Writings and Drawings

  When I looked up “dogger” the other day, I decided to have a look at “dog,” a word practically nobody ever looks up, because everybody is smugly confident that he knows what a dog is. Here, for your amazement, are some dogs other than the carnivorous mammal:

  The hammer in a gunlock. Any of various devices, usually of simple design, for holding, gripping, or fastening something; as: a Any of various devices consisting essentially of a spike, rod, or bar of metal, as of iron, with a ring, hook, claw, lug, or the like, at the end, used for gripping, clutching, or holding something, as by driving or embedding it in the object, hooking it to the object, etc. See RAFT DOG, TOE DOG. b Specif., either of the hooks or claws of a pair of sling dogs. See CRAMPON. c An iron for holding wood in a fireplace; a firedog; an andiron. d In a lathe, a clamp for gripping the piece of work and for communicating motion to it from the faceplate. A clamp dog consists of two parts drawn together by screws. A bent-tail dog has an L-shaped projection that enters a slot in the faceplate for communicating motion. A straight-tail dog has a projecting part that engages with a stud fastened to or forming part of the faceplate. A safety dog is one equipped with safety setscrews. e Any of the jaws in a lathe chuck. f A pair of nippers or forceps. g A wheeled gripping device for drawing the fillet from which coin blanks are stamped through the opening at the head of the drawbench. h Any of a set of adjusting screws for the bed tool of a punching machine. i A grapple for clutching and raising a pile-driver monkey or a well-boring tool. j A stop or detent; a click or ratchet. k A drag for the wheel of a vehicle. l A steel block attached to a locking bar or tappet of an interlocking machine, by which locking between bars is accomplished. m A short, heavy, sharp-pointed, steel hook with a ring at one end. n A steel toothlike projection on a log carriage or on the endless chain that conveys logs into the sawmill.

  And now, unless you have had enough, we will get back to Superghosts, through the clanging and clatter of all those dogs. The game has a major handicap, or perhaps I should call it blockage. A player rarely gets the chance to stick the others with a truly tough word, because someone is pretty sure to simplify the word under construction. Mitchell tells me that he always hopes he can get around to “ug-ug” or “ach-ach” on his way to “plug-ugly” and “stomach-ache.” These words are hyphenated in my Webster’s, for the old boy was a great hyphenator. (I like his definition of “plug-ugly”: “A kind of city rowdy, ruffian, or disorderly tough;—a term said to have been originated by a gang of such in Baltimore.”) In the case of “ug,” the simplifiers usually go to “bug,” trying to catch someone with “buggies,” or they add an “l” and the word ends in “ugliness.” And “ach” often turns into “machinery,” although it could go in half a dozen directions. Since the simplifiers dull the game by getting into easy words, the experts are fond of a variant that goes like this: Mitchell, for example, will call up a friend and say, “Get out of ‘ightf’ twenty ways.” Well, I tossed in bed one night and got ten: “rightful,” “frightful,” “delightful,” “nightfall,” “lightfoot,” “straightforward,” “eightfold,” “lightfingered,” “tight-fisted,” and “tight-fitting.” The next day, I thought of “light-face,” “right-footed,” and “night-flowering,” and came to a stop. “Right fielder” is neither compounded nor hyphenated by Webster, and I began to wonder about Mitchell’s twenty “ightf”s. I finally figured it out. The old devil was familiar with the ten or more fish and fowl and miscellaneous things that begin with “nightf.”

  It must have been about 1932 that an old player I know figured that nothing could be got out of “dke” except “handkerchief,” and then, in a noisy game one night this year, he passed that combination on to the player at his left. This rascal immediately made it “dkee.” He was challenged by the lady on his left and triumphantly announced that his word was “groundkeeper.” It looked like an ingenious escape from “handkerchief,” but old Webster let the fellow down. Webster accepts only “groundman” and “groundsman,” thus implying that there is no such word as “groundkeeper.”

  Mitchell threw “abc” at me one night, and I couldn’t get anything out of it and challenged him. “Dabchick,” he said patronizingly, and added blandly, “It is the little grebe.” Needless to say, it is the little grebe.

