Stuff the wife
Sir: Thurber himself (And another thing, 11 October) commented on his cartoon ‘This is the present Mrs Harris. That’s my first wife up there’ — a naked woman on all fours on top of a big bookcase — in an interview for the first series of Paris Review’s Writers at Work.
Thurber said the New Yorker editor Harold Ross had asked him if the woman was supposed to be alive, stuffed or dead. ‘After a while I called him back and told him I’d just
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talked to my taxidermist, who said you can’t stuff a woman, that my doctor had told me a dead woman couldn’t support herself on all fours. “So, Ross,” I said, “she must be alive.” “Well then,” he said, “what’s she doing up there naked in the home of her husband’s second wife?” I told him he had me there.’ Harvey Smith
Purley, Surrey
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