Art: Men, Women and Thurber

Bang! Bang! Bang! I assume, then, that you regard yourself as omniscient. If I am wrong, correct me! Laissez faire and let laissez faire is what I believe in. I thought you’d enjoy Miss Perrish, darling. She has a constant ringing in HER ears too. One of us ought to be a Boswell, taking all this down. Miss Gorce is in the embalming game. Darling, I seem to have this rabbit.

These captions of his drawings are lively clues to the imagination of James Thurber. This week The New Yorker’s famous comic master of neurasthenia—and its illumination of the so-called normal world—publishes his first picture book in ten years, Men, Women and Dogs (Harcourt, Brace; $3). Thurber has published a dozen books of prose and pictures which have already taken their places among the humorous classics of the U.S. The new book offers Thurber’s grateful public 205 pages of devastating deraillery in line and punchline.

One of Thurber’s simpler secrets is the dismaying fact that the maddest laughter is often provoked by no laughing matter. Thus, one twin-bedded, book-reading wife asks of her mate, in the other bed: “What the hell ever happened to the old-fashioned love story?” Again, five assorted Thurber dogs group themselves on a grassy bank to watch a family of human beings pass: “There go the most intelligent of all animals.” One of Thurber’s masterpieces carries no caption at all. A simple drawing which out-surrealizes a whole school of artists, it shows a lone, wan male cowering before a house whose whole three-storied back has somehow melted into the head of the waiting woman. The book also reproduces Thurber’s famous 17 drawings illustrating The War Between Men and Women (including The Fight in the Grocery and Zero Hour—Connecticut).

Advanced Fantasy. At 49, James Thurber is a greying, railish six-footer who has been prolific of achievement in the face of physical handicap. For years specialists have been fighting to save Thurber’s one remaining eye. The other was accidentally put out by an arrow in the hands of his eldest brother when James was six.

At The New Yorker Thurber is known as Old Thurber. He pooh-poohs the tendency of art critics to breathe his name with that of Matisse and Picasso. But his drawings have long been taken seriously by advanced students of fantasy, and one sketch of a lady’s alcoholic visions was hung (under the heading of Miracles and Anomalies) at the outstanding Fantastic Art-Dada-Surrealism show at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Old Thurber, anything but pompous, once described himself as follows:

“THURBER, James, autobiographer, was born in Columbus, Ohio. . . . He began to write when he was ten years old (Horse Sandusky, the Intrepid Scout). . . . Quick to arouse, he is very hard to quiet, and people often just go away. . . . He never listens when anybody else is talking, preferring to keep his mind a blank until they get through so he can talk. . . . Two overcoats which he left in the New Yorker office last spring were stolen, or else he left them someplace else.”