The thurber letters, p.2
The Thurber Letters, page 2
In 1923, Thurber was given a weekly half-page of the Dispatch’s Sunday edition to fill with bits of comic commentary and cultural notes of local interest. Called “Credos and Curios,” the feature was cancelled after six months. Disappointed, he quit the paper and, with Althea, spent the summer of 1924 in a friend’s cottage in Jay, New York, unsuccessfully trying to freelance. Returning to Columbus that fall they both worked on Scarlet Mask productions and at part-time theater and public relations jobs.
In May 1925 they traveled to France, where Thurber tried writing a novel and then took work with the Paris edition of The Chicago Tribune. In the fall they moved to Nice where Thurber co-edited the Riviera edition of the “Trib.” The following June, out of work, discouraged and plagued financially, he returned to New York, sending for Althea later with borrowed money. They spent the summer of 1926 in Gloversville, New York, at a friend’s summer residence, another failed attempt at freelancing. Thurber took a job that fall with The New York Post.
In 1927 he made his first sale—a short humorous piece—to The New Yorker. He had briefly met E. B. White, already a staff writer with the magazine, at the apartment of mutual friends. White introduced him to Harold Ross, the editor, who hired him as an unlikely “managing editor” in February 1927. That uneasy arrangement lasted for six months, after which Thurber processed nonfiction copy for publication and finally was given the Talk of the Town department to edit and rewrite. Working on his own time he continued to contribute to the magazine the personal comic essays known as “casuals,” which became his literary trademark and, to a greater extent, that of The New Yorker.
Thurber and White shared a small office where White, intrigued by Thurber’s “doodling,” recognized and promoted Thurber’s talent as an artist to Ross and to the book publisher, Harper & Bros. Thurber and White collaborated on Is Sex Necessary?, a spoof of the current self-help books. It became a bestseller, featuring Thurber’s first published drawings. White, who married Katharine Angell at the end of 1929, remained a literary inspiration of Thurber’s for most of his life, though Thurber’s persistent evidences of misogyny, increasingly aimed at Katharine, gradually drove the men apart socially.
Beginning in 1926, Thurber and Althea, both disappointed with their marriage, underwent several brief separations. In 1927 Thurber met Ann Honeycutt, who became the object of his obsessive fascination for nearly seven years, largely recorded in the passionate, pleading letters he wrote her. She enjoyed his company but refused his repeated offers of marriage. In 1929, after a temporary reconciliation, the Thurbers moved to a country home in Connecticut where Althea raised show dogs. Their daughter, Rosemary, was born in New York City on October 7, 1931. The decade of the 1930s was Thurber’s best; his prolific output included a large majority of the stories and drawings for which he is best remembered.
In 1935, Althea divorced Thurber. When he heard that Honeycutt was to wed St. Clair McKelway, a prominent writer and editor at The New Yorker, Thurber promptly married Helen Wismer, a pulp-magazine editor.
Thurber left the New Yorker staff shortly after his marriage, though remaining a regular contributor. On a trip to Bermuda in 1936, the Thurbers became fast friends and eventual frequent correspondents with Jane and Ronald Williams, publisher of The Bermudian. Thurber was soon contributing essays to Williams’s struggling little publication at no charge. In 1936, also, Thurber was expressing his negative views of the Thirties’ political, literary left in long letters to Malcolm Cowley, as well as in book reviews and satiric essays.
In May 1937, the Thurbers began an eleven-month tour of England, France and Italy, followed by a four-month stay on the Riviera. Most of his letters from abroad were to the Whites, though he also stayed in touch with the Williamses, Nugent, Robert Coates, McNulty, Honeycutt, and McKelway.
In September 1938, the Thurbers rented a house in Woodbury, Connecticut, the first of such rentals before they settled on the purchase of “The Great Good Place,” a large, old colonial in West Cornwall. The next year, 1939, was an unusually productive one for Thurber, during which he wrote his Fables for
Our Time, The Last Flower, and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” It was also the year that he and Helen traveled to Los Angeles where Thurber and Nugent collaborated on a play, The Male Animal, and the year in which his good eye began to fade seriously.
