‘Backing Into Forward’ With Humor and Chutzpah

To hear JulesFeiffer tell it, he all but had to be talked into writing Backing Into Forward (Talese/Doubleday), one of the mostentertaining memoirs you’re likely to read this (or any other) year. Theprizewinning cartoonist and playwright, novelist, movie scriptwriter,children’s book author/illustrator and unabashed liberal gadfly has lived alife too large for a single book, and interesting enough to make a reader begfor more detail after every anecdote.

Raised in the Bronx by a demanding mother and a gentle yet unsuccessfulfather, Feiffer learned, fairly early on, that his wit and prodigiousimagination were his greatest weapons against real and imagined roadblocks. Byhis own admissions, he had very little natural or acquired talents to offer. Hewas uncoordinated and wimpy, rendering him all but useless on the playgroundsand streets of the big city, where athleticism could take you a long way. As anaspiring cartoonist, he was inhibited by only marginal drawing and letteringskills. The opposite gender, to whom he was not only attracted but obsessed,presented mysteries that took him well into adulthood to solve.

Yet, as this bookrepeatedly shows, he could always rely on his mind for rescue and triumph, evenif success was often a happy accident. This wise-cracking, storytelling Jewishkid from the Bronx and survivor of the Great Depression wrangled with hisfearsand there were manyby somehow convincing, first himself and, later,editors and readers, that the difference between him and us was his inner voiceand chutzpah, that he was bold or crazy enough to say what we were alwaysthinking but were too cowardly or unable to say.

As a teenage kidwith no experience in comics, he approached Will Eisner and landed a job, firstas a gofer around the office but eventually as a collaborator on The Spirit,arguably the most influential work of graphic art in its time. A stint in theArmy is related with both humor and outrage, giving the book and Feifferdefinition.

The absurdity ofmilitary life zapped him, much the way it did Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut,and affected his work from that point on. He took a job as a cartoonistfor nopay, no lesswith The Village Voice, then in its early days, culminatingin a 42-year relationship and a Pulitzer Prize, even though, as he confesses,he had no idea where he was going from one week to the next. Although he knewnothing about writing a play, he headed to Yaddo, the upstate New York artists’ colony, and came up with LittleMurders, an initial flop that, in a later off-Broadway production, won himacclaim and an Obie. Little Murders introduced him professionally toMike Nichols, the hot new kid in town, who, after directing The Graduate,filmed Feiffer’s screenplay for Carnal Knowledge, which introducedFeiffer to Jack Nicholson.

One way or another,Feiffer backed into an incredibly interesting life and met some fascinatingpeople along the way. Feiffer maintains a loose, self-effacing, wise-cracking,name-dropping style throughout the book, smoothing out the sharper edges ofego, although he reserves a tough stance for those occasions when he writesabout politics, whether the McCarthy and HUAC witch hunts or the most recentRepublican administration. He’s proud to wear the label “liberal”he scorns thenow-popular “progressive”and he’s not afraid to bare his fangs when he writesabout the ways in which he has been disappointed or angered over the pasthalf-century.

His analysis of ourcurrent political morass is both funny and poignant.

“Unlike Democrats,Republicans are seen as real men,” he writes. “John Kerry, who fought in Vietnam, is nota real man. Dick Cheney, who shot a best friend on a hunting trip and saw noreason to apologize, is a real man. It makes no difference that the Democrat isa war hero and the Republican is a draft dodger. Image is all, and real mendon’t apologize. Republicans own the real-man image.”

Lavishly illustratedwith samples of his work, Backing Into Forward rushes along soeffortlessly that you realize, when you hit the end, that you want to knowmore. In the end, Feiffer reminds you of the class clown you knew in school,the guy who got you in trouble for laughing at the comments he made under hisbreath, the guy who used humor to convert rage into something you would neverquite forget.