This time of year, when there’s snow on the ground (as there is here in upstate New York), reminds me of a long-time favorite passage in the third paragraph of the Foreword of Burton Bernstein‘s fabulous Thurber biography, published in 1976. I won’t repeat the paragraph here so as to avoid ruffling copyright feathers, but I believe it’s fair to show how it begins:
“During the winter of 1948, my brother and I were driving through a snowstorm in search of a new Connecticut skiing area we had heard about. We stopped at a fine old white Colonial house in Cornwall to ask directions…”
When I bought the biography, back in my college days, and began reading, it only took that passage to rope me in forever. I can’t recite it, as I can a half-a-dozen lines of Bill Shakespeare’s “Quality of mercy…” from The Merchant of Venice (an enforced memorization in grade school) but I can visualize Mr. Bernstein arriving in a snowstorm at James Thurber’s home — he [Thurber] called it “the great good place” — and meeting the celebrated writer and artist, and his wife, Helen.
When I met Burton Bernstein (four years before he passed away in 2017 at age 85), I took the opportunity to tell him how important his Thurber biography was to me. When I brought up the snowstorm passage he kindly retold the story — nothing beats a first-hand account! — adding a few details not in the book, and most fun of all, he imitated Thurber walking gingerly down the stairs to greet his visitors. That too is now incorporated in my memory of the passage. I think of Thurber, and I think of Bernstein’s Thurber, “feeling his way down the stairs.”
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Today’s Daily Cartoonist & Cartoon…
Madeline Horwath, who began contributing to The New Yorker in July of 2019, on housecleaning in these times.
…and Yesterday’s:
Zoe Si, who began contributing to The New Yorker in February of this year, on virtual partying.
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New Blitt
The latest from Barry Blitt’s Kvetchbook here.