The thurber letters, p.24
The Thurber Letters, page 24
I have endeavored without success to gain the cooperation of the gentleman who was with you two at that deplorable dinner engagement, but I can find no Mr. John Mosha [Mosher] in the phone book. It may be, of course, that he was simply a figment of the imagination of you two, what we call the Imaginary Third Person, or Hallucinatory Triangle Cloture.
There are some elements of Mr. Thurber’s case which I do not believe you thoroughly understand, for I feel that if you did you would play ball with us better. In the first place, he said nothing at that lamentable dinner engagement about you not being as good as Al Smith at making records of any kind whatsoever. I believe that you have never made a record, and Mr. Smith’s records are, so far as I know, confined solely to reproductions of certain of his speeches. Mr. Thurber is, unfortunately, what we call in my profession a Bubby Idolizer, a phrase which, I realize, is scarcely of the nicey-nicey type which you prefer to these plain statements of fact. I myself sympathize with but do not understand this particular mania. He has, however, described your bodily graces with such fervor in between his denunciation of you as a woman who is not half so good at making records as Al Smith that I feel emboldened to have the sanguine hope that some small regard for you of an emotional nature still stirs somewhere in the depths of that great heart of his. For it is a great heart, and an unusual one. I believe that if you understood it more thoroughly, you would treat him with greater consideration and would not be so shocked and disturbed by the liberties he sometimes attempts to take, the reprehensible proposals he makes, and the so-called poison-tongued dinner talks with which he favors you. He is of course what we call in my profession a Nervous Talker, but deep down behind that golden tongue is one of the greatest and most remarkable hearts I have ever examined into. I am taking the liberty of enclosing a copy of my chart of his heart, for your information.
Of course, I don’t give, as a man, a Good Goddam, as we say in my profession, whether you and Mr. Thurber get together or never get together. I think that perhaps you would be happier with this naked doctor at Bedford Hills with whom Thurber says you spend so many nights together in Miss Price’s apartment. That is none of my business, but for that man to have told Thurber that he (the doctor) had had more trouble than Thurber ever had is, on the face of it, ridiculous. Thurber, in the first place, was stripped and the doctor, as I understand it, had thrown something around his (the doctor’s) shoulders. I should think that Miss Price, lying there in the hallway, was having more trouble than any of the four of you. But for you to have opened the door to her for the purpose of allowing Thurber to see you and Dr. Bedford together, in a compromising situation, was a thing which it would have been far, far better for all of us had you left it undone. Did you do it to torture him, as he claims? He says it was a forthright strip-tease act, as we call it in the profession.
So far I have scan’t hopes of getting Thurber into any better shape than he is in at the moment, lying here in my office on a couch, with his hat and overcoat on. I took him home, or to a place he said was his home, a church in Brooklyn where he said he had an apartment in the basement. Either we went to the wrong church or there is no such apartment, which I am inclined to believe.
At any rate, here is the chart of that great heart which, if I were you, I would hesitate to break again.
In March 1935, Thurber caved in to depression, insecurity, and a nervous anxiety brought on by his unrequited love for Honeycutt, news that Althea had filed for divorce, concern over whether he would see his child again, financial worries, work pressures, and the consequences of a self-destructive lifestyle. At Honey’s insistence, he finally admitted himself to Dr. Fritz Foord’s sanitarium at Kerhonkson, in the Catskill Mountains, then a popular drying-out place for New Yorker writers and editors.
[Undated, probably March 1935]
Dear ‘Toots’:
I’m sorry about that sharp tone in my [telephone] voice an hour ago. Now that I’m on my feet again, instead of yours, I’m ashamed to have depended so on you to get me here.... After this you will observe with awe my self-reliance. I need hold on to no woman’s brassiere.
