EVERY MINUTE WOULD BE MISSPENT:

INTERVIEWER

Henry James was a strong influence, then?

THURBER

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

INTERVIEWER

But there were things to be learned from him?

THURBER

Yes, but again he was an influence you had to get over. Especially if you wrote for The New Yorker. Harold Ross wouldn't have understood it. I once wrote a piece called "The Beast in the Dingle" which everybody took as a parody. Actually it was a conscious attempt to write the story as James would have written it. Ross looked at it and said: "Goddamn it, this is too literary; I got only fifteen percent of the allusions." My wife and I often tried to figure out which were the fifteen percent he could have got.

You know, I've occasionally wondered what James would have done with our world. I've just written a piece--"Preface to Old Friends," it's called--in which James at the age of a hundred and four writes a preface to a novel about our age in which he summarizes the trends and complications, but at the end is so completely lost he doesn't really care enough to read it over to find his way out again.

That's the trouble with James. You get bored with him finally. He lived in the time of four-wheelers, and no bombs, and the problems then seemed a bit special and separate. That's one reason you feel restless reading him. James is like--well, I had a bulldog once who used to drag rails around, enormous ones--six-, eight-, twelve-foot rails. He loved to get them in the middle and you'd hear him growling out there, trying to bring the thing home. Once he brought home a chest of drawers--without the drawers in it. Found it on an ash-heap. Well, he'd start to get these things in the garden gate, everything finely balanced, you see, and then crash, he'd come up against the gate posts. He'd get it through finally, but I had that feeling in some of the James novels: that he was trying to get that rail through a gate not wide enough for it. [...]

INTERVIEWER

Though you've never done a long serious work you have written stories--"The Cane in the Corridor" and "The Whippoorwill" in particular--in which the mood is far from humorous.

THURBER

In anything funny you write that isn't close to serious you've missed something along the line.

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