January 2011

The late James Thurber was an inveterate doodler. Until he could no longer see well enough to draw, he scrawled his familiar dogs, rabbits, and people on practically any surface that was flat and would show pencil marks. In fact, he continued to outline dog heads from memory even after he was blind. Like most doodles, a great many of his landed in the wastepaper basket. But some were preserved by alert friends, and therein lies a small, and distinctly domestic, tale.

The tablecloth photographed on these two pages is an example of evening-long doodling. It happened in 1937 when the Thurbers and some friends went to Tim Costello’s restaurant in New York, a murky, pleasant place where the walls are adorned with Thurber drawings. The occasion was the birthday of J. P. Glide, a friend of Thurber’s who later became his agent. The evening was a long one, Mr. Glide now recalls, with large steaks and lots of drinks and everyone leaving the booth periodically and milling about the restaurant.

MAXIM GORKY : The day of justice and deliverance for the oppressed of all the world is at hand. MARK TWAIN : My sympathies are with the Russian revolution. We are going to offer Gorky the literary hospitality of the country. REPORTER (to Gorky): Who was that lady I saw you with last night?

I might have become a millionaire,” he once said, “but I chose to become a tramp.” As a boy in Scotland, he had thrilled to descriptions of primeval America, to John James Audubon’s picture of passenger pigeons that “darkened the sky like clouds”; and fifteen years later in Wisconsin, on a March morning when the wild geese were heading north on the first warm wind, he said good-by to his family atid wandered away. He wanted to experience the wilderness, “not as a mere sport or plaything excursion, but to find the Law that governs the relations … between human beings and Nature.” It was a quest that lasted all his life.

The interests that impel a man to dig into the shadowed corners of the past can be obscure, and what he finds there may not always seem worth the effort. Yet light can come from unlikely places, especially when it falls on a primitive society that kept no records and never bothered to try to explain itself. Simply to know how stone-age people made the things they used can put those people in a new perspective. Suddenly in place of an untutored savage we can see a man, with emotions and intelligence like our own, painfully doing his best to cope with a hostile world. Seeing him so, we see our kinship with him, and history’s mysterious continuity begins to mean more.

In his somewhat sardonic book of political sketches, Masks in a Pageant, William Allen White had a chapter on Warren Gamaliel Harding in which he recorded incidentally one of Harding’s “primrose detours from Main Street.” It had come to garish light in the summer of 1920, when the Republican presidential candidate returned to Marion from his nomination at the convention in Chicago. Local pride had laid out a triumphal way from the railroad station through the town center to the Harding house on Mt. Vernon Street with its bandstandlike front porch that was to serve as the motif of the coming campaign. White columns topped by gilt eagles lined the route at regular intervals, and every storefront bloomed with red, white, and blue bunting—every storefront but one. That uncompromisingly bare building belonged to a merchant of the town with whose wife Harding had had an affair some years earlier. The merchant—unnamed by White—had found out, and though he had condoned the relationship, the absence of decoration was his mute revenge.

On the dusty journey in late May, 1785, from Paris to Calais, where they would cross the Channel to Dover, John and Abigail Adams and their nineteen-year-old daughter took turns reading Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia . It was an interesting book, doubly interesting because it had just been presented to them by the author in Paris. Yet very likely their attention wandered. Virginia was far away, London was coming closer by the mile, and they were journeying toward a great adventure.

I was about twelve years old when I discovered, to my great pleasure, that our family had a skeleton in its closet. In our case, the skeleton was represented by a dim daguerreotype showing an old lady in a cap. Framed in red velvet, the picture inhabited the upper left-hand drawer of our breakfront and came to light every once in a while, when one was rummaging through the drawer for a paper clip or an eraser. Attached to the frame was a bit of yellowed paper with a verse written on it in a spidery hand: