Writings and Drawings

by James Thurber

  That was the last I ever seen of Pearl du Monville. I never seen hide nor hair of him from that day to this, and neither did nobody else. He just vanished into the thin of the air, as the fella says. He was ketched for the final out of the ball game and that was the end of him, just like it was the end of the ball game, you might say, and also the end of our losin’ streak, like I’m goin’ to tell you.

  That night we piled onto a train for Chicago, but we wasn’t snarlin’ and snappin’ any more. No, sir, the ice was finely broke and a new spirit come into that ball club. The old zip come back with the disappearance of Pearl du Monville out back a second base. We got to laughin’ and talkin’ and kiddin’ together, and ’fore long Magrew was laughin’ with us. He got a human look onto his pan again, and he quit whinin’ and complainin’ and wishtin’ he was in heaven with the angels.

  Well, sir, we wiped up that Chicago series, winnin’ all four games, and makin’ seventeen hits in one of ’em. Funny thing was, St. Louis was so shook up by that last game with us, they never did hit their stride again. Their center fielder took to misjudgin’ everything that come his way, and the rest a the fellas followed suit, the way a club’ll do when one guy blows up.

  ’Fore we left Chicago, I and some of the fellas went out and bought a pair of them little baby shoes, which we had ’em golded over and give ’em to Magrew for a souvenir, and he took it all in good spirit. Whitey Cott and Billy Klinger made up and was fast friends again, and we hit our home lot like a ton of dynamite and they was nothin’ could stop us from then on.

  I don’t recollect things as clear as I did thirty, forty year ago. I can’t read no fine print no more, and the only person I got to check with on the golden days of the national pastime, as the fella says, is my friend, old Milt Kline, over in Springfield, and his mind ain’t as strong as it once was.

  He gets Rube Waddell mixed up with Rube Marquard, for one thing, and anybody does that oughta be put away where he won’t bother nobody. So I can’t tell you the exact margin we win the pennant by. Maybe it was two and a half games, or maybe it was three and a half. But it’ll all be there in the newspapers and record books of thirty, thirty-one year ago and, like I was sayin’, you could look it up.

  The Gentleman in 916

  ONE OF my remarkable collection of colored maids wrote me a letter the other day. This girl, named Maisie, is the one who caused my hair to whiten over night a few years ago by telling me when I got home one gloomy November evening, tired and jumpy, that there was something wrong with the doom-shaped thing in the kitchen. This monstrous menace turned out, too late to save my reason, to be the dome-(to her) shaped thing on top of the electric icebox.

  Maisie’s letter went along quietly enough for two paragraphs, listing the physical woes of herself and her family, a rather staggering list, to be sure, but containing nothing to cause my white hair to stand on end. And then came an alarming sentence.

  “I tried to see you in December,” she wrote, “but the timekeeper said you were in Florida.”

  This was the first news I had had that there is a man holding a watch on me. All my doom-shaped fears came back with a rush. It is true that I was not in Florida at the time, but this did not comfort me. I could only guess that the man who is watching the sands run through my hour-glass is not really on the job.

  “What difference does it make where this bird is?” he probably says to himself. “He hasn’t got many hours left, so why should I bother following him around? I’ll just sit here and watch the clock.”

  There are times, however, when I think he is keeping track, that he is right in the room with me. Since I have, for the time being, about one-fiftieth vision, I can’t actually see him; but I can hear him. It is no illusion that the blind become equipped with the eardrums of an elk hound. I can hear a pin drop on a carpet. It makes two sounds—a sharp plop when it strikes the carpet and a somewhat smaller sound, a faint thip! when it bounces and strikes again. It is because of acute sharpness of ear that I hear, or think I hear, the timekeeper. This is always when I am alone in a room, or think I am. I shut the radio off suddenly, and I hear him flitting across the carpet, making a sound about three times as loud as a pin.

