INTRODUCTION
The links to the first part and the most recent part are given below. Part 8 covers Thurber’s first book of cartoons, The Seal in the Bedroom, and begins a discussion of his “slender masterpiece,” My Life and Hard Times.
PART 8
Thurber’s next book, The Seal in the Bedroom, marked his emergence as a seriously original cartoonist. E.B. White had pressed for the use of Thurber’s “naïve” sketches to illustrate Is Sex Necessary?, their limited competence contributing, in theory, to the humor. His pieces for The Owl in the Attic were illustrated as well, with little more competence, and his drawings for “The Pet Department” were an integral part of the fun, but it’s the cartoons in The Seal in the Bedroom that mark the emergence of Thurber as a caricaturist of indefinable genius. He did his own captions, for the most part, and usually they carry half the weight, or even more, but often it’s his uncaptioned works—hunters and hounds racing across a field, a man tuning a radio—that capture the fleeting moment most perfectly.
In “The Race of Life,” showing a nude man and woman, accompanied by a sour-looking boy/midget racing across a surreal landscape, Thurber first showed his flair for fantasy, moving in the direction of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. One of Thurber’s childhood heroes was Billy Ireland, legendary cartoonist for the Columbus Dispatch, who had a full page of the paper devoted to his work every Sunday. The Sunday papers, with their full-color (“four-color”) comics and illustrations, were a modern miracle when Thurber was growing up. He published sketches while still in college, and his early drawings are far more impressive than his early writings, but he never took drawing seriously, always choosing to work quickly. It was words that really counted. He had unlimited confidence in his ability to improve a piece by rewriting it, but reworking a sketch would only ruin it.1
Perhaps because he didn’t take his cartoons so seriously, Thurber depicted his classic theme of the “war between men and women” in his cartoons with perhaps greater zest and self-confidence than he did in his short stories and casuals, where in fact it was just beginning to emerge.
Thurber’s next book, My Life and Hard Times, was his slender masterpiece, an escape from the ongoing war, recollections of his Columbus boyhood, with all the bad parts left out, polished and embellished through a decade of retelling before he finally put them down on paper. The extended Thurber family, with its endless eccentricities worked out to the last, eminently rational detail, are the perfect escape from the endless frustrations of the real world. Thurber added both a preface and a “note at the end” to pad the book’s length to the extent that it might start to resemble a real book—though even with both it barely achieves 100 pages in the diminutive “Bantam Classic” paperback that I bought for 50¢ back in 1962. “The Night the Bed Fell,” with its famously effortless opening line, “I suppose the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father,” is the all-time classic Thurber story.2
Most of the humor in this wonderful collection lies in the deadpan recitation of absurdities—“We had to stun grandfather with the ironing board”—but sometimes Thurber ventures into the sort of tall tales associated with Mark Twain, such as the case of Uncle Zenas, who died of the chestnut blight: “It was the only case in history where a tree doctor had to be called in to spray a person, and our family felt it very keenly.”
Like Twain, like P.G. Wodehouse, and like cartoonist Charles Schulz,3 Thurber had a wonderful ear for the absurd—spare, exact recitation of detail that floats and transforms itself into perfect nonsense:
If that didn’t make you laugh, you have just read 6,000 words for naught.
- The market for even “great caricaturists” seems to be quite limited. My searches on the web for Isaac Cruikshank, a British caricaturist who flourished at the time of the Napoleonic wars, found very little. Billy Ireland, in contrast, has been immortalized by Ohio State University, which has an extensive website devoted to his work here. If only Cruikshank had the muscle of a Big 10 school behind him! ↩︎
- In his 1948 collection, The Beast in Me, Thurber reprints a handful of the “Talks” that he wrote as a staff writer for the New Yorker. One begins, “THE BYRD-HOPS-OFF HOUR, given through the courtesy of the Tidewater Oil Company, was in some respects the high-water mark of our summer.” Thurber had an extraordinary memory, and it seems strange that he would choose this item, but he did. (The event described is truly bizarre, a 1928 radio broadcast featuring such luminaries as New York City mayor Jimmy Walker that took place in an NBC studio but sought to convince its audience that they were actually listening to the departure of Admiral Richard Byrd’s expedition to the South Pole on The City of New York from the Jersey docks.) ↩︎
- Thurber wrote of Men, Women, and Dogs, while Schultz drew Boys, Girls, and Dogs. ↩︎
