing is I’m spending a lot of my own time at home on ideas. There is so much going on at the office, it’s hard to concentrate. So I get up an hour or so early and get ideas before I come in to work. And sometimes it makes me late. Or sometimes I go home early and work on ideas. But if you want, I could do what everyone else does, and come in on time and leave on time and stop thinking up ideas, except during office hours.”

  God, I was good at this! I had developed this skill in my battles fought from childhood, a talent for self-serving advocacy. I could take a situation where the facts indicated that I was in the wrong and, through a measured defense, never sounding less than reasonable, manage to redefine crime into error, error into mistake, mistake into confusion, so that my misdemeanor, which seemed clear enough, was given a face-lift, a whole new look that warranted reconsideration and a second chance.

  I don’t know if Larry believed my explanation or not. But he clearly believed in the results that went with my hours of late arrivals and early departures. So he offered a shrug and a mumble of consent, which I read to mean: “I’m letting you get away with this for now, but don’t push it.” He didn’t understand that it wasn’t in my nature not to push it. In any case, I was allowed more or less to come and go as I pleased.

  Once again, I sensed no resentment on the part of my fellow bull pen artists, who came in every morning at nine, and punched a time clock to prove it, and left at five—or after five—and punched the time clock again. I, however, marched to the hands of a different time clock. It didn’t seem to piss anyone off. Maybe it was assumed that I was a dead duck, and my office mates were simply waiting to see how much longer it took to see me shot down.

  Titillated by the success of my hustle, I began to wonder what I could do to shorten the hours between my late arrival and early departure. This blatant bending of the rules had a secret intent, one that I had in mind from my very first days at Chartmakers. It was to get myself fired.

  I had been with the company for over six months, much of it on good behavior. After six months on art studio jobs, I began figuring out how to get fired. If I got fired sooner than that, New York State law said I would not be eligible for unemployment insurance. However, if I ratcheted up my misbehavior one infraction at a time after six months, then even the most generous and forgiving employer would have no choice but to let me go.

  Unemployment insurance in New York State lasted six months. That was six months at home to do my artwork. After that, I would have to look for another six-month art studio job, maneuver myself into getting fired, and start the process all over again. This, in a sense, became my own personal National Endowment for the Arts subsidy, awarded by myself to myself at six-month intervals for a period of three years.

  While my friends held down jobs they either hated or felt indifferent about, I stayed home drawing—except for one morning a week when I joined the lines of the unemployed downtown at the unemployment office and let myself be interrogated by surly functionaries sitting behind barred windows who asked: Had I looked for work last week? What sort of work? What else was I doing to find work? After this small weekly humiliation (the price I paid for my freedom from want), I took myself home and went to work (or not), or went to a bar to hang out, or, if it was July or August, went out to Fire Island, where I shared an inexpensive house with friends who worked for a living. So I had the house all to myself during the week, having to share it only on weekends, when everyone got drunk, so who cared? The down side was that one day a week I made the trek into the city to sign for my insurance check. A nuisance, but I put up with it.

  Here is how I got fired from Chartmakers. Larry called me into his office on a Thursday afternoon. His demeanor was not friendly. He told me that it had been noticed for about three weeks that I had been disappearing from the office on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, leaving Chartmakers punctually at 2:45 and returning at a little after 5:00. So puzzling did my bosses find this behavior that the previous Monday they had assigned one of my friends in the office, Jeff McGrath, a fellow cartoonist, of all things, to follow me and report back.

  Jeff reported back that I was going to the 3:00 p.m. film showing at the Museum of Modern Art, which changed programs Mondays and Wednesdays. Jeff had followed me there both days. Larry waited for an explanation. I thought, “What the hell, no matter what I say I’m fired.” So I said, “Larry, this is really weird. I was going to come in tomorrow to quit, and now you’re going to fire me, aren’t you?” Larry said, “Yes.”

