Story of the Week: James Thurber

Showing posts with label James Thurber. Show all posts

Sunday, April 20, 2025

The First Years

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings & Drawings

Interesting Links

Online exhibition: “A Century of The New Yorker: Beginnings” (New York Public Library)

“Celebrating The New Yorker’s 100th . . . A Toast to Harold Ross” (Michael Maslin, Ink Spill)

Previous Story of the Week selections from the Ross Years
• “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,” James Thurber
• “Joey on the Cake Line,” John O’Hara
• “Insert Flap 'A' and Throw Away,” S. J. Perelman
• “Children Are Bored on Sunday,” Jean Stafford

Buy the book

The first and last of James Thurber’s six covers for The New Yorker: a drawing titled “New Tricks” for the February 29, 1936, issue and an untitled cartoon commemorating the Westminster Dog Show for the February 9, 1946, issue. (New Yorker archive)

By the time he was 35, Raoul Fleischmann, a scion of the Fleischmann Yeast family and director of its bakeries, had become sick of the bread business. In 1921, he renewed an acquaintance with Franklin P. Adams, whose nationally syndicated column, “The Conning Tower,” appeared in the New York Tribune, and joined him for occasional games of poker at the apartment of the Broadway playwright George Kaufman, where he met the likes of future novelist Henry Miller, New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott, songwriter Irving Berlin, and American Legion Weekly editor Harold Ross. “One day early in 1924,” Fleischmann recalled, “Ross asked me to lunch and suggested that we start a new comic paper. What I knew about publishing was zero.” Fleischmann turned down this first appeal, but Ross tried again a few months later and “this time the idea was that the magazine was to be built around New York, with humor as merely an adjunct of the publication.”

The new weekly was, of course, The New Yorker, now celebrating its 100th year. “I wasn’t at all impressed with Ross’s knowledge of publishing,” Fleischmann admitted. “I had no reason to doubt his skill as an editor, nor any reason to believe in it. I had merely got into something I couldn’t get out of gracefully.” Fleischmann’s only serious attempt to get out of it occurred early on, during the summer of 1925, when he became concerned about the magazine’s losses in money and circulation. He told Ross that they needed to “suspend publication” but soon changed his mind and, with $100,000 provided by his mother, the magazine stumbled forward without missing an issue.

Aside from Ross’s short gig at American Legion, the total of his management experience was his editorship of the Parisian edition of Stars and Stripes during World War I, when he was 26 years old. During the decade before the war, he crisscrossed the nation and worked as a reporter for no fewer than nine papers, from the San Francisco Call to the Atlanta Journal. His start came when he was thirteen or fourteen, working as a stringer for the Salt Lake City Tribune. “One of his assignments there was to interview the madam of a house of prostitution,” James Thurber related in an oft-shared anecdote. “Always self-conscious and usually uncomfortable in the presence of all but his closest women friends, the young reporter began by saying to the bad woman (he divided the other sex into good and bad), ‘How many fallen women do you have?’”

Adams and Woollcott both wrote for Stars and Stripes in France while Ross was editor, and the three became friends. While in Paris, Ross also met Jane Grant, a Times city desk reporter who was in Europe as a singer and dancer to entertain the troops and who would become, with Ross and Fleischmann, one of the three founders of The New Yorker. Shortly after returning to New York in 1919, Ross and Grant married. In June the three men joined with other writers for a party at the Algonquin Hotel, the success of which led to the establishment of the Round Table, a group that met every day for lunch—and that provided much of the talent to The New Yorker during its first decade.

By the end of the 1920s, after Fleischmann had sunk an estimated $700,000 in the business, the magazine was turning a profit, with a circulation of nearly 100,000—respectable but far from the powerhouse it would later become. As Thurber confided to a journalist writing a profile on Ross, “His mother was never persuaded that Harold’s position on The New Yorker ever amounted to much. . . . He showed her over the office one day but she made no comment. He asked her at dinner that night, ‘Well, what do you think of The New Yorker, Mama?’ She sighed and replied, ‘Harold, I hope that someday you become connected with The Saturday Evening Post.”’

Thurber sold his first piece to The New Yorker at the beginning of 1927, after a half year’s worth of rejections. He met staff writer E. B. White soon after that small success, and White introduced him to Ross, who hired him immediately as a “managing editor” responsible for the administrative aspects of the magazine—a position Thurber was uniquely unqualified for. At the time, the staff included Katharine Angell (who later married White) and Ralph Ingersoll. They were subsequently joined by Wolcott Gibbs, Brendan Gill, Gus Lobrano, and Robert Coates, all of whom had extraordinary careers as editors and authors.

“The New Yorker was the turning point, the crucial element, in Thurber’s life, just as he was a crucial element in the magazine’s development,” noted Robert Gottlieb in a 2003 reappraisal of Thurber. “But at the start no one knew quite what to do with him. Ross, as always, was in search of an administrative editor who could, through some arcane magic, make sense of the chaos that he thrived on, hiring a procession of young men ill-equipped to fill this slot—‘Hell, I hire anybody’—then quickly dumping them.” Rather than dump Thurber, Ross kept him on as an editor, writer, and, eventually, cartoonist.

Thirty years later, Thurber chronicled the chaos in “The Years with Ross,” a series of ten articles in The Atlantic Monthly; it was extensively revised and published in 1959 as a book. We present from the book the selection titled "The First Years," which covers The New Yorker’s founding and James Thurber’s hiring. In his biography of Thurber, Harrison Kinney acknowledges that the work is “considered mischievously inaccurate by some of his colleagues and other Ross admirers. . . . One of his responsibilities as a serious humorist, he believed, was to burnish the lackluster events of human existence to the sheen of good stories and apologize later for any wreckage.” Yet underlying the raillery and self-aggrandizement is a decidedly fond portrait of the editor who changed the lives of so many writers.

