Collecting Himself Read online

  Collecting Himself

  JAMES THURBER

  ON WRITING AND WRITERS,

  HUMOR AND HIMSELF

  Michael J. Rosen, Editor

  Contents

  Preface

  Courting the Muse

  THURBER AT WORK

  Speaking of His Own Writing …

  The Theory and Practice of Criticizing the Criticism of the Editing of New Yorker Articles (with a Lighted Candle for Wolcott Gibbs)

  Unfamiliar Misquotations

  If You Ask Me (The Envelope of Miscellany)

  The Book-End

  THURBER ON OTHER WRITERS

  Excerpts from “The Book-End,” 1923

  More Authors Cover the Snyder Trial

  If You Ask Me (Thomas Wolfe)

  Recommended Reading

  What Price Conquest?

  Taps at Assembly

  If You Ask Me (Anne Morrow Lindbergh)

  The Odyssey of Disney

  Peace, It’s Wonderful

  Tempest in a Looking Glass

  Voices of Revolution

  “Don’ts” for the Inflation

  Notes for a Proletarian Novel

  Ave Atque Vale

  Recollections of Henry James

  The Preface to “The Old Friends”

  Belles Lettres and Me

  THURBER AT LARGE IN THE WRITERS’ COMMUNITY

  The Harpers and Their Circle

  A Visit from Saint Nicholas (in the Ernest Hemingway Manner)

  An Evening with Carl Sandburg

  No More Biographies

  How to Tell a Fine Old Wine

  What Price a Farewell to Designs?

  The Literary Meet

  Memoirs of a Banquet Speaker

  A Mile and a Half of Lines

  THURBER ON HIS DRAWINGS

  Answers-to-Hard-Questions Department

  Speaking of Drawings …

  Glimpses of the Art Conference

  Matinee and Evening

  THURBER ON PLAYS AND PLAYWRITING

  Tonight at 8:30

  Letter from the States

  A Farewell to Santa Claus (or, Violins Are Nice for Boys with Chins)

  One Man in His Time

  Is There a Killer in the House?

  Producers Never Think Twice

  Roaming in the Gloaming

  Thurber Reports His Own Play, The Male Animal, with His Own Cartoons

  The Quality of Mirth

  The World Laughs with Them

  THURBER ON THE STATE OF HUMOR

  And the World Laughs with Them

  Groucho and Me

  Speaking of Humor …

  The State of Humor in the States

  How to Tell Government from Show Business

  On the Brink of Was

  Thinking Ourselves into Trouble

  A Biographical Sketch of James Thurber by James Thurber

  Notes

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  In Praise of James Thurber

  Books by James Thurber

  About the Editor

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  When visitors come to The Thurber House, the home where Jim and his family resided during his college years, 1913 to 1917, the home that eventually shaped many of the tales in My Life and Hard Times, they want to discover the familiar stories and drawings preserved, somehow, along with the oiled pine floors where Thurber’s bull terrier Rex slept, among the fixtures that—still?—leak electricity. They want to sound out songs from Thurber’s early Scarlet Mask musicals on a piano whose price in the Sears Roebuck catalogue of the times was about the cost of a decent typing chair today. They hope to sight Thurber’s youthful inspirations haunting the house in cahoots with the famous ghost that got in.

  Those who remember how Thurber’s progressing blindness prompted him to draw with a black crayon on poster-sized paper or with white chalk on black paper ask to try on his Zeiss loop, that headband of magnifying lenses Thurber wore to accomplish those last drawings. Not normally a part of the tour, the loop creates a frightening topography of the wrinkles and hairs on a hand held five inches from its lenses. (See Thurber’s own Fig. I.) They want to sniff the cologne in the monogrammed bottle from Dunhill’s, open Thurber’s leather briefcase, decipher a framed canary page of Thurber’s enormous, barely legible script. (Consider, too, the handwriting in the excerpted letter.) The boldest visitors will tentatively depress the space bar on the Underwood #5 typewriter on which Thurber composed many of the stories and casuals for The New Yorker.

