I was out the door, on the street in front of 22 Greenwich Avenue, the address that was going to be my new home in print, doing the first work I cared about since Will Eisner six years earlier. It happened so fast—I hadn’t been in there for more than a half hour—and now, I had a job! Not a paying job, that was made clear from the start. Who cared?
And all those book editors who rejected me, the ones who kept the Voice on their desk, they’d open the paper and they’d see me every week and eventually they’d have to say, “Isn’t this the talented kid we rejected because he wasn’t famous? Well, now it looks like he is. Let’s give him a book.”
And they’d publish my book. A best seller! And it would take me from being a little famous to more famous. All because I was appearing every week in the Village Voice. The entire process—the getting-famous thing—might take a year or two (certainly no longer). First I needed to establish a loyal readership, a fan base that would give me clout with publishers, who in two or three years would bring out Sick, Sick, Sick or Munro or Boom! This was my strategy. This was how it would happen. I had no doubts my luck had turned. I was on my way. Nothing could stop me now.
And nothing did.
Excerpt from Boom! in the Village Voice, October 29, 1958
ODETS IS BACK!
For a New York Jewish boy growing up in the Depression, politics was everywhere. It came over on the boat with one’s parents and grandparents. It met and melded with the postwar militancy of the trade union movement. It incorporated the music, style, and swagger of midwestern and western radicalism—a bit of Woody Guthrie here, a touch of Big Bill Hayward there.
A fresh and funny acquaintance of mine, the long-forgotten comedian Milt Kamen, used to say as part of his club act: “I was brought up in Brooklyn during the Depression in what was a very political neighborhood. There was the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Labor Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the American Labor Party, the Progressive Party. I was twenty and had moved to Manhattan before I ever heard of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.”
HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, was in town. It was holding hearings down in Foley Square at the foot of Manhattan, a courthouse view with which any Law and Order addict is familiar. In one of the hearing rooms on Centre Street, the brilliant young choreographer Jerome Robbins was to testify, and I went to watch.
Robbins, in the last few years, had emerged as this extraordinary crossover talent, switching between the New York City Ballet and big-time Broadway musicals, from choreographing Stravinsky to choreographing Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Officially, Broadway did not have a blacklist, but in order to go on to movies and television, actors, writers, and directors were subpoenaed to prove their loyalty and their Americanism by testifying against their friends and associates to HUAC. One could stand up to the committee, and many did, but within minutes contracts were canceled, jobs evaporated, studios fired you. Your own agent fired you. No longer were you allowed to work at the craft for which you had given your talent and established a reputation. You were instantly unemployable.
It was heartbreaking to watch Robbins go into his HUAC dance. Small, expressionless, and noncombative, he sat hunched with hands folded at the committee table. His attorney sat next to him. Across from him sat the abusive array of hack congressmen and their staffs, delighted to be the focus of all those cameras flashing away at them, their one shot at show business.
The acting chair of the committee, a raspy-voiced, somber, ministerial-looking fake, asked Robbins at the start of his sworn testimony what he did for a living. Robbins stated that he was a choreographer. The chair did not understand and could not pronounce the then-unfamiliar word. “A chori—chori—chori—what exactly is that, Mr. Robbins?” Robbins explained it was something like a dance director, described what he did, and named the shows he had choreographed, from On the Town, his first musical, to his current production, the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway hit The King and I.
The members of the committee seemed delighted to have this fancy new New York and, no doubt, Jewish word to play with. As each and every one took his turn questioning Robbins, he took a crack at pronouncing “choreographer.” Because they were loyal Americans, and were determined to prove it on camera, no one managed to say it correctly. The point, made to the cameras filming a record for the heartland, was that loyal Americans don’t need highfalutin words. No! Loyal Americans needed but one thing, fealty to God and country. Loyal Americans wrapped themselves in the flag. Disloyal Americans wrapped themselves in the Constitution.