  “Hello,” I say, but he never answers. Sometimes a waiter does, or a bell boy, or a maid who has crept into the room. On these occasions the timekeeper slips into a closet or under the bed. I never ask the waiter or the bell boy or the maid to look for the hiding man, for consider how it would sound. It would sound like this:

  “Waiter?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Would you mind looking under the bed? I think there is a timekeeper there.”

  “A timekeeper, sir? I’m sorry, sir, but it sounds as if you said timekeeper, sir.”

  “That’s right—timekeeper. There is a timekeeper hiding somewhere in this room, a chap who wears sneakers, and a suit of the same design as the wallpaper, probably.”

  “I’m very sorry. Shall I call your doctor?”

  “No, never mind, it’s all right. Let it go.”

  I haven’t let anybody call the doctor yet, but I am planning to let one of the waiters do it one of these days, a waiter named Heyst. He not only always brings the wrong order to me, but he is also the man who distributes the menus, shoving them under the door. To some people a menu being shoved under a door would make only a faint moving sound, but to me it sounds like a man stepping on a market basket, and is very disconcerting.

  So I am going to let Heyst call the doctor some day. You know what would happen to a man who phoned a doctor and said, “The gentleman in 916 hears timekeepers, sir.” He would be put away before sundown.

  I don’t know who pays the timekeeper. I do, probably, without knowing it—I can’t see my checkbook stubs. It is thoughtful of him, at least, to carry a watch that makes no sound at all. That would keep me awake at night when he sits in a chair at the foot of my bed. Even the sound of a wrist-watch prevents me from sleeping, because it sounds like two men trying to take a wheel off a locomotive. If I put stoppels in my ears, the racket is deadened somewhat. Then the ticking is fainter and farther away, a comparatively peaceful sound, like two men trying to take a rug away from a bulldog.

  The Letters of James Thurber

  Adams was a great letter writer of the type that is now almost extinct . . . his circle of friends was larger perhaps and more distinguished than that of any other American of his generation.—H. S. Commager on “Letters of Henry Adams.”

  JAMES THURBER was a letter writer of the type that is now completely extinct. His circle of correspondents was perhaps no larger but it was easily more bewildered than that of any other American of his generation. Thurber laid the foundation for his voluminous correspondence during his Formative Period. In those years he wrote to many distinguished persons, none of whom ever replied, among them Admiral Schley, Young Barbarian, Senator Atlee Pomerene, June Caprice, and a man named Unglaub who played first base for the Washington Senators at the turn of the century. Unglaub, in Thurber’s estimation, stood head and shoulders above all the rest of his correspondents and, indeed, he said so in his letter to McKinley. Thurber did not write as many letters as Henry Adams or John Jay Chapman or some of the other boys whose correspondence has been published lately, but that is because he never set pen to paper after his forty-third year.

  The effect of Thurber’s letters on his generation was about the same as the effect of anybody’s letters on any generation; that is to say, nil. It is only when a man’s letters are published after his death that they have any effect and this effect is usually only on literary critics. Nobody else ever reads a volume of letters and anybody who says he does is a liar. A person may pick up a volume of correspondence now and then and read a letter here and there, but he never gets any connected idea of what the man is trying to say and soon abandons the book for the poems of John Greenleaf Whittier. This is largely because every man whose letters have ever been published was in the habit of writing every third one to a
Mrs. Cameron or a Mrs. Winslow or a Miss Betch, the confidante of a lifetime, with whom he shared any number of gaily obscure little secrets. These letters all read like this: “Dear Puttums: I love what you say about Mooey! It’s so devastatingly true! B—— dropped in yesterday (Icky was out at the time) and gave some sort of report on Neddy but I am afraid I didn’t listen (ut ediendam aut debendo!). He and Liddy are in Venice, I think I gathered, or Newport. What in the world do you suppose came over Buppa that Great Night? ? ? You, of course, were as splendidly consequent as ever (in loco sporenti abadabba est)—but I was deeply disappointed in Sig’s reaction. All he can think of, poor fellow, is Margery’s ‘flight.’ Remind me to tell you some day what Pet said about the Ordeal.” These particular letters are sometimes further obscured by a series of explanatory editorial footnotes, such as “Probably Harry Boynton or his brother Norton,” “A neighbor at Bar Harbor,” “The late Edward J. Belcher,” “Also sometimes lovingly referred to as Butty, a niece-in-law by his first marriage.” In the end, as I say, one lays the book aside for “Snow-Bound” in order to get a feeling of reality before going to bed.

