And the World Laughs with Them
207 The New Yorker, September 29, 1934.
Groucho and Me
213 New York Herald Tribune Book Review, September 13, 1959. While photographs from Marx’s Groucho and Me originally accompanied this review, included here are portraits of the Marx Brothers taken from an article by Teet Carle that appeared in Stage, March 1937. Thurber illustrated Carle’s “Laughing Stock, Common and Preferred” and contributed the small prose feature and illustration that appears after the review.
Speaking of Humor …
217 [EASTMAN] Max Eastman. Enjoyment of Laughter. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936, p. 341.
218, 220 [LANDAU] Two letters to Elliott D. Landau, June 9, 1954, June 25, 1954, reprinted in Horn Book Magazine, “Quibble, Quibble: Funny? Yes; Humorous, No!” April 1962, pp. 162-64.
220 A. E. Housman’s Last Poems, section II, “As I gird on for fighting …” Its last stanza reads: “So here are things to think on/That ought to make me brave,/As I strap on for fighting/My sword that will not save.”
221 [SMALL WORLD] “That Girl in Galway.” New York Post, March 25, 1959. (A transcript of Thurber, Noel Coward, and actress Siobhan McKenna on Ed Murrow’s CBS TV show “Small World.”)
221 [COWLEY LETTER] Letter to Malcolm Cowley, March 11, 1954.
222 [BUCHWALD] “A Letter from James Thurber About Art Buchwald’s More Caviar.” New York Times, April 16, 1959, p. 35.
222 [BREIT-2] Interview with Harvey Breit. “Talk with James Thurber.” New York Times Book Review, June 29, 1952, p. 19.
223 [TIME] “‘The Time of Your Life’ Is Now.” New York World-Telegram and Sun, August 21, 1961, p. 4. (Written for the Associated Press and printed under various titles in papers nationwide.)
The State of Humor in the States
226 New York Times, September 4, 1960.
How to Tell Government from Show Business
231 This unpublished manuscript was written in London during performances of A Thurber Carnival and, according to a note, was “revised March 20, 1961.”
On the Brink of Was
234 New York Times Magazine, December 7, 1958. Thurber’s reply, along with statements by Mort Sahl, Al Capp, Jerry Lewis, and Steve Allen, appeared in a forum entitled “State of the Nation’s Humor.”
Thinking Ourselves into Trouble
240 Forum and Century, June 1939, as well as in the collection I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women of Our Time, edited by Clifton Fadiman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1939.
List of Illustrations
Drawings that appeared as illustrations to Thurber’s own work are listed in the Notes and are not given additional mention here.
Cover This illustration, “Thurber and Nugent at Work on The Male Animal,” appeared in a popular AP story by Jack Stinnett, which ran among other places in The Washington Star, February 25, 1940.
Illustration on binding [Man with dog resting on his knee] The New Yorker, December 31, 1938.
Endpapers “In the millennium men will not cease to be men.” Books, April 30, 1939.
Frontispiece Illustration of James Thurber by Marc Simont.
Title page [Man and girl fighting over book] Advertisement by Harper & Brothers for Fables for Our Time, in The New Yorker, October 5, 1940.
xii “Fig. I, Zeiss Loop” and holograph page, from a letter to Herman and Dorothy Miller, May 23, 1943.
I [Thurber at desk with a sky of figures] From “Thurber Finds Revising His Play for Broadway Is ‘A Great Ordeal.’” New York World-Telegram, January 7, 1940.
9 “Do you ever have fears that you may cease to be before your pen has gleaned your teeming brain?” The New Yorker, October 2, 1943.
10 “He’s giving Dorothy Thompson a piece of his mind.” The New Yorker, May 16, 1939.
II “Courting the Muse?” The Saturday Review, December 14, 1935.
24 “It’s nothing serious, Madam. They’re writers.” The Saturday Review, December 17, 1938.
25 “8 Important Characters in James Thurber’s New Column.” New York Times, September 19, 1940.
29 [Woman writing, with man and dog looking on] Cover for The Pocket Entertainer, Shirley Cunningham, ed. New York: Pocket Books, 1942.
36 “Am I the only woman in America who isn’t writing novels?” The Saturday Review, April 15, 15, 1939.
39 [Man at desk with dog staring at him] PM, October 3, 1940; also Thurber and Company.
41 “This is my house, Mr. Wolfe, and if you don’t get out I’ll throw you out!” New York Herald Tribune, March 9, 1947 (from a feature on Thurber drawings in Cos-tello’s Saloon, New York).
42 “He looks a little like Thomas Wolfe, and he certainly makes the most of it.” The New Yorker, November 23, 1935.
52 “I told Womrath’s I don’t want to read anything instructive until the war ends.” The New Yorker, October 14, 1944.
53 “Your faith is really more disturbing than my atheism.” The New Yorker, March 23, 1946.
54 “Professor Townsend is really too high-strung to be a philosopher.” The New Yorker, January 23, 1943.
78 “This is my brother Ed. He’s given up.” The New Yorker, September 1, 1934.
