Charles McArthur

Transcription

>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> And do it all. He's a cartoonist, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, children's book author and now memoirist. And he has won all the right awards for his efforts; a Pulitzer, an Obie, an Academy Award. Not bad for a guy who by his own estimation was pretty inept at most things growing up. Feiffer was born in 1929 and weathered the depression poor and Jewish in the Bronx. He was the skinny kid, the scared one. Other kids had baseball bats and could use them. He had a piece of chalk and to keep bullies at bay he drew Popeye on the sidewalk. But the chalk wasn't magic. The colleges he dreamed of attending rejected him, he had a miserable army stint, and there was no end to his mother troubles. As he has said, there are people who give you nothing but bad advice; and unfortunately one of them was my mother. But Jules Feiffer overcame it all. Eventually his village voice comic strip which brilliantly reflects our culture angst was syndicated in 100 newspapers. He illustrated the classic children's book, The Phantom Toll Booth; he wrote the movie Carnal Knowledge; the play, Little Murders; and now in his memoir, Backing into Forward, he takes us through the terrible and wonderful odyssey that is his life. For more than 50 years that life has been devoted to taking the powerful down a notch or two; the chalk is gone replaced by sheaves of satirical comments. Feiffer is an American treasure for both depth and style of his work. He's analytical and witty and he teaches us about ourselves. As one reviewer has said he's the link from Lenny Bruce to Larry David; from James Thurber to Art Spiegelman. Please join me in welcoming Jules Feiffer. [ Applause ] >> Jules Feiffer: It's a pleasure to be here. I've just finished a gig with a Norton Juster in the kiddy section and talking about his new children's book, Theodorus Gorge, which I illustrated. And that illustrates the varied career I have. Most people know me as a cartoonist of course; but even from the beginning as a cartoonist as a village voice cartoonist beginning in October of 56, it's never been about the pictures alone and in some cases, never about the pictures mainly. It's always been about voice. And this was not known to me at the time; it was not thought about at the time. But a time I was a kid being a cartoonist was all that interested me and what cartooning meant was not gag cartoons as one found out in New York, I love those, but I couldn't do them and didn't think in that vein. I was a strip cartoonist and loved the strip clones and the strip clone with words and pictures; and the comic strip at the time, the newspaper strip at the time, unlike today when they reduced so miniscule that you can't have anything complicated in them, you can't tell real stories in them, they're not very funny and they're not particularly well-drawn. A few are like Mutts and one or two others; and a few still try to be profound like Eric Trudeau and the everlasting and ever brilliant Doonesbury but there ain't much out there. But this was a form before it got so reduced in size it used to run across the page; and I'm talking about the years of my growing up-- the 1930's and 40's, before movies were in Technicolor. There were a few in color but not many, before the age of television, and certainly before the age of electronics and iPhones and videos and one kind thing and another. And the comic strip was a major American form. The comic strip was part of the culture no less than movies or theater; the comic strip was joked about on radio by Bob Hope and Fred Allen and other comedians because it represented a focal point that everybody understood. When you talked about Dick Tracy or Lil Abner or other characters at the time in the 1940's, there wasn't a member of the audience numbering into the millions who didn't know who those characters were or Andy Gump. This was a form that had taken the country form the time of its inception and it wasn't that old because the first comic strips began about 1890, 95. And so when I was a kid in the 1930's, it was still in the age of its early developmental years and early experimental years. It was no more than 30, 40 y ears old which is still pretty young for a field such as that and it was also at its most engaging and its most-- the adventure strip had just come into play a few years before; and strips used to run across a page. There were five columns, six columns and you could get detail and detail and detail in the drawing and there were any number of brilliant artists working in them who never thought of their work as art. Milton Caniff who did Terry and the Pirates which was one of the great combinations of storytelling of text and pictures uniting the two of them, he was a teacher to me. I learned virtually nothing in the schools I went to. I spent 12 years of public education in the Bronx, learned zilch. But when I opened up those comic strips whether it was Terry and the Pirates by Eisner, whether it was Prince Valiant by Hal Foster, whether it was Lil Abner by Al Capp or Abby and Slats which was also written by Al Capp and illustrated by a great illustrator named Irving Van Buren, this was my education as a kid. And particularly Will Eisner's coming out with in 1940, The Spirit. These masters and they were masters, never saw themselves as artists. They thought artists was kind of a fancy statement. They didn't regard what they did as art. They didn't regard what they did as being part of any serious game. It was just the way they made a living and if they saw themselves as anything, they liked to see themselves as newspaper men in that Ben Heck, Charles McArthur, tough guy stance. They wanted to be seen and often were as hard drinking, hard boozing, gambling characters, gambling and gambling, irresponsible, meeting deadlines to the last second with a hangover. They liked that image of themselves and the fact that these originals, this originals art was tossed, was destroyed, was thrown out by the newspapers once they had published it. Nothing was saved though; very little was saved. It was not a shock to them, they didn't view it as scant, they didn't want their work back, they didn't ask for the originals back; they didn't think they had any use other than clutter and this went on for years until a later generation of younger cartoonists; namely the generation I represented, sold this stuff as something these old timers didn't. But I love these guys and what I loved mostly was the act of storytelling; how they told the story, how they created character; how different characters even in comic strips spoke in different ways, had different styles of