From Michael Rosen’s Thurber files, this quote from what I believe to be a Book Of The Month Club newsletter article by Wolcott Gibbs. Here’s Gibbs talking about Thurber transitioning from a managing editor position at The New Yorker to a Talk of the Town rewrite editor:
“I think in the end Thurber fired himself as an editor…and began to rewrite material for The Talk of the Town at which he was superb, since his mind worked on a queer secondary level and while the facts were usually there, they had a way of suggesting something a little deranged or supernatural about his subjects.”
And this about Thurber’s drawings:
“…and all the time he was drawing the pictures which for a good many years were regarded by the rest of the staff as a hell of a way to waste good copy-paper, since his usual output at a sitting was twenty or more, not to mention those he drew on the walls.”
I’m not so sure that the “Thurber couldn’t draw” school of thinking has carried through in any major way to modern times, although I still hear it now and then — and every time I do I cringe. “Don’t you see,” I hear myself saying (if only to myself), “how beautiful his line is — how interconnected the style and the humor are. He drew as he thought, he drew his humor.
We have several Thurber drawings hanging up in our home. From where I sit and work I can see them all. When I need a pep talk about Whither New Yorker Art, or just want a burst of pure enjoyment, I step up closer to them and take each one in. They have never failed me.
Above: The original of the 8th drawing in a series of 35 from Thurber’s “The Race Of Life” that appeared in his first collection of drawings, The Seal In The Bedroom and Other Predicaments
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James Thurber Born, Columbus, Ohio, December 8, 1894. Died 1961, New York City. New Yorker work: 1927 -1961, with several pieces run posthumously. According to the New Yorker’s legendary editor, William Shawn, “In the early days, a small company of writers, artists, and editors — E.B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and Katharine White among them — did more to make the magazine what it is than can be measured.”
Key cartoon collection: The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (Harper & Bros., 1932). Key anthology (writings & drawings): The Thurber Carnival (Harper & Row, 1945). There have been a number of Thurber biographies. Burton Bernstein’s Thurber (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life and Times (Henry Holt & Co., 1995) are essential. Website