E.B. White On Thurber’s Drawings
From the Department of One Thing Leads to Another, I began this Thurber Thursday by taking Conversations with James Thurber off the shelf and turning to the book’s very first “conversation,” conducted in 1939 by Arthur Millier for The Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine. Mr. Millier spent a pleasant afternoon with Thurber, sitting poolside at Thurber’s dear friend Elliot Nugent‘s Bel-Air home. [Nugent & Thurber co-wrote the play,The Male Animal].
Among the several things I re-discovered while reading were the following quotes, all Thurber speaking:
“Captions can make a drawing. Some of my drawings lie around the office for years — waiting for an inspired line.”
“…I almost never have a piece of writing turned down [by The New Yorker] They print them all…Whereas my drawings — the things people know me for — are often turned down.”
“Listen, if you want my biography, look up the introduction E.B. White wrote for my book, The Owl In The Attic. It covers my known history very thoroughly down to the year 1931.”
So…I listened to that piece of advice from the man himself, and took my copy of The Owl In The Attic off the shelf and took another look at E.B. White’s introduction. It’s a fun read, of course, but one sentence in particular stood out (for me) above all the others:
“He [Thurber] is the one artist that I have ever known, capable of expressing, in a single drawing, physical embarrassment during emotional strain.”
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Conversations With James Thurber. Edited by Thomas Fensch. University Press of Mississippi, 1989. “Melancholy Doodler.” Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, July 2, 1939.
The Owl In The Attic. James Thurber. Harper’s, 1931. “Introduction.” E.B. White, p.xvi.