Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  Yaddo was daunting in winter, no vegetation to soften the effect of the sentinel-like, magisterial mansion, gabled, colonnaded, and porticoed up the kazoo, a cross between Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara and Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu. High-contrast grandeur holding court outside Saratoga Springs, next door to the legendary racetrack where the rich played in summer without a clue or care as to who we were. Yaddo, with its mansion and its other buildings—West House and East House, the music studio, and three or four barns for painters—was a country of its own, this institution founded by the Trask family early in the twentieth century and run since the 1920s by Elizabeth Ames, an aging, exceedingly genteel lady lioness, grand marshal of the estate, attentive warden of the inmates, our keeper, protector, and mother superior.

  Elizabeth was small and gray and noticeably of another time, a character out of Willa Cather or Edith Wharton. I had been warned about her before I arrived. She could be tough, eagle-eyed, critical of how you kept your room, so look to your housekeeping. Writers were scared of her; she could be intimidating.

  Jeez! These writers could not ever have been in the army. I found Elizabeth to be a pussycat—caring, sensitive to one’s needs (spoken or unspoken), ever watchful over her clients, her children. She babied me. And oh, how I needed babying! I needed a mother to tuck me into bed at night, kiss me on the forehead, assure me that however hard the day went I was doing so much better than anyone could have anticipated. I needed coddling, and I was coddled. I needed the movie-style mothering that Rhoda was never much good at—Jane Darwell in The Grapes of Wrath, Mary Astor in Meet Me in St. Louis, they were good at it. I needed Mary Astor as my mother, kind, soothing, compassionate, uncritically understanding … Elizabeth Ames was Mary Astor, my MGM dream come true.

  My room in East House was unappealing in so many ways, especially in the way it resembled an army barracks. It was a large, unadorned space on the ground floor, with a desk, two chairs, and a single bed, more a cot than a bed. Drab walls, drab wooden floor, drab furnishings, a sink in the corner, the toilet and icy cold shower across the hall. If you let the shower run for fifteen minutes, it got a little warmer, not that much. Nonetheless, I had no complaints. I was grateful.

  I was grateful for everything. After my first disastrous day, if Elizabeth had asked me to camp out in a tent on the nearby frozen lakes, I would have been grateful.

  My first morning at Yaddo: After a communal breakfast with the other guests (only eight of us in February), I stretched out on the bed in my room and took out the Little Murders manuscript. I had not read it in months. A numbing awareness, first distant and then dismal, that I was going down in flames. The grim revelation of why I had stopped work on this so-called novel. It was hopeless. It was shit. It was unsalvageable. Two years of time and effort that could have been better spent on anything else—parenting, partying … A complete waste, a washout, only one word to describe it: shit.

  I walked to town. Now what? Saratoga, the town, was a mile away, not an easy walk in February with snow and ice patches everywhere on the road. I didn’t have a car nor could I drive a car, but I had a need—to escape that room in which I was supposed to write my novel. I had a destination in mind, and I found it on Main Street, short of life and business in the windless but numbingly cold freeze: a liquor store. I bought a pint of Scotch, fit it into the pocket of my duffle coat, and walked back to my room. Now what?

  It was only two days since the Kazins had thrown me a finishing-my-novel party. It would be pathetically defeatist for me to turn tail and go home. How could I return after Alfred Kazin, this leading light of the literary-critical establishment, had blessed me with his high expectations and sent me off? Running home was out of the question.

  Unless I sneaked home. What if I didn’t tell anyone, hid out in our apartment on Riverside Drive, locked in my bunker waiting for Alfred, ten years my senior, to die of old age? Buried alive, I could send out for meals. Judy, then Katie, when she’s older, can leave them by the door of my studio. One or the other knocks—that’s the signal—then leaves. But I ignore the knock, all knocks. Now is not the time to eat. Now is the time to figure out my next move. Change my name. Grow a beard. Drink my Scotch.

  I skipped dinner that first night of my first day at Yaddo. I drained my Scotch in passive anticipation of sought-after oblivion. I stared out the window. Nothing to see. No one to look at. No one to look at me. I had self-erased. An empty writer in an empty room. I concentrated on the Scotch until it was time to fall unconscious, which I did with gratitude.