At the conclusion of Robbins’s testimony, when he had spilled all the names that had been agreed upon in order for him to go to Hollywood someday and make movies, the chair said, “Mr. Robbins, this committee would like to thank you for your patriotic testimony. And on a personal note, I would like to add that my wife and I have tickets to see The King and I tonight, and I know we are going to enjoy your chori—chori—chorieo—choreography that much more because of the patriotic testimony you have given this day.”
And Robbins bowed his head in deference and said, “Thank you, Mr. Chairman.”
Forty-five years after the fact, I wrote a play about this period and, specifically, how I was affected and changed by it. It is called A Bad Friend. My heroine, Rose, a teenaged girl (who is a cross-dressed version of me), has a favorite uncle, a Communist screenwriter named Morty. Morty is in from Hollywood to go to a memorial service for the blacklisted actor J. Edward Bromberg, who was a founding member of the Group Theatre.
I was at that memorial in 1953, and here is Morty’s version of events, which reflects what I saw and heard:
NAOMI
I want to hear about the Bromberg rally.
UNCLE MORTY
Memorial.
(NAOMI shrugs)
Everybody was there: Howard DaSilva, Morris Carnovsky.
NAOMI
Zero Mostel?
UNCLE MORTY
I didn’t see him.
NAOMI
Why not, I wonder.
UNCLE MORTY
And you know who showed up at the end and had the entire house standing on their feet, screaming?
NAOMI
Who?
UNCLE MORTY
Clifford Odets.
NAOMI
I can’t believe it!
SHELLY
I thought he sold out when he went to Hollywood.
UNCLE MORTY
You thought I sold out.
NAOMI
You did, but that’s another story.
(All laugh)
Clifford Odets? Really?
UNCLE MORTY
It was a complete surprise. He gave a speech—it could have been out of Waiting for Lefty—denouncing the Un-American Committee. His language soared—it was astonishing—all ad lib! … The way he talked about Joe Bromberg, and the Group Theatre days—the ideals they had, the kind of artist Joe was, the kind of Progressive he was—and what the Committee did to him, what the fascists put him through: how they murdered him—but not what he stood for. They couldn’t murder that because they’d have to murder us all. There are too many of us, too many of us and we’re not backing down, and we’re not going away—I have tears in my eyes now talking about it.
At the conclusion of Odets’s remarks, I was on my feet, tears in my eyes, cheering and weeping with the rest of the crowd: “Odets is back! Odets is back! Odets is back!”
It was one of those watershed moments. A turning point, with Clifford Odets’s stirring and poetic defiance (and nothing I wrote was as moving as what he really said). With Odets coming out of left-wing retirement, reawakened to sing out against the plague-meisters of fear and loathing and self-loathing, hope soared. Victory was sure to be ours. I believed it. I so believed it that I, not by nature a group participant, was on my feet leading the cry of “Odets is back! Odets is back!”
And no more than a week later, Clifford Odets made
an appearance before the selfsame Committee on Un-American Activities before which I had heard Jerome Robbins testify. And instead of giving them the hell I expected, he gave them names. Names of all of those he knew as Communists and suspected subversives in theater and film. Overnight, Odets swept away my hopes for a restored Frank Capra-ish America, an America rejuvenated, keyed in once more to its better instincts—all of this hope, all of this illusion demolished by Clifford Odets’s friendly testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Odets educated me. He taught me that there were no heroes, there was no one to trust. Betrayal was the watchword. Idealism was a joke that I could find nothing funny about, nothing to make cartoons of.
I could pretend it didn’t happen. That’s what I did with my career failures. Might it not work with my idealism failures? Lie myself into a more positive state of mind. Believing and not believing at the same time. Holding out the possibility that I was drawing the wrong lessons from this experience. I might try to put aside my anger, learn to adjust to it, along with my confusion and bitterness. Adjust—that new word that psychoanalysis had taught us—was supposed to be a good thing. Maybe within the context of no hope, if I kept applying myself, working out my adjustment—just maybe I could find hope.