  Thurber’s letters from Europe during his long stay there in 1937 and 1938 (the European Phase) are perhaps the least interesting of all those he, or anybody else, ever wrote. He seems to have had at no time any idea at all, either clear or vague, as to what was going on. A certain Groping, to be sure, is discernible, but it doesn’t appear to be toward anything. All this may have been due in great part to the fact that he took his automobile to Europe with him and spent most of his time worrying about running out of gas. The gasoline gauge of his car had got out of order and sometimes registered “empty” when the tank was half full and “full” when it contained only two or three gallons. A stronger character would have had the gauge fixed or carried a five-gallon can of essence in the back of the car, thus releasing the mind for more mature and significant preoccupations, but not Thurber.

  I have been unable to find any one of Thurber’s many correspondents who saved any of his letters (Thurber himself kept carbons, although this is not generally known or cared about). “We threw them out when we moved,” people would tell me, or “We gave them to the janitor’s little boy.” Thurber gradually became aware of this on his return to America (the Final Phase) because of the embarrassed silence that always greeted him when, at his friends’ homes, he would say, “Why don’t we get out my letters to you and read them aloud?” After a painful pause the subject was quickly changed, usually by putting up the ping-pong table.

  In his last years the once voluminous letter writer ceased writing letters altogether, and such communication as he maintained with the great figures of his time was over the telephone and consisted of getting prominent persons on the phone, making a deplorable sound with his lips, and hanging up. His continual but vain attempts to reach the former Barbara Hutton by phone clouded the last years of his life but at the same time gave him something to do. His last words, to his wife, at the fag end of the Final Phase, were “Before they put up the ping-pong table, tell them I am not running out of gas.” He was as wrong, and as mixed up, in this particular instance as he was in most others. I am not sure that we should not judge him too harshly.

  Here Lies Miss Groby

  MISS GROBY taught me English composition thirty years ago. It wasn’t what prose said that interested Miss Groby; it was the way prose said it. The shape of a sentence crucified on a blackboard (parsed, she called it) brought a light to her eye. She hunted for Topic Sentences and Transitional Sentences the way little girls hunt for white violets in springtime. What she loved most of all were Figures of Speech. You remember her. You must have had her, too. Her influence will never die out of the land. A small schoolgirl asked me the other day if I could give her an example of metonymy. (There are several kinds of metonymies, you may recall, but the one that will come to mind most easily, I think, is Container for the Thing Contained). The vision of Miss Groby came clearly before me when the little girl mentioned the old, familiar word. I saw her sitting at her desk, taking the rubber band off the roll-call cards, running it back upon the fingers of her right hand, and surveying us all separately with quick little henlike turns of her head.

  Here lies Miss Groby, not dead, I think, but put away on a shelf with the other T squares and rulers whose edges had lost their certainty. The fierce light that Miss Groby brought to English literature was the light of Identification. Perhaps, at the end, she could no longer retain the dates of the birth and death of one of the Lake poets. That would have sent her to the principal of the school with her resignation. Or perhaps she could not remember, finally, exactly how many Cornishmen there were who had sworn that Trelawny should not die, or precisely how many springs were left to Housman’s lad in which to go about the woodlands to see the cherry hung with snow.

  Verse was one of Miss Groby’s delights because there was so much in both its form and content that could be counted. I believe she would have got an enormous thrill out of Wordsworth’s famous lines about Lucy if they had been written this way:

  A violet by a mossy stone

  Half hidden from the eye,

  Fair as a star when ninety-eight

  Are shining in the sky.

