Thurber on Ross

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Had a truly hectic day.

Slept last night (morning) at 6 AM and Ishani got me out of bed at 8.30 AM to play ball with her.

Then my son drove me along with him to our Nile Valley Township to inspect the kitchen sink extension; and it was 3 PM by the time we were back.

And Ishani was ready.

Another fond trip to Nile Valley in the evening with lifelong friends.

And so on...

In this job of daily blogging, I cheat whenever I don't get time for an original blog by lifting something or the other from Google.

Here is Thurber on Ross.

Thurber is Thurber, while Harold Ross was his Editor at New Yorker where Thurber published most of his work.

They were a weird pair, unique species of the Author-Editor symbiosis.

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http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5003/the-art-of-fiction-no-10-james-thurber

INTERVIEWER

You say that your drawings often don’t come out the way you intended?

THURBER

Well, once I did a drawing for The New Yorker of a naked woman on all fours up on top of a bookcase—a big bookcase. She’s up there near the ceiling, and in the room are her husband and two other women. The husband is saying to one of the women, obviously a guest, “This is the present Mrs. Harris. That’s my first wife up there.” Well, when I did the cartoon originally I meant the naked woman to be at the top of a flight of stairs, but I lost the sense of perspective and instead of getting in the stairs when I drew my line down, there she was stuck up there, naked, on a bookcase.

Incidentally, that cartoon really threw The New Yorker editor, Harold Ross. He approached any humorous piece of writing, or more particularly a drawing, not only grimly but realistically. He called me on the phone and asked if the woman up on the bookcase was supposed to be alive, stuffed, or dead. I said, “I don’t know, but I’ll let you know in a couple of hours.” After a while I called him back and told him I’d just talked to my taxidermist, who said you can’t stuff a woman, that my doctor had told me a dead woman couldn’t support herself on all fours. “So, Ross,” I said, “she must be alive.” “Well then,” he said, “what’s she doing up there naked in the home of her husband’s second wife?” I told him he had me there.

INTERVIEWER

But he published it.

THURBER

Yes, he published it, growling a bit. He had a fine understanding of humor, Ross, though he couldn’t have told you about it. When I introduced Ross to the work of Peter de Vries, he first said, “He won’t be good; he won’t be funny; he won’t know English.” (He was the only successful editor I’ve known who approached everything like a ship going on the rocks.) But when Ross had looked at the work he said, “How can you get this guy on the phone?” He couldn’t have said why, but he had that bloodhound instinct. The same with editing. He was a wonderful man at detecting something wrong with a story without knowing why.

INTERVIEWER

Could he develop a writer?

THURBER

Not really. It wasn’t true what they often said of him —that he broke up writers like matches—but still he wasn’t the man to develop a writer. He was an unread man. Well, he’d read Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and several other books he told me about—medical books—and he took the Encyclopedia Britannica to the bathroom with him. I think he was about up to H when he died. But still his effect on writers was considerable. When you first met him you couldn’t believe he was the editor of The New Yorker and afterward you couldn’t believe that anyone else could have been. The main thing he was interested in was clarity. Someone once said of The New Yorker that it never contained a sentence that would puzzle an intelligent fourteen year old or in any way affect her morals badly. Ross didn’t like that, but nevertheless he was a purist and a perfectionist and it had a tremendous effect on all of us: It kept us from being sloppy. When I first met him he asked me if I knew English. I thought he meant French or a foreign language. But he repeated, “Do you know English?” When I said I did he replied, “Goddamn it, nobody knows English.” As Andy White mentioned in his obituary, Ross approached the English sentence as though it was an enemy, something that was going to throw him. He used to fuss for an hour over a comma. He’d call me in for lengthy discussions about the Thurber colon. And as for poetic license, he’d say, “Damn any license to get things wrong.” In fact, Ross read so carefully that often he didn’t get the sense of your story. I once said: “I wish you’d read my stories for pleasure, Ross.” He replied he hadn’t time for that.

INTERVIEWER

It’s strange that one of the main ingredients of humor—low comedy—has never been accepted for The New Yorker.

THURBER

Ross had a neighbor woman’s attitude about it. He never got over his Midwestern provincialism. His idea was that sex is an incident. “If you can prove it,” I said, “we can get it in a box on the front page of The New York Times.” Now I don’t want to say that in private life Ross was a prude. But as regards the theater or the printed page he certainly was. For example, he once sent an office memorandum to us in a sealed envelope. It was an order: “When you send me a memorandum with four-letter words in it, seal it. There are women in this office.” I said, “Yah, Ross, and they know a lot more of these words than you do.” When women were around he was very conscious of them. Once my wife and I were in his office and Ross was discussing a man and woman he knew much better than we did. Ross told us, “I have every reason to believe that they’re s-l-e-e-p-i-n-g together.” My wife replied, “Why, Harold Ross, what words you do spell out.” But honest to goodness, that was genuine. Women are either good or bad, he once told me, and the good ones must not hear these things.

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