Richard Luckett on Thurber and 'New Yorker' poetry
James Thurber's father, building a rabbit hutch for his sons to keep their pets in, succeeded in locking himself inside; his grandMother, convinced that electricity leaked from empty sockets and plugs, did her wornanful best to counteethe waste; his aunt, °Ile of nature's appeasers, afflicted with the horrific awareness that a burglar might well come and blow chloroform under her bedroom door whilst she slept, left her valuables outside with a note which read: "This is all I have. Please take it and do not use your chloroform, as this is all I have." The first two anecdotes are true, the last perhaps a little iMproved but certainly based on fact; the real world of Thurber's boyhood and youth in Columbus, Ohio, shades off imperceptibly into the contrived world of My Life and Hard Times. Once we know that contrived world the real world has suffered a small but perceptible change; the bare record of what hapPened to Thurber's father has about U the faint yet undeniable suggestion of the thin, Precise outline of an excluded rabbit, hanging disconsolate in the mid-Western air. When Thurber was blind, unable to draw, and dependent on his ' seeing-eye ' wife, he said that J'the clocks that strike in my 'dreams are the clocks of Columbus." The world that had nourished his invention was now With him always, because "the imagination uc'esn't go blind." Mr Holmes has provided a chronicle of ihurber's literary career, which is really an account of the way in which Thurber's private world became a shared public world, a world that eventually provided the encour4.ing spectacle of the members of the Walter ,atte IttY Society standing firm and united in an Mpt to prevent Sam Goldwyn from dese`r,a!ing their mutual daydream in a film ;Inch starred Danny Kaye. Progress to such Minence was not easy in either personal or Elrofessional terms: Thurber experienced both ',Motional and literary frustrations, involving ,(311g periods of dissatisfying work on newsvaPers, the break-up of his disastrous first Marriage, drink, loneliness and comparative P°VertY. As it was he learnt in both areas: his Tarriage gave him those unnerving insights at make The War of the Sexes stand in ething like the same relationship vis-à-vis so!dinary accounts of matrimony that Tols Sevastopol occupies in relation to the r,I,re.rage glamorisation of war, whilst his exvo'rience of the windy caves of journalism s',..a.ye him a first hand initiation into the sIeoce of that terse hyperbole which he was u_9ften and so effectively to deflate. the turning point was Thurber's appoint7:,e,sot to the New Yorker. When he joined in f'o'47 the magazine had only been established shr Ltvvo years, and its start was decidedly But Thurber seems to have realised at it might become, and in 1926, after no less-than six attempts, had his first article accepted. Such persistence can hardly be explained even by a desire to escape breakfasts in a doughnut shop; some sense, however dim, of what he could accomplish on The magazine must have spurred him on. As it was, when he attained his staff position, it was in the role of business manager; Harold Ross was certainly a talent spotter, but it is equally certain that his perspicacity did not always extend to the right application of talent. Thurber's relationship with his new editor, though subsequently warm, was never to be entirely free from misunderstanding; their cross-purposes were to provide a rich comic vein which found an enduring monument in The Years with Ross. The New Yorker gave Thurber both a base and a theatre of operations. It was not a journal on which a spirit of office togetherness was greatly cultivated, and Ross, to his credit, disliked the notion of any kind of New Yorker collective, but through the magazine Thurber was-able to make several lasting friendships. These, in turn, gave him a forum where he could play out the acts that in due course would so delight his readers, forming a new family in circumscribed town, a remodelled Columbus within the Eastern metropolis. In due course Thurber left the New Yorker, though he was never entirely happy at having done so. Other literary activities, books, plays and the increased fees that his work commanded made it preferable to be free of regular commitments, and in addition his blindness, which became virtually total in 1941, for some time prevented him from writing more than the occasional article. By that time, also, it was his great good fortune that he was hap Richard Luchett, who is Director of Studies in English at St Catherine's, Cambridge, has been appointed principal book reviewer of The Spectator.
Also this week, Tony Palmer takes over as fiction reviewer. He writes on page 623.
pily married to a wife who could sustain him through a period of physical and psy chological anguish that might well have des
troyed his capacity to work at all. He had gained things from the New Yorker which
could 'not be taken away, some of which were more enduring than the friendships: those stylistic qualities on which Ross was un flaggingly insistent — clarity, smoothness and, within the dimensions of the chosen form, brevity.