  It is hard for me to believe that Miss Groby ever saw any famous work of literature from far enough away to know what it meant. She was forever climbing up the margins of books and crawling between their lines, hunting for the little gold of phrase, making marks with a pencil. As Palamides hunted the Questing Beast, she hunted the Figure of Speech. She hunted it through the clangorous halls of Shakespeare and through the green forests of Scott.

  Night after night, for homework, Miss Groby set us to searching in “Ivanhoe” and “Julius Caesar” for metaphors, similes, metonymies, apostrophes, personifications, and all the rest. It got so that figures of speech jumped out of the pages at you, obscuring the sense and pattern of the novel or play you were trying to read. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” Take that, for instance. There is an unusual but perfect example of Container for the Thing Contained. If you read the funeral oration unwarily—that is to say, for its meaning—you might easily miss the C.F.T.T.C. Antony is, of course, not asking for their ears in the sense that he wants them cut off and handed over; he is asking for the function of those ears, for their power to hear, for, in a word, the thing they contain.

  At first I began to fear that all the characters in Shakespeare and Scott were crazy. They confused cause with effect, the sign for the thing signified, the thing held for the thing holding it. But after a while I began to suspect that it was I myself who was crazy. I would find myself lying awake at night saying over and over, “The thinger for the thing contained.” In a great but probably misguided attempt to keep my mind on its hinges, I would stare at the ceiling and try to think of an example of the Thing Contained for the Container. It struck me as odd that Miss Groby had never thought of that inversion. I finally hit on one, which I still remember. If a woman were to grab up a bottle of Grade A and say to her husband, “Get away from me or I’ll hit you with the milk,” that would be a Thing Contained for the Container. The next day in class I raised my hand and brought my curious discovery straight out before Miss Groby and my astonished schoolmates. I was eager and serious about it and it never occurred to me that the other children would laugh. They laughed loudly and long. When Miss Groby had quieted them she said to me rather coldly, “That was not really amusing, James.” That’s the mixed-up kind of thing that happened to me in my teens.

  In later years I came across another excellent example of this figure of speech in a joke long since familiar to people who know vaudeville or burlesque (or radio, for that matter). It goes something like this:

  A: What’s your head all bandaged up for?

  B: I got hit with some tomatoes.

  A: How could that bruise you up so bad?

  B: These tomatoes were in a can.

  I wonder wh
at Miss Groby would have thought of that one.

  I dream of my old English teacher occasionally. It seems that we are always in Sherwood Forest and that from far away I can hear Robin Hood winding his silver horn.

  “Drat that man for making such a racket on his cornet!” cries Miss Groby. “He scared away a perfectly darling Container for the Thing Contained, a great, big, beautiful one. It leaped right back into its context when that man blew that cornet. It was the most wonderful Container for the Thing Contained I ever saw here in the Forest of Arden.”

  “This is Sherwood Forest,” I say to her.

  “That doesn’t make any difference at all that I can see,” she says to me.

  Then I wake up, tossing and moaning.

  A Ride with Olympy

  OLYMPY SEMENTZOFF called me “Monsieur” because I was the master of the Villa Tamisier and he was the gardener, the Russian husband of the French caretaker, Maria. I called him “Monsieur,” too, because I could never learn to call any man Olympy and because there was a wistful air of ancien régime about him. He drank Bénédictine with me and smoked my cigarettes; he also, as you will see, drove my car. We conversed in French, a language alien to both of us, but more alien to me than to him. He said “gauche” for both “right” and “left” when he was upset, but when I was upset I was capable of flights that put the French people on their guard, wide-eyed and wary. Once, for instance, when I cut my wrist on a piece of glass I ran into the lobby of a hotel shouting in French, “I am sick with a knife!” Olympy would have known what to say (except that it would have been his left wrist in any case) but he wouldn’t have shouted: his words ran softly together and sounded something like the burbling of water over stones. Often I did not know what he was talking about; rarely did he know what I was talking about. There was a misty, faraway quality about this relationship, in French, of Russia and Ohio. The fact that the accident Olympy and I were involved in fell short of catastrophe was, in view of everything, something of a miracle.