  We can show visitors these things. The docents can read aloud from the Columbustown stories. But we fall short, of course, in our attempts to show Thurber becoming a writer, discovering his particular materials and genius, and honing the forms that would best convey his bristling compound of hard-earned, soft-hearted sympathy for this wayward, worrisome, and often unwelcoming world. We’re unable to display how he came to make his work, his art, his labor, out of these very surroundings and their biographical circumstances.

  Collecting Himself begins to address this subtler curiosity that a reader, a literary pilgrim, might possess about James Thurber. Were Thurber alive, were he a part of our guest writers series at The Thurber House, the reader’s interest would probably be articulated with the same general questions our audience members invariably pose to visiting contemporary writers: (I) “What are your ‘conditions’ for writing?” (i.e., What are your ideal hours, surroundings, and paraphernalia?); (2) “What were your influences?” (i.e., Who did you read, what did you study, and where did you gather material?); and (3) “What are you reading now?” (i e., Who do you ad mire, who should I be reading, do you agree that so and so is over-/underrated?). The audience members also pose questions less specific to literary life, questions that might be asked of the writer-as-correspondent—or better, respondent: a worldly attaché whose views on political embroilments and cultural phenomena they would like to hear expressed with the same fluency and perspicuity with which the writer’s published work has been enjoyed.

  In lieu of a casual evening with the author, Collecting Himself should begin to respond to those questions about James Thurber as a composite creature: reader, writer, cartoonist, critic, journalist, respondent, and above all (or through it all) an unclassifiable Thurber—a beast that readers around the world have adopted, read, taught, and shared like no other figure in the natural history of pictures and letters.

  By “collecting himself,” I mean something akin to “composing himself,” and I submit that the present compilation will show something of Thurber’s literary composition: a rare admixture of abandon, conscientiousness, curiosity, uneasiness, urgency, pedantry, confabulation, wiliness—so many conflicting qualities that his prose recognized rather than reconciled. Arranged primarily by theme rather than by chronology or genre, the pieces here show a man learning—as in the other meaning of “to collect”—to reorient himself, as if after some unsettling personal or public confrontation. It should be no surprise that humor is Thurber’s prevailing mode of equilibrium, that single form that has it both ways: admits and refutes; calls into question and then answers. It should also be no surprise that men, women, dogs, and other reputable distractions play important parts in Thurber’s balancing act, however writerly or literary the table of contents might appear.

  The work included in Collecting Himself has never appeared in a book by James Thurber. With few exceptions—notably those that have never appeared in print before—the writings, captioned drawings, and spot illustrations enjoyed a one-time appearance in a magazine or a newspaper or as a part of another author’s book.


  While Thurber included some of his best pieces on his own work and reading in his many anthologies, the convening, in a single volume, of the many he did not choose presents a creative coherence that has never before emerged in all of its passion and dispassion, flippancy and contempt, awe and eloquence. Writing of others’ works, Thurber discovered the values that he would either appreciate or disdain in his own work. By plotting the points that he makes in reference to others (x=here, a genuine concern; y=there, a round of unreserved applause, or a dismissive swipe, or a raised eyebrow), a figure of Thurber’s own accomplishment can be traced. This is, I believe, what we mean by a writer’s style: the working solution of those qualities that a writer holds to and holds off simultaneously.

  I have tried to employ Thurber’s own instincts for anthologizing by mixing various kinds of work—article, essay, review, cartoon, parody—into a volume that can be read from cover to cover. Unless one pruned or burnished each piece, there is no escaping the eclectic, momentum-gathering, at-large-and-getting-larger ways of Thurber’s energetic considerations. All that’s left to us is relishing. Nonetheless, I have imposed a design, intending it to be the sort that Robert Frost commended when he spoke of a poem moving under the weight of its own making “like a block of ice on a hot stove.” Collecting Himself should glide with the passionate heat and portentous weight of humor through Thurber’s working thoughts on his creative processes, on the climate for humor writing and playwriting, on the inspirations for his drawings, on the works of his contemporaries and on contemporary society.

