The thurber letters, p.14
The Thurber Letters, page 14
When I saw Darling for the first time that day, which was a beautiful day, she laughed aloud as soon as she looked at me and said something about I certainly was a scream. I need not emphasize the disconsolate effect that this had upon me. I realized more and more that this woman was going to play a big part in my life and I realized that, at the very outset of this important affair, I had set up the almost insurmountable handicap of making myself, to her, essentially a crackpot and clown. Years later her memories of me, her first impression, were to pop up with a burst of laughter in the midst of my most intense moments. And it was partly to offset this deplorable recurrence that my usually genial nature began slowly to turn to a nature out of which I could summon up the most biting, cruel, and uncalled for remarks and actions, to prove that I was not a clown. Better to go to the other extreme, I thought, and be a horrible brute than endure, in the eyes of a loved one, the stigma of funny-looking clownishness. Of course therein did not lie the full reason for my turning, at times, bitter, nasty, and mean—the further reasons I shall take up in due course, in the chapters devoted to sex analysis, but therein did lie some of the reasons.
The next time I saw Darling was on another occasion, a week or two later, at the same summer place. My heart leaped up when, in looking out of the door of the ice house one morning I beheld her sitting in a chair in the doorway of the God Head wearing an enchanting sweater and reading a book. I wondered if by any possible chance her knowledge that I was at the Ice House that weekend had caused her to come back again. Later I was to find out that it had. She said she simply had to come back and see me because I was the funniest person she had ever known in her life.
Chapter II
The Emergence of the Sensual Element [Signature indistinguishable]
In early 1928, Althea was in Greece, and Thurber invited his brother Robert to stay with him at their Horatio Street apartment. News that Robert’s dog, Muggs, was fatally ill took him back to Columbus prematurely.
TO ROBERT THURBER
[March or April 1928]
Dear Robert:
You must think I am a coo-coo, as the French say, not to have written you, but several things have had me down: first the hemorrhoids, known to the Sioux tribes as Flame-in-the-Bowels (which would be my tribal name, if I am ever made President like Coolidge) and then a slight attack of dysentery, crick, naushy, spring sickness and a recurrence of the old Black Plague. This added to the fact that I have to get out a little work to hold my position kept me floundering, but I seem to be okay now. I sent off your slippers, terribly late, because the maid had placed them on top of the highboy, or old Chippendale garmentoire, where she wanted to see if I could find them without being told, a sort of game she plays because she lives in Jersey and gets such little fun. For days this went on, me missing her when she came here, so that she couldn’t even help by saying “cold” or “warm” when I searched. Finally I found them and mailed them.... Thus I have your stamps which I will send back so that you will be reminded to write. If you don’t want them send them back and we will keep them going back and forth for ever so long until finally we get a piece in the papers about it:
THURBERS KEEP TWO-CENT STAMPS
GOING FOR TEN MONTHS.
Columbus Boy and former Columbus Boy Believed To have Set
New World’s Record Exchanging Little Bunch of Stamps
LOTS OF FUN, SAY BROTHERS, WHEN INTERVIEWED....
