by Michael Sims
Andy claimed that he asked the bird about this restless unease.
Baby confessed that he was not entirely happy with his life now that he had been joined in the cage by a “wife,” Justa, whose tendency to noble self-sacrifice manifested itself in digging choice bits out of the seed cup and leaving them on top for her husband to find. Baby insisted that he would prefer to find them himself. “Take away an artist’s troubles,” he complained to Andy, “and what has he?”
In this scenario, Andy pointed out that Baby’s love lyrics to Justa during their first few weeks together were his most beautiful music. “That throat-bulging song that ripples my feathers and shakes my frame,” Baby replied, “that song of desire and love and conquest—it’s life, but it isn’t art.”
“I’m in love, and I’m going crazy.”
(translation of a Boston terrier’s bark)
IN MARCH 1927 a new writer came on board at The New Yorker, a tall and nearsighted, bespectacled and mustached thirty-two-year-old named James Thurber. He had considerably more journalistic experience than Andy. He had already worked as a newspaperman in his native Columbus, Ohio, as well as for the Chicago Tribune in Paris alongside other expatriates such as William Shirer. Thurber was serious about his career as a writer, but like Andy he couldn’t remain solemn for more than an hour at work. In Paris, Thurber liked to sneak in fictional filler paragraphs, including one quoting President Coolidge as having said to a religious convention that a man who does not pray is not a praying man.
Thurber and Andy had met through a mutual acquaintance. Ross got the idea that they were old friends, however, and impressed as he was with Andy, he immediately hired Thurber. Ross was seeking, as always, a managing editor who could orchestrate all the burgeoning departments of the magazine—a “jesus,” they called it in the office. Ross himself referred to this elusive messiah as the Hub. Ross didn’t quite explain to Thurber that he had nominated him for the role. Completely unsuited, Thurber was miserable, but when offered the job he was having little success as a freelancer. He was so poor he had begun to think of doughnuts and cocktail-party anchovies as sustenance. At The New Yorker he wanted to write, not edit, and eventually Ross permitted him to.
Among the early tasks assigned to Andy was writing captions for cartoons, which Ross usually referred to simply as “drawings.” Ross was as fanatically attentive to every line of a cartoon as he was to every word in an essay. He tended to ask about characters in them, “Who’s talking?” He didn’t hesitate to suggest revisions to a drawing or to apply to it his own passion for narrative lucidity. After spending two long minutes peering at a drawing of a Model T on a dusty road, he once snapped to his secretary, “Take this down, Miss Terry. Better dust.” Other staffers reported that Ross once examined a cartoon of two elephants and asked, “Which elephant is talking?”
Thurber was soon involved in this process as well. In November 1928, he and Andy sat in the closet-size office they shared—it was barely large enough for two desks—and thought up a caption for a static ink-and-wash scene by a young cartoonist named Carl Rose. The magazine had published Rose’s first drawing during its debut year, and he had become a regular contributor. But his new drawing was less than inspired. It showed an elegantly dressed brunette dining in a restaurant with her young, curly-haired blond daughter. While holding her fork in midair above her plate, the mother was looking down at her daughter and speaking. Her expression was neutral and the daughter barely had any expression at all. The dialogue could go in any direction. The setting gave no clue to what Rose was thinking about when he drew it. His own caption had been rejected, but Ross and the others liked the drawing itself.
Although nothing indicated that the child was speaking as well, Andy wrote under the cartoon an old-fashioned dialogue, the kind of two-line caption that Ross was trying to get away from. Ross disliked the antique cartoon that required a script below with speakers clearly labeled as COUNT and SHOWGIRL. Andy didn’t mind being old-fashioned, especially when he could amusingly mislead the reader by doing so. In his caption, clearly the mother speaks first: “It’s broccoli, dear.” And the daughter replies, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”
Not one to chortle over his own humor, and uncertain as always about his work, Andy passed the now captioned drawing to Thurber, who took the sheet of paper and read it without smiling. He said simply, “Yeah, it seems okay to me.”