  Perhaps any composite recollection of a writer is as cheerfully skewed as the seance in Thurber’s famous drawing in which the medium announces, “I can’t get in touch with your uncle, but there’s a horse here that wants to say hello.” But perhaps we can yet make out a ghostlike image of James Thurber from the imitations, parodies, letters, “playlets,” apologies, editorials, cartoons, and tributes that Thurber wrote in the nearly fifty-year period contained here.

  The texts are as free from editorial intervention as possible; a footnote is supplied only when a reader might otherwise be distracted by a reference or allusion. The Notes section at the end of the book provides relevant contextual annotations as well as information about where and when each piece was originally published.

  The greatest attrition in compiling this book occurred among pieces where the requisite editorial framework would have weakened the effective punch of the writing. Primarily, these were writings centered on an individual who has been displaced from our current attention and memory or reviews and prefaces of books outside our familiar canon that Thurber did not feel compelled to summarize or gloss himself.

  I have supplied an additional structure to coalesce excerpts from some of Thurber’s interviews and commentaries. As he enjoyed continual popularity from works as wide-ranging as his Fables, his revue A Thurber Carnival, and his various published collections, Thurber agreed to a staggering number of formal and informal, written and oral, brief and extended interviews. In pieces that span some thirty years of questions and answers, the interviewers, too, shared but a few basic questions, focusing on his early years, his eyes, his method of drawing, his tactics in writing, his relationship to Harold Ross or E. B. White, his true thoughts on dogs and women. In London during 1958, having been “assiduously solicited by press, TV, and radio on everything from the future of humor in the nuclear age to the sex life of frustrated bloodhounds,” Thurber told Eddy Gilmore, “I’m getting tired of hearing about myself over here.” In the AP story of August 10, Gilmore added, “But he said it softly. And almost as if he felt he was to blame for getting tired of himself.”

  Clearly, the whole popularizing and intrusive phenomenon, combined with Thurber’s extraordinary memory, helped him to polish his multifarious experience and considerable opinions into anecdotes, soliloquies, spiels, and aphorisms. These selected pieces form a loose monologue that appears throughout the book in sections called “Speaking of…” I have intended these fragments to derive further substantiation from the book’s calculated, revised expressions, in hopes of allaying what I suspect would have been stern reservations on Thurber’s part. Despite his generosity with the media, he was wary of dangers created by the ease of oral composition. After a lengthy interview with Harvey Brandon, he sent his misgivings in a three-page, single-spaced letter to Brandon:

  In the watches of the night I began remembering recent verbal assaults I have made, when in a bad mood, upon the craze for interviews. My opposition lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language in my country and yours [England]…. While lying around dawn this morning I began polishing some of the things I told you. Since I rewrite everything all the way through from five to twenty times, it is hard for me to think of my conversational replies being used as my final considered opinions and judgments.

  (According to Brandon, both participants finally conceded that the taped conversation was the better. [BRANDON])

  The last question to which any posthumous volume might be subjected is, “Why didn’t the author collect these pieces before?” In Thurber’s specific case, more than the usual number of factors combine to provide the always unsatisfactory answer.

  But before any supererogation on my part, I should note that Thurber shot several, somewhat parting, glances at his future executor’s work. In “The Notebooks of James Thurber,” published posthumously in Credos and Curios, Thurber pokes among his own “memoranda and memorabilia”:

  What I came up with presents a very dark picture indeed, complete with at least seven major deterrents [to a “serious literary executor”]: persistent illegibility, paucity of material, triviality of content, ambiguity of meaning, facetious approach, preponderance of juvenilia, and exasperating abbreviation.

