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<text>
<title>
(1950s) Priceless Gift of Laughter:James Thurber
</title>
<history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1950s Highlights</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
July 9, 1951
Priceless Gift of Laughter
</hdr>
<body>
<p> "James Grover Thurber, Doctor of Humane Letters," intoned
the president of Williams College, "cartoonist, playwright,
foremost humorist of our day and nation, he has brought to a
troubled America the priceless gift of laughter."
</p>
<p> The priceless gift for which Thurber was honored in
Williamstown on Commencement Day, 1951, may soon be made
available to half the world. United Productions of America,
which last year made the Oscar-winning cartoon comedy short,
Gerald McBoing-Boing, has announced a forthcoming eight-reel,
80-minute color film--partly animated, partly live, that will
be derived solely from Thurber's writings and drawings. U.P.A.
crosses its heart and hopes to die that the picture, tentatively
titled Men, Women and Dogs, will be not only all Thurber but
true Thurber. Shooting will start this year, release is
scheduled for next year.
</p>
<p> Men, Woman and Dogs will open with Thurber himself giving
an illustrated lecture in a theme that brought him fame both as
a writer and an artist--the Domination of the American Male
by the American Female. The fact that Thurber will talk
throughout the entire first reel should leave him with a decided
histrionic edge over Somerset Maugham, who merely introduced
Quartet and Trio, the films made from his own stories.
</p>
<p> Is It Really Art? Although Maugham may have made a dressier
screen appearance than Thurber presumably will (on Thurber's
gaunt frame his expensive clothes give an unfurled effect),
several ardent Thurberites have already pointed out that Maugham
cannot draw. But, as the question has often been phrased in his
home town, Columbus, Ohio: "Can Thurber, either?" For some time
now, a psychiatrist has been writing Thurber, offering to cure
him of his drawing.
</p>
<p> Whether Thurber's drawing requires psychiatry or not, a
great many people, including New Yorker Editor Harold Ross,
cannot get enough of it. A series of murals, executed by Thurber
years ago in Manhattan for Tim Costello's Third Avenue saloon
(known to it's clientele as "The Chop House of Broken Dreams"),
is one of the extracurricular features of the establishment. The
late Paul Nash, British painter and art critic, once declared
Thurber "a master of impressionistic line," comparing him to the
early Matisse.
</p>
<p> That enraged most of the professional artists Thurber knew,
and sent him into delighted guffaws; not only has he never had
a lesson, but he has never taken his drawing seriously. He loves
to tell of the time Ross was asked why he ran such a fifth-rate
artist in his magazine. "Thurber's a third-rate artist," Ross
snapped loyally.
</p>
<p> Of Thurber's work, which comprises 17 volumes of prose and
pictures, Nobel Prizeman T.S. Eliot said last year: "It is a
form of humor which is also a way of saying something serious.
There is a criticism of life at the bottom of it. It is serious
and even somber. Unlike so much humor, it is not merely a
criticism of manners--that is, of the superficial aspects of
society at a given moment--but something more profound. His
writings and also his illustrations are capable of surviving the
immediate environment and time out of which they spring. To some
extent, they will be a document of the age they belong to."
</p>
<p> Men, Woman and Dogs ought to be quite a document in its
own right. After Thurber's opening lecture, the rest will
consist of: 1) animated versions of the stories "You Could Look
It Up" (how a big league ball club won a pennant by sending a
midget in to bat), and "The Unicorn in the Garden" (how a woman
tried to have her husband sent to the booby-hatch and was
instead committed herself); 2) dramatizations, using flesh and
blood actors, dealing with marriage perplexities; 3) another
animated lecture, urging the superiority of dogs to humans and
including that celebrated cartoon sequence "The Bloodhound and
the Bug"; 4) a live demonstration of "The Whip-poor-will", one
of Thurber's narrative ventures into neurasthenic horror; and
5) a three-reel version of his fantasy, "The White Deer."
</p>
<p> If it does nothing else to its audiences, Men, Women and
Dogs should give them an abnormal 80 minutes. It will also be
the first time in cinema history that the creative protagonist
of a motion picture has been a blind man.
