Fensch Conversations With James Thurber

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9963154-3-2
Verlag: New Century Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 100 Seiten

In 'Conversation with James Thurber,' this remarkable man, who has been called America's twentieth-century Mark Twain, and who was one of the great talkers of his time expresses his opinions on just about everything and recounts stories and anecdotes about his life which provided the basis for much of his humor and his writing. Articles in this collection are all the public interviews Thurber gave during his lifetime, in chronological order. In this collection we can visualize the Thurber men, the Thurber women, his dogs, his wit, imagination and wordplay, his blindness, his years at 'The New Yorker' magazine and his own unique perceptions of the world.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fensch, Thomas

Leseproben

Introduction

“Comedy is his chosen field,” Malcolm Cowley wrote of James Thurber, but while Thurber’s range of effects is deliberately limited, within that range nobody writes better than he does, that is, more clearly and flexibly, with a deeper feeling for the genius of language and the value of words. Cowley, in his essay “Lions and Lemmings, Toads and Tigers” in continued, “He prefers the familiar words that would be used in conversation without a self-conscious pause. His art consists in arranging them so that they give the impression of standing cleanly and separately on the page, each in its place like stones in a well-built wall.”

Thurber, who may well stand unchallenged as America’s twentieth-century Mark Twain—in 1958 he became the first American since Twain to be invited to join the editors of during their weekly luncheon—established himself as a writer and cartoonist after joining the staff in 1927. Charles S. Holmes wrote, in his “creative talent flowered in the years after he joined the magazine.” (1929), (1931), (1932), (1933), and (1935) established him as a writer and cartoonist of rare originality. Here were the subjects, characters, and themes which identified his work up to the period of his blindness: the domestic scene and the trivia which somehow explode into major conflicts; the timid day-dreamy men and the aggressive practical women; the view of marriage as a state of undeclared war; the celebration of the natural, the individual, the eccentric as against conventions, formulas, and systems of all kinds; and above all, the constant and surprising interplay of reality and fantasy.”

In the Prospectus for the first issue of the founder and editor Harold Ross promised that his new magazine would be a model of sophistication—it would not, he declared, be written and edited for “the little old lady in Dubuque.” Then, however, James Thurber joined the staff as Managing Editor, quickly working his way to staff writer, hailing from Columbus, Ohio. Literally only hundreds of miles apart, Thurber’s Columbus and Ross’s Dubuque were figuratively identical. Thurber joined Ross, the relatively unschooled journalist from the Rocky Mountains, E. B. White, and others to craft the into the sophisticated magazine Ross envisioned. No wonder they seemed surprised that it succeeded.

Thurber had moved from his provincial hometown to the urbane world of the but his idyllic world of Columbus never left him. “I am never very far away from Ohio in my thoughts and … the clocks that strike in my dreams are always the clocks of Columbus,” Thurber acknowledged in an oft-quoted line from his speech/ essay “Thurber on Humor,” given when the Ohioana Library Association awarded him the Sesquicentennial Medal in 1953. Thurber returned to Ohio again and again for inspiration and to mine material, especially for (1952), the wry portrait of his real (and mythical) family life in Columbus.

“Confusion, chaos, eccentricity—these are the qualities Thurber discovers and delights in as he looks back at the world of his boy-hood.” Holmes, cited above, wrote in “Reality Twisted to the Right: My ” in “and in telling the story of those early days he consistently reshapes reality, stylizes and fictionalizes it, to bring it closer to the world of fantasy. Long before he put any of it down on paper, he was thinking about it, working it over in his memory and imagination, shaping it into anecdotes for the entertainment of his friends at parties …. By the time he came to write it all down, fact and fantasy had become so perfectly assimilated to one another that there was no longer any noticeable difference between them.”

Thurber was well-served by the years of working material over “in his memory and imagination” when increasing blindness, beginning about 1940, forced him to compose everything mentally, revising and editing it, then dictating to a secretary. Thurber, like other writers—except for his claim to a near photographic memory—revised and edited his own memories as well and, presented them in slightly different forms in various interviews.

And what of those interviews? No doubt, if we were to interview Thurber today, he would talk more about the things he always talked about:

• Anecdotes and family members from his life in Columbus, of course, perhaps slight variations on the material included in or
• His days as a student at Ohio State University: struggles with botany classes and his inability to see through a microscope; ROTC classes; football players he knew and games he saw; conflicts about academic freedom he witnessed (which later appeared in his play his work for the Ohio State University newspaper and humor magazine; the professors he knew; the musicals he wrote which were produced on campus;
• His days in Europe as a code clerk and newspaperman, when he had to recreate entire stories from a few words of coded copy from the newspaper wire services;
• His early days in New York City, when he joined the staff of the His astonished discovery that he had been appointed Managing Editor without his knowledge and his rapid demotion to staff writer. Comparisons of the early days of the to later days, when he had resigned from the staff to free-lance. Anecdotes of various staff writers, from early to later years;
• The origins of his drawings and the art (or lack of it) in his technique;
• Word games and mental puzzles that fascinated him;
• His blindness—its origins and subsequent affect on his work—and related to his blindness, his techniques for writing and editing mentally, and then dictating material for publication. How his blindness changed his perceptions of the world;
• His imagination and memory in all their various aspects;
• The Thurber Men he created, the Thurber Women, the constant and shifting Battle of the Sexes and the general Superiority of Women (His 1953 Associated Press Interview “Says Superwomen Will Force Peace” sounds refreshingly current);
• Thurber dogs in particular and animals in general;
• The growing decline of theater in America;
• Humor—what it is—and how to write it;

And various combinations of anecdotes, complaints and opinions about the world.

The interview is a format that Thurber found friendly. In Charles Holmes wrote that Thurber “seldom refused a request (for an interview), partly because he was an old newspaperman and sympathized with reporters, and partly because he was one of the great talkers of his time. He had opinions on everything and liked to express them; he was a superb story-teller and mimic, and he loved an audience. Over the years, he made the interview-monologue into an art form, the oral equivalent of the autobiographical essay which he had developed to perfection in his prose. It was, perhaps, the form most congenial to him as he grew older. The key to it was the balance between the casual, conventional manner—its spontaneous quality—and the basic structure of ready-made topics, anecdotes and routines which gave it substance and coherence. Depending upon how the particular interview was going, Thurber would rely mostly on his standard anecdotes or introduce fresh material and improvise on it as the spirit moved him.”

At least one, however, of the many who interviewed Thurber had harsh criticism rather than praise for him in his later days. A young John Updike complained about Thurber in an article, “Writers I have Met,” published in the August 11, 1968 issue of Updike described Thurber as “a big-boned blind giant … and there could have been no way of anticipating the alarming way his eyes caromed around the refracting magnification of his glasses.” Updike criticized not only Thurber’s blindness but his memory, writing, “Though Thurber cocked his head alertly at my poor fawning attempts to make conversation, these attempts did not appreciably distract him from the anecdotes of Columbus, Ohio, he had told a thousand times before, and that I had read 10 years before in their definitive, printed version. Pages of and My issued from his lips virtually intact.”

With his friendlier mien, Holmes continued in to describe Thurber’s interview talents as a kind of autobiography. “Some interviews, like those conducted by Plimpton and Steele or Alistair Cooke,* were carefully structured, wide-ranging discussions of Thurber’s aims, habits and tastes as an artist. In those conversations Thurber is the artist as autobiographer, talking seriously and entertainingly about how he got started, about the people who influenced him, about the...