  Thurber described the executor himself with no less delicacy, suspecting that he

  will hang around your house, known as “the estate,” for at least a year, mousing through voluminous papers, collating and annotating, drinking your Scotch with your widow, and sometimes, in the end, marrying your daughter.

  There is also the disturbing chance that your executor … may stumble on the Figure in the Carpet…. That is, he may adduce from the notebooks dubious internal evidence supporting the theory that you were …

  well, various things. In what follows I hope that in my role as mere editor, I have escaped Thurber’s prefiguring as I propose my reasons for selecting what Thurber himself never selected, and I make public my genuine appreciation of—not my marital intentions toward—Rosemary Thurber, James’s executrix and daughter.

  The simplest answer and, admittedly, the most daunting to an editor is that Thurber didn’t like the specific writing. I hope, of the nearly fifty pieces included here, this reason applies to very few, but I risk saying that a writer’s own estimation of a given piece at a given time isn’t necessarily a judgment of its actual quality. Moreover, humorous writing, the sort of nervy, unnerved journalism that Thurber fashioned, is, perhaps, all the more inscrutable within the span of one’s own life. The problem could be—Thurber himself discusses this danger in the “Speaking of Humor …” section—that the humor of a piece didn’t age well. It could also be, I offer, that it didn’t age long enough. As we near the twenty-first century, we can look at a Thurber parody from the 1930s, for example, and regard it as a genuine representative of a period—both the cultural period and the period of Thurber’s own writing. (Certainly, the latter perspective would tax an author’s humility beyond the bounds of critical assessment.) The view from the 1940s—whether from that of a reader or that of the anthologizing eye of the author himself—might have seen this same parody as outdated, not timely enough, or rendered trite by the popularity of lesser versions by subsequent practitioners. The view from the 1950s might have seen this same piece as “nostalgic,” too familiar to be rediscovered and yet too remote to be ful
ly recognizable. But now, nearly thirty years after Thurber’s death and fifty years after our 1930s example was first published, the humor of the writing can be seen for exactly what it was; in the overwhelming number of cases, we can also see the humor for what it is today.

  Other simpler answers for Thurber’s omissions, answers more frequently shared by other authors, include the possibility that a given writing was too closely related to another feature in a particular book or, conversely, that it was not related enough to fit that book’s theme. And another: that Thurber felt the piece—say, a review or an introduction—was in the service of another writer’s work, not really something he wanted to claim for his own general readership.

  The more complicated, Thurber-specific reasons arise from his progressive blindness, the many eye surgeries, and the strain of related physiological and psychological illnesses, which often physically kept Thurber from writing, but always kept his writing physically from him. True, Thurber could compose in his head, holding up to 2,000 words, he often boasted; he could fit a dozen handwritten words on one sheet of paper and thereby construct a casual (a brief essay for “Talk of the Town” in The New Yorker) the size of a novel; he would dictate to his secretaries and to his wife, Helen, and he could readily respond to someone reading a piece back to him—but it is implausible to imagine Thurber in full possession of the enormous body of his uncollected work. Even allowing Thurber his extremely retentive memory, how many projects—the all-but-finished, the to-be-revised, the rejected-and-to-be-reconsidered, the finished-and-awaiting-a-place, and so on—could he command? And we must remember that on top of previous work or reworking, Thurber continued to write with an obsessive, manic charge (even if only his prolific, often prodigious, correspondence) through all but his most compromised days.

  Indeed, there were always several new projects in progress—plays that never reached an acting script, a novel that preoccupied a decade, each month’s projected stories, casuals, or essays. Despite the heroic labors of his wife, friends, or secretaries, it is highly likely that an individual piece was overlooked, displaced, or forgotten in the heat of an especially volatile project; it is certain that several were prevented from receiving the many extensive revisions that Thurber imposed on his work. Yet it is also amazing—and it is with this note of confidence that my guesswork concludes—that Thurber managed to execute as much as he did and that there remain for present readers the pleasures of both the vintage and the novelty of his work.