Then came four formative years at Cornell University in upstate Ithaca, New York. Apart from earning the nickname “Andy”—traditionally bestowed upon any student with the surname White, in honor of Cornell’s first president, Andrew D. White—he gained a measure of confidence through extracurricular activities. President of Phi Gamma Delta and editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, he was also a member of the Manuscript Club, founded for students and faculty who “wrote for the sake of writing” and read their work aloud to one another.
Another profound influence was William Strunk’s course in advanced writing, English 8, and the “little book” the professor wrote to accompany it, The Elements of Style. The thin volume was “Strunk’s parvum opus, his attempt to cut the vast triangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin.” Strunk lived by its precepts. “When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his great coat lapels in his hands, and in a husky, conspiratorial voice said, ‘Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!’ ”
White figured he would be a newspaperman, but circumstances and his own temperament conspired against him. Almost immediately upon graduating from Cornell, he got a job with the United Press but quit after taking the wrong train to cover Senator Philander C. Knox’s funeral. He lasted only a few weeks writing press releases for a silk mill. He found a similar publicity job for the American Legion News Service (working, unbeknownst to him, in the same building where Ross also toiled) that was both painful and boring. A stint as a layout man for the Frank Seaman advertising agency proved no better.
What White really wanted to be was not a journalist (“When three or more facts have to be marshaled, I get upset”) but a writer, with all its romantic notions. “Writing is a secret vice, like self abuse,” he admitted. Like many similarly situated aspirants, he kept hope alive by submitting verses and squibs to Christopher Morley’s “The Bowling Green” column in the New York Evening Post and Franklin P. Adams’s “The Conning Tower” in the New York World, occasionally being rewarded with their publication. A 1922 cross-country trip he took with a friend in his Model T roadster, affectionately dubbed “Hotspur,” offered much to see and describe, generally in colorfully concrete terms. (“Success seems to be imminent. Newspapers are rotten to the core. Filling stations look like hotel lobbies. The air is free.”) And a job that he got at the Seattle Times when he reached the West Coast yielded, as it did for Gibbs in a quite different situation, a regular column that allowed him to write as he pleased—by turns humorously, musingly, and lyrically. In a bit of free verse, he revealed much about his struggles to put exactly the right words onto paper:
Capturing a thought
And hoping to display it in words
Is like capturing a sea gull
And hoping to show its velvet flight
By stuffing it—wings outstretched—
And hanging it in a window
By a thread.
White first picked up The New Yorker in Grand Central Terminal and figured it might be the sort of publication where his thoughts could find a home. His first piece, published in the magazine’s tenth issue, was not especially noteworthy; he merely wondered what would happen if a copywriter were assigned to tout the coming of spring. The result, “The Vernal Account,” consisted of six squibs, e.g. “Mrs. Vander Regibilt Gives Her Nose This Exquisite Treat: ‘I smelled the new 1925 daffodil to-day. It is surely the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Now I wouldn’t smell anything else.’ ”
He followed this slim effort three weeks later with a wry casual essay titled “Defense of the Bronx River.” A deceptively deprecating homage to the waterway of the title, it ended with what would become his personal trademark of a tiny surprise: “Here is one commuter who wouldn’t trade this elegant little river, with its ducks and rapids and pipes and commissions and willows, for the Amazon or the Snohomish or La Platte or the Danube, or the Mississippi, even though the latter does rise in Lake Itaska and flows south to the Gulf of Mexico and is wider.” He ended the year with “Child’s Play.” Its subtitle, “In Which the Author Turns a Glass of Buttermilk into a Personal Triumph,” pretty much tells the story. When a waitress in a bustling Childs’ restaurant spills some buttermilk onto the narrator’s blue serge suit, he turns her mortification into a self-awarded accolade by not only paying the bill but by nobly leaving a twenty-five-cent tip. White later told his brother:
I discovered a long time ago that writing of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the heart, the inconsequential but near things of this living, was the only kind of creative work which [sic] I could accomplish with any sincerity or grace. As a reporter, I was a flop, because I always came back laden not with facts about the case, but with a mind full of the little difficulties and amusements I had encountered in my travels. Not till the New Yorker came along did I ever find any means of expressing those impertinences and irrelevancies.
Normally, Ross would have had little patience with a self-confessed flop of a reporter. But one of his editors saw merit in White’s prose. Sometime early in 1926, at this editor’s suggestion, Ross invited White to drop by The New Yorker’s office at 25 West 45th Street. Awaiting him was Katharine Sergeant Angell.
