Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  I cover my ass with infinite charm. I am funny but not a jokester. I am the professor but not the center of attention. The students’ work is the center of attention. The class is solely about work, and I talk to my students, repeatedly, about how they must separate their egos from the work under consideration.

  Judgment of their work is not a judgment on them or their worth. I warn them that if they turn the built-in problems of an assignment into a statement of their own inadequacy, they will have sprung a trap on themselves that trades the difficulties of process for the more seductive diversions of self-examination.

  I prod them to experiment with voices distinct from their own. In the course of the semester, they will write essays, monologues, observations from a variety of angles and in changing voices. At the end of the semester, they write a one-act play.

  I urge them to work, if they can manage it, with a sense of play. Writing, I insist, is a form of play. It is serious fun. As far as I’m concerned, if it doesn’t end up as fun, why bother? The job of a writer is too hard, too full of disappointment and failure, too calculated for rejection. If it can’t be fun, not all the success in the world is worth it.

  Village Voice, March 5, 1978

  BEDTIME FOR MEMOIR

  I backed into fatherhood with all the reluctance of a man who knows what he thinks but not what he wants. I thought I wanted privacy when what I wanted was children interrupting my work. I thought I wanted independence when what I wanted was responsibility. I thought I feared commitment, but I pursued it. I thought I needed peace and quiet when all along it was confusion that I needed. I needed whatever it took for a shy boy to grow into socialized manhood. So in order to pull myself out of boyhood into manhood, I needed children, the ultimate test, those carriers of chaos.

  Whatever one’s plans, children screw them up. Whatever one’s routine, they upend it. Whatever one’s deadline—children are death to deadlines. They play Russian roulette with schedules. Ever the contrarian, I found myself far happier ensnared in the muddle of child rearing and child survival than without.

  You must realize by now that, for me, happiness is a term of ambivalence. It’s entangled with so many other feelings, among them rage. For example, Kate Feiffer on the Vineyard back in the early seventies. It is ten in the evening, Kate is nine, she is upstairs in bed (finally). I am a single parent, having walked out on my marriage two years earlier. I have driven Kate to horseback riding lessons at Pond View Farm, I have driven her to the library and the playground a block up from the library. She likes the airport playground better, so I drive her there, only ten minutes away, near the great little diner that specializes in malteds and frappes. I drive her home and we go next door to Seth Pond, where all three of my children swam almost every day of every summer into their teens. I pan-broiled her a hamburger, which she liked, accompanied by vegetables, which she ignored. I played a game of Aggravation with her, which I loved, especially when I knew I could beat her and didn’t. Then I put her to bed.

  It was my time now. Out on our screened porch, reclining on the glider that is a major part of my summer happiness, relaxing for the first time that day, smoking a Monte Cristo smuggled in from Cuba, looking out at the first stars and the rising moon, a half-empty glass of Scotch in my hand, a fresh one soon promised. Kate’s day is done and I am relieved, also exhausted, but pleasantly so.

  A call from upstairs. “Daddy!”

  “What is it, honey?” She is supposed to be asleep.

  “Come up here!” shouts my darling daughter.

  “Go to sleep, honey!” She was asleep when I left her.

  “I need you!”

  “I’m resting!”

  “Daddy, I need you! Please come up here!”

  “No, you come down here!”

  “It’s important!”

  “If it’s so important, come down and tell me!”

  “I can’t, I’m in bed!”

  Now, if you replay this scene with essentially the same dialogue repeated with minor variations for five or ten minutes, what an outsider would perceive might be a congenial, amusing family moment reminiscent of that old TV series The Waltons. Sweet, homespun Americana.

  But that would be on the surface. Inside my head resounded a frenzied Bernard Herrmann score from a Hitchcock thriller: boom dum-de-dum, boom boom crash mangle kazam tear limb from limb zap boom dum-de-kaboom!

  The contrast between what lay on the surface—this sweet, banal encounter between long-suffering father and persistent but adorable daughter—and what was buried in the subtext: an urge to run up there, scream, yell, jump up and down in fury. But instead of pounding my beloved daughter, I’d pound the walls of her bedroom with my fists. “Take that, you wall! And that! How do you like that one, wall? Plenty more where that came from!” That moment went into my play Grown Ups. It got laughs of recognition (humor, the great accommodator).

  Fifteen years later, Halley Feiffer at four interrupts me at work in my studio. She wants something or needs something or has lost something. I have learned not to be irritated or impatient with these interruptions. I myself interrupt my work, to do absolutely nothing, more times in the course of a day than any of my children. But in response to interruptions, I have developed a strategy, my Creative Defense Initiative (CDI). It is a child-interruption device that I have metaphorically installed in my head. It is a pause button that I activate the moment I am waylaid by a child while in the middle of writing a scene, drawing an illustration, or trying to finish this memoir.

  I push the pause button. I deal with the child. It can take up to a quarter of an hour. Once she is pacified, satisfied, deflected, detoured, slickly maneuvered by this old hand at fathering to wander off down a path where her soon-to-be abandonment is agreeable to both of us, I return to my desk, deactivate the pause button, finish the drawing, the scene, or this sentence.

  My life is like a comic strip: short breaks between panels, the briefest of breaks. Each break comes from a child stepping between me and my process. I am so used to it, I hardly ever scream anymore.

  Katie, Halley, and Julie have all sat in my lap at my drawing table, playing comic strip in exactly the same way I play it alone for real. I’d compose a first panel, draw it, and write in the dialogue. My daughter would come up with a second panel and either draw it herself or dictate the scene and the dialogue she imagined. I took it from there and wrote and drew a third panel, she did the next panel, and so on and on until we had finished the page or the story.

  Part of the fun was stumping each other, coming up with ideas for the next panel that defied follow-up—the introduction of monsters, dinosaurs, impending disasters that could only lead to hopeless conclusions—and yet we managed always to maneuver ourselves out of our own traps into usable, if not plausible, endings.

  My daily routine for my second children’s novel, A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears, came out of this game with my children. I started work in the morning, writing all day until I put my hero, Prince Roger, into a situation from which he could not possibly escape. And then I quit for the day and resumed the next morning, having overnight devised a way out for myself and Roger. This took me through another day of writing until nightfall, a new trap set, no solution in sight until the following morning.

  The inspiration my children represent in terms of my present line of work is so overarching that I often mean to ask my accountant if I can deduct them as a business expense. Following three-and-a-half-year-old Halley around our West End Avenue apartment, I can’t help but notice the absence of even the vaguest linear process. No action necessarily connects to what proceeds or follows it. A stuffed bear exists for the purpose of seating her Barbie on its lap until it becomes more interesting to pull a leg off the Barbie and try to fit it onto another Barbie as a third leg, and then both Barbies are forsaken for a toy freight train car on which it might be possible to seat one of the Barbies but not the stuffed bear, so a wrestling match ensues between child and bear to teach one or the ot
her to sit properly on the freight car.

  Bear and toy freight car are abandoned for blocks that are made into a tunnel that Barbie hides in, challenging me to find her. I find her too quickly, which is my mistake. The price I am made to pay is to dig out more blocks from under Halley’s bed in order for her to build a better tunnel, an idea which is soon abandoned in favor of a skyscraper of blocks (forget the tunnel), ascending in a single wavering row headed for the ceiling.

  My insane desire to scream “No, no!” to my child, to advise her to complete one task before starting another, led me straight to my earliest picture book, I Lost My Bear, in which a blond little girl (Halley) loses her favorite stuffed bear and while anxiously searching for it completely forgets what she’s looking for because there are so many distractions that compete for her attention.

  On a family holiday in the Dominican Republic, I watched Maddy, my two-year-old granddaughter (Kate’s child), at the shallow end of the swimming pool instruct her father, Chris, on how to hold and assist her as she made him over into an edifice and before my eyes composed an instructional manual on how to climb your father from his feet to his shoulders. “That’s a book!” I said to myself at my end of the pool.

