The Thurber Letters edited by Harrison Kinney, with Rosemary A Thurber
Pritchard, William H
THE CURSE OF HUMOR The Thurber Letters Edited by Harrison Kinney, with Rosemary A. Thurber William H. Prltchard Some years ago, the Library of America published a volume of James Thurber's...
...I know this, that that that that we are discussing has long been a concern of mine...
...In a 1947 letter to Hawley Truax, also employed by the New...
...He wrote New Yorker fiction editor Roger Angell with annoyance after a story of his had been rejected: "I wouldn't worry about that that...
...The following one, addressed to "Dear bewildered and thoughtless Honey," ends in the bathetic: "And I have the oh so sad sad feeling that, after reading this, you will simply hate me, and be hurt...
...In a long letter to White written in 1938, Thurber vividly invokes the "dreary, fatiguing, and maniac parties" that "our horrible bunch" attended so many of: I keep telling people about them...
...A fully engaged reader of these letters has to be very much interested in things New Yorkerish: Ross, E. B. and Katherine White, Gus Lobrano, Wolcott Gibbs, John McNulty, and others figure who composed what "Andy" White once called "a cesspool of loyalties...
...For example, a letter to Burgess Meredith in 1952 begins: The enclosed clippings will put you up to date on Franchot Tone, in accordance with your second question the other night...
...But even an older cohort could use some help in certain selections...
...He was given, indeed burdened with, the curse of humor-with the satirist's itch to see through everything...
...By then (1935) he had published, with E. B. White, a parody on sex manuals (Is Sex Necessary...
...THE CURSE OF HUMOR The Thurber Letters Edited by Harrison Kinney, with Rosemary A. Thurber William H. Prltchard Some years ago, the Library of America published a volume of James Thurber's writings (selected, appropriately, by Garrison Keillor), thus designating him an American classic...
...Thurber felt that his boss, Harold Ross, was determined to make an editor out of him, rather than a writer, and he gave up his staff position after eight years to freelance...
...I edited all of the departments, did the theater art captions, many of the blurbs, edited Goings On, and some fifty-five other things...
...More to the point, why, forty-some years after his death, do we need 762 pages of Thurber's letters...
...brought out The Seal in the Bedroom, and composed his deadpan illustrated memoir My Life and Hard Times...
...Thurber, who as a young man admired Henry James above all writers, had managed to invent an original manner of humor that, as Robert Frost put it, "doesn't seem to appreciate itself"-a "dry" humor with all the wet squeezed out of it...
...They no longer sound real to me as I tell them: everybody slugged or sick at a quarter to seven, holding on without dinner until 10:45, going home to sleep in a draught with one's hat on and a cold corner hamburger sandwich in one hand, rousing up at twelve to vomit and call somebody up and say you're sorry...
...There hasn't been anything finer than that in my time and my book...
...Sometimes he included himself in the game: "After Ham Basso wrote 'The View from Pompey's Head,' I decided to write about my return to Columbus and call it 'The View from Pompous Ass.'" The occasional moments of uniron-ic tribute to things and people outside himself may be treasured for their relative infrequency: a January 1961 letter to Hemingway, attempting to cheer him up (it failed...
...Thurber's" state of mind ("It might be a good idea if you arranged to let him pat your hair now and then...
...The letter is signed Grace L. McTush...
...Kinney contributes a brief introduction but thereafter stays pretty much out of the way, steering clear of any prefatory paragraphs to the unimaginatively named sections ("The Emerging Years," "The Wandering Years," "The Triumphant Years," etc...
...Now comes a large volume of his letters edited by Harrison Kinney, whose massive biography of Thurber was published in 1995...
...This last perfected his trademark style...
...Perhaps most appealing is his testimony on seeing My Fair Lady: "The place my eyes began misting last night especially, even though I couldn't see the action, was the 'Rain in Spain' sequence...
...Letter after letter goes on and on, especially his love letters to Ann Honeycutt, a hopelessly aspired-after beloved...
...But a more active editing of the letters could have provided some helpful context...
...What did the clippings reveal about Tone's recent behavior...
...Editorial notes on individual letters are also kept to a minimum, resulting in who knows how many references lost on the younger generation...
...Like a lot of other things, he got that one right...
...Fitz Foord's sanatorium in the Catskills-a drying-out place favored by New Yorker people-that he took hold of his life by marrying Helen Wismer...
...In these prolix effusions, horseplay alternates with maudlin self-display...
...What was Tone's connection with Meredith...
...There follows a reference to Tone having been "kicked around by both men and women, I guess...
...The perfect time to encounter it was when one discovered the New Yorker as an undergraduate...
...In one letter, Thurber pretends to be a secretary at the New Yorker, concerned about "Mr...
...He joined us about 11:30 last Friday and had had a few drinks as we had, but seemed bright and gay on the surface...
...one sent to Fred Allen's widow that begins "To Fred in Heaven" and recalls "those unforgettable crows of yours who were scared so badly by the scarecrow that they brought back corn they had stolen two years before...
...However highly one rates his virtues as a writer and humorist (and Kinney sees him as the successor to Mark Twain), his talents are not best on display in the epistolary mode...
...His satiric wit became darker, more acerbic, and even desperate in the 1950s, when, blind and at odds with the New Yorker, beset by health problems (he died suddenly of a brain tumor after acting up at a party for Noel Coward), he exercised it on the verbal miscues of others...
...The answer to these questions might well be who cares...
...I'm aged enough to know something about both Meredith and Tone, now misty figures from the silver screen and stage...
...whether the delight holds up over the years is another question...
...nobody believes me...
...Or he decides that the theologian Paul Tillich is no help for him in thinking about death, since "he pronounces 'faith' and 'face' the same way, so you can't tell whether the Chinese are losing face or faith or both...
...It wasn't until Thurber gave up on Ann Honeycutt, married and divorced his first wife Althea Adams, and spent some time at Dr...
...Thurber wouldn't have been happy and satisfied anywhere for very long...
...Yorker, Thurber describes how he came to work at the magazine in March 1927, for one hundred dollars a week, and tasks-so it seems-just about limitless...
...But why was Meredith asking Thurber about Tone...
Vol. 130 • October 2003 • No. 18
