The Lower East Side was too squalid and depressing a home for me, the Village too much of a hot spot and competitive threat. So I had moved to the other side of the river, Brooklyn Heights. From there I could see the city as I meant it to be, the New York I couldn’t find while I was living in the middle of it. But if you walked the quarter-mile Promenade that frames the eastern border of the Heights, you saw the splashy movie version of the city, the soaring, breathtaking skyline that was so nice to have at a distance.
The Promenade was suspended above the mostly out-of-use waterfront, such a drop below that the Financial District across the river felt closer. It stretched along a leafy avenue of terraced and bedecked brown-stones and town houses looking out on overstuffed minigardens hemmed in by stately wrought-iron fences. Its sense of place might have been lifted off a side street of old Savannah or New Orleans.
David Levine lived on Hicks Street, a couple of blocks down from where I had found an apartment on the second floor of a four-story brown-stone owned and run by a retired dentist.
I had met David through my Fort Monmouth buddy Harvey Dinnerstein and his painter friend Burt Silverman. Harvey, Burt, and David, all living in Brooklyn, introduced me to other painters. I had never before hung out with painters, but here were Danny Schwartz, Herb Steinberg, Shelly Fink, Aaron Shikler, all of the realist school, most with the appropriate pinko politics to match. Their subject matter tended to be the working class at thankless labor or exhausted leisure, but David had a lighter side. He loved comics. He was delighted to learn that I had worked for Will Eisner, whom he admired. He was delighted to learn that I had grown up as a fan of Sheldon Mayer’s comic book creation Scribbly, a boy cartoonist with whom we both identified.
Dave, too, had been a boy cartoonist. Now he was a heavyset, friendly-faced fellow with a good-humored, ironic manner that made him fun to be around as long as you watched yourself. He had a dry and sometimes devastating wit. He showed me a series of cartoons he was working on as greeting cards, fine-lined, cross-hatched drawings that took their lead from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century English illustration. Interesting stuff but hardly an indication that within four or five years he would blossom into one of our greatest caricaturists, helping to establish, and gain fame for, the New York Review of Books.
Burt Silverman was a talkative, likable realist painter who taught himself how to play lefty folk songs on the guitar as a strategy to meet girls. Burt was affable even when he was pissed off. He laughed off disappointment, laughed off his own and others’ failures, laughed off the sterility and seeming permanence of Cold War America. It was a survival tool: outlast the fuckers.
Norton Juster and I met while taking out the garbage. At least that’s how I choose to remember it. We would have run into each other just outside Norton’s barred window on the basement floor of the brownstone of my second-floor furnished room on Hicks Street. No doubt it went this way: Norton spotted a new face and made a wisecrack. I wisecracked back, and we did that for a minute or two, admiring our own and each other’s wit. At the end of the contest, we introduced ourselves. I found out that Norton, though one would never guess it, was in the navy, a lieutenant stationed at a desk at the Brooklyn Navy Yard with six months to go on his enlistment. He was filling up the time he spent on duty by calling up pretty models whose pictures he had seen in newspapers and arranging to interview them for the Navy News Service. This was a fictional agency that Norton concocted to get himself dates, the kind of activity that, in the fifties, was dismissed as a prank but these days would doubtless get him arrested.
Norton was short and husky, with eyes that twinkled in a round face that beamed mischief. He walked and even napped as if he wore a back brace, which he didn’t. Nervous energy emanated out of him. He was ever-cordial, ever-competitive, mixing whimsy, wit, and curiosity with wisecracks and put-downs. The wordplay he was to employ a few years later in The Phantom Tollbooth worked its way into our everyday conversations.
You had to be in training to keep up with Norton. Not a problem—everyone our age was in training. We ran in place, we joked in place, playing our games slyly to indicate they didn’t mean that much. Winning was never the point, not in our present positions. The point was to score. Getting the edge on a friend once or twice in the course of a day inspired one to look forward to the next day.
Norton liked to cook. I liked to eat his cooking. And we had nonstop conversations about books, politics, and getting laid, toward which end he’d throw free-for-all garden parties. Outside his furnished basement room and a half was a small fenced-in garden, common to Brooklyn Heights town houses. Norton enjoyed preparing cold cuts and white bean salad and we split the purchase of wine and soft drinks. He’d put on some music and invite everyone he knew who might bring a pretty girl. I don’t remember either of us meeting women at these parties, but they continued on a regular basis until we moved out of Hicks Street to share a duplex on State Street.
At one of the parties, we happened to meet a young couple, recent Bennington graduates and folksingers, just married. They had moved in a couple of houses down Hicks a few days earlier and crashed the first noisy party they heard going on in the neighborhood.
