I’ve been brooding about the kind of change that seems to have darkened the magazine’s funny cartoons recently. There is much too much stuff about the man and woman on the raft and the two beachcombers. The first should have ended twelve years ago when the man said, “You look good enough to eat,” and I thought I had ended the other one in the Ohio State Sun-Dial in 1917 with:
1st Beachcomber: “What did you come here to forget?”
2nd Beachcomber: “I’ve forgotten.”
… The best thing The New Yorker has ever done in comic art is the probable or recognizable caption dealing with the actual relationships of people in our middle-class society. All of us have had a fling at fantasy and formula, but they should never predominate. I had hoped to do a few drawings based on captions I have dug out of hell in the past two years, but I think the strain would be too much for me now. Maybe [Whitney] Darrow, who drew the picture for my “When you say you hate your species do you mean everybody?” could do this one about a long married middle-aged couple. The wife is saying, “You’re always talking about how dark the future of Man is—well, what do you think I got to look forward to?” This is two years old in my head. I can’t do anything now since my humor sounds like that of an assistant embalmer. [DE VRIES]
“When did you learn to draw?”
“I don’t know how to draw,” Thurber says, astounded that I don’t know this. “Say, if I could draw, I’d probably be starving.”
“No? Then, who does draw those men and women I see in the magazines?”
“You’re trying to make me happy,” Thurber says, grimacing. “You know you don’t think they’re men and women. Somebody once said that I am incapable of drawing a man, but that I draw abstract things like despair, disillusion, despondency, sorrow, lapse of memory, exile, and that these things are sometimes in a shape that might be called Man or Woman….” [SHER]
People who exclaim over them as being “fine,” that is, a “new or exciting form of art” or whatever else they may decide they are, almost invariably miss the fact that, essentially, most of them are funny, or supposed to be funny. Those that find them funny often do not see them as being “art.” You are getting a great many of the funny ones because the fellow that selected the ones for the London show invariably picked out what he thought represented “art,” “draughtsmanship”—of which I, of course, in the academic meaning of the word, have none, which lack is, in itself, one of the essential points and purposes of the way I draw—”composition,” “scope,” and God know what else. In doing so, he got some good ones, but not very many good ones. Anyway, not many of the most successfully funny ones.
About prices, I have never had any real notion or feeling or standard. In the first place, being essentially a writer, I find that I do not in any possible way share the emotions and mentality of artists who draw or paint. They, to me, are as alien and difficult to understand as Sally Rand [the renowned fan dancer of the period]. I have, as a matter of fact, no community of anything with artists. I originally drew, I think, to satirize and poke fun at the more pretentious artists. Once I began to share the temperament, the phoney profundities, the ah-ing and oh-ing, the extravagant praise or denunciation of this and that, the language of art criticism—exceeded in monkey business only by the criticism of music … I would be lost…. [GUMP]
… I think it was in 1902, however, that I did my first drawings. My father was in politics—had been all his life—and although his three sons grew up to hate politics, there was a time in our extreme youth when we were fascinated by the thought of some men being elected and others defeated. So, we used to draw pictures of men and take them around and ask family, friends, and strangers which one they wanted to vote for. Each of us would draw one man for President, you see, on a separate sheet of paper, and submit the three sheets to people. I was eight years old and my brother William nine. He was at that time considered the artist in the family. He used to copy, painstakingly, the Gibson pen and ink drawings. I remember nothing about the men I drew as my candidates, but William had a man named, for no reason at all, Mr. Sandusky. Mr. Sandusky was elected President almost always over the man I drew. Mr. Sandusky had a mustache, and after 34 years, I remember him well—out of hate and envy I guess. I’ll show you what he looked like:
Now, I don’t remember my own men well at all, but I imagine they were like this:
It is fairly easy to see why people chose to place the fate of the nation in the hands of Mr. Sandusky, rather than in the hands of my nameless candidate, a man obviously given to bewilderment, vacillation, uncertainty, and downright fear.
