The cartoonist who could make even God the Father laugh
People who are infuriated by the huge sums paid for stuffed animals in tanks and the adulation heaped on Francis Bacon’s squiggly horrors should grasp that there is no reason or logic in aesthetics. Andy Warhol, no mean exponent of effrontery, if not of skill, summed up the game for all time: ‘Art is what you can get away with.’ This is certainly true of modern fashion art. Was it always true? In studying the history of the subject, I am often struck by the bizarre careers of artists. For instance, that obscure figure Grünewald was better known in his day as a hydraulic engineer than as the painter of the Isenheim Altarpiece. The monks saw him as more useful in getting water from the nearby mineral springs to their hospital than in directing thoughts heavenwards by his images. The leprosy and other skin diseases which figure so strikingly on his panels required treatment as well as prayers.
One has to admit that luck or accident is a prominent player in the game. The hair of Christ which covers up the right side of his face in Velázquez’s ‘Crucifixion’ was his way of dealing with a mess left when his hand slipped. Turner likewise claimed that the miracles of beauty Ruskin read into a square inch of a certain landscape of his were nonsense — it was just a mistake. An even more striking instance was the entire career as a comic draughtsman of James Thurber.
No one doubts that Thurber was a genius of a kind. He left to posterity four masterpieces of prose: ‘The Night the Bed Fell’, ‘The Day the Dam Broke’, ‘The Night the Ghost Got In’, and ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’. They are just as funny, for reasons which go right to the dark heart of the soul, as when they were written three quarters of a century ago. Thurber worked like an inspired maniac on such pieces, writing them over countless times. He sweated over every word, and words were jewels to him. His approach to art was quite different. When aged six, in 1901, his left eye was destroyed by a toy arrow shot by his brother. His mother, a Christian scientist, refused to let his condition be properly treated, and as a result ‘sympathetic ophthalmia’ developed in his right eye, and eventually led to virtual sightlessness. By the time I met him, in 1958 I think, he was effectively blind.
But he always did drawings, with a pen or pencil, very fast, recklessly. He sometimes did them on walls and tablecloths. He thought nothing of them and threw them away, though sometimes, when drunk at parties, he would give them to girls in return for a fumble. In 1929, while sharing an office with E.B. White at the New Yorker, he drew a seal sitting on a rock, with two dots in the distance. It took him five seconds. Without thinking, he put a caption beneath: ‘Hm, explorers.’ He was about to throw it on the floor when White said, ‘Hey, give me that. It’s funny.’ He insisted on taking the drawing, done on yellow lined copy paper, to the weekly art conference. Rea Irvin, the art editor, just pushed it away. Later, he sent Thurber a drawing: ‘This is the way a seal’s whiskers go.’ Nevertheless, White insisted on showing it to Harold Ross, the editor. Ross was annoyed, and said to Thurber: ‘How the hell did you get the idea you could draw?’ Later, White found Thurber trying to improve the drawing with shade and hatching. He said: ‘Don’t do that. If you ever get good, you’d be mediocre.’ White subsequently got Thurber to illustrate a little collection of his pieces, Is Sex Necessary? It sold 50,000 copies in 1930 and was much talked about. Ross was puzzled by its success, largely attributed by critics to Thurber’s drawings, and said (as he often did when baffled by the editing game): ‘How I pity me!’ He sent for Thurber. ‘Where is that drawing of a seal? I want it.’ ‘But I threw it away, Mr Ross.’ Mr Ross, angrily: ‘Don’t throw things away just because I reject them. Do it again.’ Thurber tried, but failed. He could not get the rock right. Unlike his prose, his drawing could not be improved. After various fresh starts, he found the seal was resting on what looked like a bed-head. So he drew a bed underneath, and a man and a woman lying on it. The woman looked cross and the man bewildered. So he thought of a line for the woman to say: ‘All right, have it your way — you heard a seal bark!’ By then it was December 1931. He took it into Ross, who had forgotten about the original drawing, but half-liked this one. Anyway, he ran it in the paper on 30 January 1932. It was an immediate success with readers, and was eventually reprinted more often than any other 20th-century cartoon. Tireless, placeless, classless, colourless, it made people laugh in China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Russia, as well as throughout the West.
The gestation of this famous cartoon, over three years, and by a series of accidents, gives a curious slant on Thurber’s genius, for though he cannot exactly be credited with the thing, in strict truth, there is an element of genius in it, and if it is not his, whose is it? There was another curious case, of an animal with horns, which Thurber did for a query series, ‘Our Pet Department’. The reader thought it was a moose with loose antlers. Thurber’s reply: ‘The animal is obviously a horse with a pair of antlers strapped to his head.’ What he intended to do when he started is unclear. The drawing was a mistake which he rationalised. Moreover, possibly when drunk, he allowed one of his floozies to draw in teeth, which gives the animal a suggestive leer of derision. Another ‘accidental’ cartoon has the caption: ‘That’s my first wife up there, and this is the present Mrs Harris.’ The original scheme was quite different, but the drawing failed, and Thurber turned it into a bookcase and put the first Mrs Harris on top of it. Dorothy Parker claimed she was stuffed, but she is obviously still alive.
It is a curious fact that Thurber, who could draw very few things, had a knack of turning failures into bookcases, which occurs in two other masterpieces, the Rabbit Doctor joke and the English Butler joke (‘It’s Parkins, Sir, we’re ’aving a bit of a time below stairs.’) Thurber drew hundreds of drawings, and ‘gave them away like smiles’ — especially to ‘drunken ladies at drunken parties’, sometimes as many as 30 in an evening, he said. A score of his published cartoons are masterly, and five in the highest class in history. When I contemplate them, I sometimes feel that after a lifetime of studying and practising art, I know nothing about it.
Thurber’s drawings were compared to Matisse’s. In fact Matisse was a much better draughtsman: that is, he could usually draw what he wanted to, whereas Thurber could not. It was claimed Thurber was Matisse’s favourite artist, though he did not say so. In 1937, Matisse’s secretary haughtily denied the claim: ‘Le Maître knows nothing of Thurber.’ But in 1947 when Matisse was asked to name his favourite American artist, he replied: ‘Monsieur Toobay.’ Asked to spell it out, he eventually wrote down ‘Thurber’.
Personally, I would rather own a good Thurber joke than anything in Le Maître’s entire oeuvre. The experts may consider Matisse a better artist than Thurber. But he never made anyone laugh. Except, possibly, his bank manager.
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