The whole scheme of my existence is based on concealment.
IN ADULTHOOD AS in high school and college, romance was not Andy’s strong suit. In 1926, the year he became a staff writer for The New Yorker, he began occasionally seeing a young woman named Mary Osborn, but the poems he wrote during this time indicate a typically halting and unrealized relationship. In a sonnet entitled “To the Bronze Bust of Holley in Washington Square,” he apologized for his awkwardness during a romantic moment and explained why he failed to kiss her:
I could not then unbend to claim my prize
Simply because you would not close your eyes!
In a later poem he made the odd claim that he had “Too small a heart, too large a pen.” But he was candid about his anxious response to the stirrings of his own yearning for love:
And if I have not said it well,
Or even loud enough to hear it,
That is because I cannot tell
How much I like, how much I fear it.
By 1927 Mary was gone and Andy was flirting with a nineteen-year-old named Rosanne Magdol, who had recently come to work at The New Yorker as a secretary. She had deliberately chosen the hip new magazine as a road that would lead her out of what she considered the suffocating culture of her family, who were recent Jewish immigrants from Russia. Rosanne was petite, attractive, lively, and—by Andy’s standards, anyway—distractingly uninhibited. Unlike him, she simply was not shy. Once she caused a stir during a staff beer party by walking up to Gene Tunney, who was awkwardly standing by himself and looking self-conscious, and casually engaging him in conversation. At thirty, Tunney was a two-time world heavyweight boxing champion, having pummeled Jack Dempsey both this year and last; he towered over Rosanne and smiled down at her. Andy watched from across the room.
Rosanne’s relationship with Andy never progressed to an actual three-dimensional romance. As usual, rather than taking a woman out on a date, he invited Rosanne for long walks, during which he tried to amuse her with stories such as the adventures of his pet canary, Baby. Once Rosanne invited him to a lecture on yoga, an occasion he soon mocked in a casual; he also parodied in writing her desire to, as she said, “rub shoulders with the famous.” Once he showed up at her apartment at night, unannounced, only to find a man there—an older friend who, she explained, needed a sofa to sleep on for a couple of nights. Despite having never actually expressed his feelings to Rosanne, Andy was upset.
Eventually he described himself—safely costumed in third person—in a self-conscious sonnet called “Portrait.” It was as self-aggrandizing as a Romantic poet striding across the Lake District a century earlier, but candid about his crippling second-guessing and his melancholy bent.
He goes his way with a too cautious stride
That checks him safe just short of every goal;
Seeks not conclusions lest they try his pride,
Claims not fair booty lest it glut his soul.
If it be love, he finds it unrequited,
And seasons it with sadness to the taste;
If it be fame, he finds his name is slighted,
And turns his luck aside in conscious haste.
Frustration tickles his most plaintive strings
And satisfies his bent for somber living;
He daubs with mystery the obvious things,
And holds fulfillment off—always contriving
From life (held very gingerly) to press
The fine musk odor of unhappiness.
About the time he wrote up his interview with the sparrow, during the spring of 1927, Andy used a different bird as mouthpiece for his worries. While working at The New Yorker and agonizing as usual over the conflict between his romantic attraction to women and his deep-seated fear that he might lose himself if he committed to love and marriage, Andy wrote up the dilemma as a conversation between himself and the canary Baby, whose exploits he had recounted to Mary. This male caged bird, Andy claimed, thought of himself as an artist. Like the sparrow in Madison Square that Andy had written about, the canary exhibited signs of a nesting urge that made Andy uneasy. One spring night, Andy claimed with Don Marquis chutzpah, he was reading the recently published Journal of Katherine Mansfield aloud to Baby, who now and then sang along with the words. But then Andy read an evocative phrase from Mansfield, “the warm soft wind of spring, searching out the heart,” the kind of expression of vague longing that he often found moving. Suddenly the bird stopped singing and began fidgeting with a piece of string, finally trying to wrap it around himself and sit down in it.
Andy claimed that he asked the bird about this restless unease.
Baby confessed that he was not entirely happy with his life now that he had been joined in the cage by a “wife,” Justa, whose tendency to noble self-sacrifice manifested itself in digging choice bits out of the seed cup and leaving them on top for her husband to find. Baby insisted that he would prefer to find them himself. “Take away an artist’s troubles,” he complained to Andy, “and what has he?”
