Introduction
Part 4
Through Professor Taylor at Ohio State, Thurber imbibed the theory of the “Ideal Woman” as embodied in Madame de Vionnet, a theory with a multitude of ironies. I confess that I don’t know how old James conceived the madame to be, though surely she must be younger than Streuther himself. Women aged far more quickly back then, in part because no decent woman would dye her hair, and the “gray-haired woman of thirty” was often an object of derision and ridicule. Yet even though madame is almost surely younger than Streuther, her extraordinary authority puts her above him in a markedly Oedipal manner. Taylor and Thurber’s cult of Madame de Vionnet as the ideal woman has a strong flavor of adolescence to it, the ideal protecting us from the real. Thurber tells us that Taylor used to “explain” to the co-eds in his class that they were far too young to equal madame’s true beauty and mature charm, a subtle form of misogyny. Thurber and Nugent liked to believe that Taylor’s marriage to a “pretty but shallow” wife robbed him of a chance to fulfill his talent as a writer, but it is also easy, if unkind, to believe that he was suited by nature to be a professor of English in a land-grant university, sighing over an ideal beauty that was sadly/conveniently out of reach across the sea.
Thurber, unlike Taylor, did cross the sea and explored the landscape of Paris, not as a middle-aged man but as a young one, with his whole life ahead of him. While there he wrote long love letters to Eva, back in the U.S., not realizing that he was living in a world of self-created illusion. Then, something happened, something that, like James’s “obscure hurt” and the “little nameless object” manufactured by the Newsomes, is destined to remain forever secret. For whatever reason, Thruber broke off all his correspondence for months, without ever providing an explanation. Thurber biographer Harrison Kinney advances the quite believable theory that the unpleasant “Thurber woman”—prosaic, manipulative, aggressive, and entirely without either romance or scruple—represents his sense of betrayal at having his illusions shattered, though we will never know how the shattering took place. Still, after Eva failed him—she ultimately, and wisely, married someone “sensible”—Thurber returned home to Columbus and found a new Madame de Vionnet in the form of Althea Adams, who certainly was glamorous enough in her own right.1
Like his father, James Thurber married up. Althea Adams was the daughter of an army doctor. She had grown up for the most part in California and Hawaii. When her father died, her mother moved in with an uncle, dean of the Ohio State physics department. Althea graduated from Ohio State at a time when, of course, very few women even attended college. She was one of the most popular women in her class, one of nine “Rosebuds,” the women who were esteemed as exemplifying the best of Ohio State womanhood. It is remarkable that James Thurber, the son of a distinctly low-level party functionary making $30 a week as a reporter, even thought that he could win such a woman. The fact that he did win her suggests that Althea saw in Thurber something that she wanted, and something that no one else did. He was a man she could control—once they were married she kept him on a daily allowance—but also a man who could take her places the Columbus lawyers and doctors who would have gladly married her could not. The only flaw was, once they got there, he might not need her to tell him what to do any more.2
Where they were going was first France—Thurber had always wanted to return there, and Althea had always want to go—and then New York. For awhile they lived in a village in Normandy, where Thurber briefly attempted a novel. For most of their time in France, they were either in Paris or Nice, Thurber working for the French edition of the Chicago Tribune. It was chic, but it wasn’t getting them anywhere. They traded Paris for New York, where Thurber struggled, to the point that he was on the verge of throwing in his hand and returning to Columbus, but his luck finally changed when he managed to secure a foothold with a struggling new magazine—the New Yorker, and the strange man who ran it, Harold Ross.
In The Years With Ross, Thurber recounted in near infinite loving detail those golden years from 1928 to 1935, immersed for virtually every waking moment (as he remembered it, at least) in Harold Ross’s manic pursuit of elegant, effortless perfection, a world of words, a world where, at last, the writer, and not the businessman was king.3 For the first three years at the New Yorker, Thurber shared an office with E.B. White, who, Thurber always insisted, turned him into a writer rather than a reporter. The two would join in Thurber’s first book, Is Sex Necessary?, a fairly dated work that carries with an aroma of philistine prudery. The Twenties were the first great explosion of popular discussion of sex, which appears unlikely to abate any time soon, and Thurber and White come across as nervous high school boys wanting rather to make a joke of the whole thing. We laugh at things we don’t understand, and sometimes in particular at things we don’t want to understand.
- Eva eventually married a “sensible” man, but Thurber still kept in touch with her, as he did with the woman who introduced him to Althea, Minnette Fritts, who also married sensibly. When Thurber was breaking up with Althea, he made appeals to both Eva and Minnette to leave their husbands and run off with him. ↩︎
- There is a fair amount of dispute about whether Thurber ever would have gotten out of Columbus without Althea to push him. But he had gone first to Washington and then to Paris on his own. And perhaps he wanted to be pushed. ↩︎
- Thurber had virtually none of the Bohemian aesthete in him, but he had a deep dislike of “business.” His mother’s family, the Fishers, had money, and were impatient with poor Charlie Thurber, who sat around thinking up jingles instead of getting out there and making an honest dollar. Thurber had deep misgivings about his Thurber inheritance—his nickname for the nervous instability that seemed to run through his family was “the Thurbs” and he told friends he was determined not to bring any more Thurbers into the world—but he was bound to take his father’s side against any criticism: “My father was easily the most honest man I ever knew.” ↩︎