It is true, of course, as Ralph McCombs wrote in the Citizen—if it was the Citizen and if A Benvenuto is Ralph—that I used to draw in Caesar’s Commentaries and also illustrated the Manual of Arms at Ohio State (usually with pictures of Mutt and Jeff). The divine urge rose no higher than that. I did pictures for the Sun-Dial when I was editor because all the artists went to war or camp and left me without any artists. I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn’t monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge rose no higher than that. In those years, I was absolutely uninterested in the art, not only of myself, but of anybody else, from anybody else to myself….
‘Hm. Explorers.
It was, to be sure, E. B. White, a man given to examining everything carefully, who first began to look at my drawings critically. Like the discovery of San Salvador and the discovery of pommes soufflé the discovery of my art was an accident. I reproduce [above] the first drawing of mine ever submitted to The New Yorker—it was submitted by White. Naturally enough, it was rejected by an art board whose members thought they were being spoofed, if not, indeed, actually, chivvied. I got it back and promptly threw it away as I would throw away, for example, a notification from the Post Office that a package was being held there for me. That is, not exactly deliberately, but dreamily, in the course of thinking about something else. In this manner a great many of my originals have been lost…. [MILLER]
A few weeks ago Tom Bevans of Simon and Schuster brought me some sheets of flat black paper and a handful of white pastel chalk and, after three years, I have started plaguing The New Yorker with drawings once more. The men and the dogs are the same and so are the women, except that they have plunging necklines. By reversing the cuts, the drawings come out black on white. [FALL AUTHOR]
I had a friend who was on the telephone a great deal and while he talked was always flipping the pages of his memo pad and writing things down. I started to fill up the pad with drawings so he’d have to work to get to a clean page. I began to draw a bloodhound, but he was too big for the page. He had the head and body of a bloodhound; I gave him the short legs of a basset. When I first used him in my drawings, it was as a device for balance: when I had a couch and two people on one side of a picture and a standing lamp on the other, I’d put the dog in the space under the lamp for balance.
I’ve always loved that dog. Although at first he was a device, I gradually worked him in as a sound creature in a crazy world. He didn’t get himself into the spots that human beings get themselves into. Russell Maloney stated once that I believe animals are superior to human beings. I suspected he wanted to get me sore. If I have run down the human species, it was not altogether unintentional. They say that Man is born to the belief that he is superior to the lower animals, and that critical intelligence comes when he realizes that he is more similar than dissimilar.
Extending that theory, it has occurred to me that Man’s arrogance and aggression arise from a false feeling of transcendency, and that he will not get anywhere until he realizes, in all humility, that he is just another of God’s creatures, less kindly than Dog, possessed of less dignity than Swan, and incapable of becoming as magnificent an angel as Black Panther. [BREIT]
Dear Mr. Ross:
After you suggested the other day that I try to do some captions for a sheaf of [Mary] Petty drawings which seems to have sta
cked up almost as high as the photostatic copies of rough sketches around the office, I got to thinking that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to let me spend, say, two afternoons a week in the office not only trying to write captions to pictures, but also having a look at the captions to pictures which have been bought. Since I haven’t sent in an idea drawing of my own for a year and a half, my beloved art meeting could hardly say that my criticisms were based on a sheaf of my drawings having just been rejected.