In this scenario, Andy pointed out that Baby’s love lyrics to Justa during their first few weeks together were his most beautiful music. “That throat-bulging song that ripples my feathers and shakes my frame,” Baby replied, “that song of desire and love and conquest—it’s life, but it isn’t art.”
“I’m in love, and I’m going crazy.”
(translation of a Boston terrier’s bark)
IN MARCH 1927 a new writer came on board at The New Yorker, a tall and nearsighted, bespectacled and mustached thirty-two-year-old named James Thurber. He had considerably more journalistic experience than Andy. He had already worked as a newspaperman in his native Columbus, Ohio, as well as for the Chicago Tribune in Paris alongside other expatriates such as William Shirer. Thurber was serious about his career as a writer, but like Andy he couldn’t remain solemn for more than an hour at work. In Paris, Thurber liked to sneak in fictional filler paragraphs, including one quoting President Coolidge as having said to a religious convention that a man who does not pray is not a praying man.
Thurber and Andy had met through a mutual acquaintance. Ross got the idea that they were old friends, however, and impressed as he was with Andy, he immediately hired Thurber. Ross was seeking, as always, a managing editor who could orchestrate all the burgeoning departments of the magazine—a “jesus,” they called it in the office. Ross himself referred to this elusive messiah as the Hub. Ross didn’t quite explain to Thurber that he had nominated him for the role. Completely unsuited, Thurber was miserable, but when offered the job he was having little success as a freelancer. He was so poor he had begun to think of doughnuts and cocktail-party anchovies as sustenance. At The New Yorker he wanted to write, not edit, and eventually Ross permitted him to.
Among the early tasks assigned to Andy was writing captions for cartoons, which Ross usually referred to simply as “drawings.” Ross was as fanatically attentive to every line of a cartoon as he was to every word in an essay. He tended to ask about characters in them, “Who’s talking?” He didn’t hesitate to suggest revisions to a drawing or to apply to it his own passion for narrative lucidity. After spending two long minutes peering at a drawing of a Model T on a dusty road, he once snapped to his secretary, “Take this down, Miss Terry. Better dust.” Other staffers reported that Ross once examined a cartoon of two elephants and asked, “Which elephant is talking?”
Thurber was soon involved in this process as well. In November 1928, he and Andy sat in the closet-size office they shared—it was barely large enough for two desks—and thought up a caption for a static ink-and-wash scene by a young cartoonist named Carl Rose. The magazine had published Rose’s first drawing during its debut year, and he had become a regular contributor. But his new drawing was less than inspired. It showed an elegantly dressed brunette dining in a restaurant with her young, curly-haired blond daughter. While holding her fork in midair above her plate, the mother was looking down at her daughter and speaking. Her expression was neutral and the daughter barely had any expression at all. The dialogue could go in any direction. The setting gave no clue to what Rose was thinking about when he drew it. His own caption had been rejected, but Ross and the others liked the drawing itself.
Although nothing indicated that the child was speaking as well, Andy wrote under the cartoon an old-fashioned dialogue, the kind of two-line caption that Ross was trying to get away from. Ross disliked the antique cartoon that required a script below with speakers clearly labeled as COUNT and SHOWGIRL. Andy didn’t mind being old-fashioned, especially when he could amusingly mislead the reader by doing so. In his caption, clearly the mother speaks first: “It’s broccoli, dear.” And the daughter replies, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”
Not one to chortle over his own humor, and uncertain as always about his work, Andy passed the now captioned drawing to Thurber, who took the sheet of paper and read it without smiling. He said simply, “Yeah, it seems okay to me.”
Ross hesitated over it. He wasn’t particularly impressed and also worried about the word hell because he already felt that there was too much profanity in the magazine. But Katharine Angell, who had become quite fond of Andy and his kind of humor, thought it was hilarious. While Ross was on vacation in Florida, Katharine published it. It appeared in the December 8 issue and soon became the most famous cartoon the magazine had published.
Thurber himself drew, had indeed been drawing compulsively since childhood. In the tiny office with Andy, he filled stray yellow copy paper with graceless flowers, childish lamps and chairs and desks, mournful hounds of dubious ancestry, couples whose rubber arms wrapped around each other like vines and ended in square, three-fingered hands. Because Thurber knew nothing about perspective and never planned a drawing ahead, what had started out as a staircase might be forced to metamorphose into an article of furniture. It was Andy who first appreciated Thurber’s skewed, disproportionate, perspectiveless, and yet brilliant talent.
