The Thurber Letters, page 65
... I keep running my play through my head, looking for the right scene sequence and picking up dialog as I go. The great eye doctor finally tells the younger writer to go ahead and have an affair with his wife and get it over with. This is one way to disarm an amorous writer. Nugent had a variant of this theme in his almost successful “By Request,” in which the Nugent family starred for six weeks in 1928. George Cohan liked it well enough to produce it. In this one, the Middlewestern wife, Norma Nugent, tells her husband, Elliott Nugent, to have an affair with the New York blonde, Verree Truesdale, saying, “After all, she looks clean and she might be good for you.” “You can’t call her clean!” cries the husband, indignantly. They were going fine in this second act but lost their way and put the final act on a pullman car, and I don’t have to describe that to you, except to say that the comedy died on wheels. You cannot save a comedy by making it ambulant. My doctor is in his early forties and the writer is supposed to be about thirty-eight. The wife is not older than thirty since that is not allowed in American comedy. I think I have a good title, since tennis also figures—”Forty Love.”
I’m just giving you one touch of this. I work things up slowly. This one will depend greatly on smart dialog. The woman is not important, as long as she is beautiful, charming, and sexy, and you know how easy it is to find actresses like that!
The guy playing opposite Meredith should be as good as Raymond Massey, but stronger and more physically attractive. I’m not trying to compare this unwritten play with that undying one. I’m just trying to give you an idea of shape and measure. More later.
Helen and I both send our love to you and Kaja.
As ever,
P.S. My daughter Rosie was here, but she didn’t fall for Tone. I guess the gal must just be different.
Mr. Burgess Meredith, 58 West 57th Street, New York, New York
TO E. B. WHITE
Ely’s Lodge, Somerset Bridge, Bermuda
April 25, 1952
Dear Andy:
... I was glad to hear that you had turned in your children’s book, and I am anxious to see it. My publishers don’t write me anymore, but I hear my book [The Thurber Album] is coming out June 12, although they had told me it would be May 28th. I am going to write about imaginary people from now on since real ones take too much out of me.
We all loved your fine description of the great party, but I was sorry to hear that Gluyas Williams couldn’t hold more than one, because I am rapidly approaching his age. I have had a neuritis headache for a month, but nobody knows why. The doctor said, “Of course, you know about your own worries, problems, and temperament.” I told him that I did in a vague kind of way, vague and voluminous. If the trouble lies somewhere between Eva Prout, with whom I was in love in the third grade, and the fact that my French poodle is nearly thirteen, I could be dead before I figured it out. I’ve never had anything the doctors didn’t suspect might be prostate, since I was fifty, and I can only guess that every symptom is a symptom of that. There is one outstanding one, however, and I haven’t got that. One clipping I got of a review of the Kramer book said, “Not only has Ross died, but Cobine and Hokinson were killed, and Thurber is aging and blind.” Hell, I am thirty-seven years younger than my Uncle Mahlon Taylor.
Rosie was down here, and we had a fine time with her. She came down on the cuff and went back on a pass, since we didn’t have time to buy her ticket down, and she lost her ticket up. We were saved by the courtesy of B.O.A.C.
We send you and Katharine our love and kisses.
As always,
Mr. E. B. White, The NEW YORKER 25 West 43rd St., New York, New York
TO CASS CANFIELD
Ely’s Lodge, Somerset Bridge, Bermuda
May 28, 1952
Mr. Cass Canfield, Harper & Brothers, 49 East 33rd Street, New York 16, New York
Dear Cass:
I wasn’t able to answer you sooner because of persistent headaches, an unbelievable volume of mail, and the fact that I am trying to get some rest.
Neither Helen nor I think very much of the front flap stuff for “Fables” which seems flat, uninviting, and written by somebody who didn’t really get the point of the book. Harper’s used to do this kind of thing for my books until I took to writing the stuff myself. It is probably too late now, and I don’t suppose it makes much difference. Ed Murrow could give your writer the right idea of how to do it, and you succeed in quoting on the flap the least interesting of all the morals, the one about the bloodhound. There is a kind of genius in missing things so widely as this, and I respect it. The book has a kind of reputation, and it will probably survive this blurb.