  I said, “I was going to give you two weeks’ notice. Is that what you had in mind?”

  Of course, that’s not what he had in mind. I had been working there for six months and seen people get fired. They were called in Thursday afternoon, as I was, and told to leave on Friday. No one was ever given notice. But now I was acting so openly, in such a friendly fashion, that I had caught Larry flat-footed.

  He was a decent guy. He was irritated with me, but he liked me. I could see the indecision in his eyes. If he told me he wanted me out by tomorrow, which was certainly his right, it would have undermined the good feeling between us. Possibly this was the friendliest firing Larry had ever managed. Did he really want to spoil it for a lousy extra two weeks’ pay? He said without enthusiasm, “Yes, two weeks is fine. But if you want to leave earlier—”

  I said that I wouldn’t dream of it. We shook hands. Minutes later, I was feeling wistful. I made the rounds telling my office mates, who already knew. I liked them all, even Jeff, who spied on me. I was disappointed in him but not mad. He was too big for me to be mad at.

  My fellow bull pen artists seemed both chagrined and relieved by my dismissal. In two weeks my high-wire act would be a thing of the past. How they really felt about me, I didn’t know and was afraid to know. I was concerned that I might have exhausted their patience. Pretty soon their lives would be back to normal.

  THE VOICE

  The Village Voice, edging up on its first anniversary, occupied a crammed floor-through above a store at 22 Greenwich Avenue in the heart of the Village. Next door was Sutter’s Bakery and across the street the fortresslike Women’s House of Detention. A struggling newspaper, a family bakery, and a women’s jailhouse lumped together like the set of a Broadway musical comedy. And I had gone there to try out for the male ingénue part.

  My first visit to the Voice was in October of 1956. I landed there in the throes of a scheme, a desperate last shot to break into print. Nearly four years out of the army, and I had faced nothing but rejection. Not a single cartoon or illustration had been published. Not a single cartoon narrative, not the most commercially abject satire, lampoon, or spoof had made it into print. When I tried to be me, I didn’t sell. When I tried to be anyone but me, I didn’t sell. My subversive antinuke, antiwar satires had been under discussion at Simon and Schuster, Random House, Harper Brothers, Henry Holt, Crown, Atheneum, and others. Many others. Editors liked me. They admired my work. They claimed I was unpublishable.

  According to these editors, it wasn’t my politics—no one mentioned politics, we all shared pretty much the same politics. No one mentioned McCarthyism. No, the reason this work, passed from editor to editor’s desks, evoking comment and guffaws, couldn’t be published was that I was unknown. No one had heard of me. Come back, they said, when you’re established. Come back when you’re famous.

  Without a marketable name, no publisher would go near the three cartoon narratives I was then hustling. One called Sick, Sick, Sick, on conformity; another called Boom!, on the bomb; and then my good old rejected perennial, Munro, who was only four years old when I first thought of drafting him into the army in late 1951. If I had allowed Munro to age normally, he would have been nine.

  Friendly editors assured me that if my name had
only been James Thurber or Saul Steinberg or William Steig my books would have been in bookstores. But since no one knew who I was, they couldn’t afford to take a chance on me. But come back when I had more.

  I came to notice that on almost every desk of these editors who admired and denied me was a copy of a new Greenwich Village weekly, the Village Voice. The paper was unknown to me. But not for long. I went out and bought it and then kept buying it, hoping to come up with an idea of how I might use it to change the minds of cautious editors. The Voice was our first alternative weekly (although no such term existed then), designed as an antidote to the staid Villager, a neighborhood PR sheet, today’s equivalent of a pennysaver. The Voice boasted two big names from the beginning: Gilbert Seldes, a literary and cultural critic famous since the 1920s for his book The Seven Lively Arts, and Norman Mailer, our generation’s successor to Ernest Hemingway, or so Norman and the rest of us assumed.