The Male Animal opened in New York on January 9, 1940, to favorable reviews, providing Thurber with his first substantial income. That year he underwent five eye operations by Dr. Gordon Bruce that did little to inhibit the onset of near-blindness. Despite Thurber’s disappointment and a postoperative nervous collapse the summer of 1941, he remained an admiring correspondent of Bruce’s. He gamely wrote a column for the newspaper PM that year and continued to contribute to The Bermudian. No longer able to see to type, he tried handwriting in pencil on yellow copy paper for a time but gradually turned to dictating his letters and manuscripts to a secretary. The flow of books of his collected casuals and drawings continued. Through exhausting concentration and the aid of a Zeiss Loop, or jeweler’s glass, Thurber continued to draw intermittently until 1951.
The war having interrupted their Bermuda trips, the Thurbers spent their fall vacations at The Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia. When the shortage of gasoline made commuting by car to the city from West Cornwall difficult, they rented an apartment in Manhattan. Agreeing to speak at a fund-raising event for Poetry Magazine in 1944, Thurber met Peter De Vries, its editor and an admirer of Thurber’s work. The two men would remain loyal friends and correspondents. Thurber submitted De Vries’s writing to Harold Ross who hired him as poetry editor and “Notes and Comment” writer. De Vries would become best known as a writer of comic novels.
In 1945, the best of Thurber’s work to that point was published in The Thurber Carnival, a bestseller that greatly increased the number of his readers. ‘He refused an election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters because his personal icon, E. B. White, had not been invited to join. When Samuel Goldwyn purchased the film rights to “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” Thurber was retained to work with the regular scriptwriter in adapting the short story to the screen. His suggestions, which filled a number of letters to the West Coast, were all rejected. His dislike of the eventual movie was inevitable.
Learning that O.S.U. was changing the name of Thurber’s beloved Sun-Dial, Thurber wrote to the university’s president in fervent protest, getting the title restored. Blindness had led to Thurber’s listening to the radio a great deal, and in 1947 he became interested in researching the radio soap-opera industry for a series of New Yorker articles. He also began examining his family’s past for what would become The Thurber Album. His treatment of his father in that family history created a storm of angry letters between him and his brother Robert.
The excesses of Congress’s Un-American Activities Committee began to attract his worried attention. Meanwhile his teen-age daughter, Rosemary, was visiting him frequently and receiving his entertaining letters at school. Fritzi Von Kuegelgen became his West Cornwall secretary in 1948 and the principal transcriber of Thurber’s dictation until nearly the end of his life.
By 1950, Thurber was a frequent guest on radio and television programs. His work now included children’s books along with the continued collections of his casuals and drawings. His fables and stories were being adapted to music and stage. He announced in 1951 that the self-portrait he drew for Time magazine’s cover story about him would be his last drawing. He refused an honorary degree from O.S.U. to protest its practice of screening campus lecturers for any hints of “un-American” ideology, but he received honorary doctorates from Kenyon, Williams, and Yale.
In the spring of 1952, Thurber became afflicted with a hyperthyroid condition, wrongly diagnosed and treated, which lasted nearly two years. At times he couldn’t tolerate alcohol or even tie his shoes, and, wild with frustration, was irritable with everyone, a condition that led to acid but often funny replies to letters from people seeking his help or advice. In February 1953, he attended Rosemary’s marriage to Frederick Sauers in Philadelphia. His letters to the newlyweds were frequent and often hilarious.
After Ross’s death in December 1951, Thurber steadily cooled toward The New Yorker’s content and its editors and they toward him. He more frequently sold his work to other publications. He was also preoccupied with writing a play about Ross and The New Yorker (never produced) and further plagued by what Helen described to their agent, Jap Gude, as mental aberrations, or “The Thurbs.” It was an especially difficult time for Thurber. In 1953, Helen, his “seeing-eye wife,” suffered a detached retina, and Thurber’s frantic efforts to track down his eye surgeon attracted international press attention.
