A Cool Bit with Jules Feiffer
In April 1998, I had the pleasure of interviewing the amazingly talented Jules Feiffer. He has so much to say here
about the creative process and the monsters we encounter along the way. He thinks failure can be a heck of a lot of fun. Enjoy!
 Cathy Young: Your fourth book for children, I Lost My Bear, has just been published. You are a political and social cartoonist, playwright,
screenwriter, satirist... Where are these children's books coming from? Are they really for children, or are they for adults?
Jules Feiffer: The answer is a cliché, but they are for children of all ages or adults of all ages. I am NOT writing disguised adult books. I am writing specifically for kids. But, I think, when you write about certain basics, any sensitive adult (or any adult who remembers being a kid) has to identify as well. I am writing to myself or the kid inside myself.
CY: How did you begin? What is the kernel of thought or experience that inspired The Man in the Ceiling?
 Feiffer: What turns out to be the kernel behind The Man in the Ceiling… well, I didn't know it until I was somewhat into the book.
You see, when I started writing plays, I began with thesis plays like "Carnal Knowledge" and "Little Murders." I knew what the point was going to be and what I wanted to say. I've moved away from that. (Though, that seemed to work well in both those pieces.) I theoretically and aesthetically disagree with [the idea of] knowing your point before you make it. I think it can freeze your characters and harden the work, taking away the surprises and the pleasure.
Particularly, I dislike thesis books for children - the books that try to teach everyone to be good to each other, the books that lecture kids about becoming good citizens. I say, "screw that!" If that is the organic message of a brilliantly written text, that's fine. But, when you start telling a kid what the point of the book is, I think that's a cheat to the reader and a disrespect to the child.
So whatever message or moral or point I want to make, I have to make sure that, at the beginning, I don't know what it is because I don't want to be overly conscious of it. Also, it needs to be organic to the material so that IT decided to happen, and I didn't make it happen.
A lot of the people who talk about [The Man in the Ceiling] say it is a study of the byways of the creative process, [a theme] which I only saw in there after I was told! I thought the book was about FAILURE. It was important to me as a father and as a former boy to get this out. Having been a smart, sensitive kid who didn't live up to his own expectations of himself almost always, and having had two children very much the same way, I wanted to deal with a character who failed in order to show that failure was a process. In a country where we talk about winners and losers and being number one, we don't give any attention to failure as being one of the most interesting things we can do in life - in terms of working out our character, working out ways of doing things, and working out a process of thinking.
One of the things that I learned about myself over the years, having been beaten up a lot, is that it's not failure that counts, but how you treat failure and what your attitude is going to be about it. Because, of course, if you do anything that is of value, or -- for that matter -- if you screw up, you are going to fail. One way or another, you are going to fail - sometimes for the good things and sometimes for the bad things.
I've had plays that were raved about that were inferior to the plays that got slammed. I decided early on that I am not going to let the critics make up my judgement about my work. They are not going to tell me who or what I am. They can make me a financial or commercial success if they want, but I'm not going to let that tell me whether I am any good or whether a particular piece of work is any good. I am not going to let strangers make judgements on me that prevail in my own mind.
But KIDS do that all the time. And sometimes they - themselves -- are the critic. When something that they do (or think they can do), doesn't work out, they go NUTS. They think it's a judgement from God. "I'm never going to do this again. I'm never going to play ball again. I thought I was good, but I stink. I'm no good. I'm lousy." Until you see them through this tantrum, they won't give themselves a break, and sometimes they never give themselves a break depending on their culture or their support system (or lack of it).
CY: How did you learn to give yourself a break?
Feiffer: Oh, I don't know… 85 years of therapy?! Part of it was that, as a kid, I saw people like Walt Kelly -- who did Pogo -- and others who started to have a hard time, becoming bitter in their work. Their point of view turned sour. I thought, "I can't ever let that happen to me."
As the reader, as the fan, I thought it was a betrayal of my trust in these great artists. I didn't want to know that they were that human, that they could strike out. If you have to do that, it's for your private life. Have too much to drink and then get rid of it or whatever else you need to do, but don't do it in front of your audience. I have nothing against self-pity, and I have been known to indulge in it. But I think - just as a professional - there has to be a pride in what you show the reader. And also there has to be a lesson in these books for young people -- one about the difficulty of the road, which is what I showed particularly in A Barrel of Laughs. "Man, it ain't nothing but hard out there!" But the other part is the journey is worth it even if it turns out to be the wrong quest!
 CY: Speaking of A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears, one of the scenes that touched me so much in that book was the scene at the Mountain of Malice when Roger was pummelled with nasty notes wrapped around rocks. What inspired that particular creative twist?
