By HARRY L. KATZ
For 40 years Jules Feiffer has made Americans worry.
In his cartoons, books, plays and films he has questioned the motives of political leaders, challenged new and old assumptions about male and female relationships and exposed angst and alienation in modern urban society. The quality and variety of his work have won him wide recognition. His honors include a 1961 Academy Award for the animated version of his short story "Munro" and the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. In 1995 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Asked to identify the elements linking all his satirical endeavors, Mr. Feiffer said he tries to show "the mess that all of us are in, and to some extent humanize it and perhaps give us more patience with it."
Mr. Feiffer's cartoon strip has appeared weekly in the Village Voice since 1956 and in syndication since 1959, while the numerous cartoon compilations, novels and scripts for plays and films he has produced since the 1960s have made him one of the foremost satirical writers in America. His early plays, such as Little Murders, Carnal Knowledge and The White House Murder Case, continue in repertory throughout the country, a tribute to their lasting appeal. Most recently, Mr. Feiffer has published two books for older children, extending his influence to a new generation.
On Oct. 19 the Library opened an exhibition marking Jules Feiffer's gift to the Library of Congress of his literary archives, including manuscripts and typescripts, and a large selection of original cartoon drawings. Containing both false starts and finished products, the archives demonstrate Feiffer's intellectual breadth and document his working methods, evolving styles and changing techniques. Furthermore, they reveal Feiffer's growth as an artist and writer, and chronicle 40 years of rapid social and political change in urban America from his unique perspective.
Born in 1929, Mr. Feiffer first attracted attention in October 1956 when he introduced in the pages of Manhattan's weekly Village Voice an innovative cartoon feature that elevated the genre to new heights of sophisticated social and political satire. First called "Sick, Sick, Sick" and later simply "Feiffer," the feature resembled neither the standard political cartoon nor the conventional comic strip. Mr. Feiffer had created something new: a serial cartoon, with a New York flavor, that combined the impact of political cartoons with the narrative power of comic strips in a seamless blend of words and images. It was a comic strip for grownups, which Mr. Feiffer used as a vehicle for trenchant soliloquies and dialogues about life, love, power, hypocrisy, violence and despair.
Witty, cynical, ironic, sometimes abstract and often angry, Mr. Feiffer's cartoon commentaries helped extend the limits of acceptable intellectual discourse during the early Cold War era. He satirized the military when Cold War tensions were high, and questioned the universal American Dream as millions of Americans looked optimistically to the future.
After several years of successful cartooning for the Village Voice, Mr. Feiffer tired of explaining the meaning of the strip's title and changed it. He later recalled, "Time and Newsweek labeled what we did as sick humor. I replied that it was not sick humor, but that society was sick, you understand? and that I was commenting on a sick society. … I turned blue explaining myself. Eventually, it was simpler to drop the title 'Sick, Sick, Sick' and rename the cartoon 'Feiffer.'"
From an early age, Mr. Feiffer aspired to be a cartoonist. He grew up in the Bronx during the Depression, when the newspaper funnies were in their heyday and the first modern comic books had just been published. He read comic strips and comic books voraciously, drew his own and spent endless hours studying the work of professional cartoonists. "My idea of going to school was to mark time until I got into the comic-strip business," he later recalled. Mr. Feiffer realized that ambition in 1946, when he went to work as an assistant to Will Eisner, creator of the comic book "The Spirit" and a legendary figure in American cartooning.
Mr. Feiffer reached a turning point in his career when he was drafted into the Army during the Korean War: "I was … thrown into a world that was antagonistic to everything I believed in, on every conceivable level. In a war that I was out of sympathy with, and in an army that I despised. … After two years of discovering hate, I turned into a satirist."
While in the Army, he developed an illustrated short story in which the Army drafts a 4-year-old boy named Munro and refuses to discharge him. Although it remained unpublished for many years, this first satiric exercise gave Feiffer confidence and a new direction, which ultimately led to his debut in the Village Voice. By 1959, in addition to his weekly appearance in the Voice, Mr. Feiffer's cartoons were syndicated nationally and widely available in two popular compilations, Sick, Sick, Sick: A Guide to Non- Confident Living and Passionella and Other Stories.
