Writings and Drawings

by James Thurber

  “Gave us each one of these mints,” went on the woman, “and asked us what we thought of them—asked us whether we thought they’d go or not. ‘It’s a little thing I thought up one day,’ he said. Then he’d go on with a long rigmarole about how he happened to think of the idea, and——”

  “And then he’d take a pencil out of his pocket,” cut in Potter, “and ask you what you thought of the eraser on the end of it. ‘Just a little gadget I thought up the other night,’ he’d say. Then he says he’ll show you what it’s for, so he makes everybody take a piece of paper and he says: ‘Now everybody make some pencil marks on the paper; any kind—I won’t look,’ so then he goes into another room and says to let him know when you’re ready. So we all make marks on the pieces of paper and somebody goes and gets him out of the other room——”

  “They always go and get him out of the other room,” Joe Mayer said to me.

  “Sure,” said Potter. “So he comes out with his sleeves rolled up, like a magician, and——”

  “But the funniest thing he does,” began the woman whom Potter had interrupted.

  “And he gathers up the papers and erases the marks with the eraser and he says: ‘Oh, it’s just a novelty; I’m not going to try to market it.’ Laugh? I thought I’d pass away. Of course you really ought to see him do it; the way he does it is a big part of it—solemn and all; he’s always solemn, always acts solemn about it.”

  “The funniest thing he does,” began the interrupted woman again, loudly, “is fake card tricks. He——”

  “Oh, yes!” cried Potter, roaring and slapping his knee. “He does these fake card tricks. He—” Here the recollection of the funny man’s antics proved too much for Potter and he laughed until he cried. It was several minutes before he could control himself. “He’ll take a pack of cards,” he finally began again. “He’ll take a pack of cards—” Once more the image of Klohman taking a pack of cards was too much for the narrator and he went off into further gales of laughter. “He’ll take this pack of cards,” Potter eventually said once more, wiping his eyes, “and ask you to take any card and you take one and then he says: ‘Put it anywhere in the deck’ and you do and then he makes a lot of passes and so on——”

  “Like a magician,” said Joe Mayer.

  “Yes,” said Potter. “And then he draws out the wrong card, or maybe he looks at your card first and then goes through the whole deck till he finds it and shows it to you or——”

  “Sometimes he just lays the pack down and acts as if he’d never started any trick,” said Griswold.

  “Does he do imitations?” I asked. Joe Mayer kicked my shins under the table.

  “Does he do imitations?” bellowed Potter. “Wait’ll I tell you——”

  The Black Magic of Barney Haller

  IT WAS one of those hot days on which the earth is uninhabitable; even as early as ten o’clock in the morning, even on the hill where I live under the dark maples. The long porch was hot and the wicker chair I sat in complained hotly. My coffee was beginning to wear off and with it the momentary illusion it gives that things are Right and life is Good. There were sultry mutterings of thunder. I had a quick feeling that if I looked up from my book I would see Barney Haller. I looked up, and there he was, coming along the road, lightning playing about his shoulders, thunder following him like a dog.

  Barney is (or was) my hired man. He is strong and amiable, sweaty and dependable, slowly and heavily competent. But he is also eerie: he trafficks with the devil. His ears twitch when he talks, but it isn’t so much that as the things he says. Once in late June, when all of a moment sabres began to flash brightly in the heavens and bowling balls rumbled, I took refuge in the barn. I always have a feeling that I am going to be struck by lightning and either riven like an old apple tree or left with a foot that aches in rainy weather and a habit of fainting. Those things happen. Barney came in, not to escape the storm to which he is, or pretends to be, indifferent, but to put the scythe away. Suddenly he said the first of those things that made me, when I was with him, faintly creepy. He pointed at the house. “Once I see dis boat come down de rock,” he said. It is phenomena like that of which I stand in constant dread: boats coming down rocks, people being teleported, statues dripping blood, old regrets and dreams in the form of Luna moths fluttering against the windows at midnight.