“There must be a pony in here somewhere.”
LUCKING INTO THE ZEITGEIST
From midchildhood on, I developed an interior whine that went: “Why does everything come easy to everybody else and not me?” Virtually all the other kids, certainly all the bright ones, caught on faster than I did. Or so I thought. They picked up skills and acquired facility without going through the unending string of pratfalls that regularly befell me. I missed the obvious, got stuck at the starting gate, didn’t get what everybody else got, or got it more slowly. Everyone raced past me.
Other boys had no trouble catching, throwing, and hitting a baseball. I watched them scoop up grounders in the lot behind our house with ease. Why was this so impossible for me? What was the secret that everybody else knew that I wasn’t let in on?
Other kids raised their hands in class because they had the answers. What I wouldn’t have given to have an answer. They also raised their hands when they had a question to ask, not a show-offy question but a useful and thoughtful question. Why couldn’t I ever come up with a question? In twelve years of school, I think I raised my hand a half dozen times to ask a question, and each time it was with flop sweat.
That frustration, that sense of permanent exclusion, missing out, never picked for the team, sidelined on the sidelines, nose pressed against the window … and what was there to do about it but yak? Yak, yak, yak. That’s what my characters did—turn their pain and humiliation into talking points.
I had found my subject for the Voice: anxiety. Okay, self-pity.
Of all the material I’d covered in my longer, unpublished cartoon narratives (Munro, Boom!, Sick, Sick, Sick), individual anxiety played no part. I had bigger fish to fry, taking on the abuse of authority and the codified language that deafened debate during the Cold War. I was out to right social wrongs, so who had time for feeling sorry for myself? But the need to scale my length downward, from forty pages to eight or ten panels, led me—in a sense, forced me—to be personal. It was the limitations of space that backed me into introspection.
I thought of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, my first experience with the unreliable narrator in fiction. What if I introduced the “I” voice to my readers in the form of eight- or ten-panel monologues—unwinding, self-serving kvetches in which my “I” character gives away more than he means to, exposes what he’d rather keep hidden. It could be comic strip psychotherapy, laugh while you wince, wince as you laugh.
The drawing style, I decided, should be direct, cartoony. animated, akin to what I so admired coming out of the UPA studios, Gerald McBoing-Boing and The Nearsighted Mr. Magoo.
The more painful the subject, the funnier it should look. So my chronic stomachaches took center stage for my first Village Voice cartoon in October of 1956, turning a psychosomatic problem into a metaphor. For what? Who cared? It just seemed funny.
The second strip was in another drawing style.
William Steig’s collection The Agony in the Kindergarten was very much on my mind as I drew about my inability to play baseball. A kid who couldn’t catch a ball—that was me—determined to learn—that was me—couldn’t learn—me again—kidded himself that he would learn—who else but me? And didn’t learn and would never learn—me again. He tried, and he failed and tried some more. Ever hopeful. Ever failing.
I adapted what I learned from Steig’s Reichian-influenced Agony art: depictions of the inner me, drawn from the inside out. But in my case written as monologue, not the one-line captions one found in Steig. I drew this strip more illustratively than my opening cartoon, trying to ape the psychiatric Steig as if he were drawn by the more realistic and gestural Gluyas Williams.
My third strip was drawn in yet another style. And the fourth, fifth, sixth, etc., all in different styles. I didn’t know what I was doing, but at the same time I was having a ball. My meditations on self-doubt, questioning, all those things I most disliked about myself, I now displayed giddily, almost voyeuristically.
First Village Voice strip, October 24, 1956
Second Village Voice strip, October 31, 1956
I saw the work in print. It wasn’t at all what I wanted. The gags were right, the drawing wasn’t. It wasn’t in my style. I didn’t have a my style. Another week, another try, another appearance in print. I was giddy with excitement and pissed off because, at this golden moment of opportunity, I was screwing up by not being able to draw.
