“A story I’ve been working on was rewritten fifteen complete times…”
This is an excerpt from an interview that James Thurber gave to Max Steele and George Plimpton of The Paris Review sometime in the late 1950s; it’s included in a book entitled Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, published in 1958.
The interviewers asked Thurber if he devoted a lot of time to “prefiguring” his work.
Thurber: No. I don’t bother with charts and so forth… I can’t work that way. [Playwright and Thurber collaborator Elliott] Nugent would say, “Well, Thurber, we’ve got our problem; we’ve got all these people in the living room. Now what are we going to do with them?” I’d say I didn’t know and couldn’t tell him until I’d sat down at the typewriter and found out. I don’t believe the writer should know too much where he’s going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint– old man propaganda.
Interviewers: Is the act of writing easy for you?
Thurber: For me it’s mostly a question of rewriting. It’s part of a constant attempt on my part to make the finished version smooth, to make it seem effortless. A story I’ve been working on– “The Train on Track Six”– was rewritten fifteen complete times. There must have been close to 240,000 words in all the manuscripts put together, and I must have spent two thousand hours working on it. Yet the finished version can’t be more than twenty thousand words.
Interviewers: Then it’s rare that your work comes out right the first time?
Thurber: Well, my wife took a look at the first version of something I was doing not long ago and said, “Goddamn it, Thurber, that’s high school stuff.” I have to tell her to wait until the seventh draft, it’ll work out all right. I don’t know why that should be so, that the first or second draft of everything I wrote reads as if it was turned out by a charwoman. I’ve only ever written one piece quickly. I wrote a thing called “File and Forget” in one afternoon– but only because it was a series of letters just as one would ordinarily dictate. And I’d have to admit that the last letter of the series, after doing all the others that one afternoon, took me a week. It was the end of the piece and I had to fuss over it.
Interviewers: Does the fact that you’re dealing with humor slow down the production?
Thurber: It’s possible. With humor you have to look out for traps. You’re likely to be very gleeful with what you’ve first put down, and you think it’s fine, very funny. One reason you go over it and over it is to make the piece sound less as if you were having a lot of fun with it yourself. You try to play it down…
Still, the act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even rewriting’s fun. You’re getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.
Postscript – I looked online, first doing a general search by author and title, then in the New Yorker online archive, and finally in Edwin’s Bowden’s 1969 James Thurber: A Bibliography (Ohio State University Press), and nowhere could I find a published story entitled “The Train on Track Six,” so it’s possible that, even after all that work (and Thurber’s talk about all that work), Thoreau either abandoned the story, or decided it wasn’t worth publishing, or maybe even submitted it someplace and had it rejected.
Max Harrick Shenk, writer 