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.
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