Now don’t you fall down on me about coming here Saturday... my heart leaps up at the thought of seeing your wide blue eyes and golden hair again. I think of you as my “Blue and Gold Girl.” You will find me calm and poised and altogether a charming, if slightly aloof and reserved, companion. The jitters have left me. My right hand is almost steady enough to hold peas on a knife. Not quite, yet, but almost.... The violin strings are slowly losing their tautness and the winds of life now set up in them a low murmurous tranquil sound in place of the high sharp whine that used to throw Tony’s kitchen into a rage. See how evenly I write this line.... My countenance has resumed its wonted studious, determined look... and even my hair has quieted down. The turmoil that was sex now comes but faintly to these serene ears, like the far away sound of retreating artillery. I am almost ready for the World again....
They have run my ass off up here but the discipline has been fine, my Creole beauty. I expect my Forties to be fine. What a name I shall leave behind for future ages to search for in vain! Fox tracks in the snow, but boldly made, my queenly dowager!
I anticipate with some misgivings the letter you said you were writing, for I suppose you will deny everything with a sweet despairing courage. Live alone, then, goddam it, and see if I cease to care!...
Who said I had no money. I make enugh for you to bathe in, you & ed and willie....
... Look out for these quiet dreamers. You’re safer with a man that talks it off....
... God be with you, Ann Honeycutt, my tube rose!
J.
P.S.
I have just been hosed and pummelled (one “1”; they beat the other one out of me). Every day for an hour I’m hosed and pummeled. Then I go to my room and read: Emerson, Plato, The Marhouse Murders, Wordsworth, Byron, Rab and his Friends, Swedenborg, Mr. Fortune Explains, the American Mercury, and your dear little note, my haughty minx! I would put that note under my pillow every single night only I forget about it. Not a word have I wanted to write for the NYer....
Half the poems the poets used to write were to Ann, I find. Most of them bewail the coldness of these Anns. Here’s one:
Snowdrop
When, full of warm and eager love,
I clasp you in my fond embrace,
You gently push me back and say,
”Take care, my dear, you’ll spoil my lace.”
You kiss me just as you would kiss
Some woman friend you chanced to see;
You call me “dearest,”—All love’s forms
Are yours, not its reality.
Oh, Annie! cry, and storm, and rave!
Do everything with passion in it!
Hate me an hour, and then turn round
And love me truly, just one minute.
William Wetmore Story (1819-1895)
Well, he lived to be 76 in spite of her.
Here’s hoping I don’t do the same.
Jamie
Dear Honey:
The first fowarding of mail from the Nyer arrived today, with 45 letters, some 23 days old, and the batch included the one I am enclosing. I read it over and it seems, in my present mood, a little impetuous and insane in spots, but I signed it again, okayed it, like a tired business man. I don’t subscribe to it as much as when I wrote it (and never leave a hotel without a forwarding address, my dear) because of those true and accurate but nevertheless cruel remarks you make about how people can have freedom of expression since I am no longer [at] the party. I am no longer like that. You refer to a period which is past and gone. The mail also included several other depressing letters, so today is bad. Also I am in a rather depressing fix, as far as life goes, which does not seem to improve so much as it seems to worsen. It worsened the other night. God has seen fit to place me in the spot I’m in, and all I can do is accept, and try to be a good, fine Christian boy, hoping that the animus of people will fall off my back like a duck’s water. The fix I refer to includes my associations with practically everybody in the world except the King of Italy. I seem to have managed it all very badly, as you know. I don’t know anybody who has managed so badly. In my next letter however conditions will seem better. Keep on the wagon, no matter what Coates’s dog says. Give my love to all, and say that I shall be happy in receipt of your obedient servant 21st ultimate in consideration your daily bank balance now below bill due please remit must have escaped your attention can’t understand in hands of a lawyer for collection.
Yourx,
Jim
[Undated, March or April 1935]
Dear Honey: At Foord’s.
