Collecting Himself
Page 21
The illustration reprinted here publicized the column’s debut and bore the following caption: “James Thurber, who for years (and years) has been writing what he feels, has turned to saying what he thinks for PM. His brand-new column, ‘If You Ask Me,’ will appear every Tuesday and Thursday, complete with opinion, guesswork, men, women, dogs and seals, (signed) James Thurber.”
This particular essay had a subsequent appearance under the title “Writer’s Age Measured by Rejection Slips” in Parade, September 21, 1941.
Excerpts from “The Book-End,” 1923
31 The Columbus Dispatch, February-December 1923.
31 In 1923, as a feature writer at The Columbus Dispatch, Thurber wrote forty-two features entitled “Credos and Curios” in the Sunday magazine. The pages included such items as “Dad Dialogs” (exchanges on Midwestern ideals and idiocies), “The Cases of Blue Ploermell” (a parody of the popular Arthur Conan Doyle), “The Book-End” (mini-reviews and excerpts from current books), and several short bits often pertaining to events in the motion picture industry, book publishing, and the theater. The pages were illustrated with cartoons, literary portraits, and incidental drawings by Ray Evans. In many elements—note particularly the entries that engage a found piece of prose with an twist of editorial development—Thurber was developing many of the forms he would bring four years later to a new magazine called The New Yorker.
Rereading the columns in 1956, Thurber wrote Frank Gibney (October 31, 1956) that he felt “alarm, disbelief, and some small pleasure here and there…. It was practice and spadework by a man of 28 who sometimes sounds 19, praised ‘clean love’ and such books as Faint Perfume and If Winter Comes and practically any play or movie I saw, and attacks Cabell, Joyce, Hecht, and Sherwood Anderson. I was a great Willa Cather man.”
31 James W. Faulkner, who was born in 1860 in Cincinnati and died in 1923, became one of the best-known and most respected political journalists for over thirty years in Ohio.
More Authors Cover the Snyder Trial
37 The New Yorker, May 7, 1927. In The Years with Ross, Thurber writes of reading his early submissions to the The New Yorker. “I marvel that Ross put his approving R on … a short parody called ‘More Authors Cover the Snyder Trial.’ In this last I tried to imitate a style of James Joyce and that of Gertrude Stein, and Ross could never have read a single line of either author…. In gritting his teeth, swallowing hard, and buying that, Ross must have depended upon the counsel of his literary editor, Mrs. Katharine Angell….”
In this highly publicized case, Ruth Snyder, a flapper from Queens, New York, in league with her “lover boy,” Judd Gray, conspired to murder Ruth’s husband, Albert, on whom Ruth had taken out a $96,000 double indemnity insurance policy. During 1926, Albert experienced seven “accidents”; on March 19, 1927, returning home from a bridge game, he was clubbed to death with a sash weight, chloroformed, and strangled with a wire. Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray were electrocuted at Sing Sing in January 1928.
If You Ask Me
39 PM, October 3, 1940. Besides the accompanying illustration, two added drawings hint at Thurber’s discomfort with Mr. Wolfe, who “came to a party at my apartment in New York at 6 P.M. and stayed until 7 A.M. Many writers do this and I myself have no superiors in long lingering” (Letter to Neda Westlake, January 11, 1949). Several letters recount this evening of Wolfe’s ravenous appetite, his “disagreeable” drunkenness, and his sense of a “real writer” as someone “whose books were so heavy they were hard to lift.” Thurber wrote: “It seems that God, knowing my strength, only lets me meet great writers once: Wolfe, Lewis, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway” (Letter to Oscar Cargill, January 14, 1953).
Recommended Reading
43 Letters to Sarah B. Whitaker, reprinted in Alumnae News (Northampton School for Girls), December 1962, and in the Chicago Tribune Magazine, May 26, 1963, under the title “James Thurber on the Perplexities of Educating a Daughter.” For the present volume, only the parts of these letters that pertain to Thurber’s recommended list are included. In addition, an excerpt on the same gift shelf of books from Thurber’s Bermudian column, “Letter to the States” (December 1949), has been appended at the end of this entry.
What Price Conquest?
48 The New Republic, March 16, 1942. Robert Nathan (1894-1985) was a prolific and popular author in Thurber’s time whose works include fantasy, children’s books, poetry, plays, and fiction.
Taps at Assembly
55 The New Republic, February 9, 1942. In a letter of March 2, 1951, to Malcolm Cowley, the magazine’s literary editor, Thurber reconsiders this review, despite “[Edmund] Wilson’s note … saying that is was ‘one of the few reviews with any critical merit’” which Thurber had shared with Cowley in a letter of February 3 the month before. “In 1941 … I see that I underrated the promise of that book, just as I have emotionally overstated his stature as a novelist. I have tried to see him in balance now, but the piece shows the warm admiration I will always have for him.” Thurber’s letter alludes to a new piece that he was writing that addressed Fitzgerald’s opus as well as the Arthur Mizener biography The Far Side of Paradise. Thurber’s finished piece, “Scott in Thorns,” appears in the posthumous Credos and Curios.
If You Ask Me
58 PM, October 24, 1940.
The Odyssey of Disney
61 The Nation, March 28, 1934.
Peace, It’s Wonderful
64 The Saturday Review, November 21, 1936. A review of Be Glad You’re Neurotic by Louis E. Bisch, M.D. Thurber’s book Let Your Mind Alone develops Thurber’s reservations on the whole psychiatric, self-improvement subject.
66 A grim souvenir of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, miniature ladders, similar to the one Hauptmann used to abscond with the child, were sold in various parts of the country.
Tempest in a Looking Glass
67 Forum and Century, April 1937.
Voices of Revolution
73 The New Republic, March 25, 1936. This piece, the following one entitled “Notes for a Proletarian Novel,” and many of Thurber’s letters during this period touch on Thurber’s ongoing concern with the relationship of Marxism and Communism to the literary community in which he found himself: “I’m protesting, mainly, against being classed as a bourgeois who does not, cannot, know the feelings of the proletarian. That’s one reason I undertook this book: I want to know, and feel at home, among these proletarian writers” (Letter to Malcolm Cowley, February 3, 1951). In this, one of several voluminous midnight letters on the subject, Thurber wrote to his friend and editor: “I have written, I suppose, at least fifty thousand words in my fifteen or twenty rewrites of this piece. I have spent at least fifty solid hours of work on the mere writing, perhaps twenty on the reading…. I have been influenced by nothing except my own feelings, definitely my feelings as a writer, possibly my feelings as a bourgeois (a hell of a goddam loose word to apply to all Americans who are not proletarians. After all my grandfather had a stand on Central Market and my father never made more than $50 a week in his life)…. What is essentially the matter … [is that] nobody, reading this book as carefully as I have, can fail to see that these people are, for the most part, essentially writers. You feel that, as such, they would, first of all, like to have this be a Utopian world, as quickly as possible, in which it would be all right to write for The New Yorker. But it isn’t such a world. Therefore, they go over to writing about the proletariat (about whose actions, reactions, idioms, and gestures they betray a constant pathetic ignorance) and because they have to do this rather than want to do it there arises bitterness, anger, and, of all things, this curious wail and plaint against the sex life of the bourgeois.”
Notes for a Proletarian Novel
84 The New Yorker, June 9, 1934.
84 Stanley J. Weyman (1855-1928) published several popular books, often subtitled “a romance,” during Thurber’s pre-New Yorker years. His works include The Wild Geese, The Man in Black, Sophia, The Long Night, and Unde
r the Red Robe.
Ave Atque Vale
89 Bermudian, November 1950. When Harold Ross died, Thurber wrote his friend Ronald Williams (December 15, 1951) that he had shown E. B. White this drawing and that “he was all for using it as the illustration for the obituary, but the conservative boys turned it down. Now Andy and I have made a pledge to use it for the obituary of whichever one of us dies first. I will either write his, or he will write mine.” Thurber died first. His obituary was written by White, but no drawing accompanied it. His gravestone in Columbus, Ohio, does bear a picture of “the last flower” from Thurber’s book of that name.
Recollections of Henry James
91 The New Yorker, June 17, 1933.
The Preface to “The Old Friends”
96 Unpublished manuscript, dated 1955. Thurber’s earlier parenthetical gloss affords some alternate information on this piece’s occasion: “A Small Attempt to Prefigure After Re-reading Henry James’s Preface to What Maisie Knew, the Sort of Verbal Fragment Upon Which the Master Might Have Stumbled At Almost Any Party, In This Year of Jeopardy, And What He Might Have ‘Done,’ As Who Should Say, With It.” In his conversation with The Paris Review, Thurber discusses a work-in-progress “in which [Henry] James at the age of 104 writes a preface to a novel about our age in which he summarizes the trends and complications but at the end is so completely lost he doesn’t really care enough to read it over to find his way out again.”
In addition to his three parodies of Henry James, Thurber also wrote “A Call on Mrs. Forrester (After Re-reading, in My Middle Years, Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady and Henry James’s The Ambassadors),” published in The Beast in Me; an unpublished casual, “An Adventure in Time,” an antic family episode touching on his personal relationship with Madame de Vionnet of The Ambassadors; and several letters detailing the possible theatrical adaptation of The Ambassadors, as well as other smaller tributes and discussions. Henry James also features prominently in two other pieces included in this volume: “Recollections of Henry James,” a fabricated meeting with the Master, and “One Man in His Time,” an imagined collaborative work by Eugene O’Neill and Henry James.
The Harpers and Their Circle
06 “Letter from the States,” Bermudian, July 1951.
A Visit from Saint Nicholas
110 The New Yorker, December 24, 1927, Thurber’s first Christmas at the magazine.
An Evening with Carl Sandburg
115 Included are three unpublished drawings as well as reprints of the two playing instruments and reading to one another, which did appear in Thurber & Co.