  I went through a hundred permutations in bed that night without getting anything else out of “abc” except a word I made up, which is “grabcheck,” one who quickly picks up a tab, a big spender, a generous fellow. I have invented quite a few other words, too, which I modestly bring to the attention of modern lexicographers, if there are any. I think of dictionary-makers as being rigidly conventional gentlemen who are the first to put the new aside. They probably won’t even read my list of what I shall call bedwords, but I am going to set it down anyway. A young matron in Bermuda last spring told me to see what I could do with “sgra,” and what I did with it occupied a whole weekend. Outside of “disgrace” and its variants, all I could find were “cross-grained” and “misgraff,” which means to misgraft (obsolete). I found this last word while looking, in vain, for “misgrade” in the dictionary. Maybe you can think of something else, and I wish you luck. Here, then, in no special order, are my bedwords based on “sgra.”

  pussgrapple. A bickering, or minor disturbance; an argument or dispute among effeminate men. Also, less frequently, a physical struggle between, or among, women.

  kissgranny. 1. A man who seeks the company of older women, especially older women with money; a designing fellow, a fortune hunter. 2. An overaffectionate old woman, a hugmoppet, a bunnytalker.

  glassgrabber. 1. A woman who disapproves of, or interferes with, her husband’s drinking; a kill-joy, a shush-laugh, a douselight. 2. A man who asks for another drink at a friend’s house, or goes out and gets one in the kitchen.

  blessgravy. A minister or cleric; the head of a family; one who says grace. Not to be confused with praisegravy, one who extols a woman’s cooking, especially the cooking of a friend’s wife; a gay fellow, a flirt, a seducer. Colloq., a breakvow, a shrugholy.

  cussgravy. A husband who complains of his wife’s cooking, more especially a husband who complains of his wife’s cooking in the presence of guests; an ill-tempered fellow, a curmudgeon. Also, sometimes, a peptic-ulcer case.

  messgranter. An untidy housekeeper, a careless housewife. Said of a woman who admits, often proudly, that she has let herself go; a bragdowdy, a frumpess.

  hissgrammar. An illiterate fellow, a user of slovenly rhetoric, a father who disapproves of booklearning. Also, more rarely, one who lisps, a twisttongue.

  chorusgrable. Orig. a young actress, overconfident of her ability and her future; a snippet, a flappertigibbet. Deriv. Betty Grable, an American movie actress.

  pressgrape. One who presses grapes, a grape presser. Less commonly, a crunchberry.

  pressgrain. 1. A man who tries to make whiskey in his own cellar; hence, a secret drinker, a hidebottle, a sneakslug. 2. One who presses grain in a grain presser. Arch.

  dressgrader. A woman who stares another woman up and down, a starefrock; hence, a rude female, a hobbledehoyden.

  fussgrape. 1. One who diets or toys with his food, a light eater, a person without appetite, a scornmuffin, a shuncabbage. 2. A man, usually American, who boasts of his knowledge of wines, a smugbottle.

  bassgrave. 1. Cold-eyed, unemotional, stolid, troutsolemn. 2. The grave of a bass. Obs.

  lassgraphic. Of, or pertaining to, the vivid description of females; as, the guest was so lassgraphic his host asked him to change the subject or get out. Also said of fathers of daughters, more rarely of mothers.

  blissgray. Aged by marriage. Also, sometimes, discouraged by wedlock, or by the institution of marriage.

  glassgrail. A large nocturnal moth. Not to be confused with smackwindow, the common June bug, or bangsash.

  hossgrace. Innate or native dignity, similar to that of the thoroughbred hoss. Southern U.S.

  bussgranite. Literally, a stonekisser; a man who persists in
trying to win the favor or attention of cold, indifferent, or capricious women. Not to be confused with snatchkiss, a kitchen lover.

  tossgravel. 1. A male human being who tosses gravel, usually at night, at the window of a female human being’s bedroom, usually that of a young virgin; hence, a lover, a male sweetheart, and an eloper. 2. One who is suspected by the father of a daughter of planning an elopement with her, a grablass.

  If you should ever get into a game of Superghosts with Mitchell, by the way, don’t pass “bugl” on to him, hoping to send him into “bugling.” He will simply add an “o,” making the group “buglo,” which is five-sevenths of “bugloss.” The word means “hawkweed,” and you can see what Mitchell would do if you handed him “awkw,” expecting to make him continue the spelling of “awkward.” Tough guy, Mitchell. Tough game, Superghosts. You take it from here. I’m tired.

