Creators of ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ reminisce on its 50th anniversary
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NEW YORK - Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer are touring like rock stars. And at the age of 82 (Feiffer is the elder by six months), it's something they say they never saw coming.
The two are the author and illustrator, respectively, of "The Phantom Tollbooth," the beloved children's book that this year celebrates its 50th anniversary. To honor the milestone, Alfred A. Knopf Publishers in New York City, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, this week released two new editions of the book: a 50th-anniversary version and an annotated version, and have sent the two longtime friends and occasional collaborators on a whirlwind of appearances - together and solo - across the country.
The book, a modern fable which has been compared to such classics as Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," became an instant hit when it was published in 1961.
Juster and Feiffer say they are still trying to figure out why.
One reason, Feiffer suggests, might be that the book "spoke to kids in a way that no one had spoken to them before. The book became their friend. That's what happens to young readers. That's what happened to me and, I'm sure, with Norton," he said.
At each stop on the tour, Juster, who lives in Amherst, and Feiffer, who lives on Long Island, will talk about the book they created while living in the same apartment building in Brooklyn - Juster upstairs, Feiffer down.
During a recent two-hour interview at Random House in New York City, the pair chatted like the old buddies they are.
A matter of serendipity
Although Juster and Feiffer quickly became friends after they met, they say they had no idea they would become collaborators. That was simply a matter of serendipity.
As the Korean War was winding down, Juster, who was in the U.S. Navy stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was given a $77.10 monthly housing allowance and went in search of an apartment in nearby Brooklyn Heights. He found a spot in a basement apartment owned by a Viennese dentist, Dr. Noskin.
"She would accept the 77 dollars and 10 cents for that lavish apartment that didn't have its own bath - that was another room in the basement - but overlooked the garden. The garden, of course, was just the backyard. Not much in it. But you had light and it was nice," Juster said.
After he moved in, he met Feiffer, another tenant in the building.
"Jules and I just ran into each other during the course of doing what we had to do. Hanging out and picking up garbage," Juster recalled.
Feiffer would go on to an illustrious career: He is a wildly popular syndicated cartoonist, the author of 35 books, a playwright and a screenwriter. In 1986, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartooning in the Village Voice.
Juster is the author of 12 books, including "The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics," which he also illustrated, and "The Odious Ogre," published last year by Michael di Capua Books at Scholastic, and illustrated by Feiffer. It was the first book the two had worked on together since "The Phantom Tollbooth." Juster is also a founding partner of the architectural firm Juster Pope Associates, now Juster Pope Frazier, first located in Shelburne Falls and now in Northampton. He taught architecture and environmental design at Hampshire College in Amherst for 22 years.
Not long after encountering each other in the 1950s - they don't recall exactly when - Juster and Feiffer moved together into a run-down duplex at 153 State St., also in Brooklyn. And that's where the "Tollbooth" magic happened.
When he met Juster, Feiffer was already established in his career drawing cartoons for the Village Voice - something he did weekly for 42 years.
"The strip in the Voice was already talked about quite a bit. I think the first collection of strips came out in '58 and became a best-seller right away. So I was already on my way to becoming famous," Feiffer said.
But Juster was in a state of uncertainty.
Newly out of the Navy, he was working as an architect, teaching a class at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and trying to avoid writing a book for kids about urban planning for which he had received a $5,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.
The fact was, Juster admits, "I had no idea what it was I really wanted to do. ... I was very confused at that time."
Wordplay and puns
Apparently, Juster spent some of his time daydreaming. He started to fashion a whimsical tale about Milo, a bored schoolboy who travels to a fanciful land via a mysterious, magical tollbooth. Creating "The Phantom Tollbooth," Juster said, was both a way of procrastinating and an effort to make some sense out of a world in which he was foundering.
The book starts like this:
There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself - not just sometimes, but always. When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd bothered. Nothing really interested him - at least not all the things that should have.
Comparisons to Juster's own sense of uncertainty seem unavoidable.
"It was a metaphor," Feiffer said, "although I don't think Norton ever thought of it that way, nor did I until recently. It was simply about finding your own place. Working your own way through."