  The bulk of the paper was given over to snatches of Village-related news and events, theater and movie reviews, and opinion pieces by writers who otherwise made a living by conforming to the editorial slant of the magazine or newspaper that hired them. The Voice attracted them by offering, for the one time in their professional lives, an outlet that let them speak as themselves, and not in the revised and edited prose styles approved by Harper’s or the Atlantic or Esquire or the Nation or the New York Times. The tradeoff that the Village Voice required was this: you don’t get edited and you don’t get paid.

  Professionals feel unprofessional when they’re not paid. So it was a select few writers who came to the Voice in the beginning, fewer than might have been anticipated, considering the freedom they were offered. They came in dribs and drabs, a cautious bunch, hesitating until they saw the results of this strange, unprecedented experiment, freedom of the press.

  I had no professional reputation to damage by working for free. No magazine or newspaper had bought anything from me in close to four years. Besides, in my first months out of the army I’d come to a decision about professionalism. I didn’t want any part of it.

  Before I took up working for a living, with the aim of getting fired after six months to go on unemployment, I tried making a go of it as a freelancer. I managed to pick up a few jobs from ad agencies, and since I was being paid (not much, but something), I accepted the judgment of the people who paid me, the art director or his assistant, whoever it happened to be. And this was the procedure: I’d arrive at the studio with the layout for the assignment. Instant dissatisfaction. I’d be told how to fix it. I’d fix it. I’d be told to change what I’d fixed. I’d change it. I’d be told to fix the changes. Agonizingly, I’d move closer to, but still not quite attain, the approval of the art director. One art director actually said, while staring down at my finished art spread out on the floor, “I don’t know, I get a feeling, but I just can’t come.” As he spoke, a hand was in his trouser pocket playing pocket pool.

  I’d redraw my art over and over again, fiddle here and paste up there and white out here and there and everywhere. I’d start from scratch, try to make it better and, if not better, acceptable. Often enough, what was acceptable to them looked crappy to me. Finally, grudgingly, with the clear indication that it still wasn’t right but the deadline was upon us, my sniveling illustration was bought and paid for—and by that time it was hard to remember why I wanted to be a cartoonist.

  I had begun to hate the work in which I had invested my heart and soul, my hopes and dreams. Now, as I rose each day, I faced the thought of drawing with dread, the very same feeling I awoke with for most of the twelve years I went to school. Sitting at my drawing table one day, despising the blank sheet of paper on which I was expected to commit an act of hackdom, I wondered where the fun had gone. The answer was plain: it went away when I started getting paid. The conclusion I came to was obvious and instantaneous. I had to reclaim my amateur status. The Village Voice was my first step in that direction.

  It did not impress me as a bustling, movie-style newsroom that first time I walked in. In movie newsrooms, the neophyte steps into an intimidating atmosphere of hustle. At the Voice, the first lack one felt was hustle, the second was intimidation. No one was trying to intimidate, manipulate, or manhandle. No one was doing much of anything that one expected to find in a newsroom, including putting out a newspaper. There weren’t many signs of life. There were simply a few amiable men talking amiably—in fact, philosophically.

  The conversation was led by Dan Wolf, who in his heart of hearts was a philosopher but found himself in the odd position of editing a new weekly newspaper, an area in which he had no prior experience. Dan was short and slight, with a high forehead and thin black—beginning to gray—wavy hair. His style bespoke casual formality, as he sat behind his desk in jacket and tie with his chair tilted back, his feet up on his desk, crossed at the ankles. Appealing contrasts abounded: he was avuncular and reserved, dismissive and gentle, inviting intimacies and offering none of his own.

  The Voice staff, every single one of us, felt privileged to be in his company, flattered that he chose to spend time with us, although it was hard to see how else he might use his time. I never actually caught him working—say, editing copy or checking out or pitching a story. He appeared to be less an editor than a wry and bemused host of a hip journalistic salon, engaging a ceaseless flock of visitors in gossip and observations. You went to the Voice to turn in your copy (in my case, cartoon), but truly in the hope of chatting up Dan. Conversation with him could extend well beyond one’s expectations and/or desires—and yet, when it was time to end the discussion, one couldn’t help but be unpleasantly aware that a younger journalist or an aging essayist waited in the wings to replace you.

