Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.) —"The Flaw in Paganism,"
by Dorothy Parker
There was a unicorn in the garden.
Of course there was. We were living at 77 Jefferson Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, in the attic of Thurber House, the late Victorian brick gingerbread home where James Thurber and his family lived while he was a journalism student at Ohio State University. You may remember the attic, where the ghosts got in and the bed collapsed. We had read the stories, and came prepared with extra shoes to throw down the hallway at night, to keep burglars away.
It's hard to imagine an artist/writer whom Jeanne and I admire more than Thurber, whose birthday we celebrated just last week (he was born December 8th, 1894). Whenever we're in New York City, we stop by the Blue Bar at the Algonquin, his hangout while he worked for The New Yorker, to drink a toast to him (we tend to say "Touché," the punch line of his cartoon where one swordsman insouciantly decapitates another).
But we don't stay in the hotel's Thurber Room — too expensive. In fact, even the martini's pretty pricey these days: $15. (At happy hour in St. Petersburg we can still find a decent one for $5.) Still, the Blue Bar's most famous drink costs $10,000: the "Proposal Martini," which comes complete with a diamond ring; every year the Algonquin sells several — in pre-recession 2005, they sold six! Thurber would have had a lot of fun with that: his feckless male would have somehow swallowed the ring, etc.
These days, Thurber's boyhood home is a combination museum, bookstore and — upstairs — a writer's residency, changing writers regularly. The House has a meeting room where, one evening a week, I led a workshop in writing nonfiction to a bright group of OSU journalism majors, where we'd sprawl in comfortable chairs surrounded by Thurber's whimsical drawings and cartoons.
In a closet in our apartment, writers who lived there have signed their names on the inside of the door: Nora Sayre, Jane Howard, P. F. Kluge and St. Petersburg's own Enid Shomer, to name a few, while many others, like John Updike, Toni Morrison, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Garrison Keillor have stayed for shorter periods. The house holds not only Thurber's ghosts, but those of his fellow scribes blowing about, so it was pretty drafty walking through the rooms after everyone had left and we had the place to ourselves.
The unicorn, which was made by sculptor Jack Greaves, has its own Thurberish history, as a while back it disappeared for a few days before reappearing with a cryptic note attached: Sorry. Had to sow some wild oats. Won't happen again.
Like the unicorn, Thurber didn't do punch lines. He was a surrealist, less Freudian and more genial than Salvador Dalí. Even his decapitation cartoon is bloodless. Who hasn't recognized himself in Thurber's depictions of the War of the Sexes? OK, have it your way, says the exasperated wife, a seal perched behind her on the headboard of their bed, there's a seal in the room. And what woman doesn't recognize the wife who says to the pudgy wimpish man lying beside her, You were wonderful at the Gardners' last night, Fred, when you turned on the charm. And who doesn't recognize a bit of Walter Mitty in himself? These days, of course, there must be uncounted numbers of Millicent Mittys as well.
Thurber's characters, and the very lines of his prose and his drawings, somehow convey a childlike wonder at this untidy world we live in. He needled the rich and complacent, but didn't have a New York edge, like his friends Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott at the Algonquin's Round Table, where they drank their lunch; the Round Table regulars called themselves the Vicious Circle, but Thurber didn't like that aspect of their humor. (In our Columbus springtime, Jeanne and I walked below the city's flowering trees — yellow cherry dogwoods, white pear blossoms, pink crabapples — and caught some inkling of what might have made him gentler.)
Above my desk hangs a poster of Thurber's chinless but endearing self-portrait. It's hard to look at without smiling. He had his troubles with strong drink, and famously said "One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough." So we had martinis last week, on his birthday (I won't say how many). Touché.
The man she had was kind and clean
And well enough for every day,
But, oh, dear friends, you should have seen
The one that got away!
—"The Fisherwoman" by Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
—A drawing of Thurber House is included in Jeannie's book, Lines from Wildwood Lane.