  A Final Note on Chanda Bell

  (AFTER READING TWO OR THREE LITERARY MEMORIALS, TO THIS OR THAT LAMENTED TALENT, WRITTEN BY ONE CRITIC OR ANOTHER)

  THERE WERE only three of us around Chanda Bell at the end: Charles Vayne, her attorney; Hadley, the butler (if he was a butler); and myself. The others had departed with the beginning of the war, to new dedications, or old hideouts, and the obituaries in the journals after Miss Bell’s death were erroneous in claiming that the great, dark house in the East Sixties was, up to the very last, bedlam and carnival. Chanda Bell’s famous largess and laissez-faire had, naturally enough, attracted the strange and the sublimated from the nooks and crannies of Greenwich Village. I had been particularly pleased to witness the going away of the middle-aged man who rode the tricycle, the schoolteacher who had resigned from the human race to become a bird, and Miss Menta, the disturbingly nude Chilean transcendentalist.

  Charles Vayne, as regular and as futile as a clock in an empty house, showed up once a week with important documents that Chanda Bell would never sign. Some of them were dated as far back as 1924. A year of my friendship with the gifted lady had passed (so long ago!) before I could be sure that I knew what she was trying not to say, but Vayne never knew. Her use of the triple negative, in such expressions as “not unmeaningless,” and her habit of starting sentences in the middle bewildered him, and so did her fondness for surrogate words with ambiguous meanings, like the words in dreams: “rupture” for “rapture,” “centaur” for “sender,” “pressure” for “pleasure,” and “scorpio” for “scrofula.” She enjoyed frustrating him, and she made the most of his discomfiture. “Praise me!” she would say as he handed her a fountain pen and the documents, which she always waved away. “Praise me!” she would command again. He invariably reacted the same way. It had become a kind of ritual. “I repeat that I have not read a novel all the way through since ‘The Crimson Sweater,’ by Ralph Henry Barbour,” he would say. His expostulations and his entreaties amused her for a while, but then she would poke at him with her cane and drive him off, crying, “He comes without armor who comes without art!”

  Hadley, who ushered the attorney in and out every Wednesday afternoon, had one cold, impassive eye and one that he could cause to twinkle. It gave you the chill sense of being, at one and the same time, in the presence of advocate and adversary. His duties in the final months were sparse, consisting mainly of serving Madeira to Chanda Bell and me, or to Chanda Bell and Vayne and me, in the Gray Room, after four o’clock, when she had had her egg and had dressed and was ready to receive. One always stood in her presence, for it was Chanda Bell’s conceit to believe that only the uncomfortable are capable of pure attention.

  Chanda Bell was fifty-seven when I first bent over her hand, and her mind seemed so keen and agile it was difficult to believe that she could confuse her guests, even her intimates, with one another. But she did. Charles Vayne was sometimes Lord Rudgate, an Englishman of dim background and cryptic reference, and sometimes Strephon (“a Jung mad I cussed in the Sprig”). I was alternately Dennis, a deceased painter, who had specialized in gun dogs for the calendars of coal companies, and one McKinnon or McKenyon, an advertising executive, who had attempted to deflower Miss Bell in a speeding motorboat during the panic of 1907. This was highly exasperating to such scholarly critics as Hudson van Horne and Dantes Woodrow, and they never came back after their separate agonized hours in the underwater gloom of the echoing Gray Room.

  It is not congenial to me, at this time, to expose in detail how I became lost—if lost I became—in the “brilliant wilderness” of Chanda Bell’s prose, or to reënact the process of equation, synthesis, and integration by means of which I was able to reveal the subtle affirmation compounded of the double negative of her unmeaning and her unmethod. This was ably—if mistakenly, still ably—set forth in my “A Note on Chanda Bell.”* Upon its publication, she had sent for me, and in the fine years of intellectual intimacy that followed, my faith in her genius was more often reinforced than not. It wasn’t until the last few months, when, by design or aberration, she began to discuss herself, between teatime and twilight, as if she were discussing someone else, that the blackest of a critic’s ravens, uncertainty of his soundness, came to dwell in my consciousness. It is a terrible thing not to be sure whether one has sought or been sought, not to be able to tell the hunter from the quarry, the sanctuary from the trap.