* * *

Notes: In the selection below, Thurber refers to an episode described in the first chapter of The Years with Ross, a “turning point” in his relationship with his boss. While Thurber was visiting his family in Columbus, his Scottish terrier Jeannie escaped. It took extraordinary efforts and several days to find her, and he returned to New York two days late. When Ross dismissively chided his employee and implied that his concern for a dog was unmanly, Thurber lost his temper and suggested that he get somebody else to help him with the magazine. “Who would you suggest I call in?” Ross asked, and Thurber responded, “Alexander Woollcott”—which launched both men into fits of laughter. “An hour later we were having dinner together at Tony’s after a couple of drinks.”

Herman Mankiewicz was a screenwriter, movie producer, and film director, best known for the screenplay of Citizen Kane (1941). Thurber’s references to Dubuque evoke a famous (or, perhaps, infamous) line in the magazine’s original prospectus: “The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about. This is not meant in disrespect, but The New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience. . . .” Ben Turpin was a slapstick comedian, famous for his crossed eyes, who starred in many silent films produced and directed by Mack Sennett. The U.S. navy dirigible Shenandoah crashed during a thunderstorm in Ohio in 1925, resulting in the deaths of 14 crew members. New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson died of tuberculosis at the age of 45 in 1925. Hero and Leander is a Greek myth about two lovers who lived on the opposite sides of the Hellespont strait. The Synder trial refers to the conviction and execution of Ruth Snyder and her lover Henry Todd Gray for the 1927 murder of Snyder’s husband.

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I had never heard of the New Yorker when I sailed from New York on the Leviathan in May, 1925, for a year in France. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

Sunday, April 5, 2020

The Night the Bed Fell

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings & Drawings

Interesting Links
“James Thurber: Humor for an age of anxiety” (Max Rudin, Library of America)

Audio: “James Thurber’s Life in Columbus” (Bob Hunter, WOSU)

Previous Story of the Week Selections
• “Lavender with a Difference,” James Thurber
• “The Young Immigrunts,” Ring Lardner
• “Imaginary Countries,” Ursula K. Le Guin

Buy the book

“He came to the conclusion that he was suffocating.”
© 1933 James Thurber. Image reproduced by arrangement with Rosemary A. Thurber c/o The Barbara Hogenson Agency.

Just as the effects of the Great Depression were intensifying in the American Midwest, Charles Thurber was dismissed from his longtime position as assistant to Columbus mayor James Thomas, who, like many Republican officials in the early 1930s, lost his reelection bid. For the next few years Charles did piecemeal work for politicians and campaigns and took on other temporary jobs. At the end of 1933 he and his oldest son Robert decided to drive to upstate New York to sell ideas for promotional contests and puzzles to newspaper editors.

James, the middle Thurber son, had just published My Life and Hard Times, a fictionalized memoir of growing up in a family home where “there was a three-ring circus in progress all the time,” as one visitor described it. The episodes first appeared in The New Yorker in eight installments during the summer of 1933 and then as a book in November. Without notifying James in advance, his father and brother drove to Manhattan, showed up at the offices of the magazine, wandered uninvited through the halls of the editorial department, and ended up outside the door of fiction editor Katharine White. James had not yet arrived for work, and White was perplexed as to what to do with two men she knew only from Thurber’s stories. “We felt as if we’d been caught robbing the place,” Robert later told biographer Harrison Kinney. “It occurred to me later maybe she thought we’d sneaked in to blow up the place for revenge.”

Long before he set down on paper the installments of My Life and Hard Times, Thurber had been telling them—or, more accurately, performing them—in the homes of friends and in Manhattan bars and social clubs. “I first heard Thurber tell me these stories at Martin & Mino’s speakeasy,” Elinor Gibbs, wife of New Yorker editor Wolcott Gibbs, recalled to Kinney. St. Clair McKelway, a writer at the magazine, described a typical Thurber performance: “One after another, and sometimes more or less simultaneously, he would play the parts of his mother, his father, his grandfather (offstage), his brothers . . . and a dog . . . in addition to playing himself.”

Cover of July 9, 1951, issue of Time,
with Thurber's self-portrait, the last
drawing he created for publication.

Most of the chapters in My Life and Hard Times had a kernel of truth in them, a bit of family history or a funny incident that would inspire Thurber to conjure an over-the-top farce. For example, certain details of the book’s opening chapter, “The Night the Bed Fell,” were later confirmed by various family members. “My father frequently slept in the attic,” Robert told Kinney, “to get away from any possible uproar or undue noise.” Yet, to enhance the comedy, Thurber would switch around the roles of the characters, invent additional outlandish incidents, and exaggerate or revise what really did happen. As Kinney explains, it was not James but rather his older brother, William (Herman, in the story), who fell out of a cot and launched the night’s non-catastrophe. It was a boarder, not one of his aunts, who—thinking a thief was in the house—hurled a shoe through a transom window, shattering the glass. (His mother, too, was known for throwing shoes in the night at imagined burglars.) As for much of the rest: “Jamie always did exaggerate. You mustn’t believe a thing he says,” his mother, Mame, told a Time reporter for a July 9, 1951, cover story.

“When it comes to his past, however—to his family, his childhood, his life in Columbus—he’s never nasty,” Robert Gottlieb pointed out in a 2003 appraisal of Thurber. “This is the material that seems closest to his heart, and he returns to it lovingly again and again.” Yet his parents and two brothers had mixed feelings about being the involuntary performers in Thurber’s carnival. Another biographer, Burton Bernstein, relates an anecdote told years later by someone who ran into Charles Thurber and congratulated him on the book’s success. His irritated response “scared the squirrels over in the State House yard.” Eventually, however, Charles seems to have come around; when a reporter for the Columbus Citizen asked about his portrayal in the book (and particularly in “The Night the Bed Fell”), he “grinned” and responded, “Jamie is a great hand to enlarge on those little things that used to happen when he was a kid.”

