Unless you have read Thurber’s delicious memoir, The Years With Ross, it’s probably impossible to grasp New Yorker founder Harold Ross’s obsession with polished yet effortless writing, writing that would somehow be exquisite without being “literary.” Reading these early pieces, it’s remarkable to see how easily Thurber achieved the languid, foppish, self-amused tone that persists in the magazine even today. Writing under his own name, Thurber was crisp, colloquial, and direct, but the “Talk,” which was supposed to be “like dinner conversation,” according to Ross, was always arch and affected. Why a high-school dropout from Aspen, Colorado and a dreamy, one-eyed graduate of Ohio State University would think this was “smart” is another matter.*
Although only in his mid-thirties when he started writing for the New Yorker, Thurber showed himself ever aware of the passing hand of time. A piece from early 1928, “Where Time Has Stopped,” discusses old cemeteries, including “the most tranquil cemetery in town, probably,” the New York Marble Cemetery on Second Street, east of Second Avenue†, with “two hundred vaults and also many tombstones and monuments, lovely—as we once saw them—in the snow.”
Thurber devotes three entries to chasing down the haunts of the once legendary O. Henry, the most famous writer in America when Thurber was growing up, now deservedly forgotten. He traipses through the Pulitzer mansion, abandoned for twenty years (it’s now a co-op and you can get a one-bedroom for $1.75 million). He is also on hand when the “old” Waldorf-Astoria closes its doors, but on hand as well for the construction of the edifice to replace it—the Empire State Building.
Though Ross was fiercely “American,” it’s curious to see that he spelt “cheque” in the English manner. In addition, he lets Thurber say that “mongooses spend their life chivvying about and killing” cobras on Feb. 18, 1928 and then, two years later, Thurber finds himself in the construction site of the Empire State Building, where “seven thousand workers chevy you about.”
Word doesn’t object to “chivvy” but balks at “chevy.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961) prefers “chivy” but will accept either of Thurber’s spellings, as will the Second (1934), but wouldn’t Ross, who would have been using the “First” (1909, but, of course, not so designated), have remembered how to spell “chivvy”? How many words have a double “v”?
Afterwords
The New Shorter Oxford English (1993) likes “chivvy,” but will take the other two. Webster’s Third, but not the Second, has a remarkably extensive derivation for “chivy,” endorsed by the Oxford: “probably short for E dial. Chevy Chase chase, pursuit, noise, confusion, fr. the name of a ballad describing the battle of Otterburn (1388), prob. alt. of Cheviot Chase, fr. Cheviot hills, range of hills in northern England and Scotland, near which the battle took place.”
Last week, I traveled to the Chevy Chase Library to track down The Thurber Album. The man ahead of me presented a list of books to the librarian which he said were supposed to be available but appeared to be missing. She studied the list carefully and then said, “You want the Chevy Chase library in Maryland. This is the Chevy Chase library in the District of Columbia.” The two are both on Connecticut Avenue, several miles apart. How irritating is that?
*Naturally, neither Thurber nor Ross thought of themselves as languid. In The Years With Ross, Thurber offers a highly unconvincing account of how he once threatened to beat Ross up because Ross called him a “sis” (or, more specifically, claimed that Thurber’s concern for a puppy was “the act of a sis”).
†Thurber carefully explains to us that there are two New York cemeteries with this name, located within a block of each other, that are entirely separate from one another.
