Unfinished business revisited, Part 1: In which it turns out that not even Dorothy Parker can tell us how the heck Thurber's seal got in that bedroom

"All right, have it your way--you heard a seal bark!"

Awhile back I found myself trying to resurrect E. B. White's description of his role in making his friend James Thurber's faint pencil drawings visible to the naked eye--simply by way of describing how I feel while transcribing recorded Daily Show segments for this space. Somehow that seemingly simple goal launched me on a tour of the history of comedy, none of which saved me from having to rely on my memory of White's account of the process, owing to the mysterious disappearance of my copy of what was for both Thurber and White their first published book, the 1929 collaboration Is Sex Necessary?

I. CRIME-WATCH UPDATE

Much business was left unfinished in that account, I'm afraid, and it seems about time to revisit the scene of the crime, as it were--starting, naturally, with the actual crime, the mysterious disappearance of my copy of Is Sex Necessary? It seemed pretty clear to me at the time that the book had been stolen, and very likely by the same fiend who periodically sneaks into my premises and makes off with the very record or book--out of the zillions to choose from--that I am about to want. Shockingly, law enforcement has shown no interest whatsoever in the case. Not even a nibble from any of the thousands of "cold cases"-type shows now infesting the upper reaches of the digital cable-TV spectrum.

However, I discovered that I could easily, and surprisingly inexpensively, lay hands on a pristine copy of a 75th-anniversary edition (gasp!) of the book published in 2004 by HarperCollins, the corporate legatee of Harper Brothers, the original publisher. The new Is Sex Necessary? even comes rigged out with an interesting new foreword by John Updike. Astonishingly, as Updike points out, this little book has never been out of print. I'm not sure if you can imagine how that cheered me the Friday evening I ripped the book out of the mailbox, following an unusually stressful work week. True, the cheer didn't last all that long, but I believe in taking it where you can get it.

II. UPDATE ON (FROM?) THE YEAR 1950

Now, the year 1950 is important to our story. As it happens, in that year both Thurber and White were writing, separately, about the subject of White's role in the propagation of Thurber's drawings--to introduce new editions of books originally published some two decades earlier.

White was writing a new introduction for Is Sex Necessary?, expressing wonder that the book had survived 21 years of life. (Could he have imagined that there would be a 75th-anniversary edition?) Sure enough, this introduction contains his account of how the Thurber illustrations in the book came to be published--at a time when no Thurber drawing had ever been published anywhere. This is the very material I had been searching for all along! In recognition of it's importance, we're going to set it aside and come back to it in Part 2.

Meanwhile, in 1950 Thurber was writing an "author's memoir" for a new edition of his first collection of drawings, The Seal in the Bedroom and other predicaments (1932). I have already quoted Thurber's account of his "collaboration" with White on the drawings, which is in some ways more informative than White's, as you'll see when we come back to White's account. Notably, Thurber traces the history of his experience of pictorializing a seal, which ultimately led to the drawing that inspired the title of this book, reproduced above.

Now, if you don't recall, or have never read, Thurber's own account, it would be easy enough for you to follow the link above. Or, since that's already typed, I could just cut-and-paste it in here, and unwary readers might think I've been typing my fingers to the bone. Say, why don't we do that?

The few interviewers who have shown a mild interest in trying to find out how such drawings as mine ever came to be published have told their several versions of the important part White played in the process, but my own account seems to me to belong here. In the spring of 1929, then, he tried to get The New Yorker to publish a drawing I had done with a pencil on yellow copy paper. It showed a seal on a rock staring at a distant group of human beings, and saying, "Hm." The magazine's art meeting rejected it and sent along, for my instruction and guidance, a professional's drawing of the head of a seal, with the message, "This is how a seal's whiskers go." White sent my drawing back to the next art meeting with the message, "This is the way a Thurber seal's whiskers go." It was rejected again, without drawings or messages. White and I then wrote Is Sex Necessary? and he forced our shocked publishers to publish my illustrations for that book. The New Yorker then asked me to have another look at the seal on the rock, but I destroyed it. I set about doing another one, and what came out of that, by accident and ineptitude, was the drawing in this book of the seal in the bedroom.

I gave the original drawing to Bob Benchley, who had sent me a telegram the day it was reproduced in The New Yorker, the first telegram I ever got about anything of mine. About 1934 he lent it to a New York art gallery for an exhibition that lasted three weeks. The gallery kept it for seven years, in the basement wrapped and tied and addressed to Bob. When I found out about this, I went to the gallery and dug it up and gave it back to him. "Why didn't you tell me it had been gone for seven years?" I asked its owner. "I thought maybe it was on permanent loan," he said. And it darn near was.

What I did not quote was the introduction provided for the original edition of The Seal in the Bedroom--and of course retained in the new one--by Dorothy Parker. When I was writing before, it seemed off-topic (even in a ramble that can hardly have laid much claim to having a topic), and possibly too much of a strain on the patience of any readers who might have made it that far. Or maybe it just would have meant more typing, not to mention proofreading, than I felt up to just then. Either way, let me correct that oversight now (even at the cost of perhaps skimping on the proofreading):

Once a friend of a friend of mine was riding a London bus. At her stop she came down the stair just behind two ladies who, even during descent, were deep in conversation; surely only the discussion of the shortcomings of a common acquaintance could have held them so absorbed. She heeded their voices but none of their words, until the lady in advance stopped on a step, turned and declaimed in melodious British: "Mad, I don't say. Queer, I grant you. Many's the time I've seen her nude at the piano."