Thurber’s mother, too, was initially appalled by some of the incidents attributed to her; some of the funniest parts, Thurber later admitted, would have been expunged “if Mama had got her hands” on the proofs. But Mame, too, learned to enjoy the resulting celebrity, and she unhesitatingly—and frequently, it seems—boasted of being his mother to complete strangers. Once, when she was returning home from New York, she requested a ticket to Columbus and the clerk commented, “James Thurber’s hometown,” to which she insisted proudly, “I’m his mother.” Family lore has it that the clerk alerted the conductor to the delusional woman boarding his train and advised him to keep an eye on her.

Thurber’s stories about his quirky family have fascinated readers young and old for generations. In 1940 (or thenabouts) a ten-year-old girl read My Life and Hard Times for the first time and more than sixty years later she remembered the experience:

I knew they were funny, that grown-ups laughed aloud reading them, but they didn’t make me laugh. Thurber’s stories were wonderful, mysterious tales of human behavior, like all the folktales and stories in which people did the amazing, terrifying, inexplicable things that grown-ups do. The various night wanderings of the Thurber family in “The Night the Bed Fell” were no more and no less strange to me than the behavior of the Reed family in the first chapter of Jane Eyre. . . .

When I did laugh at Thurber was when he played with words. . . . The story is the way the story is told.

The young girl was Ursula Kroeber, whom our readers will know as Ursula K. Le Guin.

* * *

Most of the above biographical details and the quotes from Thurber’s friends and family members are from Harrison Kinney’s biography, James Thurber: His Life and Times.

Note: Crotchets, as Thurber uses it in the story, is an archaic word for “whims.”

Video: In 2010, in honor of his recently deceased father, Keith Olbermann concluded his Friday night broadcasts of the news program Countdown with readings of Thurber’s stories. Now, a decade later, he has resumed his readings for audiences stuck at home during the pandemic—this time nightly on Twitter. The second episode features Olbermann reading “The Night The Bed Fell” and “The Moth And The Star”; the video is available here. (Note: You do not need a Twitter account to view the video. Past and future episodes can be viewed on Olbermann’s Twitter feed @KeithOlbermann.)

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I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

Sunday, December 8, 2019

The Day the Dam Broke

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings & Drawings

Interesting Links

Interview with Thurber expert Michael J. Rosen: “‘Humor at First Sight’ as James Thurber’s Art Is Celebrated for His 125th Birthday” (Library of America)

Photo Gallery: “Great Flood of 1913” (The Columbus Dispatch)

Previous Story of the Week selections by James Thurber
• “Lavender with a Difference”
• “A Box to Hide In”
• “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox”

Buy the book

“Two thousand people were in full flight.”
© 1933 James Thurber. Image reproduced by arrangement with Rosemary A. Thurber c/o The Barbara Hogenson Agency.

A curious article appeared in The Columbus Citizen on March 27, 1913, concerning a bizarre event the day before:

PANIC FOLLOWS FALSE REPORT THAT THE DAM HAD BROKEN

Like a flash, business on High street was paralyzed, the whole city was thrown into a panic, rescue work in the flood district was hurriedly abandoned, the river’s east brink from a mile was cleared of humanity, when, at 4:30 Wednesday afternoon, someone shouted: “The storage dam has burst.”

Never before in the history of Columbus was there such a scene of panic, even consternation. Through alleys, down street, down stairways, out of windows, people hurried, tumbled ran, shouted and fairly fought each other in their almost mad rush. . . .

The story was mostly buried by the local press; The Columbus Dispatch reported the chaos on page 8—perhaps because many of the newspaper’s employees had themselves fled the scene. One reporter sheepishly admitted to biographer Harrison Kinney, “There was a silent agreement among us on the paper that the panic run was best forgotten.”

To be fair, this non-catastrophe was overwhelmed in the news by the actual devastation surrounding it: five days of cataclysmic rainfall had flooded the Midwest and, in particular, Ohio. The death toll in eleven states exceeded 650, more than half of which were in the area around Dayton. In Columbus, the neighborhoods west of the Scioto River were rapidly inundated when the levees failed; some blocks were soon under seventeen feet of water. “Houses were bowled off their foundations and people who had gone to the upper stories were thrown in the water and drowned,” wrote Columbus historian Osman Castle Hooper a few years later. “Thousands of people were imprisoned in their homes for three or four days; others escaped, leaving all their possessions behind, only to find that they were swept away or otherwise destroyed by the water.” Ninety-three people in Columbus were killed by the floods.

The east side of Columbus, including downtown, was largely untouched by the rising water, although many of its inhabitants participated in relief and rescue efforts. Twenty years later, when James Thurber was writing a series of vignettes about his youth in Columbus, he plucked from oblivion the forgotten story of the panic of 1913—the only part of the disaster he, a high school student on higher ground, experienced directly.

In eight short autobiographical pieces written for The New Yorker between July and September 1933, including such popular stories as “The Night the Bed Fell” and “The Dog That Bit People,” Thurber whimsically celebrated not only his hometown but also his own family. Even before he set them to paper, the episodes he collected later that year as My Life and Hard Times had provided their author with material for impromptu performances in homes and speakeasies around lower Manhattan. St. Clair McKelway, a writer who joined The New Yorker staff that year, told Kinney about the night Thurber showed up in his apartment and entertained his friends with a story “about the night the bed fell. He threw himself into the act. He’d climb under the table to illustrate the bed falling on him, would slam doors and change his voice to imitate his mother, brothers, and the barking dog.”

