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Backing Into Forward: A Memoir

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I hadn't heard the term "spirit guide" when I was growing up in the Sixties. But if I had, I would probably have nominated Jules Feiffer to be mine. A Jewish-ish kid in a suburb north of Chicago, I was smart enough to see how predicated on injustice much of society of the mid-Sixties was as well as being very aware of my lack of power as a teenager to do much about it. The person who best articulated this perspective (and thus made me feel as if I weren't alone in holding it) was Jules Feiffer. In his strips, I saw someone I recognized as an older brother as he came up against stuff I knew I would come up against shortly. At a time when there weren't a lot of people to trust, on the basis of his writing and drawing I knew Feiffer was one who would give it to me straight. Not that he offered answers, but he seemed to at least identify what the true issues were accurately, and that was a pretty good start.

I came to New York in time to see the Alan Arkin productions of LITTLE MURDERS and THE WHITE HOUSE MURDER CASE, both of which knocked me out and seemed to me to be the logical next step from the sketches by Nichols and May and Second City that also spoke to me. Then CARNAL KNOWLEDGE came along (directed by Nichols), and that, too, seemed revelatory. (For those who think David Mamet invented candor between the sexes in drama, CARNAL KNOWLEDGE pre-dated Mamet's excellent SEXUAL PERVERSITY.) Again, it gave definition to my confusions.

BACKING INTO FORWARD is billed as Feiffer's memoirs. It is not a full account of his life, but it is a pretty thorough account of his thought process in the face of a changing American culture. To be accurate, it is also about Feiffer's part in CHANGING the American culture. (Conventions now accepted as part of comics were innovations he introduced in his strip for the VOICE.) I am fascinated by how what we think of mainstream culture shifted between the mid-Fifties and the late-Sixties. Feiffer was in the middle of this. Having been in the middle, he doesn't offer an Olympian perspective. But he is more self-conscious and analytical than many of the others who were involved -- sort of like the gang's designated driver.

Did I mention that the book is entertaining? Deeply so. I wolfed it down in a few gulps, carrying it with me everywhere, reading it everywhere -- subways, during intermissions at the theatre, even in an elevator once because I couldn't be bothered to wait to finish the end of a given section.

Feiffer and "The Village Voice" were two of the great joys of my arrival in New York City; he accompanied me to the 'burbs ten years later, and seemed just as popular there as he did on the Upper West Side.

He has written a vast hodgepodge of a life, skipping around from experience to experience and finishing with a three page strip that describes a few omissions in the book, including Lennie Bruce's obscenity trial.

He started early in therapy, working through, he writes, rage and guilt for his overbearing mother, and his nebbish father -- a man "not very significant in my life -- or his own."

"My mother had failed to live up to her early promise as a fashion designer. It was never clear why her career had gone flat, but what was clear, much too clear, was how she toiled, night and day, over her drawing table stationed in a corner of our living room, sandwiched between the piano no one knew how to play and the bookcase stacked with Russian, French, and English novels (read by my father) and uplifting essays by Emerson and others (studied by my mother). She drew her fashion sketches, cloaks and suits they were called, in pencil and lightly tinted watercolor. Three days a week she packed them up and subwayed down to the Garment District on Seventh Avenue, where she peddled them door-to-door to dress manufacturers. Each sketch earned her three dollars. Since my father perennially failed at business and his various other jobs didn't last that long, it was my mother's three-dollar sketches that brought us through hard times."

The book samples his hectic life in the '60s and '70s with David Levine, Maurice Sendak, Hugh Hefner (at the 1968 Chicago riots), Bernard Malamud, and Norman Podhoretz and many others. He calls himself a "pop culture junkie among the intellectuals" and confesses to being somewhat self-conscious about not having a college education. He writes on his website that "persistent failure inspired [me] to reinvent himself as an artist over and over.

There are bits I would have like to learn more about -- the wonderful Tantrum, for example. There is a great collection of his work online at a gallery carrying much of his work; Google Jean Albano Gallery . But overall, I greatly enjoyed reading about his version of his life, one I shared over the years through his strips, books and plays, with great pleasure and at times with fear and despair, tinged often with ruefulness.