  Of course I finally figured out what Barney meant—or what I comforted myself with believing he meant: something about a bolt coming down the lightning rod on the house; a commonplace, an utterly natural thing. I should have dismissed it, but it had its effect on me. Here was a stolid man, smelling of hay and leather, who talked like somebody out of Charles Fort’s books, or like a traveller back from Oz. And all the time the lightning was zigging and zagging around him.

  On this hot morning when I saw Barney coming along with his faithful storm trudging behind him, I went back frowningly to my copy of “Swann’s Way.” I hoped that Barney, seeing me absorbed in a book, would pass by without saying anything. I read: “. . . I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francis I and Charles V . . .” I could feel Barney standing looking at me, but I didn’t look at him.

  “Dis morning bime by,” said Barney, “I go hunt grotches in de voods.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, and turned a page and pretended to be engrossed in what I was reading. Barney walked on; he had wanted to talk some more, but he walked on. After a paragraph or two, his words began to come between me and the words in the book. “Bime by I go hunt grotches in de voods.” If you are susceptible to such things, it is not difficult to visualize grotches. They fluttered into my mind: ugly little creatures, about the size of whippoorwills, only covered with blood and honey and the scrapings of church bells. Grotches . . . Who and what, I wondered, really was this thing in the form of a hired man that kept anointing me ominously, in passing, with abracadabra?

  Barney didn’t go toward the woods at once; he weeded the corn, he picked apple boughs up off the lawn, he knocked a yellow jacket’s nest down out of a plum tree. It was raining now, but he didn’t seem to notice it. He kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye, and I kept looking at him out of the corner of my eye. “Vot dime is it, blease?” he called to me finally. I put down my book and sauntered out to him. “When you go for those grotches,” I said, firmly, “I’ll go with you.” I was sure he wouldn’t want me to go. I was right; he protested that he could get the grotches himself. “I’ll go with you,” I said, stubbornly. We stood looking at each other. And then, abruptly, just to give him something to ponder over, I quoted:

  “I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

  I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

  (And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

  I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.”

  It wasn’t, I realized, very good abracadabra, but it served: Barney looked at me in a puzzled way. “Yes,” he said, vaguely.

  “It’s five minutes of twelve,” I said, remembering he had asked.

  “Den we go,” he said, and we trudged through the rain over to the orchard fence and climbed that, and opened a gate and went out into the meadow that slopes up to the woods. I had a prefiguring of Barney, at some proper spot deep in the woods, prancing around like a goat, casting off his false nature, shedding his hired man’s garments, dropping his Teutonic accent, repeating diabolical phrases, conjuring up grotches.

  There was a great slash of lightning and a long bumping of thunder as we reached the edge of the woods.

  I turned and fled. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Barney standing and staring after me. . . .

  It turned out (on the face of it) to be as simple as the boat that came down the rock. Grotches were “crotches”: crotched saplings which he cut down to use as supports under the peach boughs, because in bearing time they became so heavy with fruit that there was danger of the branches snapping off. I saw Barney later,
putting the crotches in place. We didn’t have much to say to each other. I can see now that he was beginning to suspect me too.

  About six o’clock next evening, I was alone in the house and sleeping upstairs. Barney rapped on the door of the front porch. I knew it was Barney because he called to me. I woke up slowly. It was dark for six o’clock. I heard rumblings and saw Bickerings. Barney was standing at the front door with his storm at heel! I had the conviction that it wasn’t storming anywhere except around my house. There couldn’t, without the intervention of the devil or one of his agents, be so many lightning storms in one neighborhood.

  I had been dreaming of Proust and the church at Combray and madeleines dipped in tea, and the rivalry between Francis I and Charles V. My head whirled and I didn’t get up. Barney kept on rapping. He called out again. There was a flash, followed by a sharp splitting sound. I leaped up. This time, I thought, he is here to get me. I had a notion that he was standing at the door barefooted, with a wreath of grape leaves around his head, and a wild animal’s skin slung over his shoulder. I didn’t want to go down, but I did.