Ross hesitated over it. He wasn’t particularly impressed and also worried about the word hell because he already felt that there was too much profanity in the magazine. But Katharine Angell, who had become quite fond of Andy and his kind of humor, thought it was hilarious. While Ross was on vacation in Florida, Katharine published it. It appeared in the December 8 issue and soon became the most famous cartoon the magazine had published.
Thurber himself drew, had indeed been drawing compulsively since childhood. In the tiny office with Andy, he filled stray yellow copy paper with graceless flowers, childish lamps and chairs and desks, mournful hounds of dubious ancestry, couples whose rubber arms wrapped around each other like vines and ended in square, three-fingered hands. Because Thurber knew nothing about perspective and never planned a drawing ahead, what had started out as a staircase might be forced to metamorphose into an article of furniture. It was Andy who first appreciated Thurber’s skewed, disproportionate, perspectiveless, and yet brilliant talent.
In spring 1929 Thurber quickly scribbled a drawing of a seal—complete with doggish whiskers and deadpan expression—perched on a rock, looking off to its right at two small specks and uttering the boring caption “Hm, explorers.” Andy liked the style of the drawing immediately and argued that Thurber ought to send it to the next Tuesday-afternoon art meeting. Thurber already had a tremor in his hands that prevented his inking his own pencil sketches, so Andy carefully drew black India ink lines over Thurber’s pencil original to create a reproducible drawing. Then he sent it to the meeting.
Thurber could imagine Ross’s and art director Rea Irvin’s disdainful responses. Sure enough, the next Tuesday the drawing appeared back on Thurber’s desk. On the same yellow paper, beside Thurber’s sketch, Irvin had drawn his own more realistic seal portrait and added the note, This is the way a seal’s whiskers go. Andy attached a note saying, This is how a Thurber seal’s whiskers go, and sent it to the next weekly meeting. It was rejected without further comment.
Soon Ross was growling at Thurber, “How the hell did you get the idea you could draw?”
During the summer of 1929 Andy and Thurber wrote a brief book together entitled Is Sex Necessary? or, Why You Feel the Way You Do. A parody of the sex-and-romance advice books that were becoming common, it was a resolutely frothy parade of silliness that read like what it was—a freshman outing by two young men who were only one generation past Victorian. But they also addressed recurring themes in the dance of romance and sexuality.
Just the minute another person is drawn into some one’s life, there begin to arise undreamed-of complexities, and from such a simple beginning as sexual desire we find built up such alarming yet familiar phenomena as fêtes, divertissements, telephone conversations, arrangements, plans, sacrifices, train arrivals, meetings, appointments, tardinesses, delays, marriages, dinners, small pets and animals, calumny, children, music lessons, yellow shades for the windows, evasions, lethargy, cigarettes, candies, repetition of stories and anecdotes, infidelity, ineptitude, incompatibility, bronchial trouble …
They urged the young to inform their elders about sex, mocked independent working women, and explained to wives how to keep their husbands from feeling claustrophobic. Amid much silliness were some inspired non sequiturs. “There are apartments in New York,” they wrote, “in which one must step across an open bathtub in going from the kitchen to the bedroom; any unusual layout like that arouses sexual desire and brings people pouring into New York from other cities.”
Three years after Andy’s poetic apology for failing to kiss Mary O
sborn, Is Sex Necessary? featured a chapter entitled “Frigidity in Men,” which included a several-page section called “The Declination of the Kiss.”
To kiss in dream is wholly pleasant. First, the woman is the one of your selection, not just anyone who happens to be in your arms at the moment. Second, the deed is garnished with a little sprig of glamour which the mind, in exquisite taste, contributes. Third, the lips, imaginatively, are placed just so, the concurrent thoughts arrive, just so.… When a kiss becomes actual anything is likely to happen.… So you see, frigidity in men has many aspects, many angles.
