Writings and Drawings

  I never saw the editor of the New Yorker get more enjoyment out of anything than he derived from a Gluyas Williams full page showing a board meeting room in which all the chairs at the long table are empty while the chairman and the members of the board are crouched in a football huddle in one corner of the office. That one lingered lovingly in his memory along with the famous Williams drawing of the day a cake of Ivory soap sank at Procter & Gamble’s, and the picture captioned “Oops, sorry,” in which one trapeze artist misses the outstretched hands of another, high in the air—the work of George V. Shanks. There were hundreds of others, too, but I haven’t got all year.

  A magazine that has published nearly twenty thousand drawings was bound to run into repetitions and formulas years ago, and they formed another nightmare for Ross. There were too goddam many men and women on rafts and on desert islands, and too many talking animals, and too many guys in a jail cell—on and on the calendar of formula ran. I once made a series of drawings especially for Ross about the trials and tortures of the art meeting. One showed the scowling Ross himself shoving a drawing at a timid office employee and snarling, “Is that funny?” He was a great man for what he called the outside opinion, and sometimes sent a questionnaire to five or six of us on which we were to say yes or no about a drawing, or a casual, or a poem. Two of the other art meeting drawings I did for Ross (“You tease him too much,” my mother once told me sternly. “You shouldn’t tease him so much.”) showed, respectively, an old woman asking for a cup of cold water at a storage dam, and the same old woman asking a fireman for a match at a great conflagration. The editor had the drawings framed and hung on the walls of his office to remind him of the threat of formula. That was Harold Ross. He could not only take a joke at his own expense, he could perpetuate it. Not long before he died, I discovered, in going through my scrapbook of drawings in the office library, that I had drawn one with the caption “The magic has gone out of my marriage—has the magic gone out of your marriage?” and another with “Well, who made the magic go out of our marriage—me or you?” I sent tear sheets of the two drawings to Ross, and he sent me a note that read, “Well, who’s responsible for the magic going out of your marriage twice—you or me?”

  It would not have surprised Ross if the sanity had gone out of any artist at the very moment he was saying good morning to the editor. Ross regarded writers as temperamental mechanisms, capable of strange behavior, and artists were just as bad, or even worse. Complexes, fixations, psychological blocks, and other aberrations of the creative mind had him always on the alert. “They have sinking spells,” he would say. “They can’t ride on trains, or drive after dark, or live above the first floor of a building, or eat clams, or stay alone all night. They think automobiles are coming up on the sidewalk to get them, that gangsters are on their trail, that their apartments are being cased, and God knows what else.” This dissertation, with variations, always gave Ross his saddest look and his darkest sigh. After one of these enumerations of his woes, he and I had lunch at the Algonquin. It was in the years when I could see, and I suddenly stared blankly at the bill of fare as if I had never seen one before, got slowly to my feet, and began trembling. I tried to turn pale, too, but I doubt if I managed that. Ross’s alarm bell rang. “Are you all right?” he demanded nervously. I kept on staring at the bill of fare. “What the hell is this thing?” I croaked.

  “It’s the goddam menu,” Ross said, and then he got it. “Don’t do that to me, Thurber,” he pleaded. “Too many people I know are really ready for the bughouse.” That was his invariable word for rest home, sanitarium, and such.

  For Ross’s developed taste and sense of humor in selecting cover art and idea drawings I have a firm and lasting respect. Sitting and staring at a hundred pictures, one after the other, week after week, can become a tedious process that dulls perception, but Ross’s eager, unflagging desire to get the best and the funniest kept a sharp edge on his appreciation. Picking drawings at a lengthy meeting is somehow comparable to producing a play. You’re not going to know for sure whether something is good until the readers or the audience see it in print or on the stage.

  One afternoon in the winter of 1928, when I was sharing an office with White, Andy interrupted my typing to ask my opinion of a caption he had just worked out for a drawing. He was a little solemn about it, and clearly uncertain that he had hit on the right idea. I looked at the drawing and the caption and said, “Yeh, it seems okay to me,” but neither of us cracked a smile. This drawing, by Carl Rose, appeared in the issue of December 8, 1928, and it carried one of the most famous and laughed-at captions in the history of the magazine, the one in which the mother says, “It’s broccoli, dear,” and the little child replies, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.” The youngster’s expression of distaste was to become a part of the American language. A song was written about it called “I Say It’s Spinach,” it has been mentioned in hundreds of editorials and newspaper columns, and it was worked into the title of a book by Elizabeth Hawes, which I illustrated, called Fashion Is Spinach. (In An American Dictionary of Slang the definition of the word “spinach” as “nonsense or bunk” is attributed to J. P. McEvoy, who used it in his book, Hollywood Girl, in 1929.)

  The experience of that winter afternoon so long ago, when Andy tossed the famous caption up for grabs and both of us darn near let it fall, served to moderate my disappointment whenever a caption drawing of mine was later turned down, or bought without comment, as a matter of routine. I suppose the best known of my own scrawls is the one of the seal on the headboard of a bed in which a wife is snarling at her husband, “All right, have it your way—you heard a seal bark.” I hadn’t thought enough of it to show it to anybody before submitting it, and I was as surprised as I was delighted when its appearance in the magazine in January, 1932, brought me a truly ecstatic telegram from Bob Benchley, than whom there was nobody whose praise a cartoonist or humorist would rather have had. I gave him the original of the drawing, and named my first book of pictures The Seal in the Bedroom because of what he had said.

  The incredulous eye of Harold Wallace Ross fell for the first time upon a drawing of mine in the spring of that troubled year 1929. For years I had been scrawling drawings on pieces of yellow copy paper and throwing them on the floor or leaving them on my desk. I began drawing at seven, mostly what seemed to be dogs, and carried the practice into the years of so-called maturity, getting a lot of good, clean, childish fun out of filling up all the pages of memo pads on the office desks of busy friends of mine, seeking to drive them crazy. Ingersoll recalls that he was a frequent victim of the ubiquitous dogs when he tried to find a blank page to write down an address or a phone number, but he maintained his reason like a veteran of the artillery of infantilism. After all, he had gone through worse than dogs with Ross.

  It was White who got the mad impetuous idea that my scrawls should be published and, what is more, paid for with money. I didn’t think he could make it. It is true that, a dozen years earlier, I had filled up a lot of space with dogs and an improbable species of human being in the Ohio State Sun-Dial, but I was its editor-in-chief then (one of my predecessors was Gardner Rea, a New Yorker artist since its first issue), and nothing could be done to stop me. Some of the Sun-Dial drawings were about the same as those I had done when I was seven and the ones I did for the New Yorker, but others were elaborate arrangements of solid black and crosshatching. When White caught me trying this same style again one day, he spoke a sound word of warning that has gained a small deserved fame: “Don’t do that. If you ever got good you’d be mediocre.”

  One spring day in 1929 I had done, in approximately thirteen seconds, a pencil sketch on yellow copy paper of a seal on a rock staring at two tiny distant specks and saying, “Hm, explorers.” White inked it in, a task for which rough tremor disqualified me, and sent it to the art meeting. Anything that had the strong backing of Andy White was likely to impress Ross, who had bought and printed the year before my first seri
ous casual, a thing called “Menaces in May,” only after getting White’s favorable opinion on it. I don’t know what Ross said upon first gazing at a Thurber drawing, but he probably dismissed it lightly as a gag, a single buzzing fly that one could swat and then there wouldn’t be any more. Rea Irvin drew a picture of a seal’s head on the same paper with my seal and wrote under it, “This is the way a seal’s whiskers go.” Promptly the following Tuesday White sent the drawing back to the meeting with a note attached that read, “This is the way a Thurber seal’s whiskers go.” It came back again, this time without a word. As the weeks went on, White kept inking in and sending on other drawings of mine, and they were all rejected. All that Ross ever said during this preliminary skirmishing was a gruff “How the hell did you get the idea you could draw?”