  I woke before dawn with one thought in mind: “I am not that bad.” I couldn’t be. I might not be a novelist, but I was not stupid. I was too smart and too practical to waste two years of my life on the kind of shit I had wasted two years of my life on. There must be a reason, some good sense that I could find in this.

  I dug out the original notes I had jotted down when I first had the idea for the novel. I hadn’t looked at them since I began the book. It was a jolt—oh, yeah!—as if I had never seen them before: America on the brink of a nervous breakdown (like me, right now), the country coming unglued (like me, right now), acts of random violence breaking out in response to this climate of unacknowledged chaos. (If I wasn’t so chicken, I might be close to that point.) Alfred, a photographer who believes in nothing; Patsy, his Doris Day-like savior, who is the spirit of go-getterism. Alfred believes life is shit. (Like my novel.) Accordingly, he takes pictures of shit. It is his single subject matter. So graphic, fanciful, and imaginative are his depictions of shit that he wins awards, gets a gallery exhibition, gets a Vogue magazine spread. This completely validates his nihilism.

  Patsy is the embodiment of the American spirit, of JFK and his famous phrase “We can do bettah.” She believes Alfred can do bettah. She will convert him. And she does. She convinces him that she is right and he is wrong, that he must fight the odds, reject the metaphor he has lived by. No, she declares, life is not shit, life is tough, but it can be beautiful—and under her guidance, it will be beautiful. For both of them.

  She sells him on her rose-tinted vision. And as Alfred is ready to follow her anywhere, as they embrace to seal the bargain, a sniper from across the street gets off a shot and blows Patsy’s head off. And the sixties begin.

  I finished reading my notes with growing excitement. I thought, “Hey this is good stuff! Somebody should write this!”

  I had about run out of options. Okay. Think. What could be done to save this terrific idea that I had so badly screwed up? Little Murders was not a novel, I had proved that. It wasn’t a comic strip either, or what we now call a graphic novel. It needed a more direct form, one with a sense of immediacy, confrontation … It didn’t take much more thinking before Little Murders announced itself. It was a play. Whether I liked it or not. And I wasn’t sure I liked it at all.

  I had given up on The World of Jules Feiffer with Nichols and Sondheim because I concluded that dramatized cartoons did not constitute real theater. But Little Murders cried out that it was true theater. And that I could write it around the themes that obsessed me. And with determination and a little luck, it might be a good play.

  Of course, it wouldn’t run. I was a theater lover, but the theater I loved was more challenging than the plays that became hits on Broadway. I liked plays that upset me, made me think, drove me out of the theater in confusion, sometimes in anger. I liked plays that I didn’t necessarily understand when I left the theater, that both pissed me off and intrigued me. Plays like Marat/Sade or Ulysses in Nighttown. If I liked a play, really liked it, it usually closed quickly. If I disliked a play enough to walk out on it after the first act, you could be sure it would win either a Tony or a Pulitzer Prize.

  I understood, as I sat in my cold cell of a room, that if I actually managed to write a play that said what I wanted it to, the play of my notes that touched on the undiscussed breakdown of authority in post-assassination America—that play, by its very nature, would close in a week.

 
To go forward with a flop of such certainty would be an act of pure masochism. But I couldn’t pack up and go home and have my friends laugh at me. Better to close in a week.

  I sat down at my desk to start the first act and within an hour was having the time of my life. Within two hours, I knew that I was a playwright, that whatever its fate, this work was so much fun that it was worth any clobbering the critics were bound to hand me.

  The notion of a critical clobbering began to interest me rather than daunt me. If I was going to get busted for this play, then let me outrage the critics in ways that would really get them upset. I had been lamenting for some months that my cartoons had become too popular, too readily accessible. I wanted to use theater to clear up the confusion about my subversive content. What I would demand of this play that I now passionately embarked upon was attention, controversy, and a famous failure.

