Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  His slapdash impressions were so crude it was hard to understand what made them stand out. It was François’s sense of the moment that made me want to be him. Immediacy on paper. Drawing as if it were coming from inside the paper out, a scrawl by an invisible hand announcing itself on the page without consciousness of layout, composition, or design. Art that just happened. That’s what I was after.

  Munro was going to be a subversive book. Before I knew much else about it, I knew that. It was going to attack the mindset of the military in a time of war. It was going to do so not as a polemic or a scathing satire but as a funny and entertaining story. A children’s story. For grown-ups. Eisner had done parodies of children’s books in The Spirit, and I had written one of them, and that may have been where I got the idea.

  I wanted to be subversive, but I wanted to get away with it. So I had to think in terms of sleight of hand. How to make it look like you’re doing one thing while actually doing another. I wanted my book to be written in a childlike mode and to look childlike, almost as if a child could have drawn it. This child.

  André François illustration from The Half-Naked Knight, 1958

  © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

  So appropriating André François seemed like a good idea. I couldn’t draw Munro the way I would have drawn a newspaper strip. The style of Clifford, my back-page strip for Eisner, had been strongly influenced by Pogo, but Walt Kelly’s appealing thick and thin, animated brush line was inappropriate for what I had set out to do. Kelly’s style was not right for overthrowing the government.

  I was one of three GIs newly appointed to the Publications Agency, which was civilian-run under civil service mandate. Percy Couse was supervisor in conjunction with a Colonel Somebody-or-other, a bluff, cordial man who stayed out of everyone’s way while Mr. Couse ran the joint. It had been through his assent that I was able to escape radio repair—and now, with his gruff approval, I was seated at an army desk struggling to find the right voice and drawing style for my anti-army story that the Signal Corps was subsidizing.

  Private Harvey Dinnerstein occupied the desk in front of mine. He was a Brooklyn boy from a left-wing family with politics similar to Mimi’s, but whether Reds or not I didn’t know. One didn’t ask. The day we met in the agency’s office, a barracks made up of two floors with an informal mix of officers and civil service civilians, we approached each other gingerly, our left-wing paranoia in play.

  We were in the fall of 1951, the heyday of McCarthyism. The Red-hunting shenanigans of the junior senator from Wisconsin and his boy commandos, my cousin Roy Cohn and his partner, G. David Schine, were in the headlines, and when not in the headlines, never far from my thoughts. Joe McCarthy had turned Roy into a media star, his small, dark frame with its ever-present scowl planted next to the lumbering, intimidating senator, whispering sweet character assassination in his ear—by now a familiar sight to millions of viewers.

  Roy may have been a distant cousin, but not distant enough. He and G. David were touring military bases on behalf of Senator McCarthy, checking out subversion in the military. Every McCarthy antic was amply publicized in the press. Although many editors and reporters were skeptical of the senator’s charges, still they serviced him with every inch of space he desired; it sold papers and they were scared of him. Paranoia in the guise of anti-Communism had become our most thriving ideology. We had not witnessed such an epidemic since the Red Scares of the 1920s.

  Paranoia was not built out of hysteria alone: the Hiss case was all over the news, an accused Soviet spy working in the upper levels of the U.S. government—and a high-class WASP, to boot. Charges and countercharges, a trial for perjury, Hiss found guilty, leading to other investigations of Communists or their sympathizers inside the government: Harry Dexter White, Owen Lattimore, men of high repute, brought under suspicion. Loyalty oaths for all government employees to sign, pledging that they wouldn’t spy for the Russians—something like that. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, arrested as spies for the Soviets. They gave atomic secrets to the Russians. Or did they? Or was it Julius alone and not Ethel? And did the secrets amount to that much? Maybe yes, maybe no. On that basis, with a judge secretly conspiring with the prosecution, they were convicted. And executed.

