Jules Feiffer Tries Yet Another New Thing

Christopher Borrelli’s interview with Jules Feiffer in the Chicago Tribune brings out several interesting remarks about his multifaceted career:

Q: You've done so many different things — where do your biggest royalty checks come from?

A: (Laughs.) A diversity of places. Mostly children's books, I suppose. A lot of it comes from "The Phantom Tollbooth," the book I did with Norton Juster. That book has become a great annuity for me, a sizable one. It just celebrated its 50th anniversary, and it's amazing how well it still sells. It's also amazed me how much the book and my art has been remembered. At the time, in the early '60s, it was work that I didn't really appreciate that much. I had difficulty doing it and didn't feel like I was a natural at that kind of thing.

Q: Was it hard because so much of "Phantom Tollbooth" feels abstract?

A: No. Maurice [Sendak], in the new edition, wrote that I was one of the few cartoonists who can illustrate ideas. I've always felt that illustrating the abstract — drawing ideas — is one of the primary jobs of the cartoonist. . . .

Q: How did the death of Maurice Sendak affect you?

A: When you said his name my heart sank. I loved him. We rarely saw each other because he was in Connecticut. But we had deep affection for each other. When he had his first heart attack, he was in London and I happened to be in London, so I spent time with him. But we were very different in temperament. He was much more of a Russian Jew than I was, much more given to doubts of depression and grimness, and I never entirely lost some of the giddy boy-cartoonist traits I've always had. We would sit for hours and talk.

Q: And like Maurice, you seem too acidic to write children's books.

A: True. (Children's books) were a means to an end, a way to make me a living. Children's books were not a passion. That's how I felt in the '50s — once I met Maurice, I didn't think I would dare compete with him. But years later, after one of my plays, "Grown Ups," got beat up badly, I thought I needed another obsession. My idea was about this kid cartoonist, and that became "The Man in the Ceiling." I wrote it, then I called Maurice, and he gave me the name of his editor, Michael di Capua, and I've been with Michael ever since.

Feiffer’s current project is Kill My Mother, a graphic novel drawn in a film noir style he expects his fans not to recognize.

Yes, thought I could write a graphic novel, someone else could illustrate it. But as it developed, it ended up being long, starting in 1933, then switching to 1943, going from the Depression to World War II. And I couldn't find anyone to draw it right. For this kind of Chandler-Hammett noir thing, you need shadows, rain. So I had to learn how to do it. Fortunately, I have Turner Classic Movies. I record all this film noir, "The Maltese Falcon," "The Big Sleep," and hit pause on my remote. That's been my research medium. It will not be drawn (in a) traditional Feiffer style. I stole from [Will] Eisner. I hope it will be finished by the end of next year.

Last month Feiffer told Publishers Weekly about this project:

Feiffer went on to explain that, “when I started out in the comic book business, I didn’t plan on producing social and political commentary,” and said he really wanted to produce action/adventure comics strips like his cartoonist heroes, Will Eisner (The Spirit) and Roy Crane (Wash Tubbs). “But I couldn’t draw like them. Since I had no qualifications and couldn’t imitate them, I tried to do my own thing,” Feiffer said.

The Tribune interview also contains remarks about Hugh Hefner as an editor, Philip Roth as a joker, Jack Nicholson starstruck by Warren Beatty, and more.

Brother, Can You Paradigm for the Tollbooth?

With all the attention flowing to The Phantom Tollbooth on its fiftieth anniversary, I decided to do what Peter Sagal warned against: to reread the book as an adult.

The copy I found on my shelf was issued for the thirty-fifth anniversary, with a foreword by Maurice Sendak. I was surprised to find that my copy is also autographed by author Norton Juster and artist Jules Feiffer. I’ve met Juster once or twice, but never asked for his signature, and I’ve never met Feiffer. I guess I bought a copy they signed for Books of Wonder or another store, but I’d prefer to think of those autographs as a mysterious apparition.

Sagal’s warning and my own memory of first reading the novel (I vaguely liked it, didn’t love it) meant I wasn’t subject to crushing disappointment on rereading. Juster’s play with words and logic is clever throughout, but it’s a single note struck over and over.

The young hero Milo is quite a blank slate; feeling bored is hardly a galvanizing personality trait. At least he’s not a paragon, however. As in some other fantasies written for the same age range, the protagonist’s lack of a strong, distinct personality might make it easier for young readers to project themselves into his adventures.

I had long thought of The Phantom Tollbooth as a portal fantasy, but I was struck by how closely the book followed that standard map:

• Milo goes through an unusual opening to a fantasy world. That portal’s a tollbooth, but it might as well be a mirror, a wardrobe, or a cyclone.
• Milo’s status as a newcomer allows the characters of that world to explain it all for the benefit of the readers.
• There’s something wrong in that world (Princesses Rhyme and Reason are missing), and Milo gets the mission to fix it. Because the fate of the world must always depend on an eleven-year-old who pops up out of nowhere.
• Over the course of a journey, Milo accumulates companions (Tock, the Humbug), knowledge (so many valuable lessons about life), and tools (a stolen sound) that allow him to fulfill that mission. Whatever was wrong with that world is fixed, and the status quo ante is restored.
• After a celebration, Milo returns to his own world, more mature and sure of himself than he began.

