On the Background and Significance of Thurber's "Seal in the Bedroom" Cartoon

Richard Raskin

"All right, have it your way—you heard a seal bark!"

©The New Yorker (January 30, 1932)

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Background

The story behind Thurber’s seal cartoon is such a good one that the artist himself often enjoyed retelling it.

The story begins with an earlier seal drawing Thurber had made, and which was based on an entirely different concept:

One spring day in 1929, I had done, in approximately thirteen seconds, a pencil sketch on yellow copy paper of a seal on a rock staring at two tiny distant specks and saying, "Hm, explorers."¹

At the time he made the sketch, Thurber was writing for The New Yorker, where he was responsible for the "Talk of the Town" column. As the legend goes, he thought so little of the countless drawings he was constantly making, that they often wound up on the floor of his office or in the wastepaper basket, where some were rescued by staff writer E. B. White. White saw the drawing of the seal, liked it, inked it in and submitted it to the magazine’s weekly art meeting. There, Harold Ross—founder and publisher of The New Yorker—apparently treated it as a gag and had it sent back to Thurber, along with an anatomical correction supplied by the magazine’s art editor. In Thurber’s words:

Rea Irvin drew a picture of a seal’s head on the same paper with my seal and wrote under it, "This is the way a seal’s whiskers go." Promptly the following Tuesday White sent the drawing back to the meeting with a note attached that read, "This is the way a Thurber seal’s whiskers go. It came back again, this time without a word. As the weeks went on, white kept inking in and sending on other drawings of mine, and they were all rejected. All that Ross ever said during this preliminary skirmishing was a gruff "How the hell did you get the idea you could draw?" (ibid., pp. 56-57).

Later that year, Thurber and White collaborated on a book called Is Sex Necessary? with texts by both of them and illustrations by Thurber.

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The book was published by Harper and sold very well. When Harold Ross heard about the successful use a rival publisher had made of an artistic talent he himself had turned down, he became irritated enough to correct his original mistake:

(Ross) came into my office, looking bleak. "Where’s that goddam seal drawing, Thurber?" he demanded. "The one white sent to the art meeting a few months ago." I told him that he had rejected it and I had thrown it away. "well don’t throw things away just because I reject them!" he yelled. "Do it over again." I didn’t do it over again for two years, although he kept at me" (ibid. p. 58).

While there is no way for us to know what the lost cartoon may have looked like, there is also no harm in guessing. If the drawing was as simple as Thurber’s description would imply, then perhaps it looked something like this:

At any rate, when Thurber finally gave in to Ross’s persistent requests and tried to reconstruct the drawing of the seal on the rock, one evening in December, 1931, he found that "the seal was all right, atypical whiskers and all," but

The rock, in the process of being drawn, began to look like the head of a bed, so I made a bed out of it, put a man and wife in the bed, and stumbled onto the caption as easily and unexpectedly as the seal had stumbled into the bedroom.²

Thurber "hadn’t thought enough of it to show it to anybody before

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submitting it." But his view of the cartoon changed radically when, immediately after it appeared in The New Yorker issue of January 30, 1932, he received a telegram from humorist atid theater critic Robert Benchley. The wire read: "Thank you for the funiest drawing caption ever to appear in any magazine." A euphoric Thurber gave Benchley the original of the drawing, and named his first book of pictures The Seal in the Bedroom, "because of what he had said,"

The seal cartoon became enormously popular, and when Ross finally realized how important an asset Thurber’s drawings were becoming for The New Yorker, he denied ever having rejected the original "Hm, explorers" cartoon, and he and Thurber were to argue about that for years.

On the occasion of Thurber’s visit to London in 1961, shortly before his death, Punch paid tribute to him with a cartoon of its own:

The situation depicted: What must have happened

Single-frame cartoons like "The Seal in the Bedroom" show the final moment in an implied series of events. Deducing those events on the basis of cues built into the drawing and caption, is an important part of our experience of the cartoon. How far back can we go in working out the steps which must logically have led up to the wife’s remark in Thurber’s seal cartoon?

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According to the information supplied by the artist—or rather, the information the artist could expect us to supply for ourselves—there is a five-step sequence of events which must have occurred:

1. The furthest back we can go (I will return to this issue in a moment) is to the point where a seal, perched on the headboard of the married couple’s bed, lets out a bark which the husband hears and the wife does not.

2. The husband tells his wife, "I just heard a seal bark!"

3. She answers something to the effect that he must have imagined it—that he cannot have heard any such sound—and she expects him to yield to reason.

4. Refusing to yield, he maintains his claim that he has just heard a seal bark.

5. It is at this point that the wife loses patience and snarls at him, "All right, have it your way—you heard a seal bark!"

These successive stages in the couple’s interaction—once the husband has heard the strange sound—are relatively easy to deduce. But there can be no logical explanation as to how the seal got there in the first place. There is no going further back than what I have called step one, and anyone who tries to do so by supplying an ingenious and far-fetched explanation, is almost certain to miss the point of the cartoon.

Reality status and ways of being

We know that the seal is really there. And we are expected to enjoy the absurdity of its presence on the headboard, coupled with the disbelief and bewilderment embodied respectively by the wife and husband. If only they looked up, they would see with their own eyes what we see so plainly.

The seal, however implausible and inexplicable its presence may be, is as real as the husband and wife are. Furthermore, the seal is totally uninvolved in the couple’s discussion. Something ‘off camera’ has caught its eye (originally the two explorers, but that’s no longer relevant here), and its bark had undoubtedly been directed at whatever it is so attentively looking at, off in the distance. The seal has an alert, fresh, youthful and appealing look about it, especially in contrast with the married couple.

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There is something nasty about the way the wife expresses her disbelief—which, by the way, we know to be as wrong as it is unshakable. She uses the rhetorical device of mockingly pretending to believe her husband ("All right, have it your way") as a means of clobbering him and denying the reality of his experience. In his own descriptions of the cartoon, Thurber designated her as "shrewish" and as "snarling at her husband." The outlook she embodies is realism, in the sense that she expects reality to conform to reasonable, routine assumptions as to what is and isn’t possible. And any claim which conflicts with her reality-sense is dismissed as being necessarily unfounded.

Physically as well as spiritually, she is a true representative of "the Thurber woman"—a species Newsweek once defined as

a fiercely aggressive female with the figure of a potato sack, a face which is a cross between a weasel’s and a swordfish’s, and, the final indignity, perfectly straight and stringy hair.⁶

She is also chinless, the bottom of her face consisting entirely in a lower lip, under which lies a fat neck. She is markedly unfeminine and sexually unattractive.

The husband is a perfect match for her. He is bald, fat-necked, round shouldered, has a receding chin, a weasely nose, and is as lacking in virile appeal as his wife is in femininity. The look on his face is a mixture of bewilderment and exasperation, resulting at least in part from the wife’s aggressive expression of her disbelief. He knows what he has heard, but can’t understand it or defend his claim, and is utterly helpless in these respects.

Finally, there are no signs identifying this middle-aged couple in terms of social status, except for the plainness they exude and the ordinary furnishings; they are presumably representatives of the average, middle-class, American couple of their age-bracket.

A reality-principle paradox

A strong case can be made for seeing the seal’s presence in the bedroom as "a dreamlike intrusion of the . . . fantastic into the commonplace," as one commentator has suggested.⁷ After all, Thurber did state that "Fantasy is the food for the mind, not facts,"⁸ and "Realists are always getting into trouble. They miss the sweet, easy victories of the day

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