vocal representation so that you could recognize them even without seeing their pictures. And not all of them did that but the best ones did. And this was part of my schooling so when I, back in the 1950's, began my strip, it was a long time since I had given up on the notion of being a traditional strip cartoonist. I had done after I got out of the Army in 1953 all sorts of attempts to get syndicated and to have my work which looked like their work and try to this is what they do to me. They obliterate-- I'm being censored. I wanted very much to be one of the big boys and join the rank of the big boys as I grew up with them. But I would try to do the more traditional strips and send them around to various syndicates and they were all turned down. And finally, I was left without any choice but to move in another direction because all the traditional directions were close to me. And when I went to the Village Voice to show them my work, the work I showed them was not the traditional work but something I was trying out for some time when I was in the Army, outraged by the fact that the United States Army would draft me of all people. I joined the Korean War when I had other plans. As Dick Cheney said, remember him? When he was asked why he was not in the Vietnam War which he was so-- rather his answer was, "I had other priorities." Well so did I. I had certainly as many priorities as Dick Cheney and most of them were less lethal. [ Applause ] >> Jules Feiffer: But not all of them. And in the Army in reaction to what I found was the oppressiveness of the military and the mindless of the military and nothing has changed. I started drawing as a means of survival; as a means of retaining my sanity. I began to make up story about a little boy four years old who was drafted into the Army by mistake. Talk about metaphor. And I called up Munro and it was my first satire although I didn't realize what it was going to be and it was the first time I tried to work in terms of cartoon narrative, telling a story in words and pictures the way comic strips are supposed to be, but also using the style in the form of a children's book, a children's book for grownups but certainly a children's approach where there is narrative and there are balloons and there is the storytelling. And the storytelling takes a little boy Munro through the Army where he tries to explain his only four and nobody believes him. And the whole point behind the story was to express my rage and my anger at the policies of the military and the policies of a country for that matter in the midst of a Cold War, where mindlessness often ruled the day and good sense often was ruled out; but to show it as I understood then and have always understood, to show it in innocent terms. I understood that I could not take a message which at the time was quite political and overt; take a message that was countered to the politics and notions and establish institutional feel at the time. Take that and make it documented rage; nobody would pay attention, it wouldn't be accepted and nobody would hear what I'm saying. I had to do what I've done my entire career which was use sleight of hand and fool them. Basically seduce the reader into a story that was going to be charming, that was going to be innocent, that was going to be fun and fun was operative here. I had to have fun doing it and so I wanted it to be fun for the reader but I also thought the fun was a way of getting through the point before anybody knows I'm slipping it at them. The fun was there to say strong things that ordinarily and polite company back in the 1950's and the heyday McCarthyism were not acceptable. So early on I learned in a sense the approach that I have followed in forms I've worked in the following 50 years and that was that you can't say it directly-- you can't make the point directly. You must say it indirectly and not obscurely, not obtusely, you kind of sneak the reader along and sneak the audience along if it's a theatrical form, not leading him or her down a path they don't know where they're going and often as I write these things I don't know where I'm going. It's often I don't know where I'm headed at all. I heard Jonathan Franzen before talking about his objection to those writers who say their characters take over and of course he says that's bologna, the characters never take over; and that in a real book you know exactly where you're going; and now I have to warn you about truth. There is writer's truth which is everything that I believe as a writer, and then there is nonsense which is what every other writer believes. I've found that often with my own work in all of these forms that the voice I chose be canned as in the cartoons a form of improvisation; as one used to see on the stage with Second City of Chicago or Nickles and Nay [assumed spelling]. We start with an opening line and just follow the music of the word, see where it leads you not knowing and I often didn't know where it was going and I knew perhaps what I was aiming it. Something viscerally told me say if I was making a comment about relationships, what comment I wanted to make; I just didn't know how I was going to get there. If it was about politics then it was going to be the growing war of Vietnam at the time or Civil Rights. I knew the point I wanted to get to; I just had no real notion what was going to take me there so it's a combination of having intent and then giving up the intent to the innocence of creation. And that innocence of creation when you surrender to a higher truth than anything the grain will give you. You give up this for this and you let the gut lead you and you let the gut do the writing. And the gut will take you down a certain path and if it works it will be the right path; and if it doesn't you go back and do it over again. There are cartoons over the years that I wrote and these were at first acts of writing before I drew them; that I would write on yellow scraps of paper and they would go perfectly until the last panel; and then I'd have no last panel; I'd have no payoff. I thought this was great stuff, I have no way of ending it; give up after a day or so and put it away in the file, and sometimes 25 years later I'd go through that file looking for something else, find the cartoon, read it and suddenly the last panel would write itself but I'd have it in a minute, in less than a minute. And there it was a perfect cartoon that took only 25 years to put together. And 25 years earlier I wouldn't have had a clue how to do it. These things do take control of you. It's not you who are running it although you do run it sometimes and sometimes the things you do run and do control are often your most mediocre efforts. Sometimes, often