Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  Village Voice, May 29, 1957

  OUR GANG

  The Lower East Side was too squalid and depressing a home for me, the Village too much of a hot spot and competitive threat. So I had moved to the other side of the river, Brooklyn Heights. From there I could see the city as I meant it to be, the New York I couldn’t find while I was living in the middle of it. But if you walked the quarter-mile Promenade that frames the eastern border of the Heights, you saw the splashy movie version of the city, the soaring, breathtaking skyline that was so nice to have at a distance.

  The Promenade was suspended above the mostly out-of-use waterfront, such a drop below that the Financial District across the river felt closer. It stretched along a leafy avenue of terraced and bedecked brown-stones and town houses looking out on overstuffed minigardens hemmed in by stately wrought-iron fences. Its sense of place might have been lifted off a side street of old Savannah or New Orleans.

  David Levine lived on Hicks Street, a couple of blocks down from where I had found an apartment on the second floor of a four-story brown-stone owned and run by a retired dentist.

  I had met David through my Fort Monmouth buddy Harvey Dinnerstein and his painter friend Burt Silverman. Harvey, Burt, and David, all living in Brooklyn, introduced me to other painters. I had never before hung out with painters, but here were Danny Schwartz, Herb Steinberg, Shelly Fink, Aaron Shikler, all of the realist school, most with the appropriate pinko politics to match. Their subject matter tended to be the working class at thankless labor or exhausted leisure, but David had a lighter side. He loved comics. He was delighted to learn that I had worked for Will Eisner, whom he admired. He was delighted to learn that I had grown up as a fan of Sheldon Mayer’s comic book creation Scribbly, a boy cartoonist with whom we both identified.

  Dave, too, had been a boy cartoonist. Now he was a heavyset, friendly-faced fellow with a good-humored, ironic manner that made him fun to be around as long as you watched yourself. He had a dry and sometimes devastating wit. He showed me a series of cartoons he was working on as greeting cards, fine-lined, cross-hatched drawings that took their lead from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century English illustration. Interesting stuff but hardly an indication that within four or five years he would blossom into one of our greatest caricaturists, helping to establish, and gain fame for, the New York Review of Books.

  Burt Silverman was a talkative, likable realist painter who taught himself how to play lefty folk songs on the guitar as a strategy to meet girls. Burt was affable even when he was pissed off. He laughed off disappointment, laughed off his own and others’ failures, laughed off the sterility and seeming permanence of Cold War America. It was a survival tool: outlast the fuckers.

  Norton Juster and I met while taking out the garbage. At least that’s how I choose to remember it. We would have run into each other just outside Norton’s barred window on the basement floor of the brownstone of my second-floor furnished room on Hicks Street. No doubt it went this way: Norton spotted a new face and made a wisecrack. I wisecracked back, and we did that for a minute or two, admiring our own and each other’s wit. At the end of the contest, we introduced ourselves. I found out that Norton, though one would never guess it, was in the navy, a lieutenant stationed at a desk at the Brooklyn Navy Yard with six months to go on his enlistment. He was filling up the time he spent on duty by calling up pretty models whose pictures he had seen in newspapers and arranging to interview them for the Navy News Service. This was a fictional agency that Norton concocted to get himself dates, the kind of activity that, in the fifties, was dismissed as a prank but these days would doubtless get him arrested.

  Norton was short and husky, with eyes that twinkled in a round face that beamed mischief. He walked and even napped as if he wore a back brace, which he didn’t. Nervous energy emanated out of him. He was ever-cordial, ever-competitive, mixing whimsy, wit, and curiosity with wisecracks and put-downs. The wordplay he was to employ a few years later in The Phantom Tollbooth worked its way into our everyday conversations.

  You had to be in training to keep up with Norton. Not a problem—everyone our age was in training. We ran in place, we joked in place, playing our games slyly to indicate they didn’t mean that much. Winning was never the point, not in our present positions. The point was to score. Getting the edge on a friend once or twice in the course of a day inspired one to look forward to the next day.

  Norton liked to cook. I liked to eat his cooking. And we had nonstop conversations about books, politics, and getting laid, toward which end he’d throw free-for-all garden parties. Outside his furnished basement room and a half was a small fenced-in garden, common to Brooklyn Heights town houses. Norton enjoyed preparing cold cuts and white bean salad and we split the purchase of wine and soft drinks. He’d put on some music and invite everyone he knew who might bring a pretty girl. I don’t remember either of us meeting women at these parties, but they continued on a regular basis until we moved out of Hicks Street to share a duplex on State Street.

  At one of the parties, we happened to meet a young couple, recent Bennington graduates and folksingers, just married. They had moved in a couple of houses down Hicks a few days earlier and crashed the first noisy party they heard going on in the neighborhood.

  They entertained us with folk songs for the next hour, some of them recorded on their new album, The Baby Sitters, about to be released. Their recording careers got them nowhere, and their marriage broke up. The wife, Jeremy, disappeared from my life, but her husband, Alan Arkin, became a friend, a very funny Second City actor, a genius movie star, and the incisive, farcical director of two of my plays, Little Murders and The White House Murder Case.

  Norton was a trained architect. Shortly after leaving the service, he applied for and received a grant from the Ford Foundation. Five thousand dollars to write a book on urban design. As it turned out, he never got around to writing the book. Instead he commenced work on a novel for children, The Phantom Tollbooth.

  When I agreed to do the illustrations he neglected to tell me that he was writing a classic. Otherwise, I might have drawn my finished art on something more substantial than tracing paper with a survival expectancy of zilch. No more than seven or eight drawings still exist, almost all of them in bad shape.

  Norton started reading me pages of The Phantom Tollbooth not long after we had moved to State Street, where we were joined by an English friend, Max Eckstein, a professor at Queens College and chairman of the comparative lit department. This being Norton’s first book, he was unable to write a paragraph in his upstairs bedroom without running a flight down to my quarters to read it aloud, chuckle in admiration, and wait for me to say something and start drawing. In that manner, The Phantom Tollbooth began to take on shape, a case of tell and show.

  Milo and Tock, the watchdog, from The Phantom Tollbooth, 1961

  “Illustration” by Jules Feiffer, copyright © 1961 by Jules Feiffer. Copyright renewed 1989 by Jules Feiffer, from The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer. Used by permission of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Norton did all the cooking for the household and it was understood that the size and quality of the menu was dependent on the production of my art. To inspire him to excel (not in the text but in the kitchen), I did my best to appropriate the style of the early-twentieth-century English illustrator Edward Ardizzone.

  Norton’s gift for language and puns and his admiration, even adoration, of classic children’s literature from Lewis Carroll to E. Nesbit to C. S. Lewis drove his story and his hero’s toy car forward, outraging logic, turning phrases, and testing young readers in ways that, decades hence, might well not be tolerated. In the dumbed-down culture of today, Norton’s wordplay can sound dangerously close to Finnegans Wake.

  Through David and Burt, I met, and became friendly with, an older, would-be painter, an amateur who was taking lessons from my friends. A hawk-nosed, eagle-eyed fellow in his fifti
es who enjoyed hanging out with us, although we were from different generations and different backgrounds. He was a cheery fellow with a straightforward manner and weathered blue eyes that hinted at hard times. His name was Emil Goldfus, and he was from Canada and spoke with a light but resonant burr, a Scottish-sounding brogue.

  Burt was the first to meet Emil, and he got to know him in a movie-style, meet-cute scenario. Burt painted in a sizable studio in the Overton, a downtown office building on Court Street on the edge of Brooklyn Heights. Other artists and writers found it a cheap and convenient location: David Levine painted there, and Norman Mailer had an office there where he worked on his new novel, The Deer Park, about Hollywood under the blacklist.

  Emil entered our lives late one night by knocking on Burt’s studio door as Burt was in the process of unhooking his girlfriend’s brassiere. Emil announced his name from the other side of the door and asked if he could borrow a cup of turpentine. And in this comic fashion began a relationship that affected the lives of all of us.

  Emil was friendly, benign, something of a burnt-out case, simpatico in a manner not unlike Dan Wolf’s at the Village Voice. He was a semiretired photofinisher with a studio full of cameras and radio equipment. Although Emil was close to our parents’ age, his lack of presence, his air of loneliness mixed with determined good cheer, led us to like him, include him, and trust him. We shared our views on everything from art and culture to politics, Reds, and Red-baiting. Emil absorbed our opinions without comment, seldom confiding his own thoughts. Not that we were interested. He was old and clearly going nowhere. We were young and our futures glowed before us with a bright light visible only to ourselves.

  One look at him was enough to know that Emil was the past and we were the future. We were cocky and self-absorbed and hated to shut up. Emil’s mere existence as an audience for our outrageous comments and jokes was pleasing, a kind of validation. He made up in a small way for the lack of validation that came our way in the real world.

  When he was not in residence at the Overton, no one knew where Emil lived. Periodically he went off on business trips and was gone for weeks, occasionally months. Out of sight, he was out of mind. On his return, however, we were glad to see him. I watched his skills as a painter progress over the two or three years that David and Burt instructed him. He was showing a new interest and feeling for color at the time the headlines took him out of our lives and the FBI arrested him.

  RED SCARE

  Waiting too long on the Seventh Avenue subway platform on a hot August afternoon, I strolled over to a newsstand to see if there was anything worth looking at in the headlines. The New York World-Telegram and Sun, a Scripps-Howard paper, had the headline BROOKLYN ARTIST ARRESTED AS RUSSIAN SPY.

  The Telegram was a broadsheet, so they carried the story on the front page with a banner headline and a story but no photograph. That left me to muse playfully on who among my painter friends this might be. Not Burt Silverman; there was nothing hidden about Burt, impossible to believe he had a secret life. David Levine was a possibility. David, with all his wry humor, could be reserved, at times aloof, and I sometimes found him so doctrinaire left he reminded me of Mimi. Harvey Dinnerstein was in the running, often humorlessly left, not sharing much, suspicious of other people’s motives.

  And then, just as my train lumbered its way into the station, a deliveryman plopped down the afternoon edition of Hearst’s New York Journal-American. The moment played out as in a movie. The stack of newspapers in the hands of the deliveryman dumped on the newsstand, loose corner pages fluttered open like a riffled deck of cards, a tantalizing glimpse of a headline and a photograph … a face I knew staring up at me! And just as in an Agatha Christie murder mystery, the face was the person I least suspected. Under the banner headline RED POSING AS B’KLYN ARTIST INDICTED AS TOP SOVIET SPY was Emil Goldfus.

  On the subway home, I was reacting a mile a minute, trying to fashion a reality that measured up to the unreality before my eyes. They’ve got to be kidding. Emil? One of the more unmemorable people I had ever met, the least prepossessing. If he was a Red spy, what the hell was he doing hanging out with a bunch of loudmouth Brooklyn lefties? Weren’t we the very people a real spy would avoid, lest he get snared in a cross-investigation?

  I knew this was a crock, an FBI screwup like the Hiss case—although I had more or less come to believe in Hiss’s guilt (guilty of something or other, I didn’t know what). Okay, then the Rosenberg case. I had believed all along that the Rosenbergs were spies of some sort, maybe not what they were accused of—and even so, to get the death penalty for such a low-grade endeavor …

  In Emil’s case, I thought, all right, arguably he could be a spy. But a master spy, as the newspapers declared? Give me a break! Maybe a third-or fourth-grade, low-level, order-taking apparatchik, a gofer who went out for coffee for higher-up spies. The FBI was pumping this up to make it look important when it was really small potatoes. Go for the headlines, stir up the natives, beef up their budget. It was pure PR. I was not going to be hoodwinked.

  I went home to Brooklyn Heights having read the Journal story over three times. Emil wasn’t Emil, or so the indictment claimed. He was a Russian colonel named Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, or so they said. No mention was made of exactly what the charges were, but he was labeled the most important Russian spy ever caught in this country. I didn’t believe it.

  I walked in on Norton. At the time, he was working in an architect’s office, but he was home early, napping on a couch against the wall. Norton napped on his back like a corpse, stiff as a board, eyes sealed shut against the Journal-American that I dropped on his chest. He blinked open his eyes, startled, and looked up to see what was happening. He took me in standing over him. He understood by my silence that I was waiting for him to look at the newspaper. He picked the paper off his chest and stared at the headline. Then he performed the most perfect triple take I have ever seen, actually the only triple take I’ve seen outside of movies.

  Norton’s triple take was a perfect metaphor for the reaction of all of us who knew Emil. It took weeks for it to become real. We, smart guys all, cocky, sure of ourselves. I, in particular, was confident of my powers of analysis and my ability to understand people. That was one of my strong points: reading between the lines, understanding the subtext. It’s what I did in my cartoons.

  But now I began to doubt everything. If Emil was not Emil, if Emil was a Russian whose name was Abel. And he was a spy. And I never suspected. What else out there did I have all wrong?

  Were my friends actually my friends? Who were they? And what about my family? My father and mother—who might they be? I used to fantasize as a child that I had been kidnapped, that they weren’t really my parents. Was I on to something? Were my sisters my sisters?

  The depth of my knowingness met, and was vanquished by, the depth of my stupidity. One revelation after another mocked my belief in my perception. What I was sure I understood I misunderstood. In the Clifford Odets case, where he named names … I had every right to feel betrayed after his defiant speech at the Bromberg memorial. But how should I feel in Emil’s case? He didn’t betray his country. The United States wasn’t his country. If he truly was a spy, then the man was only doing his job, part of which was to deceive me and my friends. What did I expect him to do, take me aside and say, “Listen, Jules, I don’t want you and the others to get the wrong idea about me …”? What right did I have to feel angry? You can’t go around telling people you’re a spy!

  Maybe he was innocent! Maybe we’d find out it was all a frame-up! In any case (as I insisted on telling everyone), he couldn’t have been that much of a big-deal spy or he wouldn’t have hung out with us.

  I stuck to that opinion for a year or so after Emil’s conviction as Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel. And then one day I picked up the newspaper and he was in the headlines again. He’d been freed in a prisoner exchange with the Soviet Union. The Russians had been holding prisoner the most famous American spy ever captured
, the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, shot down over the Soviet Union in a spy plane that was designed to fly well outside Soviet missile range. Not so. The Russians turned Powers over to the United States. They traded him for Emil.

  Up until that headline, I had convinced myself that if Emil was indeed a spy, he was inconsequential, a very low-level spy. Once again …

  Oy vey!

  Emil, who as it turned out was not Emil, was also not Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel. He was Willie Fisher, raised in England, the son of a transplanted Russian Jew who fled the czar and returned after the revolution with his English-speaking son, who was perfect material for a spy. Not to mention a friend. All this came out years later, after Emil, I mean Abel, I mean Fisher died.

  Forty-five years later my play A Bad Friend dealt with the confusion and consternation the Emil affair caused me and my friends. The beauty part of being a writer is that if you get it wrong in life, you can always work it out on paper.

  THE MATING DANCE

  Sexual liberation was in the air. Hugh Hefner had begun Playboy, but I didn’t think of it as a possible outlet for me one way or the other. The Voice was my single preoccupation, and on its pages I was finding my own way to sex. It wasn’t the sex act itself I was interested in as subject matter, but what went on before and after: the mating dance.

  Looking back on this work one can’t help but wonder: What was the big deal? Now, fifty years after I introduced the mating dance into my cartoons, with the passage of time moving us out of the Age of Anxiety into the Age of Britney, Madonna, and Paris, blatant eroticism taking over the mainstream, it is impossible to parse how for more than a century sexual repression was a determining factor of our private and public lives.

  Young people at play—the ironies, disappointments, and victories were years away as subject matter for film, drama, and sitcoms. The mating dance, as most of us were experiencing it, was not yet a fit subject for proper media. In New York, one discovered it in my cartoons in the Voice. On the West Coast, one could find it in a San Francisco cabaret called the Hungry I, where Mort Sahl, a year or so before my first appearance, walked out on stage in a crewneck sweater, carrying a rolled-up newspaper, and introduced in rambling monologue form undiscussable subjects: politics, the FBI, the Cold War, and sex.