In Juster's tale, Milo, with plenty of time on his hands and a map for guidance, sets forth in his toy car to the Kingdom of Wisdom. Along the way, he takes the road to Expectations, where he meets the Whether Man, who tells Milo, "Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going. Of course, some people never go beyond Expectations, but my job is to hurry them along whether they like it or not."
The book is brimming with similar wordplay and puns. Juster said he inherited that talent from his father and it's a passion that continues to this day. "I really believe in the importance of the words," Juster said. "Kids love the words."
Among the characters in "The Phantom Tollbooth" are Dr. Kakofonous A. Dischord, a scientist who creates unpleasant sounds; twin princesses named Rhyme and Reason; and The Everpresent Wordsnatcher, a bird that "takes the words right out of your mouth."
As Milo drives to Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, the Mountains of Ignorance and The Silent Valley, he tries to make sense of a topsy-turvy world run by unaccommodating adults. Early on, he lands in the Doldrums, "where nothing ever happens and nothing ever changes." There he meets the Lethargarians, who produce a set of rules - local ordinance 574381-W - to govern his behavior.
"In the Doldrums, laughter is frowned upon and smiling is permitted only on alternate Thursdays. Violators shall be dealt with most harshly," the Lethargarians tell him.
"Well, if you can't laugh or think, what can you do?" asked Milo.
"Anything as long as it's nothing, and everything as long as it isn't anything."
Eventually, Milo is saved from the Doldrums by Tock, a watchdog.
Milo's eyes opened wide, for there in front of him was a large dog with a perfectly normal head, four feet and a tail - and the body of a loudly ticking alarm clock.
"What are you doing?" growled the watchdog. "Just killing time," replied Milo apologetically. "You see -"
"KILLING TIME!" roared the dog - so furiously that his alarm went off. "It's bad enough wasting time without killing it."
With that very thought in mind, Juster said, he paced back and forth in his upstairs apartment, furiously scribbling down his musings with paper and pencil - a method he uses to this day. It never occurred to him that he was writing a book.
"What I was doing was tap dancing really, because it was something that got me away from the book on cities, and it was kind of fun," Juster said. "Things began to pop into my mind. Things I remembered from childhood, or some other kinds of things that worked into my sense of wordplay, which I liked."
First reader hooked
In the meantime, Feiffer, living downstairs, became curious about his friend's incessant pacing. When he went to investigate, Juster told him about his project. Feiffer read a bit of it - he was the first person to do so - and was enthralled.
"It's hard to believe that it was the first thing he had ever written," Feiffer said. "The degree of control, of what he gives, what he takes away, what he doesn't give, it's done with such maturity and such style. ... It's quite remarkable."
He offered to do some drawings. "I don't remember this as a fact, but I clearly must have been charmed, because if it didn't appeal to me, if it didn't say something to me, I would have said, 'Very nice,' or 'I don't get it,'" Feiffer said. "Something must have made me want to start drawing. It wasn't that Norton suggested that I do some drawings. It was my idea."
And a good one, Juster added. "It seemed like an easy and inevitable collaboration. I couldn't consider it being done any other way."
Even with Feiffer as a sounding board, it took Juster several years to complete the work - it was a process, he said, that didn't always go smoothly.
"I spent many a dreadful time working for a whole day then crumpling everything up and throwing it out and feeling hopeless."
Over the decades, "The Phantom Tollbooth" has been translated into several languages. Director Chuck Jones adapted the book into an animated film in 1971; Juster adapted it in 1995 into a libretto for an opera, with a musical score by Arnold Black; and there also have been various stage adaptations, including a musical that runs through Nov. 20 at Wheelock College in Boston. In 2008, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington sponsored a six-month tour, and last year, director Gary Ross began development of a remake of "The Phantom Tollbooth" for Warner Bros.
So, how do Juster and Feiffer explain the book's staying power? They don't.
"I think the people who know the least about that are Norton and me," Feiffer said. "We don't have a clue."
Kathleen Mellen can be reached at kmellen@gazettenet.com.