Although embellished and exaggerated for comic effect, “The Day the Dam Broke” is generally accurate. The date and time are off: Thurber places the incident two weeks too early and in midday rather than late afternoon. A reader might quibble over Thurber’s statement that “even if the dam had broken, the water level would not have risen more than two additional inches.” Yet Thurber was on relatively firm ground: an article in the Citizen quotes engineers who dismissed the idea that Griggs Dam could have ever failed from a flood, because its foundation is so wide and water as a matter of course flows over the top. One of them stated that even if the impossible had somehow happened “the river would not have risen more than two feet, and it had dropped [that day] over three feet,” so the water wouldn’t have made much of a difference in the flooded area of the city—and wouldn’t have even touched the east side.

Where the story begins to depart from reality, however, is in its depictions of the zanier antics of individuals, including family members, during the panic. In 1951 he told an interviewer, “There’s a book in every family, in every person, in mothers, fathers, children, the front yard, the dog, the porch.” For the most part his family had resigned themselves to their reluctantly public roles as nutty yet lovable eccentrics but, when he met with resistance later in his career, he reminded them, “In writing any story, it is necessary to make up a few things, and I hope you won’t be too literary about minor facts.” As for many of the sillier incidents he had shared with the world, even the true ones, he tried to reassure them that “nobody in the world believes I didn’t make it up.”

Still, as Harrison Kinney relates in his biography, there was enough truth about mass hysteria in Thurber’s account of the Afternoon of the Great Run of 1913 to impress at least one important reader. General William M. Hoge, who experienced the ill effects of rumor and panic during the Battle of the Bulge, read “The Day the Dam Broke” shortly afterward and “required every member of his staff to do the same.”

Notes: The Columbus newspaper articles quoted in this introduction are reproduced at “Our National Calamity”: The Great Easter 1913 Flood, a site managed by science writer Trudy E. Bell.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate Army general during the Civil War. The American ship Mary Celeste (often incorrectly referred to as Marie Celeste in contemporary reports), sailing from New York to Genoa with a cargo of alcohol, was found adrift midway between the Azores and the Portuguese coast in December 1872, with no crew members aboard and its cargo intact. Various explanations, many extremely fanciful, have been proposed for the ship’s abandonment. William S. Hart was one of the most popular silent film actors of the late 1910s and 1920s; he was known particularly for lead roles in westerns. Thurber is employing a little creative anachronism here, however, since Hart didn't begin acting in movies until 1914. Irving Berlin’s “In My Harem” was a popular song in 1913.

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My memories of what my family and I went through during the 1913 flood in Ohio I would gladly forget. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

Friday, September 29, 2017

If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings & Drawings

Interesting Links

Video: James Thurber interviewed in 1956 by Alastair Cooke (YouTube)

“Pour One Out for Ulysses S. Grant” (Adam Gornik, The New Yorker)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Greatest Man in the World,” James Thurber
• “The Man Who Came to Dinner, With George Kaufman Directing,” Morton Eustis
• “Battle of Gettysburg,” Arthur James Lyon Fremantle

Buy the book

“I was wrassling some general. Some general with a beard.” James Thurber’s drawing for “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox.”
© 1935 James Thurber. Image reproduced by arrangement with Rosemary A. Thurber c/o The Barbara Hogenson Agency.

At the end of 1930 Scribner’s Magazine began publishing what would prove to be a short-lived series of “alternative history” pieces. The first installment, in the November issue, was “If Booth Had Missed Lincoln.” This was followed by a contribution from none other than Winston Churchill, who turned the concept on its head. It was bafflingly titled “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg”—but, as we all know, Lee didn’t win the Battle of Gettysburg. Instead, Churchill’s essay purported to be written by a historian in a world in which Lee had won not only the battle but also the entire war. This fictional historian, in turn, speculates what might have happened if Lee had not won the battle. This type of dizzying zaniness brought out the parodist in Thurber, who published “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” in The New Yorker in December. The next month Scribner’s published a third essay (“If Napoleon Had Escaped to America”) before bringing the series to an end. All three pieces were soon forgotten, but Thurber’s parody became one of his most famous and beloved works.

Three decades later “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” enjoyed a second life when it was included in the hit revue A Thurber Carnival. Virtually every review proclaimed it as one of the show’s highlights. During an interview, a reporter admitted to Thurber that “the Grant skit” was one of her favorite parts of the show. Thurber responded, “A woman said to me, ‘I don’t like the bastardization of history,’ That woman didn’t know the point of the thing and she didn’t know history. And I don’t like my humor to be called mild and gentle.”

A Thurber Carnival opened on Broadway in early 1960 and received excellent reviews, but it closed after seventeen weeks because of a citywide actor’s strike. When the show reopened for three months in the fall, Thurber agreed to play himself in the quasi-revival. His old college friend Elliott Nugent, a stage and screen actor who collaborated with Thurber on the 1940 Broadway comedy The Male Animal, remarked, “That S.O.B. has been trying to get on the stage for forty years, to my certain knowledge.” Yet Thurber was a self-described perfectionist and had a reputation for stubbornness, and the crew and actors were understandably nervous about including the untested writer in such a prominent role.

They need not have worried; his stage debut was an extraordinary success, and he ended up appearing in eighty-eight performances. “He received crashing applause upon entering, exiting, and at curtain call,” writes biographer Harrison Kinney. “He rarely flubbed a line.” Even when he made a mistake, he recovered quickly and his ornery ad-libs often earned even more laughter. Once, in a scene that depicted him dictating to his “secretary,” he gave his address as “Westport, Connecticut” rather than West Cornwall and promptly sneered, “These publishers have me so mixed up I don’t even know where I live.”

