Writings and Drawings

by James Thurber

  Corporal Shultz, of the Sixty-fifth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, aide to General Grant, came into the outer room, looked around him, and sighed. He entered the bedroom and shook the General’s hammock roughly. General Ulysses S. Grant opened one eye.

  “Pardon, sir,” said Corporal Shultz, “but this is the day of surrender. You ought to be up, sir.”

  “Don’t swing me,” said Grant, sharply, for his aide was making the hammock sway gently. “I feel terrible,” he added, and he turned over and closed his eye again.

  “General Lee will be here any minute now,” said the Corporal firmly, swinging the hammock again.

  “Will you cut that out?” roared Grant. “D’ya want to make me sick, or what?” Shultz clicked his heels and saluted. “What’s he coming here for?” asked the General.

  “This is the day of surrender, sir,” said Shultz. Grant grunted bitterly.

  “Three hundred and fifty generals in the Northern armies,” said Grant, “and he has to come to me about this. What time is it?”

  “You’re the Commander-in-Chief, that’s why,” said Corporal Shultz. “It’s eleven twenty-five, sir.”

  “Don’t be crazy,” said Grant. “Lincoln is the Commander-in-Chief. Nobody in the history of the world ever surrendered before lunch. Doesn’t he know that an army surrenders on its stomach?” He pulled a blanket up over his head and settled himself again.

  “The generals of the Confederacy will be here any minute now,” said the Corporal. “You really ought to be up, sir.”

  Grant stretched his arms above his head and yawned.

  “All right, all right,” he said. He rose to a sitting position and stared about the room. “This place looks awful,” he growled.

  “You must have had quite a time of it last night, sir,” ventured Shultz.

  “Yeh,” said General Grant, looking around for his clothes. “I was wrassling some general. Some general with a beard.”

  Shultz helped the commander of the Northern armies in the field to find his clothes.

  “Where’s my other sock?” demanded Grant. Shultz began to look around for it. The General walked uncertainly to a table and poured a drink from a bottle.

  “I don’t think it wise to drink, sir,” said Shultz.

  “Nev’ mind about me,” said Grant, helping himself to a second, “I can take it or let it alone. Didn’ ya ever hear the story about the fella went to Lincoln to complain about me drinking too much? ‘So-and-So says Grant drinks too much,’ this fella said. ‘So-and-So is a fool,’ said Lincoln. So this fella went to What’s-His-Name and told him what Lincoln said and he came roarin’ to Lincoln about it. ‘Did you tell So-and-So I was a fool?’ he said. ‘No,’ said Lincoln, ‘I thought he knew it.’ ” The General smiled, reminiscently, and had another drink. “That’s how I stand with Lincoln,” he said, proudly.

  The soft thudding sound of horses’ hooves came through the open window. Shultz hurriedly walked over and looked out.

  “Hoof steps,” said Grant, with a curious chortle.

  “It is General Lee and his staff,” said Shultz.

  “Show him in,” said the General, taking another drink. “And see what the boys in the back room will have.”

  Shultz walked smartly over to the door, opened it, saluted, and stood aside. General Lee, dignified against the blue of the April sky, magnificent in his dress uniform, stood for a moment framed in the doorway. He walked in, followed by his staff. They bowed, and stood silent. General Grant stared at them. He only had one boot on and his jacket was unbuttoned.

  “I know who you are,” said Grant. “You’re Robert Browning, the poet.”

  “This is General Robert E. Lee,” said one of his staff, coldly.

  “Oh,” said Grant. “I thought he was Robert Browning. He certainly looks like Robert Browning. There was a poet for you, Lee: Browning. Did ja ever read ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’? ‘Up Derek, to saddle, up Derek, away; up Dunder, up Blitzen, up Prancer, up Dancer, up Bouncer, up Vixen, up——’ ”

  “Shall we proceed at once to the matter in hand?” asked General Lee, his eyes disdainfully taking in the disordered room.

