An Evening with Jules Feiffer at the Cosmos Club in 2007

 The great cartoonist Jules Feiffer has passed away. IJOCA ran this interview in print in Fall 2008. 

An Evening with Jules Feiffer

By Alan Fern

 

The late Dr. John P. McGovern established an award program at the Cosmos Club Foundation in Washington, D.C., to recognize people of achievement in science, literature, and the arts. Each recipient is asked to speak about his or her work and career. Past recipients have included Mstislav Rostropovich, Carlos Fuentes, Joyce Carol Oates, Edward O. Wilson, Maya Lin, Saul Bellow, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, J. Craig Venter, Derek Jacobi, Michael Frayn, and Wole Soyinka, among many others. Jules Feiffer received theaward on April 30, 2007, at the Cosmos Club in Washington. Feiffer gave a slide presentation on his work and read sections from his autobiography-in-progress. The following is a transcript of the third part of the evening, an interview with Foundation trustee Alan Fern and Feiffer’s responses to questions from the audience.

 Alan Fern: I’m going to start with a couple of questions I was thinking about, just to get Jules rolling and then we’ll ask you [in the audience] to think about what you’d like to ask. One subject we haven’t talked about very much tonight was really the beginning of your cartoon career with Will Eisner. We mentioned that in this little biographical statement [in the award program], but someone named Michael Rhode who is a cartoon specialist, contacted me and said, “By the way, [DC Comics is] just reprinting an issue [of The Spirit] which, supposedly under Eisner’s signature, in 1947, but really drawn by Feiffer, shows Eisner getting killed…

 Jules Feiffer: Yes… I killed him.

 AF: …so the apprentice could take over the strip. You killed him. So tell me about it. What kind of a way is that to repay your mentor?

 JF: I forget how that happened. First of all, Eisner was my hero as a kid, when I was ten, eleven, and twelve. The three cartoonists I was crazy about were Roy Crane, who did Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, Milton Caniff, who did Terry and the Pirates, and Eisner. In particular, Eisner and Caniff I loved most because they combined words and pictures, they told stories, they created characters that were infinitely more grounded, nuanced and sophisticated than anyone else. It was quite remarkable what they did. Caniff in daily and Sunday strips and Eisner in the comics, particularly with the Spirit which ran as a supplement, a comic book supplement, first sixteen pages and then eight pages, in Sunday newspapers. In 1946, just out of high school, I took my samples and looked up Eisner in the phone book, and there he was – 37 Wall Street – and I went down there, terrified, but it was easier for me to walk in than call him up on the phone. I could never have done that. He was there in the outer office, where you’d think a secretary would be. He was there in his dark room just working on the Spirit. I was very excited. He couldn’t have been more friendly and and he asked to see my samples. In a very friendly way, he looked at them, and in a very friendly way, he said I had no talent at all…

 [audience laughs]

 …and that the stuff was awful. Which really troubled me because I hated to hear the truth in those years. But I had long ago established a habit of responding to unpleasant truths by not hearing them, or changing the subject, and I sure as hell was not going to walk out of this meeting with Will Eisner, my hero, with my tail between my legs, being told I had no talent. This was not the way this was going to end, so I started improvising and the only thing I could think of talking about was him and his work. Now here was a guy who had revolutionized comic book art and he had three highly crafted professionals in the other room who didn’t give a damn about his work. Who thought he was kind of out of date, and didn’t know anything about his career, and then he met me and I had a whole dossier. I knew everything he ever had done. I could talk about it not just as a little boy, but as a knowledgeable fan. He had no choice but to hire me as a groupie.

 [audience laughs]

 AF: So then you kill him off?!

 JF: Well after two or three years, even as a groupie, he’s your boss. You get pissed off at him. [laughs] Because I couldn’t do anything around the office that was any good, he just tried me out on writing the Spirit stories and it turned out I could write a lot better than I could draw those things. So I became the writer. As I said at the time, I was the Spirit’s ghost.

 AF: That leads to in fact another question. I have long wondered… I have known you for a good many years, and admired you enormously – all aspects of your work. You’ve often said in your public utterances that you always wanted to be a cartoonist. And yet so much of your work, besides cartooning, displays this great gift for narrative and dialogue. Of course, your prose writing is very lucid and good. Did you know as a young man that you were talented as a writer and did you just keep it quiet because you didn’t think you could convince your mother that it would be ok to be a writer?

 JF: Good question. I had a sister four years older, my Communist sister. She was the writer in the family.

 AF: Ahhh…

 JF: Those roles were so pre-assigned, and she was the first female editor of our high school newspaper. She had a great high school career. And like so many people who are great in high school, and then disappear afterwards, she was one of those. But I was thoroughly intimidated by her as a writer and never tried writing. I would scribble out some stories, never finish them, and they weren’t very good. I always wanted to write my own cartoons. To my thinking, the great cartoonists were the ones who wrote their own stuff. To the extent I thought about writing, I thought about it as an illustrator about my comic strips…

 AF: But how does that relate to the movies?

