As with so much new-to-me New Yorker material, new-to-me James Thurber material keeps popping up. A for instance: His introduction to New Yorker writer Mary Mian’s 1947 novel, My Country-In-Law (the title ever-so-vaguely reminiscent of Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends, published in 2021). I bought a copy of Ms. Mian’s book not knowing how long the Thurber intro would be (hoping it wouldn’t be just a paragraph or three). Happily, it’s six-and-a-third pages (according to Harrison Kinney’s Thurber bio, Thurber was instrumental to getting Ms. Mian’s work in front of Harold Ross’s eyes).
For once, Thurber is almost playing it straight — no “The Night The Ghost Got In” hilarity here.
Here’s a snippet from his intro. He’s speaking of how Ms. Mian came to work for The New Yorker. She had written letters to Thurber during WWII — he refers to himself as “the reader.”:
The reader of the old letters carried the information to Harold Ross, editor of the glossy weekly called The New Yorker, that one Mary Mian should be writing stories for his magazine. “Tell her to get ’em on paper,” said Ross.”Probably nothing will come of it,” sighed Ross, and on a memo pad he wrote ‘Mian?’ Something did come of it, as the stories in this book, most of which appeared in The New Yorker, richly manifest.”
Oh, and ps: Ms. Mian dedicated the book to Thurber.