Writings and Drawings

  In the early thirties all the New Yorker cartoonists had to put up for months with the havoc and bother of a new Ross apprehension. He became convinced that somebody was giving away our captions to rival magazines before they could be used. The trouble began when two similar drawings with identical captions appeared in the New Yorker and the old Life. A snowbound traveler in the Alps is taking the brandy cask from a Saint Bernard and saying, “What, no White Rock?” The line had been invented by Donald Ogden Stewart, who told it to somebody, who told it to somebody else, and thus both magazines heard about it before long. After that alarm had sounded through the offices like a somber bell in Macbeth’s castle, the originals of drawings the New Yorker bought came back to the artists with heavy strips of butcher’s paper pasted over the captions. This ruined some of the drawings, since the paper often stuck to the caption like a collie’s tongue to a frosty hitching post. A drawing of mine with the caption “What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?” got the super-secret treatment, and was obliquely described in the office records as “Woman with strange animal.” The strange animal was a hippopotamus, but the New Yorker wasn’t going to let any spy find out about that. This panic, like many another office panic, died down and was forgotten.

  If I wrote of Ross’s constant concern and kindliness about my eyes, it would embarrass him in heaven, as it would embarrass him on earth if he were still here. He was not a demonstrative man, or he thought he wasn’t, but anyone who knew him well could see through the profane bluster and gruffness that covered great solicitude for the men and women he loved when they were in peril, or in any kind of trouble. He began by taking my drawings as a joke, went through a phase in which he dismissed them as “a passing fancy, a fad of the English,” and ended up doing his darnedest, as my disability increased, to keep the drawings going by every kind of ingenious hook and crook. After I got so I could no longer see to draw, even with black grease crayon on large sheets of yellow paper, Ross began a campaign, recorded in a series of letters he wrote me, to reprint old drawings of mine with new captions. First he suggested reversing the old cuts, a simple mechanical maneuver; then, with the aid of others in the office who knew about such things, he experimented with taking figures or furniture out of one drawing and putting them in another, arriving at a dozen permutations of men, women, and dogs, chairs, bridge lamps, and framed pictures, upon which he must have spent hours of thought with his confederates in this conspiracy of consolation.

  I did think up a few new captions for old drawings, but whatever device of recomposition was used, some readers got on to it. The first publication to point out what was going on was the News Chronicle in London. The interest of the English, or some of them, in my drawings both pleased and puzzled Harold Ross. He was puzzled by Paul Nash’s enthusiasm for my scrawls, although he was delighted by Nash’s having singled me out at a luncheon in the Century Club in 1931 from the very forefront of American painters, all present and lined up for introduction to the visiting British painter and critic. He loved my story of how Nash insisted that I be put on his right (on his left was a bottle of whiskey we had snatched from a sideboard), and by the distinguished visitor’s asking a formidably bearded connoisseur of art, seated across from him, “What do you think of Milt Gross?”

  When Nash was art critic for the New Statesman and Nation in London, he once wrote a piece about American comic art in which he mentioned that I apparently began drawing without anything particular in mind, in the manner of the early drawings of the great Matisse. This remarkable and somewhat labored comparison was distorted by word of mouth until some careless columnist printed the news that Henri Matisse was an admirer of my scrawls. So it came about that in 1937, when two bold young gallery men in London put on a one-man show of my drawings, one of them telephoned Monsieur Matisse, over my dead body, to try to arrange a meeting. The poor chap came back from the phone a little pale, and stammering, “Matisse’s secretary says that Matisse never heard of Mr. Thurber or the New Yorker.” That same year a short-lived magazine called Night and Day, too imitative of the New Yorker for its own good, was published in London, and it bought and printed a series of my drawings called “The Patient,” which the New Yorker had rejected. I saw to it that Ross was immediately notified of the sale, and I sent him a copy of the magazine. That’s when he really began telling people, “Thurber’s drawings are a fad of the English, a passing fancy.” He thought that some of my drawings were funny, all right, but what really got him, I could tell from his tone and look when he first mentioned it to me, was the praise they got from Ralph Barton and Wallace Morgan when Ross asked these friends of his about them. There was one New Yorker cartoonist, perhaps one of many that felt the same way, who yelled at Ross one day during the thirties, “Why do you reject drawings of mine, and print stuff by that fifth-rate artist Thurber?”

