Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  I let Judy sleep and made myself breakfast: a fried egg and a cup of coffee. Impatient to get going, I skipped upstairs to read my efforts, over which I had partied into the night. I had blacked out what I had written, my only memory being this incredible breakthrough that I had made. I might prove to be a real writer after all, almost as good as Nathanael West!

  Almost as good? I was Nathanael West. As I read through the twenty-five or so pages I had scribbled the night before, I was dragged, disbelieving, into a state of shock, followed by dismay, followed by ironic distance, followed by hysterical laughter. I had drunkenly sideswiped myself into a case of mistaken identity. The night before, under the illusion that I was writing Harry, the Rat with Women, I had simply, straightforwardly, and with no awareness whatever, written my own draft of Miss Lonelyhearts.

  Later that day, I managed to emerge from my state of satiric wonder and pull myself together long enough to come to terms with Harry, discarding West to find a voice that was an acceptable version of my own. The West imitation turned out to be therapeutic. The best writing in Harry came to me after the night I channeled Miss Lonelyhearts.

  Still, I didn’t think this was an experience I needed to repeat. I might be able to write a novel, but sadly I was not a novelist. I considered the novel to be the most serious and important of all art forms. If I could have been a different kind of artist, with a talent of my choice, I would have chosen novelist. But novelist had not chosen me.

  UNMAKING IT

  Harry was now finished. All in all, it was a pretty good book. I was proud of it. And the reactions were, if not celebratory, mostly positive. (My oldest friend, Ed McLean, did not like the book and expressed his dislike so gleefully that the book ended our friendship; Mike Nichols didn’t like it but expressed his criticism so gracefully that I felt flattered by his rejection.)

  The book even sold. I made money. Playboy ran it in two parts and gave me $15,000. But I didn’t think this was enough reason for me to embark on a second novel.

  I need to have fun at what I do. If I can’t have fun, I don’t see much point to doing it. It was no fun writing Harry. It was, to a considerable extent, fiction (good and great fiction) that taught me who I was and the person I was fated to be. Fiction evoked a tantalizing world I didn’t know existed until I picked up Romain Rolland or Jack London or Ross Lockridge Jr. or James T. Farrell or Dreiser or Hemingway, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy … Fiction reinterpreted my childhood and laid out a story line for my adulthood.

  Fiction was truth schematically romanticized in the form of a story that, unlike real life, was coherent. It offered clues on how to handle oneself in a confusing world outside the printed page. Fiction offered perspectives for coping. It mentored me through the self-destruction and self-loathing that came with adolescence and young manhood. Fiction upstaged my mother and father. They brought me up; fiction parented me. Fiction inspired me to invent my own story, my own fiction. The story was that I was not the person others saw me as. I was better. Guided by the novel, someday I’d prove it.

  Harry, the Rat with Women sold well enough to be considered a commercial success. Over the years, there was Broadway and movie interest. Alan Menken wanted to turn it into a musical. Why I said no to the brilliant composer of Little Shop of Horrors and The Little Mermaid, I do not know. But no is what I said.

  Warren Beatty talked of optioning it for a movie, but nothing happened. Sylvester Stallone tried to option it for an HBO series that he would produce. I asked to be put on as a consultant. Sly said no, so I said no.

  I was in the habit of saying no to everyone, I don’t know why. I still don’t understand why I said no to Alan Menken. Force of habit? Earlier I had said no to Stanley Kubrick, although I was a great fan of his work. Stanley and I were both Bronx boys, I thought The Killing and Paths of Glory were fresh, original, and provocative films, and I was flattered that he flew me out to Los Angeles to talk about writing a movie for him. It was to be on the bomb, and he was going to call it Dr. Strangelove. But it became clear after a couple of meetings that Stanley wanted me to write his movie on the threat of nuclear annihilation, not mine, and Stanley’s humor veered more toward Mad magazine. I thought I was the wrong writer for Stanley and told him so. He ended up with Terry Southern, and the rest, as we say, is history (except Terry would have said it better). Dr. Strangelove, of course, turned out to be a masterpiece, one of the bravest political statements in the history of American film. And I didn’t write it.

