Mr. Hawkins's article was gleaned from a Tweet that landed on the @ObittheFilm Twitter site that I check out daily. In true Mobius strip fashion, one thing leads to another, and brings you back where you started.
Mr. Hawkins himself can be reached at the Twittter handle @schawkins. He did not post a link to the Nieman piece on his own site. In fact, his last posted Tweet is March 8, 2016. @Niemanstoryboard Tweeted, and @obittheFilm gathered the link to the article in the Nieman Journal. "Storyboard" is a section of the journal. No matter, we're there.
Oddly, at about the same time as the @Obitthefilm site retweeted the @niemanstoryboard Tweet (still with us?) The NYT published a weekday edition that contained an astounding 11 obituaries that appeared on four pages. This might well be a record for any day's paper. Nine of the 11 were bylined. Some of the veteran Times reporters seem to have migrated to the Obits section, that long ago stopped being a destination for the punished.
The Storyboard piece contributed by Mr. Schawkins is a beaut itself. It makes frequent reference to the NYT Thurber obit in 1961, that, standard for the era, went unbylined.
I find the best part of Mr. Schawkins's piece is the disclosure that a young Truman Capote was assigned to help Thurber around town since he had lost the vision in one eye at an early age to a brother who shot him with arrow, and was now, in his later years, suffering from a cataract in the other eye.
The Truman Capote piece of information was not in the 1961 obit, nor was the disclosure that the young Truman also accompanied Mr. Thurber on his weekday visits to his mistress, and once thought it would be great fun to help Thurber dress himself, and possibly give away his extra-curricular assignation to his wife, by helping him get dressed and turning his socks inside-out.
This is a devilish prank to play on a nearly sightless guy who might have trouble finding his way around, but no trouble whatsoever in finding other things. There were backups singers to the blind Ray Charles who dubbed themselves the Raylettes--you had to "let Ray" do what he wanted if you wanted to be part of the recording, or show.
Certainly men of any era have led some duplicitous lives. Didn't a New Yorker chief editor, William Shawn, famously bounce between two apartments and two woman, one his wife of 64 years, the other one who raised an adopted son of his? I mean, Charles Lindbergh raised two families on two continents, so why not?
My own introduction to Thurber started when as a teen-ager I read 'My Years with Ross,' his biography of the legendary first editor of the magazine, Harold Ross. To me, one of the more memorable vignettes from Ross's life as described by Thurber, was that Ross always carried a good deal of change in his pocket, so that the next time the cabby needed to be paid and tipped, he wouldn't be overpaid and tipped because Ross couldn't produce payment with bills that the cabbie claimed he "couldn't break." No one wants to be hustled.
But back to Thurber's wife. He divorced his first wife in 1935 and later married Helen Weismer, a "Mount Holyoke graduate who had edited several pulp magazines prior to marrying Thurber." Apparently Thurber referred to his second wife as his "seeing-eye" wife.
It is hard to believe a pair of inside-out socks, probably either solid-colored blue or black, could trip up a philanderer to a wife, even if she was referred to as the "seeing-eye" wife. The Thurber obit does not directly mention the second Mrs. Thurber as a survivor, but you get the impression she was, and probably still married to James. Some things might just go overlooked.
Trying to cause trouble, that naughty Truman.
http://www.onofframp.blogpsot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment