James Thurber and His ‘Third-Rate’ Artwork (1930)

On this day, in 1930, a great force of improbability was unleashed on American society, an act so unlikely that it must have caused reverberations throughout the world, like the now-stale concept of the fluttering butterfly’s wings in Brazil causing a tsunami in Japan.

On Feb. 22, the latest issue of The New Yorker hit the streets with a cartoon by James Thurber. Somewhere, surely, a fine artist, institutionally trained, who devoted his life to drawing an accurate and fine line, must have leapt from a bridge, while the pre-creation shades of Scott Adams and Stephen Pastis smiled, their futures assured.

Thurber backed into his career as a cartoonist, a not-surprising development once you learn that he was in the process of going blind from a childhood encounter with an arrow. He had been hired by The New Yorker in 1927 as one in a long line of managing editors that the magazine’s founder, Harold W. Ross, hoped would keep his weekly functioning. But Thurber was a thoroughgoing incompetent as a manager, and after several months was shifted to copy editor and a writer for the “Talk of the Town” section of the magazine.

First and foremost, Thurber took pride in his skill as a writer, and under the influence of staff writer E.B. White, with whom he shared an office, he would learn to refine his talent, creating and rewriting stories that became The New Yorker style: crisp, witty, seemingly effortless.

When he wasn’t writing, he was doodling, dashed off on whatever surface was handy when the mood seized him. He had been drawing all his life. It amused him. In college, he published them in a literary magazine that he edited, but only, he said later, because there were no artists on the staff.

So around the office, staffers and, presumably, bewildered visitors would find evidence of Thurber’s passing: on notepads, manuscripts and even the walls. Long-eared dogs in mournful meditation, men and women chasing and catching each other, all drawn, in Dorothy Parker’s words, with “the outer semblance of unbaked cookies.” It’s an example of the magazine’s eccentricity and casual attitude that Thurber was permitted to indulge in his habit.

Nobody seemed to like them, but White saw something worthwhile in one of these dashed-off creations: a seal, perched on a rock, looks off in the distance and sees two dots on the horizon, and says, “Hm, explorers.” White brought the cartoon to the magazine’s weekly art meeting. It was swiftly rejected. The art editor, trying to be helpful, drew a seal’s head on the piece and wrote, “This is the way a seal’s whiskers go.”

White sent the picture back with a note: “This is the way a Thurber seal’s whiskers go.”

White persisted over Thurber’s reservations, submitting cartoon after cartoon for consideration. Each time, he was shot down. Thurber tried to improve his drawing style, but White wouldn’t hear of it.

“Don’t do that,” he advised. “If you ever got good you’d be mediocre.”

Ross was more blunt: “How the hell did you get the idea that you could draw?”

If the matter had ended there, Thurber probably would be known as the creator of Walter Mitty and the fellow who wrote about the night the bed collapsed, and the day the dam broke, spoken of in the same way readers speak of New York wits such as Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker.

After a series of rejections, White tried a different tack. He collaborated with Thurber on a parody of the earnest doctor-penned advice manuals on love and relationships popular during the 1920s, and asked Thurber to come up with illustrations, which he dashed off in an evening.

At an editorial meeting with the publisher, White delivered the manuscript and spread out Thurber’s drawings. An editor said, “These are, we presume, a rough idea of what you’d like a professional artist to do for the book?”

White replied, “No, these are the drawings that go in the book.”

Later, Thurber said in an interview, “Well, that really shook them — they almost brought the book out quietly.”

To nearly everyone’s surprise, “Is Sex Necessary? Or Why You Feel The Way You Do” became a best-seller. Ross was livid that he had passed on the cartoons. Thurber recalled, “He came into my office and said: ‘Where’s that damned seal drawing you did — several months ago — that White sent in.’ And I said: ‘Where is it? You rejected it, so I threw it away.’ And he said: ‘Don’t throw things away just because I don’t like them — or think I don’t. Do it again!”

Thurber did, and on February 22, 1930, The New Yorker published “The Pet Department,” a parody of an advice column illustrated with pictures of fainting dogs and sleeping birds.

Until blindness halted his doodling about two decades later, Thurber would publish over three hundred cartoons in The New Yorker, with memorable captions such as “All right, have it your way — you heard a seal bark” and “That’s my first wife up there, and this is the present Mrs. Harris.” Even “Hm, explorers” got in.

While Thurber is a great humorist, his cartoons added another dimension to his reputation. Their brevity makes them memorable. Their lack of drawing skill makes them personal: No one draws men and women and dogs like Thurber.

And when he’s weird, he’s Thurber weird, a unique voice. No one would ever confuse his weirdness for Matt Groening weird in his “Life in Hell” strips, and Gary Larson in his “Far Side” panels. It’s a reflection of a mind that stands out.

Despite the praise, Thurber couldn’t see what the fuss was about. He resented seeing his carefully written and edited humorous stories overshadowed by these energetic, slapdash doodles, which is why he liked to tell the story of the New Yorker cartoonist who confronted Ross and shouted, “Why do you reject drawings of mine, and print stuff by that fifth-rate artist Thurber?”

“Third-rate,” Ross replied.

Sources: “The Years with Ross,” James Thurber; “Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber,” Neil A. Grauer (University of Nebraska Press); “Conversations with James Thurber,” ed. Thomas Fensch (University Press of Mississippi); “Thurber: Writings & Drawings” ed. Garrison Keillor (Library of America)

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