  There were so many things I didn’t write. I didn’t write a Broadway show for Mike Nichols and Steve Sondheim. Paul Sills had staged my cartoons at Second City in Chicago, and Mike had flown out to see the show. Mike was about to launch his career as a theater director and, as luck would have it, my show—or rather his spin on the Second City version of The Explainers—was to be his first tryout in the States. I had not been as happy as I expected to be to see my cartoons onstage. They looked uncomfortable. They looked as if they knew they belonged on paper. They felt out of place, and who did I think I was kidding? Mike had come to Chicago to see the Sills production and wanted to bring it to New York. But, in the undying tradition of show business, he intended to change most of it. Fine with me.

  Mike was the smartest man in theater I knew, and although he was just starting out on a career as director, I had enormous confidence in him. Mike and Elaine as an act were so in tune with my work that I couldn’t think of anyone better suited to do for me onstage what he and Elaine had done together.

  Nichols’s plan for the show was to get rid of the dramatized Voice strips and center the evening on three long pieces: George’s Moon, adapted from a thirty-page cartoon monologue featuring Paul Sand; Crawling Arnold, my first play, a one-acter that I had written for the Chicago production that Paul Sills had rejected but Mike admired; and a musicalized version of my cartoon narrative Passionella. Mike thought he would ask Stephen Sondheim to write some songs for it.

  The evening was to be produced by the low-key, soft-spoken Lewis Allen. He had found us a summer stock theater in the cow country of New Jersey, the Hunterdon Hills Playhouse. One look and I was in heaven. It was right out of Mickey and Judy renting a barn and putting on a show.

  Now, this was Nichols before he was a great director, and this was Sondheim before he was a legend. And this was me, overwhelmed nonetheless by the two of them. They brought so much to the table that I, who had brought the table, began to feel that it was too flimsy a foundation to bear the weight of these two emerging stars.

  Working with Mike, watching him instruct, joke, and seduce actors into performance, watching him run scenes that I thought I knew and bring to them more than I remembered writing, sharing the excitement and high spirits of the work at hand (my work!) was—yes—exhilarating and—oops—demoralizing at the same time.

  As the production advanced, I retreated. I didn’t belong there. I was a mere cartoonist, and these two brilliant people were propping me up. I felt like Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow, not capable of standing on my own two feet. As the show ascended, I collapsed. The evening had been retitled The World of Jules Feiffer and, in my increasingly humble estimation, the single clinker in the creative team was he who bore its name.

  Sondheim had written three lovely songs, fresh, funny, touching, and original. But any music by Sondheim in the summer of 1961 was original, by virtue of the fact that his first complete Broadway show, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, was a year into the future.

  Mike’s production was obviously the creation of a soon-to-be-brilliant theater director, one who hadn’t quite put it all together yet or figured out how to make all that incisive rehearsal time cohere into an affecting performance. But he was then (and later) a blessing to work with, examining and reexamining every scene, lightly but firmly pushing and prodding.

  Eight years later, we were to collaborate on the film Carnal Knowledge and, ten years after that, my play Elliot Loves. When Mike asked me to take a look at this young
actor who had made a splash in the film Easy Rider for the lead in Carnal Knowledge, I came out of the screening thinking that my director was out of his mind. What did this Jack Nicholson, with his hip Henry Fonda stance and twangy New Jersey drawl, have to do with the young Jewish misogynist who was the centerpiece of my play and screenplay? I reported my doubts back to Nichols. His response: “Trust me, he’s going to be our most important actor since Brando.” I trusted him.

  But ten years earlier, I didn’t trust The World of Jules Feiffer. As Nichols and Sondheim talked enthusiastically about a New York production, I had less and less to say. This was more their show than mine, and it had my name on it. I was not ready to confront the conflicting emotions and certain humiliation of putting it on. Technically this was my work, bearing my name, but I knew that if it turned out to be a hit, it would be because of them, not me—and the fame and fat checks would, very likely, destroy me.

  I told Mike and Steve that I didn’t want the show to go beyond New Jersey. I wanted the last performance in Hunterdon Hills to be the last performance.

