A Vessel of Sanity

...White, "Anyone who would let himself, at my age, keep on getting mad at the New Yorker would prove only that he is silly...

...Still, some of the expressions of affection are touching...

...In a typical aside at his own incapacities, he confesses, "(I have] a curious desire to cry whiledrivingat night but have so far conquered that, save for a slight consistent whimpering that I keep up") These selections serve to remind old-timers of past pleasures and entice a new generation to future pleasures...

...In a letter to Lewis Gannett, the Herald Tribune's book reviewer, Thurber refers to the magazine's "comma-philia...

...Thurber answered: "When 1 was a baby goat, I had to do my own research on projects, and I enjoyed doing it...

...That goddam thurbing son of a bitch Ross.' 'Father, the greeve needs a new thurber.' All these years, and I never had the philological curiosity to ask a simple question...

...Thurber could get off a smart line when thespirit moved him, but that was not his special strength...

...I hadn't paused over one for many years before opening this book, and they seem to me to have gained charm and even a portion of wisdom in the interim...

...Tell your teacher 1 said so, and please send me her name...

...He observes, "In 'Afterdinner coffee was served on the terrace,' we have a sentence to drive a New Yorker editor crazy...

...What punishment did he have in mind for that teacher...

...Like the whole New Yorker cadre of his day, Thurber was obsessed with the magazine's founder, Harold Ross, yet another legend...

...He was a vessel of sanity in a wacky world, or vice versa...

...What is thurbing...

...Two other good reasons for publishing a writer's letters...

...Some passages might, with scarcely a change of word, have become parts of one of his short stories...

...Thurber's praise in these pages for the prose of E.B...

...Lens won't be able to see you until three months from now.' 'Tell him,' 1 told her coldly, 'that I wouldn't be able to see him then...

...Let us, for God sake, not die in November...

...That is not to say that I have not enjoyed his stories- quite the contrary-only that they have not aroused a craving to know more about the man...

...There is a particularly lovely note to a friend's widow written the day after his death: "There was more depth and pattern to our friendship than to any other, and I have nothing that can take its place...

...Unlike some of his colleagues at the New Yorker, he did not go for the jugular, although he could be sharp with foolishness, especially when it touched on the writer's craft...

...For the reader who responds to Thurber's skewed way of meeting an ever-confounding universe, there are pleasures here, not the least being the generous sprinkling of his cartoons, several of them quite famous...

...For instance, he wrote to Martha Deane, who had invited him to appear on her radio show: "1 should like to go on your program as Dr...

...He especially enjoyed typos that completely reversed the meaning of the original, like "Don, give up the ship," or, in a department store, "God help those who help themselves...

...Nothing here requires a reassessment of Thurber's place in American letters: the humor holds up admirably...

...Those people seem to have considered themselves legends before they entered middle age, and icons thereafter...

...In November of 1958, he wrote to E.B...

...This is the moment to confess that, for me, James Thurber does not fall into either of these categories...

...One of the harsher letters here is to a New York schoolboy, who wrote him, doubtless at the goading of a teacher, for some information for an assignment...

...In this state you are likely to fall into the orchestra pit or find yourself taking an actress to Jackson Heights in a cab...

...I think I'll go out and thurb the nasturtiums.' 'Shall we go thurbing this afternoon...

...They went to their own heads, making so much of those heady early New Yorker years that they long ago wore out any moderate interest...

...That's admirable between pals, but it doesn't do much for outsiders...

...This guy is now president of the Dog Catchers' Association...

...To another pair of young inquisitors, he responded: "You can also say that writers could get more written if they didn't have to answer so many questions about why they write...

...Photographs are for movie actors to send girls...

...Most good writers have conflicting feelings about good editors, and the fastidious pencil editing of the anonymous New Yorker workhorses was a source of both pride and exasperation to its famous contributors...