  The first scene opened with a conventionally wacky American family, Patsy’s family. She was bringing her new boyfriend home for dinner to meet the folks. She has an amiable, ditsy Broadway mother, she has a long-suffering, ineffectual father, she has an adoring, irritating kid brother of confused sexual identity.

  Into this family gathering, Patsy brings Alfred, the ultimate nihilist, a shock to their system and to the audience’s, with his aggressive passivity and his choice of photographic subject matter.

  There is a tradition in theater, going back to pre-World War I days, of outlaws, rebels, bad boys and girls, malcontents coming onstage, upsetting the apple cart, saying out loud what one might think but never express in public, throwing the other characters into an uproar, which amuses and titillates the audience because it knows that no matter how disastrous things may be at the end of the first act, all will be resolved happily by the end of the play.

  The malcontent will come to his or her senses or get his or her comeuppance, shown up as either fool or knave. The audience will have been treated to the theater of the disposable rebel, a character who shocks just short of offending and is meted out the appropriate bourgeois punishment, that of being driven off stage in disgrace or selling out his principles and winning the forgiveness and applause of the audience.

  This was the formula I wanted audiences to think I was foisting on them. And it seemed to be the play that I was actually writing, until at the end of act 2 in this three-act play, when I set up the audience for a traditional happy ending: Alfred surrenders his nihilist principles to his ever-hopeful wife. Happy ending. Not quite. Moments later Patsy is shot and killed by a sniper from a rooftop across the street. The traditional happy ending turns horrific, unpredictable, chaotic—like the times we lived in.

  The play was writing itself. I began early in the morning and scribbled nonstop, page after page on legal-size yellow pads. Speech after speech, scene after scene. It was almost as if I knew what I was doing. My scenes had a shape, a thrust, a direction, whatever one calls it, whatever the technical term is for writing a scene—of which I was totally ignorant because I had never intended to write a scene. I didn’t read a how-to book on writing plays, I just wrote my play as if I were in the audience watching someone else’s. My education, to the extent that I had any, came from my years of theatergoing, my experience in knowing when a scene was going well, when it was building right, when it let you down, when it paid off, and when it didn’t. It was as if every ticket to every show I’d bought were a form of matriculation. I worked till two or three in the morning, then up again at six. I was backing into theater as I had backed into so many other things.

  The second I brought Marjorie, Patsy’s mother, onstage, wheeling in the living room set for act 1 against a mad cacophony of city noises, car horns, police and ambulance sirens, construction hammers, a smog of city soot filling the air, intermittent power blackouts sending the stage into unexplained darkness—as soon as I entered the chaos of the civilization I had described in my notes, I felt a discipline and structured approach to work that was entirely unfamiliar, like waking up with a knowledge of calculus.

  Broadway plays still had three acts in those days, and after I finished act 1 and knew I was on to something, I began writing reviews in my head. And what I remembered of reviews was that often, too often, the critics would tell me that while acts 1 and 2 showed great talent and excitement, there was a serious falling off of energy and inventiveness in act 3. Plays that were doing great for two acts, over and over again, seemed to come up with an act 3 problem.

  I decided that the way to avoid an act 3 problem was to write the third act out of order. Instead of writing it after act 2, now that I had act 1 tucked away and more or less understood where I was going, perhaps I could avoid this problem—the falling off of act 3 that critics described—by skipping past act 2 and going on to the end of the play, as it were, with a full head of steam, at the height of my powers.

  I wrote my third act, the end of my play, in three days. Now all it needed was a middle. I was in a state of dithering euphoria. The high point of act 2 was to be an emotional confrontation between Alfred and Patsy, a knockdown, drag-out fight inspired by the Biff and Willy confrontation in Death of a Salesman, a scene I carried with me always, a scene in which two struggling antagonists stumble upon a devastating truth. I was out to write my equivalent of this Biff/Willy scene and unearth my own truth, to grab the audience by the throat and shake, rattle, and roil them.