A Thurber Carnival has been revived numerous times in the last half century—and it is still a staple among regional theaters. And now “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” has been given yet another theatrical life in an altogether different form. Over the next few months the actor Bill Murray, with cellist Jan Vogler, violinist Mira Wang, and pianist Vanessa Perez, are on the North American tour of their New Worlds show, which blends classical music, American standards, and literary readings—including Murray’s innovative rendering of Thurber’s classic story.

Note: “An army surrenders on its stomach” is Thurber’s distortion of the saying “An army marches on its stomach,” which has been attributed to both Napoleon and Frederick the Great. There is no evidence for either attribution; the quote first appeared in English in the early 1900s.

* * *

The morning of the ninth of April, 1865, dawned beautifully. General Meade was up with the first streaks of crimson in the sky. General Hooker and General Burnside were up, and had breakfasted, by a quarter after eight. The day continued beautiful. It drew on toward eleven o'clock. General Ulysses S. Grant was still not up. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

Friday, September 16, 2016

Agatha

John O’Hara (1905–1970)
From John O’Hara: Stories

Interesting Links

“He Told the Truth about His Time” (Lorin Stein, The New Yorker)

“A Natural Writer” (John Updike, The New Yorker)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Actual Thing,” William Maxwell
• “Lavender with a Difference,” James Thurber
• “The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd,” John Updike

Buy this book

John O’Hara: Stories
Sixty stories and novellas in all | 860 pages

John O’Hara in 1962. (Photo by Carl Mydans/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

In March 1959 James Thurber wrote to a New York Post reporter writing a profile on fellow New Yorker colleague John O’Hara, who had been a friend for “thirty years, off and on, but mostly on”:

John O’Hara being Irish and artist is doubly interesting, twice as complicated, and maybe three times as difficult as he would be if he were only one of those volatile beings. . . . He can always tolerate a major aggression, but takes fire about minor misunderstandings, and thus gained the name of being “Master of the Fancied Slight.” . . . I guess a man cannot have an ear and eye and mind as sensitive as O’Hara’s without also having feelings that are hypersensitive. He is, of course, one of the major talents in American literature.

Read as a whole, Thurber’s letter was probably meant as a humorous encomium for a fellow writer and friend, but O’Hara’s reputation for orneriness seeps through. The irony, perhaps, was that such characterizations came from Thurber’s pen; as Charles McGrath recalls, “At The New Yorker in the mid-1970's, it was still possible to hear editors debating which of the magazine's illustrious contributors had been the bigger jerk and the more impossible to deal with—James Thurber or John O'Hara.” McGrath also writes that “in his later years O'Hara mellowed considerably,” particularly after he give up drinking in the mid-1950s.

O’Hara’s propensity for feelings of betrayal and for grudges led, in part, to his absence from the pages of The New Yorker for more than a decade. In August 1949 his latest novel, A Rage to Live, was published to extraordinary sales and generally good reviews. One of the least favorable notices, however, appeared in The New Yorker itself, where Brendan Gill called it “sprawling” and “discursive” and compared the sexual content of the novel to the Kinsey Report. O’Hara felt betrayed, and a decade later bitterly complained to Thurber that “the most dramatic event in my association with magazine was a review written by a snotnose.” Compounding O’Hara’s resentment toward the magazine, according to John Updike, was its refusal to pony up a “kill fee” for each story it declined to publish: “O’Hara felt that New Yorker short stories were so specialized that a writer could not sell elsewhere a story written with its pages in mind.” For the next eleven years, O’Hara boycotted the magazine and wrote virtually no short fiction at all, focusing instead on long blockbuster novels.

Finally, in the summer of 1960, O’Hara offered to submit his work to The New Yorker again—but only if an editor came out to his home in Quogue and accepted a story on the spot. William Maxwell, an editor who had worked well with O’Hara before the break, agreed to spend the night. After reading two novellas not up to the magazine’s standards, he was delighted to realize that the third, “Imagine Kissing Pete,” was good enough to publish in its entirety, and O’Hara received a reported ten thousand dollars. One of the longest works of fiction ever published in The New Yorker, “Imagine Kissing Pete” is widely regarded as among his best works of fiction.

The breach repaired, O’Hara would write almost thirty stories for the magazine over the next three years. Between 1930 and 1967 he published 247 stories in The New Yorker alone—the all-time record for any fiction writer—and dozens more in other magazines and in book collections. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of this body of work on American letters. McGrath writes that O’Hara “liberated the story from the formulas of popular magazine fiction of the ’20s—the reliance on surprise climaxes; the elaborately articulated structure of beginning, middle and end. . . . Hemingway typically gets credit for this revolution in story writing, but among practitioners O’Hara was probably more influential.” In his editor’s note for a new Library of America edition collecting sixty of O’Hara’s stories and novellas (including “Imagine Kissing Pete”), McGrath adds:

He was a gifted and sensitive writer, with talents quite different from those of his more highly regarded contemporaries: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. His strength and his limitation was that he was stubbornly earthbound. There are no similes in his work, no flights of lyricism or fancy writing, no hints of a deeper meaning beyond the moment. Nothing in O’Hara is “like” anything else. Things are vibrant and valuable for their own sake, and he described them—the make of a car, the cut of a suit, the song on the radio, the brand of cigarette, the sound of a broken tire chain on a snowy morning—with a scrupulousness that bordered on devotion. . . .

He became, among other things, one of the great listeners of American fiction, able to write dialogue that sounded the way people really talk, and he also learned the eavesdropper’s secret—how often people leave unsaid what is really on their minds.

The stories from O’Hara’s later period, says McGrath, “were longer and plottier. . . . He was easier in his own skin, and it shows a little in the writing: there are fewer stories about loneliness, isolation, or exclusion.” In celebration of the release of the new Library of America edition, we present here one of those later stories, about a wealthy woman who “had had three husbands and an undetermined number of gentleman friends” and who is navigating the challenges of growing older.

