JAMES THURBER

Aphorist for an Anxious Age

The unicorn nibbled its last rose, and left the garden. But readers knew well enough what they had seen. James Thurber, who died at 66 last week, a month after an emergency operation to relieve a blood clot on the brain, was an aphorist of sad truths who mourned his times with laughter.

“There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else,” he said. And, “It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.” He was a dreamer who knew the longings of ordinary men—to stuff their wives and put them on the mantelpiece, to bet the old plantation on an uncaught ace, while the paddle wheel goes pocketa-pocketa. He was a bad artist who drew wonderful, lumpy dogs, and was often mistaken for one of them by strangers who had never seen him throw a highball glass.

Words were Thurber’s obsession; in one of his stories drunken friends burst in upon the narrator, forlornly sober, to tell him of the words they have found locked in other words:

There are lips in pistol And mist in times, Cats in crystal, And mice in chimes.

What words are locked in Thurber? There is rue and her (Thurber’s battle of the sexes, of course); hurt (the battle does not go well); the rub (Walter Mitty playing Hamlet); rube (the author was an Ohio boy); and true (it is harder to fool little girls these days).

But what of brute, locked up with the rest? The answer is that Thurber considered himself, half correctly, a rough, bruising satirist. “I am in a corner without being backed there,” he wrote, “and I often come out fighting.” To be thought a nice, lovable old character must have been as hard to endure as the slow onset of blindness. He bore both afflictions with dignity.

Goddammit, Write. Columbus, Ohio, was where the bed fell on father, and the ghost got in, where the dog that bit people did his dirty work. It was very nearly where Thurber stayed. He skipped graduation at Ohio State University to serve as a code clerk in Paris during World War I, but returned to cover city hall for the Columbus Dispatch. It was 1925 before Thurber’s first wife, Althea, a beautiful girl who had twice been elected Campus Rosebud at State, persuaded him to go to Paris and write a novel, like everyone else.

The novel fizzled, and Thurber never tried another. But when he came back this time, it was to New York. He became a reporter for the Evening Post, and sent funny prose to a feeble new weekly, The New Yorker, which sent it back. But the magazine accepted the 21st piece Thurber submitted, and after this, things moved fast. Harold Ross, the inspired Neanderthal who edited by the touch system, promptly appointed Thurber the office Jesus (unofficial title: managing editor). Things fell apart, the center did not hold, and eventually Ross desanctified Thurber: “I guess you’re a writer. All right then, Goddammit, write.”

Thurber wrote, and he also drew. But Ross took no notice of the podgy dogs and lopsided little men that Thurber doodled. It was not until Harper & Brothers had paid good money for Thurber’s drawings (in the E. B. White-Thurber parody, Is Sex Necessary?) that Ross gave in, and up. He paid good money for the drawings, even defended them when a cartoonist complained about “that fifth-rate artist.” Ross was severe. “Third-rate,” he corrected.

The drawings took Thurber no time at all—a fact that he tried to hide from Ross—and he covered the walls of Tim Costello’s Third Avenue saloon in 90 minutes, for drinks. He claimed to belong to the “pre-intentionalist” school. His famed seal-barking cartoon began, he recalled, with a fine seal. But the rock he tried to draw under the seal looked hopelessly like a bed, and one thing led to another.

Fog Settles In. The characters in Thurber’s drawings and stories are mostly pre-intentionalists themselves. There is the wife, yelling “What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?” and there is the hippopotamus, looking smug. Inside the hippo, the reader feels sure, is Dr. Millmoss, unhurt (even the Thurber fencer who loses his head is not hurt) but ill at ease, not at all sure he likes being where events have swept him. In his eloquent preface to My Life and Hard Times, Thurber complained of feeling much the same; the humorist, he wrote, “knows vaguely that the nation is not much good any more; he has read that the crust of the earth is shrinking alarmingly and that the universe is growing steadily colder, but he does not believe that any of the three is in half as bad shape as he is.” Thurber’s readers, all paid-up members of the age, of anxiety, knew very well they were in bad shape, and so Walter Mitty’s moonings were hauntingly their own. So was Grant’s frightful hangover as he surrendered confusedly to Lee at Appomattox, and the nameless little man’s fright as he stood before the house that looked to him like a great, crouching wife.

As even his good eye faded. Thurber sketched and wrote with a black crayon on huge sheets of yellow paper. When the fog became too thick, he stopped sketching and learned, helped by his second wife, Helen, to write by dictation. He kept his courage and improved his prose; The Thirteen Clocks, his delightful tone poem and fairy story, was written when he could not see.

The tall, white-haired man loved more than he mourned—crouching wives, fuddled dogs and all. Pessimism was for a man less wise, but wariness was only good sense. “The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings,” he quoted at the end of one of his fables. Being Thurber, and wary, he added, “And you know how happy kings are.”