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. I still feel bad about Rex and often dream of him. They can’t live long, and ten years is a long time for a dog. Why can’t we have alligators as pets, which live to be 1500 years old, or crows which live to be ninety? Seems strange that God would pick such cumbersome and morose animals and birds to live that long and give a dog the bad break of a handful of moments, as the years go. Still, our family has been lucky about deaths and we got to buck up against them because the years are going on and people die and what the hell, a person simply must build up a philosophy that will endure it all. I have, because my imagination is forever running on ahead of the present and I know that the blows are set to come and a person has got to set himself to meet them. It won’t save anyone from grief but it will set up a reserve power finally to meet grief and stand it. It’s a strange life, and so far I don’t seem to see where anyone has figured it out, but sometimes it seems to me that time goes by like a flash of rain and that’s all we amount to in this world. Some of the rain is clear and pretty and some is muddy and bounces off of rainspouts and down into the mud and our family seems sometimes to have been selected to play the part of the rain drops that do most of the bouncing, but my idea is that in the end we seep into the ground somewhere and help a hyacinth to grow or something like that, or maybe seep farther than that and spatter on some hot gentleman or lady in Hades. There ought to be some point to it all and I live in the hopes that the adventure of death is something equal to the adventure of life which is pretty colorful and interesting even if hard. It would seem strange to me if God made such a complicated world and such complicated people and then had no more to offer than blankness at the end, so I live in the curiosity and the hope and the excitement of what there may be afterwards and thus I have got myself to believe that those who pass on perhaps pass on to something as interesting, but lovelier and more happy, than this life. I may be wrong but I have persuaded myself that I’m not and so I don’t have the terror of things that some do. None of it helps blunt the edge of grief, though, and no one will ever discover a way of doing that, but as time goes on what once was grief becomes easier to bear if you believe that it all isn’t plain useless and silly. At any rate a hell of a lot of people have gone on and I have heard no complaints from them, that’s one thing.... Maybe Muggs will have Christy Mathewson with whom to scamper across the porphyry and chrysophase fields. Jeannie will be excellent company for someone like that too and I expect any day to find that she has wandered off and got lost upstate or been killed.... One day our dog, left here to her own devices too long—both of us were gone from eleven in the morning until eight at night—got fed up on having nothing to do and dragged down, or out, or up, everything we had practically. The house looked like twenty-seven burglars had organized and gone through it hunting for money. Hats, coats, pans, rugs, spools, needles, cigarettes, clocks, overcoats, suitcases, pillows, pillowslips, bedspreads, letters, bills, manuscripts, books, magazines, lamps, dish cloths, curtains and ties were strewn from one end of the house to the other. Many things were chewed but a lot were not. She had specialized on the cigarettes the match boxes and the bag that held Althea’s sewing things, especially chewing the spools of silk thread. Only one book was gnawed and that was one we had borrowed from a lady and it was autographed by the author—the one book of our six or eight hundred that she should not have got hold of. Althea corrects her but when I come home alone and find the dog has got things out I always say, “For God’s sake, dog, let’s hurry and straighten up here or there’ll be hell to pay.” She is wise enough to know that I will not beat her (which I should). When Althea and I come in together and she has been chewing, she crawls under the bed. Althea says in a firm contralto voice, “Come here, Jeannie”. Jeannie bats her tail once. Finally, she comes out for punishment and gets it. She seldom yelps, no matter how hard you spank her, but she yelps if you step on her. When I come home alone and she has been up to something she doesn’t crawl under the bed but takes to running up and down the apartment like a race horse, thus interfering with me putting the spools, coats, hats, bedclothes and matches back where she got them. This is to show her pleasure at getting away with murder. She knows she will get licked for raising hell but she does it because she is willing to stand the gaff—you can tell that by the way she comes out for it. She used to sleep on the bed and we spanked her, so that when she heard us coming she would get down and crawl under the bed, and then come out slowly looking sleepy and surprised. But she neglected to pat the pillows and smooth out the bedspread where she had been laying. This is a trick she has never learned but if I come in on her someday patting the pillows into shape I’ll call the police, or a minister.
Althea will not be home before the 15th of April I think. She is scheduled to sail [from Greece] on the 8th. It is too bad you had to leave here just as it got fine weather.... I wish you could get back and stay till Althea comes, because it gets pretty lonely here. I don’t like to stay alone at nights, even in an apartment house and on such nights as I see a mystery play or read a mystery story, I leave the light on in the bathroom.
... I wrote a story for Talk of the Town, on the O. Henry region, which appears in next week’s issue and I put through a check for $20 for you, and had it made out to me. I explained that the story was yours (we always pay for tips and the dope, and then write the story ourself which is what makes my job pretty complicated, as few people can write the stuff just the peculiar way we want it, or short enough, or whatnot, so if we get a good story we either rewrite it, or send it back and pay for the idea. Someone just turned in one about a toy railroad a mile and a half long some guy built here, a musician, but the story was not right, so we paid the woman for the idea and White went up and looked at the railroad and will write the story. Thus the O. Henry idea was absolutely yours as we never would have thought of it if you hadn’t brought on the book. Too bad that you couldn’t have gone with me the rest of the places because, just a few feet from the house at 55 Irving Place I found the “Old Munich”, the place where he wrote “The Halberdier of the Little Rhein-schloss”. At first I was disappointed when I came on the Third Avenue entrance which I recognized from the picture in the Mentor, for the place was vacated and the room bare and dusty. Then I found there was an entrance around on the other street—Seventeenth street—and inside was the fine old beer hall just as it was, rafters, white-clothed tables, a big fire place and steins and tankards all around. The son of the manager was there and he had been there when O. Henry was and showed us (I went with Charme Seeds) the table O. Henry ate at, right before the fireplace, and mentioned that his favorite drink was Scotch.... So I wrote a piece about it, which I will send you when it comes out next Wednesday. I wish you could in some way get more idea checks from us, but naturally it isn’t every day that such a yarn comes up. I had to hold the story to about 800 words, because our space is limited....
... I wish you could get back here—maybe if you could scrape up the money, we could dope out some way for you to make expenses here, so it wouldn’t really cost anything. There are hundreds of ways to make money in this burg.
Love to all,
Jamie
In 1924, Eva Prout married Thurber’s former rival, Ernest Geiger, who became her piano accompanist and dancing partner in vaudeville. In May 1928, Thurber read that they were playing on Broadway and routinely visited them at their hotel after the show. Their “act” was next booked in Toronto, where Thurber writes them.
TO EVA AND ERNEST GEIGER
Dear Act:
I took your key back to the old Flemish Hotel and felt very sad. The room clerk and I had a good cry together. “They’ll never come back,” I said. “Jesus, I hope not,” he said. It was very affecting.
I suppose you are full of Canada Wet by this time and how true it is that you should quit drinking. You will think better and dance weller. I should say it would be better to cut it down to a little sugar in a spoonful of rum once a day. I imagine the cherry trees are in bloom up there, but again maybe they are not. Canadian cherry trees are funny. Sometimes they bloom and sometimes they sulk until the Royal Secretary for His Majesty’s Colonial Trees speaks to them about it, for $15, 000 a year. Then they bloom, if they feel like it. Wait for the apple tree, though, it blooms loveliest.
The weather here is fine, Alice and the twins are here, your uncle fell and broke his foot, your Aunt Emma is blinder than usual and lost her crutch, the top is gone off the percolator again, the cat is poorly—it’s her liver—the last she got from the butcher’s was spoiled, but we gave it to the colored maid who said she would cook it in vinegar and it would be all right, there’s a hole in the front room curtains, the dog’s been on the body Brussells again and spotted it, I found George’s cufflinks, your cousin Arthur has the prickly heat, their child isn’t going to be smart, I guess, he’s two now but hasn’t said anything since he was born, he gets it from your grandfather, who didn’t say anything to the day he died except “How is McKinley now” (that was a year after McKinley was shot). The dog’s front paws are all funny, he’s got into the tar and tarred up every room in the house, bananas have gone up but sugar’s a little cheaper, the subways make more noise than usual, a cop shot a man yesterday named Reilly, the cop’s name was Abraham Cohen (really true)—Abie’s Irish foes. And so it goes, and we are all getting along in years.
Althea went to the country and so did I and we brought our dog back. Jeannie looks wonderful, has gained ten pounds and went accommodatingly into heat the day we got there, so Althea is taking her to a professional dog husband at Hempstead L.I. today so she can become a mother. She would have become a mother before we got there but her friend, Teddy, the big sheep dog didn’t seem to be able to do anything about that, because Jeannie’s legs are only four and a half inches off the ground and she won’t stand on a top step of the porch long enough.
Althea likes the records I divided up with the waiter her favorite being “Blue River” or whatever it is, by the Revellers.
That’s all. Write to me.
I’m well, and sunburned. I played deck tennis yesterday at which I turn out to be pretty good but it has made my joints all stiff. I’m not as young as Ernie used to be, I guess.
I’ll send you that picture of me.
My love to Jimsy, Jean, Gladys, Buzz, the electrician, Roy Cummings, Mrs. Fox and Manager Whoozis, of the Pantages theatre. If this reaches you.
