Word: thurbers
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...THURBER by BURTON BERNSTEIN 532 pages. Dodd, Mead...
...went," explained Catharine Coster of Newtown, Conn. "He pulled layers and layers of wallpaper off the attic walls looking." What Retired Executive Allan Coster eventually discovered was not a secret passage but precious pentimento. Still on the walls, beneath 40 years of papering, was the doodling of Humorist James Thurber, who had lived in the house in the 1930s. There is "no question" that the art work is that of the former New Yorker writer and cartoonist. Says Helen Thurber, the humorist's widow: "He always did drawings on people's walls...
...questions, which are trivial, and important questions, which are insoluble." For many years the magazine took that epigram seriously. Through the Depression and even through the war, Harold Ross, the magazine's legendary founder, preferred not to confront moral issues. "His old dread," recalled the owlish humorist James Thurber, "that the once carefree New Yorker, going nowhere blithely, like a wandering minstrel, was likely to become rigidly 'grim,' afflicted his waking hours and his dreams...
Inevitably, the book is more concerned with The New Yorker then than now. Gill's memories are mostly ebullient. They include, of course, Ross, that "aggressively ignorant" Midwesterner who bullied The New Yorker into shape. Thurber's portrait remains definitive, but Gill adds amusing embellishments. Once Gill included the Tennysonian phrase "nature, red in tooth and claw" in a "Talk of the Town" item. Ross's notorious innocence in literary matters ("Is Moby Dick the man or the whale?") prompted him to change the reference to "nature, red in claw and tooth." Gill explains as best...
Gill's account is laced with some acid. John O'Hara is drubbed for his vanity and status seeking. Thurber is recalled as a man "never so happy as when he could cause two old friends to have a falling out." Gill justifiably twits Movie Critic Pauline Kael for long-windedness and openly recounts the depressions, breakdowns, bouts of alcoholism and premature deaths that struck a number of his colleagues. He resurrects no quips that set the fabled Algonquin Round Table on a roar. Most drinking staffers, he reports, preferred dark saloons "suitable for people with a glum...