They submitted the book to Harper & Brothers, which had just published Andy’s first book, a small collection of light verse entitled The Lady Is Cold. With Andy still championing his artwork, Thurber drew illustrations for it—portraits of the Quiet Type of woman, spineless Thurberfolk gaining no insight at all from contemplating birds and bees and flowers, and a cartoon chart of the North Atlantic including a couple of airplane routes, with a caption explaining that the authors thought it would be more useful than a diagram of the human body. Harper & Brothers expressed interest. When the authors came to meet with three editors, Andy spread out Thurber’s sheaf of drawings on the floor. Silence ensued, punctuated by a rustling of paper and a cleared throat. The editors looked at the drawings but didn’t say anything. “I gather,” one of them asked finally, “these are a rough idea of the kind of illustrations you want some artist to do?”
Andy shook his head. “These are the drawings that go into the book.”
The editors conferred, muttering about sales and reader resistance. They protested. Andy held firm. Thurber sat silent. When Is Sex Necessary? was published a few months later, Thurber’s drawings appeared throughout the text.
Soon after the book was published, Andy was visiting his parents when he overheard them talking about his first book. “I don’t know what you think of it,” he heard his father say, “but I’m ashamed of it.”
In his dealings with parents and editors and publishers, as much as in his writing, Andy was quickly growing and gaining confidence. He was learning to stand his ground, to explore new creative avenues. Only one arena left him as lost and afraid as ever, and it was the one to which he kept returning in his writing—romance, wherein he continued his time-honored habit, when faced with the prospect of love or sex, of hiding behind imaginary animals like a ventriloquist.
Chapter 9
AS SPIDERS DO
What a life I led! How merry! How innocent! How nutty!
DESPITE HIS SATIRICAL gibes at romance and sexuality, even as he and Thurber wrote their book Andy was already in love again. This time the focus of his affection was a highly respected professional woman, a writer and editor who was several years older and decades more mature than he. He had fallen for his co-worker and editor, the woman who had brought him aboard The New Yorker—Katharine Angell.
These were tempestuous times at the new magazine. By the time Andy arrived, Harold Ross had weathered a first year of low advertising revenues, low circulation, and low morale. Now he was cautiously thinking that the magazine might become a success, even if it wasn’t yet a moneymaker. But there were still days when Ross seemed on the edge of desperation. “God, how I pity me!” he would moan in his theatrical way. Already he had hired and fired—or, whenever possible, had someone else fire—many of his former colleagues and cronies in journalism. Worry exaggerated his personal tics, such as constantly jingling the coins in his pocket. Having once been caught in a cab with nothing smaller than a ten-dollar bill, and having suffered the painful lesson of being forced to overtip, he always carried a few dollars’ worth of coins. He flailed his arms as he strode down the hallways, gesturing and complaining. He dropped into offices without knocking, merely announcing “Ross!” as he opened the door. He didn’t like to ride with anyone else in an elevator, and when trapped with someone he would try not to speak.
Troubled, not surprisingly, by ulcers, Ross had a long list of foods he couldn’t eat, but he loved restaurants and bars. He seemed to know everyone in town and might be seen lunching not only with other members of the Algonquin Round Table but with actors such as Ethel Barrymore or publishers such as Alfred Knopf. He was a close friend of and poker player with the popular young Marx Brothers, whose musical comedies The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers—written by another Round Table crony and New Yorker contributor, George S. Kaufman—stormed New York during the last half of the 1920s, just in time to be adapted into the hot new format of talking motion pictures. Under his real name, Julius H. Marx, Groucho wrote for The New Yorker, beginning in one of the earliest issues with an excerpt from a feeble stage routine between interlocutors dubbed Vaude and Ville.
Andy found Ross a fascinating hybrid of ambition, drive, modesty, prudery, and roughness. Ross seemed to like Andy from the first, but in his cautious way Andy needed time to adapt to Ross’s style and approach to life. From early on, however, Ross credited Andy with helping establish the voice he had been seeking for the magazine—sophisticated, ironic, and literary without pretentiousness. Andy also contributed poems and stories that quickly began to establish his reputation as both a humorist and a stylish writer.
