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Returning To Sender: or My Precious Thurber Correspondence
An essay by Gregory Hischak
Reprinted from the Summer 2002 Ohioana Quarterly
An overhead voice described how, in the event of a water landing, a very
unlikely scenario between Columbus and Minneapolis, I would be able to
use my seat cushion as a flotation device. Anticipating such an event, I’d
wrapped my carry-on - an Elder Beerman’s shoebox - tightly in a large
Ziplock bag. Emblazoned with the now defunct mercantile’s faded Prussian
blue logo - reflecting time’s ravages and held tenuously together by
rubberbands - my cardboard shoebox fit nicely into the overhead compartment.
Smiling, a flight attendant assured me that despite any potential
shifting that might occur during flight, my shoebox was perfectly safe.
“It’s my Thurber letters,” I tried explaining to the back of her head as she
shuffled off for cross-checking.
I was leaving Ohio, returning via mandated hubs to my pine-scented little
northwest corner of the continent and with me, in their shoebox receptacle,
were my Thurber letters. A veritable ark of correspondence to the Twentieth
Century’s Most Important American Humorist, the shoebox’s excavation from
under the basement stairs of my parent’s house was the primary agenda in
returning to “The Heart of It All.” That, and a high school reunion which
ended up being cancelled due to a hoof and mouth scare.
We had our ins and outs, James Thurber and I - never personally close
but with an immediate Ohio connection that entwined my life around his
the way kudzu sprawls across the base of a towering pylon. A young sprout,
I began writing to the Twentieth Century’s Most Important American Humorist
after he had been dead and buried in Columbus’ Greenlawn Cemetery for
almost a decade. Still, like my long postal relationship with Santa, Karen
Carpenter, and Jackie O demonstrated, I was not easily dissuaded by a
one-way correspondence. Interpreting his silence as fatherly encouragement,
I wrote Thurber all through my formative years until stamps went up
past the fifteen-cent mark.
Exhaustive field research had been conducted before my returning to
Ohio - calling the parents not once but twice during peak hours for pre-dig
consultations. My hypothesis concerning how, in the course of many years of
spring cleanings, an Elder Beerman’s shoebox might gravitate from an old
bedroom closet to beneath the basement stairs proved correct. From the
dusty trove of Betty Crocker Easy-Bake Ovens, archaic vacuum cleaner
appendages, and layers of ancient orange carpeting, the Thurber box
emerged. The letters safely exhumed, I made some final site measurements
and bid the parents a warm adieu, assuring them I’d be back for the holidays.
* * * * *
“Thurber Land,” I mumbled from my window seat at the patchwork quilt
of Central Ohio below - not to be confused with the patchwork quilt of
Northern Ohio, or the lumpy two hundred threadcount floral coverlet of
Southern Ohio. Maybe not so much a patchwork quilt or coverlet as a
comforter; an Ohio-colored comforter too warm for half the year and not
warm enough for the other half, but still nice-looking and bought on sale at
Odd Lots.
I watched Central Ohio magically transform into West-Central Ohio.
Color-coded for easy identification: light beige for new developments, dark
weathered beige for older weathered developments, dense green for soybeans,
and a xanthic yellow for corn. Ohio’s ribbon of interstate, punctuated
with intricate white cloverleafs, seemed to weave and loop and spell out
“have a good one” as our plane ascended the thin heavens. Low in the west,
the sun cast long shadows from unresponsive livestock. I waved, drawing
the attention of the woman sitting next to me in 19E.
“Some funny stuff happening down there,” I said - apparently in a tone
that caused her to ring for an attendant.
* * * * *
 I grew up with a copy of Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat in one jellied hand
and Thurber’s Men, Women, and Dogs in the other. I don’t remember where
either of them
came from, but
the combination
suggests a foster
home might have
been in order. I
devoured them
both, their
components
becoming so
interchangeable
that I later had no
trouble attaching
Thurber drawings
to the text of The
Lorax.
Slightly older, I watched a
short-lived and barely remembered
television series based on
Thurber’s work called My
World and Welcome to It
(starring William Windom).
Spanning a summer replacement
season with jerky editing
and surreal animation, it
confused, mesmerized, and
made clear how it was James
Thurber who first stumbled on
the Midwest’s potential for
magical realism.
A permanent, but in no way
mutual, bond was thus forged,
Thurber and I both drawing
our greatest inspirations from
that hazy blue countryside.
Roots penetrating deep into
our fertile loams, never far
behind and trailing like a wispy
strand of tissue paper stuck to
the shoe - our Ohio.
“In Steubenville alone,” I observed in an early letter to Thurber, “you run
the gamut of the human comedy from A to B.” Dorothy Parker later lifted
the line from me with minor variations - she was always doing that.