Robert C. Ross 2010

The Bruce trial took place during my first summer in New York City; as a young lawyer it fascinated me. Feiffer was a star witness; this extract from Kuh's (the prosecutor) cross examination shows why:

Kuh said, with proper respect,

"You puncture holes in almost anything..."

"Only things I don't like," Feiffer corrected him.

"...government authority that tends to run away with itself..."

"That's all government authority," said Feiffer...

"Have you found it necessary to use all these words?"

"I haven't used them because I can't get those words in a newspaper."

Whereupon Kuh pointed out that he had seen [a particular word] in The Village Voice. Mr. Feiffer pointed out that he was syndicated in certain other papers where that word had never been seen.

Under direct examination by Martin Garbus, who is handling the defense with London, Feiffer called Bruce "brilliant," saying that he goes beyond social commentary "into an area I would think of as metaphysical, going to the very core of life in America today, especially for my generation ... When he's on there's nothing like him." Feiffer pointed out that Bruce began working his way up as a comedian during the McCarthy era "when no one would dare say anything" and that in that sense he is "part of the history of liberalism in this country."

This section comes from the archives of the "Village Voice". July 16, 1964, Vol. IX, No. 39.

There's a certain style of parenting--intractable, relentlessly inflexible--that crushes a child. Not only does it preclude any intimacy between parent and offspring, it produces childish adults, who spend their lives forever (and often futilely) whining about the disaster that was their upbringing--unable to communicate just how bad it REALLY was, but awfully willing to try. They get stuck at age 15, and remain furious, angry children indefinitely. Jules Feiffer is one of those ex-kids.

That his Bronx upbringing was so bad is our blessing. If you've laughed (and cringed) at Feiffer's cartoons over the years, you'll agree. He's all about the socially aware pose, the skin with which we hide our icky insides from the world. His cartoon personae are, in short, obsessed at what the neighbors think. Thank goodness he got so good an education in his early life!

Lest you think he jests, he informs us his sister became a communist later in life, with an addiction to the authoritarian ministerings of Joe Stalin. How's that for a guilt-trip?! But seriously: this is one of the best autobiographies I've ever read. Feiffer's language is so beautiful that I want to quote you whole sections out of the beginning alone. Feiffer's insights into a different age--the children of WWII and the radicals they became--are spot on and beautifully expressed. But for the dearth of loving hugs from his mother, he says, he may well have been a normal person. I've of two minds on this, and secretly thank the God Feiffer doesn't believe in that he misses those hugs still. The cartoonist, playwrite and conscience of the American Left is my new favorite author, too.

Anyone who looked forward to Jule Feiffer's insightful cartoons in the '60s and '70s will relish his reflections on his difficult childhood and his subsequent success as a cartoonist. Illustrations showing his first work and his development as an artist reveal his skill as depicting the angst of not only his life but also the life of most people. At 80 and now writing children's books, Feiffer is an ideal example of someone who overcame his own feelings of inadequacy to make us laugh as we recognized ourselves in his drawing and captions.

The strength of this memoir lies in its beginning and middle. Here the extremely talented Jules Feiffer clearly and often funnily tells of his youth, angst ridden family life in the Bronx (his mother was not his favorite person), and eventual comical service in the Army--and his early and constant drive to become a notable cartoonist. Anyone with an interest in the comic strips of the mid-part of the last century will enjoy the homage paid by Mr. Feiffer to the then masters of this specialized, but often ignored, art form.

A self-described lefty or liberal in politics, the author skates over the very real problems with communism in the 1930s and 40s, when Stalin killed many a good artist (along with tons of other innocents). This, however, is his memoir and the life Mr. Feiffer has led has been almost entirely in acute despair over ever present and suffocating conformists and conservatives.

Meanwhile, his reporting on abuses in the 1960s (Vietnam and the Chicago riots) lose some of their fundemtenal power when the main story he relates about the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago is on his getting Hugh Hefner out of the Playboy Mansion to the scene of the action. And, that one of his major actions in protesting Vietnam was helping to get a full page ad placed in Martha's Vineyard's local paper against a fellow resident of this enclave of the intellectual and political elite, Nicholas Katzenbach of President Johnson's cabinet. There is a reason the term "limousine liberal" was coined (although Mr. Feiffer probably never drove or rode in such a car.)