Katharine Angell was at the center of all these developments; she had become an essential part of the magazine’s daily workings. Despite his frequently professed distrust of women, Ross grew ever more dependent upon Katharine’s taste, education, and talent. She participated in meetings about artwork, design, layout, articles, fiction. She championed poetry as an important aspect of the magazine, despite Ross’s suspicions of it because he felt more comfortable with light verse. She counseled anxious contributors, persuasively directing their work, listening to their complaints, learning about their personal lives and creating strong friendships with many of them. In the evenings she lugged home an overworked portfolio crammed with stacks of manuscript and page proofs. Katharine was a striking counterpoint to Ross’s noisy profanity and restless prowling of the office halls. Patient and calm, a disciplined professional, she was hardworking, interested in a wide variety of topics, amusing when she wanted to be, distant and severe at times but not abusive, and passionately committed to the value of the carefully written word. She was also beautiful, in a reserved and regal way that appealed to Andy. He didn’t overlook her beauty. He may have been a fan of sparrows and canaries, but he always had an eye for a pretty woman. So did Ross. When Katharine was about to depart for Paris, Ross handed her a letter of introduction to a friend of his, the famous cartoonist and caricaturist Ralph Barton. Later she found that the letter began, “This is to introduce Mrs. Angell, who is not unattractive.”
She was also not unattached. The trip to Paris had been with her husband, Ernest Angell, an attorney she had married a year after graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1914. Angell had himself graduated from Harvard Law School a year before, after only two years in what was normally a three-year program. Passionate about civil rights, famously persistent and hardworking, Ernest had long spent most of his energy on his work, but then so had Katharine. Just after they married, he took Katharine home to his native Cleveland, Ohio, so he could launch his law career near his widowed mother. A long way from friends and family and the entertaining distractions of the Northeast, Katharine spent a few depressing months as an unemployed housewife, then went on to a variety of jobs, including running a hospital survey of handicapped citizens in Cleveland.
When their first child, daughter Nancy, was not quite a year old, Ernest enlisted in the war as a first lieutenant. Soon he was off to France, helping organize the first-ever insurance system for soldiers and winding up doing counterespionage work, for which he was decorated. Lonely and isolated, Katharine would sometimes push Nancy’s baby carriage over to the home field of the Cleveland Indians, League Park (which had been renamed Dunn Field after its new owner, but the name didn’t last). Growing up in Massachusetts, Katharine had been a fan of the Boston Red Sox. In 1917, the same year she found herself in Cl
eveland, her favorite Red Sox player, center fielder Tris Speaker, was traded to the Indians, where he was earning the highest baseball salary in history—forty thousand dollars per year. Katharine would push Nancy down the sidewalk alongside the double-decker steel-and-concrete grandstands, listening to the crowd’s roar from a distance because women weren’t really welcome at ball games. She would think how odd it was that she and her revered Speaker had been traded to Cleveland in the same year. When she talked about these memories later, they merely emphasized the loneliness that had dominated her marriage.
When Ernest returned following his discharge in late 1919, almost a year after the armistice, he had been gone twenty months. He was completely changed—restless, confident, eager to put the Midwest behind him, to achieve something worthwhile. He insisted upon moving to New York City, and Katharine was more than ready to leave Cleveland after the birth of their son, Roger, in 1920. Soon Ernest was working hard and Katharine was working various jobs and selling articles to The New Republic and elsewhere. She reviewed for the Saturday Review of Literature and Atlantic Monthly. When the U.S. Senate launched an investigation of the American occupation of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, an invasion that Woodrow Wilson had authorized in 1915, Ernest was appointed to represent the people of the countries themselves. Katharine went along and wrote two powerful articles for The New Republic, in which she not only fearlessly described the racism and injustice of the U.S. occupation, but even condemned President Harding’s misguided 1922 appointment of a hated general.
Somewhere during this time Katharine learned that Ernest had returned from France with what she began to think of as French notions of marriage. She never learned how many mistresses he might have had, but he became ever more casual in letting her know about their shadowy presence. Once he was robbed while on a secret date with a lover and never mentioned the incident until Katharine noticed that he was no longer wearing his father’s gold pocket watch. Then he told her where he had been at the time of the robbery. For a while he spent his weeknights with another woman and came home to Katharine and the children only on weekends. Thinking she had few options, and worrying that the children needed their father in whatever limited capacity, Katharine tolerated the situation. When she complained, Ernest suggested that she herself have an affair.