  “Third-rate,” said Ross, coming promptly and bravely to the defense of my stature as an artist and his own reputation as an editor.

  In the last seven years of his life Ross wrote me dozens of letters and notes about my drawings. In one he said he had found out that the New Yorker had published three hundred and seven of my captioned drawings, of which one hundred and seventy-five had been printed in one or another of my books. He wanted to know if I would permit new captions by outsiders on those rearranged originals of mine. “There is a caption here on a sketch by an idea man,” he wrote me, “that it is thought might do for a re-used drawing of yours, as follows: (Two women talking) ‘Every time she tells a lie about me, I’m going to tell the truth about her.’ Now that I’ve got it on paper, it may not sound so hot, but it might do. The women in your drawings used to say some pretty batty things.” He wanted to pay me the full rate I had got for originals, but I said no on a project in which I would have no real creative part.

  The whole idea was abandoned after I told Ross that I didn’t grieve about not being able to draw any longer. “If I couldn’t write, I couldn’t breathe,” I wrote him, “but giving up drawing is only a little worse than giving up tossing cards in a hat. I once flipped in forty-one out of the whole deck, at twelve feet.” I may have been straining a point to cheer up Ross, but cheering up Ross was a good deed, like lighting a lamp.

  He was fond of two series I had drawn, “Famous Poems Illustrated” and “A New Natural History,” and here are some of the things he wrote me about them. “Why in God’s name did you stop doing the illustrated poems? There are forty million other verses in the English language, many of them unquestionably suitable for Thurber illustration.” “I hereby suggest the Blue Funk as an animal or bird in the Natural History series. Also, I suggest the Blue Streak and the Trickle, and mention the fact that you might get a few more animals out of the bones of the human skeleton.” “There might be a name for something in the Natural History series in ‘Lazy Susan,’ a flower or a butterfly, or something. Would ‘anti-macassar’ be possible? I guess not.”

  Some of his written comments on the Natural History series show the old sharpshooter at work. “The checking of the names in your Natural History series revealed that one name is a real name: there is an actual fish called the pout. You have a bird called a shriek. In real life there is a bird called a shriker and also one called a shrike. I should think the approximation here does not matter. There is a bee called a lapidary, but you have drawn an animal. You have a clock tick. There is, of course, a tick. No matter, I say. There is a bird called a ragamuffin. You have drawn a ragamuffin plant. No real conflict.” I wrote Ross that, for temperamental reasons, and such, I could draw only creatures suggested to me by my own thoughts about words, and said, “I’ve come to the end of this series, unless you want a man being generous to a fault—that is, handing a small rodent a nut. And I know you won’t want a female grouch nursing a grudge. As for the illustrated poems, they began when I sent St. Clair McKelway, from Frederick, Maryland, the Barbara Frietchie drawings, and they ended when I tried Poe’s Raven, and it turned into a common cornfield crow.”
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  In 1955 my London publishers brought out a small paperback of some forty selected drawings of mine, with a short preface. It was called A Thurber Garland and cost five shillings, or about seventy cents. That year only thirty-seven copies of it were sold, and I can hear Ross now, as I so often hear him, pacing the chalcedony halls and complaining. Perverse, unpredictable, H. W. Ross is grumbling to some uninterested angel, “What the hell’s the matter with the English? Thurber’s drawings are not a fad, or a passing fancy, they are here to stay. Don’t they know that?”

  The paragraph above is the way this installment ended when it was printed in the Atlantic Monthly. After it appeared, I got a reproachful letter from my English publishers, Hamish Hamilton, Ltd., telling me that A Thurber Garland had sold more than five thousand copies during its first year. I don’t know how I made such an appalling mistake, but it wouldn’t have surprised Ross. It wouldn’t have surprised the late Gus Kuehner, either. He was my city editor on the Columbus Evening Dispatch when I covered City Hall for that newspaper in the early 1920’s, and he once put up a kidding notice on the bulletin board announcing that I would no longer be allowed to deal with sums running into more than five figures—it now turns out it should have been four, or maybe three. As I recall it, I’d written a story in which I magnified the municipal debt by some six million dollars.