They entertained us with folk songs for the next hour, some of them recorded on their new album, The Baby Sitters, about to be released. Their recording careers got them nowhere, and their marriage broke up. The wife, Jeremy, disappeared from my life, but her husband, Alan Arkin, became a friend, a very funny Second City actor, a genius movie star, and the incisive, farcical director of two of my plays, Little Murders and The White House Murder Case.
Norton was a trained architect. Shortly after leaving the service, he applied for and received a grant from the Ford Foundation. Five thousand dollars to write a book on urban design. As it turned out, he never got around to writing the book. Instead he commenced work on a novel for children, The Phantom Tollbooth.
When I agreed to do the illustrations he neglected to tell me that he was writing a classic. Otherwise, I might have drawn my finished art on something more substantial than tracing paper with a survival expectancy of zilch. No more than seven or eight drawings still exist, almost all of them in bad shape.
Norton started reading me pages of The Phantom Tollbooth not long after we had moved to State Street, where we were joined by an English friend, Max Eckstein, a professor at Queens College and chairman of the comparative lit department. This being Norton’s first book, he was unable to write a paragraph in his upstairs bedroom without running a flight down to my quarters to read it aloud, chuckle in admiration, and wait for me to say something and start drawing. In that manner, The Phantom Tollbooth began to take on shape, a case of tell and show.
Milo and Tock, the watchdog, from The Phantom Tollbooth, 1961
“Illustration” by Jules Feiffer, copyright © 1961 by Jules Feiffer. Copyright renewed 1989 by Jules Feiffer, from The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer. Used by permission of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Norton did all the cooking for the household and it was understood that the size and quality of the menu was dependent on the production of my art. To inspire him to excel (not in the text but in the kitchen), I did my best to appropriate the style of the early-twentieth-century English illustrator Edward Ardizzone.
Norton’s gift for language and puns and his admiration, even adoration, of classic children’s literature from Lewis Carroll to E. Nesbit to C. S. Lewis drove his story and his hero’s toy car forward, outraging logic, turning phrases, and testing young readers in ways that, decades hence, might well not be tolerated. In the dumbed-down culture of today, Norton’s wordplay can sound dangerously close to Finnegans Wake.
Through David and Burt, I met, and became friendly with, an older, would-be painter, an amateur who was taking lessons from my friends. A hawk-nosed, eagle-eyed fellow in his fifties who enjoyed hanging out with us, although we were from different generations and different backgrounds. He was a cheery fellow with a straightforward manner and weathered blue eyes that hinted at hard times. His name was Emil Goldfus, and he was from Canada and spoke with a light but resonant burr, a Scottish-sounding brogue.
Burt was the first to meet Emil, and he got to know him in a movie-style, meet-cute scenario. Burt painted in a sizable studio in the Overton, a downtown office building on Court Street on the edge of Brooklyn Heights. Other artists and writers found it a cheap and convenient location: David Levine painted there, and Norman Mailer had an office there where he worked on his new novel, The Deer Park, about Hollywood under the blacklist.
Emil entered our lives late one night by knocking on Burt’s studio door as Burt was in the process of unhooking his girlfriend’s brassiere. Emil announced his name from the other side of the door and asked if he could borrow a cup of turpentine. And in this comic fashion began a relationship that affected the lives of all of us.
Emil was friendly, benign, something of a burnt-out case, simpatico in a manner not unlike Dan Wolf’s at the Village Voice. He was a semiretired photofinisher with a studio full of cameras and radio equipment. Although Emil was close to our parents’ age, his lack of presence, his air of loneliness mixed with determined good cheer, led us to like him, include him, and trust him. We shared our views on everything from art and culture to politics, Reds, and Red-baiting. Emil absorbed our opinions without comment, seldom confiding his own thoughts. Not that we were interested. He was old and clearly going nowhere. We were young and our futures glowed before us with a bright light visible only to ourselves.
One look at him was enough to know that Emil was the past and we were the future. We were cocky and self-absorbed and hated to shut up. Emil’s mere existence as an audience for our outrageous comments and jokes was pleasing, a kind of validation. He made up in a small way for the lack of validation that came our way in the real world.
When he was not in residence at the Overton, no one knew where Emil lived. Periodically he went off on business trips and was gone for weeks, occasionally months. Out of sight, he was out of mind. On his return, however, we were glad to see him. I watched his skills as a painter progress over the two or three years that David and Burt instructed him. He was showing a new interest and feeling for color at the time the headlines took him out of our lives and the FBI arrested him.