 JF: …only when I started watching ‘50s television drama… there was a period in the early ‘50s, on Sunday nights – live television, Philco Playhouse – and there was Paddy Chayefsky whoever the hell he was and Tad Mosel whoever the hell he was and Horton Foote whoever the hell he was … these brilliant writers emerging and writing one hour television dramas and they were accessible and they were brilliantly written and they connected to me as a member of the audience far more than most theater I was seeing at the time, and I went to a lot of theater. And I thought maybe I could do that, because it wasn’t a play. It wasn’t on Broadway. It wasn’t on the stage. I thought, “It’s only television, maybe I could do it.” Because it’s like a comic strip, it seemed somewhat lower in esteem, I thought, “Well, I’m low esteem enough to do this low esteem writing” and for the first time started fooling around theatrically. Prior to that I never had any ambition and those attempts at writing good television were aborted too. I never finished anything. The way I got into theater was… my joke about the Paris Review crowd telling me that I was really a playwright, not a cartoonist, is only a slight exaggeration. Second City in Chicago opened a theater next door – this is shortly after they had been running successfully and changing the face of comedy along with Nichols and May – and the theater they were opening next door was not going to be improvisation. It was going to be called Playwrights at Second City and they asked me if I would do an adaptation of my cartoons. So the first thing I wrote theatrically was taking my comic strips from the [Village] Voice and breaking them down into a two-act form. And then Paul Sills the director came to the surprising stunning conclusion for him, that none of these things ran more thirty or forty seconds. “It’s too short. We need something longer. Can you write something longer?” So I wrote something longer, and then he wanted something even longer and then I wrote a one-act play. Which he hated. [laughs] But when I wrote the one-act play, I thought, “I can do this. I know how to do this.” I mean I didn’t know that I knew how to do this. When we later took that show which was the first thing Mike Nichols was going to direct, and took it out on the road in summer stock in New Jersey, Mike took that play that Paul Sills didn’t like at all and did a wonderful production of it. So that’s when I realized that I could do this. I had my own way of working…

 AF: That leads me to another question that I’ve been thinking of. Here you just demonstrated that one director can do something with your work much better than another director might. When you’ve written plays or movies, have you had specific actors in mind, or specific directors to do it, or have you just done it and then let the thing fall where it might?

 JF: Well every time I had a specific actor… when I wrote Little Murders, the actor I had in mind was Walter Matthau and he didn’t understand a word of it. Every time I’ve ever had an actor in mind… when I sent Mike Nichols the script of Little Murders when I first wrote the play, I never heard back from him. Not a response. And we were friends and we had worked together. It just infuriated me. I thought I’d cut him cold when I saw him. We didn’t speak to each other for two years. When The Graduate was about to open I went to a screening hoping it would be a big flop, just wishing him very very poorly – disaster. I’m sitting in this audience -- this film hasn’t opened yet and it hasn’t been reviewed – there’s no advance word on it. This is a PR audience … these are people that work in the business … they haven’t been told how to react. So they sat through the movie without a peep, without a laugh, without anything, because they hadn’t been told that it was great. And I sat there inhaling this thing from the very first shot in the film where Dustin Hoffman is riding this subway as his plane lands at LAX, and I couldn’t believe what I was watching – it was so brilliant. All of my anger at Mike disappeared because I was seeing what he and Elaine had done and what I had been trying to do in my work just put on a whole different level – an extraordinary new level – and I wrote him a fan letter and sent it to him. I heard back the next day by messenger so we were back on again as friends, and when I wrote Carnal Knowledge I sent it to him and he called me back twenty-four hours later and said, “I don’t think it’s a play, I think it’s a movie. Let me do it as a movie.” And I said, “What about the language?” He said, “We won’t have any problem.” So we did it as a movie. And it was the best working experience I’ve ever had in film.

 AF: Before we open for questions from everyone, I have one question been dying to ask you about the movies. Both in Carnal Knowledge and Little Murders at several places there’s a completely black screen and a lot of stuff happens behind the black screen and then finally it emerges. In Carnal Knowledge is also a white screen and suddenly you get actors emerging. Now, was that your idea or the director’s idea?

 JF: In both cases, it was the director’s idea.

 AF: Was it.

 JF: Yes, yes.

 AF: Two different directors?

 JF: Actually Nichols wanted to open, and did open Carnal Knowledge with Jack and Artie talking under the credits and then slowly the room fades in and you see that, but that wasn’t my concept. And the ice skater who’s the transitional figure that one sees in white is not in the script. Mike came up with that as a symbol of…

 AF: So Arkin was imitating Mike…

 JF: Uhhh, no actually that was before. The film of Little Murders came before Carnal Knowledge.

