A. I find no trace in the standard fish books of any fish with ears. Very likely the ears do not belong to the fish, but to some mammal. They look to me like a mammal’s ears. It would be pretty hard to say what species of mammal, and almost impossible to determine what particular member of that species. They may merely be hysterical ears, in which case they will go away if you can get the fish’s mind on something else.
Q. How would you feel if every time you looked up from your work or anything, here was a horse peering at you from behind something? He prowls about the house at all hours of the day and night. Doesn’t seem worried about anything, merely wakeful. What should I do to discourage him?
MRS. GRACE VOYNTON
A. The horse is probably sad. Changing the flowered decorations of your home to something less like open meadows might discourage him, but then I doubt whether it is a good idea to discourage a sad horse. In any case speak to him quietly when he turns up from behind things. Leaping at a horse in a house and crying “Roogie, roogie!” or “Whoosh!” would only result in breakage and bedlam. Of course you might finally get used to having him around, if the house is big enough for both of you.
Q. The fact that my dog sits this way so often leads me to believe that something is preying on his mind. He seems always to be studying. Would there be any way of finding out what this is?
ARTHUR
A. Owing to the artificially complex life led by city dogs of the present day, they tend to lose the simpler systems of intuition which once guided all breeds, and frequently lapse into what comes very close to mental perplexity. I myself have known some very profoundly thoughtful dogs. Usually, however, their problems are not serious and I should judge that your dog has merely mislaid something and wonders where he put it.
Q. We have cats the way most people have mice.
MRS. C. L. FOOTLOOSE
A. I see you have. I can’t tell from your communication, however, whether you wish advice or are just boasting.
Q. No one has been able to tell us what kind of dog we have. I am enclosing a sketch of one of his two postures. He only has two. The other one is the same as this except he faces in the opposite direction.
MRS. EUGENIA BLACK
A. I think that what you have is a cast-iron lawn dog. The expressionless eye and the rigid pose are characteristic of metal lawn animals. And that certainly is a cast-iron ear. You could, however, remove all doubt by means of a simple test with a hammer and a cold chisel, or an acetylene torch. If the animal chips, or melts, my diagnosis is correct.
Q. My oldest boy, Ford Maddox Ford Griswold, worked this wooden horse loose from a merry-go-round one night when he and some other young people were cutting up. Could you suggest any use for it in a family of five?
MRS. R. L. S. GRISWOLD
A. I cannot try the patience of my public nor waste my own time dealing with the problems of insensate animals. Already I have gone perhaps too far afield in the case of stuffed birds and cast-iron lawn dogs. Pretty soon I should be giving advice on wire-haired fox terrier weather-vanes.
Q. Mr. Jennings bought this beast when it was a pup in Montreal for a St. Bernard, but I don’t think it is. It’s grown enormously and is stubborn about letting you have anything, like the bath towel it has its paws on, and the hat, both of which belong to Mr. Jennings. He got it that bowling ball to play with but it doesn’t seem to like it. Mr. Jennings is greatly attached to the creature.
MRS. FANNY EDWARDS JENNINGS
A. What you have is a bear. While it isn’t my bear, I should recommend that you dispose of it. As these animals grow older they get more and more adamant about letting you have anything, until finally there might not be anything in the house you could call your own—except possibly the bowling ball. Zoos use bears. Mr. Jennings could visit it.
Q. Sometimes my dog does not seem to know me. I think he must be crazy. He will draw away, or show his fangs, when I approach him.
H. M. MORGAN, JR.
A. So would I, and I’m not crazy. If you creep up on your dog the way you indicate in the drawing, I can understand his viewpoint. Put your shirt in and straighten up; you look as if you had never seen a dog before, and that is undoubtedly what bothers the animal. These maladjustments can often be worked out by the use of a little common sense.
Q. After a severe storm we found this old male raven in the study of my father, the Hon. George Morton Bodwell, for many years head of the Latin Department at Tufts, sitting on a bust of Livy which was a gift to him from the class of ’92. All that the old bird will say is “Grawk.” Can ravens be taught to talk or was Poe merely “romancing”?
