The thurber letters, p.56
The Thurber Letters, page 56
We read most of the reviews and the various summaries printed of the score. It is amazing how the 50-50 ratio kept going. This happened to “Madame Bovary” in France, to Shaw’s first plays in England, and even to “Alice in Wonderland” which was not even reviewed in Punch the year it came out. Later a Sir Hobart [Brendan] Gill took a crack at it, referring to the text as “Those nonsensical legends for the superb Tenniel drawings”. The night I was born, December 8, 1894, Cesar Franck’s D-minor symphony had its world premiere in Paris. Fifty percent of the audience cheered at the end and the others booed, tore up auditorium seats, and fenced the other side with walking sticks. The piece is now known as “The keystone of modern symphonic music.” At 245 Parsons Avenue that night, the score was 4-1 in favor of me.
I somehow don’t believe that Gill’s “discursive” was derived from Gibb’s “discursive”. Gibbs sees very few people outside the office and only grunts to the Gills at the water-cooler, hiding behind his left shoulder. Practically everybody at the place was something more than indignant that Gill had got the book and had written what he must have thought was a witty review. I am told that he is hipped on the subject of novels, and for years has bemoaned the fact that he didn’t write one before he was thirty. He still mutters about this in bars and on trains. His only way out is to attack the later novels of men who wrote one before they were thirty. He sings while rewriting Talk of the Town and thus was placed at the far end of the office, where Ross can’t hear him.
I am thinking of writing a topical revue, but so far I have only one blackout. We see Lowell Thomas in the mountains of Tibet. He falls and bruises his hip, and many voices cry: “A litter! A litter!” In from the wings left comes Heywood Hale Broun, carrying thirteen collie pups. I have thrown out the scene in which one character says: “Someone shot Donald Culross Peattie”, and another character says: “Ah, another Ruskin bit the dust”. I feel that Peattie isn’t well enough known.
We think it is a wonderful idea to live in Princeton. Helen and I fell in love with the place ten years ago come December when “The Male Animal” opened there. The first act ran sixty-two minutes and the dress rehearsal was so bad that Elliott wanted to put his father in as the trustee and Shumlin thought the dancing incident should be funnied up by lines like: “What do you say we shake a leg.” He put glasses on the trustee to make him funnier, but I managed to get them off.
Ann Honeycutt, halfway through her book about the American male, was told by Jack Goodman to sex it up, unthink it, and personalize it. I told her that if she personalizes it, she will have to use four photographs of me and one of McKelway, all five of which I will select personally.
Helen and I send you and Belle and Wylie our love and best wishes, congratulations, and personal regards. It’s high time we saw you. I will be fifty-five in December and on a street in New York a man recently called to me “Watch it, Pop”.
As ever and always,
TO GUS LOBRANO
The New Yorker paid authors by the column inch.
West Cornwall, Connecticut
July 8, 1949
Mr. Gus Lobrano, The New Yorker
25 West 43rd Street, New York, N. Y.
Dear Gus:
I am bringing in corrected proof of “The American Literary Scene” and also “The Case of the Laughing Lady.” In the first one I think I have satisfied Ross’s objections. I also cut out the brief passage he objected to. This brings up a great problem and a sore point with me.
I object strenuously and indignantly to the cut of sixty dollars from “Da guerrotype of a Lady” by the auditing department, and I demand that a check for sixty dollars be sent me. I don’t know who is paid to recount corrected proofs, but I think he or she should be fired or sent to Time. I resent the assumption and insinuation that I am trying to get away with something and would turn in stories longer than I intend to make them. This thing may be added to since it is one of my favorites and I have worked on it for months. I have both added to proofs and cut them, and I do not want to be paid for additions or taxed for cuts. Going over a proof takes time and work, and improvement may lie either in shortening or lengthening. In any case, it is hard work. I have added whole paragraphs to stories and taken some out since 1927. Whatever I do to a proof in the future is no business of the overstaffed auditing department. I think it should be investigated before I take it apart some day. The cheap and insulting sixty dollar cut upset me for three days and I ought to charge for this loss of time.
I have made several cuts of from one to seven words in “The Literary Scene.” This would amount to $2.85, but nobody should be paid for such recounts.
In the future no reexamination must be made of my proofs by an auditor, after the check has been mailed. Cuts and additions balance out in the end and save you at least one hundred dollars a week on the salary of whoever was hired for this unnecessary and degrading work.
