INTRODUCTION
This is the 30th episode of “James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide,” a rambling consideration of Thurber’s works, examining his life and work in some detail. Generally, these appear every Friday. The links to the first part and the most recent part are given below. Part 30 discusses Thurber’s book-length reminiscence The Years With Ross.
Thurber might have continued to write more stories with sympathetic female characters throughout the fifties but much of his energy became absorbed in what proved to be the biggest project of his life, The Years With Ross, his book-length memoir of the New Yorker’s founder. In a classic case of poetic injustice, the project prompted some of Thurber’s best work but angered and alienated many of his close friends. In the years following Ross’s death in 1951, Thurber first struggled to write a play about Ross and himself, casting Ross as the man of action and Thurber as the man of refinement and thought, which sounds a great deal like The Male Animal.
Thurber struggled fruitlessly with the play for several years, seemingly defeated by the long form once more, but did write several “casuals” recounting his early days with Ross, holding them back from publication until the Atlantic Monthly talked him into letting them start the series in their centennial issue. The initial reaction of Thurber’s New Yorker friends was very positive, and Thurber developed the plan to write at least six pieces for the Atlantic, which would be published in a collection of essays contributed by other leading New Yorker writers, including E.B. White and A.J. Liebling. But Thurber found that he enjoyed writing about the good old days so much that he didn’t want to stop and he ended up writing an entire book all by himself, leaving the other writers out in the cold. The long form that had always eluded him dropped unbidden into his lap, the effortless Godzilla of all casuals.
While the first pieces Thurber published in the Atlantic received near-universal praise, reactions changed when he reached the ever-touchy topics of sex and, especially, money. Through his research, Thurber learned that the New Yorker started making money in 1928, and stayed comfortably in the black throughout the thirties. Thurber knew that he had Ross’s affection and respect as a unique talent both as a writer and a cartoonist and he felt betrayed to realize that, despite all that, Ross dealt with him coolly and at arm’s length when it came to “business”—that Thurber was the wooly-headed dreamer and Ross the shrewd, unemotional man of affairs.
Katherine White was infuriated by the book, in large part, one suspects, because she always felt that she was the real secret for the New Yorker’s success and importance as a publication. Naturally, she lacked the self-confidence to put forth that claim herself, but she would have liked to have someone else do it for her. Instead, Thurber wrote about all the funny things he said to Ross.
It certainly didn’t help that The Years With Ross was Thurber’s biggest success. It was as though Thurber had taken a patent out on Ross and was cashing in, and the rest of the New Yorker gang could only stand and stare helplessly while the kid from Columbus defined them and their world for all of America and pocketed all the profits as well.
Fifteen years after The Years With Ross appeared, Brendan Gill came forth with Here at the New Yorker, written more or less as the anti-The Years With Ross, “exposing” both Thurber and Ross.1 Yet Gill’s Ross is recognizably Thurber’s Ross, and more recent works have done little if anything to change Thurber’s picture,2 fixing forever the image of the Broadway bad boy who bedded actresses half his age, gambled compulsively for high stakes, agonized over grammar and obsessed over good writing but tried to improve it by randomly sprinkling others’ prose with “elegant” turns of phrase (“and such like”), who seemingly without knowing what he was doing created one of the most prestigious magazines in America.
Thurber also got a little of his own back in writing about Ross’s relationship with his mother. He observed that he and Ross were both “largely raised by women”—“women” rather than “our mothers” because, one suspects, of the importance of Aunt Margery to him. Both Thurber and Ross took immense pains in arranging “perfect” visits for their moms when they came to call in the Big Apple, though Thurber surely goes overboard in describing the elaborate deceptions that Ross would engage in to prevent his mother from discovering the high cost of living in New York. In private correspondence, Thurber speculated wildly on Ross’s supposed fixations and compulsions arising from his mother’s controlling influence, no doubt as a form of therapy for his own.
- Gill had a deep-seated grudge against Thurber in particular. Thurber biographer Harrison Kenney demonstrates, believably enough, that, despite all of Thurber’s faults, the basis for Gill’s complaint against Thurber was entirely false. ↩︎
- The only serious criticism of Thurber’s Ross came from Jane Grant, Ross’s first wife. Grant said that if Ross had been the untutored boor that Thurber portrayed, she never would have married him. But everyone agreed that Ross had no interest in literature and was in fact quite unread, exactly the sort of man who would ask “Is Moby Dick the man or the whale?” But lots of people would like to ask that question. Ross just had the nerve to do it. ↩︎
