Bill Peschel

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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On this day in 2005, Hunter S. Thompson, the iconoclast writer and proponent of what he called “Gonzo Journalism,” interrupted a conversation by phone with his wife, put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. He was 67. He had asked his wife to come home and help him write a column for ESPN, and had cocked his Smith & Wesson Model 645 handgun. She mistook the sound of a typewriter and hung up as he shot himself.

In the typewriter was a sheet of paper with the date and the word “counselor.”

Later, Rolling Stone published what was described as a suicide note. It read:

“No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your (old) age. Relax — This won’t hurt.”

In a private ceremony 6ix months later, on August 20, Thompson’s ashes were fired from a specially designed cannon of his own design, in the shape of a double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button that he used during his run for sheriff in 1970.

I can’t remember when I first encountered Thompson’s writing. I was a journalism geek, so it might have been through Rolling Stone, which published his writings. It might have been from the Uncle Duke character in Doonesbury, which he hated and regularly threatened to tear out cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s lungs. It might have been from seeing the paperback version of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” with the now iconic Ralph Steadman drawing of Thompson and his friend, Oscar Acosta.

Wherever. It didn’t matter. Thompson opened my head like “Catcher in the Rye” did for other kids. Of course, I had no context for what I was reading. It was probably the late seventies by the time I got to it, at least a decade past those times. I grooved on the words and images, and the sheer weirdness of it all.

But what really impressed me was Thompson’s skills as a journalist. If you want to know what it’s like to see a presidential campaign from the inside, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,” is a masterful, sobering account. Not only does he cover the candidates, but the news media’s shallow, incestuous relationship with them. All journalism students should read this book; they would learn more about the profession and its pitfalls than four years in college.

Even is pre-Gonzo journalism, covered in “The Great Shark Hunt” is worth reading for its style and in-depth reporting.

By coincidence, I was reading through Caitlain Flanagan’s autopsy on Joan Didion in The Atlantic, and found this interesting comparison between Didion and Hunter S. Thompson:

Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” Thompson wrote. “All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better,” Didion wrote. To not understand the way that those two statements would reverberate in the minds of, respectively, young men and young women is to not know very much at all about those types of creatures. Thompson’s work was illustrated by Ralph Steadman’s grotesque ink blots, and early Didion by the ravishing photographs of the mysterious girl-woman: sitting barelegged on a stone balustrade; posing behind the wheel of her yellow Corvette; wearing an elegant silk gown and staring off into space, all alone in a chic living room.

If you want to know more about Hunter S. Thompson, try The Atlantic’s profile by Hampton Stevens: The Hunter S. Thompson You Don’t Know.

Hunter was as fierce with his correspondence as on the page. Letters of Note published two of them, one to Ralph Steadman (”Don’t Get Pompous With Me”) and another to a biographer William McKeen: (”You Are Scum”).

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It’s my day off, but I’m in front of the computer writing the Holmes/Twain novella, so let me leave you with this story excised from “Writers Gone Wild” for space. Have a great weekend!

Like a trained scientist, Michael Crichton investigated the paranormal with the same critical eye he used for his best-selling novels about dinosaurs (“Jurassic Park”), viral plagues (“The Andromeda Strain”) and the Japanese (“Rising Sun”). But his rational view of the world was shaken when he was told that he had a dark entity on his back.

He had been exploring astral travel with a channeler named Gary for two years, trying “not to judge what was happening, but simply to accept everything as an experience.” But being told that he had a “tramp soul” that needed to be exorcised made it personal.

That was how he found himself on a table in Gary’s darkened apartment, surrounded by lighted candles, crystals and pictures of holy people, being induced into an altered state while Gary’s friend, Beth, took a walk on Crichton’s wild side.

In this state, Crichton saw the entity: a Disney-like devil out of “Fantasia.” Under Gary’s questions, Crichton learned that it had appeared when he was four. He had been climbing a rock wall with his father, got scared, and thought “my father wants to kill me.” Throughout his life, the demon would reappear to protect Crichton whenever people hurt him.

To get rid of the demon, Crichton was told to say goodbye to the creature, while Beth entered the astral plane to help. There, Crichton saw Beth as a misty yellow light, and the entity in its true form. “He is just a little kid,” he wrote. A wave of sadness washed over him “for this tiny thing formed in the image of his tiny creature, this frightened, forlorn child that must now leave.”

And then he was gone.

Later, when he described the experience to his psychologist, she replied, “A lot of people are having experiences like that.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes. Entities are very big now.”

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On this day, Kurt Vonnegut — a prisoner of the Germans after being captured during the Battle of the Bulge — witnessed the firebombing of Dresden. Over three days, more than 1,300 American and British bombers — one of them, ironically, navigated by one of Vonnegut’s fraternity brothers from Cornell University — flew over the Baroque city and destroyed 15 square miles, killing more than 25,000 people, the exact number will never be known. Vonnegut survived the attack because he and his fellow prisoners were held in an underground meat locker called by the Germans Schlachthof Funf (Slaughterhouse Five).

After the firebombing, Vonnegut and the other prisoners were put to work gathering the dead. As he described in a letter to his family: “women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.” The task grew so overwhelming that the Germans used flamethrowers to incinerate the bodies in place.

Three months later, Vonnegut and his fellow soldiers were freed by the Russians. The horrors of war and indiscriminate attack stayed with Vonnegut and became the theme for his novel “Slaughterhouse Five” and at least six other works.