Feiffer: When I had the idea for that, I imagined those rocks… but it didn't seem dramatic enough. It wasn't funny. Then I realized the rocks had notes, and that idea made me feel so good! The rocks tell him what a little shit he is. The rocks are all those people undercutting you -- or your own superego (or whatever it is) that tells you that you are no good.
Here he is a bald eagle! He saves lives! [Roger] is much better at being an eagle than being a prince, but the rocks are telling him that's not so.
CY: Sounds also like a bad review.
Feiffer: Well, yeah… bad reviews, but also bad grown-ups!
Coming from a Jewish home in the Bronx, being raised during the depression. It was a very hard life. Whenever I came home full of excitement over something and made the mistake of confiding in my mother about this excitement, she had this extraordinary gift of putting a pin in my balloon. Because her life was so hard, I think [my happiness] seemed a violation of good taste to her. She couldn't let you get away with your happiness.
CY: Well, happiness can be frightening. It can take you in wild, new directions.
Feiffer: That's an interesting thing that you say about happiness. I think that particularly for people who are trapped, perhaps for very good reasons, in their own despair, it's a real offense to see someone happy. For one thing, they think it's mindless, irresponsible. It's that "You have a lot of growing up to do, young man." stuff.
CY: I've read that you are interested in expanding comic book narrative into adult books, just as you have done in the realm of children's books. How do you plan to do that?
Feiffer: Well, in fact, I started out that way. The first satire I did was called "Munro," and that was in a book called Passionella and Other Stories. The early books, which were not collections of the Village Voice cartoons, were cartoon narratives - hence they were in kind of fake kids book form -- but they were very satirical and on very adult themes. "Munro" was about a 4-year-old kid who gets drafted into the army, back in the 50's, by mistake. [Since] the army doesn't admit mistakes, they make him think he is not four. Also, there were cartoon narratives about the Bomb. I did a lot of these until I stopped for some reason. I just lost interest. Well, when I got involved in the theater, I just stopped all other forms of long writing. Now that I have lost interest in theater, I guess I am going back to this sort of narrative.
I have a long book I started doing a few years ago: drawings -- without any purpose at all -- of tap dancers, based on Fred Astair and others.
CY: Only YOU could do this. This is what I love so much about your drawings - the way you capture movement.
Feiffer: Well, my conceit about these drawings is that they are not drawings of dancers but that they are dance themselves. The drawings are a form of dance. I have shown these in exhibitions up on Martha's Vineyard, and I am going to have a show of them in New York in the Fall. But I thought, "I gotta get these damn things out there somehow. I want people to see them. I just love them so much, and I can't stand them not being seen so I have to figure out some way to use them in a book."
So I started playing around with the idea of a book about a dancer, and then I got a dance team, and then I got a plot. And then when I was done, I found I had written an old backstage Twentieth Century Fox musical! I call it Little Fox Blues. I read it, and I re-read it, and I thought, "This is terrific. It's only missing one thing… it needs music!" So I prevailed upon a friend of mine, Michael Wolf, who used to be the musical director of the Arsenio Hall show. He is writing a jazz score for this book, and we're going to release a CD with the book!
CY: How do your ideas come? When you were talking about The Man in the Ceiling, it seemed as though you don't really have an idea but that you just get into the process of it and then something crystalizes?
Feiffer: Well, both are true. I take long walks in Central Park, and things just start popping. This will not happen if I am sitting at my desk. Not at all. If I'm on the go, I start making connections about what interests me. It HAS to be fun. It HAS to be something that I want to talk about; it can't be just private fun.
CY: How do you balance your writing and cartooning? Do they work from different parts of your mind?
Feiffer: Yes.
You know, it's interesting. This is a question that people have always had, and it has always been to me the least interesting question -- in a sense -- because I always assumed that these different arts had forms and structures. A comic is one thing; a play is another, and a children's book is another, and a narrative cartoon is different than a comic strip, and yet they are all connected in terms of certain things like telling a story, making a point, and - in particular - making my point. I've got something I want to say, and the form I choose to say it in will automatically decide how it is going to be written or addressed. If I can do it in a cartoon, I will, but if it clearly isn't a cartoon, then I will start thinking in terms of that form, that structure, and in telling it that way. And because I have been a fan of all of these different forms, I can think the way I am supposed to for the particular form. It's just automatic.
CY: Well, darn it, not all of us are as creative and versatile as you are! You can't get mad at all of us for asking you this question over and over.
