[ad_1]
When Susan Orlean was about five years old, she wrote and illustrated a book called “Herbert the Near-Sighted Pigeon.” In her case, the early funny stuff led to the later funnier stuff. An obsession with members of the animal kingdom, domesticated and otherwise, has spurred her to write about pandas, snakes, show dogs, movie-star dogs, military mules, Moroccan donkeys, a woman in New Jersey who kept two dozen tigers, Orlean’s own chickens and turkeys (who “follow me around like puppies”), the itinerant life of a whale celebrity named Keiko, and, once more and at length, pigeons. Susan Orlean is the kind of person who did not call the police when a boyfriend showed up at her apartment on Valentine’s Day with a lion. Reader, she married him.
The New Yorker, in its ninety-eight-and-a-half-year history, has not exactly been run by animal people. From what we know of its longest-serving editor, William Shawn, a quiet and fastidious man, it is no easier to imagine him living with a yappy schnauzer than with a flock of pink flamingos. Harold Ross, the founder and first editor of the magazine, seemed almost to resent the devotion of so many of his writers to their animal companions. In the early days of this comic weekly, as Ross called it, James Thurber took a trip home to Columbus, Ohio, with a Scottish terrier named Jeannie. When Jeannie went missing, Thurber was beside himself, and he delayed his journey back to Babylon until she could be found. Returning to the office two days late, Thurber was confronted by an irate editor. “I understand you’ve overstayed your vacation to look for a dog,” Ross growled. Thurber, as he recounted in his memoir “The Years with Ross,” responded in kind: “I told him what to do with his goddam magazine, that I was through.”
Like any editor worth his inkpot, Ross knew he’d better put things right, and Thurber went on filling these pages with bowsers for many years to come. “I am not a cat man, but a dog man,” he once wrote. “All felines can tell this at a glance––a sharp, vindictive glance.”
Dorothy Parker, Thurber’s contemporary at the magazine, was also partial to dogs (one of her poodles was named Cliché), and she wrote about them with some regularity. But Parker, unlike Thurber, was open to the world’s entire menagerie, worms to warthogs. “You can always tell that the crash is coming when I start getting tender about Our Dumb Friends,” she wrote in “Just a Little One.” “Three highballs, and I think I’m St. Francis of Assisi.”
And so it goes. No small part of the history of The New Yorker involves its writers’ and artists’ fascination with animals: E. B. White’s spiders, swans, and pigs; Joseph Mitchell’s clams, oysters, and rats; Diane Ackerman’s whales and golden monkeys; George Booth’s frenzied house cats; Roz Chast’s epigrammatic parrots; Sam Gross’s dyspeptic frogs; Amy Hwang’s very shy snails. (Horses are rare, at least in the visual realm, and generally unsuccessful: no one here, it seems, can draw a proper horse.)
To memorialize this multigenerational obsession, we bring you a modest, if highly eccentric, selection from our past near-century. Human beings tend to think that they are the only species with the capacity to tell stories. And yet many of our writers are tuned in to other frequencies. The failure to hear these frequencies, our writers seem to say, means simply that we aren’t really listening. White, who was for years Ross’s most dependable staffer, put it this way in “Charlotte’s Web”: “It is quite possible that an animal has spoken civilly to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention.” ♦
[ad_2]
Source link
