Books: Priceless Gift of Laughter

“James Grover Thurber, Doctor of Humane Letters,” intoned the president of Williams College, “cartoonist, playwright, foremost humorist of our day and nation, he has brought to a troubled America the priceless gift of laughter.”

The priceless gift for which James Thurber was honored in Williamstown on Commencement Day, 1951, may soon be made available to half the world. United Productions of America, which last year made the Oscar-winning cartoon comedy short, Gerald McBoing-Boing, has announced a forthcoming eight-reel, 80-minute color film—partly animated, partly live—that will be derived solely from Thurber’s writings and drawings. U.P.A. crosses its heart & hopes to die that the picture, tentatively titled Men, Women and Dogs, will be not only all Thurber but true Thurber. Shooting will start this year; release is scheduled for next year.

Men, Women and Dogs will open with Thurber himself giving an illustrated lecture on a theme that brought him fame both as a writer and an artist—the Domination of the American Male by the American Female. The fact that Thurber will talk throughout the entire first reel should leave him with a decided histrionic edge over Somerset Maugham, who merely introduced Quartet and Trio, the films made from his own stories.

Is It Really Art? Although Maugham may have made a dressier screen appearance than Thurber presumably will (on Thurber’s gaunt frame his expensive clothes give an unfurled effect), several ardent Thurberites have already pointed out that Maugham cannot draw. But, as the question has often been phrased in his home town, Columbus, Ohio: “Can Thurber, either?” For some time now, a psychiatrist has been writing Thurber, offering to cure him of his drawing.

Whether Thurber’s drawing requires psychiatry or not, a great many people, including New Yorker Editor Harold Ross, cannot get enough of it. A series of murals, executed by Thurber years ago in Manhattan for Tim Costello’s Third Avenue saloon (known to its clientele as “The Chop House of Broken Dreams”), is one of the extracurricular features of the establishment. The late Paul Nash, British painter and art critic, once declared Thurber “a master of impressionistic line,” comparing him to the early Matisse.

That enraged most of the professional artists Thurber knew, and sent him into delighted guffaws; not only has he never had a lesson, but he has never taken his drawing seriously. He loves to tell of the time Ross was asked why he ran such a fifth-rate artist as Thurber in his magazine. “Thurber’s a third-rate artist,” Ross snapped loyally.

Of Thurber’s work, which comprises 17 volumes of prose and pictures, Nobel Prizeman T. S. Eliot said last year: “It is a form of humor which is also a way of saying something serious. There is a criticism of life at the bottom of it. It is serious and even somber. Unlike so much humor, it is not merely a criticism of manners—that is, of the superficial aspects of society at a given moment—but something more profound. His writings and also his illustrations are capable of surviving the immediate environment and time out of which they spring. To some extent, they will be a document of the age they belong to.”

Men, Women and Dogs ought to be quite a document in its own right. After Thurber’s opening lecture, the rest will consist of: 1) animated versions of the stories, You Could Look It Up (how a big-league ball club won a pennant by-sending a midget in to bat) and The Unicorn in the Garden (how a woman tried to have her husband sent to the booby hatch and was instead committed herself); 2) dramatizations, using flesh & blood actors, of four of the “Mr. & Mrs. Monroe” stories, dealing with marriage perplexities; 3) another animated lecture, urging the superiority of dogs to humans and including that celebrated cartoon sequence, The Bloodhound and the Bug; 4) a live dramatization of The Whippoorwill, one of Thurber’s narrative ventures into neurasthenic horror; and 5) a three-reel version of his fantasy, The White Deer.

If it does nothing else to its audiences, Men, Women and Dogs should give them an abnormal 80 minutes. It will also be the first time in cinema history that the creative protagonist of a motion picture has been a blind man.

