Michael J. Rosen
Courting the Muse
THURBER AT WORK
Speaking of His Own Writing …
I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don’t think clearly—too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System—the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse. [LIFE]
Hervey Allen, you know, the author of the big best-seller Anthony Adverse, seriously told a friend of mine who was working on a biographical piece on Allen that he could close his eyes, lie down on a bed, and hear the voices of his ancestors. Furthermore, there was some sort of angel-like creature that danced along his pen while he was writing. He wasn’t balmy by any means. He just felt he was in communication with some sort of metaphysical recorder. So you see the novelists have all the luck. I never knew a humorist who got any help from his ancestors. [PARIS]
Still, the act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing’s fun. You’re getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not. I remember Elliot Paul and I used to argue about re-writing back in 1925 when we both worked for the Chicago Tribune in Paris. It was his conviction you should leave the story as it came out of the typewriter, no changes. Naturally, he worked fast. Three novels he could turn out, each written in three weeks’ time. [PARIS]
EDITOR’S NOTE: For the source of each interview or article, please see the Notes on pages 249-250, matching the key word at the end of each excerpt with the list’s respective entry.
[Georges] Simenon, who can write four hundred times as fast as we can, happened to drop in yesterday with my English publisher, Hamish Hamilton. Fastest writers I know are Sally Benson and John O’Hara. O’Hara, like me, is no good at plotting in advance, but his only revising, even of novels, is what he calls “pencil work,” a minor change here and there in final rereading. When you consider that Appointment in Samarra was done like that, it makes you think that the boy is a genius. One thing is sure, a genius, by definition, doesn’t have to go over and over his stuff. [COWLEY]
I draw in the south light of a glassed-in porch and write in a bedroom of my house, a mile from Cornwall Plains, Connecticut, and three hours from the Algonquin Hotel. I once worked in a well-lighted bathroom and have done drawings while riding on trains or lying down or sitting with friends in a restaurant. The Perfect Place to write a fairy tale is Bermuda, with its 1913 tranquility, and there I did “The Thirteen Clocks” last spring, a clock a week. For other stories all I need is a card table, anywhere, a hundred sharpened pencils, and a lot of yellow paper, since I use a thousand sheets a month, perhaps two hundred of them worth saving. [FALL AUTHOR]
[a first draft is] just for size…. That draft isn’t any good; it isn’t supposed to be; the whole purpose is to sketch out proportions…. I rarely have a very clear idea of where I’m going when I start. Just people and a situation. Then I fool around—writing and re-writing until the stuff jells. [GELDER]
I used to be a writer who thought on the typewriter. My father had been with Underwood, and I knew how to typewrite by the time I was 6. Writers have wanted to run me out of town on a rail because I’ve said I like the physical business of writing on a typewriter. Now, I use a soft black pencil on yellow copy paper. I get about twenty words on a sheet. When I finish a short story it’s about the size of a novel. I can’t read those twenty words back. Fortunately, I have a good memory…. Usually I get from 500 to 1,500 words in my mind before I start writing. Also I have shifted from being an eye-writer to being an ear-writer. Mrs. Thurber can read my unreadable hand and reads what I’ve written back to me. [BREIT]
I often tell them [works-in-progress] at parties and places. And I write them there too…. I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, “Is he sick?” “No,” my wife says, “he’s writing something.” I have to do it that way on account of my eyes. I still write occasionally—in the proper sense of the word—using black crayon on yellow paper and getting perhaps twenty words to the page. My usual method, though, is to spend the mornings turning over the text in my mind. Then in the afternoon, between 2 and 5, I call in a secretary and dictate to her. [PARIS]
A blind man benefits by a lack of distractions. I remember sitting with Ross at a table in this restaurant. He picked up a bottle of Worcestershire sauce and then threw it down, saying, “Goddammit, that’s the 10,000th time I’ve read the label on this bottle.” I told him, “Goddammit, Harold, that’s because you’re handicapped by vision.”
The luckiest thing that can happen to a blind man is to have total recall. I first found out I had it in 1913, when I was in a psychology class at Ohio State. There were forty in the class, conducted by a Viennese professor named Weiss. He read a 1,000-word piece to us, and then told us to write down as much as we could remember. My score was 78 per cent, the next highest was 20. Three weeks later, he told us to write down as much as we could remember. This time my score was 50 percent, the next highest was 6. [DOLBIER]
Well, you know it’s a nuisance—to have a memory like mine—as well as an advantage. It’s … well… like a whore’s top drawer. There’s so much else in there that’s junk … costume jewelry, unnecessary telephone numbers whose exchanges no longer exist. For instance, I can remember the birthday of anybody who’s ever told me his birthday. Dorothy Parker—August 22nd, Lewis Gannett—October 3rd, Andy White—July 9th, Mrs. White—September 17th. I can go on with about 200….