  Soon Andy and I began writing Is Sex Necessary?, for which he insisted that I do the illustrations. We finished the book in the late summer and sent it to Harper’s, who had published White’s book of verses, The Lady Is Cold. Then one day we called on the publishers with a big sheaf of my drawings. White laid them out on the floor, and three bewildered Harpermen stared at them in dismay, probably murmuring to themselves, “God, how we pity us.” One of them finally found his voice. “I gather these are a rough idea of the kind of illustrations you want some artist to do?” he said. White was firm. “These are the drawings that go into the book,” he said. There was a lot of jabber then about sales ceilings, the temper of the time, reader resistance, and the like, but the drawings went into the book, and the book was a success, and Ross kept hearing about it and about the drawings. He was mightily disturbed. Something created in his own office, something he had had first shot at, had been printed by a publisher, a species of freak with whom Ross never ceased to do battle. He came into my office, looking bleak. “Where’s that goddam seal drawing, Thurber?” he demanded. “The one White sent to the art meeting a few months ago.” I told him that he had rejected it and I had thrown it away. “Well, don’t throw things away just because I reject them!” he yelled. “Do it over again.” I didn’t do it over again for two years, although he kept at me.

  The first drawings of mine to appear in the New Yorker were of animals, illustrating a 1930 series called “Our Own Pet Department.” In one of these, incidentally, a drawing of a horse’s head with antlers strapped to it, the horse’s teeth had been put in by a girl friend of mine. Everybody took liberties with my drawings. In one of them, showing a man and his wife and another woman at a table, a charming editrix blacked in the other woman’s shoes with India ink to make it clear to readers that the designing minx was playing footy-footy with the husband. The startled husband, strained and bolt upright in his chair, had drawn from his wife the line, “What’s come over you suddenly?” Benchley, always a kind of jealous guardian of my art, such as it was, was annoyed by this monstrosity of explicitness, and said so to Ross. My goddam drawings were beginning to close in on Ross. Now he had something new to fret and fuss about, something he had never dreamed God would let happen to him.

  It wasn’t until January, 1931, that I sent another idea drawing to the New Yorker’s art meeting. I had begun drawing straight away in India ink, without pencil foundation. Ross bought the drawing and asked for more. This was easy, since I could do a hundred in one week end, but I usually submitted only two or three at a time. (In 1939 I did all the drawings for The Last Flower between dinner and bedtime one evening, but spared Ross this flux of pictures, because I didn’t want to be responsible for his having a seizure of some kind.) He still kept pestering me about the seal drawing, and one evening in December, 1931, I tried to recapture it on the typewriter paper I always used. The seal was all right, atypical whiskers and all, but the rock looked more like the head of a bed, so I turned it into a bed, and put the man and his wife in it, with the caption Benchley so generously wired me about. With its purchase and printing in the magazine, I became an established New Yorker artist, still to Ross’s mixed bewilderment and discomfiture.

  He never asked me if the couples I put in beds were married, but some of the drawings aroused his best Sunday alarm or perplexity. There was the one known around the office as “The Lady on the Bookcase,” a nude female figure on all fours, about whom a man is saying to a visitor, “That’s my first wife up there,” and adding, “and this is the present Mrs. Harris.” I have often told about what happened when that hit Ross squarely between his fretful editorial eyes. He telephoned me in the country to say, “Is the woman on the bookcase alive, or stuffed, or just dead?” I told him I would give the matter my gravest consideration and call him back, and I did. “She has to be alive,” I told him. “My doctor says a dead woman couldn’t support herself on all fours, and my taxidermist says you can’t stuff a woman.” He thought about it for a few seconds and then roared into the phone, “Then, goddam it, what’s she doing naked in the house of her former husband and his second wife?” I told him he had me there, and that I wasn’t responsible for the behavior of the people I drew. Just the other day I turned up a note of amplification that I had sent to him. In it I explained that I had tried to draw a wife waiting for her husband at the top of a flight of stairs, but had got the perspective all wrong and suddenly found I had a woman on a bookcase. This led naturally, I said, to the unnatural domestic situation I had drawn. “Thurber’s crazy,” Ross told someone later, but it wasn’t the first time he had so diagnosed my condition.