This matter, the significance of the New Yorker style, is one to which Mr Holmes very properly devotes considerable attention. As he indicates it was indeed crucial in the formation of Thurber's mature manner. What he does not stop to consider is whether it might also have been, in some ways, a limitation. The New Yorker brought together a number of distinguished contributors, among them Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson and Lilian Ross. For the magazine they were to produce some of their most effective and character istic work. This may have been marginally improved as a result of Ross's known views on style, but in general it reflects only the individual excellencies of the authors concerned. Yet whilst this is undeniable, a rum mage around back issues can also produce a quite different and rather disquieting impression. Its origin is to be found in those num
bers which contain no memorable and substantial item. Each page is effortless, urbane and poised; reading through is no more difficult than eating creme caramel, and no more satisfying than subsistence on so restricted a diet would be. The mind craves roughage. The neat ambivalence of point in so many of the cartoons becomes pointless, the gliding style becomes a tactic, of evasion, the carefully calculated final paragraph of each article, delicately modulated to avoid melodrama or bathos, suggests instead vacuity. The inadequacies of the editorial policy are nowhere more evident than in the choice of poems, all of which display competence, wit and little more besides. It is not merely that the New Yorker failed to print the best in American poetry; that Was never its aim. It intended instead to offer accessible social and satirical verse, and carried this through to the point where a clearly recognisable type of New Yorker poem emerged. Such pieces were written by Dorothy Parker and Edmund Wilson, neither of whom ever shook the incubus off. Latterly poems which represent considerable modifications of individual style in the direction of the New Yorker norm were composed by W. H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov, both of whom should have known better. The results were, with very few exceptions, lamentable. But because the New Yorker had early developed an authority of its own and because, despite Ross's disclaimers, it was always in some ways representative of the ideals of a literary clique, the New Yorker poem continued, alive though not well, and indeed survives into the present. This phenomenon is instructive when we consider Thurber's somewhat umbilical association with the magazine.
What could be done to poetry could also be done to satire and fantasy. Though the New Yorker may have nurtured Thurber's talent it simultaneously restricted it. Thurber was always imitative, a natural mimic many of whose stories succeed because they lead us not so much to actual events as to the author's imitation of them; our chief sense, when we read 'The Night the Bed Fell,' is of Thurber acting the drama out, rather than of the camphorating of Cousin Briggs Beall taking place directly before our eyes. Thurber read widely and knew literary excellence when he encountered it; he always admired Henry James and later in life expressed his devotion to Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald
and Evelyn Waugh. From these writers he learned, and sometimes their lessons anti
cipated those of the New Yorker — Hemingway's emphasis on the importance of ex cision, of what is left out, is a case in point. But the demands of the. New Yorker always
had the practical effect of moderating Thur ber's experiments, at least in the literary field. His drawings were so original that they had to be taken or left; Ross, once he had been convinced that it was commercial to take them, continued to do so for as long as Thur ber could see to make them. Even so he was unwilling to credit stories of European critics who noted in Thurber's drastic sim plifications processes of stylistic reduction analogous to those employed by Picasso and Matisse. Thurber could dash off thirty or forty cartoons in a night if need be — and he actually performed this feat when it came to illustrating Is Sex Necessary? But his literary development was altogether a slower affair, and editors could tamper with his work; the ultimate sanction was seldom his. Perhaps because of this Thurber pulled his punches when the New Yorker ethos required that he should.
If proof is needed it is provided by the way in which his style changed when he went blind. He could still write in his old manner if he wished, but he spent much time on wordplay and fairy stories. His style became denser and more resonant. Significantly, in his fairy stories he repeatedly returned to the theme of the dreamer or poet and the way in which those with the gift of imagination . might mitigate the dreariness and hardship of ordinary life. But these fables about the artist are limited precisely because they adumbrate a function; like poems about poetry they are restricted because they are autotelic. And partly because they come late in Thurber's career they make us conscious that his life wasn't entirely one of fulfilment, that he might, in the right circumstances, have achieved something more.
This isn't, when all's said and done,so damaging a grouse. The extraordinary vitality of his work always survives its context; nothing can diminish the force of his assurance that the slings and arrows of even the most outrageous fortune may, by a hair's breadth, miss; there is always the feeling that though, as Peter De Vries once said, Thurber always hits the male on the head, for every hen-pecked and terrorised husband there may yet be one sweet moment of revenge. But perhaps the complaint goes some way to explaining why Thurberian people are often, and rather tediously, admirers of Thurber; those who quote the master on the nice presumption of domestic Burgundys are those who, had he not invented it, would have been most likely to commit the remark themselves. It is a little sad to note that there is a suspicion that Mr Holmes comes into this category; his book is admirable in its thoroughness but pedestrian in its presentation. It contains enough new Thurber for addicts not to mind, and the biographical sketch, though thin, is of sufficient interest to hold anyone with any knowledge of the pre-war American literary scene, but it can scarcely be argued that Holmes has those literary virtues that he is at , pains to point out in his subject. Perhaps his chief merit as commentator is that he, too, comes from Columbus and has a sense of its continuity in Thurber's work. For Thurber it was never exactly the great good place, but equally it was not to be accorded so abrupt a dismissal as Philip Roth's goodbye. It was some kind of sustainable community, and in it was all the comedy that Thurber could ever need. Escape was necessary, but so was return; just as the arrow which in a game of cowboys and Indians pierced Thurber's eye and caused both his eventual blindness and, through that, his marvellous return to the world of childhood, so Columbus caused T.brirber both pain _and pleasure. It was the pleasure which survived and which he transmitted so well, and it is the merit of Mr Holmes's book that, despite occasional laboriousness, it leaves us with at least an inkling of how this was so.
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