Notes: O’Hara includes several references (pages 466–67) to various mid-century haunts of the upper crust. Pine Valley is a golf club in southern New Jersey, generally considered among the best golf courses in America, with highly restricted access; the resort town of Thomasville, Georgia, is the home of the Glen Arven Country Club. Canoe Place, built in 1923 was an upscale inn and dance pavilion in Hampton Bays, New York, legendary for attracting bootleggers and gangsters, as well as the sons and daughters of the wealthy; six miles away in Southampton were the tennis courts and facilities of the ultra-exclusive Meadow Club (founded in 1887 and still in operation). The course at Elizabeth Arden (page 470) was hosted at the health retreat of cosmetics and beauty entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden (pseud. Florence Graham, 1878–1966) on her Maine Chance Farm estate in Maine.

* * *

Both dogs had been out. She could tell by the languid way they greeted her and by the fact that Jimmy, the elevator operator, had taken his twenty-five-cent piece off the hall table. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Saturday, October 17, 2015

The Greatest Man in the World

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings & Drawings

Interesting Links
Video: Keith Olberman reads “The Greatest Man in the World” (YouTube)

Interview: James Thurber: The Art of Fiction (George Plimpton & Max Steele, The Paris Review)

Previous Story of the Week selections by James Thurber
• “Lavender with a Difference“
• “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”

Buy the book

One of James Thurber’s illustrations for “The Greatest Man in the World” when the story was reprinted in his collection The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935).
© 1935 James Thurber. Image reproduced by arrangement with Rosemary A. Thurber c/o The Barbara Hogenson Agency.

Shortly after selling his first piece to The New Yorker in 1927 (after a slew of rejections the previous year), James Thurber met and befriended E. B. White, who introduced him to the magazine’s founding editor, Harold W. Ross. Impressed, Ross immediately hired Thurber, who had been working as a reporter for the New York Evening Post, and made him an administrator. It didn’t take long for Ross and his colleagues to realize that Thurber had absolutely no talent for management. So Thurber took on copyediting chores, White became his new office mate, and the two men created or edited virtually all of the “Talk of the Town” pieces for the next eight years. “White taught me about writing, how to clear up sloppy journalese,” Thurber said in an interview a quarter century later. “He got me away from a rather curious style I was starting to perfect—tight journalese laced with heavy doses of Henry James.”

By 1931, when Thurber wrote “The Greatest Man in the World,” the magazine was regularly publishing his stories and drawings (including the first of 307 captioned cartoons that would appear in its pages). Thurber’s success happened despite—or perhaps because—his marriage and personal life was in shambles. “The only good that came out of that marriage,” White wrote to Thurber’s second wife many years later, “was that it made Jim so miserable that he doodled to take his mind off his troubles. And from the doodles came the drawings that enchanted the world.” William Shawn, who was hired in 1933, told Thurber biographer Harrison Kenney, “When I joined the staff, he was an established part of the New Yorker generation ahead of me, one of the founding fathers, already much more than a ‘Talk’ rewrite man; he was known internationally, and an important writer.”

“The Greatest Man in the World” is characteristic of Thurber’s satires and parodies: “genteelly vitriolic,” as The New York Times put it. At the time he wrote the story, Scribner’s magazine had been running a series of short “alternative history” pieces imagining what might have happened if events had turned out differently (e.g., “If Napoleon Had Escaped to America”). “To Thurber,” write Kenney, “the series begged to be parodied,” and his first New Yorker piece in this vein was “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox.” Then, inspired by the public adoration for aviator Charles A. Lindbergh after making the first non-stop transatlantic flight in 1927, Thurber wondered what if, instead of a man as modest and gracious as Lindbergh, America’s next hero turned out to be an illiterate, ill-mannered, drunken boor.

Thus was born Jack “Pal” Smurch. Of course, Thurber wasn’t ridiculing Lindbergh himself; he was instead mocking the American susceptibility to hero worship—and the part played by the media in fostering such narratives. Perhaps not surprisingly, the figure of Smurch has often been invoked over the last eight decades—up through the present election cycle—when referring to certain politicians and celebrities. If anything has changed since Thurber’s day, it’s the more prominent role of the media in tearing down such figures after building them up.

* * *

Looking back on it now, from the vantage point of 1940, one can only marvel that it hadn’t happened long before it did. The United States of America had been, ever since Kitty Hawk, blindly constructing the elaborate petard by which, sooner or later, it must be hoist. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Friday, May 8, 2015

Lavender with a Difference

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings & Drawings

Interesting Links
“The Years with Thurber” (Robert Gottlieb, The New Yorker)

“The Not-So-Secret Life of James Thurber” (Peter Tonguette, The Christian Science Monitor)

Previous Story of the Week selections by James Thurber
• “The Lady on the Bookcase”
• “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”

Buy the book

“Some nights she threw them all.” Thurber’s
drawing of Aunt Gracie Shoaf from “The Night
the Bed Fell,” one of the many characters inspired
by his mother. According to Thurber’s brother
Robert, when the children thought they heard
burglars in the house, Mrs. Thurber “would
throw shoes down the hall in the dark, or
down the stairs, just to add to the confusion.”

“Almost all my memories of the Champion Avenue house have as their focal point the lively figure of my mother,” writes James Thurber in “Lavender with a Difference,” recalling where he lived in Columbus, Ohio, when he was five years old. Mary Agnes (“Mame”) Fisher Thurber was locally famous—some might say notorious—for her extravagant storytelling, elaborate practical jokes, and deep interest in astrology, numerology, and various systems of self-help. As a teenager in the 1880s, encouraged by her teachers, Mame starred in school drama productions and flirted with the idea of running away and becoming an actress; her strict Methodist parents were apparently mortified and thwarted her plans. For the next seven decades she instead channeled her energies as a humorous and sometimes overbearing mischief-maker. Thurber’s biographer Harrison Kinney relates an incident in 1951, when the eighty-five-year-old matriarch ran into an old classmate, whose granddaughters pleaded, “Oh, Grandma, make her do something!”

