(Tiffany Thayer, who was prominent in the Fortean Society,...)
Tiffany Thayer, who was prominent in the Fortean Society, wrote many unusual novels in the first half of the 20th century but DOCTOR ARNOLDI is one of the most elusive. Now, for the first time since its initial publication in 1934, it's available. The story is an old one -- what happens when death is defeated -- but no one has ever written about it as Thayer has.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Tiffany Ellsworth Thayer was an American novelist and actor.
Background
Thayer was born in Freeport, Illinois, in 1902. He was the son of Elmer Ellsworth Thayer and Sybil Farrar. His parents were actors and were divorced when Thayer was five. He lived with his father in Rockford, Ill. , until 1916, when he ran away to join his mother in Chicago.
Education
He dropped out of high school in his third year.
Career
He worked for a commercial artist and, in 1917, as a copyboy on the Chicago Record-Herald. Thayer emulated the careers of his parents by joining a dramatic and operatic stock company in Oak Park, Ill.
From 1918 to 1922 he played in theaters in Illinois, Indiana, and elsewhere in the Midwest, mostly in one-night stands. He had roles in Her Unborn Child and Up the Ladder and, in 1918, appeared with Lillian Kingsbury in The Coward. However, he was not notably successful as an actor and worked as a newspaper reporter between theatrical seasons.
For a time he clerked in bookshops specializing in old and rare books in Chicago and managed bookshops in Cleveland and Detroit. In 1926 Thayer moved to New York City, still hoping to achieve fame on the stage. His savings ran out before he could find a role, and he took a job as an advertising copywriter. He at once showed extraordinary competence in this field and continued to work in it for the rest of his life, even after achieving financial success as a novelist.
Written during evenings and weekends in 1928 and 1929, Thayer's first novel, Thirteen Men, was published in May 1930. Soon afterward, he sailed for Europe. On his return to New York that fall, he found that he had produced a best-seller. In the novel twelve of the characters are members of the jury deciding the fate of the thirteenth man, Frank Miller, a young intellectual who had murdered thirty-eight people. The stories of their lives are narrated, one reviewer wrote, "with speed, humor and verve. They are smart and smutty, and sometimes both the smartness and the smut pall, but not badly. " These observations apply appropriately to most of Thayer's more than twenty other novels, some of which were published under the pseudonyms Elmer Ellsworth, Jr. , and John Doe. Nearly all of them-including Call Her Savage (1931), Thirteen Women (1932), An American Girl (1933), One Woman (1933), and The Old Goat (1937) – are ribald, gaudy, and spiced with facetious sexual episodes. In their mild salacity they resembled the novels of Maxwell Bodenheim, Thorne Smith, and Ben Hecht, who once referred to Thayer as "a fellow pornographer. "
Thayer, who prided himself on his understanding of feminine psychology, wrote with gusto and always seemed capable of doing better work than he actually did. Critic Burton Rascoe wrote of Thirteen Men that "the author has one of the most promising talents I have observed among newcomers in fiction. " However, Thayer had no literary pretensions. "To hell with literature, " he told interviewer Rochelle Girson in 1956. It may have been this attitude and declaration that inspired Ezra Pound's remark to Donald Hall in a Paris Review interview that "People who have lost reverence have lost a great deal. That was where I split with Tiffany Thayer. "
Thayer had befriended Pound and his daughter Mary and worked (1957 - 1958) for Pound's release from St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, D. C. From 1930 Thayer was advertising manager of the Literary Guild.
In the mid-1930's Thayer spent time in Hollywood as a scenarist and part-time actor. Always insisting that he would rather act than write, he appeared in a mediocre film and "scored a personal triumph, " he believed, in a stage revival of Whistling in the Dark. He returned to New York and from 1938 to 1948 worked as a radio advertising writer for J. Walter Thompson Agency. After 1948 he wrote for the advertising firm of Sullivan, Stauffer, Caldwell, and Bayles for six months and spent the other half of the year writing at Nantucket, Massachussets.
In 1939 Thayer began a prodigiously long and ambitious story of the Renaissance in Italy with the aim of discovering the reasons for the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile. The first three of twenty-one projected volumes were published in 1956 as Mona Lisa: The Prince of Taranto. Many reviewers were impressed with the enormous extent of the author's research and with his narrative skill, but some were repelled by the immense cargo of "venery, chicanery, and intrigue" that Thayer's inflated prose was able to support. Thomas Caldecot Chubb, writing in the New York Times, said the book "as a sheer piece of work" is "amazing and unforgettable. "
Thayer died of a heart attack at Nantucket, Massachussets.
He described himself as an "atheist, an anarchist, – in philosophy a Pyrrhonean. "
Membership
In 1931 he founded the Fortean Society honoring Charles Fort, a critic of science and expounder of unconventional theories of scientific phenomena. Other members included Alexander Woollcott, John Cowper Powys, and Ben Hecht. Thayer was permanent secretary of the society and editor of its magazine, Doubt.
Personality
He was off average size (five feet, seven inches).
Quotes from others about the person
Dorothy Parker, in a New Yorker review of An American Girl, said "He is beyond question a writer of power; and his power lies in his ability to make sex so thoroughly, graphically, and aggressively unattractive that one is fairly shaken to ponder how little one has been missing. "
F. Scott Fitzgerald said "curious children nosed at the slime of Mr. Tiffany Thayer in the drug-store libraries. "
William Tenn, recalling Dr. Arnoldi more than sixty years after he had read it, characterized it as "absolutely fascinating – and disgusting. .. If you ever find a copy, give it to some sf fan you dislike. Your reward will be the baffled misery in his eyes after he's read it. "
Interests
He prized rare books and was an expert collector of first issues of odd and curious magazines, an interest he discussed learnedly in 1930 in one of his few magazine articles.
Connections
Thayer, who insisted throughout life that his marital status was "nobody's business, " was married three times. His widow was the former Kathleen McMahon. He had no children.