  He was as usual, solid, amiable, dressed like a hired man. I went out on the porch and looked at the improbable storm, now on in all its fury. “This is getting pretty bad,” I said, meaningly. Barney looked at the rain placidly. “Well,” I said, irritably, “what’s up?” Barney turned his little squinty blue eyes on me.

  “We go to the garrick now and become warbs,” he said.

  “The hell we do!” I thought to myself, quickly. I was uneasy—I was, you might even say, terrified—but I determined not to show it. If he began to chant incantations or to make obscene signs or if he attempted to sling me over his shoulder, I resolved to plunge right out into the storm, lightning and all, and run to the nearest house. I didn’t know what they would think at the nearest house when I burst in upon them, or what I would tell them. But I didn’t intend to accompany this amiable-looking fiend to any garrick and become a warb. I tried to persuade myself that there was some simple explanation, that warbs would turn out to be as innocuous as boats on rocks and grotches in the woods, but the conviction gripped me (in the growling of the thunder) that here at last was the Moment when Barney Haller, or whoever he was, had chosen to get me. I walked toward the steps that lead to the lawn, and turned and faced him, grimly.

  “Listen!” I barked, suddenly. “Did you know that even when it isn’t brillig I can produce slithy toves? Did you happen to know that the mome rath never lived that could outgrabe me? Yeah and furthermore I can become anything I want to; even if I were a warb, I wouldn’t have to keep on being one if I didn’t want to. I can become a playing card at will, too; once I was the jack of clubs, only I forgot to take my glasses off and some guy recognized me. I . . .”

  Barney was backing slowly away, toward the petunia box at one end of the porch. His little blue eyes were wide. He saw that I had him. “I think I go now,” he said. And he walked out into the rain. The rain followed him down the road.

  I have a new hired man now. Barney never came back to work for me after that day. Of course I figured out finally what he meant about the garrick and the warbs: he had simply got horribly mixed up in trying to tell me that he was going up to the garret and clear out the wasps, of which I have thousands. The new hired man is afraid of them. Barney could have scooped them up in his hands and thrown them out a window without getting stung. I am sure he trafficked with the devil. But I am sorry I let him go.

  Something to Say

  Hugh Kingsmill and I stimulated each other to such a pitch that after the first meeting he had a brain storm and I lay sleepless all night and in the morning was on the brink of a nervous breakdown.—William Gerhardi’s “Memoirs of a Polyglot.”

  ELLIOT VEREKER was always coming into and going out of my life. He was the only man who ever continuously stimulated me to the brink of a nervous breakdown. I met him first at a party in Amawalk, New York, on the Fourth of July, 1927. He arrived about noon in an old-fashioned horse cab, accompanied by a lady in black velvet whom he introduced as “my niece, Olga Nethersole.” She was, it turned out, neither his niece nor Olga Nethersole. Vereker was a writer; he was gaunt and emaciated from sitting up all night talking; he wore an admiral’s hat which he had stolen from an admiral. Usually he carried with him an old Gladstone bag filled with burned-out electric-light bulbs which it was his pleasure to throw, unexpectedly, against the sides of houses and the walls of rooms. He loved the popping sound they made and the tinkling sprinkle of fine glass that followed. He had an inordinate fondness for echoes. “Halloooo!” he would bawl, wherever he was, in a terrific booming voice that could have conjured up an echo on a prairie. At the most inopportune and inappropriate moments he would snap out frank four-letter words, such as when he was talking to a little child or the sister of a vicar. He had no reverence and no solicitude. He would litter up your house, burn bedspreads and carpets with lighted cigarette stubs, and as likely as not depart with your girl and three or four of your most prized books and neckties. He was enamored of breaking phonograph records and phonographs; he liked to tear sheets and pillowcases in two; he would unscrew the doorknobs from your doors so that if you were in you couldn’t get out and if you were out you couldn’t get in. His was the true artistic fire, the rare gesture of genius. When I first met him, he was working on a novel entitled “Sue You Have Seen.” He had worked it out, for some obscure reason, from the familiar expression “See you soon.” He never finished it, nor did he ever finish, or indeed get very far with, any writing, but he was nevertheless, we all felt, one of the great original minds of our generation. That he had “something to say” was obvious in everything he did.