  A year later, when I showed the first color proofs of The Daddy Mountain to my family at the dinner table, nine-year-old Julie became very silent (no reaction at all), then looked at me wounded and accusing, and quietly said, “You did a book about her before you did a book about me.”

  I was staggered in the way one is when one thinks one is the bearer of glad tidings and discovers—not so fast!—it’s the opposite. Jenny reacted first: “Julie, that was a mistake, Daddy is very sorry, and his next book is going to be about you.” I was six months into this memoir. What a relief to have to write about something else. The next day, I opened a discussion on the subject. “Julie, my next book is going to be about you, but I don’t have any ideas. Do you have an idea?” Julie did not pause for a moment. “How about a girl with a zoo in her room?”

  This from a child who was the owner of two hamsters, three fish, a turtle, a hermit crab, and two cats, Timmy and Jessie. Timmy and Jessie had preceded Julie into our lives. They were given to Halley as birthday presents. Halley’s interest in cats didn’t last long, no more than a year or two, and then the cats—Jessie, black with white markings, and Timmy, a brown tabby—had to wait till Julie came along to receive their proper due. Julie adores animals. She talked of becoming a vet, and she talked about the animals her friends had for pets, mostly their dogs, big dogs, little dogs, how much fun they were, how much she wanted a dog. I did my best to avoid the subject.

  “How about a girl with a zoo in her room?”

  It was a perfect subject for a kid’s book. And the idea came out of Julie’s phrasing. If she had said, “How about a girl who loves animals?” I wouldn’t have had the hook to hang a book on. If she had said, “How about a girl who wants a dog and her father won’t buy her one?” the self-laceration involved would be too problematic to turn into a book. But… a girl with a zoo in her room?

  A Room with a Zoo! With a title like that, the story poured out. It was Julie’s voice that I channeled onto the page—and every member of our family, all of us, appears in fictionalized episodes (some almost true) that make up this book I was guilt-tripped into writing and that I’m as proud of as anything I have ever done.

  My children backed me into this joyously accidental career, which has reintroduced me to the Sunday supplements of my youth. I have volumes of them, going back over fifty years. When it comes time to illustrate a new story, I think, “Which master will I steal from now?” Winsor McCay (Little Nemo)? Frank King (Gasoline Alley)? Percy Crosby (Skippy)? Cliff Sterrett (Polly and Her Pals)? I browse through my comics collection, grateful to my children for inspiring my move from satirist to children’s book author, taking me back to the best part of boyhood—on the floor on all fours. I followed the funnies, never suspecting that they would lead me down this crooked, uncharted, barely navigable trail. Good thing I don’t have a sense of direction. I might have given up.

  Sidewalk poster for New-York Historical Society retrospective, 2003

  AND IN CONCLUSION

  Jenny asked not to be in this book, so mostly she’s not. But her presence is everywhere—like Conan Doyle’s dog that didn’t bark.

  Her influence on me has been remarkable since the minute we met, which was by way of a phone call from New York to Martha’s Vineyard in August of 1980, when she introduced herself as Jenny Allen, a reporter for Life magazine. She wanted to come up and interview me for an article timed for the release of the movie Popeye.

  I made a joke about this being a mistake, screenwriters did not get interviewed. But despite my banter and her banter, her voice came through on the phone as vital, funny, sexy, and so female that, then and there, a crush developed, put on hold until I was able to get my first look at her, which took place ten days later when she flew to the Vineyard during a rainstorm and was delivered by taxi soaking wet to my door.

  Instantly, I fell in love.

  She altered my mind in so many ways, most importantly about having more children. Without Halley and Julie, my life would be unimaginable. Without Jenny, my life would be nonexistent. So I apologize to my readers that you haven’t met her in this book.

  If she had been included, you would have found that she is brilliant and entertaining and writes like a dream. Her essays are serious, amusing, and unpredictable. She performs stand-up comedy on a personal level that’s both intimate and full of laughs—and without telling a single joke. She does an evening-length performance piece about her life and her family that’s moving and hilarious. Her humor embraces audiences in a hands-on, unsentimental way. And audiences return the favor. They love her.

  We have done one book together, The Long Chalkboard and Other Stories, three urban fables that she wrote and that I laid out and illustrated.

  That seems to be much of what I do these days: I work in the company store.

  Kate, my eldest, now writes picture books for children that are like no one else’s, charming, witty, and infectious—and fictively autobiographical. Her first, Double Pink, was about Maddy, my granddaughter, who is also the protagonist of my own book The Daddy Mountain. Not bad for a kid who wasn’t yet seven.

  Kate’s second book, Henry the Dog with No Tail, is about her Australian shepherd, Henry, and his envy of dogs who have a tail while Henry does not. Our second book together was Which Puppy? about a contest among dogs (and other animals) to pick a puppy for the Obamas. I am about to start work on our third book together, My Side of the Car. In the meantime, Kate has turned out five other books with other illustrators. And she’s written and directed an hour-long documentary called Matzo and Mistletoe, a personal essay about being raised a nominal Jew by a family so secular that they forgot to inform her of her Jewishness until she was six years old. Can you believe such people exist?

  Halley, twenty years younger than Kate and my first child with Jenny, is an actor (actress seems to have fallen out of usage). She is also a playwright and, when opportunities arise, a theater director. She is brilliant, but I shouldn’t have to tell you that, because if you’re bothering to read this book you may already know a little something about my family. She has been featured in several films, among them The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, The Messenger, Fighting Fish, and Gentlemen Broncos. Off-Broadway she’s appeared in Eric Bogosian’s SubUrbia, Election Day, None of the Above, Some Americans Abroad, and Still Life. Her father takes it for granted that someday she’s going to be a star and make a pile of money and retire him from having to write more memoirs.

  Julie is ten years younger than Halley and came about as a result of Halley’s announcement when she was eight that she was tired of being an only child. So we went out and adopted Julie, whom we found through an adoption agency in Texas.

  I held her in the palms of my hands when she was a week old. Everything she has now�
��her beauty, her intelligence, her wit, her strong humor—all of it was there looking up at me from the palms of my hands. As good as I imagined her then, the reality is better.

  Julie is the one whom I denied a dog until she was old enough to take care of it by herself. I had lived too long and had spent too much time with dogs to want to deal with another one now that I was in my seventies. So here I am, at eighty, about to walk Lily, an adorable one-eyed Chihuahua mixed breed whom three times a day I take to Riverside Park. Yes, I gripe about it but always have a good time. (Lily coexists with Daisy, who came into our household as a kitten whom Lily adopted. Daisy acts as if Lily is her mother. Lily does not discourage the notion.)

  I walk Lily, as I said, three times a day, something I swore I would not do. Much of what I do is what I swore I would not do. That is the best part of my life.

  Once I believed that if you saw that the glass was half empty, you did your best to fill it, in the hope and understanding that you would not be alone in this effort. Now I believe that if the glass is half empty, more of us than not will do our best to keep it that way. I grumble about this. I grumble about what this country has turned into in the twenty-first century. This is not my century. I am a fogey. And I am proud. I enjoy my dotage. The current year is my favorite year until next year, which I am determined to enjoy even more.

  I don’t enjoy our politics (which are an embarrassment), or our media (which are our shame), or what I see us becoming. Whatever I see and can’t stand I hope is a sign of age, not acuity …

  Stop the presses!

  Since I wrote the above in the winter of 2008, we’ve had an impossible election and Barack Obama is president. The first president I’ve been smitten with since 1932! I have renewed my citizenship (spiritually revoked four years earlier). Now I am an American again. I am proud. I am riding a pony. I think of my children, and grandchildren to come, and my heart swells. I drink from a half-empty glass of water, but with growing optimism. Never has water tasted so good. Never has the day loomed so bright. Yes, I know everything can go wrong. I know that my hopes can crash and burn, as they have so often in the past. But I have rediscovered illusion. Once I have illusion back, it can carry me far. My pony breaks into a gallop. I stare at my glass in wonder. No matter how fast I go or how much I drink, it doesn’t lose any water. My glass is half full.