His best-known animals, of course, were not his mythical concoctions but his dogs—endlessly climbing, crouching, pouncing, drooping, sniffing, and snooping. What for other people were companions or pets were for Thurber perhaps the most admirable, maintenance-free beings in the universe. Dogs “would in all probability have averted the Depression, for they can go through lots tougher things than we and still think it’s boom time,” he observed. “They demand very little of their heyday; a kind word is more to them than fame, a soup bone than gold; they are perfectly contented with a warm fire and a good book to chew (preferably an autographed first edition lent by a friend); wine and song they can completely forgo; and they can almost completely forgo women.”
The importance of this last trait, insofar as it informed his artistic output, cannot be overstated. Thurber’s complex relationship with virtually all women ran the gamut from adoration to terror. His entire approach to the female of the species jibed with H. L. Mencken’s memorable assessment: “The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.” Thurber’s friend Joel Sayre thought Thurber’s feelings about the fair sex rather less ambivalent. “He hated their goddam guts!” Sayre said.
Thurber’s high-water mark as an artist may have been reached with seventeen dialogue-free panels that began appearing in The New Yorker on January 20, 1934, and ended on April 28. “The War Between Men and Women” depicted a literal campaign of aggression between the sexes, starting with a Thurber man tossing a drink in a Thurber woman’s face and concluding with a wholesale surrender by the men. “The War Between Men and Women” was not merely the title of a series but became shorthand for an entire Thurber view of the world, set forth and refined over the course of his drawing life, in which men are harried and haunted and the women demanding and predatory.
Frequently, Thurber combined his fantasy and sex-against-sex worlds. A woman in a restaurant, announcing the baffling appearance of a couple of semitransparent owls by exclaiming “Look out! Here they come again!” doesn’t scream in fright. Instead, she cries in devilish delight; her male companion, by contrast, merely scowls. A scoffing man tells his female companion, “You and your premonitions!” with neither of them seeing that a Nosferatu-like demon with bared teeth is roaring down at them from the sky. The quintessential expression of this otherworldly theme was “Home,” wherein a Thurber man tentatively approaches a house whose back portion has taken on the form of a huge, menacing Thurber woman.
His art was sui generis. Yet he outwardly dismissed this entire aspect of his New Yorker life. “My drawing?” he once said to an interviewer. “I’ve never taken it very seriously.” This nonchalance is hard to believe, given the efforts he put into his work. As his blindness worsened, drawing became much harder, made possible only with brighter lights and larger magnifying loupes.
Irrespective of his physical infirmity, he labored mightily and let the staff know it. He once called for an “outside opinion” on a certain cartoon he had drawn, insisting that because he had such high standards for himself, he should be exempt from the art meeting’s capricious procedures. “I very much resent being lumped in with the New Yorker artists,” he wrote to Daise Terry. “I send in about two drawings every week, not fifty-two. I do fifty-two, and make my selections, with at least as much understanding of what is funny as the Art Conference has. Then, zam, I am lumped together with Zilch and all the other artists, although I am not an artist at all, in their sense, and dont [sic] belong with them.” Thurber vented his frustration by sketching himself slumping over his drawing table and looking dejected while one observer remarks to another, “He’s trying to think of something that would amuse the Art Conference, but there isn’t anything.” Another sketch along these lines was captioned “5.45 P.M. The Art Conference reaches the Thurber drawings.” The facial expressions of the editors in response to one of Thurber’s submissions are utterly blank.
Gibbs, too, was frustrated by the persnickety protocol of the conferences—the endless criticisms, the requests for revisions, and so on. But even though he felt he was “most insanely miscast” in these marathon sessions, he was called upon to defend the results. This he did in a preface to The Seventh New Yorker Album, published in 1935. It was actually the second of two prefaces in the volume. The first, by the magazine’s architecture critic, Lewis Mumford, was a curiously lukewarm appraisal of the contents. Mumford baldly said that he found the volume’s cartoon humor “a little too pure for my taste”—that is, too genteel and not sufficiently “tainted with dust and carbon monoxide.” He summed up, “The comedy has that special kind of temporary madness that springs out of a tough day at the office and three rapid Martinis. It is titillating but a little frothy; it tickles me but it remains peripheral; it has flavor but it lacks salt.”