  Chanda Bell had, in fact, commanded me to her salon, but had I not asked for it, had I not commanded the command, by the tribute of my unique and penetrating analysis of her work? She had cause to be grateful, and her summoning me to her side was, in my early opinion, the most natural of acts. Careless and churlish critics, in malice or mischief, had dismissed her bright and tangled intention with such expressions as “bloom and drool,” “the amorphous richness of a thrown pie,” “as dull as Daiquiris with the commodore of a yacht club,” and “as far to the Right as a soupspoon.” This last was the sheerest nonsense. One might as reasonably have said that she was as far to the Left as a fish fork. The closest she ever came to mentioning politics was one day when, in a rare moment of merriment, she referred to Karl Marx as “Groucho.” I myself had heard the faint and special obbligato of elfin horns in her work and the laughter in the dusty house, and I alone had seen the swift and single flashing of a naked nymph by moonlight.

  It is hard to mark the hour and day when the thunderhead of suspicion first stains the clear horizon of an old admiration, but I came to be drenched, in the horrid mental weather of last autumn, by the downpour of a million doubts and dreads of Chanda Bell. I began to fear that she had perpetrated, in her half-dozen dense, tortured novels, one of the major literary hoaxes of our time, and to suspect that she had drawn me into the glittering web of a monstrous deceit, in order to destroy, by proxy and in effigy, the entire critical profession. We would sit in the Gray Room from four till dark—she had permitted me to sit, at last, with the compassionate concession of a queen—and she would pierce my thin armor of hope and prayer with sharp and studied flicks of her sardonic, allusive intelligence. “You have the scaffold touch of a brain certain,” she told me one afternoon. This was in the best tradition of her infernal dialectic. I could figure, in accordance with her secret code, that I had the scalpel touch of a brain surgeon, or I could take her to mean, in perverted literalness, that I was doomed to die—and was about to—an awful death for my wrong and sinful certainties.

  “You have found the figure, Thurber,” she told me one afternoon, “but have you found the carpet?” This was accompanied by her shrewd, tiny smile. I could not determine whether she meant there was something to find that I had not found, or nothing to find at all, beneath the gleaming surface of her style. The devil of it was that I could not be sure of anything. I spent that night going over “The Huanted Yatch” with a fine-tooth comb, searching for esoteric anagrams, feeling for what she had called “the carpet.” I scrutinized, investigated, explored, took apart, and put back together again the entire fibre and fabric, uncertain of what shape and texture I was looking for. I read the thing backward, and I even tried to re
ad it upside down and in the mirror of my bureau. I copied out one disturbing sentence and carried it about with me for close study: “Icing mellow moony on a postgate doves snow and love surrender.” Its once perspicuous feel-meaning deserted me, and its cool loveliness became the chatter of a gibbon in my distraught consciousness. I could no longer tell whether it was beauty or balderdash. If it was balderdash, the book degenerated into the vivid cackling of a macaw, and my critique stood as a monument to a fatuous gullibility.

  Toward the end, Chanda Bell began to talk about herself in the third person, as if she were not there in the house but on her way to visit us. “I’ve asked her to tea,” she would tell me, “but it will not astonish me if she fails to appear. Nobody has ever been able to pin her down.” And she would study the effect of this upon me with her hooded gaze. She had lapsed into simple, declarative sentences, and this was a comfort, but I was deeply perturbed by the feeling that her outlandish fantasy and her revelations were new and planned inventions of her cruelty.

  “Chanda Bell,” she said one evening, “had an allowance of two hundred dollars a week while she was still in pigtails. Her father, the millionaire industrialist, doted on the awkward, big-eyed little girl. He would bring her curtsying into the library for his cronies to admire. ‘By God, she’ll be the first woman president of Standard Oil!’ he exclaimed one night. He had a stroke when he discovered that she proposed to become a writer. ‘By God!’ he roared. ‘I would sooner see you operate an unsuccessful house of ill repute!’ At fourteen, a dreadful thing occurred. The small son of one of her father’s gardeners sold two poems to the Atlantic Monthly, entitled ‘Ruffian Dusk’ and ‘The Strangler of Light.’ Chanda offered him fifty dollars a week to write poems that she should sign and publish. The little boy coldly rejected the proposition, and his father, a stern Presbyterian, informed Chanda’s father of the deal and how it had fallen through. ‘By God!’ the old man roared. ‘At least she’s not guilty of integrity, and that’s more than I can say for any Bell in four generations except my grandfather and myself.’ ”