  The House Un-American Activities Committee were out hunting for Reds, real and imagined, among the Hollywood elite. Friends and colleagues ratting out one another. The Fifth Amendment dismissed by the press and public as a tool of Communists and their sympathizers, the First Amendment scorned as a shield for Communists who misused our constitutional freedoms to spout sedition and subversion. Were these questionable amendments to the Constitution worth keeping if they aided and abetted Communists? Was the Constitution worth keeping if Communists wrapped themselves in it, misguiding the public with pink-tinged phrases such as peace and coexistence? If Communists exploited the Constitution, maybe it was time to get rid of it so that we could better defend our freedoms.

  Freedom of speech became freedom of selective speech, my speech not your speech because my speech was within the confines of acceptable debate, checked out by the network watchdogs to ensure that the point of view would not incur protests from viewers or complaints and cancellations from sponsors. No Communist need apply for TV or radio exposure, no left-wingers either—unless they were avowedly anti-Communist. No liberals whose criticism sounded disruptive. Criticism, okay, it was fine, it was the American way—but by the end of the argument, we should all be able to agree that whatever we have done wrong, we are still right. And the oversights, mistakes, and injustices we commit in the pursuit of freedom must be measured against how much better we are than they are.

  If one went to American movies at the time, apart from the bursting-with-cheer musicals of the fifties, one saw invaders-from-outer-space movies, creatures from another planet, body snatchers, and weird pods hovering outside our homes, and then—God help us—they were inside our homes, they were our children. Our parents! They looked and sounded like us, but they were really Commies—oops!—Martians!

  It seemed as if our response to our postwar boom, prosperity wide-ranging enough to create a new middle class, was to view our new well-gotten gains with an insistent fear that someone out there was plotting to screw us. Witness film noir, which came into vogue in the midst of our boom. Hero veterans, having fought for their country, returned to small-town U.S.A. to find it all changed: crime, corruption, cynicism, all in high-contrast black and white. A home front that had rejected them, a girlfriend who betrayed them, a best friend who had stayed home to screw our hero’s girl and rob our hero blind. Hollywood was sounding a psychic cultural truth: we were living better than we ever had and feeling threatened by it.

  Harvey Dinnerstein, his wife, Lois, and I spent nights at their apartment off post talking about the threat, not from the Communists but from the anti-Communists. We saw ourselves as the other, the body snatchers, the creatures from the other planet, living with our mouths shut, except within the privacy of our cabal, pretending during our day jobs in the army that we were one of them, marking time, hoping that we would get away with it. And doing everything we could on the job to not get away with it.

  Harvey was a realist painter in a tradition going back to Raphael whose most recent vogue was Socialist Realism. His current subject was war, and in the apartment that he and Lois shared, there was a floor-to-ceiling canvas of multiethnic victims of war hoisted onto a giant bayonet, brilliantly drafted and painted but nonetheless reminding me of a Hugo Gellert political cartoon out of the Daily Worker. I was in awe of Harvey’s talent but not of his larger-than-life art that so blatantly editorialized.

  And during the day, our leader, Mr. Couse—or Perce, as he asked us to call him—convinced that Harvey was far too talented to waste on retouching photographs for training manuals, used him as sparingly as possible. He encouraged him to do his own art at his desk, which turned out to be remarkable little charcoal-and-wash studies of his antiwar paintings.r />
  Perce felt that I, too, shouldn’t be hobbled with army drudgery. If I completed the day’s assignment early enough, I was free to spend the rest of my time, more than half a day, as it often turned out, working on Munro. At the height of McCarthyism, with Roy Cohn and David Schine seeking out disloyalty on army posts, Harvey Dinnerstein and I found ourselves supported by the United States Army in our dedicated and happy subversion. All because of Perce Couse.

