Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer on his new graphic novel ‘Amazing Grapes’

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Let’s begin with a song. (Singing) Amazing grapes, how sweet to eat one bite. How can it be?

Ooh, that song – sung better, to be sure – is at the center of a new graphic novel for middle-grade readers. “Amazing Grapes” is by the great Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and illustrator of “The Phantom Tollbooth.” Jules Feiffer has been drawing and writing for a living since he was 17 years old. He is now 95 and joins us from his home in upstate New York. Jules, thanks so much for being with us.

JULES FEIFFER: It’s my pleasure.

SIMON: Why write a story for this age group when you’re in this current age group?

FEIFFER: It’s what I do. I sit down at a table, and I make notes and scrawl things down. And suddenly, as a result of scrawling, a notion hits me. And I scribble that and then another notion and another notion, and suddenly, I’m on a track somewhere. The one thing I don’t want to know ever is where I’m going before I get there. I follow the orders of the book. The book tells me where it wants to go, and I write, and I draw accordingly.

SIMON: The story begins with a pretty sad event. The father of a family walks out on his wife and three children, Shirley, Perlie and Curly.

FEIFFER: That’s right. He’s not a nice guy apparently.

SIMON: Yeah.

FEIFFER: But everything that happens as a result of that leads this family into adventures and into universes that’s an infinite improvement on the home they’ve been living in and the life they’ve been living in. And if there’s a point to the book – and I don’t know that there is a point to the book – it’s go where your sense of adventure takes you. Go where your sense of surprise takes you. And don’t ever lose your sense of play ’cause the book is full of a sense of play.

And I found, as I got older over the years, my sense of play has gotten more relevant, in a sense, to my daily life. If it’s not all, in some way or another, full of play, I don’t want to do it.

SIMON: Wow. So you make more room for play in your life now than you did?

FEIFFER: Or my sense of play makes room for me. It lets me in. When I was a young man and a middle-aged man, I did the work I loved, and I always did the work I loved. But I worried a lot, and I troubled over it a lot. But as I got older and things got more fixed and I couldn’t do anything about them and I had health problems – a couple of heart attacks, long hospital stays, this, that, the other – when things get settled like that, you make a deal, or you don’t, and that is to use your remaining time to be as productive as you can and to have as good a time as you can. That’s how I’m trying to live these years.

SIMON: So a two-headed duck or swan enters the story.

FEIFFER: Yes. And the two-headed swan – it’s kind of the master of ceremonies for the book. There were three children, and two out of the three, he takes on these adventures.

SIMON: The children go into another dimension…

FEIFFER: Yes.

SIMON: …And meet their mother. I don’t want to tell too much, but it reminded me that I wish we could meet our parents when they were children, when they were younger.

FEIFFER: Well, in a way, I think we do know our parents when they’re younger. We may have forgotten. But my mother, who lived a very hard life – she was the sole source of income during the years of the Great Depression. I was born in 1929, and she was a fashion designer. And she had a terrible life. And she and I had a terrible relationship. But before that terrible relationship, she had a sense of playfulness, and she sang songs.

And I realized that the only thing wrong with my mother was that, like a nice Jewish girl, she did what her family told her to do, which was get married when she didn’t want to and have a family which she didn’t want and she wasn’t any good at. So the irony of all of that is it worked out to my good fortune, to my benefit. What she was not allowed to do, what she was robbed of, I was gifted with. And the older I get, the less forgetful of that I am, and the more it becomes the point of my continued existence.

SIMON: Yeah. Did I get the song right?

FEIFFER: “Amazing Grapes”? You did great (laughter).

SIMON: Thank you.

FEIFFER: The idea of “Amazing Grapes” – years ago, Obama was at this funeral in the South doing a memorial.

SIMON: Yeah, I remember.

FEIFFER: I think everybody remembers. And out of nowhere, suddenly he stops and starts singing “Amazing Grace.” There probably wasn’t a dry eye in the Western world. It so took me – the naturalness, the beauty of it, its connectedness to us all, whoever us all were. And somewhere, all these years later, when I was looking for an idea to turn into a book, the “Amazing Grace” song of Obama came through. Because it’s a children’s book, I had to play with it, and I turned it into “Amazing Grapes,” and I had my story.

SIMON: Are you on to the next project already?

FEIFFER: Of course. What a foolish question. Of course. When my wife, Joan, found this house, which is a thing of great beauty surrounded by great beauty, my earliest thought was that I have to find a way to make myself worthy of this, you know, to pay this off, the privilege of this being my day-to-day experience. And so I started fooling both with drawing and text, which is drawn on 18-by-24 sheets of watercolor paper. Because I – among other things, I’m suffering from acute macular degeneration, I have to work big, big, big, big, big to see what I’m doing. And I’m letting the book tell the story, in memoir form, of my life from the time I was a baby to the time I am an old man.

But I’m happier now than I ever have been, doing the work I love and having a wife I’m crazy about and living this wonderful life to the end, where I can say things and do things, and my work has been accepted so that I can get away with it. Getting away with it is a very important deal.

SIMON: Jules Feiffer, his new book – latest thing he’s gotten away with – his first for middle-grade readers, “Amazing Grapes.” Thank you so much for being with us.

FEIFFER: This has been a great pleasure. As you know, I’ve followed you for years.

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