Best wishes to you anyway.
As ever,
TO THE RONALD WILLIAMSES
Thurber’s hyper-thyroid condition had worsened in Bermuda. It was not properly diagnosed or treated during his three months there, which led to his more cantankerous letters and aggravated his anger over McCarthyism. He was required to give up drinking and smoking. The illness also discouraged him from writing for publication. His July, 1952, essay, “Dark Suspicions: Contemporary Writers Are Handicapped by Current Atmosphere of Distrust,” in The New York Times, was his last published writing for nearly a year. Only one Thurber piece appeared in 1953 and just three in 1954. His gloom persisted even with the successful return of The Male Animal to Broadway.
His infatuation with Jane Williams and his impatience with her husband steadily deepened.
West Cornwall, Connecticut
June 23, 1952
Dear Janey and Ronnie:
This is our first chance to write, since every day has been crowded and everything has piled up. We had a fine time at the play the night we arrived, although I had to stuff my handkerchief in my mouth every time Robert Preston came on. As I had prefigured, he was the perfect arrested development muscular male and he brought up the comedy to a new level as a powerful tiger who is badgered constantly by two pussycats. We went backstage to meet everybody, and then on to 21 with the Nugents. The Ullmans liked it, too, but said they were mainly delighted by my reaction.
The cocktail party Monday was a strain, and I’m enclosing a clipping about it. One night Janey said, “You go back there and fight!” and the clipping is a play-by-play of the first round. Five or six people called me to “salute you,” as Maney put it, and the New York Times has asked me to expand it for their Sunday edition, which I will. I have had no letters, pro or con, since people are no longer much concerned or are afraid to get into it. Nugent’s line, “Not in this country! Not yet!” used to get cheers and applause, but met with dead silence that Friday night. People think it has happened in this country, telling people what they can read and write.
Dr. Sullivan in New York diagnosed my condition instantly as a hyperthyroid syndrome, which means a concurrence of symptoms indicating a certain disease. I guess Dr. Curtis had not had much experience with thyroid and he was looking for the wrong factor X. I have always had an Ohio thyroid, but it has never kicked up like this. It is closely connected with the nervous system and can be exacerbated by the constant rantings of noisy sailors. It is nice to know that there is no real stomach or intestinal trouble. I am supposed to take it easy and to be surrounded by quiet and tranquil people like the better half of Seaforth [Jane Williams]. I hope the other half has on this birthday taken up new resolutions. He ran away from domesticity once, and he would like to do it again he says a thousand times, but he can’t escape in the salt water and so he escapes into rum, the famous drink of sailors. We have counted a dozen friends of ours with from three to five children, and none of them scream the way he does against their families. I’ll always remember Janey’s saying, “In the state you’re in you couldn’t be a fourth officer on a fifth-rate thing.” Ronnie’s letter to the ship along with the nice flowers actually showed that he thought I was to blame for being on the wagon and unable to take good old-fashioned drunken babbling. If he does not know the truth, it is very sad indeed. I stood a long series of terrible nights for three springs in Bermuda and now my whole nature rebels, and I can’t do it again. The highest price I can think of paying for anything is not to see Jane and the children again after a hard winter, but I am afraid that’s the way it has to be.
The book [The Thurber Album] is doing wonderfully, having outsold “Witness” last week, and the play continues to gross around 20, 000. Rosie is here before going into Summer School. I found I couldn’t go over to the New Yorker yet on account of the memory of Ross, but I will make it when we go down next time. We naturally hope that Janey will get up here, but we’re not building the hope too high because we might get hurt in the crash.
Love to all those who care about such things. Ronnie kept saying that love is nothing more than sexual gratification, so he’s not included. How immature, stupid, and pig-headed can you be?
From us all, as ever,
TO LEWIS FUNKE
West Cornwall, Connecticut
June 25, 1952 Mr. Lewis Funke, Drama Editor, THE NEW YORK TIMES, Times Square, New York 36, N. Y.