  Ross and Kuehner, incidentally, had a great deal in common. They had both started in as part office boy and part reporter when they were in their teens; they both got along well with cops; their frowns and snarls and moods were similar, and they talked the same language. One day in 1928 the phone rang in my office at the New Yorker and a voice as loud as Ross’s tried to disguise itself, with about as much success as Ross would have had. “Are they serving tea and lady fingers at the New Yorker now?” said a strong falsetto that I recognized instantly. Kuehner could never get it out of his head that the New Yorker was a fancy pants place, with thick carpets on the office floors, and editors who smoked cigarettes in long holders. He said he had been in town for a convention of newspapermen, but was on his way back to Columbus. I told him to come over so I could introduce him to Ross. “I want you to meet him,” I said. “He’s a guy like you. In some ways he is you.” Kuehner was unimpressed. “I’m taking a train in about ten minutes,” he said. “Don’t let your tea get cold. Kiss Ross for me.” And that was the last time I ever heard his voice. He died one Christmas Day in Columbus, at the age of forty-nine. If heaven were a place in which guys could get together and talk, Ross and Kuehner would have a fine time exchanging newspaper and editorial experiences and taking Thurber apart, the guy who didn’t know the difference between thirty-seven and five thousand.

  The Talk of the Town

  ONE of the already well-established rituals aboard the New Yorker when I joined its jittery crew in the wayward weather of 1927 was what skipper Harold Ross, alternately dauntless (“Don’t give up the ship!”) and despairing (“ ‘We are lost!’ the captain shouted.”) called the weekly Talk meeting. I survived hundreds of them—physically, at any rate. Named for “The Talk of the Town,” the front-of-the-book department that was Ross’s favorite and gloomiest preoccupation in the early years, the Wednesday morning meetings rambled on for anywhere from one to three hours, depending upon the mood of the master.

  When Ross’s secretary informed him that the rest of us—Katharine Angell, Andy White, Ralph Ingersoll, and I—were gathered around the table in the meeting room, Ross would saunter in, sometimes with the expression of a man who has heard an encouraging word but oftener with the worried brow of a bloodhound that is not only off the scent but is afraid it’s losing its sense of smell. (“You’re lousing up your metaphors,” I can hear Ross grumbling. “Now you got a goddam bloodhound commanding a ship.”) He would plop his briefcase on the table, sit down, sigh darkly, and open the meeting with some pronouncement, either a small fact about a big man: “William Randolph Hearst still has all his teeth,” or a derogatory comment about an institution: “Medical science doesn’t even know how to cure dandruff,” or a running broad jump to some despondent conclusion: “Maude Adams lives in town now, but I haven’t got anybody that can find out what she does and where she goes and who she sees.”

  Then the regular order of business began with a safari through the darkest regions (“Now, by god, I’m Stanley!”) of the X issue, the one that would reach the stands the following day. It never satisfied Ross, and it rarely put him in a good humor. There weren’t enough laughs in Talk, or any interesting facts; two drawings in the issue were too much alike; and “White and Thurber both mentioned novocain in their casuals. We’re getting neurotic.”

  There was always, tossed in somewhere, a brief lecture about something: the lack of journalistic sense in the female of our species, everybody’s ignorance of the rules of grammar and syntax, the wasting talent of a certain artist who was making a career of sex, or the incompetence of some doctor who was treating a friend of Ross’s. He affected a disdain for doctors and other professional men, and once when I introduced him to a great eye surgeon, he shook hands with him and said, “I have little respect for professional men.” He actually had great respect for this particular doctor, and for several others, but his rude generalization was prompted by the little boy in him, or the partly educated adult envious of specialized training and skeptical of technical knowledge, or some orneriness of mood aggravated by the peptic ulcers that bothered him during the last thirty years of his life. Alexander Woollcott explained the ungracious phase of the fabulous editor in ten words: “Ross has the utmost contempt for anything he doesn’t understand.”