Hired the previous August as a part-time reader at twenty-five dollars a week, this small, dowdy woman of finely tuned literary tastes quickly proved to be so indispensable that a couple of weeks later she was taken on full time at double the salary. The investment was a bargain. “More than any other editor except Harold Ross himself,” said William Shawn, “Katharine White gave The New Yorker its shape, and set it on its course.” No appreciation of her value to the magazine and its founder could be more vivid than this one, offered by her second husband:
Ross, though something of a genius, had serious gaps. In Katharine, he found someone who filled them in. No two people were ever more different than Mr. Ross and Mrs. Angell; what he lacked, she had; what she lacked, he had. She complemented him in a way that, in retrospect, seems to me to have been indispensable to the survival of the magazine. . . . She had a natural refinement of manner and speech; Ross mumbled and bellowed and swore. She quickly discovered, in this fumbling and impoverished new weekly, something that fascinated her: its quest for humor, its search for excellence, its involvement with young writers and artists. She enjoyed contact with people; Ross, with certain exceptions, despised it—especially during hours. She was patient and quiet; he was impatient and noisy. Katharine was soon sitting in on art sessions and planning sessions, editing fiction and poetry, cheering and steering authors and artists along the paths they were eager to follow, learning makeup, learning pencil editing, heading the Fiction Department, sharing the personal woes and dilemmas of innumerable contributors and staff people who were in trouble or despair, and, in short, accepting the whole unruly business of a tottering magazine with the warmth and dedication of a broody hen.
Her antecedents were pillars of the old colonial establishment. The Sergeants had arrived in Branford, Connecticut, not long after the Pilgrims disembarked from the Mayflower. Several proved crucial in the formation of what became Princeton University and one helped write the New Jersey state constitution. Rev. John Sergeant, a Yale scholar, was a founder of Stockbridge, Massachusetts; his son Erastus fought in the Battle of Ticonderoga and Shays’s Rebellion. Katharine’s father, Charles, was an executive of the Boston Elevated Railway.
Born on September 17, 1892, Katharine grew up in “the rich men’s town” of Brookline. Many years later she would render this charmed period as “a series of Victorian postcards. A small girl carefully snips a backyard rosebud for the breakfast table; with her sister, trims their Boston schoolgirls’ hats with flowers from the shrubbery; paddles in a canoe, in the glorious early-morning light, to pick water lilies on the lake at the foot of Mont Chocorua.”
She was not destined to be a
Mackay-type debutante. The Sergeant house set great store by the life of the mind. “I was the youngest in a family that read aloud,” Katharine recalled. “I was continually listening to books that were ‘too old’ for me—or, at any rate, ones that would be called too old by today’s educators.” Katharine wrote, too; like Andy, she received a silver badge for her contributions to St. Nicholas. Her education at the proper Miss Winsor’s School—where she earned the sobriquet “Goody” for her bright, upright behavior—prepared her for Bryn Mawr. Here she flourished, as Andy would at Cornell. She rose to become editor of both the biweekly magazine Tipyn O’Bob (Welsh for “a bit of everything”) and the literary annual The Lantern, finishing fourth in the seventy-nine-member class of 1914.
Katharine had been engaged throughout her college career to Ernest Angell, a Harvard-educated lawyer, and married him the year after she graduated. Thus began a decade-long search for herself. It was understood that young Bryn Mawr alumnae of that era would become wives and mothers but would also make solid contributions to the professions and establish themselves in a world were traditional gender roles were being upended. The intelligent, determined Katharine was initially stifled in her attempts. She and Ernest moved to Cleveland; while he practiced law, she busied herself with the activities of the Cleveland Playhouse. She also held a couple of jobs, taking a door-to-door survey of the local crippled and handicapped and inspecting factory conditions. These were not steps toward a career, however, especially after Ernest enlisted as a lieutenant to fight in World War I in 1917 and she found herself bringing up their baby daughter, Nancy. Home life became even more central after Ernest returned from France and the couple moved to New York City, the birthplace of their son Roger, a future New Yorker star.
“I have and always have had, a personal need for the opportunity to follow my own heart,” she said. “One hesitates to use that much overworked and now somewhat ludicrous term ‘self-expression’—but if honest, I must admit to a distinct personal ambition that is thwarted and an underlying cause for unhappiness when I cannot do the work of mind, not hands, for which I am best fitted.” She found a bit of salvation in 1922, when Ernest represented citizens of Haiti and the Dominican Republic during a Senate investigation of the U.S. occupation of those countries. Dispatched to Hispaniola, he took along Katharine. She put the occasion to good use, filing two perceptive, colorful dispatches for The New Republic. But only three years later, after her writer friend Fillmore Hyde said that a new magazine called The New Yorker, where he was then working, might be able to use her, did she find her métier—and, as it turned out, White.
Working in concert, Katharine and Ross persuaded the young writer to join the staff on a part-time basis. His first regular contributions were “Newsbreaks,” those sharp, bottom-of-the-page rejoinders to flubs and confusing prose found in other publications. White honed them to a fine sparkle. Confronted, for instance, with an advertisement in a Pittsburgh newspaper that declared, “gent’s laundry taken home. Or serve at parties at night,” White responded sourly, “Oh, take it home.” Over time he grouped these squibs under such enduring headings as “Letters We Never Finished Reading,” “Neatest Trick of the Week,” and the “Uh Huh Department.” And almost immediately he was doing “Talk of the Town” stories and especially “Notes and Comment.” White’s very first “Comment,” from early in 1927, typified his ability to merge whimsy and minor profundity with a bit of poetry:
Quite well aware that most persons, in their earthly glee, are too forgetful of the heavenly bodies, we are greatly pleased to hear that plans are under way for a star-gazing wing at the Museum of Natural History. There is talk of installing a planetarium, where moon and stars would pursue their course with marvelous intimacy. Nothing, really, is more exciting—and surely New York is the city nearest the sky.