...Thurber's specialty was the short piece, but he did a successful play, The Male A nimal, and appears to have suffered some sort of trauma from its production...

...the theater seemed to him designed to drive a poor writer into hallucinations...

...By Ross Possessed," as he concedes...

...Maybe it is that having been seasoned by the years, I am able to see the relations or anti-relations between men and women more in the way that Thurber saw them...

...Well, there are some writers whose lives or times exert a fascination that their works only whet, and there are some who are irresistible in any form...

...She will praise Benchley and Perelman" Given the auspices of this collection, nobody will expect a show of warts, if any there were...

...When the dog died, she had it stuffed with its fangs showing and its eyes bloodshot, and there was a mechanism inside the thing...

...You wonder why you wrote it and have a wild intention to ask the producer to postpone it a year...

...Craft was always on Thurber's mind, even down to the despised typographical error...

...When her husband touched the dog, it not only snapped at him, but squirted water on him...

...The English, he reports, speak of this as "The Century of the Comma Mag...

...In spite of motorman's knee, as you may know, thirteen motormen escape every year from Rumania...

...Imagine, though, being buried between black borders under 248 pages of prose and advertising...

...He laments Ross' thriftiness and his literalness as an editor, but most of what Thurber had to say about the gentleman, he said in My Years With Ross...

...But who wants them...

...The few letters included from Thurber's friends do not add much to the book, but I was taken with this salutation from JohnO'Hara: "DearThurbs: By the way what does a thurber do...

...He died three years later, on November 2, and his passing was duly recorded in a magazine heavy with seasonal advertisements...

...He wrote in 1947: "The retinue of persecutors grows very large in Congress...

...I can't stand the thought of a 200-pound dowager with 48 pounds of gaudy jewelry lying upon my dead body...

...Going blind, you know.'" One of his more felicitous plays on words springs from a union of his eye troubles and the nation's political troubles...

...Thurber informs the bereaved: "A friend of mine who packed all his frustrations, regrets and dreams into the love of an English setter had an extremely wise and cunning wife...

...I hazard no guess, yet one can hardly come away from this book without admiration for Thurber's stoicism (at least in print) during his long ordeal of examinations, operations and the fading of the light...

...Unfortunately, they seek refuge in countries which have given up streetcars, so the problem is even greater than it was...

...Anyway, he had a fine time elaborating on the experience...

...I never wrote an author for his autograph or photograph in my life...

...What this country needs is a good detached retinue...

...White, for example, is positively reverential, and no doubt White reciprocated in kind...

...He wrote to Wolcott Gibbs, shortly before the production of Gibbs' own play Season in the Sun: "On the thirteenth day of rehearsal, the play suddenly makes no sense to you and does not seem to be written in English...

...Perhaps there were other letters that would show a less amiable side to Thurber, but let us trust that his editors, his widow and another old pal, have not been too protective...

...Jacob Thurberg, who has spent his life trying to find the cause and cure of motorman's knee, but admits that we are no further along than we were when the streetcar was invented...

...The fact that he kept carbons leads me to suspect that what we are enjoying here are by no means first drafts...

...The sole touch of impatience to a friend registered here, and a welcome one, appears in his condolences to a couple back in Columbus, Ohio, who were mourning the loss of a dog...

...It may simply be that I feel I have already been told too much about Thurber and his circle by writers who spent their careers in the ambience of the New Yorker of his time...

...He was a most careful worker, as these letters demonstrate...

...Thurber did not, as everyone knows, see very well...

...Perhaps there was some connection between his insights, as revealed in his inimitable line drawings of the sexes in dubious battle, and his failing sight, which failed entirely in the final years of his life...

...They celebrated each other and themselves like actors at an endless opening night party...

...It comes through strongly in letters to his friendly ophthalmologist, where he moves easily from sober concerns about saving children from eye injuries to the prospect of leaving his own troublesome orbs to science to gags such as the following: "I call this man up and his secretary says,' Dr...