A Matter of Medium

By Jules Feiffer As told to Francine Russo

I was 37 years old in 1966 when I became a playwright. I'd been writing a successful comic strip for 10 years, so this was not necessarily a good time to start on a new career. But the Kennedy assassination had hit me hard. Over the next six months, it came to me that we were living in a different America. The country seemed to be on the verge of a national nervous breakdown. And nobody was writing about it. Not then. But I saw it taking place in random acts of violence and the almost casual breaking down of recognized patterns of authority--political, religious, educational.

I wanted to talk about this, but I couldn't do it in six panels of a cartoon. So I started drafting my thoughts as a novel. I'd written one--Harry, the Rat with Women--a few years before. It had some success, but I hated the writing of it. It wasn't a natural form for me. When I had 300 pages of my new novel down, I went to Yaddo, the writers' colony in upstate New York, to finish it. But after I'd been there 24 hours and read through it, I knew there wasn't a book there. I either had to go home--which I couldn't do because my friends had thrown me a big going-away party--or I had to figure out something else. I went into Saratoga Springs and bought a bottle of Scotch. How could I have spent two years working on something with so little value?

So I started sketching it out as a play, Little Murders, and it just took off. It was pure epiphany: a week before, I didn't know I could construct scenes, create characters in action with voices that pulled against each other, and make a social and political statement about something that was important to me. Writing on this rather grim theme, I was euphoric. The satirist's irony--the better I felt, the worse things had to be.

From that point on, I balanced two or three careers--cartoons, plays, children's books. I wrote plays and screenplays--Carnal Knowledge, Popeye--for the next 20 years, switching forms of work in what I called my system of avoidance. When I had a deadline on Job No. 1 and didn't want to do it, I switched to Job No. 2. I found that one form energized the other. As soon as I moved into theater, my cartoons improved.

Then in 1990, my play Elliot Loves, which I thought was my best play to date, got a miserable reception. So I stopped writing for the theater because everyone was so mean to me. And besides, I was getting tired of being a pro bono playwright. I backed into writing children's books. An illustrator friend asked me to write the story for an idea he had in mind. Then, just as I was getting hot on it, he fired me. He'd decided to write it himself. So, out of spite, I wrote my own book, thinking, "My book will be better than your book." That was The Man in the Ceiling, and it was a great success. I've written seven now, and it's been wonderful in every possible way. With these and the plays, I feel as if I've been working in forms that are viscerally as right for me as my cartoons. And it took only 30 or 40 years to find it out. All these forms are in their own way an extension of childhood passions. As a kid, I loved color comic supplements, which were really kids' books on newsprint. And as a young man I loved plays that created conflicts in audiences, made them think--and argue.

Now I seem to be at another turning point. Three summers ago, some friends on Martha's Vineyard asked me to put together a theater benefit. So I took some long comic strips that Vanity Fair paid me a lot of money for but never ran, and I added bits of this and that, got my friend Michael Wolff to compose some music for it and called it Jules' Blues. I cast only family and friends. It played like a dream, and suddenly I'm back in the theater. There's talk of putting the show on in New York. And I've accepted a grant to write a new play. A couple of years ago, Lincoln Center offered me a commission to write one, and I said, "Never." After Jules' Blues, I went back to them and said, "Never is over."

--As told to Francine Russo