* * * * *
“In the early years of the nineteenth century,” Thurber wrote to someone
other than me, “Columbus won out, as state capital, by one vote over
Lancaster, and ever since then has had the hallucination that it is being
followed, a curious municipal state of mind which affects, in some way or
other, all those who live there.”
Posed across blue-lined paper, my early mailings to Thurber were full of
puerile inquiries that would forever go unanswered: was Piqua funnier than
Tipp City; Zanesville giddier than Coshocton; Wapakoneta more
knee-slapping than Sidney? It was a one-sided debate raging like an untended
barbecue grill as to whether history would eventually deem either
Dayton or Columbus as America’s Humor Capital.
Despite Thurber’s obvious pro-Columbus stance, I strove to make a
strong case for Dayton as the Hometown of Humor. Having spent too
many developmental years drinking Fresca outside Dayton’s laundromats,
I felt I knew the place. Watching its tide of humanity pass by, one
tire-squealing Chevy Nova at a time, had allowed me to crown Dayton
“Birthplace of Whimsical Flight” long before it became a common moniker.
“After all,” I boldly stated in another unanswered letter to Thurber,
“Jonathan Winters is from Dayton.” Of course, Winters didn’t write The Seal
in the Bedroom but he certainly could have made the sound effects for it -
had Jim asked. I don’t think he ever did though; it was that Dayton-
Columbus rivalry, I suspect.
My plane passed somewhere over the Indiana border where a front of
massing cumulus had a run-in with a pocket of low pressure, or high
pressure, I couldn’t tell which, and turned to ask the woman in 19E, but
she’d changed seats. Against such amorphous cloud shapes Thurber
squinted and traced his characters. Sketched in assured billowing lines (and
dutifully inked in by his ubiquitous chum E. B. White), Thurber’s figures
seem contained by glasses, collars, and neckties. “All of them have the outer
semblance of unbaked cookies,” Dorothy Parker wrote in a preface to The
Seal in the Bedroom, though I believe I said something like it first.
Thurber’s renderings always seemed to reflect the fragile eggshell light
and limited visibility of a Columbus summer afternoon - characters poised
to tumble Humpty Dumpty-like to the hot pavement. Thurber himself,
suffering from his own increasingly limited visibility, could never respond
directly to my suggestion of switching to thicker pens. A Sharpie Ultra Fine
Point, I argued, or a Pentel Hybrid Gel Grip would be just the thing to beef
up his artwork. Thurber’s drawings suffered from poor reproduction all his
life. I wrote him once saying so but fearing that it sounded like I was saying
he suffered from poor reproduction all his life, I never sent it. The potential
misunderstanding still haunts me.
* * * * *
From a creekside hideaway near Xenia I once wrote: “Dear Jim, I believe
the Buckeye State’s towering contribution to humor will always be its
flatness.” Again, I took Thurber’s unresponsiveness as a tacit nod of assent.
Well-graded landforms are inspiring to humorists and farmers alike - both
eking out their living from whatever dirt the earth gives up. Place seeds into
its soils and they will grow; place fauna upon its grasses and they will
ruminate glassy-eyed; place a town across its alluvial plains and lacking any
natural boundaries it will sprawl; nurture the town into city and its towers
will grow vertical and ludicrous against the recumbent horizon.
Ohio has always been comfortable positioning itself as a placid domain, a
well-thumbed book not to be judged by its unsplashy cover. The Crossroads
of Crossroads, skirted by Phoenicians and Greeks via bypasses and
outerloops, to be eventually settled by eastward-migrating Indians. Smiling
atop Ohio’s oblate terrain, they settled in and when they needed to get
serious the Indians knew what to do: they built mounds.
Nobody writes humor in mountainous places. I once tried sending
Thurber a list of funny people from Boulder or Santa Fe and failed - the
blank foolscap mocking my efforts. Even Samuel Clemens, for all his
western speculating, had to sit down in a room in Connecticut before
producing something memorably funny.
Population, of course, has much to do with where humor is generated.
Sociologists produce carefully researched graphs showing the population
densities necessary for humor to occur. Wyoming, mountainous and
sparsely populated, is fallow ground for naturally occurring humor; Iowa,
though flat, lacks the critical mass of citizenry; Ohio, bestowed with
geopopulous blessings sits comfortably within the parameters: eastern
enough to have genuine antique malls and people to buy genuine antiques,
western enough to be once considered frontier - albeit a flat one, southern
enough to be relaxed without
feeling the need to secede, and
northern enough to be industrial
- able to wear, and look
good in, hats. In short, the
heart of it all.
