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Epilogue: New Challenges, New Treatments: Trauma and the Contemporary Journalist-Literary Figure
- University of Illinois Press
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epilogue New Challenges, New Treatments Trauma and the Contemporary Journalist-Literary Figure “All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.” —James Thurber Sadly, the letters and correspondence of James Thurber toward the end of his career indicate that the final outcome was not always easy for the writer living with the effects of trauma, psychological stress, and behaviors that tried to compensate for the emotional disequilibrium caused by inherited proclivities and family dysfunction. Like his friend, Ernest Hemingway, Thurber suffered from a combination of early life traumatic experiences and emotional struggles that fueled his journalistic and artistic ambitions but also contributed to actions in his final years that were viewed by friends as pathetic and out-of-control. Virtually blind, cantankerous, alcoholic, and in perpetual conflict with his editors at the New Yorker magazine, Thurber spent much of his time attending late-night parties and drinking in the company of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other friends whose self-destructive lives also were falling apart. When Thurber learned that Hemingway had ended his life with a shotgun blast at his Sun Valley home in 1961, he was devastated. “I believe that all of us, especially the men, are manic-depressed. . . . I keep fighting it, though, and I have no shotgun, Thank God,” he wrote in a series of despairing letters to friends. (When Thurber died a few months later, suffering from arteriosclerosis, the effects of several small strokes, and a blood tumor, as well as the consequences of his heavy drinking, his last words to his daughter were reportedly, “God bless . . . God damn.”)1 In contrast, Thurber’s close friend and mentor, E. B. White, is one of the few examples of a journalist-literary personality who was afflicted with neurotic symptoms (he once described a “nervous crack-up” in 1943 as “a panic fear, as near as I can make out, [that] is not of death. It is an amorphous fear, lacking in form”) but achieved some level of inner peace in his twilight years. Although White experienced the effects of anxiety and nervous tension throughout his life, he presented a very different picture than Thurber in his later career: producing his most celebrated art (the children’s books—Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan), documenting in Charlotte’s Web the cycle of life and death that he embraced as part of the natural world, spending much of his time on a hobby farm in Maine where he observed contentedly the comings and goings of the seasons, and philosophizing in sanguine terms in his writings for the New Yorker and other magazines that helped his readership find sustenance in dealing with the gloomy global issues that embroiled the United States during World War II and the Cold War. “We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy,” he wrote, “even if it is only picking grapes or sorting laundry.” (White—despite a late-life falling out with Thurber, who disliked White’s wife, a New Yorker editor—nonetheless delivered the eulogy at Thurber’s funeral. “When he was well and sober, there was never a kinder, nicer friend,” White would come to say.)2 In reality, Thurber’s life patterns were more the norm for the 150 journalist -literary figures who have been the focus of this study. It is not always easy to know which came first—the drunkard or the environment that encouraged the out-of-control drinker to drink, the emotionally troubled personality or the work life that brought out unhealthy responses in a journalist -literary figure. Yet, the contrast between White’s and Thurber’s lives raises important questions that emerge from this examination: If artistic achievement by journalist-literary figures often has seemed to grow out of pain and dysfunction, is it inevitable that great emotional suffering and fractured personal lives must be the price of artistic accomplishment? Beyond that, what should one make of the role of journalism and the impact of the journalistic environment as a precipitating factor in such tumultuous lives? Should one conclude that journalism attracts personalities who are already psychologically troubled, harbor grandiose ambitions, and look to the stimulation of journalism and art as a way to help maintain their emotional equilibrium and deal with traumatic pasts? If this is the case, are there lessons that might be taken from the lives of these figures that would be helpful to...