Naked Woman On Top of a Bookcase: Alive, Stuffed or Dead?... James Thurber@125

#JamesThurber125

Today December 8 2019 is 125th birth anniversary of  James Thurber

Following is the exchange between great James Thurber and  Paris Review for the latter's issue dated Fall 1955:

"...PR: You say that your drawings often don’t come out the way you intended?

JT: 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.

PR: But he published it.

JT: Yes, he published it, growling a bit. He had a fine understanding of humor, Ross, though he couldn’t have told you about it. When I introduced Ross to the work of Peter de Vries, he first said, “He won’t be good; he won’t be funny; he won’t know English.” (He was the only successful editor I’ve known who approached everything like a ship going on the rocks.) But when Ross had looked at the work he said, “How can you get this guy on the phone?” He couldn’t have said why, but he had that bloodhound instinct. The same with editing. He was a wonderful man at detecting something wrong with a story without knowing why..."

The cartoon in the discussion does not accompany this article.

When I located the cartoon, I found it bizarre. No wonder Ross went in a tailspin.

I could not stop smiling reading Ross's query: Was the woman up on the bookcase supposed to be alive, stuffed, or dead...

Here it is:

 
 Artist: James Thurber, The New Yorker, March 16 1935