The screenwriter Joel Sayre, who was raised in Columbus and who later joined Thurber for a spell at The New Yorker, described to Kinney a typical boyhood visit to the Thurber home. “There was a three-ring circus in progress all the time. The mother had them all competing to be the funniest. Years later, when Jim began to ring the bell with his New Yorker pieces about family life in Columbus, I’d think, Who couldn’t be a successful comic writer with that kind of mother and family?” Thurber often credited his mother’s influence for his own comic sensibility and fanciful imagination. In a 1953 speech, he claimed that a friend met Mame and subsequently told him, “Your humor is only a pale reflection of your mother’s, but if you keep at it you might be almost as good as she is someday.”

A family friend told Kinney that Thurber’s mother “didn’t object to embellishing the truth, but never at the expense of anyone but herself.” And so Mame often appears in her son’s outlandish stories, either as a slightly exaggerated version of her real self or as a thinly disguised fictional character. Burton Bernstein, a young New Yorker staff writer during the last half-decade of Thurber’s life, describes Mame as “the prototype, for millions of readers, of the Thurber Eccentric, Female Division.” Among the many pieces that feature Mrs. Thurber (or someone like her), “Lavender with a Difference” is Thurber’s most detailed and accurate portrait of his mother’s eccentricities, her tall tales, and—above all—her pranks.

Notes: Julia Marlowe (page 753) was an English actress noted for her Shakespearean roles. Evangeline Adams (p. 756-757) was a well-known astrologer in the early nineteenth century; Emile Coué was a psychologist who promoted a form of self-therapy based on auto-hypnosis.

* * *

Belinda Woolf telephoned my mother at the Southern Hotel in Columbus one morning three years ago, and apologized, in a faintly familiar voice, for never having run in to call on her. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Thursday, December 26, 2013

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings & Drawings

Interesting Links
“Why We Relate to Characters Like Walter Mitty” (Steve Stephens, The Columbus Dispatch)

“James Thurber’s Humorous Heart,” (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post)

Previous Story of the Week selections by James Thurber
“A Box to Hide In”
“The Lady on the Bookcase”
“You Could Look It Up”

Buy the book

An article that appeared recently in The Columbus Dispatch (James Thurber’s hometown newspaper) considers the enduring popularity of characters like Walter Mitty, who made his creator famous after the publication of “The Secret Life” in 1939. Beaten-down underachievers had long been—and would continue to be—central to many of Thurber’s stories and drawings, but what set Walter Mitty apart from his counterparts was a series of flights into heroic fantasies—daydreams that increasingly seem to intrude on Mitty’s grasp of reality. In an interview for the Dispatch article, Jared Gardner, a professor at Ohio State University, acknowledges, “Thurber was drawing on a classic device found in some of the great comedies in American culture—in which the timid or oppressed man finds release or redemption in fantasies drawn from popular culture.”

“Though the theme was far from new,” summarizes biographer Harrison Kinney, “Thurber handles it with a greater universal application than anybody before or since.” Soon after the story’s initial appearance in The New Yorker, it was reprinted in Reader’s Digest (twice), Life, Scholastic, and This Week Magazine. The selection was also included in Thurber’s best-selling collection, My World—and Welcome to It (1942). Throughout the war, anthologies of Thurber’s writings were issued as Armed Services editions, and the story became a favorite among American soldiers. Kinney explains, “World War II flyers used ‘pocketa-pocketa’ in radio code; planes and vehicles were named ‘Walter Mitty’; airmen formed Walter Mitty clubs; troops used ‘Walter Mitty’ as passwords.” During the 1940s Charles Laughton recorded an audio version, and Robert Benchley created a radio production. And, of course, the story was adapted for the big screen, first in the 1947 film featuring Danny Kaye and, now, in an updated major motion picture released this week with Ben Stiller as director and star.

Although the 1947 film was a commercial success and has acquired the patina of a classic in its own right, Thurber was upset with the studio, which had not used any of the material he had written or approved. The movie bears little resemblance to the original story, and at one stage of production, Goldwyn Productions even considered changing the title. When the author’s dissatisfaction became public, Samuel Goldwyn released excerpts from letters Thurber had written praising various scenes from drafts of the script yet disingenuously neglected to note that none of this material had actually made it into the final film. According to Random House publisher Bennett Cerf (who thought the movie was “hilarious”), at the end of the movie’s premiere Thurber asked, “Anybody catch the name of this picture?”

* * *

“We’re going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Friday, June 17, 2011

A Box to Hide In

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings and Drawings

Interesting Links

Rosemary Thurber, Keith Olbermann, Calvin Trillin, and friends honor fatherhood with the writings of James Thurber (Reader's Almanac)

Olbermann reading Thurber’s “A Box to Hide In” (YouTube)

Previous Thurber selections from Story of the Week:
“The Lady on the Bookcase”
“You Could Look It Up”

Buy the book

James Thurber once wrote, “Everybody’s father is a great, good man, someone had said, and mine was no exception.” (The “someone” was actually Thurber himself.) His only child, Rosemary, learned that Thurber was her own “great, good man” in a roundabout way. Thurber and her mother, Althea, had divorced when Rosemary was an infant, and she didn’t see much of him for several years. “I thought Franny Comstock [her stepfather] was my father,” she told Harrison Kinney, author of James Thurber: His Life and Times. “I was somewhere around eight when my mother, who was about to divorce [Comstock], told me he wasn’t.” She then began to associate this new presence in her life with some of the fables and stories she enjoyed so much as a child (particularly Thurber’s “The Little Girl and the Wolf”). When Althea remarried, “some instinct” caused Rosemary to choose Thurber as her last name.

