Back in May of 1939, James Thurber decided to travel west to California to work on The Male Animal, a play he was co-authoring with his old college friend, Elliot Nugent. Told they’d need a car to get around out in California, Thurber and his (second) wife Helen, decided to travel, with the car, by sea. According to Harrison Kinney in James Thurber: His Life and Times:
“…they booked passage on the SS President Garfield along with the Ford, It was a mistake. The voyage, by way of Havana and the Panama Canal, was a long one, and the tropical sun worsened Thurber’s eyesight.”
According to various accounts, the trip began well. Thurber’s eyesight was still good enough so that he could compete in a ping-pong tournament aboard ship.
June 4th, 1939, the night before the Garfield docked in California, Thurber and Helen attended a “Farewell Dinner.” Here’s the menu:
Passengers and various members of the ship’s crew signed this particular menu. Thurber signed on the back, and, luckily, drew two dogs:
I say “luckily” because Thurber’s eyesight deteriorated drastically during the time aboard the Garfield. According to Helen Thurber, (as quoted in Burton Bernstein’s Thurber: A Biography) “By the time we arrived at the Nugent’s house in Bel-Air, he couldn’t see well enough to read a newspaper.”
On June 9th, just five days after Thurber drew the dogs on the menu, he wrote his regular eye doctor asking for the name of one in California. He went on to say he was “struggling to type, read, and draw…” and “Life is no good to me at all unless I can read, type, and draw.” [By the summer of 1940, he was, according Kinney, “all but sightless.”]
With this menu recently acquired and added to the Spill‘s collection, I’ve been able to examine it up close. Having seen a good number of Thurber dog drawings over time, I believe that the dogs we see casually drawn on a menu, were drawn with the confidence Thurber showed in his work all through the 1930s. These two dogs, in all likelihood, are among the last of their kind.
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James Thurber’s A-Z Entry
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