(2 of 8)
Men, Women and Dogs ought to be quite a document in its own right. After Thurber's opening lecture, the rest will consist of: 1) animated versions of the stories, You Could Look It Up (how a big-league ball club won a pennant by-sending a midget in to bat) and The Unicorn in the Garden (how a woman tried to have her husband sent to the booby hatch and was instead committed herself); 2) dramatizations, using flesh & blood actors, of four of the "Mr. & Mrs. Monroe" stories, dealing with marriage perplexities; 3) another animated lecture, urging the superiority of dogs to humans and including that celebrated cartoon sequence, The Bloodhound and the Bug; 4) a live dramatization of The Whippoorwill, one of Thurber's narrative ventures into neurasthenic horror; and 5) a three-reel version of his fantasy, The White Deer.
If it does nothing else to its audiences, Men, Women and Dogs should give them an abnormal 80 minutes. It will also be the first time in cinema history that the creative protagonist of a motion picture has been a blind man.
Slow Fade. Thurber is not totally blind. At the age of six, he lost his left eye when one of his brothers accidentally shot him with an arrow. For about the next 40 years, his right eye did double duty, then it failed him; ten years ago, Thurber underwent five extremely painful operations on it for cataract and trachoma. The eye has since had one-eighth vision, not enough for a 56-year-old writer to get himself around with safety. The shins of the long, gangling (6 ft. 1½ in., 154 Ibs.) Thurber bear a mass of scars from collisions with coffee tables.
Before his sight began to go, Thurber could punch a typewriter at a brisk pace. Never having learned the touch system, however, he is now forced to scrawl with soft pencils on sheets of bright yellow paper, getting about 20 words to a sheet, words which he cannot see, although he peers at them through a thick goggle. After he has finished the first draft of a piece, it is read back to him, and he makes oral revisions sentence by sentence. Thurber always was a relentless reviser (he rewrote The White Deer 25 times) so that his composition has become slow and painful. Nevertheless, in the past ten years he has written and published more than he did in the previous ten.
After a lapse of several years, during which he did not draw at all, Thurber is drawing again (see cover). He works with chalk on black paper, preferably just at sundown on clear days. About the porch of his Connecticut home, where he has his drawing board set up, drawings are stacked along with stove wood.
On hot days when there is a lot of glare, Thurber sometimes sees a face that looks to him like Herbert Hoover's; at other times, there appears what might be the George Washington Bridge flapping in the wind. Thurber is never bitter about his blindness, nor self-pitying, nor "saintly." Often he discusses it in a completely detached manner; now & then he uses it for little jokes. "I bet I can think up a cornier title for my memoirs than you can," he challenged a friend. "How about Long Time No See?"