As a teenager, Rosemary became much closer to her father, often staying with him each summer. According to Kinney, Thurber “developed a full parental claim on her” during this period, paying her tuition at a private school and sending the headmistress a list of nearly thirty books that he thought should be required of students for summer reading: from Henry James’s Daisy Miller and Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy to Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris. When she graduated, her father gave her twenty-seven books as a graduation present, which she loved but says, “My father never got over the fact that I didn’t want to be a writer.”

When Rosemary became a mother, her husband was upset that their daughter screamed whenever he picked her up. Thurber wrote to her with advice for the new father:

Tell Fred that the feminine sex should start off in proper terror of the males. It shows that nature is preparing the girls to do something about the other sex before it is too late. By the time you get this letter, of course, your daughter will be in love with [him] as much as her mother. It takes time to adjust to the greatest menace on the earth, the male of the human species.

For this week’s selection, we offer “A Box to Hide In,” a short Thurber story published a few months before Rosemary was born (she turns eighty later this year). It is also the selection Keith Olbermann chose to launch a popular series of Friday night readings in honor of his own recently departed father, who had suggested just before he died that the broadcaster read Thurber as part of his Countdown program. Olbermann had initially demurred, but his father persisted. “How often have I ever suggested anything for your shows? Try it. You never know.” Sometimes, it happens that fathers do know best.

* * *

I waited till the large woman with the awful hat took up her sack of groceries and went out, peering at the tomatoes and lettuce on her way. The clerk asked me what mine was. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Friday, September 24, 2010

You Could Look It Up

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings and Drawings

Also of Interest
“A Can of Beer, a Slice of Cake—and Thou, Eddie Gaedel” (excerpt from Bill Veeck’s memoir)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Lady on the Bookcase,” James Thurber
• “Baiting the Umpire,” George Jean Nathan

Buy the book

Eddie Gaedel at his only at-bat appearance for the St. Louis Browns, August 19, 1951. His jersey, bearing the uniform number 1/8.

While playing with a toy bow and arrow, William Thurber accidentally shot his seven-year-old brother, James, in the left eye. A local doctor bandaged it, but a few days later the eye began to cause pain again and a specialist determined it would have to be removed. Later in life, Thurber’s remaining eye began causing him problems and he underwent five operations in 1940 and 1941. (The operations were a failure, and he would eventually become nearly blind.) During this period he found it difficult to work, but somehow, after the first operation, he managed to finish one of his most famous pieces, which, his wife later recalled, was the result of the “fact that he couldn’t read” and instead listened to baseball. He finished the story too late for the 1940 baseball season, however, so the Saturday Evening Post published it in April 1941.

Many of Thurber’s fans have noted the similarity between the barely literate dialect employed by the narrator of “You Could Look It Up” and the vernacular of athletes portrayed in Ring Lardner’s stories. But, as Thurber biographer Harrison Kinney writes, “nothing by Lardner matches Thurber’s wild plot.” The story acquired additional notoriety in 1951, when Bill Veeck became owner of the ill-fated St. Louis Browns, a team that ranks, in his own words, “in the annals of baseball a step or two ahead of Cro-Magnon man.” During that lamentable season, Veeck hired Eddie Gaedel, who at 3 feet 7 inches tall remains the shortest player in the history of major league baseball and whose career lasted for all of a single at-bat in a game against the Detroit Tigers on August 19. Veeck denied that he got the idea from Thurber’s story, although he admitted he suddenly recollected it, with more than a little nervousness, during the game itself. As to what happened to Gaedal, whether he struck out, walked on balls, or even succumbed to the temptation of swinging at a pitch—well, you could look it up.

Note: “Damon and Phidia” refers to the legend of Damon and Pythias (symbolizing true friendship); “Pope-Hartford” was a motor vehicle manufactured during the first decade of the twentieth century.

* * *

It all begun when we dropped down to C’lumbus, Ohio, from Pittsburgh to play a exhibition game on our way out to St. Louis. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Friday, April 23, 2010

The Lady on the Bookcase

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings and Drawings

Also of Interest
The Thurber House, including selected quotes and a chronology of his life (Columbus, OH)

Video readings of Thurber selections: In 2010 Keith Olbermann, in memory of his late father, ended his Countdown program on Fridays with readings from the Library of America edition of James Thurber’s writings and drawings. See the first two segments from April 2 and April 9. (YouTube)

Buy the book

“I don’t think any drawing ever took me more than three minutes,” James Thurber once said of his work. Yet his style is instantly recognizable, his humor timeless and sometimes unsettling, his tableaus abounding with dogs, seals, birds, and (perhaps his favorite species) husbands and wives. His comic writings—stories, portraits, sketches, parodies, memoirs—spare no one, least of all himself.

In 1945 he wrote “Thurber As Seen By Thurber,” a whimsical assessment of his own cartoons, and published it in The New York Times Magazine. Facetiously dividing his body of work into five “separate and indistinct” categories, the article presents ten sample drawings (all reproduced in the selection below), discusses their creation and content, and uses the opportunity to tease Thurber's colleagues and editors at The New Yorker. Three years later, “verging on his middle fifties, when he should be engaged on some work dignified by length and of a solemnity suitable to our darkening age,” he included the piece in a book-length collection, The Beast in Me and Other Animals, and renamed it “The Lady on the Bookcase.” In the book’s foreword, he remarks that the “imaginary” animals in his stories and drawings “emerged from the shameless breeding ground of the idle mind and they are obviously not going anywhere in particular.”

* * *

One day twelve years ago an outraged cartoonist, four of whose drawings had been rejected in a clump by The New Yorker, stormed into the office of Harold Ross, editor of the magazine. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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