I don’t have to do the sort of thing Fitzgerald did with The Last Tycoon—the voluminous, the tiny and meticulous notes, the long descriptions of character. I can keep all these things in my mind. I wouldn’t have to write down “three roses in a vase,” or something, or a man’s middle name. Henry James dictated notes just the way that I write. His note-writing was part of the creative act, which is why his prefaces are so good. He dictated notes to see what it was that they might come to. [PARIS]
Helen is one of the greatest proofreaders, editors, and critics I’ve ever known. She’s often rescued things I’ve thrown aside. And, if there’s something she doesn’t like, she pulls no punches. When I wrote “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” I had a scene in which Mitty got between Hemingway and an opponent in a Stork Club brawl. Helen said that had to come out, that there should be nothing topical in the story. Well, you know how it is when your wife is right. You grouse around the house for a week, and then you follow her advice. [DOLBIER]
I’ve never wanted to write a long work. Many writers feel a sense of frustration or something if they haven’t, but I don’t…. [Could the nature of humor impose a limit on a work’s length?] Possibly. But brevity in any case—whether the word is supposed to be humorous or not—would seem to me to be desirable. Most of the books I like are short books: The Red Badge of Courage, Turn of the Screw, Conrad’s short stories, A Lost Lady, Joseph Hergesheimer’s Wild Oranges, Victoria Lincoln’s February Hill, The Great Gatsby… you know Fitzgerald once wrote Thomas Wolfe: “You’re a putter-inner and I’m a taker-outer.” I stick with Fitzgerald. I don’t believe, as Wolfe did, that you have to turn out a massive work before being judged a writer. Wolfe once told me at a cocktail party I didn’t know what it was to be a writer. My wife, standing next to me, complained about that. “But my husband is a writer,” she said. Wolfe was genuinely surprised. “He is?” he asked. “Why, all I ever see is that stuff of his in The New Yorker.” In other words he felt that prose under 5,000 words was certainly not the work of a writer … it was some kind of doodling in words. If you said you were a writer, he wanted to know where the books were, the great big long books. He was really genuine about that.
I was interested to see William Faulkner’s list not so long ago of the five mos
t important American authors of this century. According to him Wolfe was first, Faulkner second … let’s see, now that Wolfe’s dead that puts Faulkner up there in the lead, doesn’t it? … Dos Passos third, then Hemingway, and finally Steinbeck. It’s interesting that the first three are putter-inners. They write expansive novels. [PARIS]
And there’s “The Train on Track 5.” No, it’s not a novel. I haven’t written a novel, and don’t plan to. It seems today that after youngsters get over the braces on their teeth, and then get through college, the next thing you hear their mother saying is, “Thank God, Tom or Harry has gotten over his first novel.” No, “The Train on Track 5” is a satire on modern American life, done in terms of fairy tale and dream. I’ve been working on it, off and on, for some time, and it hasn’t quite come right yet. My wife read a part of it aloud to some of our friends. I asked how it was received, and she said, ;Well, some one kept making ugly sounds with their lips all through the reading. Me.” [DOLBIER]
[“The Spoodle” is] a sort of fairy tale that will run to about 12,000 words…. The story is placed in a country called Confusia. In it, everybody is supected of the wrong thing. One person has seen the spoodle, another has heard it, and a third has even tasted it. The prosecutor is sure that the spoodle is un-Confusian and has to find it. It he can’t find one, the prosecutor says, he will have to build one. It’s a satire on the Un-American Committee’s worst confusions. Enough hasn’t been said, by the way, about the term un-American. Imagine saying un-Persian or un-Belgian. [BREIT]
I once wanted to write a novel about Bernadette until that book came along. I have a theory about Bernadette and her vision. There are certain kinds of spots-before-the-eyes that take definite shapes. They are scientifically called phosphenes. I have a bright blue shape these days—though it used to be brighter. It’s always there, but you have to look for it. At one time my phosphenes used to take the definite shape of the face of Herbert Hoover. Of course, it wouldn’t make history. [BREIT]
Three sure-fire ones [best-sellers] I would like to write are: How to Make Love and Money, How to Tell Your Blessings from Your Burdens, and How to Pass the Joneses at a Dogtrot. [LIFE]
“Do you ever have fears that you may cease to be before your pen has gleaned your teeming brain?”
“He’s giving Dorothy Thompson a piece of his mind.”
“Courting the Muse?”
The Theory and Practice of Criticizing the Criticism of the Editing of New Yorker Articles
(WITH A LIGHTED CANDLE FOR WOLCOTT GIBBS)
1. When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare (see E. B. White’s “How to Tell a Major Poet from a Minor Poet,” which was inspired by his wife’s saying to him, “Why can’t poets be more clear?”).
2. The problem of the editor who is also a writer is considerable, as against that of the non-writing, or illiterate, editor, such as H. W. R. [Harold W. Ross]. Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, “How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?” and avoid “How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?”
Malraux has said that form is the true expression of the artist and thus form cannot be changed without disaster to what the writer has to say.
3. There is as great a danger in type casting a writer as in type casting an actor. The New Yorker has a tendency toward this as revealed in its editors’ occasional use of “uncharacteristic” and “unfamiliar.” Katharine White suggested twenty years ago that I be asked to do some book reviews, which got from Ross a “Dismiss it from your mind. Thurber is not a book reviewer.” Thurber had reviewed books for the Sunday Times and Herald Tribune, The Nation, The New Republic, The Saturday Review of Literature, the Columbus Dispatch (for two years), and the Christian Science Monitor. This doesn’t mean he wants to do any more book reviews.