  “Some of the boys was wrassling here last night,” explained Grant. “I threw Sherman, or some general a whole lot like Sherman. It was pretty dark.” He handed a bottle of Scotch to the commanding officer of the Southern armies, who stood holding it, in amazement and discomfiture. “Get a glass, somebody,” said Grant, looking straight at General Longstreet. “Didn’t I meet you at Cold Harbor?” he asked. General Longstreet did not answer.

  “I should like to have this over with as soon as possible,” said Lee. Grant looked vaguely at Shultz, who walked up close to him, frowning.

  “The surrender, sir, the surrender,” said Corporal Shultz in a whisper.

  “Oh sure, sure,” said Grant. He took another drink. “All right,” he said. “Here we go.” Slowly, sadly, he unbuckled his sword. Then he handed it to the astonished Lee. “There you are, General,” said Grant. “We dam’ near licked you. If I’d been feeling better we would of licked you.”

  How to See a Bad Play

  ONE of my friends, who is a critic of the drama, invited me to accompany him last season to all the plays which he suspected were not going to be good enough or interesting enough to take his girl to. His suspicions were right in each instance, and there were dozens of instances. I don’t know why I kept accepting his invitations to first nights of dubious promise, but I did. Perhaps it was sheer fascination. I know a man, an inveterate smoker of five-cent cigars, who once refused my offer of a Corona: he said he just couldn’t go the things. Bad plays can get that kind of hold on you; anyway, they did on me. (I’m not going to go to any plays this season; I’m going to ski, and play lotto.)

  I still brood about some of the situations, characters, tactics, and strategies I ran into last season in the more awful plays. I thank whatever gods may be that very few lines of dialogue, however, come back at night to roost above my chamber door. As a matter of fact, the only line that haunts me is one from “Reprise,” during the first scene of the first act of which a desperate young man is prevented from jumping off the balustrade of a penthouse (all plays set in penthouses are terrible) by another young man. The desperate young man then has three or four shots of what he describes as “excellent brandy” and the other man asks him if he still wants to jump. “No,” says the desperate young man. “Your brandy has taken my courage.” That marked the first time in the history of the world when three or four slugs of excellent brandy took a desperate man’s courage. I find myself thinking about it.

  It was in this very same play, “Reprise” (or was it “Yesterday’s Orchids”?), that the double-wing-back formation and triple lateral pass reached a new height. I have drawn a little diagram (Fig. 1) to illustrate what I mean. There was really no business in the play, only a great deal of talk, and the director must have found out early—probably during the first rehearsal—that the way the play was written the characters were just going to sit in chairs or on chaise longues and talk to each other, so he got them to moving around. After all, there has to be action of some kind in every play. Fig. 1 shows one of the more intricate moves that were made, as accurately as I can remember it now (I may have left out a couple of shifts, but it’s close enough). Character A, to begin with, is standing at the right (A 1) of the handsome chair, centre rear, and Character B is sitting (B 1) on the chaise longue. A moves over (A 2) and sits on the foot of the chaise longue, whereupon B gets up and moves to position B 2 and then around the chaise longue (B 3) to the same place he had been sitting, as A reverses his field (A 3), circles around the big chair (A 4), and goes to the little chair (A 5). B now moves to the foot of the chaise longue (B 4), and then goes over and sits in the big chair (B 5). As he does so, A moves over and sits on the foot of the chaise longue again (A 6), then B crosses to the little chair (B 6), thus completing a full circle, with variations. All this time a lot of dialogu
e was going on, dealing with some brand-new angle on sex, but I was so engrossed in following the maze of crisscrosses that I didn’t take in any of it, and hence, as far as sex knowledge goes, I am just where I was before I went to the play. There were a great many other involved crossings and recrossings, and what are known on the gridiron as Statue of Liberty plays, in this drama, but the one I have presented here was my favorite.