</p>
<p> Slow Fade. Thurber is not totally blind. At the age of six,
he lost his left eye when one of his brothers accidentally shot
him with an arrow. For about the next 40 years, his right eye
did double duty, then it failed him; ten years ago, Thurber
underwent five extremely painful operations on it for cataract
and trachoma. The eye has since had one-eighth vision, not
enough for a 56-year-old writer to get himself around with
safety. The shins of the long, gangling (6 ft. 1-1/2 in., 154
lbs.) Thurber bear a mass of scars from collisions with coffee
tables.
</p>
<p> Before his sight began to go, Thurber could punch a
typewriter at a brisk pace. Never having learned the touch
system however, he is now forced to scrawl with soft pencils on
sheets of bright yellow paper, getting about 20 words to a
sheet; words which he cannot see, although he peers at them
through a thick goggle. After he has finished the first draft
of a piece, it is read back to him, and he makes oral revisions
sentence by sentence. Thurber always was a relentless revisor
(he rewrote "The White Deer" 25 times) so that his composition
has become slow and painful. Nevertheless, in the past ten years
he has written and published more than he did in the previous
ten.
</p>
<p> After a lapse of several years, during which he did not
draw at all, Thurber is drawing again. He works with chalk on
black paper, preferably just at sundown on clear days. About the
porch of his Connecticut home, where he has his drawing board
set up, drawings are stacked along with stove wood.
</p>
<p> On hot days when there is a lot of glare, Thurber sometimes
sees a face that looks to him like Herbert Hoover's; at other
times, there appears what might be the George Washington Bridge
flapping about in the wind. Thurber is never bitter about his
blindness, nor self-pitying, nor "saintly." Often he discusses
it in a completely detached manner: now and then he uses it for
little jokes. "I bet I can think up a cornier title for my
memoirs that you can," he challenged a friend. "How about `Long
Time No See?'"
</p>
<p> Home Life. James Grover Thurber was born in Columbus in
1894, second of the three children of Charles Leander and Mary
Agnes Fisher Thurber (Mrs. Thurber didn't like the "Leander,"
so her husband, a loyal Republican, changed it to "Lincoln.")
Their other sons were William, a year older than Jim, and
Robert, two years younger.
</p>
<p> Charley Thurber, the boys' father, was tall, thin, an
inveterate wearer of derby hats and by profession an
unsuccessful politician. Although he kept running for various
offices until he was nearly 65, he never got elected to any.
When there were six leading candidates for five offices, Charley
Thurber would invariably finish sixth. Too honest to play ball
with a political machine, and too amiable and gentle to be a
winning maverick, he was a chronic also-ran.
</p>
<p> In return for his unflagging idealism and perseverance, he
received appointments that were largely drudgery: secretary to
two governors of Ohio (Asa Bushman and William McKinley), to a
mayor of Columbus; member of a committee to investigate hazing
at West Point; state organizer for Teddy Roosevelt's
unsuccessful Bull Moose campaign for the presidency in 1912,
etc. In a piece called "Gentleman from Indiana," Jim has written
lovingly and beautifully of his father.
</p>
<p> In contrast to her mild, quiet husband, who never scolded
the boys, Mamie Thurber was a hurled hand grenade. The class
comic in school, a star at amateur theatricals, for a while she
considered running away from home and going on the professional
stage. Her stern Methodist father scotched that, clamping down
on even the amateur theatricals, but it made no difference,
Mamie kept right on performing.
</p>
<p> Once at a buffet luncheon she found a bowl of uncooked eggs
waiting to be used for eggnogs. "You know, I've always wanted
to throw a dozen eggs," she said to nobody in particular.
Whereupon she selected a dozen and threw them at the nearest
wall, not missing it once.
</p>
<p> Another time, she attended an overflow meeting conducted
by a faith healer, who with his exhortations and layings-on-of-
hands had set Columbus afire. Somehow she got hold of a
stretcher, lay down on it and had a couple of friends carry her
toward the platform. Halfway down the aisle, Mamie flipped to
her feet, yelling, "I can walk! I can walk! It's the first time
I've walked in 40 years!" Hundreds wept or screamed at the
miracle.
</p>
<p> Mamie Thurber has gone on performing. Her husband died in
1939 at the age of 72, but she is still at it, an amazing old
lady of 85, with piercing grey eyes under black brows, and none
of her staggering faculties impaired. Wolcott Gibbs, of The New
Yorker, has written of Thurber's "sure grasp of confusion."
Nobody who ever heard Jim's mother tell a long, detailed,
uproarious misadventure story would wonder where his sureness
of grasp came from. There are oldtimers in Columbus who insist
that Jim is but his mother's pale copy.
</p>
<p> Club Life. The five Thurbers constituted a family unit, but
they were also a kind of club. Things were apt to be quite
electric around the house; just how electric Jim has described
in "My Life and Hard Times," a book which many Thurberites
consider his most durable masterpiece. (Although they would
probably give the accolade for funniest, saddest and best single
Thurber story to "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty".) Sometimes
it got a little overwhelming for Charley Thurber. In Jim's story
"The Night the Bed Fell," occurs the sentence, "It happened
then, that my father had decided to sleep in the attic...to
be away where he could think."
</p>
<p> Thurber family sessions were marked by plenty of mimicry.
William and Robert were good mimics (and still are), but Jim was
even better. One day, during their young manhood, he phoned
William and pretended to be a tailor, claiming in dialect to
have made a suit for him which had not been called for, and
demanding to be paid. Flabbergasted, William swore he had never
ordered the suit and finally put his mother on the phone. After
some angry argument, she challenged the "tailor" to describe
William. "Ha!" said Jim, "It's a fine mudder dat don't even know
her own son." Convinced that if Jim could write and make money,
he could too, William once sent his famous brother a manuscript
which began: "Columbus is a town with an alley between every
street." Commented their mother, "William is twice as crazy as
James, only he can't put it down."
</p>
<p> Outside the family, Jim was shy through grammar and high
school and his first two years at Ohio State University, where
he did little else than sit reading in the library with his hair
in his eyes, looking like an emaciated sheep dog. After testing
him, the psychology department reported that he had a remarkable
memory. Unkempt, unloved and unknown, he was on his way to a
Phi Beta Kappa key, perhaps to a life of scholarship.
</p>
<p> But one fateful day in a junior-year English class, the
professor, William Lucius Graves read aloud a student theme
entitled, "My Literary Enthusiasms," in which the dime novels
of the day were wittily treated. Before he had a chance to
announce the writer's name, the bell rang, and the students
streamed out. Thurber found himself walking alongside Elliot
Nugent, who was everything on the campus that Thurber was not--athlete, social success, best actor in the dramatic club,
class president, idol of the coeds.
</p>
<p> "Gee, that was a swell piece, wasn't it?" Nugent remarked
to the weedy stranger beside him. "I wonder who wrote it."
Thurber swallowed, "I did," he said in a dim voice. Nugent
stared at Thurber, then introduced himself. The two became best
and lifelong friends. (In 1939 they wrote a hit play, "The Male
Animal," in which Nugent starred. It's root idea, "What might
have happened if we had stayed on at Ohio State?" Later it was
a successful movie, directed by Nugent. Perhaps disgruntled by
the play, Ohio State has never granted Distinguished Son Thurber
an honorary degree. Even before Williams College honored him,
however, small, urbane Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio) had made
him a Doctor of Letters.)
</p>
<p> Nugent made Thurber get his hair cut and buy a new blue
suit, then got him into his own fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi.
Thurber blossomed and expanded. He became an editor of the
college daily and editor-in-chief of the humorous monthly, acted
for the dramatic club, was elected to the senior honor society.
</p>
<p> He did not wait to graduate, for by then the U.S. was at
war with Germany and he wanted to do something about it. Unable
to enlist in the armed forces because of his eye, he entered the
State Department and served a year and a half as code clerk at
the American Embassy in Paris. With that memory of his, Jim was
an outstanding code clerk. One of his colleagues in the code
room was a young Yale poet named Stephen Vincent Benet.
</p>
<p> After returning from Paris in 1920, Thurber went to work
as a reporter on the Columbus Dispatch, where he stayed three
years, mostly covering the City Hall beat. To Thurber's city
editor, the pattern of a perfect lead for all stories whatsoever
was: "John Holtsapple, 63, prominent Columbus galosh
manufacturer, died of complications last night at his home, 396
Persimmon Blvd." Any attempts by the staff to get wit or
originality into the paper usually landed on the spike. The city
editor, who began by addressing Thurber as "Author" and "Phi
Beta Kappa," came to respect him, but Thurber still sees this
Legree in a recurring anxiety dream: "He runs up to my desk with
a shoe in his hand and says, `We've got just ten minutes to get
this shoe in the paper.' Boy do I move!"
</p>
<p> In 1922, Thurber married Althea Adams, then a sophomore at
Ohio State and one of the prettiest girls on the campus. He was
chafing to write something better than city council doings, but
had little confidence in his ability to make good outside
Columbus. Urged on by Althea, he finally decided to assault New
York by way of France, which he had loved in his code-clerk
days. When they had saved up $125, they took off.
</p>
<p> After the novel Jim started in a Normandy farmhouse had
petered out, the Thurbers went to Paris. He got a job on the
Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune at $12 a week. The Paris
Trib's cable tolls were in keeping with the princely salaries
it paid its staff: a fat 50 words of variegated news arrived
from America each night. Once Jim was handed a flimsy containing
the line "Christy Mathewson died Saranac," and from memory and
by Ouija board wrote a column obituary on the great New York
Giants pitcher.
</p>
<p> Big Town. The summer of 1951 marks the 25th anniversary of
Jim Thurber's arrival in New York City. Knowing only Columbus
and Paris, he loathed New York at first, with its roar, its
dirt, its jostle and the brash ways of its citizenry. But he got
a job as reporter on the Evening Post, which reduced its price
from five cents to three cents the day he went to work.
</p>
<p> That fall and winter, he bombarded The New Yorker, a
struggling humorous weekly little more than a year old, with 20
pieces, all of which were rejected. Althea argued that he was
sweating too much over them and suggested that he bat one out
in 45 minutes. On his next Sunday off, he did. It was about a
man who got caught in a revolving door. The New Yorker bought
it.
</p>
<p> During the four years he was a reporter, Thurber registered
countless impressions that he could not have gotten into any
newspaper. These were filed away in his memory, and he began
working them into enchanting monologues for the amusement of his
friends. In the '20s and '30s, to sit with drink in hand and
listen to Jim Thurber off on a free-association talking marathon
was an indescribable pleasure. When he used to mimic Harold
Ross, he even looked like Ross, an incredible accomplishment.
</p>
<p> One night in 1927 at a small party in Greenwich Village,
Thurber met E.B. White, who was already doing "Notes and
Comments" on the front page of the New Yorker's "Talk of the
Town" section. White was immediately taken with him; a little
later, he recommended Thurber to Ross as a "Talk" reporter and
writer.
</p>
<p> Big TIme. Not long after Ross hired him, Thurber was
puzzled to find that he had a secretary, which he had never
heard of a reporter having; he supposed that things were
different on magazines. He was amazed when she handed him the
office weekly payroll to sign, and the fine print of the "Goings
On" department to check and okay. He asked her why, and her
answer left him thunderstruck. "Because you're the managing
editor," she said.
</p>
<p> In that era, New Yorker managing editors had a life
expectancy hardly greater than that of May flies. In addition to
hiring and firing managing editors, Ross was combating his
restlessness by having the office walls torn down. The editorial
floor was cluttered with scaffolding; workmen bashed out plaster
and lath with sledge hammers; a chalky haze permeated the halls,
assailing the lungs of staff and visiting contributors.
</p>
<p> Thurber wanted to write. He hated being managing editor,
but Ross kept encouraging him. Once in an editorial conference,
Ross snarled, "This week's issue has more mistakes in it than
any we ever published. Who's responsible?" Hope rising in his
breast, Thurber shot up his hand. "Good," Ross said. "Only
honest managing editor I ever had."
</p>
<p> Thurber stood it for six months and, in spite of his misery
as an executive, managed to write seven pieces that were
accepted, but for which he did not get paid. At last Ross said,
"I guess you're a writer. All right then, goddammit, write." So
Thurber continued to write pieces and, in addition, he and White
and one legman for 7-1/2 straight years got out "The Talk of the
Town," which, nowadays, requires virtually a platoon. Between
them, White and Thurber pretty much set the tone of the magazine
that Ross had created.
</p>
<p> Thurber learned a great deal from White, and he is the
first to acknowledge the debt. "I learned more about writing
from White than from anybody," he has said. "He taught me to
write a simple declarative sentence. I still send my things to
him to read."
</p>
<p> World of His Own. Of his old colleague, White has written:
"Most writers would be glad to settle for any one of ten of
Thurber's accomplishments. He has written the funniest memoirs,
fables, reports, satires, fantasies, complaints, fairy tales
and sketches of the past 20 years, has gone into the drama and
the cinema, and on top of that has littered the world with
thousands of drawings. Most writers and artists can be compared
fairly easily with contemporaries. Thurber inhabits a world of
his own.
</p>
<p> "When I first knew him, his mind was unbelievably restless
and made him uncomfortable at all hours. Now, almost 25 years
later, I can't see that it has relaxed. He still pulls at his
hair and trembles all over, as though he were about to sell his
first piece. His thoughts have always been a tangle of baseball
scores, Civil War tactical problems, Henry James, ancient myths and modern
apprehensions. Through this jungle stalk the unpredictable
ghosts of his relatives in Columbus, Ohio."
</p>
<p> In 1935 Jim and Althea were divorced. Their daughter,
Rosemary, has just finished her sophomore year at the University
of Pennsylvania. She has shown marked acting talent, perhaps
inherited from her paternal grandmother. Thurber is an
affectionate father; he and his daughter get along splendidly.
Althea is now the wife of Dr. Allen Gilmore, head of the history
department at Carnegie Tech.
</p>
<p> Jim always had a taste for handsome women, and the year of
his divorce he married Helen Wismer, a clergyman's daughter,
Mount Holyoke graduate and the former editor of a string of pulp
magazines. She expertly manages his business affairs and his
home, and has helped him enormously in conquering his blindness.
The Thurbers spend part of every winter and spring in Hot
Springs, Va. and Bermuda. Summer and fall they live in their
beautiful twelve-room, 90-year-old house on 65 acres of land in
West Cornwall, Conn.
</p>
<p> At present, Jim is putting the finishing touches on his
latest book, The Thurber Album, which will be published next
fall. In some of the chapters that have appeared in The New
Yorker--particularly one called "Daguerreotype of a Lady"--Thurberites believe they have detected a new Thurber, still very
funny, but somehow deeper and richer; the most exciting Thurber,
they claim, since his sight failed.
</p>
<p> Sometimes I Love You. Ambivalent is probably the word for
Thurber. Although he believes he is essentially optimistic about
the human species, he tends to nurse doubt when he rolls the
subject around in his mind: "The human species is both horrible
and wonderful. Occasionally, I get very mad at human beings, but
there's nothing you can do about it. I like people and hate them
at the same time. I wouldn't draw them in cartoons, if I didn't
think they were horrible; and I wouldn't write about them, if
I didn't think they were wonderful."
</p>
<p> That, however, might be what his wife calls Jim's Friday
Opinion. By the following Monday, he may have reversed himself,
or be fretting over something entirely different. For humorists,
there are not many fixed rules; about the only thing they are
consistently against is pomposity.
</p>
<p> During wassail, Thurber's ambivalence can snap loose and
he may be given to bursts of hooting and hollering. A New Yorker
editor once returned to the office after a stormy evening at the
Algonquin Hotel and thoughtfully announced, "Thurber is the
greatest guy in the world up to 5 p.m." Those who love Thurber
ascribe such outbursts to old-fashioned artistic temperament and
simply shrug them off. They know that when real troubles arise,
there is nobody more steadfast and generous. The jams he has
helped and comforted friends through are without number.
</p>
<p> When The Thurber Album is completed, his next big effort
will probably be another play. On Men, Women and Dogs, Thurber
has a percentage-of-box-office deal with United Productions. If
the picture is a success--and nearly everything Thurber
touches creatively is successful--he will earn a great deal
of money. For a man who has never once demeaned his talent for
profit, nor ever aimed at mass appeal, he has already earned
quite a lot.
</p>
<p> If more Thurber movies are made--and there is plenty of
material to draw on--it is conceivable that the people and
creatures of his imagination may one day be figures in
international folklore. Already The Lancet, a learned British
medical journal, has used the term "Walter Mitty syndrome" in
referring to daydreaming on a grandiose scale.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>