MRS. H. BODWELL COLWETHER
A. I am handicapped by an uncertainty as to who says “Grawk,” the raven or your father. It just happens that “Arrk” is what ravens say. I have never known a raven that said anything but “Arrk.”
Q. I have three Scotch terriers which take things out of closets and down from shelves, etc. My veterinarian advised me to gather together all the wreckage, set them down in the midst of it, and say “ba-ad Scotties!” This, however, merely seems to give them a kind of pleasure. If I spank one, the other two jump me—playfully, but they jump me.
MRS. O. S. PROCTOR
A. To begin with, I question the advisability of having three Scotch terriers. They are bound to get you down. However, it seems to me that you are needlessly complicating your own problem. The Scotties probably think that you are trying to enter into the spirit of their play. Their inability to comprehend what you are trying to get at will in the end make them melancholy, and you and the dogs will begin to drift farther and farther apart. I’d deal with each terrier, and each object, separately, beginning with the telephone, the disconnection of which must inconvenience you sorely.
Q. My husband paid a hundred and seventy-five dollars for this moose to a man in Dorset, Ontario, who said he had trapped it in the woods. Something is wrong with his antlers, for we have to keep twisting them back into place all the time. They’re loose.
MRS. OLIPHANT BEATTY
A. You people are living in a fool’s paradise. The animal is obviously a horse with a span of antlers strapped onto his head. If you really want a moose, dispose of the horse; if you want to keep the horse, take the antlers off. Their constant pressure on his ears isn’t a good idea.
THE SEAL IN THE BEDROOM
& OTHER PREDICAMENTS
PART ONE
Women and Men
“All Right, Have It Your Way—You Heard a Seal Bark!”
“Have You People Got Any .38 Cartridges?”
“I’m Helping Mr. Gorley with His Novel, Darling”
“When I Realize That I Once Actually Loved You I Go Cold All Over”
“Everybody Noticed It. You Gawked at Her All Evening”
“You’re the Only Woman That Ever Let Me Alone”
“With You I Have Known Peace, Lida, and Now You Say You’re Going Crazy”
“Mamma! Come Quick! I Think Granpa Is Folding Up”
“Perhaps a Woman’s Intuition Could Solve Your Problem, Mr. Barr”
“So I Says to Him, ‘Don’t Take That Tone with Me, Mr. Gebholtz’ ”
“Mamma Always Gets Sore and Spoils the Game for Everybody”
“It’s in de Bag for de Little Guy, Bobby”
“I Wouldn’t Be Uneasy—One of My Husbands Was Gone for Three Weeks”
“Here’s a Study for You, Doctor—He Faints”
“Well, What’s Come Over You Suddenly?”
“She Was Crazy about Him, but He Interfered with Her Novel”
“The Father Belonged to Some People Who Were Driving Through in a Packard”
“I Keep Toying with the Idea of Suicide, Doctor”
“Stop me!”
“I Understand She Kills Herself in the Next Act and He Goes Back to His Wife”
“Will You Be Good Enough to Dance This Outside?”
“Your Wife Seems Terribly Smart, Mr. Bruce”
“He Got Aphasia and Forgot Where I Lived”
“Why Don’t You Get Dressed, Then, and Go to Pieces Like a Man?”
“Your Ailment Is on the Tip of My Tongue, Mrs. Cartright—Let Me Think”
“I Told the Analyst Everything Except My Experience with Mr. Rinesfoos”
“For the Last Time—You and Your Horsie Get Away from Me and Stay Away!”
“Lookit, Herman—Flars!”
“He Claims Something Keeps Following Him, Doctor”
“They’re Playing ‘Bolero,’ Mr. Considine—It Drives Me Mad!”
“I Can Tell You Right Now That Isn’t Going to Work”
“Here’s to the Old-time Saloon, Stranger!”
“I Don’t Know. George Got It Somewhere”
“Have You Fordotten Our Ittle Suicide Pact?”
“I Yielded, Yes—but I Never Led Your Husband On, Mrs. Fisher!”