time I find that the work that's most allowed when I'm at it is the work that controls me as much as I'm controlling it. That when I went into theater, my first play Little Murders, was a thesis play. I was trying to say something about the disillusion-- hello. I've never worked in a room like this before. I was trying to say something about the disillusion of authority in America post John F. Kennedy assassination after November 22, 1963. For the following year I noticed increasingly a breakdown of all forms of authority both personal levels in families and in institutional levels in schools, religion, certainly government. Everything seemed to be falling apart as it had not done for many years. Basically we had been when Kennedy was President the same country we had been from the days before World War II after the depression on. And suddenly it was all falling apart and becoming unglued and I was waiting just to read the people writing about it and hear some comment on it and it wasn't happening. And so my first play, my first play came about purely by accident because I wanted to comment on this thing that wasn't being commented on. I knew the cartoon which was my form at the time and my only form at the time, wasn't adequate to say something as profound as I wanted to say so I began fooling around with the idea of a novel that got nowhere; and finally in desperation as a play. And the play began with me having lots of notes about what I wanted to do but really not knowing how to go about it and then simply writing it down and letting it take over. And it take over and it lead me down these paths, some of which worked, some of which didn't but became-- my first play taught me that I was a playwright and from that point on I engaged in this career of where theater writing was every bit of much fun and in many cases more fun than writing a comic strip; and that led me into other forms and I should say it was all about voice-- that the voice of the comic strip which has to be because of the form six or eight panels, has to be [inaudible], has to be restrictive, that's not the voice you use as a playwright. That as a playwright you've got a lot of room to talk and you can talk and talk and talk, and you have monologues and you can have a lot of fun with language. You can indulge in language in theater the way you can't and shouldn't in a comic strip or in a movie; and then writing a screenplay which is unfriendly the monologues, you've read another form so all of these forms have different demands but they're all about voice, they're all about language. When I started writing the memoir Backing into Forward, the book I'm going to talk about and having directly, I had to find a voice for the guy telling the story that the first person in memoirs or in anything that's supposed to be personal and biographical, is only a substitute for who and what you really are. It's a front; it's an idealized version of how you want to come across because none of us including me right now really sounds that way. You're going to be saying everything you believe on paper but you're putting it in ways that as far as you can manage are the most engaging to the reader, the most seductive to the reader, the most open seeming, but all of it has to do not just with putting it down it also has to do with art and craft and years of learning what people will take and what they won't take, what plays before an audience and what doesn't. So all of it is a form of like I said before a sleight of hand; it's a game. And it's that game that I've never stopped playing and still enjoy playing. It says I'm in overtime which means there's no time for questions or is there? There is time for questions. Two questions all right. Who has two very good questions? Now I've got to tell you this. It doesn't matter who asks the questions; I'm not going to hear them I'm deaf. So it might be best if you came right up here and addressed them directly and forgive me but I'm... >> Audience question: First of all I just want to say that I'm a big fan of the book about the book about the boy going into the Army. I remember the panel where he was sitting taking a test and he was making a drawing-- a picture and the soldier next to him was looking over and copying that picture. But I did want to ask you you're talking about cartoonists, and I was wondering how you feel about animated movies and television shows like-- that work with Brad Bird, the Incredibles and Ratatouille, and if that in any way is similar to what was going on with the [inaudible] you talked about? >> Jules Feiffer: Frankly I don't know why-- I've worked in animation and used to work in the 50's and the 60'sto an outfit called Terry Tunes. I did Tom Terrific which some of you may remember. But I've never been interested in animation as a form and I never wanted to do animated cartoons. Munro as an animated cartoon came around by accident because it was Jean Diegh [assumed spelling] who ran Terry Tunes who bought it was very happy with the results and it won an Academy Award. But I don't look at animated cartoons. I haven't seen Up, I haven't seen-- Miyazaki the Japanese filmmakers, the one I've seen more of and I think is brilliant, and there's one called My Dog Two about now which is a wonderful piece of work. And there's countless wonderful things being done and it will remain uncounted by me because I'm not going to see most of them. It's not a film I have a lot of curiosity about. >> Audience question: I was wondering what your experience was like working with Mike Nichols on the screenplay for Carnal Knowledge. Was it a pleasant experience with Hollywood people or not? >> Jules Feiffer: Now for those of you who've read the book Backing into Forward you wouldn't have to ask that question so I urge you to buy the book else why am I here? It's-- Carnal Knowledge was originally written as a play. I've sent it to Mike he read it in 24 hours and called me back and he said I want to do this but I think it's a movie not a play. What do you think? And I said what about the language? He said we won't have any trouble with the language what do you think? And I said give me 30 seconds. And then he really put me through when it came time to work on the screenplay a tutorial on how you turn a play script full of long speeches as we talked about what theater is into a screenplay where we did have monologues but didn't run nearly as long as the ones in the play; and to make it seem natural to the form and it was from beginning to end it was about the most joyful collaboration I've ever had and I've been fortunate to have a lot of good collaborations but this was the best. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.