The secret life of James Thurber

“It is 104 here today,” James Thurber wrote to a friend from Hollywood in 1939, “but the papers in this godawful hellhole proclaim ‘Angelenos Suffer no Discomfort.’ That would be too bad. I hope the sons of bitches burn up.”

What could be more refreshing than a Great East Coast Literary Figure draining his spleen beneath the remunerative palms? There are a number of delicious L.A. moments in this door-stopper collection of Thurber’s letters. My favorite: “Jack Warner wanted to know yesterday if I was any relation to Edna Ferber -- was I her husband? I spelled my name and then pronounced it. Zane Ferber? he said. Any relation to Zane Grey?”

A few years later, Thurber was back in town, as a consultant so that he could watch from the sidelines as the Goldwyn studio ruined his classic short story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” After the ordeal was over, Thurber wrote, “My defeat was complete.” Years later he wrote to Fred Allen that the legendary Harold Ross, who had hired Thurber to work at the New Yorker, “shared Sam Goldwyn’s belief that Wuthering Heights was something that wuthers.”

Thurber was born in 1894 and died in 1961. He left some 24 books, notably “A Thurber Carnival,” a multitude of drawings of soulful dogs, improbable seals and formidable wives lurking like gargoyles on top of dressers and of course a passel of New Yorker cartoons that are still quoted every day. (“It’s a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.”)

He was prolific up to the end, heroically so, beset by various medical afflictions, not the least of which was near-total blindness from the early 1940s onward. One of his last projects was a series of articles about Ross for the Atlantic Monthly that was eventually published in book form as “The Years With Ross,” still in print and for my money still the book to read about the New Yorker founder. Those articles eventually ruined his decades-long friendship with Katherine and E.B. White; he credits the latter in several of these letters as having been his literary mentor. (And not only literary: “Andy White once came upon me trying to shade in a drawing and said, ‘Don’t do that. If you ever became good, you would be mediocre.’ ”)

Amid all this output, Thurber also wrote letters, a thousand or more a year, and here they practically all are, an epistolary autobiography. At the age of 26, he wrote in jest to his chum Elliott Nugent, with whom he eventually wrote the successful play “The Male Animal”: “If anyone should ever wish to compile my letters after I am famously dead ... I fear you would have to censor and expurgate with a free wrist movement.”

Nothing appears to have been left out. This makes for some painful reading in parts, especially as Thurber suffers through unhappy love affairs with various women. (“Please don’t be mad at me, Eve, and like me more than a little bit. Please, please, please, please, Eve.”)

Oh dear. Thurber’s first book -- written with E.B. White -- was “Is Sex Necessary?” One wonders now, upon reading these excruciating letters, was this necessary? His daughter Rosemary -- upon whom he dotes here in dozens of charming, affectionate letters -- is co-editor of this collection, with Harrison Kinney. Her father is long dead, but one looks up from the pages a dozen times in embarrassment for the poor man. I guess the moral is: Burn your old love letters if you don’t want them published.

One other quibble: This volume, which rightly aspires to be the definitive “Thurber Letters,” is inadequately edited. The first footnote doesn’t appear until Page 24. The next one is on Page 94. Half the time you don’t know the context of a letter or what is going on. Subsequent editions really ought to redress this. Each time I came across an unfamiliar name, I heard the echo of Ross’ famous query scribbled in the margin of New Yorker galleys: “Who he?”

Complaints aside, this is a stupendous and splendid collection of letters by the preeminent American humorist of the 20th century. “Humorist” diminishes him; Thurber was much larger than that. As his fan T.S. Eliot once wrote about him, “Unlike so much humor, it is not merely a criticism of manners -- that is, of the superficial aspects of society at a given moment -- but something more profound.”