  I finished the scene a little after midnight, exhausted but pleased. I read it over twice. It worked. I went to sleep, woke at 4:00 a.m., hopped out of bed, turned on the desk lamp, and reread the scene: it didn’t work. I went back to sleep, excited. In the morning, before breakfast, I’d take another shot at it. Before and after breakfast, I did revisions on the scene. It was closer but still not right. I walked through Yaddo’s piney woods, around the three small lakes frozen solid with ice. I, too, was frozen solid but didn’t mind. I was happy to have a scene to revise in the first play I was writing. Yes. I was truly a playwright, not a single doubt in my mind.

  Two years of writing Harry, the Rat and a year and a half struggling with Little Murders, the novel, and never once did I feel the sense of command that I now felt as a neophyte playwright. I had no doubt that my play would get written (as I continually doubted with my novels). I had no doubt that it would be good. And, oh yes, it would be panned; it would be that good. It didn’t seem to matter to me. Reviews were beside the point. Acceptance was important to me but in some ways it, too, was beside the point.

  After ten years at the Voice, I was beginning to feel that perhaps I was getting too much acceptance. What did it say about these cartoons that I thought were so challenging that they no longer raised much controversy? My unchallenged readers looked forward to my new strip each week as if preparing to be braced by a dry martini. Yes, that’s how challenging I had become. I was cocktail chatter.

  Gide or someone made a comment dear to my heart: “Do not understand me too quickly.” Little Murders was designed to correct my having been understood too quickly.

  I finished my walk around the Yaddo lakes, returned to my chilly cell, and rewrote the Alfred/Patsy confrontation scene for the fourth time, delighted to have one more chance to fix it.

  I felt, as I feel in my best writing moments, as if I were a private eye on the trail, following leads, dismissing clues that were red herrings, going off now and again in the wrong direction and coming back to start all over again. I sniffed patiently away at the case, knowing the solution waited at the end of some trail that I would in my own way and at my own pace surely get to.

  I had a rough first draft at the end of two weeks. I had never worked that hard or that happily in my life. I had always worked in short spurts, which was fine for six-to-nine-panel cartoons, but not when I was committed to a longer work. Yaddo, in its distance from New York, in its frigid and unrelenting isolation, in its embracing, sustaining aura (overseen by Elizabeth Ames), taught me, as if I were a child learning to walk, how to organize, how to structure work habits. Structure was f
oreign to me up till now; so were work habits. Obsession drove me. Once on the trail, nothing could slow me down.

  I took a break, drove back to New York with my friend Nina Schneider. It was in Nina’s car that I heard over the radio about the bar mitzvah murder and suicide committed by my young visitor, Richard Wishnetsky. Of course, I was horrified, but close on the heels of my horror came pinpricks of titillation. I was on to something.

  I read the entire play to Judy on my first night home. Her response was, “I love it, but I don’t think the third act works.”

  The next night, we had dinner with the Kazins and came back to our apartment for a nightcap. Alfred lounged on the couch and sipped at a Scotch. He said, “Read me your play.” I had my own Scotch and sat in an armchair facing him. I said, “Alfred, I’m not a reader, and it’s almost midnight.” Alfred said, “Feiffer, I got you into Yaddo. Read me your play.”

  I went down the hall, past Kate’s room, where she had long been asleep, into my studio. I retrieved the legal-size yellow pads that constituted the first draft. I returned to the living room and, very nervous indeed, began to read Little Murders. I was tired, I was scared, I read in a self-conscious monotone. Judy and Ann were very attentive, but Alfred was asleep in five minutes.

  Village Voice, April 21, 1966

  WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION

  Robert Brustein wanted Little Murders for his theater at the Yale Rep.

  Brustein, the theater critic for the New Republic and the newly appointed dean of the Yale School of Drama, was an old friend. It was Bob and his wife, Norma, who, in the late spring of 1966, introduced Judy and me to Martha’s Vineyard. They invited us for a weekend, along with Philip Roth and his girlfriend, Ann Mudge. Getting to the Vineyard in those years was a nuisance, especially for a New York boy who didn’t drive and had no affinity for car culture. The Brusteins drove us up from New Haven. The drive took five hours or more, at the end of which we boarded a ferry that took another forty-five minutes. By that time I had settled into an early judgment that any place that hard to get to wasn’t worth it. And then we got off the ferry and it was love at first sight.