Dear Mr. Funke:
I will get that piece to you well before July 21, if all goes well, and certainly in time, in any case. I am a good man about making deadlines.... I rarely see Ruth [McKenney], but when she was a senior at Ohio State she asked me what chance there was of becoming a successful writer in New York. I told her to forget it, and before long she was outselling me. She wrote a remarkable letter to the New Yorker after Ross’s death saying he was responsible for getting her out of far leftism, but Red Channels thinks we are far left. It was the last thing Ross Goddamned and he picked the right monsters. I also advised a young Yale graduate [Vincent Price] to forget about the theatre. In a few months he was playing opposite Helen Hayes as Prince Albert in “Victoria Regina.” I now tell all youngsters they can do anything, and many of them can, too.
I’ll have my secretary sign this, since I won’t be here tomorrow.
Cordially yours,
James Thurber
TO MRS. GUS PHILLIPS
West Cornwall, Connecticut
July 2, 1952
Dear Mrs. Phillips:
I still count on the women taking over national and international politics to give it decency, intelligence, and humor, and I will be glad to vote for you for any job. My wife is a Nebraska girl, and she voted for Dewey last time. I voted for Truman. My daughter is for Crosby against Sinatra. I have always called myself an Independent, but I reckon I am really a Democrat, but my record is pretty spotty. I voted for Hoover, a boyhood idol of mine, in 1932, but I had been for good old Al Smith in 1928. The Democrats, however, haven’t asked me to contribute anything to anything. I’ll send you a copy of “The Thurber Album,” which is about my Ohio ancestors, in part, all of whom were staunch Republicans. My father turned Progressive in 1912, and I am the only male in the family who voted for Roosevelt. I will not vote for Taft against anybody, but I will vote for Eisenhower against Truman. I wish we could have Stevenson and Warren on a bi-partisan ticket. If you Republicans lose this time, we’ve got to stop trying to win by tax tricks, machine tactics, and the old sad G.O.P. guff.
Thanks for what you said about the TIME summary of an explosion of mine. I had been away for three months and was sore about things. The book sells for $3.50 retail, and it has had a bi-partisan sale.
Best wishes
Sincerely yours,
James Thurber
Mrs. Gus Phillips, 2316 Lane St.,
Falls City, Nebraska
TO ADOLPH WALLER
On a reader’s reaction to The Thurber Album.
West Cornwall, Connecticut
July 3, 1952
Dear Adolph Waller:
Boy, I didn’t get all honeyed words. I went through three years of part hell on this book, including a family break that is just now mended. A guy wrote me that he is glad Kuehner is dead and knows he’s in hell. Writing about real people with friends and relatives alive is never milk and honey. Mizener got some brutal letters from the two sisters of Zelda Fitzgerald. I have been bawled out, carped at, insulted, corrected, and Christ knows what else. You Botany boys have all the fun hiding among the petals. Thanks again.
Cordially yours,
James Thurber
Dr. A. E. Waller, Botany Department, Ohio State University, Columbus 10, Ohio
TO GUS LOBRANO
West Cornwall, Connecticut
July 3, 1952
Dear Gus:
One of the last things Ross got mad at was one of those magazines which list the political activities of writers. He told me that it sometimes used, in parentheses, “writes for the New Yorker.” Do you remember anything about this? He couldn’t have read the thing, somebody must have brought it to him. Lewis Funke, drama editor of the Times, has asked me to write a piece based on my theory that comedy and humor have been scared out of American writers. I think it’s high time we all quit hiding and praying. A great many writers attended one or more Communist meetings before rejecting the whole idea, and they are afraid of subpoenas because they don’t want to name who was there. Well, they don’t have to, it seems to me. I don’t think thousands of writers would be sent to prison for this. It is a problem, of course, because the writer who won’t tell all is usually a Communist or a former one. But then, Emmet Lavery, the anti-Communist president of the Movie Writers’
Guild, didn’t name anyone on the stand and came off fine. Once a guy says, like Lavery, “I am not a Communist, I have never been a Communist, and I don’t propose to become one,” the probers are likely to let him alone. But we have gone four years without a Lavery on the stand, as if Congress were trying to identify Communism with literature and the theatre. One of my points is that 95% should demand to be heard.