Some fifteen years ago Andy White spent three weeks cutting down a proof, and I believe he was not charged for this extra and devoted work on behalf of improving his story and the magazine. Andy would quit if the auditing department kicked him around, and I will be happy to go over to Cosmopolitan or somewhere if this incredible annoyance is permitted to hang over my head. I would like to know who is responsible for it and to have him or her acquainted with my feelings on the subject. This is a serious situation and The New Yorker’s future might well be affected if it persists.
See you Monday.
Love and kisses,
Jim
TO ROSEMARY THURBER
West Cornwall, Connecticut
July 13, 1949
Dear Patient:
The phone has been ringing all the time, even from New York, and everybody is happy that you came out of your [auto] crash so well. As a graduate of three hospitals, and as your old man, I suffer with you since I know about all the annoyances of being tucked away in a bed on your back. I am glad you have your mother’s pelvis, which may bend a little but doesn’t break. We’re all delighted that you got a private room, because the only person I know who likes a ward is your admirer John McNulty. He picks out a ward by preference, so he can have people to talk to. I was put into a ward with fifteen other kids when I was seven, and I still remember the night nurse saying I gave her more trouble than all the others. Wouldn’t you know that I would have preceded you into a ward? I have always thought of writing about it, and if you wait as long as I have you will be sixty-six. I remember my mother slipped me chocolates and I trust that yours refrained from this. It wasn’t until 1915 that I could stand the sight of one.
I hear that you are a good patient. A good patient hates it but sees it through. We are coming up to see you Friday. I would have been there a few minutes after the ambulance if I hadn’t found out you were all right. Everybody was afraid I would dash into the ward, breathing heavily, and stumbling over people, thus leading you to think you were really bad off. We’ll have you out of there in no time.
I still say that women are the best drivers. They know they cannot take a curve on two wheels. Everyone I know has had his accident and it’s nice to get it over with early.
Helen and I went to see “Detective Story” Monday night, but I didn’t like it. Six shots are fired at the end of the play and I was afraid that one of the two guns would not go off. I understand they have prepared for this, and that Ralph Bellamy has practised clutching at his chest and crying, “There goes my heart!”
I came into the room last night when I heard Helen talking to someone, and I hadn’t heard anybody come in the house. It turned out she was trying to explain to the poodle what had happened to you....
One of Helen’s old beaux took us out last Saturday and insisted on buying champagne. He drank his so fast he got hiccoughs that lasted until four o’clock Monday morning. Then he phoned a doctor out of bed. The doctor told him to hold his breath as long as he could and then hold it twice that long, whereupon he slammed up. It cured the boy anyway.
If you can’t get a radio, we will bring you one of ours. Keep a stiff upper lip. I am working on an invention you will like—a hospital bed with a built-in bathroom. The present system of private room with public bath annoyed me for a few days, but you get used to it.
Zabby is tugging at the leash and wants to come up to see you. I like a man who runs out of gas. We all send you our love and kisses and our heartfelt thanks that they can’t beat a Thurber by hitting her with a car.
As ever and ever,
Daddy
TO HARVEY BREIT
Thurber was asked to review a collection of Robert Benchley essays for the New York Times Book Review.
West Cornwall, Connecticut
August 26, 1949 Mr. Harvey Breit, The New York Times
Book Review, Times Square, New York, N. Y.
Dear Mr. Breit:
The tendency of all of us is perhaps to write too intimately about Benchley, and thus the “I” will turn up. I wanted to mention Benchley’s first book and his famous Treasurer’s Report, and not myself, but I will accept the change with “celebrated” in place of “small”.
I have taken out some comparative references to me and I insist on them being left the way I have now fixed them in the proof. It is probably news to you that a well-known American novelist believes, to the point of near legal action, that he invented the modern day dreamer. Most New York writers and Times readers know about this, and thus I went to some length to show Benchley’s claim. I have now reinforced it and would like to have it remain the new way.
I have not been accused of “long windup” since the middle Twenties and nobody before you has taken the liberty of throwing out my words and putting in his. When I say “fond preface” I do not mean “affectionate preface”. There is an “affection” in the Sullivan quote. I have put back the “fond”.