The end part of the memoir is of reduced general interest and is devoted to the final stages of Mr. Feiffer's long and notable career, and is mainly focused on his writing of children's books and of tending to beloved grandchildren.

Fans of Mr. Feiffer, students of comics, and those interested in American liberal politics/culture of the 1950s through 70s should buy and read this book.

As an aside, the jacket design by Michael J. Windsor is perfect.

In "Backing Into Forward," Feiffer is rough on himself - depicting a self-pitying, envious tortured neurotic - but far rougher on his mother, a living Jewish mother stereotype, complete with all the horror that implies.

She emerges as the villain of his life and Feiffer has the guts to make no bones about it. Still he manages to understand her a bit in the end and so does the reader.

Using this sour relationship as the book's through line, Feiffer threads us through an exciting - and often hilarious - story of failures and more failures committed by a kid who has no choice but to persevere. It doesn't get any easier when he achieves success, but he sure meets a lot of interesting people along the way (the name-dropping is outrageous). I especially liked that he mentions Alexander King, someone I thought had been forgotten by everyone on earth but me; and his stories about the great Will Eisner are worth the cover price alone.

I loved this book, but I wouldn't really recommend it to non-fans of the Visual Vox of the Village Voice. But if you're among the millions who appreciate the work of Jules Feiffer, hey - Christmas is coming. Buy one for yourself and a few more for friends.

From a literary standpoint memoirs tend fall in a certain catergories, although I'm not going to get into that now or I could be here all day. I will say, however, that some memoirs focus very clearly on one life-changing event or situation (example: Jim Beaver's Life's That Way), others focus on a certain time period of someone's life (example: Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life), still others attempt to depict a life from early childhood all the way up until the time the writer is penning the memoir (example: J. R. Moehringer's The Tender Bar). Jules Feiffer's memoir belongs in the latter category. At one time, I found these types of memories the most because they showed the immense range of growth throughout many years, with a clear, retrospective voice. I enjoyed that about Feiffer's memoir as well, but there were times when I felt that he was juggling too much info in his book and explicating way too much. The book is very long and he has lived a long and interesting life, for sure, but in my opinion, there wasn't enough driving the narrative forward.

Prior to reading, I didn't know Jules Feiffer by name, but I love the movie Carnal Knowledge (I wished he'd spent more time talking about it and said a few words about Art Garfunkel) and read The Phantom Tollbooth as a kid. I've also seen quite a few movies his daughter has apparently been in. I found there was too much name-dropping in the book at times, although that is typical of celebrity memoirs and they can't help it I suppose, when these are the people they know. I also didn't care too much for the long political tangents. I understood why they were there, because he did draw political cartoons and have a strong political opinion, but I felt myself skimming over those sections.

What I liked outweighed the negatives, however, I wish he'd spent more time on them. I'm not Jewish and I didn't grow up in the Bronx, but I found I experienced a similar childhood. Our relationships with our mothers growing up seemed to be very similar as well as our struggles with learning disabilities and stomachaches in school and our love for drawing and making up stories. I wanted a bit more of that. Of course the best thing about the book however were the drawings and comics and photos sprinkled throughout (I loved that last one - he has great style) that related to what he had just written. It was quite refreshing to see and appropriate to his career of course, instead of the usual glossy plates that publishers place in the center of the book.

Bottom line, while I think parts could've been shortened or split into separate memoirs, I think this is a must-read for anyone who aspires to be a famous artist or writer, not to mention anyone who struggled in school and was always and is still waiting for their parents' approval.

Grade: B+

Thank you, goodreads and Doubleday for sending me this lovely book!(less)

BACKING INTO FORWARD reads like the memoir of a great raconteur who has the perfect story to capture the personalities, events, or issues that were in play at every important moment in his life. In BIF, Feiffer uses a chronological approach to discipline this raconteur's gift. The effect is that his memoir, which is written with both simplicity and elegance, is a near effortless read. Feiffer, now more entertainer than provocateur, has done all the heavy lifting for his readers.