The Thurbers spent the summer and fall of 1955 in Europe. Temporarily reconciled to The New Yorker and its fiction editor, Gus Lobrano, Thurber resumed his contributions. Then Lobrano died, and Thurber argued with his next editor, William Maxwell, over the editing of Thurber’s The Wonderful O. It was finally rejected, further alienating Thurber from the magazine.
In November 1957, his “The Years with Ross” articles began to run in The Atlantic Monthly. Preparation for the series, which resulted in a bestselling book, generated more Thurber correspondence than even that of The Thurber Album. Old New Yorker associates and friends sent him long letters of reminiscences, to which he replied in kind. But a number of Ross’s former colleagues and contributors resented the book as a put-down of the founding editor. Thurber’s disillusionment with The New Yorker editorially was augmented by his belief that he was never adequately compensated for his contributions to it, the subject of a number of his letters to the magazine’s administration.
In 1960, some of Thurber’s prose and drawings were put together as a musical revue that made it to Broadway. Later he joined the cast, playing himself. The next year the Thurbers traveled to England to promote the revue’s British production. When no commitments could be found for staging the show, the Thurbers returned home dejected and worn out. Small strokes, undiagnosed, were resulting in Thurber’s increasingly erratic behavior, evidenced in his final letters. He collapsed from a massive brain hemorrhage in his room at the Algonquin Hotel in October 1961, and died a month later, his obituary appearing on the front page of newspapers across the country.
THE EMERGING YEARS
Except for accompanying his father on a business trip to Cleveland when in his teens, Thurber had not ventured far from Columbus until 1918 when, at age twenty-three, he entrained for Washington, D.C., as a State Department code-clerk trainee. He at once began writing his close friend and fraternity brother, Elliott Nugent. Nugent, already planning a career as actor and playwright, probably kept Thurber’s adolescent outpourings as stage material. Nugent and his father did write a play, The Poor Nut, a few years later, whose principal, a bewildered and comic college student, was based on Thurber.
Throughout his life Thurber rarely found lasting satisfaction in his relations with women, almost, it seems, by design. He was handicapped by a prolonged and naive incomprehension of his own sexual emotions, and imprisoned by an unrealistic, romantic “story book” view of the opposite sex. As he acknowledges, he preferred the chase to the quarry, the excitement of courtship to that of conquest. His strange variety of misogyny left him unable to fully accept or reject the often-baffled women who interested him. Here his headlong fascinations swing between Eva Prout, film and stage performer, and Minnette Fritts, an O.S.U. classmate. “Pomerene” was an undersecretary of state.
TO ELLIOTT NUGENT
THENEWEBBITT
Army & Navy Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Friday, June 28, 1918
Mr. Elliott J. Nugent
Dover, Ohio
My dear old confrere, Nugey:
Time has not yet served to efface your blonde handsomeness from my retentive memory, old keed. I have been in the capitol of our lil old nation just one week today, and every now and then I spare a moment for reminiscence on the college days etc. Sounds like the mournful words of one bidding adieu to his youth, doesn’t it? Well, not youth exactly, Elliott, but certain of the haunts and pastimes and ways of things connected with youth, such as the “keen, bitter-sweet’ days, blazoned against the night.” For there you are in the navy, and there everyone else is in the navy except the misguided few who are trench food. And here I am in Washington intent on vying with the whole darn enlisted bunch in the matter of ultimate distance from Ohio State attained. When I think of the old institution with its rich gallery of imperishable pictures by Memory, I can see now only a drab chromo of the well-known Duke of Medina [Virgil “Duke” Damon], studying in a far corner, a solitary figure in the old Phi Psi Castle. That is my vision of next year.
I am not going back, Nugey.
If you have tears of joy or regret or whatnot, prepare to shed them.
