Thurber Thursday: What Lies Beneath

It is always a very happy day when a James Thurber original drawing arrives at Spill headquarters. I fell for the one shown below some weeks back. I’d never seen it before, and never seen one like it before. Thurber’s somewhat apprehensive man is so great. I loved the moon and the star. There was something oddly positive about the drawing, despite the man’s body language. And then there was Thurber’s energetic handwritten From this Vale look up!. What did it mean, was it an obscure literary reference?

The seller told me he’d heard from the seller he acquired it from that the drawing was a gift from Thurber to a fellow writer who had written a book with a title like From the Mountains Look Down.  

With that clue it didn’t take long to discover that there was a book, published in 1934, From This Hill Look Down  by Elliot Merrick.

Mr. Merrick, I learned, was a New York Times best selling author (Northern Nurse), a New Jersey native (small world…we were actually born in the same town), and, surprise surprise, a New Yorker contributor (two pieces of fiction, one in the the 1930s, and one in the 1940s, plus a very brief Talk Of The town contribution in the 1930s).

When the Thurber drawing arrived here, in its frame, I immediately wanted to see the piece itself  (there are often, but not always, some interesting things to be found by examining the actual piece of art out of its frame). And so with my fellow New Yorker colleague, Liza Donnelly assisting, I cut off the browned backing paper on the frame and lifted the matted drawing out.

The first thing I noticed was that the drawing had been taken from a copy of Thurber’s 1935 collection, The Middle-Aged Man On The Flying Trapeeze. I knew this because whoever cut the drawing out of the book also took out the next page (you see what the book’s title page looks like in the photo below below). The drawing was on a piece of paper attached to the title page –still held together at one edge by bookbinding glue.

When I detached the drawing from the matt, we found that the passed down story of Thurber gifting From this Vale look up! to “a fellow writer” was true. Hidden under the matt, for who knows how long, was proof positive that Thurber’s From This Vale Look Up! was most definitely based on Elliott Merrick’s book, From This Hill Look Down.