  Another formation that interested me in several of the plays I studied was what I call the back-to-back emotional scene (Fig. 2). The two characters depicted here are, strange as it may seem, “talking it out.” In some plays in which this formation occurred they were declaring their love for each other; in others she was telling him that she was in love with someone else, or he was telling her that he had to go to South America because he was in love with her sister or because he thought she was in love with his brother, or his father-in-law, or something of the sort. I have witnessed a number of emotional scenes in real life, but I have just happened to miss any in which the parties involved moved past each other and faced things out back to back. Apparently I don’t get around as much as playwrights do.

  Fig. 3 illustrates another position that was frequently to be seen on our stage last season: the woman, standing, comforting the man, sitting. In this curious entanglement, so different from anything that has ever happened to me, the position of the arms is always just as I have shown it in the picture and the woman’s head is always lifted, as if she were studying a cobweb in a far corner of the ceiling. Sometimes she closes her eyes, whereupon the man opens his. When they break away, it is quite simple to go into the back-to-back formation. Some years ago, along about the time of “Merton of the Movies,” the comforting scene was done in quite a different manner: the woman sat on the chair, and the man got down on his knees and put his head in her lap. But times have changed.

  In Fig. 4, we take up the character who bobbed up (and down) oftenest in last year’s bad plays (she bobbed up and down in some of the better plays, too, but mostly in the bad plays); namely, the elderly lady who is a good sport, a hard drinker, and an authority on sex. There was one such lady in the forgettable “Yesterday’s Reprise” (or was it “Orchids”?). She could get away with half a quart of brandy between dinner time and bedtime (3 A.M.), and when she went to bed finally she took the bottle with her—“I’m going to put a nipple on this thing and go to bed,” she announced as she made her exit. This type of old lady was also given to a stream of epigrams, such as: “At twenty, one is in love with love; at thirty, love is in love with one; at forty, one is in love with two; at fifty, one does not care what two are in love with one; and at sixty,” etc., etc. It doesn’t have to make a great deal of sense; the sophisticates in the audience always laugh, and one or two who have been through a lot applaud.

  There were a lot of other trick moves, positions, and characters in last year’s plays, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to remind you of all of them. In winding up the season, I might mention two postures that were very prevalent. It was customary, in the theatre of 1934–35, for juveniles to sit down backward, or wrong-side-out, in straight chairs—that is, facing the back of the chair with their arms crossed on the top of it and their chins on their arms. This position indicated nonchalance and restless energy. Of course, it has been resorted to for years (and years), but last season was the biggest season for it that I can recall; almost no man under forty-five sat down with his back to the chair back. Another popular position—for juveniles and ingénues—was sitting on the extreme edge of a davenport or chaise longue. It seems that nowadays a young couple in love never relax and lean back against anything; they must sit (and it is one of the few face-to-face postures in the modern theatre) on the very edge of whatever they are sitting on, their legs thrust backward, their bodies inclined sharply forward, their eyes sparkling, and their words coming very fast. From this position, as from the standing-sitting position (Fig. 3), it is easy to stand up, work the double-crossing maneuver, and go into the back-to-back emotional scene. Apparently young people no longer meet on their feet, face to face, and engage in the obsolete practice of putting their arms around each other. As I say, times have changed. Or maybe it’s only the theatre that has changed.

  The Funniest Man You Ever Saw

  EVERYBODY seemed surprised that I had never met Jack Klohman.

  “Judas, I didn’t know there was anybody who didn’t know Jack Klohman,” said Mr. Potter, who was big and heavy, of body and mind. “He’s funnier’n hell.” Mr. Potter laughed and slapped his knee. “He’s the funniest man you ever saw.”

  “He certainly is funny,” said somebody else.

  “He’s marvellous,” drawled a woman I didn’t like. Looking around the group I discovered I didn’t like any of them much, except Joe Mayer. This was undoubtedly unfair, for Joe was the only one I knew very well. The others had come over to the table where we were sitting. Somebody had mentioned Jack Klohman and everybody had begun to laugh.

  “Do you know him, Joe?” I asked.

  “I know him,” said Joe, without laughing.