It has been, says this friend of my friend's, the regret of her days that she did not hear what led up to that strange fragment of biography.

But there I stray from her. It is infinitely provocative, I think, to be given only the climax; infinitely beguiling to wander back from it along the dappled paths of fancy. The words of that lady of the bus have all the challenge of a Thurber drawing--indeed, I am practically convinced that she herself was a Thurber drawing. No one but Thurber could have thought of her.

Mr. James Thurber, our hero, deals solely in culminations. Beneath his pictures he sets only the final line. You may figure for yourself, and good luck to you, what under heaven could have gone before, that his sombre citizens find themselves in such remarkable situations. It is yours to ponder how penguins get into drawing-rooms and seals into bed-chambers, for Mr. Thurber will only show them to you some little time after they have arrived there. Superbly he slaps aside preliminaries. He gives you a glimpse of the startling present and lets you go construct the astounding past. And if, somewhere in that process, you part with a certain amount of sanity, doubtless you are better off without it. There is too much sense in this world anyway.

These are strange people that Mr. Thurber has turned loose upon us. They seem to fall into three classes--the playful, the defeated, and the ferocious. All of them have the outer semblance of unbaked cookies; the women are of a dowdiness so overwhelming that it becomes tremendous style. Once a heckler, who should have been immediately put out, complained that the Thurber women have no sex appeal. The artist was no more than reproachful. "They have for my men," he said. And certainly the Thurber men, those deplorably desoigne Thurber men, would ask no better.

There is about all these characters, even the angry ones, a touching quality. They expect so little of life; they remember the old discouragements and await the new. They are not shrewd people, not even bright, and we must all be very patient with them. Lambs in a world of wolves, they are, and there is on them a protracted innocence. One sees them daily, come alive from the pages of The New Yorker--sees them in trains and ferryboats and station waiting-rooms and all the big, sad places where a face is once beheld, never to be seen again. It is curious, perhaps terrible, how Mr. Thurber has influenced the American face and physique, and some day he will surely answer for it. People didn't go about looking like that before he started drawing. But now there are more and more of them doing it, all the time. Presently, it may be, we shall become a nation of Thurber drawings, and then the Japanese can come over and lick the tar out of us.

Of the birds and animals so bewilderingly woven into the lives of the Thurber people it is best to say but little. Those tender puppies, those faint-hearted hounds--I think they are hounds--that despondent penguin--one goes all weak with sentiment. No man could have drawn, much less thought of, those creatures unless he felt really right about animals. One gathers that Mr. Thurber does, his art aside; he has fourteen resident dogs and more are expected. Reason totters.

All of them, his birds and his beasts and his men and women, are actually dashed off by the artist. Ten minutes for a drawing he regards as drudgery. He draws with a pen, with no foundation of pencil, and so sure and great is his draughtsmanship that there is never a hesitating line, never a change. No one understands how he makes his boneless, loppy beings, with their shy kinship to the men and women of Picasso's later drawings, so truly and gratifyingly decorative. And no one, with the exception of God and possibly Mr. Thurber, knows from what dark breeding-ground come the artist's ideas. Analysis promptly curls up; how is one to shadow the mental processes of a man who is impelled to depict a seal looking over the headboard of a bed occupied by a broken-spirited husband and a virago of a wife, and then to write below the scene the one line "All right, have it your way--you heard a seal bark"? . . . Mad, I don't say. Genius, I grant you.

It is none too soon that Mr. Thurber's drawings have been assembled in one space. Always one wants to show an understanding friend a conceit that the artist published in The New Yorker--let's see, how many weeks ago was it? and always some other understanding friend has been there first and sneaked the back copies of the magazine home with him. And it is necessary really to show the picture. A Thurber must be seen to be believed--there is no use trying to tell the plot of it. Only one thing is more hopeless than attempting to describe a Thurber drawing, and that is trying not to tell about it. So everything is going to be much better, I know, now that all the pictures are here together. Perhaps the one constructive thing in this year of hell is the publication of this collection.

And it is my pleasure and privilege--though also, I am afraid, my presumption--to introduce to you, now, one you know well already; one I revere as an artist and cleave to as a friend. Ladies and gentlemen--Mr. James Thurber.

DOROTHY PARKER
September 1932

For the record, Thurber comes back to this introduction in his 1950 "author's memoir." Here is the final paragraph:

As long ago as last May, Harpers sent me a copy of Mrs. Parker's Introduction. I had had some idea of sending it to her on the ground that she might want to take certain things back. I decided not to let her see it. It has always been one of my cherished possessions, and I was afraid that its author might take out a word or put in a comma. Dorothy Parker was the first to supply the kind and constant words that a man who draws stuff like the stuff in this book must have, if he is going to go ahead with it. I send her my love, and gratitude, and blessings, as always.

At this point, the logical thing to do would be to introduce the relevant portion of White's introduction to Is Sex Necessary?, where it can be juxtaposed with Thurber's, and see what if anything results. You don't think I'm stopping here just because I'm not prepared to do more typing, do you? No, I sure hope you don't think that.

[to be continued]