I rarely use the ugly word “grew” and I have changed this back to “was”. This is not only good English, it is the way I write, and this is my piece. I cannot refrain from mentioning the loving care for a writer’s words which has made Ross the great editor he is.
The Times Book Review appears not to be a place for me. I am too goddam touchy, but I have the vanity to believe it is slightly justified by my intense devotion to English prose. Mr. Lyons was eight days ahead of the Tribune Books in asking me to do this piece. This may have been lucky for him, as a young and highly intelligent editor, but it was unlucky for me, as an old, and perhaps hyper-sensitive writer. I will plague you no further.
Yours truly,
James Thurber
TO CHARLES SAXON
West Cornwall, Connecticut
October 14, 1949
Mr. Charles Saxon, Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 261 Fifth Avenue, New York 16, N. Y.
Dear Mr. Saxon:
As a loyal member of the contributing staff of what you call a magazine of “hidebound tradition”, I must say first of all that I could not possibly bring myself to contribute to an out and out rival. I do not believe that you can win over the other boys and girls either, for most of the New Yorker writers and artists are devoted to that magazine.
You don’t sell me the idea that “Ballyhoo” has been selected for any other reason than sweet memories of a million sales. You put up such an interesting argument for “Esmeralda” that I wonder you don’t use that title instead. I think that your letter shows that what you want to do is to bring back BALLYHOO without Elmer Zilch and the comic ads, but it seems to me that that magazine died an awful and deserved death and that it cannot be successfully revived, even under the flowery screen of your high and noble dedication. In writing to the New Yorker artists and writers you would have been smart to leave out that crack. It sounds to me as if you would like to take over our boys and girls and have them work for Dell instead of Ross. This won’t work and what you need is satirists for the masses, as you say. We have never developed any.
Thanks for the enlightening ride on your dream boat.
Sincerely yours,
James Thurber
TO HAROLD ROSS
October 10, 1949
Dear Ross:
I wanted to tell you what a triumph McNulty’s [”Back Where I Had Never Been”] was.... The surprise comes from the fact that it was not run through our formidable prose machine in a desperate and dedicated Ross-Shawn attempt to make it sound like everybody else.... The machine has left almost no differences in tongue or temperament or style... since there has to be so much rewriting of most of the authors, this dreadful similarity is hard to avoid.
I understand that McNulty had the usual terrible battle to survive as the magnificent individual he is, but he made it. The curse of our formula editing is that uniformity tends toward desiccation, coldness, and lack of vitality and blood.... We are afraid of warmth, as we are afraid of sex and human functions. Our only true boldness lies in the use of “Jesus Christ” to show we’re not afraid of the Catholic Church....
[Thurber]
The attack on Shawn incensed Ross, for McNulty had become discouraged with the piece and it was Shawn who urged him on, accepted it in pieces, and assembled it into a splendid whole. “You understand as wrong as a man can understand,” Ross wrote Thurber heatedly.... “Shawn was the obstetrician, the midwife, and the godfather of that piece, and it never would have been done without him”
Walden was a staff member whose play about The New Yorker was about to open, highlighting a fictitious Ross.
”The story of the midget” was Thurber’s “You Could Look It Up.”
West Cornwall, Connecticut
October 14, 1949
Mr. H. W. Ross, The New Yorker
25 West 43rd Street, New York, N. Y.
Dear Ross:
I didn’t know whether you had seen the enclosed letter from Dell and the prospectus. Here they are with my letter to Dell.
Maybe you will have to have a rally to keep the boys and girls from going to BALLYHOO. It would be interesting to know how many of them got such a letter.
Grantland Rice was once connected with a Saturday morning half hour on the radio which dramatized sports fiction, and they did the story of the midget, who was played by Roy Fant very well. The story appeared in the Post in 1940 or 41.1 think it would make a movie, but there isn’t a single woman in the story. It wouldn’t be too hard to work in Lana Turner. The artist who illustrated the piece hired a midget as a model and the little guy still keeps after him to draw him again. I expected him to call on me, but he never did. You are probably a better agent than Myron Selznick and the movies do a baseball story once a year. The last one dealt with a chemistry prof, who accidentally discovered that a certain solution would make a baseball allergic to wood. He won the pennant for St. Louis.
Keep pitching.
As ever,
James Thurber
P.S. I accept your explanation of the McNulty story, and I’m glad I’m not Shawn. I dreamed the other night that I was Walden.