White’s contributions, said Thurber, “struck the shining note that Ross had dreamed of striking.” They made a deep impression on Thurber: “Until I learned discipline in writing from studying Andy White’s stuff, I was a careless, nervous, headlong writer. . . . The precision and clarity of White’s writing helped me a lot, slowed me down from the dogtrot of newspaper writing tempo and made me realize a writer turns on his mind, not a faucet.”
Thurber was literally in a good position to watch White work that kind of magic. For the first several years of the magazine, as White wrote in “Comment,” Thurber wrote and rewrote much of “Talk.” They toiled closely together in an office “the size of a hall bedroom,” White remembered. “There was just room enough for two men, two typewriters, and a stack of copy paper.” Their admiration was mutual.
“His mind was never at rest,” said White, “and his pencil was connected to his mind by the best conductive tissue I have ever seen in action. The whole world knows what a funny man he was, but you had to sit next to him day after day to understand the extravagance of his clowning, the wildness and subtlety of his thinking, and the intensity of his interest in others and his sympathy for their dilemmas.”
This extraordinary man entered the world on December 8, 1894, in Columbus, Ohio. James was the second of three brothers, and in his literary productivity and originality, he was a classic middle child, always striving to be noticed in that precarious position between eldest hero and youngest dotee. If the family was far from poor, it was decidedly lower middle class. Thurber’s father, Charles, was a self-made political operative who kept failing in his runs for elective office. Still, he managed to serve in a series of minor posts, including as a staff member to two Ohio governors and secretary to the mayor of Columbus.
“My father was not a machine man,” Thurber said. “He wasn’t even a politician, and it’s kind of hard to explain why he stayed in politics, but, as they say in the theatre of a bad play, it was a job.” It was Thurber’s mother, Mary, who truly helped mold him. “I owe practically everything to her, because she was one of the finest comic talents I think I’ve ever known,” he said. “Mame” Fisher was a high-strung and often erratic woman, a frustrated actress who contented herself with mimicry and practical jokes—activities in which her middle son would later engage in abundance.
Thurber’s life changed irrevocably in 1901 when, while playing a version of William Tell, his older brother William shot an arrow into his middle brother’s eye. Through a series of delays and misunderstandings, the eye was lost and “sympathetic ophthalmia”—effectively a spreading of the attendant infection—attacked the healthy eye. Despite an agonizing series of operations, Thurber would become increasingly blind, finally losing his sight altogether. His degenerative condition would in large part define him for both ill and good, closing him off from much of the world but also bringing out the best of his rich interior existence.
That interior life quickly found creative outlets. Thurber was typing by the time he was seven, the same age at which he began to draw. He was, a classmate at East High School recalled, “a studious and sometimes withdrawn type, a kind of loner. But he wrote much better than the rest of us, and that made the teachers love him. He was, without a doubt, their favorite.” Elected president in his senior year, Thurber graduated with honors and enrolled at nearby Ohio State University. There, on the vast fraternity-and-football-conscious campus, the gangly, shy teenager felt overwhelmed. During the 1914–15 academic year, he didn’t pass a single course. Botany was a particular bugbear, his semiblindness wreaking havoc in the lab. (“I would put my eye to the microscope and see nothing at all except now and again a nebulous milky substance—a phenomenon of maladjustment.”) His compulsory course in military science and tactics was similarly bedeviling. “You are the main trouble with this university,” the commandant of the cadet corps would yell at him on the drill field. “Either you’re a foot ahead or a foot behind the company.”
But eventually, encouraged by his athletic, outgoing friend Elliott Nugent, he blossomed. He was a reporter for the Ohio State Lantern, editor of the humor magazine Sundial, and a member of the campus theatric
al troupe The Strollers. In the classroom, he threw himself into English courses, where he learned a genuine appreciation of fine literature, above all the work of the “great God” Henry James.
Yet in June 1918 he quit Ohio State, having accumulated little more than two-thirds of the credits he needed to graduate and eager to make some contribution to the war effort. His glass eye and flat feet rendered him incapable of soldiering. So he wangled a position as a code clerk for the State Department, joining a training class that included Stephen Vincent Benét. Thurber ended up spending more than a year at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, where the charms of that metropolis captured him just as they had Ross. Paris was, Thurber said, the “City of Light and occasional Darkness, sometimes in the winter rain seeming wrought of monolithic stones, and then, in the days of its wondrous and special pearly light, appearing to float in mid-air like a mirage city in the Empire of the Imagination.”
His return to the States in the spring of 1920 began a nearly seven-year period of frustrating journalism and attempts to define himself as a writer. A reporting job at the Columbus Dispatch revealed to him the dispiriting experience of covering city hall and similar civic grist. “My anxiety dreams,” he said much later, “are still about the Dispatch, where I’m with no paper, no pencils, a typewriter that won’t work, [editor] Gus [Kuehner] glaring over my shoulder, and the clock frozen at one—with one o’clock the deadline.”
Cast of Characters Page 4