As ever
Jamie
Thurber’s short story, “Menaces in May,” based on his reunion with the Geigers, was published in The New Yorker May 26, 1928. Thurber eventually turned against the story, and it was only collected for book publication posthumously
TO ANN HONEYCUTT
[Undated, probably May 1928]
Dear Miss Honeycutt:
I am sending you a copy of the NYer containing the piece called “Menaces in May”. I hope you like it. The Julia, the Joe, and the Lydia of the piece are mostly, as an author so frequently has to point out, imaginary characters. Art must be the twisting of characters and of motives to suit one’s purposes and one’s mood. Even so, I lost the Julia [Eva] I think, because of this story— maybe not. The Lydia [Althea] took it for what it was. The Joe [Geiger] didn’t no what it was all about. The “man” [Thurber] believes, even now, almost two years later, that this lil story, originally intended to bear the sub-caption “Notes for a chapter in a book,” is the best thing he has done, and an earnest example of the book he sometime expects to do—all things being equal, which they ain’t ever. However, perhaps inequality of all things is better than an even break. My novels, if any, will deal with menace. And God knows the menace of George is greater than the menace of Joe, who was a kindly fellow, save when in his cups. The essential merit of this story, to me (who ought to know) is its consistent holding of a certain minor note—I got hold of a mood and kept hold of it, didn’t I?—and also its absolute sincerity. It could have fallen with a tremendous bang if I had been “arty”. It’s really as real as hell. Just between me and you, I think that it should have been included in the best short stories of 1928. I got to get around to doing the things that somehow I really believe this small and casual piece shows I can do. I hope, really, that you think it shows it. If you don’t, it’s okay. I am a swell dart thrower.
Jim
[1928]
Dear Miss Honeycutt:
The editor of the New Yorker has asked me to write to see whether you can help us out in a matter which troubles us greatly. Our Mr. Thurber, whom we understand you are familiar with, has not been himself for several days. Of course when he is himself it’s rather bad, but now it’s worse. Discreet inquiry has elicited only the vague statement from him that he is going to have dinner with a young woman Wednesday evening. Whenever he mentions this, which is frequently, he acts so exaggeratedly overjoyed and ecstatic that we can only believe he is not, at the moment, mentally “right.” Our Mr. White tells us that you are the young lady with whom he is having dinner. If it is not asking too much, would you mind letting us know how he acts? We feel that perhaps some action should be taken before it is too late. Also Mr. Ross thinks you should be advised to treat him a little distantly on the ground that, if he acts the way he does over a mere dinner with a woman, how would he act if she touched knees with him under the table. While we have no disposition to interfere in what must be a truly delightful companionship, we nevertheless feel that you should know that Mr. Thurber’s heart is already strained to the utmost at the mere prospect of seeing you at dinner. Obviously if you should be overly kind or gentle to him—if you should walk with him down a fairly dark street even—his heart might burst. Mr. Thurber has a great deal of work to do and is perhaps not the strongest man in the world anyway, and we trust that you will do nothing to excite him. We all think that if you could manage to calm him down a little and get him on some safe middle road between this silly excitement over a dinner and his occasional moments of depression when he throws things out of windows, it would be an excellent thing for all of us. You must know how it is in an office like ours, since we understand you also have a great number of crazy men around your office and things are bad enough here when Mr. White and Mr. Thurber are normal, but when they have their “streaks” as we call them, that is, long months of worry and fretting over a woman, the place is just barely liveable. We all think a great deal of Mr. Thurber, although God knows none of us women would engage to cast in our lot with his—we have too much to do here to give as much time to love as he seems to consider necessary. We feel that Mr. Thurber dwells on love overly much—in a nice, wistful sort of way, of course—but dwells. We often find him all alone in an unused room, dwelling. It might be a good idea if you arranged to let him pat your hair now and then, as I am told that a person ceases to dwell, as soon as he can, as you might say, practise. From all we can gather he is in no immediate danger of having fits, but we all feel that the sooner you take him in hand, seriously—if you can keep a straight face long enough to do that—the better.