In spring 1929 Thurber quickly scribbled a drawing of a seal—complete with doggish whiskers and deadpan expression—perched on a rock, looking off to its right at two small specks and uttering the boring caption “Hm, explorers.” Andy liked the style of the drawing immediately and argued that Thurber ought to send it to the next Tuesday-afternoon art meeting. Thurber already had a tremor in his hands that prevented his inking his own pencil sketches, so Andy carefully drew black India ink lines over Thurber’s pencil original to create a reproducible drawing. Then he sent it to the meeting.
Thurber could imagine Ross’s and art director Rea Irvin’s disdainful responses. Sure enough, the next Tuesday the drawing appeared back on Thurber’s desk. On the same yellow paper, beside Thurber’s sketch, Irvin had drawn his own more realistic seal portrait and added the note, This is the way a seal’s whiskers go. Andy attached a note saying, This is how a Thurber seal’s whiskers go, and sent it to the next weekly meeting. It was rejected without further comment.
Soon Ross was growling at Thurber, “How the hell did you get the idea you could draw?”
During the summer of 1929 Andy and Thurber wrote a brief book together entitled Is Sex Necessary? or, Why You Feel the Way You Do. A parody of the sex-and-romance advice books that were becoming common, it was a resolutely frothy parade of silliness that read like what it was—a freshman outing by two young men who were only one generation past Victorian. But they also addressed recurring themes in the dance of romance and sexuality.
Just the minute another person is drawn into some one’s life, there begin to arise undreamed-of complexities, and from such a simple beginning as sexual desire we find built up such alarming yet familiar phenomena as fêtes, divertissements, telephone conversations, arrangements, plans, sacrifices, train arrivals, meetings, appointments, tardinesses, delays, marriages, dinners, small pets and animals, calumny, children, music lessons, yellow shades for the windows, evasions, lethargy, cigarettes, candies, repetition of stories and anecdotes, infidelity, ineptitude, incompatibility, bronchial trouble …
They urged the young to inform their elders about sex, mocked independent working women, and explained to wives how to keep their husbands from feeling claustrophobic. Amid much silliness were some inspired non sequiturs. “There are apartments in New York,” they wrote, “in which one must step across an open bathtub in going from the kitchen to the bedroom; any unusual layout like that arouses sexual desire and brings people pouring into New York from other cities.”
Three years after Andy’s poetic apology for failing to kiss Mary Osborn, Is Sex Necessary? featured a chapter entitled “Frigidity in Men,” which included a several-page section called “The Declination of the Kiss.”
To kiss in dream is wholly pleasant. First, the woman is the one of your selection, not just anyone who happens to be in your arms at the moment. Second, the deed is garnished with a little sprig of glamour which the mind, in exquisite taste, contributes. Third, the lips, imaginatively, are placed just so, the concurrent thoughts arrive, just so.… When a kiss becomes actual anything is likely to happen.… So you see, frigidity in men has many aspects, many angles.
They submitted the book to Harper & Brothers, which had just published Andy’s first book, a small collection of light verse entitled The Lady Is Cold. With Andy still championing his artwork, Thurber drew illustrations for it—portraits of the Quiet Type of woman, spineless Thurberfolk gaining no insight at all from contemplating birds and bees and flowers, and a cartoon chart of the North Atlantic including a couple of airplane routes, with a caption explaining that the authors thought it would be more useful than a diagram of the human body. Harper & Brothers expressed interest. When the authors came to meet with three editors, Andy spread out Thurber’s sheaf of drawings on the floor. Silence ensued, punctuated by a rustling of paper and a cleared throat. The editors looked at the drawings but didn’t say anything. “I gather,” one of them asked finally, “these are a rough idea of the kind of illustrations you want some artist to do?”
Andy shook his head. “These are the drawings that go into the book.”
The editors conferred, muttering about sales and reader resistance. They protested. Andy held firm. Thurber sat silent. When Is Sex Necessary? was published a few months later, Thurber’s drawings appeared throughout the text.
Soon after the book was published, Andy was visiting his parents when he overheard them talking about his first book. “I don’t know what you think of it,” he heard his father say, “but I’m ashamed of it.”
In his dealings with parents and editors and publishers, as much as in his writing, Andy was quickly growing and gaining confidence. He was learning to stand his ground, to explore new creative avenues. Only one arena left him as lost and afraid as ever, and it was the one to which he kept returning in his writing—romance, wherein he continued his time-honored habit, when faced with the prospect of love or sex, of hiding behind imaginary animals like a ventriloquist.