TO E. B. WHITE
West Cornwall, Connecticut
October 18, 1949
Dear Andy:
... It was nice to have you and Kay here, but you didn’t stay long enough. I didn’t even ring my Bermuda carriage bell for you, or get out the 1902 rubber bulb auto horn we found in the house. Fifty years ago the place was owned by a Mr. Livingston, who made a million dollars by inventing the honeycomb radiator, early models of which are still plowed up. He died in a car accident and the last owner died on a ship. I will be killed by a Mrs. Charles L. Schwartz driving the wrong way on a one way street. Mrs. Schwartz will come east in her car from Des Moines, because her sister in Torrington wired her “I am very sick.” It will turn out that this is a Western Union garble for “I am very rich.”
As ever, Jim
Mr. E. B. White, do The New Yorker
25 West 43rd Street, New York, N. Y.
TO ELIZABETH GREEN
November 18, 1949
Miss Elizabeth Green, Director of News Bureau, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts
Dear Miss Green:
I was delighted to learn that Mount Holyoke overwhelmed Harvard 6 to 2 in their gruelling field hockey match. I was confident of the outcome all the time and my fingers were steady as the ticker tape ran through them with the play by play story of an event that was not only a famous moment in history, but also in sex. Please congratulate all the warriors for me and tell them that in 1908 I invented a game to be played in backyards, in which the contestants, armed with sawed off broomsticks, tried to hurl a man’s black sock over their opponent’s goal, or fence. I was the best.
The drawing of the Mount Holyoke girls defeating Yale in football was drawn nearly eighteen years ago, even though the newspaper account managed to convey the idea that it was fairly new. At 54 I am no longer that bold and skittish.
An undergraduate at Ohio State has written me requesting that I ask the Mount Holyoke girls if they want to wrestle.
Thanks again for your letter.
Athletically yours,
James Thurber
TO HARVEY BREIT
Breit was preparing an article on Thurber for the New York Times.
West Cornwall, Connecticut
November 22, 1949
Mr. Harvey Breit, The Sunday Book Review,
New York Times, Times Square, New York, N. Y.
Dear Breit:
... The only piece I ever wrote about the drawings appeared in the New York Times and in my recent book under the title “The Lady on the Bookcase.” As I have already told you, I have not done any drawings for two years, but I am still referred to in the New York papers as “the New York playwright and cartoonist.” I am not New York. I wrote only one play ten years ago, and I am no longer a cartoonist, but I can’t get away from these tags, even though only three of my books are books of drawings and thirteen are books of short pieces.
I somehow don’t believe that Gill’s “discursive” was derived from Gibb’s “discursive”. Gibbs sees very few people outside the office and only grunts to the Gills at the water-cooler, hiding behind his left shoulder. Practically everybody at the place was something more than indignant that Gill had got the book and had written what he must have thought was a witty review. I am told that he is hipped on the subject of novels, and for years has bemoaned the fact that he didn’t write one before he was thirty. He still mutters about this in bars and on trains. His only way out is to attack the later novels of men who wrote one before they were thirty. He sings while rewriting Talk of the Town and thus was placed at the far end of the office, where Ross can’t hear him.
I am thinking of writing a topical revue, but so far I have only one blackout. We see Lowell Thomas in the mountains of Tibet. He falls and bruises his hip, and many voices cry: “A litter! A litter!” In from the wings left comes Heywood Hale Broun, carrying thirteen collie pups. I have thrown out the scene in which one character says: “Someone shot Donald Culross Peattie”, and another character says: “Ah, another Ruskin bit the dust”. I feel that Peattie isn’t well enough known.
We think it is a wonderful idea to live in Princeton. Helen and I fell in love with the place ten years ago come December when “The Male Animal” opened there. The first act ran sixty-two minutes and the dress rehearsal was so bad that Elliott wanted to put his father in as the trustee and Shumlin thought the dancing incident should be funnied up by lines like: “What do you say we shake a leg.” He put glasses on the trustee to make him funnier, but I managed to get them off.
Ann Honeycutt, halfway through her book about the American male, was told by Jack Goodman to sex it up, unthink it, and personalize it. I told her that if she personalizes it, she will have to use four photographs of me and one of McKelway, all five of which I will select personally.