In his response, Gibbs acknowledged that his job as editorial liaison was a “perplexing lot” and that “any attempt to reconcile the warring aspirations of four editors and fifty artists is, of course, a matter of considerable confusion and embarrassment to everybody concerned.” He concluded on a maddeningly indecisive note: if Mumford was dissatisfied, he wrote, “it is the fault of the editors, who in ten years have done little or nothing toward formulating a coherent political philosophy (beyond the negative one of suspecting all such philosophies), and have, I’m afraid, practically no intention of beginning now.”
It would take time, but Gibbs would come to better appreciate The New Yorker’s artists, doing so in part in the introductions that he wrote to some of their collections. Gibbs declared George Price, creator of squalid households populated by equally unfortunate and oddly angled denizens, to be “one of the most alarming and hilarious artists in the business.” He praised Alan Dunn’s “economy of means (he is matchless at the extremely difficult feat of drawing pictures that get along hilariously without captions) and highly intelligent topical comment.” Gibbs also had high regard for the “intensely emotional atmosphere” that the fanciful William Steig created around his characters. “In the best of his pictures (or the ones I happen to like best),” Gibbs wrote, “there is the queer, distorted, absolutely faithful definition of character available to most of us only in alcohol or a dream, when an old friend is apt to appear fantastic but recognizable, as the essence of what he is rather than what he looks like.” Steig, he said, possessed “a rare and happy combination of honest observation and of a technique by no means as simple as it seems.” One of his other few favorites was Al Frueh, who, from Manhattan and his place in West Cornwall, Connecticut—which he nicknamed “Belly Acres”—drew for the theater page what Gibbs called “the best caricatures in the country.”
By far the most personal introduction Gibbs wrote was for a compilation by an outsize, jovial fellow with a taste for the macabre:
I can only report that he seems to me very little different from my other friends—a little larger and more casually assembled perhaps, and, of course, somewhat set apart from them by his mysterious dealings in ancient crossbows, articulated bones, and costly, buglike foreign cars. Of the morbid eccentricities that you have undoubtedly been led to expect, however, I’m sorry to say that there is scarcely any trace. It is true that once he gave my ten-year-old son a gleaming human skull, but this, I should say, was merely an example of his generous and perceptive spirit (it was clear that the child needed a skull beyond anything else at the moment in the world), and I doubt if he can be charged with any desire to add one more budding monster to his black domain.
The very first piece of art that a young Charles Addams of Westfield, New Jersey, sold to The New Yorker was a February 6, 1932 “spot” of a window washer high atop a building. It took him almost another year before his first full-fledged cartoon appeared, a simple line illustration of a stocking-footed hockey player on the ice sheepishly confessing to his teammates, “I forgot my skates.” Neither offered any hint of the unique contributio
n he would make to the magazine for more than half a century.
No New Yorker artist ever generated as much curiosity about his personal life as did Addams, and none ever offered a greater contrast between his private and public self. Virtually everyone who ever met the man agreed that he was gentle, cheerful, and companionable. “He had a sweetness that someone who was less of a man would be afraid to show,” said Walter Matthau’s wife, Carol.
Those who didn’t know him never quite believed it. No one who drew a two-headed woman blocking the view of an ordinary one-headed man in a movie theater, they figured, or who depicted a snowman as dead by toppling it on its side, impaled by its own broomstick, could be quite normal. And so devoted readers bombarded Addams with ideas, most of them too grisly for consideration. “That’s really not the sort of thing we do at The New Yorker,” he would tell would-be gagsters in social situations before slipping away. Protests notwithstanding, Addams had his eccentricities. He picnicked in graveyards and visited freak shows and lunatic wards in search of raw material. Rumors to the contrary, he didn’t sleep in a coffin or keep a full-sized guillotine around the house. But his midtown Manhattan apartment was indeed filled with medieval arms and armor, a sewing basket made from an armadillo, and a table formerly used for human embalming. He relished playing the part of the devilish cherub, presenting acquaintances with bizarre tokens—like the black rubber spider and assorted toy lizards he gave to Burgess Meredith’s two-year-old son, Jonathan.