A letter from Sandburg, dated May 14, 1947—more than ten years after this meeting—expresses something of their shared admiration:
“It is long since that dandy all-night session in Columbus, Ohio. And you keep growing all the time, gathering a permanent audience that cherishes you as very real to them. Some of them would form James Thurber reading and study clubs and then drop the idea on hearing, ‘Thurber is old-fashioned black-walnut Quaker mixed with modern-chromium philosophical anarchist and you cant [sic] organize it.’ I started meaning to tell you Asheville amateur players put on The Male Animal this March and it stood forth as a classic and was a hit and you would have been proud and humble and when they hauled me before the curtain between acts I praised the players and the audience and testified that you are a clown and an architect and amid all your shenanigans a man of great faith and I wouldn’t go into details about angles of you that are near heroic. May you go on.”
No More Biographies
118 The New Yorker, March 19, 1932.
How to Tell a Fine Old Wine
121 The New Yorker, February 24, 1934.
What Price a Farewell to Designs?
126 The New Yorker, March 18, 1933.
The Literary Meet
129 The New Yorker, September 24, 1927. The magazine Liberty, along with The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, were the three weekly miscellanies with large circulations at the time.
Memoirs of a Banquet Speaker
136 The New Yorker, March 29, 1930.
136 Captain George Fried, master mariner, was widely recognized for rescuing the crew members of the steamer ships Antinoe (January 1926) and Florida (January 1929).
Answers-to-Hard-Questions Department
143 The New Yorker, August 2, 1930.
147 During his association with The New Yorker, Thurber often wrote under various pseudonyms. These included Jamie Machree; Col. Bolton Field-Field, K.C.B., V.C., M.P., K.R.G.E.; Childe Harold; James Grover; Rags; J. G. T.; T. J. G.; G. T. J.; Foot Fault (for his serial feature “The Tennis Courts”); and Jared L. Manley (for the serial “Where Are They Now?”). Of course, many of Thurber’s casuals for The New Yorker observed the practice of “we,” the magazine-as-writer, and carried no by-line.
Speaking of Drawings …
148 [COOKE] Interview with Alistair Cooke. (First presented on Omnibus, the Ford Foundation TV program.) Atlantic Monthly, August 1956, pp. 36-40.
148 [GARLAND] James Thurber. A Thurber Garland. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955, Preface.
149 [DE VRIES] Letter to Peter De Vries, October 16, 1952.
149 [SHER] Interview with Jack Sher. “Meet James Thurber.” Detroit Free Press Sunday Magazine, February 25, 1940, p. 23.
150 [GUMP] Letter to S. and G. Gump Art Gallery, reprinted in article by Emilia Hodel in the San Francisco News, March 6, 1937.
152 [MILLER] Letter to Herman Miller, undated (1940).
153 [ROSS] Letter to Harold Ross, October 20, 1941, published in Thurber, A Biography by Burton Bernstein. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975.
153 The three drawings in the October 18 issue of The New Yorker to which Thurber refers are by Richard Decker, Alan Dunn, and Ned Hilton, respectively.
Glimpses of the Art Conference
157 In The Years with Ross, Thurber alludes to these drawings: “I once made a series of drawings especially for Ross about the trials and tortures of the art meeting. One showed the scowling Ross himself shoving a drawing at a timid office employee and snarling, ‘Is that funny?’ … Two of the other art meeting drawings I did for Ross (’You tease him too much,’ my mother once told me sternly. ‘You shouldn’t tease him so much.’) showed, respectively, an old woman asking for a cup of cold water at a storage dam, and the same old woman asking a fireman for a match at a great conflagration. The editor had the drawings framed and hung on the walls of his office to remind him of the threat of formula.”
Tonight at 8:30
164 Stage, December 1936. Thurber contributed several illustrated comments to this theater publication, including pieces on A Day at the Races (see present volume under “Groucho and Me”), George White’s Scandals, Mae West’s Klondike Annie, a theatrical revival of Pride and Prejudice, and Katharine Dayton and George S. Kaufman’s First Lady. The illustrations in “James Thurber Presents William Shakespeare” that are collected in Thurber & Company were another part of his Stage contribution.
Letter from the States
169 Bermudian, April 1950.
A Farewell to Santa Claus
173 The New Yorker, December 24, 1932. Reprinted in the New York Times, December 24, 1988.
One Man in His Time
179 The New Yorker, January 20, 1934.
Is There a Killer in the House?
184 The Observer (London), July 10, 1955.
Producers Never Think Twice
190 The New Yorker, February 16, 1935.
Roaming in the Gloaming
194 New York Times, January 7, 1940.
The Quality of Mirth
201 This speech, originally given at the London opening of A Thurber Carnival at the ANTA, was printed in the Sunday New York Times, February 21, 1960. Among James Thurber’s papers is a brief annotation for a section called “Matinee and Evening.” It remains unclear whether this was a book’s section planned by Thurber himself or by his wife, Helen, who brought out the posthumous volumes Thurber
& Company, Credos and Curios, and Selected Letters of James Thurber. The note suggested the following cluster: “On the Brink of Was,” “The Quality of Mirth,” “The State of Humor in the States,” and “The Other Side of the Footlights.”