Confessions of a Cockeyed Artist

Armed with a finely tempered wit, a keenly observant eye, and a talent for expressing both, cartoonist Jules Feiffer breezed into Cambridge for a one-day stop last week in his whirlwind tour of college bookstores throughout New England.

Holding forth from behind a table in Barnes & Noble, Feiffer autographed his books (Sick, Sick, Sick, and his latest, Passionella), speedily reproduced many of his characters on request, and generally entertained the local menagerie with his peculiar blend of a genuine inquisitive interest in humanity and a quiescent abandon with which he was endowed as a native son of the Bronx.

Feiffer's childhood, which he describes as "monotonous," was colored by cocktail parties when he was twelve ("We were a sophisticated group of kids") and fantasies of becoming Jimmy Cagney, which he grew out of at fourteen, when he decided to become Humphrey Bogart. "After I got out of Monroe (James Monroe High School). I didn't do anything. I got drafted. I got out. I sat in my room and worried." And now, he admits, "I still don't know where it's going."

Except for boyhood aspirations, Feiffer never wanted to be anything but a cartoonist. When asked what he really wanted to do in life, he immediately replied, "I'm doing it," and added that he would continue "until they catch on to me." For a while, Feiffer attended the Pratt Institute of Art in New York where, as he says, he learned "very little." "But," he confesses, "that was probably more my fault than theirs."

Asked why he thought society was "sick," Feiffer replied, "I pick up a newspaper in the morning, and it's the only logical conclusion I can come to." (He is particularly disturbed about nuclear tests, radiation fallout, etc. as is evidenced by his section in Passionella entitled "Bomb.") "All I'm doing is counting heads."

Generally, Feiffer takes an optimistic view towards people. "They're apathetic about everything, but they're coming out of it. Everyone seems to have one prime desire in life, that's to cop out." He doesn't see himself as part of the beat or silent generation because, as he says, "I don't identify myself with any generation. I sometimes have enough trouble identifying myself."

In replying to the numerous queries put to him during his six hour visit, Feiffer relied on his spontaneous and quick reflexes which, when added to his other birdlike features, gave him a general appearance not unlike that of a chicken hawk on the make.

On folk music: "I used to be wild about folk songs, but now, after ten years of listening to them, I'm a little less wild. Folk music is like all good things; it attracts people who are pretentious and affectacious, but that doesn't detract from the songs themselves."

On Mort Sahl: "Our outlook is similar because we have a similar approach to many things, and because some of the same things frighten us."

Inevitably, discussion drifted toward Feiffer's plans for his next book. He admitted that he hadn't given much thought to another book, but speculated that one might be published next year, "maybe it will be something about the Presidential elections." "My next project" he said, "will be a screen play. Someone came along one day and said, 'How'd you like to write a movie script?' I said, 'Gee, yeah.' So, this summer I'm going to try. It's something I've always wanted to do."

Time after time, Feiffer was asked to do caricatures of people ranging from Napoleon to Senator Kennedy or Fidel Castro. Most of the characters in his own cartoons, according to Feiffer, are not people he has really seen, but rather stereotypes "filtered through our general mass culture." "In order to point out the things you want to point out," he explained, you have to take an image and "distort it slightly" by running it through "a cockeyed mirror."

There is no doubt that Feiffer receives great satisfaction from his work. Even though he is only thirty, it took a long time for his work to gain any acceptance beyond the limited audience of the Village Voice, a weekly published in Greenwich Village to which Feiffer contributed cartoons before they were collected and published in his first book.

Now that he is enjoying a moderate degree of success by satirically trampling on virtually all of the contemporary fads and values, even he doesn't know who is buying his books. What's more, he doesn't seem to care, as he refuses to write for a particular audience. "I think it would be fatal to do it," he commented. And then he added philosophically, "When I stop pleasing me, I might as well quit."