Helen and I send you and Belle and Wylie our love and best wishes, congratulations, and personal regards. It’s high time we saw you. I will be fifty-five in December and on a street in New York a man recently called to me “Watch it, Pop”.
As ever and always,
TO GUS LOBRANO
The New Yorker paid authors by the column inch.
West Cornwall, Connecticut
July 8, 1949
Mr. Gus Lobrano, The New Yorker
25 West 43rd Street, New York, N. Y.
Dear Gus:
I am bringing in corrected proof of “The American Literary Scene” and also “The Case of the Laughing Lady.” In the first one I think I have satisfied Ross’s objections. I also cut out the brief passage he objected to. This brings up a great problem and a sore point with me.
I object strenuously and indignantly to the cut of sixty dollars from “Da guerrotype of a Lady” by the auditing department, and I demand that a check for sixty dollars be sent me. I don’t know who is paid to recount corrected proofs, but I think he or she should be fired or sent to Time. I resent the assumption and insinuation that I am trying to get away with something and would turn in stories longer than I intend to make them. This thing may be added to since it is one of my favorites and I have worked on it for months. I have both added to proofs and cut them, and I do not want to be paid for additions or taxed for cuts. Going over a proof takes time and work, and improvement may lie either in shortening or lengthening. In any case, it is hard work. I have added whole paragraphs to stories and taken some out since 1927. Whatever I do to a proof in the future is no business of the overstaffed auditing department. I think it should be investigated before I take it apart some day. The cheap and insulting sixty dollar cut upset me for three days and I ought to charge for this loss of time.
I have made several cuts of from one to seven words in “The Literary Scene.” This would amount to $2.85, but nobody should be paid for such recounts.
In the future no reexamination must be made of my proofs by an auditor, after the check has been mailed. Cuts and additions balance out in the end and save you at least one hundred dollars a week on the salary of whoever was hired for this unnecessary and degrading work.
Some fifteen years ago Andy White spent three weeks cutting down a proof, and I believe he was not charged for this extra and devoted work on behalf of improving his story and the magazine. Andy would quit if the auditing department kicked him around, and I will be happy to go over to Cosmopolitan or somewhere if this incredible annoyance is permitted to hang over my head. I would like to know who is responsible for it and to have him or her acquainted with my feelings on the subject. This is a serious situation and The New Yorker’s future might well be affected if it persists.
See you Monday.
Love and kisses,
Jim
TO ROSEMARY THURBER
West Cornwall, Connecticut
July 13, 1949
Dear Patient:
The phone has been ringing all the time, even from New York, and everybody is happy that you came out of your [auto] crash so well. As a graduate of three hospitals, and as your old man, I suffer with you since I know about all the annoyances of being tucked away in a bed on your back. I am glad you have your mother’s pelvis, which may bend a little but doesn’t break. We’re all delighted that you got a private room, because the only person I know who likes a ward is your admirer John McNulty. He picks out a ward by preference, so he can have people to talk to. I was put into a ward with fifteen other kids when I was seven, and I still remember the night nurse saying I gave her more trouble than all the others. Wouldn’t you know that I would have preceded you into a ward? I have always thought of writing about it, and if you wait as long as I have you will be sixty-six. I remember my mother slipped me chocolates and I trust that yours refrained from this. It wasn’t until 1915 that I could stand the sight of one.
I hear that you are a good patient. A good patient hates it but sees it through. We are coming up to see you Friday. I would have been there a few minutes after the ambulance if I hadn’t found out you were all right. Everybody was afraid I would dash into the ward, breathing heavily, and stumbling over people, thus leading you to think you were really bad off. We’ll have you out of there in no time.
I still say that women are the best drivers. They know they cannot take a curve on two wheels. Everyone I know has had his accident and it’s nice to get it over with early.
Helen and I went to see “Detective Story” Monday night, but I didn’t like it. Six shots are fired at the end of the play and I was afraid that one of the two guns would not go off. I understand they have prepared for this, and that Ralph Bellamy has practised clutching at his chest and crying, “There goes my heart!”
I came into the room last night when I heard Helen talking to someone, and I hadn’t heard anybody come in the house. It turned out she was trying to explain to the poodle what had happened to you....
One of Helen’s old beaux took us out last Saturday and insisted on buying champagne. He drank his so fast he got hiccoughs that lasted until four o’clock Monday morning. Then he phoned a doctor out of bed. The doctor told him to hold his breath as long as he could and then hold it twice that long, whereupon he slammed up. It cured the boy anyway.
If you can’t get a radio, we will bring you one of ours. Keep a stiff upper lip. I am working on an invention you will like—a hospital bed with a built-in bathroom. The present system of private room with public bath annoyed me for a few days, but you get used to it.
Zabby is tugging at the leash and wants to come up to see you. I like a man who runs out of gas. We all send you our love and kisses and our heartfelt thanks that they can’t beat a Thurber by hitting her with a car.
As ever and ever,
Daddy
TO HARVEY BREIT
Thurber was asked to review a collection of Robert Benchley essays for the New York Times Book Review.
West Cornwall, Connecticut
August 26, 1949 Mr. Harvey Breit, The New York Times
Book Review, Times Square, New York, N. Y.
Dear Mr. Breit:
The tendency of all of us is perhaps to write too intimately about Benchley, and thus the “I” will turn up. I wanted to mention Benchley’s first book and his famous Treasurer’s Report, and not myself, but I will accept the change with “celebrated” in place of “small”.
I have taken out some comparative references to me and I insist on them being left the way I have now fixed them in the proof. It is probably news to you that a well-known American novelist believes, to the point of near legal action, that he invented the modern day dreamer. Most New York writers and Times readers know about this, and thus I went to some length to show Benchley’s claim. I have now reinforced it and would like to have it remain the new way.
I have not been accused of “long windup” since the middle Twenties and nobody before you has taken the liberty of throwing out my words and putting in his. When I say “fond preface” I do not mean “affectionate preface”. There is an “affection” in the Sullivan quote. I have put back the “fond”.
I rarely use the ugly word “grew” and I have changed this back to “was”. This is not only good English, it is the way I write, and this is my piece. I cannot refrain from mentioning the loving care for a writer’s words which has made Ross the great editor he is.
The Times Book Review appears not to be a place for me. I am too goddam touchy, but I have the vanity to believe it is slightly justified by my intense devotion to English prose. Mr. Lyons was eight days ahead of the Tribune Books in asking me to do this piece. This may have been lucky for him, as a young and highly intelligent editor, but it was unlucky for me, as an old, and perhaps hyper-sensitive writer. I will plague you no further.
Yours truly,
James Thurber
TO CHARLES SAXON
West Cornwall, Connecticut
October 14, 1949
Mr. Charles Saxon, Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 261 Fifth Avenue, New York 16, N. Y.
Dear Mr. Saxon:
As a loyal member of the contributing staff of what you call a magazine of “hidebound tradition”, I must say first of all that I could not possibly bring myself to contribute to an out and out rival. I do not believe that you can win over the other boys and girls either, for most of the New Yorker writers and artists are devoted to that magazine.
You don’t sell me the idea that “Ballyhoo” has been selected for any other reason than sweet memories of a million sales. You put up such an interesting argument for “Esmeralda” that I wonder you don’t use that title instead. I think that your letter shows that what you want to do is to bring back BALLYHOO without Elmer Zilch and the comic ads, but it seems to me that that magazine died an awful and deserved death and that it cannot be successfully revived, even under the flowery screen of your high and noble dedication. In writing to the New Yorker artists and writers you would have been smart to leave out that crack. It sounds to me as if you would like to take over our boys and girls and have them work for Dell instead of Ross. This won’t work and what you need is satirists for the masses, as you say. We have never developed any.
Thanks for the enlightening ride on your dream boat.
Sincerely yours,
James Thurber
TO HAROLD ROSS
October 10, 1949
Dear Ross:
I wanted to tell you what a triumph McNulty’s [”Back Where I Had Never Been”] was.... The surprise comes from the fact that it was not run through our formidable prose machine in a desperate and dedicated Ross-Shawn attempt to make it sound like everybody else.... The machine has left almost no differences in tongue or temperament or style... since there has to be so much rewriting of most of the authors, this dreadful similarity is hard to avoid.
I understand that McNulty had the usual terrible battle to survive as the magnificent individual he is, but he made it. The curse of our formula editing is that uniformity tends toward desiccation, coldness, and lack of vitality and blood.... We are afraid of warmth, as we are afraid of sex and human functions. Our only true boldness lies in the use of “Jesus Christ” to show we’re not afraid of the Catholic Church....