You already have filed away for your autobiography some 50 or 100 blasphemous notes from me on what is the matter with the magazine. Most of these were written, I suppose, just after I got 3 or 4 of my best drawings back. Now we are on a new basis, since I am a blind, gray-haired playwright who still has a great affection for the magazine and is still capable of indignation. It seems to me that something is the matter when the first 3 drawings in the magazine turn out the way they did in the issue of October 18 [1941]. The parachutist, the man with the little fire extinguisher, and the man painting the sign (“Did he want this on white or rye?”) should not have followed one right after the other. These are all definite gag ideas and belong to the rather labored formula type. Most of the great New Yorker captions have not had to depend on some character holding something: a parachute, a fire extinguisher, a cat-o’-nine-tails, or a tomahawk in the scalp. Just to quote a few of the great ones—”I’m the one that should be lying down somewhere,” “Yeh, and who made ‘em the best years?,” “I want to report a winking man,” “You’re so good to me and I’m so tired of it all,” “With you I have known peace, Lida, and now you say you’re going crazy”—most of the great ones, I repeat, did not have to depend on somebody holding, wrapped up in, or pinned down by, any implement, invention, or piece of apparatus. The really great New Yorker drawings have had to do with people sitting in chairs, lying on the beach, or walking along the street. The easy answer the art meeting always gives to the dearth of ideas like the ones I am trying to describe is that they are hard to get or that nobody sends them in any more. It seems to me that the principal reason for this is that the artists take their cue from the type of drawing which they see constantly published in the magazine. Years ago I wrote a story for The New Yorker in which a woman who tried to put together a cream separator suddenly snarled at those who were looking at her and said, “Why doesn’t somebody take this god damned thing away from me?” I want to help to take the cream separators, parachutes, fire extinguishers, paint brushes and tomahawks away from four-fifths of the characters that appear in The New Yorker idea drawings.
There are other things, too. It must have been 6 years ago that you told me drawings about psychoanalysts were terribly out of date. The next week I turned in one in which the analyst says, “A moment ago, Mrs. Ridgway, you said that everybody you looked at seemed to be a rabbit. Now just what did you mean by that?” You are still basically right. Drawings involving analysts have to have something fresh and different in them, such as the one I have just so modestly mentioned. But you can’t publish a drawing about an analyst and a woman with the caption, “Your only trouble is, Mrs. Markham, that you’re so horribly normal.” This is one of the oldest, tritest, and most often repeated lines in the world. If you will look up a story of mine called “Mr. Higgins’ Breakdown,” published more than ten years ago, you will find that the first sentence is as follows (I quote from memory): “Gorham P. Higgins, Jr., was so normal that it took the analyst a long time to find out what was the matter with him.” Just after that story appeared, the editor of Redbook sent for me and said he wanted me to write something for him because he had been so enchanted by that line. At that time, I have the vanity to believe, it was not old. But the years roll on, Mr. Ross, and turn into decades. So what you probably need is an old blind man sitting in one corner of Mr. Gibbs’s office and snarling about certain captions which you are too old to remember helped make certain issues of The New Yorker way back before the depression.
Another fault of the art meeting, it seems to me, is your tendency to measure everything with rulers, stop watches, and calendars. I told Andy [E.B.] White the caption I sent in for Mary Petty and he laughed more wholeheartedly than he has since his teeth began to go and arthritis took him in the back of the neck. I understand that the art conference decided Mr. Swope was not old enough to be known to the old lady in the suggested drawing. She certainly would know old Jacob Swope’s boy, Herbie, just as a woman of your mother’s generation would know about Mrs. Ross’s boy Harold. Furthermore, there are at least a dozen variations of that caption which I could have suggested.