“What Kind of Woman Is It, I Ask You, That Goes Gallivating Around in a Foreign Automobile?”
“No Son of Mine Is Going to Stand There and Tell Me He’s Scared of the Woods”
“Two Best Falls Out of Three—Okay, Mr. Montague?”
“Hello, Dear!—How’s Everything in the Marts of Trade?”
“Get a Load of This Sunset, Babe!”
“They Say He Has No Weakness”
“Then He Wrote Me from Detroit That He Couldn’t Get Married because There Was Crazy People in His Ancestors”
“Are You the Young Man That Bit My Daughter?”
“Charlie Evans!—or Am I Crazy?”
“You Keep Your Wife’s Name Out of This, Ashby!”
“If I’m a Fake, Officer, How Do You Account for This?”
PART TWO
The Bloodhound and the Bug
PART THREE
The Race of Life
A PARABLE
THIS SEQUENCE of thirty-five drawings represents the life story of a man and his wife; or several days, a month, or a year in their life and in that of their child; or their alternately interflowing and diverging streams of consciousness over any given period. It seems to lend itself to a wide variety of interpretations. Anything may be read into it, or left out of it, without malting a great deal of difference. Two or three previewers were brought up short by this picture or that—mainly the Enormous Rabbit—and went back and started over again from the beginning. This mars the flow of the sequence by interrupting the increasing tempo of the action. It is better to skip pictures, or tear them out, rather than to begin over again and try to fit them in with some preconceived idea of what is going on.
The Enormous Rabbit, which brought two engravers and a receptionist up short, perhaps calls for a few words of explanation. It can be an Uncrossed Bridge which seems, at first glance, to have been burned behind somebody, or it can be Chickens Counted Too Soon, or a ringing phone, or a thought in the night, or a faint hissing sound. More than likely it is an Unopened Telegram which when opened (see Panel 12) proves not to contain the dreadful news one had expected by merely some such innocuous query as: “Did you find my silver-rimmed glasses in brown case after party Saturday?”
The snow in which the bloodhounds are caught may be either real snow or pieces of paper torn up.
The Start
Swinging Along
Neck and Neck
Accident
Water Jump
The Beautiful Stranger
The Quarrel
The Pacemaker
Spring Dance
Faster
The Enormous Rabbit
Escape
Top Speed
Winded
Quand Même
Breathing Spell
The Dive
Dog Trot
Down Hill
Menace
Up Hill
Dogs in the Blizzard
Out of the Storm
The Skull
The Water Hole
The Laggard
Indians!
War Dance
Gone!
The Bear
Sunset
On Guard
Dawn: Off Again
Final Sprint
The Goal
PART FOUR
Miscellany
“A Penny For Your Thoughts, Mr. Griscom”
Mrs. Cortez
Bar
“A Penny for Your Thoughts, Mr. Gardiner”
Fifty-second Street Interior
Mating-Time
“A Penny for Your Thoughts, Mr Jaffe”
“He’s Finally Got Me So That I Think I See It, Too”
Youth
“A Penny for Your Thoughts, Mr. Speaks”
Scylla
Speakeasy
“A Penny for Your Thoughts, Dr. Garber”
The Furies
“A Penny for Your Thoughts, Mr. Coates”
Footie-Footie
Ad Astra
End of Paved Road
PART FIVE
The Bloodhound and the Hare
PART SIX
Tennis
Waiting for Service
Drop Shot
Forehand Smash
Placement
Cross Court
The Kill
PART SEVEN
Parties
First Husband Down
Love
“When I Wore a Tulip”
The Brawl
Berserk
The Bawling Out
The Fog
Four o’Clock in the Morning
PART EIGHT
The Collapse of Civilization
The Flirt
Street Scene
The Suitor
The Good Provider: I
The Good Provider: II
The Argument
The Storm
Spring
“My Man!”
The Prude
The Story-Teller
MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES
For
Mary A. Thurber
Contents
Preface to a Life
I. The Night the Bed Fell
II. The Car We Had to Push
III. The Day the Dam Broke
Thurber: Writings & Drawings Page 4