The Thin Red Leash

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From Thurber’s Dogs

Interesting Links

“Gallery: A suite of cartoons and images by Thurber” (James Thurber site)

“James Thurber, Consummate Doodler” (Navied Mahdavian, The New Yorker)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “You Could Look It Up,” James Thurber
• “The Emissary,” Ray Bradbury
• “The Cat,” Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
• “Enjoying the Presidency,” Theodore Roosevelt

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Thurber’s Dogs
Two dozen stories and essays | Six sequences of drawings | 311 pages
List Price: $25.00
Web store price: $21.00

James Thurber with his Scottish terrier Jeannie, the troublemaking subject of several pieces in Thurber’s Dogs. Courtesy of the Ohio State University Archive.

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In June 1940, James Thurber underwent a cataract operation with the aim of slowing or halting the deterioration of his eyesight, which had been impaired since a childhood accident involving a toy bow and arrow. Four additional surgeries followed over the course of the next ten months, with the result that he was nearly blind the following spring. Emerging from a period of deep depression (what he later called “a five-year nervous crack-up”), he spent the summer on Martha’s Vineyard and, in August, he wrote to fellow New Yorker colleagues E. B. White and Katharine White—who were also the proud owners of Minnie, a dachshund. Thurber’s surprisingly cheerful and optimistic letter imagined a future that included a new home and lots of dogs:

We would, of course, love to have a Minnie puppy, and it breaks our hearts that we wouldn’t be just right for a dachshund just now. It has long been our dream to have six or eight variegated dogs when we buy our house in the country—a dachshund, a poodle, a water spaniel, etc.

By the time of his “crack-up” Thurber had become nationally famous for his drawings of dogs, as well as his essays and stories mocking the interactions between humans and their canine friends. His very first short story, “Josephine Has Her Day,” featuring a couple’s fraught relationship with a bull terrier, appeared in the Kansas City Star’s Sunday magazine in 1926. In the fall of that year, Thurber and his wife, Althea, moved to New York City, found a small apartment on the outskirts of the meatpacking district, and celebrated his first wages as a reporter for the New York Evening Post by purchasing a Scottish terrier. “Jeannie had no show points to speak of,” he later wrote. “Her jaw was skimpy, her haunches frail, her forelegs slightly bowed. She thought dimly, and her co-ordination was only fair.” Early in 1927, Thurber sold his first short piece to The New Yorker and soon accepted a position on the magazine’s staff; among the stories he published that year was “The Thin Red Leash,” a humorous tale about Jeannie (although Thurber thinly disguised her with a more whimsical name).

From the beginning, Jeannie caused the Thurbers—and especially James—no end of angst and embarrassment. While they were visiting family in Columbus, she escaped. It took several days to find her, and he returned to his job at The New Yorker two days late. Three decades later, when Thurber selected the best of his writings and drawings about dogs for a collection called Thurber’s Dogs, he included “The Thin Red Leash,” two subsequent stories about Jeannie’s escapades, and a new essay titled “In Defense of Dogs, Even, After a Fashion, Jeannie.”

According to biographer Harrison Kinney (and confirmed somewhat by Thurber’s Dogs), Thurber eventually became disenchanted with Scotties and came to prefer poodles, which he regarded as more intelligent. Yet in March 1928, despite Jeannie’s travails and challenges, he was still quite fond of the breed. When he sent a letter to his brother Robert, who was grief-stricken over the loss of a family dog, Thurber wrote:

I certainly felt badly about Muggs, on account of you and the rest, and the old dog himself. I know what it would mean to me if Jeannie passed out and we've only had her little over a year. When I lost her in Columbus I was nearly nuts. That's the hell of having a dog. . . .

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For this week’s selection, we reproduce Thurber’s story in its entirety below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

The Thin Red Leash

It takes courage for a tall thin man to lead a tiny Scotch terrier pup on a smart red leash in our neighborhood, that region bounded roughly (and how!) by Hudson and West Streets, where the Village takes off its Windsor tie and dons its stevedore corduroys. Here men are guys and all dogs are part bull. Here “cute” apartments stand quivering like pioneers on the prairie edge.

The first day that I sallied forth with Black Watch III bounding tinily at the street end of the thin red leash, a cement finisher, one of the crowd that finds an esoteric pleasure in standing on the bleak corner of Hudson and Horatio Streets, sat down on the sidewalk and guffawed. There were hoots and whistles.

It was apparent that the staunch and plucky Scotch terrier breed was, to these uninitiated bulldog-lovers, the same as a Pekingese. But Black Watch must have his airing. So I continued to brave such witticisms as “Hey, fella, where’s the rest of it?” and—this from a huge steamfitter—“What d’y’ say me an’ you an’ the dog go somewheres and have tea?”

Once a dockworker demanded, in a tone indicating he would not take Black Watch III for an answer, “What’s that thing’s name?”

My courage failed me. “Mike,” I said, giving the leash a red-blooded jerk and cursing the Scotty. The whole affair was a challenge to my gumption. I had been scared to call my dog by its right name.

The gang was on hand in full force the next evening. One of them snapped enormous calloused fingers at Black Watch and he bounded away, leash and all, from my grasp.

“Black Watch!” I shouted—if you could call it shouting.

“What did y’ call that dog, fella?” demanded a man who, I think, blows through truck exhaust whistles to test them.

“Black Watch,” said I.

“What’s that mean?” he asked menacingly.

“It was a Scottish regiment wiped out at Ypres or somewhere,” I said, pronouncing it “Eeprr.”

“Wiped out where?” he snarled.

“Wiped out at Wipers,” I said.

“That’s better,” he said.

I again realized that I had shown the white feather. That night I took a solemn, if not fervent, oath to tell the next heavy-footed lout that flayed my dog to go to hell. The following evening the gang was more numerous than ever. A gigantic chap lunged forward at us. He had the build of a smokestack-wrecker.

“Psst!” he hissed. Black Watch held his ground.

“They’re scrappers, these dogs,” I protested amiably.

“What d’ they scrap—cockroaches?” asked another man, amid general laughter. I realized that now was the time to die. After all, there are certain slurs that you can’t take about your dog—gang or no gang. Just then a monstrous man, evidently a former Hudson Duster who lifts locomotives from track to track when the turntables are out of order, lounged out of a doorway.

“Whadda we got here?” he growled.

“Park Avenoo pooch,” sneered one gas-house gangster.

The train-lifter eyed Black Watch, who was wagging his tail in a most friendly manner.

“Scotty, ain’t it?” asked the train-lifter, producing a sack of scrap tobacco.

“Yeah,” I said, as easily as I could.

“Damn fine dogs, Scotties,” said the train-lifter. “You gotta good ’un there, when it puts on some age, scout. Hellcats in a fight, too, I mean. Seen one take the tonsils out of a Airedale one day.”

“Yeah?” asked the smokestack-wrecker.

“Yeah,” said the train-lifter.

“Yeah,” said I.

Several huge hands went down to pat a delighted shaggy head. There were no more catcalls or hoots. Black Watch III had been acquitted of Pomeranianism. We’re quite good friends now, Black Watch and the gang and I. They call him Blackie. I am grateful to a kind Fate that had given the train-lifter the chance, between carrying locomotives, to see a Scotty in action.

First appeared in The New Yorker (August 13, 1927). Revised and included in Thurber's Dogs (1955). Copyright © 1955 James Thurber. Reprinted by permission of Rosemary A. Thurber and the Barbara Hogenson Agency.