4. Metrics or no metrics, Housman’s “It only leaves me fifty more” is better than the so-called correct “It leaves me only fifty more.” In 1921 I wrote the libretto for an Ohio State musical comedy called The Cat and the Riddle. In it a sheriff says, “They is in jail” to which another character replies, “You can’t get them both in on one is.”
“I got them both in on one is,” the sheriff said.
And so A. E. Housman got fifty years in on one is, thus setting the present world’s record.
The compulsion of editors, who can write, and write well, to impose their own style upon an author’s was demonstrated when my “[John] McNulty’s death darkened the day for his friends” was changed to “McNulty’s death darkened the world etc.” The word “day” is often bigger than the world, and the world cannot be darkened by the death of any New Yorker, however eminent, because it has already been darkened by larger, impersonal things. I anticipate no future time when the editors of The New Yorker will have dominated the form and style of all writers so that the experience, beliefs, and style of the editors outshine those of the writers.
5. The Years with Ross contains an exchange of letters between him and me about the style of John McNulty and it’s worth reading [pages 270-272]. The hero of this old situation, my book reveals, was Bill Shawn [editor in chief] who preserved all the peculiar and inviolable rhythms of old McNulty. Gus Lobrano also helped and Ross used his old intuition to go along with them. I had been wrong in my fears about it all.
6. The piece of mine McNulty liked most was called “The Wood Duck” and it was the last piece of mine that the old editorial setup monkeyed with (1936) by sticking in a line to “clarify” the piece. I had a sentence that went something like this, “They’re not allowed to shoot wood ducks in this state anymore.” This was amended to read something like this, “Hunters haven’t been allowed to shoot wood ducks in this state since the Connecticut legislature passed a law in 1932 putting those birds on the protected list.” What I had to say about that cost The New Yorker seventeen dollars in one collect phone call from Litchfield. Needless to say I saved the piece from the wreckage of clarification. This clarification was on behalf of that fourteen-year-old girl who is supposed to be a composite of New Yorker readers. God help us all.
7. Editors must deal with rejections the way doctors deal with dying persons, but doctors have an easier time, because they usually turn the ordeal over to priests or parsons. The system with [John] O’Hara was to hand him a check for a piece that had been bought and then slip him the piece that had been turned down, but this only works when two or more casuals have been submitted at once. Whether or not to explain to the author the why and wherefore of rejection is a moot point, and I understand the moot is dying out in America like the whooping crane. Some of us prefer to be told, bang off, that the piece was not liked, but this doesn’t mean that we will not put on a scene, nor does the scene really mean much in the long run. The writer who takes it lying down is what is known as a lying-down writer. (See Calvin Coolidge’s “The Man Who Does Not Pray Is Not a Praying Man.”)
8. That “that” could easily become as serious an infestation as the commas that spread like black dandelions. When I was asked recently to insert a “that” on behalf of style except in direct quotes, I stayed awake writing such sentences as this. I consider that that “that” that worries us so much should be forgotten. Rats desert a sinking ship. Thats infest a sinking magazine.
9. The writer’s mind and the reader’s eye must both be considered, and this is hard for the editor who is neither the writer nor the reader. Poetry solves these things so easily, and always has. Take, for example, this line from Catullus: “Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus” [Carmina, V, I.I.]. The poet wrote it that way and the old Roman reader knew how to speak it aloud. This is the way one academic fellow fixed up the line in his book on Catullus: “Vivamus me(a), Lesbia, atqu(e) amemus.” This is that old wood duck situation, with a distance
of 2,000 years in between.
10. Henry James used more dependent clauses than anybody, in his long concentric sentences, but he also used few commas. He would have written it this way, “Tall dark and handsome.” Since there is no dark that can be called tall dark, even the dark at the top of the stairs, there is no confusion.
My Ross book takes up the time that he decided, with White’s approval, to punctuate the flag like this. “The red, white, and blue.” I held out, futilely, for the red white and blue, and—oh, well, read the book.
In 1933 I wrote a casual which was rejected (it was serious and uncharacteristic) and it got lost. Later one editor said “they” wanted to see it again. This is known as delayed appreciation. In that piece I left the apostrophe out of every present participle on the ground that so many apostrophes are like so many fly specks. What is the matter with “I was lyin there and thinkin"? This simple solution was sheer revolution to Ross. It’s worth thinking about, or thinkin.
11. I was sometimes not counselled enough by Lobrano, although he was 90 per cent right in not using a fine-tooth comb on my stuff. In those days the overall effect was sometimes lost sight of because of the concentration on words and phrases. As a result there are a dozen or more pieces of mine never included in books because I didn’t consider them perfectly done. In Alarms and Diversions I rewrote, in part, three or four casuals, including “But It’s Your Mother” and “And a Happy New Year.”
Collecting Himself Page 2