You remind me of a husband with morning sickness. But seriously I’m worried about you. Dysentery, your ass. What does that naked cupid know? I think you should go to a specialist or something. My own private theory is that you need the bitter medicine of sex—plain god damn sane sexual regularity. Not a cross between prison and taxicab kissing. There is a technical word for ladies who have never borne children—something like eudolpholophiam or precalpsus, an ugly word but useful to medical men because so many maladies arise from continence when continence becomes stubborness and from childlessness when childlessness becomes an intellectual conviction. It is a matter of plain medical statistics that unmarried ladies have more troubles than married ones and of even grimmer statistics that childless women suffer more diseases and die younger than married women with children. Cancer is, I believe, the great bane of the childless woman. You haven’t got that—what you have—and it is a wonder unmixed to me that no doctor seems to have told you—is a general basis for maladies growing solely out of your unique and unrealistic personal life at 33. I suppose that if doctors have asked you about your private life you have lied about it with that oda-lisque smile, that disarming charm, that apparent adjustment of yours. You have no more real adjustment than a caged rabbit. Unmarried rabbits always die. I raised rabbits. Nature... brooks no interference with, or distortion of, her simple rules. The eye was made for seeing. Mules that work in deep coal mines go blind. Arms carried in slings wither. There can be no exception no matter how firm the illusory mental or emotional compromise....
... There can be no real or lasting value in an arbitrary rearrangement of those laws. There can be no beauty or peace in it, either. One can accomplish frigidity, virginity, even barrenness, but the adjustment is only apparent not real.... Something like 80 percent of so-called unamorous women become normally adjusted after child-birth. Behold this fact: the penis is no more unlovely than the nose, the vagina than the lips. All distinctions of the kind are arbitrary. Of the so-called erogenous areas, the lips (long sung by poets) are made of the same material as the glano and the vulva. Their contact, except for sentiment, tradition and convention, is identical. If Nature had so arranged it that pregnancy was possible by contact of the lips... you would never have kissed 200 men in taxicabs, you would have slept with 200 men in beds—and walked home.
Notes to this effect I have been taking for years to be enlarged some day for my book whose working title is “The American Woman.” They are my own interpretations of indubitable facts. I expect the volume to be a monument to me and a boon to woman-kind. I will make it as simple and truthful and well-written as Emerson’s essays on Nature and the Spirit. It is really my Work, based, finally, on 50 years of observation, experience, and reading. I am already ahead of Stekel, who had his hands on it and then let it go, by overlooking the romantic, the sentimental, and the traditional factors behind all forms of maladjustment.... Perhaps I shall go in for the practise of my own theories and set up an office. I would take only the cases of sensitive intelligent people with humor and imagination. They get into worse spots than most, but the way out, although difficult, is surer—under my care. I’ll charge $3, 000 a patient. At 50, with gray hair, I’d be a prepossessing consultant, radiating confidence... but I allowed myself to become patient rather than physician in your case.... It is odd that knowing as much as I do I should have let myself get into a state similar to those I like to examine....
I have written you 2 letters already—unmailed.... I’ll bring them to town. Your letter was here when I came back from my morning walk.
It is odd that I should be emotionally bound to my favorite patient, and yet probably a good idea as I can conceive of no one else who could carry out with you in practise the theories I have.... Everybody else has only been bad for you.
Your pondering the idea of marrying Willie [Coleman, Herald Tribune journalist] is just another step in the unconscious furtherance of your gentle determination to avoid reality. You think of separate rooms and separate lives....
Keep in mind that you and I have avoided simplicity and courted complexity. We (especially you) insist on making simple things difficult.... Confusion is not a way out. See “Rain” and read the Bible (here & there)....
... I haven’t written to anyone but you.... I think the line “after all’s said and nothing’s done” is wonderful. I am still saying too much but won’t afterwards. The thing is to quit talking and do something.... I’ve gone back to the theory of laughs.... I have taken things too heavily. I’m going to be quieter & funnier. After I marry you, which I am pretty sure I will. I won’t look upon it as an experiment, a peril, a task, or a doubtful enterprise, but as a simple thing, like moving out of the Algonquin.... I thought it was impossible to get out of there. It was easy. If we were the most miserable persons in the world we couldn’t be half so miserable together as we have been apart.... I wouldn’t make things difficult. After all, you have never been married to me. I would marry very nicely, surprisingly nicely, without ranting or anything.... I can’t imagine living with anyone else. It’s simply you, as you are—everything you are—that I want to be with.... You are the main person in my world....
Who said you’d have to look after me? I didn’t. Only about laundry and dentists’ dates, not about work or life or fun or strength in sickness.... I don’t really ever whine, I shout. That’s better, but the shouting and the tumult will die. This place has helped me already to see things straight. I’m never again going to let lawyers & taxes & [John] McNulty & my family & Tony’s & the Algonquin get me down. Even when they did I wrote & drew more stuff for the NYer than anyone else. I’m a great big brave man and rather nice looking as you can see when I shut my mouth.
With love and assurance,
Jim
Wednesday
[Undated, spring 1935; from Foord’s]
Dear Honey:
I have not only got away from New York but from writing, and it’s bad to think I’ll always have to get back to that, anyway. But I’ll want to, finally.... Excuse the lack of that certain artificial style I usually use (in which I would never use “usually use” together) as I have let it go with everything up here.
It’s nice here, the place, the people, the country. I have gained 2 pounds and feel better than I have since June-November, 1918, already. I do not accept that lank, sick, nervous man who for years wandered from the N. Yorker to the Algonquin to Tony’s. I don’t accept the things he said or did. I never want to see him again. I don’t marvel that you & everybody else avoided him.
I go to sleep at 10:30 & up at 7.45. Long walks, lots to eat; and my mind is slowly getting back to where it belongs. I don’t miss drinking at all—as if there had never been any such thing as drinking. My nervousness is wearing away, with slight reactions such as now when I try to make sense in writing, but that’s natural. The state I was in, I can see, was not only awful but perilous. I’ll be saved in the nick of time. I was writing & drawing on sheer nerve force or something. The humor was purely mechanical like a six-day rider sleeping as he rode.... I’ll never stay so long in NY again. I dread coming back to the income tax, the [divorce] court judgments, the grind for money, but I’ll be able tp do it when I do.
... I’m a little drugged by the peace & quiet, the release from that hell down there where no one can, or has, lived a decent, motivated life of which he can be proud. Your “living from day to day” is not so good as I thot it was when you said it. It’s another escape mechanism, another justification for a life without beauty, purpose, or meaning & I want you out of it, too.
... Don’t tell me about any people except yourself. Keep well & sober. There’s nothing in drinking & carrying on. There’s a purpose in life.
Have faith in Ohio.
As always (only better)
Jim
[Undated, probably spring 1935; handwritten from Foord’s]
Dear Honey:...
You’ll love it (ah, but for a day!) up here. It’s like a Longfellow Inn, only moderner and stone-&-stucco. The living room is 42 x 42 and its windows look out on a lovely sweep of valley now cut by a tumbling stream of melted snow... (If the mountains of Nebraska look like a woman’s breasts it is unfortunately true that under certain lights the far Catskills look like monteo veneris shaved for an operation... ).
The food is excellent, the rooms bright and easy, the people easy; the woods and cascades and cliffs make you silent like stout Crotz (who would have run some of the fat off his adventurous ass up here). There is no vista in Tony’s and where there is no vista the people perish.
... Perhaps no one ever gave a clearer insight into her strange and misty intentions than you did in the fading days of the old year when you told Ed you were going to marry me, but discussed a trip to Europe with Willie. And yet you could “break with”... Willie easier than Ed, and make up faster. Do you suppose I am finally getting a rounded picture of your nature? A person has to pick up clues about you, the way they do in mystery stories. Put mine all together and they do not make much sense....