Slow Fade. Thurber is not totally blind. At the age of six, he lost his left eye when one of his brothers accidentally shot him with an arrow. For about the next 40 years, his right eye did double duty, then it failed him; ten years ago, Thurber underwent five extremely painful operations on it for cataract and trachoma. The eye has since had one-eighth vision, not enough for a 56-year-old writer to get himself around with safety. The shins of the long, gangling (6 ft. 1½ in., 154 Ibs.) Thurber bear a mass of scars from collisions with coffee tables.

Before his sight began to go, Thurber could punch a typewriter at a brisk pace. Never having learned the touch system, however, he is now forced to scrawl with soft pencils on sheets of bright yellow paper, getting about 20 words to a sheet, words which he cannot see, although he peers at them through a thick goggle. After he has finished the first draft of a piece, it is read back to him, and he makes oral revisions sentence by sentence. Thurber always was a relentless reviser (he rewrote The White Deer 25 times) so that his composition has become slow and painful. Nevertheless, in the past ten years he has written and published more than he did in the previous ten.

After a lapse of several years, during which he did not draw at all, Thurber is drawing again (see cover). He works with chalk on black paper, preferably just at sundown on clear days. About the porch of his Connecticut home, where he has his drawing board set up, drawings are stacked along with stove wood.

On hot days when there is a lot of glare, Thurber sometimes sees a face that looks to him like Herbert Hoover’s; at other times, there appears what might be the George Washington Bridge flapping in the wind. Thurber is never bitter about his blindness, nor self-pitying, nor “saintly.” Often he discusses it in a completely detached manner; now & then he uses it for little jokes. “I bet I can think up a cornier title for my memoirs than you can,” he challenged a friend. “How about Long Time No See?”

Home Life. James Grover Thurber was born in Columbus in 1894, second of the three children of Charles Leander and Mary Agnes Fisher Thurber. (Mrs. Thurber didn’t like the “Leander,” so her husband, a loyal Republican, changed it to “Lincoln.”) Their other sons were William, a year older than Jim, and Robert, two years younger.

Charley Thurber, the boys’ father, was tall, thin, an inveterate wearer of derby hats, and by profession an unsuccessful politican. Although he kept running for various offices until he was nearly 65, he never got elected to any. When there were six leading candidates for five offices, Charley Thurber would invariably finish sixth. Too honest to play ball with a political machine, and too amiable and gentle to be a winning maverick, he was a chronic also-ran.

In return for his unflagging idealism and perseverance, he received appointments that were largely drudgery: secretary to two governors of Ohio (Asa Bushnell and William McKinley), to a mayor of Columbus; member of a committee to investigate hazing at West Point; state organizer for Teddy Roosevelt’s unsuccessful Bull Moose campaign for the presidency in 1912, etc. In a piece called Gentleman from Indiana, Jim has written lovingly and beautifully of his father.

In contrast to her mild, quiet husband, who never scolded the boys, Mamie Thurber was a hurled hand grenade. The class comic in school, a star at amateur theatricals, for a while she considered running away from home and going on the professional stage. Her stern Methodist father scotched that, clamping down on even the amateur theatricals, but it made no difference. Mamie kept right on performing.

Once at a buffet luncheon she found a bowl of uncooked eggs waiting to be used for eggnogs. “You know, I’ve always wanted to throw a dozen eggs,” she said to nobody in particular. Whereupon she selected a dozen and threw them at the nearest wall, not missing it once.

Another time, she attended an overflow meeting conducted by a faith healer, who with his exhortations and layings-on-of-hands had set Columbus afire. Somehow she got hold of a stretcher, lay down on it, and had a couple of friends carry her toward the platform. Halfway down the aisle, Mamie flipped to her feet, yelling, “I can walk! I can walk! It’s the first time I’ve walked in 40 years!” Hundreds wept or screamed at the miracle.

Mamie Thurber has gone on performing. Her husband died in 1939 at the age of 72, but she is still at it, an amazing old lady of 85, with piercing grey eyes under black brows, and none of her staggering faculties impaired. Wolcott Gibbs, of The New Yorker, has written of Thurber’s “sure grasp of confusion.” Nobody who ever heard Jim’s mother tell a long, detailed, uproarious misadventure story would wonder where his sureness of grasp came from. There are oldtimers in Columbus who insist that Jim is but his mother’s pale copy.

Club Life. The five Thurbers constituted a family unit, but they were also a kind of club. Things were apt to be quite electric around the house; just how electric Jim has described in My Life and Hard Times, a book which many Thurberites consider his most durable, masterpiece. *Sometimes it got a little overwhelming for Charley Thurber. In Jim’s story, The Night the Bed Fell, occurs the sentence, “It happened, then, that my father had decided to sleep in the attic … to be away where he could think.”

Thurber family sessions were marked by plenty of mimicry. William and Robert were good mimics (and still are), but Jim was even better. One day, during their young manhood, he phoned William and pretended to be a tailor, claiming in dialect to have made a suit for him which had not been called for, and demanding to be paid. Flabbergasted, William swore he had never ordered the suit and finally put his mother on the phone. After some angry argument, she challenged the tailor to describe William.† “Ha!” said Jim. “It’s a fine mudder dat don’t even know her own son.”

Outside the family, Jim was shy through grammar and high school and his first two years at Ohio State University, where he did little else than sit reading in the library with his hair in his eyes, looking like an emaciated sheep dog. After testing him, the psychology department reported that he had a remarkable memory. Unkempt, unloved and unknown, he was on his way to a Phi Beta Kappa key, perhaps to a life of scholarship.

But one fateful day in a junior-year English class, the professor, William Lucius Graves, read aloud a student theme entitled, My Literary Enthusiasms, in which the dime novels of the day were wittily treated. Before he had a chance to announce the writer’s name, the bell rang, and the students streamed out. Thurber found himself walking alongside Elliott Nugent, who was everything on the campus that Thurber was not—athlete, social success, best actor in the dramatic club, class president, idol of the coeds.

“Gee, that was a swell piece, wasn’t it?” Nugent remarked to the weedy stranger beside him. “I wonder who wrote it.” Thurber swallowed. “I did,” he said in a dim voice. Nugent stared at Thurber, then introduced himself. The two became best and lifelong friends.*

Nugent made Thurber get his hair cut and buy a new blue suit, then got him into his own fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi. Thurber blossomed and expanded. He became an editor of the college daily and editor in chief of the humorous monthly, acted for the dramatic club, was elected to the senior honor society.

He did not wait to graduate, for by then the U.S. was at war with Germany and he wanted to do something about it. Unable to enlist in the armed forces because of his eye, he entered the State Department and served a year and a half as code clerk at the American embassy in Paris. With that memory of his, Jim was an outstanding code clerk. One of his colleagues in the code room was a young Yale poet named Stephen Vincent Benét.

Fourth Estate. After returning from Paris in 1920, Thurber went to work as a reporter on the Columbus Dispatch, where he stayed three years, mostly covering the City Hall beat. To Thurber’s city editor, the pattern of a perfect lead for all stories whatsoever was: “John Holtsapple, 63, prominent Columbus galosh manufacturer, died of complications last night at his home, 396 N. Persimmon Blvd.” Any attempts by the staff to get wit or originality into the paper usually landed on the spike. The city editor, who began by addressing Thurber as “Author” and “Phi Beta Kappa,” came to respect him, but Thurber still sees this Legree in a recurring anxiety dream: “He runs up to my desk with a shoe in his hand and says, ‘We’ve got just ten minutesto get this shoe in the paper.’ Boy, do I move!”

In 1922,Thurber married Althea Adams, then a sophomore at Ohio State and one of the prettiest girls on the campus. He was chafing to write something better than city council doings, but had little confidence in his ability to make good outside

Columbus. Urged on by Althea, he finally decided to assault New York by way of France, which he had loved in his code-clerk days. When they had saved up $125, they took off.