Feiffer: Ha! Well, I'm not mad, but I think there is a particularly American unease at people who do more than one thing well. Also, I found, when I started writing plays, a bitterness… "Who is this cartoonist who thinks he can write plays?!" If I were English or French, there would have been no question about this because they are used to dilletantes, I guess, or people who move from one practice or skill to another. But here [in America] we are not. I think people find it upsetting, but I wasn't suggesting that YOU thought this was upsetting… [Feiffer snickers]
CY: Oh, I was just giving you a hard time! [Interviewer laughs nervously and then thinks of a sure-fire save…] So let's talk a bit about creative blocks! You say that, when you get them, you go on walks in the park and that sort of dislodges things. Sometimes, though, you MUST get uninspired by everything ["or something, please! God, who is this creative freak I am interviewing?" she wonders.]
Feiffer: Like everybody else, I have my bad periods, but I don't think of myself as getting blocked. We were talking about PROCESS before… I wrote a play called "Elliot Loves." Always before, once I had an idea for the play and its characters, it took me something like 6 weeks to write the first draft. It went very, very fast once I knew what I wanted to do. With "Elliot Loves," I wrote the first two scenes one summer on Martha's Vineyard, and then I let it alone and couldn't go near it again for another year. Then, the next summer I wrote one more scene and then couldn't go near it again for a year. I kept wondering, "what the hell is going on here?" I knew what I wanted this play to be, and I knew where it was going. I just couldn't write it! And then I decided: This is what the play wants. It wants to do this. It will tell me when I can write it. I would read it and re-read it from time-to-time and think, "this is good work; this is as good as I get… I haven't made a mistake. I have to let it do what it wants to do."
Then, when I was in Paris working on a movie one year, [the play] suddenly decided that was the time it wanted to get written. I spent a week having meetings with the director of the film in the day, and staying up all night writing the play. It was a rush of work. When I flew home to New York, I had a first draft of the play. When I wrote the last line, I remember crying because I was so happy. I was so thrilled! I knew it was right. I knew it was good. I drank my way across the Atlantic and went to a party.
So, in terms of blocks, I just trust the process. I've been doing this for a very long time, and I have learned in that time that there are certain things I am good at and certain things I am bad at. I can't write descriptive prose as my wife, who is a writer, can. I don't know what anything looks like. I can't draw backgrounds in my cartoons. It was hard as hell to draw the backgrounds in I Lost My Bear.
CY: Oh yes you can! That bookcase in I Lost My Bear is juicy!
Feiffer: That bookcase took 4 or 5 hours to do.
CY: Does your bookcase at home look like that?
Feiffer: Of course!
But, having done this [creative work] for so long, I figure that I have been very lucky. I've ended up, as few people are able, to do exactly the work I planned to do from the age of five or six, and then I was able to get serious enough about it and turn it into something else (but still keep to the original nature of the cartoon form). And then [I was able] to do something I never thought I could do: to become a writer. I never thought I could do that! And a playwright! I mean, my god…
So I guess I felt that if I have an affinity for this…which means if I can go to movies and like movies, then I can write a movie; if I can go to the theater and like plays, then I can write a play. If I can read comic strips and enjoy them, then I can do that, and the same for children's books…
On the other hand, don't ask me to write War and Peace or Tough Jews by Rich Cohen. I can't do that. My prose, if it is not in the first person or written in a personal voice, isn't going to work. It only manages to work in these children's books because - whatever spooks me in the other form or intimates me - is not there in this work. For that I am very grateful.
CY: It's very inspiring for me to hear you talk about this trust you have in your creative process. I try to create a similar relationship with mine, giving it room to work the way it wants to work.
Feiffer: Well, what do you write? What do you want to write?
CY: I want to write Young Adult books, but I am trying to get over my fears of doing that.
Feiffer: Can I make a couple of suggestions?
CY: Yes!
Feiffer: I think you have to catch the critic napping. What I have done at different times is either go to work late at night when I am too tired to stand up or do it first thing in the morning before I have had coffee or anything else, and I just sit down and start babbling on paper, not worrying about whether it makes any sense or not. You need to get this stuff out before the people smarter than you, your super ego or whoever, starts kicking in.
CY: You mean, before I cross "The Mountain of Malice?"
Feiffer: Yes! It's like doing an improvisation. You have to assume that you are going to screw it up, and just say, "The hell with it… I will [fail], and it will be lousy." But somewhere along the line -- by page 3, 4 , 5 or maybe 10 -- you'll write an interesting sentence, and that will lead to a second one.
CY: Okay. I promise you I will try to trick my inner critic, and I will try hard not to be afraid of failure!
Feiffer: Failure is FUN! Failure has to be fun. Failure is simply PROCESS! Get rid of this American shit! [much laughter…]
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