Talk:Will Cuppy

Searching for Will Cuppy

One of the problems of finding reliable information about Will Cuppy is that he seems to have told little fibs about himself; or, more accurately, he said things with double meanings that only he understood. For example, some biographical sketches report that Cuppy's father was "a cobbler." Wrong, at least in the normal sense of the word. Most of Thomas Jefferson Cuppy's career was spent working for the Detroit, Eel River & Illinois Railroad or its successors, a line of work that he probably fell into because his maternal uncle James Collins was the railroad's president. What Cuppy meant when he fed that information to someone was that his father tended to cobble things up: that the things he did were sort of half-baked.

Burton Rascoe, who knew Cuppy at the University of Chicago and was later his boss at the New York Tribune, was responsible for some misinformation about the date of Cuppy's graduation from college. In his 1937 memoir, Before I Forget, Rascoe called Cuppy "an infant prodigy at the University, graduating at eighteen...." Nope, Cuppy was just 18 when he entered Chicago in the fall of 1902; and it took him five years to get his degree, a circumstance that Cuppy himself attributed to his outside activities as a newspaper reporter. (Kunitz and Haycraft, eds., Twentieth Century Authors, New York: H.W. Wilson, 1942, p. 341.)

Nor can Cuppy be blamed for some confusion over where his remains are buried. Sometime in the 1970s, someone doing research for a reference about authors phoned the editor of the local newspaper in Auburn, Indiana, to ask where Cuppy's ashes were interred. All the caller knew was that Cuppy's remains were sent back to his hometown. The editor didn't know at the time who Cuppy was, but made an educated but incorrect guess that the ashes might have been placed in the Roselawn Cemetery mausoleum. No, Cuppy's ashes (or most of them) were put in a little wooden urn by the Dilgard Funeral Home and driven in a hearse to Evergreen Cemetery where they were buried with a spade in the middle of a plot next to his mother's. The funeral home kept no record of the burial, and the cemetery didn't record it either. So how do I know that this is his grave? Two of his nieces from Fort Wayne verified the site to me in 1984 when I was involved in a project to have the grave marked with a headstone. "We put him right here!" one of them said emphatically as she brought her foot down on a suspiciously low spot.

I said that "most" of Cuppy's ashes were put there. The box containing them broke at the Fort Wayne post office. The clerks phoned the niece to whom it was addressed to report the damaged package and ask her what was in it.

Cuppy's politics are also problematic and probably wouldn't be worth mentioning but for the fact that his name appears in Barbara Branden's 1986 book, The Passion of Ayn Rand ISBN 0-38519-171-5, as part of a group of "a few conservative friends" who met with assistant literary editor Isabel Paterson in Paterson's office at the New York Herald Tribune on Monday nights when the paper's book section for the coming week went to press. According to Branden, Ayn Rand became part of this group.

It's not surprising that Cuppy, a book reviewer, was in Paterson's office for these gatherings. (I rather think that Cuppy, a supreme perfectionist, was on pins and needles in fear of finding a misprint in one of his columns.) Also, Paterson was a mentor to Cuppy (as she was to Rand), encouraging and prodding him to make the most of his talent. In return, Cuppy dedicated his books to Paterson. But I don't think that this association justifies Branden's implication that Cuppy was a political conservative, let alone one of Paterson's or Rand's take-no-prisoners individualist persuation. I don't think that Cuppy was political at all except insofar as politics provided grist for his inventory of human folly in The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. And except for some favorable references to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and some little digs at President Herbert Hoover in the posthumous How to Get from January to December (not the sort of thing one would expect from anyone who shared Paterson's anti-New Deal sentiments), Cuppy kept his observations of politicians safely confined to ones that were long dead. Interestingly, Cuppy's entry in Who Was Who in America identifies him as "Democrat," a bit of information that could only have come from Cuppy himself...if he meant it seriously.

It's also hard to imagine the famously witty Cuppy and the famously humorless Rand together in the same room for very long without Rand failing to get one of Cuppy's jokes. If that was the case, my guess is that Cuppy, a perfect gentleman, would have passed on to another topic as if nothing had happened.

If Cuppy was at least somewhat acquainted with the right-wing Rand, he also had some acquaintance with Max Eastman during the latter's left-wing period. In a 1936 letter to Eastman (Eastman mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington), he complained about a garbled quote attributed to him in Eastman's book, The Enjoyment of Laughter ISBN 0-38413-740-7 (reprint), something that deeply pained the hypersensitive Cuppy. Like a poet, Cuppy was a humorist who could survive anything but a misprint.

Cuppy's letter to Eastman made no mention of politics, but it contained a wonderful observation on humor: "I think you are absolutely right about everything, except I think humor springs from rage, hay fever, overdue rent and miscellaneous hell."

I recommend taking his humor at face value without trying to read between the lines for a hidden political meaning. -- Cuppysfriend 20:27, 14 August 2006 (UTC) and -- Cuppysfriend (talk) 17:16, 12 December 2009 (UTC)