Backing Into Forward: A Memoir
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- ISBN13: 9780385531580
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
The award-winning cartoonist, playwright, and leader delivers a witty, illustrated rendition of his life, from his childhood as a wimpy kid in the Bronx to his legendary career in the arts.
A gifted storyteller who has delighted readers and theater audiences for decades, Jules Feiffer now turns his talents to the tale of his own life.
Plagued by learning problems, a controlling mother, and a debilitating sense of dread, Feiffer embarked on his first cartoon apprenticeship at the age of seventeen, emboldened only by a passion for success and an aptitude for failure. He vividly recalls persons transformative years effective under the legendary Will Eisner, and later, after he was drafted into the army, his evolution from “smart-ass kid into an enraged satirist.” Backing into Forwards also traces Feiffer’s like life, from a doomed hitchhiking trip to reclaim his high-school sweetheart to losing his virginity in Greenwich Village, and his road to marriage and fatherhood.
At the center of this journey is Feiffer’s prolific creativity. In dazzling detail, he recounts the birth of his subversive graphic tale Munro, his entrée into New York’s literary salons, collaborations with film greats Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, and Jack Nicholson, and additional major turning points. Brimming with wry punch lines, slices of Americana, and pithy social commentary, Backing into Forwards charts Feiffer’s rise as an unlikely and sharp provocateur during the conformist fifties and the Vietnam and Civil Rights sixties and seventies.
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Feiffer and “The Village Voice” were two of the fantastic joys of my arrival in New York City; he accompanied me to the ‘burbs ten years later, and seemed just as well loved 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 examination.
He ongoing early in therapy, effective 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 confront 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 additional jobs didn’t last that long, it was my mother’s three-dollar sketches that brought us through hard times.”
The book samples his confused 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 to some extent 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 fantastic collection of his work online at a gallery carrying much of his work; Google Jean Albano Gallery . But overall, I momentously loved reading about his version of his life, one I shared over the years through his strips, books and plays, with fantastic pleasure and at times with dread and despair, tinged regularly with ruefulness.
Robert C. Ross 2010
The Bruce examination 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 stab holes in nearly anything…”
“Only things I don’t like,” Feiffer corrected him.
“…government power that tends to run away with itself…”
“That’s all government power,” said Feiffer…
“Have you establish it necessary to use all these words?”
“I haven’t used them because I can’t get persons 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 additional 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,” adage that he goes beyond social commentary “into an area I would reflect 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 started effective 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.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
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 a name I recognizable as an older brother as he came up against stuff I knew I would come up against before long. 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 right issues were accurately, and that was a pretty excellent 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 persons who reflect David Mamet invented candor between the sexes in drama, CARNAL KNOWLEDGE pre-dated Mamet’s brilliant SEXUAL PERVERSITY.) Again, it gave definition to my confusions.
BACKING INTO FORWARD is billed as Feiffer’s life tale. 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 reflect 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 end the end of a agreed section.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5