Word: thurberism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...novel fizzled, and Thurber never tried another. But when he came back this time, it was to New York. He became a reporter for the Evening Post, and sent funny prose to a feeble new weekly, The New Yorker, which sent it back. But the magazine accepted the 21st piece Thurber submitted, and after this, things moved fast. Harold Ross, the inspired Neanderthal who edited by the touch system, promptly appointed Thurber the office Jesus (unofficial title: managing editor). Things fell apart, the center did not hold, and eventually Ross desanctified Thurber: "I guess you're a writer...
...Thurber wrote, and he also drew. But Ross took no notice of the podgy dogs and lopsided little men that Thurber doodled. It was not until Harper & Brothers had paid good money for Thurber's drawings (in the E. B. White-Thurber parody, Is Sex Necessary?) that Ross gave in, and up. He paid good money for the drawings, even defended them when a cartoonist complained about "that fifth-rate artist." Ross was severe. "Third-rate," he corrected...
...drawings took Thurber no time at all-a fact that he tried to hide from Ross-and he covered the walls of Tim Costello's Third Avenue saloon in 90 minutes, for drinks. He claimed to belong to the "pre-intentionalist" school. His famed seal-barking cartoon began, he recalled, with a fine seal. But the rock he tried to draw under the seal looked hopelessly like a bed, and one thing led to another...
...Settles In. The characters in Thurber's drawings and stories are mostly pre-intentionalists themselves. There is the wife, yelling "What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?" and there is the hippopotamus, looking smug. Inside the hippo, the reader feels sure, is Dr. Millmoss, unhurt (even the Thurber fencer who loses his head is not hurt) but ill at ease, not at all sure he likes being where events have swept him. In his eloquent preface to My Life and Hard Times, Thurber complained of feeling much the same; the humorist, he wrote, "knows vaguely that the nation...
...even his good eye faded. Thurber sketched and wrote with a black crayon on huge sheets of yellow paper. When the fog became too thick, he stopped sketching and learned, helped by his second wife, Helen, to write by dictation. He kept his courage and improved his prose; The Thirteen Clocks, his delightful tone poem and fairy story, was written when he could...