“Charley is this kind of a guy,” Meredith told a reporter. “No sooner are you settled down, the kids are put to bed, and the first drink is coming around, when he says, with that quiet grin of his, ‘Lot of ticks out here this time of year. If they bite you, you know, there’s no cure.’ ”
Actually, much of Addams’s humor wasn’t mordant; witness his cartoon of one bear asking another after hibernating, “What in the world was the matter? You tossed and turned all winter.” Invariably, though, readers responded most enthusiastically to his blackest images, like the one of an annoyed woman in a jungle bungalow snapping, “Oh, speak up, George! Stop mumbling!” unaware that George has been devoured by a giant snake. Addams generally resisted the urge to examine the source of his demons too closely. “I don’t think much about why I do what I do,” he said. “Probably better not to. If I found out why, I might lose it.” Pressed, he would reply, “Oh, I suppose it represents a kind of separate life, a dream thing.”
Perhaps it was for that reason that the shy, gloomy Gibbs especially took to the ebullient, ever-smiling Addams. In his dark art, Addams offered Gibbs a twinkling spin on his natural pessimism. Addams’s universe, said Gibbs, reflected life’s “dominant strain . . . as if God had shrugged His shoulders and given up the world, natural selection has reversed itself and presently our civilization will once again belong to the misshapen, the moonstruck, and the damned.”
For all his negativity, Gibbs the art conference appraiser responded to a job well done, and in Addams he saw a true craftsman. So deeply did he admire Addams’s work that when, like Thurber, he impetuously dashed off a cartoon on a corridor wall, it was an Addams parody. Situated near the water cooler, it depicted a nurse outside a maternity ward handing a baby to a monstrous-looking father and asking, “Will you take it with you or will you eat it here?”
Gibbs was especially taken with Addams’s most famous creation, his clan of creepy eccentrics known first colloquially and later formally as “The Addams Family.” He may have glommed onto them because their brittle, dysfunctional father-mother-son-daughter arrangement offered some parallels to his own household. The father figure held particular interest for Gibbs, resembling as he did a squat, evil-looking Thomas E. Dewey, whom Gibbs loathed with particular gusto. Whatever the reason, Gibbs yearned to collaborate with Addams on a project involving the brood, as he suggested in 1947:
[S]omething really ought to be done about that haunted house bunch, and if you haven’t made any other arrangements, I’d love to try a play with you. As I see it, you’ve really got most of the lines already, since, surprisingly, about half the lines and situations from the other pictures could just as well be part of that series and could certainly be borrowed for it. There’s never been material so rich in sight gags, characters, atmosphere, and perfect curtain lines. The trouble, again as we said, is to avoid that old, foolish scream-and-trap-door note, and the problem is to get a soundplot [sic] to offset too much fantasy, but I think it can be done. You’d probably be better off with sombody [sic] like [Lindsay] Crouse, who knows his business though otherwise a pinhead, but if my version didn’t work out, you could always get him or somebody like him in the end.