 Enter Thurber, filling these
crossroads with wind-blown
characters, bent slightly forward
while looking back over their
shoulder, a wary eye out for any
possible historic impact. The
denizens of these townscapes,
incubated under a warm yellow
Ohio light, move swiftly about
their business. Coursing
through these middle American
locales - places situated in
awkward elegance upon the
land like shiny metal patio
chairs amidst the Elysian
Fields - ten thousand Mittys
run their errands.
* * * * *
Like Thurber, and like many others, I left Ohio for elsewhere.
Bookending a creative restlessness, James and I parted ways, Thurber lured
east, I trudging westward. In my Lewis and Clark-like traversal of the
continent, the journal entries of which still sit in my glove compartment
next to a Montana Radium Spa brochure, I observed for the first time the
effects of natural formations on humor. The high plains might elicit a smirk,
and the badlands a twitter, but against the eastern escarpments of Rockies,
all whimsy jumped ship. Where chipper sardonicism once flourished, a
monotonous fatalism set in and remained all the way into Seattle’s puddled
eastside Park-&-Rides.
“Dear Jim,” I wanted to write from a rest area outside Pine Valley, Utah,
“nothing swallows irony like nature’s grandeur.”
Through his life, Thurber resided in France, New York, Connecticut,
Bermuda - elsewhere places that he lit with his particularly revealing Central
Ohio light. After receiving an Ohioana Award for lifetime achievement in
1953, Thurber wrote “the clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks
of Columbus,” though about whether he awoke screaming or sweating from
these dreams, he remained curiously silent. His upbringing beside the
Crossroads of Crossroads certainly forged a deep and profound sense of
whatever in Thurber, and he adapted well that Ohio trait of moving forward
while looking backward.
* * * * *
“Think of the office supplies, James,” I wrote him once, believing he still
worked at the New Yorker magazine. Requesting he pinch a box of Post-Its
for me, I think he might have done it had he been alive, and had he a little
more nerve. Cursed with having become the Twentieth Century’s Most
Important American Humorist, Thurber has been frequently overlooked for
his beautiful prose. Indeed, the crispness and precision of the New Yorker’s
style, still, has everything to do with Thurber’s having pecked away for years
in one of their cubicles.
Like his drawings, Thurber’s writing moves lightly and swiftly across the
page. Misleadingly sparse, Thurber may not have invented - but he certainly
perfected - the notion that in humor, as in architecture, Less is More.
Through airy spaces and deftly implied outcomes Thurber leads the reader
into a hall of mirrors and leaves them there to laugh at themselves.
Thurber’s prose was nothing if not surgical: it cut clean and deep, with as
little scarring as possible. When Henry Brandon wrote of Thurber that he
had “a warm heart and an angry mind” he was absolutely right, though
when it came to stealing office supplies I think Brandon might have mentioned
the cold feet.
* * * * *
An overhead voice described, in clinical detail, our descent into Seattle -
the western-most elsewhere in the lower forty-eight. Time zones having
clicked by, I was back home and ready to continue my work - laboriously
typing out run-on sentences and dangling the odd participle in attempts to
get laughs. In my stumbles through the English language it is clear that,
while desiring to write with the surgical finesse of Thurber, I still practice
my form with the subtlety of a chainsaw artist.
In spite of my best efforts, I age. Gnarling like an old tree, with swing sets
hanging from my shirt and birds in my thinning hair, I await the plagues of
lower back pain and self-absorption. Having gotten my Ohio source
materials in order, I instruct the Fates to bring it on. The LP collections
gathered back; the Peanuts paperbacks recalled home (I now recognize
Charles M. Schulz’s economy of line and gesture as distinctly
Thurberesque); my postcards and letters brought home. My Thurber
letters - every single piece of unopened correspondence written by me and
returned to me with “Deceased” stamped across them - when I feel the need
to peek inside the addled child’s brain that composed them, they’ll be there.
In the meantime, I have a nice spot in the kitchen cabinet where they’ll be
comfortably interred.
Ohio roots are a funny thing. Pull at a flower, droopy, frail, and drawn in
Thurber’s hand, and you pull up runners spreading out beneath the soil in
every direction. So what if Thurber died when I was a year old? Seemingly
delicate yet unbreakable runners transcend mere chronology like they
transcend dirt. In formulating my diabolical plans for global domination
I’m lucky to have Thurber to steal from and to call my own. When I plow
through my past with every spring introspection looking for something of
worth, I always uncover that Thurber nugget - an italicized aside, a sly
assemblage of lines capturing utter defeat, or fragile salvation - glittering in
the freshly turned earth like a barbed little arrowhead.
Dorothy Parker will tell you she wrote that.
 Gregory Hischak
is a writer, performance artist, and playwright.
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