Introduction
Some months ago, I thought I would write a longish piece on James Thurber—maybe five or ten thousand words at the most. Well, that was then. I’ve got about thirty-five thousand and counting, including footnotes. I’m going to start running this thing in thousand-word chunks, starting with this one. I’ve been learning about footnotes in Tumblr, but I’m only half-educated. I can jump you down, but I can’t jump you back up. Sorry, but this is an iterative process. Maybe in a month or so. Anyway, if you want to read a lot about the writings of the man who immortalized the little girl who said “This book told me more about penguins than I wanted to know,” dive in.
When I was growing up in Falls Church, Virginia in the 1950s, James Thurber was part of the atmosphere I breathed. I was a compulsive reader while still in single digits, and I studied the books in every home I visited, seeing The Thurber Carnival, My Life and Hard Times, The Last Flower, Thirteen Clocks, Men, Women, and Dogs, and The Beast in Me. Short stories like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and “The Catbird Seat” were more than legend. Somewhere around the age of 10 I read my way through the entire Subtreasury of American Humor, put together by E. B. and Katherine White, and “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” and “The Greatest Man in the World” struck me as absolute gems, perfect works of art that were, line for line, funnier than anything even Mark Twain had written. 1
My parents subscribed to the New Yorker, whose cartoons I studied long before I bothered to read any of the text—which, in fact, never quite measured up to the illustrations. I also remember when Thurber’s memoir of New Yorker founder Harold Ross began appearing in the Atlantic in the late fifties. I don’t know if I read them in “real time” (probably not), but I did read them when I was still in my teens, when I knew virtually nothing about the cast of characters Thurber presented (I did know who Robert Benchley was, but that was it). But while introducing myself to a cast of now mostly forgotten folks, like Ross, Alexander Wolcott, and Wolcott Gibbs, I was also introduced to a ghostly “pre-world” of Thurber’s imagination, the world of big-time New York City journalism that existed before he arrived 2—the World of Pulitzer and Hearst, of O. Henry’s “Baghdad by the Subway,” and Franklin Pierce Adams’ “Conning Tower,” a world of dreams even more exciting than one he knew, even though the two overlapped to a great extent—Adams, one of Ross’s many Algonquin friends, was still very much on the scene in the twenties and thirties 3 and Wolcott (Alexander Wolcott) had a foot in both worlds. I didn’t know why Thurber should be fascinated by a world that I knew absolutely nothing about, but it was clear to me that he was.
For whatever reason, I’ve continued to read almost compulsively about the New Yorker world to which Thurber introduced me at a precocious age, even though I’ve never been that impressed with the magazine itself—even though I read that semi-compulsively as well. 4 Because of its immense prestige, the New Yorker was able to publish a great deal of excellent writing, but overall the magazine took itself far too seriously. The New Yorker was always pretending—making fun of people while pretending it wasn’t, sucking up to people while pretending simply to be amusing and amused, and condescending to people while pretending not to condescend. Vietnam pushed the magazine unattractively to the left, leading it to discover that it was better than the rest of America. Moral snobbery, once taken up, is a vice not easily put down, and the New Yorker has never bothered to do so.
Thurber was the one New Yorker writer that I’ve never looked down on. There are a number of_ New Yorker_ writers that I did enjoy—S. J. Perlman and A.J. Liebling in particular—but when I reread them, or when I read other New Yorker writers from the “golden era,” like E.B. White or Wolcott Gibbs, their work struck me as shamelessly padded. I explored all this in a piece I wrote on Gibbs a couple of years ago, jumping off a profile Gibbs wrote of once legendary now forgotten Broadway press agent Dick Maney, so I’ll just quote myself here:
First of all, the piece is far too long. Second, it’s cloyingly overwritten. Third, and worst of all, it’s not even journalism, but rather a favor written for a friend, a puff piece on an influential Broadway player who was in a position to do an influential drama critic like Gibbs any number of favors and undoubtedly did do them—free drinks, free meals, free tickets, introductions to young actresses—all the grist of Broadway’s scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours mill—all the things the New Yorker was supposed to be against and above. 5
- My touchstone for literary quality at age 10 was, indisputably, Huckleberry Finn, whose greatness dwarfed anything else on my literary landscape. “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” was a diamond, but Huckleberry Finn was a mountain. ↩︎
- If you’re interested in this world, Joyce Milton’s The Yellow Kids: Foreign Correspondents in the Heyday of Yellow Journalism, provides plenty of detail, even though her focus, on foreign correspondents, is not what excited Thurber. Why read about “the world,” when you can read about New York? ↩︎
- Adams once took Ross tobogganing, and people wanted to know what Ross looked like tobogganing. “Well,” said Adams, “you know what Ross looks like not tobogganing.” ↩︎
- My parents always subscribed, and I was once one of those people who could spend a day reading a dozen back issues of the New Yorker without thinking that I had done anything unusual or wrong. ↩︎
- This blindness to the New Yorker’s lack of journalistic virtue—in the past if not the present—continues to this day. It’s widely known that Robert Benchley, the New Yorker’s drama critic in the late Twenties and early Thirties, almost never panned a play and that he had a number of affairs with young actresses. But no one seems to notice that these phenomena might be related in some way. ↩︎
