A New York Times story published online today (“David Sedaris Has Two Apartments For His Two Picassos”) features a number of photos of the writer David Sedaris’s Manhattan home(s). In the last photo, Mr. Sedaris sits in front of a framed Charles Addams drawing hovering over his shoulder. The drawing was published in The New Yorker, August 26, 1972, It features a spouting whale in a swimming pool. A couple stands off to the side. The woman says to the man: “Thar she blows? Is that all you can say?” 

I was surprised when I saw the drawing this morning. Why surprised? Because I did a similar, (though not truly identical) drawing of a (non-spouting) whale in a swimming pool. It was published in The New Yorker August 26, 2013:

It hasn’t happened that often, but when something of mine comes graphically uncomfortably close to a previously published drawing by another cartoonist, I feel a bit sheepish about it. I console myself by thinking that, in decades of drawing thousands of cartoons (many of them involving swimming pools*, and some involving whales, including another drawing with a whale in a swimming pool**) these intersections are bound to happen. In 1972, I was in my first year of college (go Newark State!) and just beginning to pester The New Yorker‘s art editor, James Geraghty, with my earliest stabs at cartoons. It’s possible I saw the Addams swimming pool drawing that August (altho I confess I did not remember it until seeing this Sedaris article). I suppose it only took 41 years for the idea of a whale in a swimming pool to slip out of the haze of memory and into my cartoon consciousness. If that’s what happened.

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*(from The New Yorker, July 3, 2023)

** (from The New Yorker, July 8, 2019)

James Thurber, speaking to Alistaire Cooke on Omnibus:

“…after I had sold a few to the New Yorker magazine, Andy White, my colleague there, found me carefully shading in something and he said, “ Hey, stop that, don’t do that — if you ever became good you’d be mediocre.” 

This somewhat famous quote has stuck with me for decades (I’m not really sure how famous it is). It seems, on its face, simple advice, but I believe there’s way more to it than “Hey…don’t do that.” E.B. White, who of course was an advocate of clarity in writing, was heading off a notion that so many fledgling artists develop — that they should aspire to becoming “better” at drawing. If that’s really what you want to do, than, “Hey…do that!”  But I believe the hunt for “better” can sometimes stifle the artist (please remember I said, “sometimes”).

One of the very best things about The New Yorker is that it embraced Thurber’s art as it was, not as New Yorker editors might wish it would be. That’s one of the wonders of the magazine’s editorial DNA: staying out of an artist’s way. Back in 2013, in my interview with veteran artist, Dana Fradon, he discussed The New Yorker’s Art editor, James Geraghty. Mr. Fradon said Geraghty’s editorial direction was simply, “Make it beautiful.” Thanks to the magazine’s hands-off policy, and E.B. White’s two cents, Thurber did Thurber (beautifully!) and we are all the luckier for it.

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James Thurber Born, Columbus, Ohio, December 8, 1894. Died 1961, New York City. New Yorker work: 1927 -1961, with several pieces run posthumously. According to the New Yorker’s legendary editor, William Shawn, “In the early days, a small company of writers, artists, and editors — E.B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and Katharine White among them — did more to make the magazine what it is than can be measured.”

Key cartoon collection: The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (Harper & Bros., 1932). Key anthology (writings & drawings): The Thurber Carnival (Harper & Row, 1945). There have been a number of Thurber biographies. Burton Bernstein’s Thurber (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life and Times (Henry Holt & Co., 1995) are essential. Website