Thurber was a great prose stylist. Take this paragraph, from a letter written at the Algonquin Hotel in the sweltering summer of 1934, a few floors up from the famous Round Table (at which he himself sat only once or twice):

“One of those silky twilights is falling over New York. Worn and pasty people are drinking Tom Collinses downstairs, waiters are staring damply into space, men are removing their collars and shoes and cursing, women are patting their sticky hair and wriggling moistly out of their damp pants, children are whining, radios are cackling insanely, automobile brakes are shrieking, and way off a swan is flying, wings outspread, into Hell, screaming like a cowardly condemned man. The whole broiling city is complaining: The dirty curtains at my window are blowing into my face; they smell like a closed up smoking car. A tired maid is knocking at my door. She has a husband and a sickly child in Hoboken, a leaning house on a broken street.”

Wish you’d written that? I sure do, as well as dozens of other perfect sentences, all the more remarkable for not having been written for publication, but for being banged out on a typewriter in one draft, or, after the blindness descended on him, for being dictated to a secretary. (He likened that last process to “having sexual intercourse while wearing an open parachute.”)

He had a particular gift for describing a hot day: “Yesterday was hot and muggy like a 15-year-old Pekinese, but today is beautiful, clear, sunny, C Major.” And here he is lamenting the new crop of pallid editors at his beloved New Yorker: “There is about them all the air of a man who has lost his wife and four children in an outboard motorboat accident.” His complaints to and about the magazine take up a significant portion of these 800 pages. More about that anon; in the meantime, a few more gems: “We are now in two lovely rooms, each with a bath ... at the Grosvenor, 35 Fifth Avenue. I could throw a rock in any direction from my room and hit some old misery of mine.” In 1954, he wrote home to the Thurber family in Columbus, Ohio, that “The times are falling apart like dunked toast.” These aren’t the bon mots of a mere humorist. As Eliot would say, something more profound is going on here.

As a young U.S. State Department code clerk in Paris after World War I, Thurber fell under the spell of Henry James’ writing. He then went to work as a newspaperman. He was hired by Ross to edit the Talk of the Town section of the New Yorker, where he met E.B. White. These were the elements, together with his pleasantly deranged childhood in Columbus, that made up the DNA of his genius.

“I write mostly soi-disant humor,” he wrote to a friend while in his early thirties, “since I haven’t brains enough to write more solid articles and wouldn’t if I could.... I can do only one thing, even passably, and that is make words and space them between punctuations points.”

At the height of his own fame, Robert Benchley, Thurber’s New Yorker colleague, obsessed that his life’s work was trivial and labored sporadically if fecklessly to produce a “serious” volume on Queen Anne style. Humorists are very often bedeviled by an inferiority complex. I don’t know why this should be so. I’ll adduce a comment by Thurber himself: “It is harder to write a comedy character in a drawing-room scene than King Lear in a storm.” Or as P.J. O’Rourke, another humorist from Ohio, has said, “[A]nyone can draw a crowd by announcing, ‘I have cancer,’ but just try doing five minutes of stand-up.” Alas, the situation doesn’t improve with age. As early as 1938, Thurber was writing to E.B. White to complain that he believed that the New Yorker staff regarded him as a has-been: “The aging humorist I suppose is bound to be a sad figure.”

He did, however, understand his own value, even as he fretted, to the end, that others did not. A year before his death, he wrote to a journalism school student (he was unfailingly generous in correspondence to the many young people who wrote him seeking this or that): “I am surprised that so few people see the figure of seriousness in the carpet of my humor and comedy.”

Three decades earlier, exulting to Ann Honeycutt over one of his first triumphs in the New Yorker, he knew exactly what he’d managed: “I got hold of a mood and kept hold of it, didn’t I -- and also its absolute sincerity. It could have fallen with a tremendous bang if I had been ‘arty.’ It’s really real as hell.... I am a swell dart thrower.” As E.B. White might have put it, if Thurber had tried to be arty, he might have been artless. In 1960, Thurber put it simply: “I am not a writer, but a re-writer.”

He was also a great quoter. His letters are as packed with bon mots as Montaigne’s in Pascal’s “Pensees” are with tropes from classical antiquity:

“Dawn Powell once said she lived so near the Lafayette that on a clear day she could see her cheques bounce.”