  Nichols and Sondheim could not have been more gracious. They understood completely whatever lie I told them about not wanting to continue. It didn’t seem to faze them at all. As the world would shortly discover, they had bigger fish to fry.

  As it turned out, some five years later, Mike had another shot at Passionella, this time as the final act in the musical The Apple Tree by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick. The brilliant Barbara Harris, who began her career in Chicago with Second City, was cast in the lead. It was Barbara I had wanted but did not get for the Paul Sills production. She was so extraordinary a performer that had she done the show when we first put it on in New Jersey, I have no doubt that I would have buried my anxiety and happily agreed to a Broadway production, which would have been a huge hit. And the rest is not history.

  INTO EXILE

  I was reliving my Harry, the Rat experience. By April of 1965, I had been at work on Little Murders (inconsistently) for a year. I had a two-hundred-page manuscript in longhand and a dozen pages of notes. And then I stopped. I didn’t know how to go on. This was my second try at a novel, the second time I found myself blocked. I distrusted that term blocked. I didn’t believe in it. I didn’t think writer’s block truly existed or had to exist. On the other hand, what did I know? It could be argued that I wasn’t a writer.

  The times I felt most strongly that I wasn’t a writer seemed to coincide with the times I was trying to write a novel. Alfred Kazin repeatedly told me to go to Yaddo. Philip Roth told me the same thing. I had to have done a lot of whining for the two of them to be that anxious to get rid of me.

  But I couldn’t go to Yaddo. It wasn’t practical. First of all, it meant leaving my family, the wife part of which was urging me to leave: go to Yaddo, go to Europe, go to the moon, just stop this godforsaken moping from room to room. If anxiety over abandoning my family was what was keeping me home, Judy told me to forget about it. She and Kate (who was a year and a half) would be better off without me. But I knew she didn’t mean it. How could they function without me? Anyhow, I couldn’t leave, I had much too much to do.

  For example, my Voice strips. Of course, I did only one a week. I supposed I could work ahead—say, three or four weeks ahead, the amount of time I expected to be in exile if I agreed to go to Yaddo, that desolate, isolated gulag to which my wife and my friends wished to see me exiled.

  I thought these colonies—Yaddo and MacDowell—were for foundation bums, writers who went from one hideaway to another, leaving the world behind and producing little, when they could have committed acts more socially useful, like fighting for a nuclear freeze, demonstrating against Vietnam, marching for civil rights. Instead, they wasted away in the middle of nowhere, so-called artists one never heard of. Except I had heard of one or two of them: besides Roth and Kazin, I had heard of Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Ned Rorem, Hortense Calisher, and Curtis Harnack, all friends, all Yaddo-ites.

  But what about the New York social scene, the dinner parties at Jason and Barbara Epstein’s, where Roth and I played the class clowns, the dynamic duo brought in to lighten up an evening with Auden and Spender and the Pritchetts and the Lowells? How could I shrink from my social responsibilities?

  And what about my table at Elaine’s? The pre-movie-star-model-and-jet-set, early-days Elaine’s, where I met two or three nights a week with Arthur Kopit and Jack Gelber and Michael Arlen and David Halberstam and Jack Richardson and Bruce Jay Friedman and Willie Morris and Buzz Farber and Sandy Vanocur, the boys’ club where we ate and drank and explained everything and solved everything and I, for one, was hoping to meet, and liaison with, a woman not my wife. But nothing like that ever happened. Elaine’s might have been a better pickup joint if I had been gay, except my friends, if that’s what they were, were straight. So we just talked. We got us out of Vietnam, we restored relations with Cuba, we solved the assassination of JFK … We would have been better off getting laid.

  No, I was definitely not a “foundation person.” I was a single, solitary individualist, proud of my singularity. I didn’t need to go to camp to write, for God’s sake! Not me! I could solve my problems without running away from my family, without going into hiding. Kate would be two in a few months—how could I walk out on her?