  Perce, whom initially I found to be intimidating, was behind his scowl and his growl a sweet, gentle failed magazine illustrator who joined the civil service to support his wife and children. He invited me to his home near Asbury Park for dinner with his wife, Elizabeth, his daughter, Hallie, her husband, Sam, and their son, Tom. Hallie was blond and pretty, and if she had been single, oh, would I have fallen for her. Sam, a Jew among this classic WASP family, smart, dry, funny, walked with a severe polio-induced limp. Hallie and Sam became my closest friends at Fort Monmouth and my drinking partners. They had an apartment in Asbury Park. Sam was a reporter for the Asbury Park Press. He would pick me up after work and drive me to their home, where we’d drink, dine, drink some more, talk, shout, laugh, and be in love with one another. Booze cured my inability to speak. After one Scotch, I stopped stammering, after two I became myself, after three I became so much better than myself that I’d write about it if I could remember any of it.

  After a certain number of drinks—not that many, actually—I blacked out. Very little changed in my behavior (I was told) except I got funnier and, if I was with a girlfriend, meaner. Meanness was the only serious downside to my drinking. The blackouts worried me, but the drunkenness did not actually bother me as long as I was assured that it didn’t alter my behavior to the point that I got into fights and killed anyone. Drunk or sober, I didn’t think I was capable of killing anyone specific; but in general, there were masses of people I would have happily wiped out.

  The Couses and I stayed friends after the army, not seeing much of one another but remaining in touch. Once a year I would rent a car and bring my family out to Asbury Park for a visit. Perce died, then Sam, suddenly and shockingly, of a heart attack, then Hallie, slowly and with extraordinary grace, of MS. Elizabeth celebrated her hundredth birthday, and I went to the party. She died a short while after.

  Munro and my early struggles to learn how to do what I do, figuring out what story to tell and how to tell it, discovering that just when you think you’ve reached a peak, that’s when you go for more, raise the ante. And just when you think you’ve about come to the end, that you’re almost finished: Slow down, not so fast. All these facets of writing, whether for cartoons, theater, film, or children’s books, I began to figure out at my desk at the Signal Corps Publications Agency.

  If there was a pony to be found behind the door I opened in Fort Monmouth, its name was Couse.

  FIFTH STREET

  My mother was lying on the cot in her bedroom, which was the bed on which she took her afternoon naps, stretched out straight on her back, her eyes tightly shut, her mouth compressed into a lipless seam. In this mode she must have thought she was protected against the bad news I was about to bring her.

  My mother was prescient about bad news. It had made up most of her life, robbed her of her youthful joy and exuberance, pounded out the mischief, leaving her well aware of the bitter truth it had taken the army to teach me: you get up each day and start fighting from scratch.

  I had been home a month, a familiar limbo but a bad fit at twenty-four. I had aged out of the part. Each day, squirreled away in my room, hidden from my mother’s inquiring eye, I scoured the classified section of the Times looking for an apartment.

  I had found a remodeled dump in a five-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side, a few blocks from Tompkins Square. It was way east, between Avenues A and B, 521 East Fifth Street, and it cost nothing. Twenty-five dollars a month for a room and a half, which meant an alcove bedroom and a small living room with a refrigerator and a stove squeezed into a corner. I made a deposit and signed a year’s lease and visited it from the Bronx every day for almost a month, buying enough kitchenware to allow me to open cans of Chef Boyardee spaghetti lunches, heat them, and eat them. I thought up and drew cartoons lying on the floor, roughs that would become sample art with which to job hunt. I took many naps on the floor, which I needed to do, since I was never not tired.

  Tired but buoyant. This is what I had been dreaming about since I hitched to California. My own place! My first minute inside, with the door shut and locked against the landlord’s agent, who had left a second before with a signed lease, I circled the room, giggling with surprise at my own daring. And to indelibly stamp this breakthrough moment and mark my independence, I shouted at the top of my lungs: “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  I heard a pounding from the alcove wall where I intended to put the bed when I got up the nerve to buy one. An old lady’s scream from the other side of the wall in a thick Ukrainian accent: “Vot do you vant from me? Vot do you vant from me? Vot do you vant from me?”

  I was home.