79 “‘Don’ts’ for the Inflation.” The New Yorker, March 18, 1933.
103 [The Reading Hour] Thurber & Company.
105 “There isn’t room in this house for belles lettres and me both.” Saturday Review, November 5, 1938.
113 “Ravel’s ‘Bolero.’” Unpublished.
114 “Folks out of Faulkner.” Unpublished.
115 [Thurber and Sandburg playing guitars] Thurber & Company.
116 “Dance Recital.” Unpublished.
116 [Thurber dancing with Carl Sandburg] Unpublished.
117 “Sandburg Tells a Story.” Unpublished.
117 “Jeez, it looks like Sandburg’s plane, don’t it?” Unpublished.
122 [Waiter serving diners] Part of an ad for the French Line, The New Yorker, June 10, 1933.
131 “How is it possible, woman, in the awful and magnificent times we live in, to be preoccupied exclusively with the piddling?” The New Yorker, February 16, 1946.
132 “I want to send that one about ‘Instead of hearts and cupid’s darts I’m sending you a wire,’ or whatever the hell it is!” The New Yorker, February II, 1933.
133 “The trouble is you make me think too much.” The New Yorker, April 25, 1942.
134 “Well, I call it Caribbean, and I intend to go to my grave calling it Caribbean.” The New Yorker, January 29, 1944.
135 “Hey, Joe. How d’ya spell ‘rhythm’?” The New Yorker, September 16, 1933.
141 [Thurber, hand on dog’s head] New York Times, March 1, 1931.
151 “Mr. Sandusky” and “nameless candidate,” drawings from an unpublished, undated letter to Herman Miller, which appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1946.
152 “Hm. Explorers.” A redrawing of the first drawing Thurber ever submitted to The New Yorker. Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1946.
157 “The Art Conference discovers the work of R. Taylor.” Unpublished, collection of the Ohio State University.
158 “The Art Conference decides the Dust Bowl is not known to New Yorker readers.” Unpublished, collection of the Ohio State University.
158 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?” Unpublished, collection of The New Yorker. Copyright by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved.
159 “The Art Conference buys its one hundredth drawing of 3 people on a tiny island.” Unpublished, collection of the Ohio State University.
159 “Midsummer Art Conference.” Unpublished, collection of The New Yorker. Copyright by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved.
160 The Outside Opinion: ‘Is That Funny?’” Unpub
lished, collection of The New Yorker. Copyright by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved.
160 “Art Conference: Ceiling Zero.” Unpublished, collection of the Ohio State University.
161 [Seated woman and others, arguing] Cover for Theatre Arts Magazine, March 1940.
163 “The astonished hands were dancing across the family fumed heart.” Stage, December 1936.
168 Tableau from Tonight at 8:30. Stage, December 1936.
176 “I had the strangest feeling in the elevator that I was changing into Clare Luce.” The New Yorker, May 22, 1943.
177 “Well, I’ve found Miss Gish for you, Mr. Freeman. No relation to the sisters, incidentally.” The New Yorker, May 9, 1936.
178 “Slip something on, Mrs. Parks, and take a look at the new Warner Brothers sign.” The New Yorker, October 22, 1932.
197 “Thurber Reports His Own Play, The Male Animal, with His Own Cartoons.” Seven captioned drawings. Life, January 29, 1940.
205 [Man asleep in hammock with watchful cow] The New Yorker, August 15, 1936.
211 “He gave up smoking and humor the first of the year.” The New Yorker, April 15, 1939.
212 “There is no laughter in this house.” The New Yorker, January 15, 1944.
224 [Man intimidated by mechanical creature] Unpublished, collection of Judy and Jules Garel.
225 [Man sitting abreast and strangling mechanical creature] Unpublished, collection of Judy and Jules Garel.
237 “One more of these and I’ll spill the beans about everyone here.” The New Yorker, November 3, 1934.
238 “He says he’s just about got the government where he wants it.” The New Yorker, March 13, 1937.
239 “At the crossroads.” The New Yorker, October 24, 1931.
249 [Woman reporter pointing at Thurber] Los Angeles News, August 1939.
268 [Staring dog] The New Yorker, February 25, 1939.
Acknowledgments
The reconsideration of James Thurber’s uncollected work continues to be the engaging, productive, felicitious enterprise it is because four important sources have contributed to my understanding of Thurber’s work and afforded me occasions to express that engagement. With enormous gratitude and a flush of pride, I extend my appreciation here to Rosemary Thurber, who, beyond the individual permissions for each work and drawing in the collection, has permitted me the honor of working with the Thurber estate in such an equitable, respectful, well-humored manner; to The Thurber House’s board members and its executive director, Donn Vickers, who have afforded me a work environment that values and supports my own personal and professional growth; to Robert Tibbetts at the Division of Rare Books and Manuscripts of The Ohio State University Special Collections, whose facility with and knowledge of Thurber brought the libraries’ archives and Thurber’s vast bibliography within my reach; and last, to Mark Svede and the other people of my extended family for the outside opinions on all kinds of queries and readings, as well as for the inside acceptances of my working temperaments and hours.
About the Author
Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1894 and buried there in 1961, James Thurber changed the face of American humor in just about thirty years and as many books. After attending the Ohio State University, where he edited the humor magazine and contributed musicals to its dramatic club, he became a newspaper reporter, working for the Columbus Dispatch, the Paris Tribune and the New York Evening Post. In 1927 he joined The New Yorker and helped shape its identity throughout its first two decades. His first book, Is Sex Necessary? in collaboration with E. B. White, launched a matchless career of prose and pictures that includes five children’s books, two books of fables, two memoirs, two theatrical works, and eighteen anthologies of cartoons and writings.
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In Praise of James Thurber
“Thurber’s pieces…are jewels of English writing. Maybe what America needs at this critical time when everybody is bloating the language with dead ballast like ‘at this critical time’ is more reading material that was written at the rate of 800 words per fortnight.”
—Russell Baker, New York Times
“Collecting Himself is a charmer. The old Thurber is back among us again—and some of the pieces even reveal a new Thurber. Great fun.”
—Clifton Fadiman
“…Thurber, Liebling, Perelman, and White, they were my heroes. …In my mind they took the field against the big mazumbos of American Literature….”
—Garrison Keillor
Books by James Thurber
Thurber and Company
Credos and Curios
Lanterns and Lances
The Years with Ross
Alarms and Diversions
The Wonderful O
Further Fables for Our Time
Thurber’s Dogs
Thurber Country
The Thurber Album
The 13 Clocks
The Beast in Me and Other Animals
The White Deer
The Thurber Carnival
The Great Quillow
Men, Women and Dogs
Many Moons
My World—and Welcome to It
Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated
The Last Flower
Let Your Mind Alone! and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces
The Middie-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze
My Life and Hard Times
The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments
The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities
Is Sex Necessary? or Why You Feel the Way You Do
(with E. B. White)
PLAY
The Male Animal
(with Elliott Nugent)
REVUE
A Thurber Carnival
LETTERS
Selected Letters of James Thurber
EDITOR’S NOTE: The above passage from a letter to Herman and Dorothy Miller, dated May 28, 1943, reads: “At 48, going on 49, I am getting along as well as might be expected, seeing a trifle better. I draw now with a Zeiss loop, and look like a welder from Mars. Fig. I shows the wrong way to wear a Zeiss loop—the nose should be centered.”
About the Editor
Michael J. Rosen was born and reared in James Thurber’s Columbus-town, and, after receiving his MFA from Columbia University, returned there to become the literary director of The Thurber House, the writer’s center in James Thurber’s boyhood home. His own poetry, criticism, fiction and illustrations have been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ingram Merrill Foundation, and Ohio Arts Council, and published in such places as The New Yorker, Gourmet, Salmagundi, The Nation, and The New Criterion. His books include A Drink at the Mirage, a collection of poetry, and 50 Odd Jobs, a children’s book of pictures and verses.
Collecting Himself brings to light a remarkable body of previously unanthologized drawings and writings by James Thurber that presents the beloved, besieged humorist as reader, journalist, satirist, comic, and perhaps most significant, personal respondent to the written world around him. Here is the prose that helped create the voice of The New Yorker, prose that urged Malcolm Cowley to claim that “for James Thurber ‘write’ and ‘right’ weren’t homonyms; they were the same word.” Here are the drawings of the cartoonist who claimed to show “abstract things like despair, disillusion, despondency, sorrow, lapse of memory, exile … sometimes in a shape that might be called Man or Woman.” Here is a man “collecting himself” as if after the unsettling experience of a strong disagreement, or a zealous endorsement characteristic of one who claims “my specialities happen to be bloodhounds, holy matrimony, monsters and modern English misusage.”
As editor, Michael J. Rosen has followed Thurber’s own instincts for anthologizing by mixing various kinds of work—article, essay, interview, review, cartoon, parody—into an entertaining volume showing Thurber at large (and getting larger!) as he comments on
such contemporary masters as Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Will a Cather; on such genres as banquet speaking, wine labeling, editorial practices and judgments; on his experiences in the theater, during the McCarthy era, on the staff of The New Yorker, and at his own writing desk. The prose pieces along with the more than seventy drawings—some never before published—that enliven this book will incite the aspiring writer and cartoonist, reward Thurber’s longstanding admirers, and secure the delighted attention of a new generation that has yet to meet James Thurber in all his unclassifiable glory.
MICHAEL J. ROSEN is a fiction writer, and children’s book author as well as literary director of The Thurber House, a writer’s center in Thurber’s restored boyhood home in Columbus, Ohio.
Editor photograph © 1989 by Will Shively
Jacket design by Suzanne Noli
Harper & Row, Publishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, N.Y. 10022
Copyright
COLLECTING HIMSELF: JAMES THURBER ON WRITING AND WRITERS, HUMOR AND HIMSELF. Copyright © 1989 by Michael J. Rosen and Rosemary Thurber. Preface copyright © 1989 by Michael J. Rosen.
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