  Ross had a kind of mental file of prejudices and antipathies, some momentary, others permanent, and most of them of unrevealed origin. At one Talk meeting he scrawled on a memo pad “Hate Southerners,” handed it to Ingersoll, and growled, “Keep bringing that up every week.” It was brought up every week until Nancy Hoyt wrote a sharp satirical piece about a fictional Southern girl. Ross liked and admired many Southerners, among them Laurence Stallings and Nunnally (“Where I come from the Tobacco Road people are the country club set”) Johnson. In 1926 Johnson had told Ross he would like to review motion pictures for the magazine. “For God’s sake, why?” Ross demanded. “Movies are for old ladies and fairies. Write me some pieces.” Ross had early conceived a violent dislike of movies, and hoped his cinema critic would have at them with a cudgel. His feeling was moderated somewhat after he saw Public Enemy and Viva Villa. On several visits to Hollywood he became a friend of James Cagney and Frank Capra, among others, and, a dozen of his letters prove, tried for years to interest Hollywood producers in my “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” whose film possibilities he was the first to detect.

  Ross almost never got through a Talk meeting without contriving to make Ingersoll say something to irritate him. When Ingersoll suggested a dope piece about the enormous ball that surmounts the Paramount building, Ross glared at him and snarled, “I wouldn’t print a piece about that ball if Lord Louis Mountbatten were living in it.” On another Wednesday, when Ingersoll told him, “I have the stuff you wanted on Thaw,” Ross’s eyes brightened darkly. Ingersoll always pronounced Thaw as if it were Thor, and Ross knew this, but he said, “I don’t want a piece about Thor, or Mercury, or any of the other Greek gods.” Ingersoll was the main target of his gripes, and I was next. “There isn’t a single laugh in the Talk of the Town,” he snapped one day, and I snapped back, “You say that every week,” and he snarled, “Well, there are even fewer this time.” Ross was not Ross until he had churned the hour, any hour, into a froth of complaint and challenge, and this was part of the inexhaustible, propulsive force of the magazine. I took up the challenge about Maude Adams, and a few days later laid on his desk her private phone number and enough data on her goings and doings for two separate pieces in “Talk of the Town.” Ross stared at the stuff as if it had been dug up by a little child, and all he said was, “Well, I’ll be damned!” It was a long time before h
e accepted me as a dependable reporter, but I was used to this because I had had the same experience of trial by ordeal with three different city editors of newspapers.

  Russell Maloney, who took over from me in 1935 the task of writing most of Talk, once wrote in the Saturday Review that Harold Ross regarded perfection as his personal property, like his hat or his watch. This observation could be carried further without straining its soundness. In the first few years of his magazine Ross sometimes had as many as three men, in separate offices, writing pieces for Talk, each one unaware of the competition of the others. Most of them “went out like matches in the wind of Ross’s scorn,” as Ralph Ingersoll once put it. When the editor of the New Yorker became convinced that writers did not possess the perfection that was rightfully coming to him, out they went. Even when he decided that a writer probably did have his perfection, he liked to believe the fellow would never come across with it. He always hoped he would find perfection lying on his desk when he came to work, but he was pretty sure there would be no such luck.

  Fifteen years ago I brought him a sheaf of some miscellaneous writings by Peter De Vries, whom I had met in Chicago, where he was then editor of Poetry, and told Ross I had found a perfect New Yorker writer. He stared at the material glumly, and said, “I’ll read it, but it won’t be funny and it won’t be well written.” Two hours later he called me into his office. Hope had risen like a full moon and shone in his face. “How can I get DeVree on the phone?” he demanded, his enthusiasm touched with excitement. Not many days after that Ross and I had lunch at the Algonquin with Peter DeVree—the name had become wedged in Ross’s mind as French, not Dutch, and he was sure the sibilant should go unsounded, as in debris, and he never got it straightened out. I had warned Pete, since I was a veteran of such first meetings, that Ross’s opening question might go off in any direction, like an unguided missile. “Hi, DeVree,” said Ross as they shook hands. “Could you do the Race Track department?” This was the kind of irrelevancy I had in mind, and Pete was prepared for it. “No,” he said, “but I can imitate a wounded gorilla.” He had once imitated a wounded gorilla on a radio program in Chicago. Ross glared at me, realizing I had briefed De Vries, and then his slow lasting grin spread over his face. “Well, don’t imitate it around the office,” he growled amiably. “The place is a zoo the way it is.” Thirty years ago Ross would probably have opened up on De Vries with “Maybe you could run the magazine” or “Could you write the Talk department?”