When “Slaughterhouse Five” was published as a Franklin Library edition in 1976, Vonnegut in the introduction wrote:

“The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I’m in.”

BONUS: Biographer Charles J. Shields discusses the problems he encountered writing about Vonnegut’s experiences in World War II.

Also on this date in literary history:

1933: Big changes come to Dagwood Bumstead and his girlfriend, Blondie, as they get married. For three years, the comic strip named after her chronicled the comic adventures of a millionaire playboy and his flapper girlfriend. But times were changing, and an editor at King Features approached the cartoonist, Murat Bernard “Chic” Young, and suggested “Why don’t you have them marry? You know more about married life than you do about dating anyway.” Young agreed, and “Blondie” began moving from a comedy of high society to middle-class suburbia. (Cartoon courtesy the Library of Congress.)

1898: Oscar Wilde publishes “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” During his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, which caused him much heartbreak and anguish, he had been incarcerated in Reading for two years after being convicted of homosexual offences in 1895. The complete poem which can be read at Wikisource, has one particularly noteworthy stanza:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

1974: Alexander Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the Soviet Union over “The Gulag Archipelago,” his account of the Soviet Gulag system.

Born: Ivan Krylov, fablist, Moscow, 1769; Ricardo Güiraldes, novelist, Argentina, 1886; Georges Simenon, novelist, Liège, Belgium, 1903; Elaine H. Pagels, religious historian, Palo Alto, Calif., 1943.

Died: Benvenuto Cellini, sculptor, goldsmith, memoirist, Florence, 1571; Cotton Mather, theologist, essayist, poet, psalmist, Boston, Massachusett Bay Colony, 1728; Rafael Sabatini, novelist, Adelboden, Switzerland, 1950; Elizabeth MacKintosh (ps. Josephine Tey, Gordon Daviot), novelist, playwright, London, 1952.

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To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, here’s an unpublished essay written for the “Writers Gone Wild” project.

Charles Dickens, public readings were like prostitution. First, he did them for free, then for his lovers, and finally, on this day, doing it for money, appearing on stage in London for his first paid performance. Dickens had a flair for the dramatic as a child, boasting that “I was a great writer at 8 years old or so — was an actor and a speaker from a baby.” He would perform parts of plays and songs before the family. This love for performing surfaces in “David Copperfield”:

It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles [...] by impersonating my favourite characters in them [his favorite books.] I have been Tom Jones [...] for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch.

Dickens’ life might have taken a different altogether had he not been so ill that he missed a scheduled audition at the Covent Garden theater in the early 1830s. Instead, he participated in amateur theatricals, and even installed a small stage in his home.

But not everyone appreciated his readings. Mark Twain criticized his pronunciation and that his “fashion he has of brushing his hair and goatee so resolutely forward gives him a comical Scotch terrier look about the face.” A note in the New York Times in 1884 — 14 years after Dickens’ death — reassured its readers that those “who never heard Dickens read that the lost nothing which might help them to understand his creations.” Besides, the anonymous Times writer noted, he did it for the money anyway.

It was true that the returns were very good. A night’s work could bring in £800. His five month reading tour of America earned him £19,000. But it wasn’t just the money that Dickens loved. He had a passion for acting. He was also fortunate that, in the 1850s, public readings were growing popular. While some readers were content simply to read from a book, some hired actors to perform the various parts, or spice up the performance by displaying scenes from the book.

But Dickens was an entire theatrical company in one person. On a bare stage, using a desk to hold his script, a carpet to muffle his steps, gas lights for illumination and screens behind him to focus the audience’s attention on him, Dickens threw himself into his performance, shaping his voice and contorting his body to meet the demands of his story. For each of his works, he rewrote scenes, removing some of his criticisms of society as inappropriate for the stage, and tightened them up. His prompt book contained extensive notes to remind him how to move and act.

And he was a success. For the next 15 years, audiences thrilled to his performances. They loved his recitation of “A Christmas Carol” and his other holiday stories, “The Chimes” and “Cricket on the Hearth.” He brought out the pathos in “Dombey and Son” and the humor in the trial scene from “The Pickwick Papers.” But the piece de resistance was the murder of Nancy Sikes from “Oliver Twist,” that Dickens added to his repertoire in 1868.

His performance of the piece was so intense that it, along with a steady diet of cigarettes and alcohol, affected his health. He looked haggard, and his foot turned lame, forcing him to cancel some readings. Biographers believe it contributed to his premature death in 1870.

But performing must have been a pleasure and a balm, allowing Dickens’ to bask in the public’s adulation as he relived the best of a lifetime of work. At his final performance on March 15, 1870, he closed with the trial scene from “The Pickwick Papers,” his first work. At the end, as the applause died away, he gave a final benediction that began:

Ladies and gentlemen, It would be worse than idle for it would be hypocritical and unfeeling if I were to disguise that I close this episode in my life with feelings of very considerable pain. For some fifteen years, in this hall and in many kindred places, I have had the honour of presenting my own cherished ideas before you for your recognition, and, in closely observing your reception of them, have enjoyed an amount of artistic delight and instruction which, perhaps, is given to few men to know.

Less than three months later, on June 9, Charles Dickens collapsed at his beloved Gads’ Hill home and died.

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