 AF: Anyway, let’s see what you [in the audience] would like to ask Jules.

 Audience Member: Am I the only one who sees Giacometti in your work?

 JF: Well, you know, I don’t see Giacometti in my work, but I can see where you might. He learned a lot from me, Giacometti. [audience laughs] But there was a brilliant illustrator and artist of the 1930s and 40s who lived in London. He was Polish. Named Feliks Topolski. And he put out on butcher paper something Topolski’s Weekly or Topolski’s Journal and he just drew scenes around London with this loose charcoal pencil line. I thought this is how I … I mean I could never come near his skill, but that’s what I wanted my drawing to look like. And it’s also in the tradition of those Daumier sketches that are wildly loose and free. Being loose and free, that has always been what interested me about drawing. Not to do a tightly rendered sketch, but just to make it happen … like a Fred Astaire dance actually. I mean it’s dancing on paper.

 AM: Jules, with newspapers becoming kind of a dinosaur, what would a Jules Feiffer in 2007 choose as a vehicle.

 JF: There can’t be a Jules Feiffer in 2007 because all of us are creatures of the time we are brought up in and come to maturity and you’re basically controlled by the influences around you. I mean Art Spiegelman works almost solely on a computer now, doing his drawings that way. But Art is, I don’t know, twenty years younger than I am, and knows how to do this. I can’t even turn on a computer. It changes with each generation. The smarter ones are the ones who can go back and be informed by earlier work, but what they do is very much of their time and of their keeping. My style could not have evolved if there had not been a host of people like William Steig before me and Saul Steinberg and Andre Francois and Walt Kelly… I mean all of these went into the making of what I ended up doing… Robert Osborne… I mean there’s just a whole bunch of them.

 AM: I wanted to ask you about another one – Abner Dean.

 JF: I loved him! He was a friend of mine.

 AM: Abner Dean is much more gloomy than you are, but he has a kind of wit…

 JF: But his people were naked! It was disgusting. [laughs]. Abner Dean did these full page New Yorker cartoons of neurotics in situations, but his drawing didn’t influence me because he drew very tightly. He was very tight and he did washes. He was a wonderful, very sweet man and he was very very kind to me when I was starting out. I liked him enormously.

 Michael Rhode: I picked up Feiffer on Nixon over the weekend, and I was struck at how if you just changed the faces, over 90% would still be applicable.  I was wondering if you could address that and how much you miss having a forum where you could do political strips again?

 JF: Oh, I don’t really miss doing the political strips. I did them for so many years, and my god, I had the best. I had Richard Nixon working for me. Then I had Ronald Reagan, who actually meant what he said, which was so amazing… because it was all wrong… and changed the country. I mean, he got rid of the New Deal all by himself practically. I had LBJ who gave us the credibility gap. There was a story that reporters talked about when LBJ was president. “How do you know when the President is telling the truth and when he’s lying?” “When he looks at you straight in the eye, he’s telling the truth. When he leans back in his chair, he’s telling the truth. When he puts his hands behind his neck, he’s telling the truth. When he scratches his nose, he’s telling the truth. When he opens his mouth, he’s lying.” [audience laughs]

 AM: It’s hard to follow that. Can you just describe the creative process that you go through when you come up with an idea? Is it the drawing first and then the idea? Does it ever happen that way? Or is it the concept first in your mind?

 JF: It has happened first, but mostly it’s the other way. Usually when it’s the drawing first, it’s because I can’t think of an opening line, I can’t think of anything, but usually I script it on a sheet of yellow paper or whatever there is around. It’s very much like cabaret, or comic improv as I saw at Second City or Nichols and May or others… [such as] The Committee [Theater] in San Francisco. When you give an actor an opening line and he or she has to run with it, and it may involve another character, essentially that’s what I still do on paper. I start writing something and I don’t know where it’s going and I don’t want to know where it’s going. I deliberately don’t want to second-guess myself. I don’t want to use my brain in this at all. I just want my hand to control, because everything I do is in longhand, I want my hand to control what it is that’s coming out. And often, if it’s going to be any good, I’m quite surprised at what comes out on paper. I find, as in writing the memoir or writing a play, the work is not very good until I lose control of it. When the characters or the story I’m telling takes over and I’m not in charge of it, then it’s going to be good. I have a good chance of making it work.

 AF: I know half a dozen of you still have questions to ask, but I’m going to put an end to the formal question and answer period. I’m going to remind you that upstairs we will have ample opportunity to chat with Jules, ask more questions, learn more about his work. The ideal McGovern evening it seems to me is one in which a creative person lets us see a bit about what his work has been and how he does it and I think that Jules has done both of those things admirably and we’re very much in his debt. It’s been a wonderful evening.

 

Transcribed by Michael Rhode, from a tape provided by the Cosmos Club.