  Vereker could converse brilliantly on literary subjects: Proust, Goethe, Voltaire, Whitman. Basically he felt for them a certain respect, but sometimes, and always when he was drunk, he would belittle their powers and their achievements in strong and pungent language. Proust, I later discovered, he had never read, but he made him seem more clear to me, and less important, than anybody else ever has. Vereker always liked to have an electric fan going while he talked and he would stick a folded newspaper into the fan so that the revolving blades scuttered against it, making a noise like the rattle of machine-gun fire. This exhilarated him and exhilarated me, too, but I suppose that it exhilarated him more than it did me. He seemed, at any rate, to get something out of it that I missed. He would raise his voice so that I could hear him above the racket. Sometimes, even then, I couldn’t make out what he was saying. “What?” I would shout. “You heard me!” he would yell, his good humor disappearing in an instant.

  I had, of course, not heard him at all. There was no reasoning with him, no convincing him. I can still hear the musketry of those fans in my ears. They have done, I think, something to me. But for Vereker, and his great promise, one could endure a great deal. He would talk about the interests implicated in life, the coincidence of desire and realization, the symbols behind art and reality. He was fond of quoting Santayana when he was sober.

  “Santayana,” he would say when he was drinking, “has weight; he’s a ton of feathers.” Then he would laugh roaringly; if he was at Tony’s, he would flounder out into the kitchen, insulting some movie critic on the way, and repeat his line to whoever was there, and come roaring back.

  Vereker had a way of flinging himself at a sofa, kicking one end out of it; or he would drop into a fragile chair like a tired bird dog and something would crack. He never seemed to notice. You would invite him to dinner, or, what happened oftener, he would drop in for dinner uninvited, and while you were shaking up a cocktail in the kitchen he would disappear. He might go upstairs to wrench the bathtub away from the wall (“Breaking lead pipe is one of the truly enchanting adventures in life,” he said once), or he might simply leave for good in one of those inexplicable huffs of his which were a sign of his peculiar genius. He was likely, of course, to come back around two in the morning bringing some awful woman with him, stirrin
g up the fire, talking all night long, knocking things off tables, singing, or counting. I have known him to lie back on a sofa, his eyes closed, and count up to as high as twenty-four thousand by ones, in a bitter, snarling voice. It was his protest against the regularization of a mechanized age. “Achievement,” he used to say, “is the fool’s gold of idiots.” He never believed in doing anything or in having anything done, either for the benefit of mankind or for individuals. He would have written, but for his philosophical indolence, very great novels indeed. We all knew that, and we treated him with a deference for which, now that he is gone, we are sincerely glad.

  Once Vereker invited me to a house which a lady had turned over to him when she went to Paris for a divorce. (She expected to marry Vereker afterward but he would not marry her, nor would he move out of her house until she took legal action. “American women,” Vereker would say, “are like American colleges: they have dull, half-dead faculties.”) When I arrived at the house, Vereker chose to pretend that he did not remember me. It was rather difficult to carry the situation off, for he was in one of his black moods. It was then that he should have written, but never did; instead he would gabble brilliantly about other authors. “Goethe,” he would say, “was a wax figure stuffed with hay. When you say that Proust was sick, you have said everything. Shakespeare was a dolt. If there had been no Voltaire, it would not have been necessary to create one.” Etc. I had been invited for the weekend and I intended to stay; none of us ever left Vereker alone when we came upon him in one of his moods. He frequently threatened suicide and six or seven times attempted it but, in every case, there was someone on hand to prevent him. Once, I remember, he got me out of bed late at night at my own apartment. “I’m going through with it this time,” he said, and darted into the bathroom. He was fumbling around for some poison in the medicine chest, which fortunately contained none, when I ran in and pleaded with him. “You have so many things yet to do,” I said to him. “Yes,” he said, “and so many people yet to insult.” He talked brilliantly all night long, and drank up a bottle of cognac that I had got to send to my father.