  Jules at twenty-five

  Part Two

  FAMOUS

  THE VILLAGE

  The Village, with all it signified—youth, glamour, bohemianism, exoticism, danger, promise, and pretense—was more of a temptation than I was willing to handle. Too much of a challenge, too real, too fake. The eating and drinking places (the authentic ones) for artists and writers and journalists and actors were bad enough. But it was the phonies who scared me most. The loudmouths who needed to be noticed, and boy, did I notice them, at Julius’, Louis Tavern, Café Figaro, the White Horse, the Limelight, gathered in exclusionary little groups, dropping names that I had heard of but hadn’t read: Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, Reich, Fromm, Reisman, Horney. and others. Marlon and Tennessee and Truman and Dylan (not Bob, the other one) and Norman (whom I had read) and Vance (him, too), and Anatole … Anatole Broyard was gossiped about as the next Norman, as Norman was the next Hemingway, unless it was Vance Bourjaily or Chandler Brossard who was the next Norman, or Harvey Swados, or … At this point, not yet at the starting gate, I put aside my dream of becoming famous. The name-droppers had shamed me into lower expectations: to meet and befriend better-connected young men and women who might share with me Marlon or Tennessee or Bill Inge or Gore or Anatole stories. Hearing Anatole stories from an actual friend of Anatole’s would put me a rung higher on the ladder.

  My army friend Jim Ellison had an amiable, sociable way about him. Jim was tall and unthreateningly handsome (leaving me just enough leeway to feel superior). His ambition was to become the next J. D. Salinger, the current rage. His New Yorker stories were bought up and devoured as soon as they hit the newsstands. Salinger wrote in an infectious, accessible style that invited easy imitation, and that’s how Jim spent much of his first year out of the service. He rented a railroad flat on East Eleventh Street that was huge compared with my room and a half. A cavernous space, great for throwing parties. And Jim had, or seemed to have, one every week. College girls weekending from Sarah Lawrence, Vassar, and Smith, long and leggy, and oh, could they discuss Simone de Beauvoir, and oh, was I interested in what they had to say. I couldn’t get close enough to hear better, my erection working overtime as I bore in. “What you’re saying is so interesting. Go on, go on.”

  I exploded in Jim’s small closet of a bathroom, shared by three apartments on the floor. Locked in, unzipped, and unleashed. It took me minutes to wipe away the evidence, grateful to have had sex at last even if it was with a bathroom wall.

  The discharge in Jim’s communal toilet was as seminal a moment as my discharge from the army. It doubled as my discharge from the Bronx. I had been a civilian and technically on my own for more than a month. But I was still tethered to my mother’s values and judgments, with a guilt as large as my erections or my sense of futility. Why did I get my own apartment if not to have girls over? How could I have girls over if I was too guilt-ridden to mastur
bate, much less penetrate? All of this was clear as day but left me no less paralyzed to act without the incitement of drink. Drink provided my will and my nerve. But once I had taken the drink that provoked my will, my nerve excused itself: “Not now, I’m too sleepy.” My need for sleep was more insistent than my desire. I slept more than I had since I was a baby.

  I was unemployed. The army supplied a six-month lifeline to its ex-soldiers. I think it was $30 a month for six months, enough time to get one launched into the workforce unless, like me, one had no serious interest in joining the workforce.

  My serious interest was in sex. And since that wasn’t working out, okay then, sleep. Since sleep had to end at some point, I roused myself periodically, sat at my desk, and drew halfhearted samples, single-panel comic illustrations in black and white, wash, and limited color, in the hope of finding a job I didn’t want in an art studio.

  Then there was the hanging-out part. Except for Ed McLean, most of my friends were drawn from the army or postarmy period. We sat around in bars in the Village, hoping to be initiated into bohemian life, politically or sexually or any way they’d have us. We had elected to be creative types. As a result of not going to law school or medical school or business school, we weren’t on that much of a fast track. Fantasy was our fast track. So there was little to keep our minds off getting laid.

  Except for the fear of making a mistake. One went through the motions, day by day, night after night, that one thought of as freedom and that passed for fun. But the freedom did not include doing anything that fixed or changed or improved one’s lot. What if one made a mistake? Why be a fool? Why commit?