  There was another drawing that set off a memorable display of fireworks between the editor and me. It showed three hound dogs in the window of a petshop, one of them, sitting between the other two, having unusually sad eyes and gentle expression. A would-be woman purchaser is talking to the proprietor of the store, who is saying, “I’m very sorry, madam, but the one in the middle is stuffed, poor fellow.”

  “I don’t think they have stuffed dogs in pet shops,” Ross said. “Not in the show window, anyway.”

  “This shop has one in the show window,” I said stubbornly.

  “You have me there,” Ross growled. Then I got into deeper difficulty. “It’s a variant of that old story about the three men on the subway train late at night,” I said. “They were sitting across from a fourth man, who is left alone on the train with the three others after still a fifth passenger hands him a note and gets off at the next stop. The note says, ‘The man in the middle is dead.’ ” I never saw Ross look unhappier about anything. He said so much then, in such a splutter, that it doesn’t come back to me coherently now. “I’ll send that drawing in to every art meeting until it’s bought and printed,” I told him. I think it was bought on its third resubmission. Some of my drawings were held up much longer than that, and one night I got into Ross’s office with a passkey, faked his R on three drawings I especially liked, and sent them through the works the next day. Nothing was ever said about that, but for weeks I expected all hell to break loose.

  Ross’s tormented forehead was always in creases of worry about some art problem. When, early on, he had decided to put captions in italics—bang! there was the problem of what to do about emphasizing words and phrases that needed it. Clearly they would have to be set up in roman, thus reversing an ancient convention, and Ross was not fond of being the first by whom the new idea is tried. Several times I tried to sell him the idea of romanizing only part of an emphasized word, on the ground that Americans, particularly females, often do that; a case in point is the caption I sent in (my last one, I think) for which Whitney Darrow did the drawing, an ardent girl saying to her gloomily intellectual young man, “When you say you hate your own species, do you mean everybody?” Actually, it seemed to my ear, our young ladies stress only the “ev” in that word, but this was the kind of hybrid that would have driven Ross into a new ulcer.

  Since the great warrior was a worshiper of the gods of Clarity and Explicitness, that devotion sometimes led him into overelaboration of captions. I remember an early Arno of a husband and wife arguing en boudoir, the wife saying, “And after I’ve gi
ven you the best years of my life,” and the husband snapping back, “Yes, and who made them the best years?” The point would be sharper if only the husband’s speech were used, and Ross soon gave up dialogue for monologue in most captions. He could torture single lines, though, as in the case of a Hokinson dowager complaining to her pampered Pomeranian, couchant on a soft cushion in his cage at a dog show, “I’m the one that should be lying down.” The caption had come in that way, but Ross changed it to “I’m the one that should be lying down somewhere,” so readers wouldn’t get the idea the dog’s owner wanted to climb in and lie down on its cushion. I made my own mistakes in the same area, too, once drawing a tipsy gentleman, fallen prone at the feet of a seated lady and saying, “This is not the real me you’re seeing, Miss Spencer.” It should, of course, have been simply, “This is not the real me.”

  The editor was also often on the edge of panic about suspected double entendre, and after thirty-one years I recall his concern about an Arno drawing of one of his elderly gentlemen of the old school dancing with a warmly clinging young lady and saying “Good God, woman, think of the social structure!” Ross was really afraid that “social structure” could be interpreted to mean a certain distressing sexual phenomenon of human anatomy. He brought this worry to me, pointing out that “social diseases” means sexual diseases, but I succeeded in quieting his fears, and the caption ran unchanged. He was wary of fatality in drawings, sharing Paul Nash’s conviction that “not even Americans can make death funny,” and when Carl Rose, in 1932, submitted a picture of a fencer cutting off his opponent’s head and crying “Touché!” Ross thought it was too bloody and gruesome, and asked Rose to let me have a swing at it, because “Thurber’s people have no blood. You can put their heads back on and they’re as good as new.” It worked out that way. Nobody was horrified.