— the following is excerpted from my as yet unpublished memoir
Lightning Strikes, Thurber-Style
On a summer’s day in 1972, when I was eighteen turning nineteen, I was in my rented room of a Victorian home in Cape May, New Jersey, when a fellow renter, and a friend, Matthew, walked in, laughing hysterically. He held a copy of James Thurber’s Thurber Carnival in his hand.
He pointed to a drawing in the book: Thurber’s “What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?” It was the first Thurber drawing I’d ever seen, and, it was love at first sight. The drawing itself could barely be simpler: a hippopotamus, a hat, a shoe, a pipe, a woman, a tree, and a cloud. In the fifty years since I first laid eyes on it, I’m still overwhelmed by its hilarity and its perfection — its cartoon perfection.
How often does one drawing change one’s life. I don’t mean change in some minor way, as in you appreciate an artist’s work more or less, or somehow differently than you saw it before. I mean change the trajectory of one’s life. Thurber’s Millmoss drawing changed mine.
When describing this moment to others I’ve said it was as if I’d been struck by cartoon lightning. In that moment I fell into a world and a humor completely new to me, yet somehow entirely familiar. It felt like home, like the way I felt about the world, about the way I saw things. This brilliant drawing lit the way — it emboldened me to draw for fun, not to worry about how “right” the work looked, but how it felt, how I felt, putting something down on paper.
I may have grabbed The Thurber Carnival out of Matthew’s hand that day and started looking at the other drawings in the book, quickening and deepening the initial electric connection. Thurber’s work had an immediate effect on my own: I happily abandoned my fussy complex drawing style. All that detail had become a chore, keeping me from just letting the pen travel freely on the page. Until Thurber, I didn’t know how locked-in I was.
Scrambling to find more Thurber work led to finding out more about his life, and of course, his writing. That obsession quickly led to another obsession: the history of The New Yorker.
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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