Conversations with James Thurber

By New Century Books

In Conversations with James Thurber, this remarkable man who has been called America's twentieth-century Mark Twain and who was one of the great talkers of his time expresses his opinions on just about everything and recounts stories and anecdotes about his life which provided the basis for much of his humor.

In this ca

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Century Books
• Release date: Nov 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781736057537

Book preview

Melancholy Doodler

Arthur Millier/1939

From The Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, July 2, 1939, pp. 6,12,17. Copyright © 1939, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted by permission.

As I shook hands with James Thurber I looked him straight in the eye and said that I understood he was quite, quite mad.

Well, maybe I didn’t exactly say it out loud. Maybe what I really said was Where and when were you bom? But so deft a psychologist as Thurber couldn’t have missed the implication.

Columbusohioeighteenninetyfour, he replied at more than Winchell speed. That makes me forty-four. A terrible age. It scares me because there’s only one way out—through the fifties. Heh heh. And I’m not mad.

He would pardon me, I said, but any consistent reader of the New Yorker knows quite well that James Thurber, America’s ace creator of sophisticated screwy stories and equally screwy drawings, is mad.

Thurber’s face lit up.

Oh, he said, so you know I also write? There was genuine gratification in his voice.

I made a little mark in code on my cuff. It was point one in my projected analysis of Mr. Thurber’s psyche. Translated, it meant: Wife probably tells him he can’t write.

You are probably the only person in America who knows I write, he said bitterly. They all say: ‘Oh yes, Thurber?—the guy who makes those crazy drawings?’

I was interviewing him on the sunny terrace overlooking the pool in Elliott Nugent’s Bel-Air garden. Classmates at Ohio State University, Thurber was editor and Nugent associate editor of the college monthly, the Sun Dial, during the war. A confirmed telephone pad doodler, Thurber suddenly found himself without any staff artists. They were all in uniform. So he started printing his doodles in the Sun Dial.

But what was he doing in California?

Elliott and I are writing a play together. For the New York stage. We hope Elliott can get away from Hollywood long enough to act in it next season.

I made another covert mark on the cuff. It translated: Writing a play. Inferiority complex.

Behind double-lens glasses the tall, nervous Thurber was watching.

I know what you’re up to, he said, "you’re psycho-analyzing me. Three of the country’s foremost experts have offered to do it for nothing and I wouldn’t waste their time. Why waste yours?

Confidentially, he whispered, "it’s not me that’s mad. It’s Harold Ross. Harold’s mad. Wolcott Gibbs is mad. The whole New Yorker staff is mad—except me."

He leaned back luxuriantly in one of the Nugent terrace chairs and let the afternoon sunlight gild his wavy, graying hair and mustache.

Did I understand him to say that the entire New Yorker staff was mad from the managing editor down? I like to check startling statements, I explained.

"We always work that way on the New Yorker, he said. Down. I was hired in 1929. Toward the end of the first week my secretary brought me the pay roll checks to sign.

" ‘What’s the idea,’ I asked her. ‘Why should I sign ’em?’

" ‘Because you’re the managing editor,’ she said.

That’s the first I had heard of it, said Thurber. "But you get used to it. We counted up and found that the New Yorker has had 37 managing editors! Three of them are now office boys."

So he edited things, wrote stories—and doodled. One day he doodled a seal on a rock with Arctic explorers in the distance. His friend, E. B. White, picked the seal-doodle off the floor where Thurber had casually tossed it, inked it in and tried to peddle it to Ross as an illustration for the magazine. It came back with a sarcastic note appended and several marginal sketches by the art staff showing how a proper seal’s whiskers should be drawn.

The sun was steadily dropping down the hill. Troops of brown, barefooted Nugent children appeared, stared, vanished. A handsome, tanned, smiling young man sauntered up. I could have sworn he was Robert Montgomery—but he called the equally young-looking Nugent Pop. At any moment, now, I expected to see one of those melancholy menacing Thurber cave-woman in a short Greek shift come round a shrub with a stone club in her huge paw and threaten us. She would be Mrs. Thurber.

White got sore, said Thurber, and sent the seal back to Ross with an equally sarcastic note. It said: This is how Thurber’s seal’s whiskers are drawn! But Ross still had no use for it. I threw it away.

One day White took a thin manuscript to Harper and Sons with the electrifying title, Is Sex Necessary? Recognizing a vital question when they saw one, Harper’s were all for publishing. But White made one condition. They must use the illustrations by one James Thurber.

They looked at them, said Thurber, then, making a great effort at politeness, they said: ‘These are—er—the artist’s rough ideas for the illustrations?’

White assured Harper’s that these were the finished jobs.

The book came out and the screwy drawings made a hit.

You see, said Thurber sadly, "that’s the way life goes. I write stories with the utmost care, rewriting every one from three to 10 times. I have written so many of them for the New Yorker that six volumes of prose have already been published in book form to only one of drawings. Yet they say, ‘Thurber? The bird who draws?’ "

I’m not an artist. I’m a painstaking writer who doodles for relaxation. But its those doodles they go for. Do you wonder I think it’s a screwy world?

He looked around furtively and, I thought, a bit