It didn’t seem to matter. Readers were beginning to take notice. I started hearing about myself. Dan Wolf commented that his friends were commenting. Jerry Tallmer was enthusiastic. I came in with finished art on Sunday for Wednesday’s paper, never questioning, simply accepting as a given that these self-pitying cartoons were finding an audience.
In general, nothing in print or on stage is more repellent than self-pity. Something about it spiritually soils, makes the reader feel unclean. Rather than feeling sorry for the person who is so blatantly feeling sorry for himself, the urge is to turn your back on him, react with contempt, disdain.
But I got lucky with my self-pity. I happened to luck into the zeitgeist, into an entire generation of the young urban educated who were looking around for where to place themselves, having found their parents’ place uninhabitable.
By the late fifties, a lot was beginning to happen. Signs were everywhere, and if you belonged to my generation, you couldn’t help noticing: We were the ones it was happening to. And if you belonged to the older generation, you saw little or nothing.
We were close to invisible. Locked out of the mass media but for fashion and rock ’n’ roll. Locked out of politics, which was, almost without contradiction, dogma-ridden Cold War. Locked out of sex, which was smirked about but not talked about, except for the Kinsey reports, which placed the focus on statistics.
Change was in the air. Fear of change was in the air. Repression was everywhere, and it didn’t come just from the government. It came, as well, from the hearts and minds of the American people. We had never had it so good. So shut up! Suppress. Where there wasn’t official censorship, there was the infinitely more acceptable—and popular—self-censorship. Writers were smart enough to know what they could and couldn’t get away with, and they published accordingly.
Seventh Village Voice strip, December 5, 1956
We had come through a Great Depression and, more recently, two wars within a decade. It was time to bland out. Much of the fifties seemed to be about blanding out. And our reaction to blanding out. And our reaction against it. My own fifties America was one of alienation and conformity and suppression, post but not past McCarthyism. Twinned with it was another America, proud of its hail-fellow-well-met, Horatio Alger, if-you-don’t-at-first-succeed, every-day-in-every-
way-I’m-getting-better-and-better, power-of-positive-thinking tradition. That America was unprepared for this sudden assault from the inside, the onslaught of doubt, insecurity, neurosis. It was unarmed against the guerrilla attack on its own psyche.
Sigmund Freud, the Jew who had replaced Karl Marx (that other Jew) as the new guru, had the answer: psychoanalysis. Freudian acolytes shifted the dimensions of our self-awareness from stand-tall extroverts to round-shouldered analysands. From classic WASP stereotype to nebbishy Jewish caricature. Confused and on the defensive, WASP America, having begun to lose faith in its mythic identity, looked around and found a few funny Jews who mirrored their anxiety. They welcomed and embraced the victimized Jewish sensibility of displacement. WASP America was now feeling displaced. It chose the chosen funny people to explain them to themselves.
Jews were far more comfortable with the language of anxiety and alienation. First on the couch and later, in the clubs and my cartoons, this new, provocative sick humor (so-called), premiering in the provinces with Mort Sahl in San Francisco and catching on with me in New York and Mike and Elaine and Second City in Chicago and Lenny Bruce … A movement in the making, progressing from cult to midcult to mass market. The commercialization of anxiety and neurosis that would lead directly to Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, and Tony Soprano, the macho capo who sees a shrink.
Who but Jews were better equipped to transcribe, and comment on, this cleft in fifties culture that marked a permanent shift in our national sensibility? It was a not-knowing-where-the-next-blow-was-coming-from shtetl approach to events, no more or less than psychic Jewish shtetl history, almost prosaic in its familiarity, now writ continentally large.
And I happened to be standing there when the door to America’s crisis of identity opened. So I walked through, and once I was in the house I made it clear that I had worked too hard for this. I was not going to leave.
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