James Thurber, born 100 years ago today was destined to be odd. That he was funny, too, was merely a bonus.
So begins a breezy new biography of the famed writer and cartoonist, "Remember Laughter" (University of Nebraska Press), by Baltimore writer Neil A. Grauer. Timed to coincide with the centenary of Thurber's birth, the book arrives in stores just ahead of a movie about the famed Algonquin Round Table called "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle."
This sudden interest in the first generation of New Yorker writers and wits -- which included not only Thurber, but E.B. White, and those of who gathered to dine and dish at the Algonquin Hotel, such as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and Alexander Woollcott -- doesn't surprise Mr. Grauer. He tried six years ago to interest public television in a documentary on Benchley, after writing about the humorist for American Heritage.
But his timing was off. This year, given the new film and the interest generated by Thurber's 100th birthday, Mr. Grauer is in the right place at the right time. "Of course, Thurber was never part of the Algonquin Round Table," he says. "He thought it was too precious. He and E.B. White didn't see the value of sitting around, agonizing over one-liners. They saved it for the page."
A cartoonist as well as a writer -- "I've been drawing since I picked up a pencil" -- Mr. Grauer found a natural subject in Thurber, the Columbus, Ohio, native whose simple line drawings of stern women and befuddled men are as familiar as his most famous literary creations, such as Walter Mitty and The Night the Bed Fell.
But the drawings, as Mr. Grauer reminds readers, were not an instant success. New Yorker editor Harold Ross would not publish them when Thurber first joined his staff. In a scene credited to an earlier biographer, Mr. Grauer recounts: "He asked Thurber, 'How the hell did you get the idea you could draw?'"
After reading "Remember Laughter," one is tempted to recast the question. Where did Thurber, the son of a political functionary from a decidedly quirky family, get the idea he could do anything? For while Thurber's reminiscences emphasized the lighter side of his life, there was plenty of darkness, literally and figuratively.
At age 6, Thurber lost his left eye when brother William tried to re-enact the William Tell legend without an apple. The accident also damaged the right eye, so Thurber's world was always a little bit fuzzy. Later in life, despite several operations, nothing could save him from blindness.
And Thurber's first attempt at college was disastrous, largely because of Ohio State's emphasis on things that did not come easily to young Jamie: gym, marching drills and microscopes. He dropped out, but made a second pass at a college education in 1915. Buoyed by professors and a friend who recognized his incipient talent, Thurber began to come into his own.
The years that followed college included the then-necessary rites of passage for a young writer: newspaper work, Paris, a cheap room in Greenwich Village, and many, many rejection slips.
His first wife, Althea, suggested he spend no more than 45 minutes to compose his humorous pieces. (This unhappy marriage ended in 1935; Thurber then married Helen Wismer.) The new system apparently worked, as the New Yorker "snapped up" a story about a man trying to set the world's record for most go-rounds in a revolving door.
Thurber joined the New Yorker in 1927 as an editor, although he was soon "demoted" -- at his request -- to a full-time writer. White, Thurber's office-mate, quickly became a fan and mentor. And when Ross turned down Thurber's drawings, White insisted his friend illustrate a collaborative effort called "Is Sex Necessary?"
The book was a success, paving the way for Thurber's drawings to appear in the New Yorker. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he produced some of his best work, including "My Life and Hard Times," "The Last Flower" and his fables. In Thurber's version of "Little Red Riding Hood," the girl produces a gun and dispatches the wolf with a single shot. The moral: "It's not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be."
His work in the 1940s and '50s has not held up as well, but it continued to bring him success, fame and money. As Burton Bernstein's earlier, more exhaustive biography of Thurber made clear almost 20 years ago, this is not a combination that brings out one's best.
Essentially blind by 1947, Thurber became an increasingly cantankerous man who thought he had a shot at the Nobel Prize. By the time he died in 1961, at age 66, he had alienated many, although his second wife, Helen, remained intensely loyal.
Besides the Thurber biography, Mr. Grauer, who works at Vanguard Communications in Washington, has written four other books, including "Wits and Sages," profiles of well-known columnists.
A natty dresser given to bow ties, he has an affection for the past evident in his antique-and-artifact-strewn apartment in a North Baltimore high-rise. Photographs of personages such as Mark Twain, Herbert Hoover and Walter Cronkite decorate the walls. A photograph of Mr. Grauer with a cigar bears a striking resemblance to a young Groucho Marx -- but only if one knows what Groucho looked like off-stage, circa 1925. Mr. Grauer, who corresponded with Groucho and Harpo, is the kind of person who knows such things.
While he relied heavily on existing works, Mr. Grauer also drew on new sources for the Thurber book. "To be blind and angry and alcoholic and old is a combination that no one should go through," Roger Angell, a New Yorker editor who knew Thurber most of his life, told Mr. Grauer. "Add fame to that and it's a terrible burden." I don't think any of us knows how we would do any better than he did."
Rosemary A. Thurber, also interviewed for "Remember Laughter," says her father abused alcohol, but was not an alcoholic. She attributes his prickly temperament to "just the way human beings do their stuff."
E.B. White had a gentler view, despite a famous rift with Thurber over Thurber's Harold Ross memoir, which White found in poor )) taste.
"I was one of the lucky ones," White wrote in a tribute to Thurber after his death, the kind of piece Thurber had written for so many colleagues. "I knew him before blindness hit him, before fame hit him, and I tend always to think of him as a young artist in a small office in a big city, with all the world still ahead."
Mr. Grauer, perhaps best known for his scoop on the anti-Semitism and racism evident in H.L. Mencken's diaries, also has dug up some new information on Thurber. Using the Freedom of Information Act, he dug up Mr. Thurber's FBI file, started in 1939 because of Mr. Thurber's public sentiments on the Spanish Civil War. (He opposed dictator Francisco Franco.) And an interview with illustrator Al Hirschfeld confirmed what was believed to be an apocryphal story, about Thurber's habit of taking out his glass eye at cocktail parties.
But for Mr. Grauer, the most poignant personal discovery was of Thurber's work as a children's writer. These stories, including "The White Deer," "Many Moons," and "The 13 Clocks," share a voice distinct from the style of his adult essays and stories. He loved writing these stories and once described "The White Deer" as the "most fun I ever had."
Fittingly, it was one of Thurber's children's stories that provided the title for Mr. Grauer's biography. In "The 13 Clocks," Thurber had this bit of advice: "Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After." One can only hope he remembered it, too.