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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.
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| Related Links |
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| Authors Mentioned |
| John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, John Steinbeck, E. B. White, Thomas Wolfe, Hervey Allen, Robert Benchley, Willa Cather, Robert M. Coates, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Max Eastman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Thomas Hardy, Frank Harris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joseph Hergesheimer, Henry James, John Keats, Victoria Lincoln, H. L. Mencken, Elliott Nugent, John O'Hara, Elliot Paul, Mark Twain, Carl Van Vechten |
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