After the novel Jim started in a Normandy farmhouse had petered out, the Thurbers went to Paris. He got a job on the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune at $12 a week. The Paris Trib’s cable tolls were in keeping with the princely salaries it paid its staff: a fat 50 words of variegated news arrived from America each night. Once Jim was handed a flimsy containing the line, “Christy Mathewson died Saranac,” and from memory and by Ouija board wrote a column obituary on the great New York Giants pitcher.

Big Town. The summer of 1951 marks the 25th anniversary of Jim Thurber’s arrival in New York City. Knowing only Columbus and Paris, he loathed New York at first, with its roar, its dirt, its jostle, and the brash ways of its citizenry. But he got a job as reporter on the Evening Post, which reduced its price from 5¢ to 3¢ the day he went to work.

That fall and winter, he bombarded The New Yorker, a struggling humorous weekly little more than a year old, with 20 pieces, all of which were rejected. Althea argued that he was sweating too much over them and suggested that he bat one out in 45 minutes. On his next Sunday off, he did. It was about a man who got caught in a revolving door. The New Yorker bought it.

During the four years he was a reporter, Thurber registered countless impressions that he could not have gotten into any newspaper. These were filed away in his memory, and he began working them into enchanting monologues for the amusement of his friends. In the ’20s and ’30s, to sit with drink in hand and listen to Jim Thurber off on a free-association talking marathon was an indescribable pleasure.

When he used to mimic Harold Ross, he even looked like Ross, an incredible accomplishment.

One night in 1927 at a small party in Greenwich Village, Thurber met E. B. White, who was already doing “Notes and Comments” on the front page of The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section. White was immediately taken with him; a little later, he recommended him to Ross as a “Talk” reporter and writer.

Big Time. Not long after Ross hired him, Thurber was puzzled to find that he had a secretary, which he had never heard of a reporter having; he supposed that things were different on magazines. He was amazed when she handed him the office weekly payroll to sign, and the fine print of the “Goings On” department to check and okay. He asked her why, and her answer left him thunderstruck. “Because you’re the managing editor,” she said.

In that era, New Yorker managing editors had a life expectancy hardly greater than that of May flies. In addition to hiring & firing managing editors, Ross was combating his restlessness by having the office walls torn down. The editorial floor was cluttered with scaffolding; workmen bashed out plaster and lath with sledge hammers and crowbars; a chalky haze permeated the halls, assailing-the lungs of staff and visiting contributors.

Thurber wanted to write. He hated being managing editor, but Ross kept encouraging him. Once in an editorial conference, Ross snarled, “This week’s issue has more mistakes in it than any we ever published. Who’s responsible?” Hope rising in his breast, Thurber shot up his hand. “Good,” Ross said. “Only honest managing editor I ever had.”

Thurber stood it for six months and, in spite of his misery as an executive, managed to write seven pieces that were accepted, but for which he did not get paid. At last Ross said, “I guess you’re a writer. All right then, goddammit, write.” So Thurber continued to write pieces and, in addition, he and White and one legman for 7½ straight years got out “The Talk of the Town,” which, nowadays, requires virtually a platoon. Between them, White and Thurber pretty much set the tone of the magazine that Ross had created.

Thurber learned a great deal from White, and he is the first to acknowledge the debt. “I learned more about writing from White than from anybody,” he has said. “He taught me to write a simple declarative sentence. I still send my things to him to read.”

World of His Own. Of his old colleague, White has written: “Most writers would be glad to settle for any one of ten of Thurber’s accomplishments. He has written the funniest memoirs, fables, reports, satires, fantasies, complaints, fairy tales and sketches of the past 20 years, has gone into the drama and the cinema, and on top of that has littered the world with thousands of drawings. Most writers and artists can be compared fairly easily with contemporaries. Thurber inhabits a world of his own.

