Thurber's Daydreams

[James Thurber to Francis Brown]

West Cornwall, Connecticut

November 4, 1952

Mr. Francis Brown, Editor,

The New York Times Book Review

Times Square, New York 36, N. Y.

Dear Mr. Brown:

You astonish me by intimating that there is at least one book every year a writer wishes he had written. I cannot agree with this. In the first place, an average writer--take me--has a pretty narrow field and certainly enough humility not to include a translation of the Bible, a collection of great poetry, or "Sironia" in the wistful range of his aspirations. There have been times when I wished I could have written Evelyn Waugh's "Decline and Fall," O'Hara's "Appointment in Samarra," Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," and a hundred pieces by E. B. White, but these are daydreams a man keeps to himself. I think the average writer wishes he had done his own most recent book better than he did. He rarely has the guts to look at earlier ones.

Perhaps I am circling around a solid major truth: no writer actually wished, honest to God, that he had written anybody else's book or books. Maybe it would be easier to put down one I'm glad I didn't write. I don't know.

Sincerely yours,
James Thurber

-from The Thurber Letters: the wit, wisdom, and surprising life of James Thurber edited by Harrison Kinney (New York: Simon & Schuster,2003). p. 571.

Thurber (non Homeric)

[James Thurber to E. B. White]

Dear Andy,

. . . When are you coming to New York? I heard a vague rumor that you had set out to discover the Northwest Passage, but that the trees began to move on you, or something. Remember how [Morris] Markey wrote an intimate account of Baltimore without going there. He got the dope from his friend Logan Clendenning over a few drinks in St. Louis. This was the book in which everybody Markey met, in mines, or factories, or forests, turned out to be Markey himself. He did his best piece, "The Deep South" in a small upstairs front room in Little River, Florida. "There ain't any use wearin' yourself out," he used to say. Who wants to reach Duluth with the smell of Albany still on him?

We are anxious to see you and Katherine, and to hear about Joe and Roger and Evelyn. The new maple blight has not got us yet.

Love and kisses from us both

As always,

Jim

-from The Thurber Letters: the wit, wisdom, and surprising life of James Thurber edited by Harrison Kinney (New York: Simon & Schuster,2003). p. 533.

S. J. Perelman to Thurber

To James Thurber

14 Washington Square North
New York City
March 4, 1946.

Dear Jim,

Many thanks to yourself and Helen for your very kind note, which arrived as I was sitting beside a rainswept window tugging ineffectually at my beard, like Beerbohm's mournful caricature of Lytton Strachey. I was particularly heartened by the theory you relayed about the reservoir of humor we're all supposed to possess. Candidly, mine seems at the moment to have shrunken to a greenish hog-wallow dotted with kerosene cans and old shoes. Every so often, I appear in the sedge bordering this tarn, cup my hands, and shout, "Halloo--are there any side-splitting ideas in there, mate?" A voice from the opposite shore (there must be a Cockney living in there with me) replies, "Coo--not bloddy 'arf."

I suppose, however, we should all be refreshed and uplifted by the thought that one person, at least, continues to wear the old cap and bells vivaciously, and that's Bennett Cerf. Among his other exploits this winter, America's Sweetheart got out a Modern Library anthology of humor with a dust-jacket representing you and me which is going to take some intensive forgetting. One of these days when we're not too busy worrying, what say we sneak over to Random House and clap a commode snugly down over his ears?

I hope, in any case, that you are both bursting with rude health, and let's all toast each other into insensibility some evening with all kinds of malts and grains. Meanwhile, Laura and I send you our very best.
Yours,

[S. J. Perelman]

-from Don't Tread On Me: the Selected Letters of S. J. Perelman edited by Prudence Crowther (New York: Viking, 1987) p. 67-68.

James Thurber to E. B. White

To E. B. White

The Homestead, Hot Springs, Virginia

November 10, 1945.

Dear Andy:

. . . The day your book arrived with its laconic inscription, both the window shades in our bedroom shot up to the top, ostensibly on their own. There has also been great periodic commotion in the ice pitcher, and somebody has got away with one of my studs. I name no names.

Love,

Jim

-from The Thurber Letters: the wit, wisdom, and surprising life of James Thurber edited by Harrison Kinney (New York: Simon & Schuster,2003). p. 380.

James Thurber's Bread & Butter

To the Palmer Family

September 21, 1944.

Dear Minna, Janey, Mary, and Cornelia:

Well, here I am again, home safe and unsound. I lay around the Algonquin until train time, while Helen shopped for birthday presents for Rosie and an evening dress for herself to keep up her morale. She tells people that I was sick in the house of my girl, her mother, and sisters. "Well, how nice," say the neighbours primly. . .

We were only 20 minutes late, owing to the engineer, who had bella donna in his eyes. The conductor was a pleasant little man who had never made this run before and had the feeling he was going backward.

At Grand Central we could not get a cab till Helen told a redcap I had pneumonia. "Oh, I'll get your father a cab right away," he said, and he did.

September 22

A kind of moribundity got me yesterday after so much exercise with a pencil. I feel stronger today--I could easily crack an English walnut.

Yesterday was hot and muggy like a 15-year-old Pekinese, but today is beautiful, clear, sunny, C Major.

This is a plain ordinary bread and butter letter, and it should be a steak and Clos Veugeot letter. We will never be able to express our love and gratitude to the Palmers, so I won't even try. It was the best time a pneumonia patient ever had . . . .

Jim

-from The Thurber Letters: the wit, wisdom, and surprising life of James Thurber edited by Harrison Kinney (New York: Simon & Schuster,2003). p. 365.