I am certainly right in believing that Ross never knew the politics of any of us, or at least that he never cared as long as it didn’t obtrude into the magazine. He would have been the best witness. I am too nervous, White and Gibbs are too shy, so who have we got?
I hope you read Elmer Davis on Chambers in the Saturday Review, and Stuart Chase’s nineteen propositions in the same issue. The last one is this: “The United States faces many dangers in 1952, but Communism is not one of them.” He means internally, of course.
As ever,
James Thurber
Mr. Gus Lobrano, The New Yorker,
25 West 43rd St., New York, N. Y.
Thurber preferred Eisenhower over Taft in the 1952 Republican primaries but later favored Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Presidential nominee. William Shawn succeeded Ross as editor of ’The New Yorker in early 1952.
TO E. B. WHITE
West Cornwall, Connecticut
July 18, 1952
Dear Andy:
Yes, I would also like to hear Doc Beall opposing all sides of every convention, and even Jake Fisher throwin’ a few delegates. I was interested in the boys who pointed out the merits of over-coverage by television, but while it shows the rascals off guard, a merit, it adds to our unbalance by magnifying and lengthening everything. The Chambers book got more coverage than anything since the fall of Poland, and there were even special editions of magazines dedicated to it. And it was overwritten by a guy who isn’t a writer. Maybe we will never get back to the criticism of books written by creative writers. I don’t know, because we would rather read the memoirs of Benedict Arnold than the writings of Thoreau. If you missed Joseph Wood Krutch’s dialogue between Thoreau and G.B. Shaw in the Saturday Review of May 24, you better get one....
I hope you and Katharine are both up and around, and that your faculties are able to take in all the threats and confusion again. I haven’t been able to go back to the New Yorker again yet, because I always looked up Ross first when I came back from Bermuda. They are carrying on his magazine all right, I think, even though everybody I meet seems to suggest that it should now be called “Momentum.” I try to explain, making it shorter each time. I’m not going to vote for Eisenhower and Nixon, but I have no data on Shawn. I don’t have any on Eisenhower, either, but maybe we’ll get some. He is the Great Amateur, and I am not too old to care for amateurs.
Love to you both from both of us.
As ever,
TO THE RONALD WILLIAMSES
The “Lincoln letter” is, of course, by Thurber.
West Cornwall, Connecticut
July 21, 1952
Dear Janey:
It was wonderful to hear your voice even though it sounded as if you were talking through calico. We had got a note from Ronnie saying you had gone to the Point and adding, with the wistfulness of a shotgun, “She will probably call you up.” I knew you would, just as we would phone you after we had been in Hamilton a week and were getting bored. I know you should come down and see the play, and so do you, but the American woman has a way of rationalizing herself out of pleasure, especially when Papa is doing the cooking and the housework at home. I feel helpless against what I now call Williams-Bermuda reasoning, for it is well established, and different, and hard to change.
”The Male Animal” plays every Sunday night, including this coming Sunday, and you would be our guest at the Algonquin and we provide tickets, which cost me nothing in the summer, and a sitter and bed and board in the same way that you have entertained us. Rosie went last Saturday, a performance distinguished by a strange universal laugh from the balcony not shared by the orchestra people and puzzling to Elliott and his daughter who were on stage. It later turned out that the balcony had spotted a mouse on stage. Wildly played this mouse at the foot of the living room stairs. Such an unexplained laugh has an invariable effect on actors: women are sure their pants are falling off, and men are sure their pants are open.
We would be at the Algonquin, too, because Helen’s sister is here and wants to see the play. There is always an extra added attraction, it seems, and a few days ago Robert Preston got a nosebleed during one of his yelling scenes with Elliott, who gave him his breast pocket handkerchief and then his hip pocket one. The third act that night was as bloody as the last act of Hamlet. If you go Sunday, one of the thousands of crazy men walking our streets might shoot somebody on stage. More fun.