“When I first knew him, his mind was unbelievably restless and made him uncomfortable at all hours. Now, almost 25 years later, I can’t see that it lias relaxed. He still pulls at his hair and trembles all over, as though he were about to sell his first piece. His thoughts have always been a tangle of baseball scores, Civil War tactical problems, Henry James, personal maladjustments, terrier puppies, literary tide rips, ancient myths and modern apprehensions. Through this jungle stalk the unpredictable ghosts of his relatives in Columbus, Ohio.”

In 1935, Jim and Althea were divorced. Their daughter, Rosemary, has just finished her sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania. She has shown marked acting talent, perhaps inherited from her paternal grandmother. Thurber is an affectionate father; he and his daughter get along splendidly. Althea is now the wife of Dr. Allen Gilmore, head of the history department at Carnegie Tech.

Jim always had a taste for handsome women, and the year of his divorce he married Helen Wismer, a clergyman’s daughter, Mount Holyoke graduate and the former editor of a string of pulp magazines. She expertly manages his business affairs and his home, and has helped him enormously in conquering his blindness. The Thurbers spend part of every winter and spring in Hot Springs, Va. and Bermuda. Summer and fall they live in their beautiful twelve-room, go-year-old house on 65 acres of land in West Cornwall, Conn.

At present, Jim is putting the finishing touches on his latest book, The Thurber Album, which will be published next fall. In some of the chapters that have appeared in The New Yorker—particularly one -called Daguerreotype of a Lady—Thurberites believe they have detected a new Thurber, still very funny, but somehow deeper and richer; the most exciting Thurber, they claim, since his sight failed.

Sometimes I Love You. Ambivalent is probably the word for Thurber. Although he believes he is essentially optimistic about the human species, he tends to nurse doubt when he rolls the subject around in his mind: “The human species is both horrible and wonderful. Occasionally, I get very mad at human beings, but there’s nothing you can do about it. I like people and hate them at the same time. I wouldn’t draw them in cartoons, if I didn’t think they were horrible; and I wouldn’t write about them, if I didn’t think they were wonderful.”

That, however, might be what his wife calls Jim’s Friday Opinion. By the following Monday he may have reversed himself, or be fretting over something entirely different. For humorists there are not many fixed rules; about the only thing they are consistently against is pomposity.

During wassail, Thurber’s ambivalence can snap loose and he may be given to bursts of hooting & hollering. A New Yorker editor once returned to the office after a stormy evening at the Algonquin Hotel and thoughtfully announced, “Thurber is the greatest guy in the world up to 5 p.m.” Those who love Thurber ascribe such outbursts to old-fashioned artistic temperament and simply shrug them off. They know that when real troubles arise, there is nobody more steadfast and generous. The jams he has helped and comforted friends through are without number.

When The Thurber Album is completed, his next big effort will probably be another play. On Men, Women and Dogs, Thurber has a percentage-of-box-office deal with United Productions. If the picture is a success—and nearly everything Thurber touches creatively is successful—he will earn a great deal of money. For a man who has never once demeaned his talent for profit, nor ever aimed at mass appeal, he has already earned quite a lot.

If more Thurber movies are made—and there is plenty of material to draw on—it is conceivable that the people and creatures of his imagination may one day be figures in international folklore. Already The Lancet, a learned British medical journal, has used the term “Walter Mitty syndrome” in referring to daydreaming on a grandiose scale.

*Although they would probably give the accolade for funniest, saddest and best single Thurber story to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

†Convinced that if Jim could write and make money, he could too, William once sent his famous brother a MS. which began: “Columbus is a town with an alley between every street.” Commented their mother: “William is twice as crazy as Jamie, only he can’t put it down.”

*In 1939, they wrote a hit play, The Male Animal, in which Nugent starred. Its root idea: “What might have happened if we had stayed on at Ohio State?” Later it was a successful movie, directed by Nugent. Perhaps disgruntled by the play, Ohio State has never granted Distinguished Son Thurber an honorary degree. Even before Williams College honored him, however, small, urbane Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio) had made him a Doctor of Letters.