“It’s what Percy Hammond said about a play based on a real murder. ‘Just because a thing happened is no reason it’s true.’ ”

Franklin P. Adams telling a rowdy at the Player’s Club: “This is a gentleman’s club, sir, and he may be here any minute.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Thomas Wolfe: “ ‘Wolfe’s secret leaks at every seam -- he had practically nothing to say.’ Ross said the same thing about [Alexander] Woollcott, but added ‘and he says it all the time.’ ”

“Reminds me of what Stanley Kramer said about movie producers: ‘They are afraid of anything new unless it is familiar.’”

His most regular correspondents were Honeycutt, with whom he conducted an unrequited love affair that, combined with booze and other devils, landed him in Dr. Fritz Foord’s upstate sanitarium in 1935; E.B. White; Ross; Gus Lobrano, an editor at the New Yorker; his beloved daughter Rosemary, for whom he had an endless supply of affectionate nicknames; playwright Nugent; humorist Peter De Vries. (That word is getting annoying; what is it a “humorist” does, anyway? Practice “humorism”?) There are also letters to, among others, Rudy Vallee, John O’Hara, Burgess Meredith, Wolcott Gibbs, William Faulkner, George Plimpton, Alistair Cooke, Art Buchwald, Janet Flanner, Roger Angell, Kenneth Tynan, Groucho Marx, Donald Ogden Stewart and Ernest Hemingway.

One of the most affecting letters is the one to Hemingway, which his devoted wife Helen kept him from mailing. Hemingway was at this point only months from putting the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth. Thurber was writing to a friend in a valiant effort to rally his spirits. “This is what the gals call a chatty letter intended to cheer, and not to be answered until you and I meet at Tim Costello’s -- one, ten or twenty years from now, and the sooner the better.... In 1951 I had a medical examination for insurance at the New Yorker. A few days later I met my insurance agent on the street. He approached me shaking his head and said ‘you have sugar in your urine and a murmur in your heart.’ ‘That’s not a diagnosis,’ I said, ‘that’s a song cue.’ ”

The letter that brought tears to my eyes was one he wrote in November 1959 to Charles Van Doren, who had just disgraced himself nationally as a television quiz show cheat.

“Dear Charley, Any time you want to come to my house and sit in the library, just come on in -- the latch is always out. Like the pluperfect subjunctive, it’s quiet there and never crowded, except for old dreams and pleasant thoughts and high hopes and, to be sure, regrets. I’ll match regrets with you any day and beat you, but, would we through our lives hell forego, quit of scars and tears? For God’s sake, No!... I think the years to come will be even better -- maybe a hell of a lot better than they would have been if all hell hadn’t broken loose for you.... In my house, we still have the same old love for Charlie Van Doren as ever, and it seems damned silly to have to say so. Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. And God bless you.”

It’s not surprising that a man of such large and gentle heart should have found the America of his declining years strident and unlovely. “This crapulating era,” he called it. “Tennessee Williams and his colleagues are not so much expressers of their time as expressions of it.” He fizzed over with delight at the Broadway production of “My Fair Lady” in 1956: “I think it will serve to keep the fine art of comedy lifted above the guttersnickery into which it had fallen. Comedy out of Hollywood by Adultery is as dangerous to a country’s culture as disrespect for English sentences and plays put together with pipe cleaners and paper clips.” Three years later, he was writing to his old pal Nugent that the “swift decline of comedy now, emphasized by the loud and the farcical on Broadway, is the result of a panicky attempt to yell down the demons of life and fear, instead of fighting them with angels.” One year later he was deploring the “generally over-strident effort to entertain mindlessly.... We are in an Oral culture now, a period of babble in which the mind turns too easily to reminisce, and the tongue outruns the mind.”

He wrote that in 1960. Thurber, thou should’st be living at this hour. Though God only knows what he’d make of today’s Hollywood. It’s doubtful he’d reconsider wanting the sons of bitches to burn up. These letters, meanwhile, are a reminder of his civilizing intelligence, genius and generosity and a pleasurable rebuke.