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The drawings took Thurber no time at all—a fact that he tried to hide from Ross—and he covered the walls of Tim Costello's Third Avenue saloon in 90 minutes, for drinks. He claimed to belong to the "pre-intentionalist" school. His famed seal-barking cartoon began, he recalled, with a fine seal. But the rock he tried to draw under the seal looked hopelessly like a bed, and one thing led to another.
Fog Settles In. The characters in Thurber's drawings and stories are mostly pre-intentionalists themselves. There is the wife, yelling "What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?" and there is the hippopotamus, looking smug. Inside the hippo, the reader feels sure, is Dr. Millmoss, unhurt (even the Thurber fencer who loses his head is not hurt) but ill at ease, not at all sure he likes being where events have swept him. In his eloquent preface to My Life and Hard Times, Thurber complained of feeling much the same; the humorist, he wrote, "knows vaguely that the nation is not much good any more; he has read that the crust of the earth is shrinking alarmingly and that the universe is growing steadily colder, but he does not believe that any of the three is in half as bad shape as he is." Thurber's readers, all paid-up members of the age, of anxiety, knew very well they were in bad shape, and so Walter Mitty's moonings were hauntingly their own. So was Grant's frightful hangover as he surrendered confusedly to Lee at Appomattox, and the nameless little man's fright as he stood before the house that looked to him like a great, crouching wife.
As even his good eye faded. Thurber sketched and wrote with a black crayon on huge sheets of yellow paper. When the fog became too thick, he stopped sketching and learned, helped by his second wife, Helen, to write by dictation. He kept his courage and improved his prose; The Thirteen Clocks, his delightful tone poem and fairy story, was written when he could not see.
The tall, white-haired man loved more than he mourned—crouching wives, fuddled dogs and all. Pessimism was for a man less wise, but wariness was only good sense. "The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings," he quoted at the end of one of his fables. Being Thurber, and wary, he added, "And you know how happy kings are."