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In 1935, Jim and Althea were divorced. Their daughter, Rosemary, has just finished her sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania. She has shown marked acting talent, perhaps inherited from her paternal grandmother. Thurber is an affectionate father; he and his daughter get along splendidly. Althea is now the wife of Dr. Allen Gilmore, head of the history department at Carnegie Tech.
Jim always had a taste for handsome women, and the year of his divorce he married Helen Wismer, a clergyman's daughter, Mount Holyoke graduate and the former editor of a string of pulp magazines. She expertly manages his business affairs and his home, and has helped him enormously in conquering his blindness. The Thurbers spend part of every winter and spring in Hot Springs, Va. and Bermuda. Summer and fall they live in their beautiful twelve-room, go-year-old house on 65 acres of land in West Cornwall, Conn.
At present, Jim is putting the finishing touches on his latest book, The Thurber Album, which will be published next fall. In some of the chapters that have appeared in The New Yorker—particularly one -called Daguerreotype of a Lady—Thurberites believe they have detected a new Thurber, still very funny, but somehow deeper and richer; the most exciting Thurber, they claim, since his sight failed.
Sometimes I Love You. Ambivalent is probably the word for Thurber. Although he believes he is essentially optimistic about the human species, he tends to nurse doubt when he rolls the subject around in his mind: "The human species is both horrible and wonderful. Occasionally, I get very mad at human beings, but there's nothing you can do about it. I like people and hate them at the same time. I wouldn't draw them in cartoons, if I didn't think they were horrible; and I wouldn't write about them, if I didn't think they were wonderful."
That, however, might be what his wife calls Jim's Friday Opinion. By the following Monday he may have reversed himself, or be fretting over something entirely different. For humorists there are not many fixed rules; about the only thing they are consistently against is pomposity.
During wassail, Thurber's ambivalence can snap loose and he may be given to bursts of hooting & hollering. A New Yorker editor once returned to the office after a stormy evening at the Algonquin Hotel and thoughtfully announced, "Thurber is the greatest guy in the world up to 5 p.m." Those who love Thurber ascribe such outbursts to old-fashioned artistic temperament and simply shrug them off. They know that when real troubles arise, there is nobody more steadfast and generous. The jams he has helped and comforted friends through are without number.
When The Thurber Album is completed, his next big effort will probably be another play. On Men, Women and Dogs, Thurber has a percentage-of-box-office deal with United Productions. If the picture is a success—and nearly everything Thurber touches creatively is successful—he will earn a great deal of money. For a man who has never once demeaned his talent for profit, nor ever aimed at mass appeal, he has already earned quite a lot.