Although that proposal came to nothing, the following year he tried collaborating with Addams on a very different venture—a slim effort he called “The Christmas Caller.” Subtitled “A Gothic Gift Book for a Bad Child” and taking place at Addams’s haunted house (“Holocaust Hall”), it opens with the Addams children whiling away their Christmas Eve boredom by conjuring up phantoms and threatening to put curses on each other. There is much talk of presents: “six cases of weed killer,” “one blunt instrument,” “some more of those little pills that make me see in the dark,” and so on. There are also suitably unsettling details (rooms identified as “Jeopardy” and “Doom”; a cryptic entry in a notebook that reads “Joseph Force Crater. August 6th, 1930”). Considerable excitement ensues when a certain Mr. Smith, actually Santa Claus in disguise, pays a call. But when he bestows upon the children such disappointingly conventional gifts as baseball equipment, a teddy bear, and worst of all, a doll that wets its pants but doesn’t bleed, he is left to the tender mercies of “an old lady upstairs.”*
For all his fascination with “the haunted house bunch,” Gibbs never actually passed judgment on them for The New Yorker. The cartoonist placed his first Addams Family drawing in the magazine in August 1938, more than a year after Gibbs managed to abandon his place at the art conference by fobbing it off on new arrival William Maxwell. Maxwell turned out to be no more enthusiastic about his art meeting duties than Gibbs was and so began looking for someone who could replace him. His choice was James L. Geraghty, the magazine’s very first formal art editor.
One of eleven children of an Irish immigrant, Geraghty was a lapsed Catholic who had gone to Gonzaga Prep and, subsequently, Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. He was expelled from the latter in 1927 for writing an essay that compared its Jesuit teachers unfavorably with the Harvard professoriat. (A notation on his transcript stated that he had “started to develop Bolshevik tendencies.”) For a time, Geraghty drove a beer truck in Seattle while pretending to go to school. Eventually he drifted to New York, where he oversaw secretaries at McGraw-Hill. But with an eye on his brother, John, a graphic artist, he yearned to enter a more exciting aspect of the media. “So quit your job!” said his wife, Eve. “I’ve been waiting for you to say that!” Geraghty replied.
Somehow he wangled a writing gig for Tim and Irene Ryan’s radio show, crafting exchanges in the vein of Burns and Allen. After three years of work in the depths of the Depression, he earned just five hundred dollars. He contemplated moving to New Hampshire and the potentially welcoming arms of Eve’s family. Then one day she brought home a copy of The Writer magazine containing an article that described how cartoonists paid for ideas. Not an artist himself, Geraghty threw himself into this new possibility, rising at five a.m. every day to brainstorm. One of his markets was, naturally, The New Yorker. Soon he was coming up with gags for such regulars as Barney Tobey, Richard Decker, Perry Barlow, and Peter Arno, averaging about eighteen dollars per notion.
Maxwell hired him in 1939, largely on the strength of Geraghty’s ability to persuade the stubborn Arno to straighten out a drawing that looked nothing like what he, Geraghty, had conceived. Told by Maxwell to come in three days a week, he made a habit of coming in four. Inevitably he met Ross in the hall. “What are you doing here?” the editor snapped. “What does it matter,”
the art editor shot back, “so long as I get my job done?”
Geraghty would get that job done at The New Yorker for thirty-four years. He was a man of quiet economy; quite often his only advice to the artists was “Make them funny” or “Make it beautiful.” Frequently he would not even say that much. With twitches, vague gestures, and other nonverbal communication, he would somehow get his criticisms and suggestions across. He butted heads with Ross frequently, occasionally forging the editor’s signature of approval to get a piece of art into the magazine. Once when Geraghty protested that a certain drawing was good enough for publication, Ross offered a memorable retort: “Nothing, Geraghty, nothing is ever good enough.” Left unsaid, Geraghty felt, was a corollary: “And don’t you forget it.”
With Geraghty at the helm, The New Yorker’s art, already famous, would become world renowned. No one was more pleased with the final arrangement than Maxwell’s predecessor. “Gibbs was delighted not to screen the incoming work,” Geraghty recalled. “He said after looking at it for an hour or so he felt he should wash his hands with a strong soap.”
As his various cartoon-book introductions indicated, Gibbs did admire certain contributors. But Geraghty was largely right about Gibbs’s disdain for the art process. “I got very sick of transmitting notes to the artists, which always read ‘Better pix,’ ‘Who’s talking?’, or just ‘Make funnier,’ ” Gibbs said. He recalled what finally drove him to sign off: “It always meant that the meeting had no real intention of buying the picture, but sometimes the poor bastard would do things over six or seven times. The big mystic problem was which artists were permitted to leave out the wires leading to lamps and the rugs on the floor.”
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