  If Dan played the amiable but reclusive man of mystery, acting at times like a psychotherapist, the true therapist in our midst was our publisher, Ed Fancher, a psychologist and psychoanalyst who was Wolf’s opposite in every way, big and husky, open, direct, and personable, and seemingly content to play troubleshooter for the paper and take on roles that no one else was handling, handle them, and then move on to another responsibility that needed attending to.

  Jerry Tallmer, who was the first member of the staff to look my cartoons over, was associate editor, meaning that he did most of the work, because, for one thing, he knew what the work was. He was the only one of the founding staff with previous newspaper experience, having edited the college newspaper at Dartmouth. Jerry was lean and angular with sharp features and wiry brown hair. Where Dan Wolf’s approach was laconic and watchful, Jerry’s was intense. He was no-nonsense friendly, alive with nervous energy, every ounce of which was directed to putting out the Voice. His special beat was the arts, the back of the book. And in these early years of the paper, it was Jerry who was largely responsible for redefining theater coverage in the city’s press.

  He covered plays whose existence the Times seldom acknowledged, staged in small hole-in-the-wall cellar theaters or three-and-a-half-flights-up, under-the-attic-eaves theaters, with as many bridge chairs as possible squeezed together to seat whoever showed up, which turned out to be an impressively growing number.

  Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet and Eugene Ionesco had made their entrances, with Edward Albee a year or so away. Jerry was one of the few, along with Robert Brustein of the New Republic and the English critic Kenneth Tynan, soon to be imported from the Observer to The New Yorker, who alerted us to their importance. The dailies either got them wrong or looked the other way.

  Jerry’s reviews brought a new tone to theater criticism. He wrote as an ardent advocate in a personal, evocative style, almost confessional in tone, with no attempt at objectivity, his writer’s fingerprints everywhere.

  And now he was looking through the pages of Munro and chuckling and laughing and passing it on to Dan Wolf, who said, “This is great stuff!” and passed it on to Ed Fancher, who also laughed, and John Wilcock, who made up the remainder of the editorial staff and wrote a popular gossip column, “The Village
Square.” John giggled over Munro as Jerry read Sick, Sick, Sick, my cartoon-narrative about a character so completely a conformist that he was able to transform himself physically and psychically into the several subcultures he hung out with.

  They went through them all, responding not like editors but like readers, fans! “What do you want to do for us?” Jerry or Dan asked, and I was dumbfounded. I didn’t have to sell them on me. “What would you like me to do?” meaning that I’d sweep floors, empty ashtrays, clean toilets … A collective shrug was their response. Finally Jerry said, “Whatever you bring in, we’ll publish.” Two thoughts immediately occurred to me: Could this be happening? And how could I fuck this up? I improvised: “I’d kind of like to serialize Sick, Sick, Sick. I can break it down into weekly segments like a continuity comic strip, maybe in two tiers of six to eight panels.”

  “Sounds good.”

  They didn’t care what I did, and because they didn’t care, I had to sell myself harder. “But maybe that will be a little too much for readers to catch on to, until they get more familiar with my work, so maybe what I should start out with—” I sensed that it was time to shut up, thank them, and leave. “Maybe in the beginning, five or six weeks of introductory strips which will be complete in themselves—and then, when they’re used to what I do, I can start…”

  By this time, I could tell that the editors and publisher of the Village Voice were anxious to move me out of the office so that they could get back to putting out their paper. But I couldn’t shut up. I talked my way out the door, packing my wares like the salesman I was, prolonging my departure by asking about page size. They didn’t care. Deadlines. They didn’t care. Suggestions for subject matter. They didn’t care.