[Thurber]
The attack on Shawn incensed Ross, for McNulty had become discouraged with the piece and it was Shawn who urged him on, accepted it in pieces, and assembled it into a splendid whole. “You understand as wrong as a man can understand,” Ross wrote Thurber heatedly.... “Shawn was the obstetrician, the midwife, and the godfather of that piece, and it never would have been done without him”
Walden was a staff member whose play about The New Yorker was about to open, highlighting a fictitious Ross.
”The story of the midget” was Thurber’s “You Could Look It Up.”
West Cornwall, Connecticut
October 14, 1949
Mr. H. W. Ross, The New Yorker
25 West 43rd Street, New York, N. Y.
Dear Ross:
I didn’t know whether you had seen the enclosed letter from Dell and the prospectus. Here they are with my letter to Dell.
Maybe you will have to have a rally to keep the boys and girls from going to BALLYHOO. It would be interesting to know how many of them got such a letter.
Grantland Rice was once connected with a Saturday morning half hour on the radio which dramatized sports fiction, and they did the story of the midget, who was played by Roy Fant very well. The story appeared in the Post in 1940 or 41.1 think it would make a movie, but there isn’t a single woman in the story. It wouldn’t be too hard to work in Lana Turner. The artist who illustrated the piece hired a midget as a model and the little guy still keeps after him to draw him again. I expected him to call on me, but he never did. You are probably a better agent than Myron Selznick and the movies do a baseball story once a year. The last one dealt with a chemistry prof, who accidentally discovered that a certain solution would make a baseball allergic to wood. He won the pennant for St. Louis.
Keep pitching.
As ever,
James Thurber
P.S. I accept your explanation of the McNulty story, and I’m glad I’m not Shawn. I dreamed the other night that I was Walden.
TO E. B. WHITE
West Cornwall, Connecticut
October 18, 1949
Dear Andy:
... It was nice to have you and Kay here, but you didn’t stay long enough. I didn’t even ring my Bermuda carriage bell for you, or get out the 1902 rubber bulb auto horn we found in the house. Fifty years ago the place was owned by a Mr. Livingston, who made a million dollars by inventing the honeycomb radiator, early models of which are still plowed up. He died in a car accident and the last owner died on a ship. I will be killed by a Mrs. Charles L. Schwartz driving the wrong way on a one way street. Mrs. Schwartz will come east in her car from Des Moines, because her sister in Torrington wired her “I am very sick.” It will turn out that this is a Western Union garble for “I am very rich.”
As ever, Jim
Mr. E. B. White, do The New Yorker
25 West 43rd Street, New York, N. Y.
TO ELIZABETH GREEN
November 18, 1949
Miss Elizabeth Green, Director of News Bureau, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts
Dear Miss Green:
I was delighted to learn that Mount Holyoke overwhelmed Harvard 6 to 2 in their gruelling field hockey match. I was confident of the outcome all the time and my fingers were steady as the ticker tape ran through them with the play by play story of an event that was not only a famous moment in history, but also in sex. Please congratulate all the warriors for me and tell them that in 1908 I invented a game to be played in backyards, in which the contestants, armed with sawed off broomsticks, tried to hurl a man’s black sock over their opponent’s goal, or fence. I was the best.
The drawing of the Mount Holyoke girls defeating Yale in football was drawn nearly eighteen years ago, even though the newspaper account managed to convey the idea that it was fairly new. At 54 I am no longer that bold and skittish.
An undergraduate at Ohio State has written me requesting that I ask the Mount Holyoke girls if they want to wrestle.
Thanks again for your letter.
Athletically yours,
James Thurber
TO HARVEY BREIT
Breit was preparing an article on Thurber for the New York Times.
West Cornwall, Connecticut
November 22, 1949
Mr. Harvey Breit, The Sunday Book Review,
New York Times, Times Square, New York, N. Y.
Dear Breit:
... The only piece I ever wrote about the drawings appeared in the New York Times and in my recent book under the title “The Lady on the Bookcase.” As I have already told you, I have not done any drawings for two years, but I am still referred to in the New York papers as “the New York playwright and cartoonist.” I am not New York. I wrote only one play ten years ago, and I am no longer a cartoonist, but I can’t get away from these tags, even though only three of my books are books of drawings and thirteen are books of short pieces.