During the turbulent 1960s, Mr. Feiffer's graphic ruminations on civil rights, relations between the sexes, poverty, the peace movement, the generation gap and the Vietnam War struck a responsive chord. He was prolific, producing numerous cartoon compilations, including Feiffer's Album, Feiffer on Civil Rights and Feiffer's Marriage Manual. Over time, he continued to refine his drawing techniques, consciously developing a repertoire of styles that complemented his cartoon text; spare, simple images unfold frame by frame and entice the eye without distracting the mind from his potent message. "I thought that the quieter the drawing was, the more strong the effect would be," he has said.
Both a student and subject of psychoanalysis, Mr. Feiffer has brought his intimate knowledge of the process to bear on his cartoons in striking fashion. He illustrates themes of alienation, despair and self-absorption through characters overwhelmed by failed expectations or by the pressures of daily life. Those who thrive, or simply survive, do so through avoidance, rationalization and manipulation. Mr. Feiffer caricatures the minds and thoughts as well as faces of his subjects, revealing with devastating clarity the lengths to which people may go to deceive others and themselves.
"When we're born we learn very fast from our parents and our relatives that they often don't mean what they say," he has said. "So we learn that there are certain codes, and they apply to some people and not to other people.… I became a kind of spy whose job it was to figure out these codes so that I could understand them, and that's what a lot of my work ended up being about. Decoding, decoding, decoding. Decoding women's conversations and what they meant, decoding men, decoding bosses, decoding parents."
Although Feiffer has intermittently addressed such pressing social and political issues as nuclear war and racism, he has focussed on intimate human dilemmas. "The hardest thing anybody does in life is live successfully with one other person," he has stated. "Harder than climbing mountains, harder than fighting a war." His cartoons portray a psychological battlefield of tactical advances and retreats as men and women struggle to either gain the upper hand or simply understand their partners' motives. Alienation, isolation and conflict abound as his characters' succumb to bullying, dishonesty and unrequited love.
Nine presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton, have taken the oath of office since Mr. Feiffer began his remarkable run in the Village Voice, and he has skewered them all. Democratic, Republican, conservative and liberal politicians alike have been subjected to his deft cartoon attacks on what he sees as corruption, hypocrisy and deceit in public office. Like other editorial cartoonists, he uses the politicians' own excesses against them. Unlike most of his colleagues, however, who work against daily deadlines in a single-panel format, Feiffer's weekly six- or eight- panel strip affords him more time and space to devise complex commentaries that go behind the headlines and, imaginatively into the minds of his subjects.
Beginning in the early 1960s, to reach a broader audience, Mr. Feiffer began writing novels, plays and films. He published his initial novel, Harry the Rat with Women, in 1963, and theatrical success came in 1967 with the London opening of his first full-length play, Little Murders, a dark satire on family life in a city overwhelmed by violence. Such subsequent productions as The White House Murder Case (1970), and the film version of his play Carnal Knowledge (1971) advanced Mr. Feiffer's reputation as a leading American dramatist and one of the most versatile satirists in America.
Over the past two decades, Mr. Feiffer has continued his literary and artistic achievements. The list of plays produced from his scripts has grown to include, among others, Knock, Knock (1974), Grownups (1982), Elliot Loves (1988) and Anthony Rose (1989). He wrote the screenplay for the 1980 live-action film Popeye, drawing heavily on his knowledge of early American comic strips. In 1989 his screenplay for the film I Want to Go Home, not released in the United States, won the award for best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival.
More recently, he has published two illustrated children's books. In The Man in the Ceiling (1993), he recounts the struggles of a Feiffer-like boy cartoonist to gain acceptance and self-confidence. His most recent book, A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears (1995), tells the tale of Roger, a happy, thoughtless prince whose comically perilous quest prepares him for the responsibilities of life, love and kingly rule. Finally, Feiffer still appears each week in the Village Voice and syndication. The gift of his cartoons and manuscripts to the Library of Congress - to the American people - enriches our understanding of his remarkable career and underscores the relevance of satirical art and literature in the latter half of the 20th century.
The exhibition and accompanying brochure were prepared with support from the Caroline and Erwin Swann Memorial Fund for Caricature and Cartoon. The Swann Fund supports a continuing program of preservation, cataloging, acquisition, exhibition and publication in the related fields of cartoon, caricature and illustration.
"Jules Feiffer: Cartoons and Manuscripts," a Caroline and Erwin Swann Memorial exhibition, runs through Jan. 31 in the Madison Foyer of the Madison Building.
Harry L. Katz is Curator of Popular and Applied Graphic Art in the Prints and Photographs Division.