Feiffer organizes BIF into three sections. These are "Gunslinger", which shows Jules growing up in the Bronx and laying the groundwork for a life as a cartoonist; "Famous", which shows Feiffer's life and career from his emergence as the cartoonist for The Village Voice to his decision, roughly 10 years later, to stop psychotherapy and "act like a grown-up"; and "Another Country", which shows Feiffer in his new gig of screenwriter (Carnal Knowledge and Popeye) and author of 10 children's books.

Since this is a raconteur's book, a valid approach to a review is to identify a few chapters where Feiffer's stories were especially amusing or insightful. While there are many terrific choices, three of my favorites for each section of BIF include:

o Road Movie: Young Jules manages his anxieties as he hitchhikes to California.

o Camp Gorgon: Jules discusses the chain of command in the army as well as how he managed to hear and see Bobby Thompson's "shot heard round the world."

o Pony: Jules explains his growing appreciation for the art of certain cartoonists as well as the irony of writing MUNRO, his subversive book on the army mindset, while working at an easy job in an army publications unit.

o The Voice: Jules describes the moment of his breakthrough at The Village Voice.

o Lucking Into the Zeitgeist: Jules analyzes the evolution of his style and subjects, where "the limitations of space backed me into introspection."

o Spokesman: Jules puts the essence of his reader on the page, where he shows "the codified communication by which... my entire generation lived our lives."

o Yaddo: Jules discovers he has become a playwright.

o Flop: Why the first production of "Little Murderers" was a disaster.

o Voiceless: Feiffer lands in a better place after he loses his job and page-four position at The Village Voice.

Certainly, the great subject of BIF is Feiffer's extraordinary career. Interestingly, this did not happen overnight, with the publication of MUNRO, his first book, coming six years after its completion. Those hoping to break through themselves will certainly be heartened by the story of Jules's perseverance and working-smart strategy to publication.

Highly recommended.

Feiffer's "Backing into Forward" is the story of two lives, jammed into one and presented as one hefty narrative. In the memoir's first 150 pages, Feiffer accounts for his childhoood and young adult-hood as a boy struggling to understand the social and sexual world around him as he developed what would become an impressive craft as a cartoonist. Told with a healthy mix of affection and perspective, this is the work's most engaging section. The remainder, however, veers between trite political account of 1960s leftism and an almost cloyingly repetitious accounts of the author's interactions with the rich and famous. While many of the cartoons included in this edition are clearly innovative and a redeeming factor, the self-righteous tone of the author's description of his adulthood make this a difficult work to finish.

Jules Feiffer is one of those people whose life I wish I could step into and inhabit, if only for a day or a week or so. A brilliant cartoonist, a screenwriter, a playwright, and the illustrator of one of the finest and most beloved books in the Canon of American Kid's Literature--the kind of life and career that makes creative types gnash their teeth with envy. And one of the most endearing features of this book is Feiffer's unabashed and unashamed joy that he takes in his career and in his accomplishments, which are legion.

"Backing into Forward" is a no-holds-barred romp through the life and times of one of America's seminal political cartoonists and one of the keenest observers of the 20th century American human condition. He's as brutally honest about his own faults and shortcomings and missteps as he is about those of others--Feiffer never pulled punches, not even for an instant, throughout his career, and this book is a continuation of his unalloyed reaction to... well, to everything. If it's great, he says it, and he's not afraid to. If it's lousy, expect the same reaction.

He's almost painfully self-aware, but there's very little about this book that's confessional. He's utterly unapologetic and unsparing, which is the same quality that made his cartoons as shocking and as deep-cutting as they were, and continue to be. He's as fearless and raucous in his eighties as he was in his twenties and thirties, and he's just as funny now as he was in his younger days.

The only fault I find with the book is that, considering it's a cartoonist's memoir, it's not nearly as lavishly illustrated as I'd like--and I realize, as I write this, that the only fault I can find with it is a compliment as well. Reading "Backing Into Forward" only whetted my appetite for more of his work, so upon finishing it, I quickly bought "Passionella," and several of his other books (including a new copy of "The Phantom Tollbooth," since mine was falling apart). Considering Feiffer's disdain for advertising, he'd probably cringe if he knew that his memoir had encouraged me to do that, though. But, taking a page out of his book, I'm not going to apologize for doing it.