  “Judas,” went on Potter, “I’ll never forget one night at Jap Rudolph’s. Klohman was marvellous that night. This was a couple years ago, when Ed Wynn was here in a new show—let’s see, what the devil was it? Not ‘The Crazy Fool.’ ”

  “ ‘The Perfect Fool,’ ” said somebody else.

  “Yes. But it wasn’t that,” said Potter. “What the dickens was it? Well, never mind; anyway there was a scene in it where——”

  “Was it ‘Simple Simon’?” asked the blonde girl who was with Creel.

  “No. It was a couple years before that,” said Potter.

  “Oh, I know,” said the blonde girl. “It was—now wait—it was ‘The Manhatters’!”

  “Ed Wynn wasn’t in that,” said Creel. “Wynn wasn’t in that show.”

  “Well, it doesn’t make much difference,” said Potter. “Anyway, in this scene he has a line where——”

  “ ‘Manhattan Mary’!” cried Griswold.

  “That’s it!” said Potter, slapping his knee. “Well, in this scene he comes on with a rope, kind of a lariat——”

  “Halter,” said Griswold. “It was a halter.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Potter. “Anyway, he comes on with this halter——”

  “Who comes on?” asked Joe Mayer. “Klohman?”

  “No, no,” said Potter. “Wynn comes on with the halter and walks up to the footlights and some guy asks him what he’s got the rope for, what he’s doing with the halter. ‘Well,’ says Wynn, ‘I’ve either lost a horse or found a piece of rope——’ ”

  “I think he said: ‘I’ve either found a piece of rope or lost a horse,’ ” said Griswold. “Losing the horse coming last is funnier.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Potter, “Jack Klohman used to elaborate on the idea and this night at Jap Rudolph’s I thought we’d all pass away.”

  “I nearly did,” said Joe Mayer.

  “What did this Klohman do?” I asked finally, cutting in on the general laughter.

  “Well,” said Potter, “he’d go out into the kitchen, see, and come in with a Uneeda biscuit and he’d say: ‘Look, I’ve either lost a biscuit box or found a cracker’—that’s the right order, Gris—‘I’ve either lost a biscuit box or lost’—I mean found—‘a cracker.’ ”

  “I guess you’re right,” said Griswold.

  “It sounds right,” said Joe Mayer.

  “Then he’d do the same thing with everything he picked up, no matter what,” said Potter. “Finally he went out of the room and was gone half an hour or so and then he comes down the stairs and holds up this faucet and says: ‘I’ve either lost a bathtub or found a faucet.’ He’d unscrewed a faucet from the bathtub and comes downstairs with this faucet—see what I mean? Laugh? I thought I’d pass away.”

  Everybody who had been at Jap Rudolph’s that night roared with laughter.

  “But that wasn’t any
thing,” said Potter. “Wait’ll you hear. Along about two in the morning he slips out again, see?—all the way out of the house this time. Well, I’ll be doggoned if that guy didn’t come back carrying part of an honest-to-God chancel rail! He did! I’m telling you! Son-of-a-gun had actually got into a church somehow and wrenched part of this chancel rail loose and there he was standing in the door and he says: ‘I’ve either lost a church or found a chancel rail.’ It was rich. It was the richest thing I ever saw. Helen Rudolph had gone to bed, I remember—she wasn’t very well—but we got her up and he did it again. It was rich.”

  “Sounds like a swell guy to have around,” I said.

  “You’d darn near pass away,” said Potter.

  “You really would,” said Joe Mayer.

  “He’s got a new gag now,” said one of the women. “He’s got a new gag that’s as funny as the dickens. He keeps taking things out of his pockets or off of a table or something and says that he’s just invented them. He always takes something that’s been invented for years, say like a lead pencil or something, and goes into this long story about how he thought it up one night. I remember he did it with about twenty different things one night at Jap’s——”

  “Jap Rudolph’s?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said the woman. “He likes to drop in on them, so you can usually find him there, so we usually drop in on them too. Well, this night he took out a package of those Life Savers and handed us each one of the mints and——”

  “Oh, yes, I remember that!” said Potter, slapping his knee and guffawing.