Next spring, I’ll talk on types of fantasy at SCBWI New England’s annual conference, and I’ll certainly use The Phantom Tollbooth as a paradigmatic example.

Synesthesia, the Phantom Phenomenon

Leonard Marcus’s interviews for the new Annotated Phantom Tollbooth and the recent New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik bring out what seems to be new information on the source of author Norton Juster’s “nonsense”: it reflected how he actually saw the world as a child.

Juster told Gopnik:

“I had an ailment called synesthesia,” Juster explained, pronouncing the word carefully. “I could only do numbers by colors.” His mind—in a way that will be familiar to readers of the memoirs of that fellow-synesthete [Vladimir] Nabokov—made instant, inescapable associations between a number and a color. “I can still remember a few: 4 was blue, 7 was black, and so the only way I could do math was by associating colors.”

In the novel, at the Dictionopolis marketplace Milo nibbles on some letters, gaining the sensation of tastes. Later he conducts an orchestra that produces colors. And of course the whole book concretizes the abstract.

Some readers, such as Patricia Lynne Duffy in Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their Worlds and this article in LinguaPhile, had already recognized that Juster’s text described that mental phenomenon. But I don’t recall him speaking of his experience before.

The Phantom Tollbooth in Its Time

In a New Yorker article about the fiftieth-anniversary editions of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, Adam Gopnik wrote:

It’s a commonplace of scholarship to insist that children’s literature came of age when it began to break away from the authoritarian model of the moralizing allegory. Yet “The Phantom Tollbooth” is an old-fashioned moralizing allegory, with a symbolic point at every turn.

And that’s why the book can grate on adults like Peter Sagal.

The “coming of age” that Gopnik mentions occurred decades, perhaps a century, before Juster started writing. Such obvious “moralizing allegory” was long gone. Sure, there were still moralizing tales like Betty MacDonald’s Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (1947-), and William Pène du Bois was about to tackle the deadly sins (1966-). Even today, most people expect novels to leave children with a sense of hope and other subtle nudges in a right direction. But allegorical characters that spell out their valuable lessons about life without a wink—those were as old-fashioned as Pilgrim’s Progress.

The Phantom Tollbooth brought back the form, but its characters have less to say about morals than about intellect. Milo learns to see the world from different perspectives, not to jump to conclusions, and other rules of proper abstract thought. The book depicts using one’s intellect to be as important as much earlier allegories had urged readers to use their piety and/or moral sense.

going back through the Phantom Tollbooth

Peter Sagal, host of NPR's uproarious Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!, wrote a fine essay in the Chicago Tribune about reading The Phantom Tollbooth to his daughters. Such was his early love for the book that he would have named each of those female children Milo if not for the little matter of a missing Y chromosome.

The girls enjoyed the book, but Sagal found rereading it painful:

...moments I had treasured from the book down through the decades now seemed like cheap gags. The first place he arrives is a stop in the road called "Expectations." Thus, every place he goes after that is "beyond Expectations." Get it? At one point the characters make statements unsupported by facts and suddenly fly through the air to an island called "Conclusions." They jump to Conclusions. See?

Milo's friends on his quest, whom I had once thought of as my own friends, were simple archetypes who showed up, made their speeches and vanished. Where as a child I had seen mystery and wonder, as an adult I saw smug, self-satisfied intellectual humor. . . .

But I should stress, again, that while I was sitting in our beat-up glider chair reading the book, silently, motionlessly writhing as my childhood collapsed around my ears, my kids were having a fine old time.

I suspect that Sagal would have writhed just as much if he'd gotten a look at himself at the age when he first read and loved The Phantom Tollbooth. And even more if he'd been able to see into his mind at that point. I know I would have. "Self-satisfied intellectual humor" seemed like an apogee to aspire to.

The Tollbooth seems expertly calibrated for kids breaking into the realm of abstract thought. The puns and archetypes that Sagal now finds so facile are almost all based on abstractions like "Expectations" and "Conclusions." The book's treatment of them isn't very deep, to be sure. But it's many miles wide: it takes young readers on a whirlwind tour of the new possibilities of their minds, their language, their logic and mathematics. If you read the Tollbooth at the right age, its jokes are funny because they come at you for the first time, and because they represent the delight of discovering a new way to play with the world.

Now when I say "expertly calibrated for kids," I mean not calibrated at all, by someone who never claimed to be an expert and wasn't thinking of kids. As Juster told an interviewer at Powells.com, "There was no audience but me." Eventually he was also writing for his neighbor Jules Feiffer, who had gotten the assignment of illustrating this strange book. (Similar remarks from Juster at AbsoluteWrite.com.) The Tollbooth had to come from outside the children's lit field. It's not about vivid characters or a plausible world or a tight plot. It's about exploring something more, beyond Expectations.

I think everyone should read The Phantom Tollbooth once. Life won't be the same. Rereading many years later--well, that might indeed be painful.