Drawn From Life
By David Carr
Published: March 18, 2010. New York Times

BACKING INTO FORWARD
A Memoir
By Jules Feiffer
Illustrated. 444 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $30.




Truth in the matter of memoir has always seemed evanescent and, more often lately, either elusive or absent. Memories of the self are often in service of other agendas, including the settling of scores and the creation of a hero where a mere man once stood.

Photo right - Jules Feiffer in 2003. - Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times.
Illustration left  from “Backing Into Forward”

Those questions, and the recent travails of the genre, seem at great remove to the reader of “Backing Into Forward,” by Jules Feiffer. Reading Feiffer, you know where the truth lies because it is there on every page — resonant, self-­lacerating and frequently hilarious. How else to explain Feif­fer’s frank admissions that he could not stand his mother, even dead; that he coveted the success of peers; that he reflexively courted fame and the famous; and that the mysterious Woody Allen was not really so mysterious to him?

Ostensibly the memoir of an acclaimed cartoonist, “Backing Into Forward” is a portrait of a certain kind of New York during a specific era: the cultural and political foment of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. In that sense, “Backing Into Forward” is a prequel to “Just Kids,” Patti Smith’s memoir, which concurrently serves as a prism on New York’s artistic class.

By the end of his career at The Village Voice, Feiffer seemed to be everywhere — as a playwright, screenwriter, bon vivant — but it is worth remembering that he was not just a cartoonist, but a spectacular one. His cartoons ran in the paper for 41 years, a stretch during which that publication and many others churned through various generations of writers, voices and styles. Feif­fer used spare lines and fecund dialogue to very modern effect, deploying his fears and worries while lampooning ours. As a cultural critic, he understood that so many portentous subjects often came down to basic human insecurities. Although his strip in The Voice came to be called simply “Feif­fer,” to begin with, it was a neurotic’s triptych: “Sick, Sick, Sick.”

That title would fit nicely over his family’s back story. Born in the Bronx to Jewish parents humbled by the Depression, Feiffer was not a happy kid: “Fear was the principal emotion of my childhood. I was never not afraid.” Bossed around by a mother who blamed everyone else for her own dispossession, and undefended by a father who feared her, Feiffer captures his insignificance in a set piece about how his bar mitzvah was kidnapped by relatives. His hated Aunt Frances found him hiding in his bedroom examining a watch he had received, and lectured him to be careful before proceeding to break the watch as she demonstrated how to wind it. She left the room shouting a lie to everyone in earshot, that the young Feiffer had broken his brand-new gift.
To read David Carr's full review link to NYT here.






Related
Excerpt: ‘Backing Into Forward’ (March 18, 2010)
'Explainers,' by Jules Feiffer: Cartoons for Grown-Ups (October 19, 2008)
Michiko Kakutani’s Review of ‘Backing Into Forward’ (March 18, 2010)