  Philip and Alfred wrote me recommendations, and I applied to Yaddo with a sense of doom. Was it really anxiety over abandoning my child that heightened my ambivalence—or was it fear that my book sucked, this novel that I had not looked at in three months? Would it be Little Murders that I might have to abandon once I sat down and reread it at Yaddo?

  The night before I left for Yaddo, Alfred and Ann gave me a farewell party, livened up with anecdotes of miracles wrought there, writers unblocked, music composed, paintings completed, failures turned into successes. Thank you very much. I really appreciated taking on the burden of every other artist’s miracle cure at this hell I was about to be consigned to.

  A few days before I left, I was visited by a young man, a student at Wayne State University in Detroit who had somehow got hold of my phone number and started calling a month or so earlier, introducing himself as Richard Wishnetsky, a boy lefty disillusioned with radicalism and its various idiocies, hypocrisies, and mindlessness. He was on his way to New York for Christmas break and he wanted to meet the only two critical minds he had respect for: Hannah Arendt and me.

  So he told me in three or four phone calls. How could a pseudonovelist on his way to Yaddo to expose his own fraudulence resist the flattering detour of an encounter with a bookish young nutcase who name-dropped me onto an intellectual plane with Hannah Arendt?

  Young Richard, when he came by, was in no way different from what I expected: tall, slim, stooped, Jewish, Afro-Jewish hair, and with a manic intensity that despite his intelligence (which he couldn’t help showing off) made me want to get rid of him as soon as possible.

  He talked at me for about an hour, displaying no interest in culling knowledge from the man he ranked with Hannah Arendt. He’d sought me out, it seemed, not to hear my words of wisdom but for me to be an audience for his. His nonstop monologue, a diatribe against everyone and everything, backed me into a corner, turning me away from my own politics into an advocate for the radical middle. I tried to mollify Richard with radical-middle homilies—on the one hand this, on the other hand that—none of which gave him a moment’s pause.

  He was the last truth teller. Everyone else was a fraud, a liar, corrupt. Left and right were both no good, no difference between them. It was an exhausting indictment. A compulsion to ease him out of my studio, to get him the hell out of my apartment before I too was accused, drove me to divert him off politics onto culture, movies in particular. He knew nothing about film noir, he had never seen a Bogart film. Perfect!

  There happened to be a Bogart festival playing around the corner at my friend Dan Talbot’s theater the New Yorker. The New Yorker was the first American theater to exhibit commerci
al American films as if they were art house films, and on this day it was showing a double bill of The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, both starring Bogart. I took young Richard around the corner, him talking all the way, me prodding him forward. I bought him a ticket and saw him through the door into the darkened theater. He was still lecturing as I waved good-bye.

  The next day he called to thank me profusely for introducing him to Bogart and film noir. Film noir, indeed. The next I heard of Richard Wishnetsky was during a break in my Yaddo stay. I was on my way back to New York in a car being driven by a friend, a fellow Yaddo-ite at work on her first novel. On the car radio, we heard a news bulletin from Detroit: in the middle of a bar mitzvah ceremony a young man had denounced the rabbi as a liar and a hypocrite, taken out a gun, and shot and killed the rabbi and himself. Richard Wishnetsky. Little murders.

  YADDO

  Yaddo changed my life. More so than it affected Alfred Kazin or Philip Roth, who had encouraged me to go. Had Philip and Alfred never gone to Yaddo, their work would have continued as before, as it did after, Alfred writing literary essays and books, Philip writing Rothian novels. They worked faster and better at Yaddo, no distractions, but the nature of their work had been settled years before.

  But if I had not gone to Yaddo in February of 1966, I rather doubt that I would ever have written a play. I might have known how to write a play—I had already shown an inclination with my one-acter, Crawling Arnold—but not for a moment do I think I would have achieved the discipline or the self-confidence or the unrelenting obsessiveness that came to me in a rush and with a shock of great surprise that was Yaddo’s personal gift. In the fierce February cold I taught myself hard lessons as I lived in a charmless room in monastic isolation. Here I had no family to look after; I was looked after. I was treated as if my work was the first priority, the only priority, while at home it seemed as if it was at the bottom of the list of things I had to do for the day.