If you ever write a comedy for the theatre you will discover that the best laughs invariably follow some simple and natural line which the characters involved would normally say. Thus, one of the best laughs in The Male Animal followed the simple statement, “Yes, you are.” To show you what I mean, let’s take the specific example of the drawing which appeared in the issue of October 18th in which the salesman says to the lady at the door, “Couldn’t we go inside and sit down? I have a rather long sales talk.” This is such an extravagant distortion of reality, it is so far removed from what any salesman would ever say, that to be successful it has to be fantastic. But since the situation is not fantastic, it ends up simply as a bad gag. All salesmen that get into drawings in The New Yorker ring the changes on cocksureness, ingenuity, or ignorance. When I was a little boy, in my early 20’s, in Columbus, my mother opened the door one afternoon to a tall, sad salesman with a sample case, who said, “I don’t suppose you want to buy any of my vanilla. Nobody ever does.” There is such a thing as a tired, sad, defeated salesman, but even if there weren’t we could use one. I can hear this salesman in the October 18th issue saying, “I just want to say to begin with, madam, that I have been through a great deal today.” Or, “I simply must talk for a few minutes to some understanding married woman, madam. It’s not about my products.” I’m just batting these rough ideas out to give you an idea of how a situation and its caption can be explored, as Marc Connelly puts it. In an hour’s time I could get 2 or 3 perfect captions for this particular drawing. The best laugh you get in the theatre comes from the women and as the result of hitting a universal and familiar note. The closer you come to what a human being might say, the funnier your caption is going to be. A woman laughs at a line about salesmen because it reminds her of what that funny little Fuller Brush man said to her sister Ella. No salesman ever said to any housewife what you have him saying in the cartoon I am talking about. That is a gag man’s idea.
I’ll talk this all over with you any time you say. I can’t go on any kind of salary basis on account of the State Income Tax, but I am willing to be paid by the caption. You must feel free to reject my ideas if you don’t think they are right. I just want somebody to listen to them.
Love,
THURBER [ROSS]
Glimpses of the Art Conference
The Art Conference discovers the work of R. Taylor.
EDITOR’S NOTE: These seven unpublished cartoons were probably executed in 1934 and refer to the once-a-week meetings of The New Yorker’s committee that would decide on the magazine’s cartoons, spots, and illustrations.
The Art Conference decides the Dust Bowl is not known to New Yorker readers.
The funny picture is rejected because you can’t tell who is talking, the old lady or the fireman, and because we had a picture of a man trying to get a drink at a dam. Besides, how did the old lady get through the police lines?
The Art Conference buys its one hundredth drawing of 3 people on a tiny island.
Midsummer Art Conference.
The Outside Opinion: “Is That Funny?”
Ceiling Zero.
Matinee and Evening
THURBER ON PLAYS AND PLAYWRITING
Tonight at 8:30
“The astonished hands were dancing across the family fumed heart.”
In Mr. Coward’s cycle of nine short plays, grave and gay, there are seventy characters in all, of whom Mr.
Coward and Miss Lawrence together play eighteen. The settings and the time run from an autumn evening in Kent in 1860 to flats and houses in London and Mayfair of the present day, with stopovers at a country club in Samolo, the refreshment room of the Milford Junction railroad station, a villa on the Cote d’Azur, and the stage of a variety hall in a provincial English town. The plays deal, mainly, with the anatomy of love and marriage and the treatment varies from a feathery touch (We Were Dancing) that parodies Mr. Coward’s wittiest manner to the sombre and tragic examination of a gray-haired psychiatrist drowning in the waters of a wayward passion (The Astonished Heart).
Mr. Coward dresses up (and sometimes undresses) as every kind of character, from a miserable, henpecked husband of the lower classes, in Fumed Oak, to the courtly Victorian Jasper Featherways of Family Album. Miss Lawrence runs an astonishing gamut, from a slatternly frump of a wife to a beautifully gowned doll of a wife, back to a loud-tongued dancer in a cheap music hall.
Sprinkled over the plays are seven or eight songs by Mr. Coward, some graceful dancing, some vaudeville hoofing; there are costumes and sets that bring exclamations from the audience and others that start them guffawing. I remember a music box playing an old waltz, a desperate man jumping out of a window, a pair of dancers kissing, an old woman screaming, ladies in pretty dresses drinking Madeira, a husband throwing butter on the floor. It’s pretty hard, at the far end of nine plays, to get at them all by a listing and an itemizing. Fortunately, in some improbable way, the whole thing hangs together as an entity: the latest work of Noel Coward in the theatre. Taking it thus boldly as a whole, I can say, without any hesitation, that I liked it; hell, I was crazy about it.
Collecting Himself Page 13