Nugget, old fella, I am promised a place with an American Embassy, told that I can begin preliminary work in the State Dept here in a few days—to last a week or 10 days—and then go over. Furthermore and best surprise yet, it is almost a certainty that I will be assigned to Berne, Switzerland, where the well known Bernie Williamson is.
We came here with some good letters, especially 2 personal notes to Pomerene’s secretary from some mutual friends of his and my dad’s— newspaper fellows with a drag. We were then sent to the office of the 3d assistant Sec’y. of State where a dream of a brunette, just my type and not over 27, quietly informed us that she had charge of those appointments, that there was an opening and that I could have it, after my papers had gone thru the necessary channels. The Hague was the place. Then I mentioned about Bernie, whereupon she gave me another smile (there were several) and said she would very gladly shift the 6 or 8 fellows who were listed for Berne over to other places, and give that to me. It was all so quick and miraculously easy that I am dazed yet. The only ways I can account for the speed and certainty of her words is (if you’ll pardon me and likewise God save the mark) that the lady was impressed with me. Pomerene’s Secretary told us we could be certain of a place but might have to wait 6 months or a year as Pomerene himself had 4 recommendations in ahead of mine....
That about covers my present status and my prospectus, I guess. As far as things else go—in Washington—the phrase “historical interest” describes my daily life in a nut-shell. I have seen more “here lies,” more “This was builts”, more “in the original handwritings” and that sort of stuff here than I imagined existed. But my dear fellow much of it is really interesting with a punch. And one can trust the relics in the Library of Congress to be authentic. It is only when one discovers, after adding up on his fingers the various individual ones he has seen—that Booth wore six spurs on his right boot the night he shot Lincoln, that one loses some zest. That is more or less a fanciful illustration, however. In the Congressional Library we saw the original draft of the Gettysburg Address. It contains on the first page 6 or 8 changes—additions or erasures. One line is like this, if I can remember it: “as the a final resting place of for those who here etc.” You see even the wonderful grammarian Abe had to moil and toil a bit with his Mss. Also the original draft of the Second Inaugural, with the famous words staring up at you in Lincoln’s own pen-script “With malice towards none, with charity for all.”...
... Dad goes back tomorrow and I will be like a painted ship upon a painted ocean. Another phrase from that same poem will fit here too. “Water, water everywhere—” Washington is bone dry. The only thing I’ve seen in the way of liquor here is the law. Papa asks me to add his best regards and luck....
Now, please, old rounder pal o’me’ yout’, Write me quick. I want to know how much more time you get before they sink you etc.
Yours in Phi Psi
Jim
1301 E St. N. W, c/o Post Cafe,
Washington, D.C.
July 16, 1918
Dear old Pythias:
So a pair of Brown Eyes has wooed you away from old John Typewriter and allowed me to pine and waste away worrying about just what sector of the sea had embraced your sunken form. No, my dear Nugey, in all our many lil talks over the W.K. Omars; you never told me a word about the love that came but once, and then perhaps too soon.... The Romance of me life is, too, just such an affair as our well-meaning parents laugh to scorn, only I was not quite so precocious as to play Lothario at the callow age of knee high to a duck. Mine was one of the legended “school boy and girl” affairs. I played 15 opposite her 14 in the drama “The Seventh Grade,” and ten years have passed, friend of me college days, and I love her yet.... I once wrote this wonderful girl a letter, 7 years after we parted back in the grammar grades—or three years ago. I was lifted aloft to places where cherubim twitters by a 12 page answer from Colorado Springs asking me to write again which I did in a way that set me back 8 cents for postage of the Rellum, addressed, as she requested, care of her sister 203 Underwood St., Zanesville, Ohio. No response. And, quite like the lackadaisical Thurber, I let it ride from thence to nownce.... But her voice, Nugey, her voice!... Hence, the stage for her. But she had ruined John voice when young. Thence, the movies. Thence, vaudeville. Now, Lord only knows. Ask your dad if ever in his theatrical circles he saw or heard of a certain little Dream named Eva Prout.
