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University Microfilms International 300 N. ZEEB ROAD, ANN ARBOR, Ml 48106 18 BEDFORD ROW, LONDON WC1R 4EJ, ENGLAND 8001770

L a u r it s e n, Jo h n Ro l a n d

A PREFACE TO THURBER: MIND AND MORALITY IN THE EARLY COLLECTED WORKS, 1929-1937

The Ohio Slate University Ph.D. 1979

University Microfilms International300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 18 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4EJ, England

Copyright 1979 by Lauritsen, John Roland All Rights Reserved A PREFACE TO THURBER:

MIND AND MORALITY IN THE EARLY COLLECTED WORKS, 1929-1937

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

John Roland Lauritsen, B.A.

* * * * *

The Ohio State University

1979

Reading Committee: Approved By

Thomas Cooley

John B. Gabel

Arnold Shapiro For Jean

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks are due to Arnold Shapiro for his perceptive criticisms of this dissertation and for never mentioning my defection, to John B. Gabel for providing the initial in­

spiration and for many years of encouragement and wise coun­

sel, and to Thomas Cooley for his exhaustive criticisms and

suggestions, practical help, patience, and good humor.

To my mother, Anna May Lauritsen, who taught me how to read and who allowed Thurber in the house, I owe more than

I can ever repay or even begin to express. My special grat­

itude, however, must go to my wife, Jeannette, and to my friend, William C. Segmiller. Without them this disserta­ tion simply would not have been done. I should also like to express my thanks to Mrs. Jane Ott for her meticulous

typing under trying circumstances. VITA

September 21, 1938 .... Born - Omaha, Nebraska

1968 ...... B.A., Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

1970-1971, 1972. 1973-1974, Teaching Associate, Depart­ 1975 ...... ment of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1974 ...... Editorial Assistant, The Novels of Anthony Trollope (The Clarendon Press), by Professor James R. Kincaid, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1974 ...... Reader, Department of English and Office of Student Evalua­ tions, The Ohio State Univer­ sity, Columbus, Ohio

1976-1978...... Research Associate, The Sophia Hawthorne Project, Professor Thomas Cooley, Director, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1978 ...... Research Assistant, The Norton Sampler (W. W. Norton & Company), by Professor Thomas Cooley, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1978 ...... Writer-Consultant, "The Worlds of James Thurber" (Television Proposal), WOSU-TV, Tele­ communications Center, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

iv FELLOWSHIPS

Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 1968.

NDEA Fellow, Department of English, The Ohio State Univer­ sity, Columbus, Ohio, 1968-1969, 1969-1970, 1971-1972.

AWARDS

Distinguished Teaching Award, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 1972-1973.

Distinguished Teaching Award, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 1973-1974.

PUBLICATIONS

"Donne's Satyres: The Drama of Self-Discovery," Studies in English Literature, Winter 1975.

v CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

VITA ...... iv

Chapter I

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Chapter II

THE OWL IN THE A T T I C ...... 39

Chapter III

MY LIFE AND HARD T I M E S ...... 66

Chapter IV

THE MIDDLE-AGED MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE . . . 99

Chapter V

LET YOUR MIND A L O N E ...... 168

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 229 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

It is perhaps more often thought than said of James

Thurber that, after all, he wrote nothing of consequence— no novels, no volumes of poetry, no epics, no tragedies or, except for The Male Animal, plays. Furthermore, he dealt hardly at all— and almost never directly or at length— with the cataclysmic events of his time— with the Depres­ sion, for example, or the War or the Holocaust. His subject matter was, for the most part, not the momentous but the momentary, the ephemeral, even the trivial. It is not, then, simply that Thurber wrote nothing "major," but that, as some would account it, he dealt with nothing "real." In his later years Thurber did, of course, deal increasingly with what might be called the issues of the day— "Television, psychoanalysis, the Bomb, the deterioration of grammar, the morbidity of contemporary literature— these were just a few of Thurber's terminal pet peeves," but by then he had be­ come, as John Updike points out, just "one more indignant senior citizen penning complaints about the universal decay of virtue."'*’

Small wonder, then, that Thurber should have fallen from critical grace or that, in consequence, the most recent edition of the MLA International Bibliography should list precisely one entry under his name: an article 2 in German by a German in a German journal. Such are the portents of obscurity, with Thurber1s former celebrity now matched by a thunderous silence. The most recent inspir­ ation for that silence, no doubt, has been Burton Bern- 3 stein's Thurber, a "coroner's report of a biography," ac- 4 cording to Wilfrid Sheed, a work which pays glowing trib­ ute to Thurber's presumed provincialism and various pathol­ ogies, physical and psychological, and to little else.

Although they are neither full-scale biographies nor dis­ tinguished by the kind of single-minded reduction that characterizes Bernstein's book, the book-length treatments 5 6 by Robert Morsberger, Charles Holmes, and even, in its 7 way, Stephen Black are in varying degrees biographical, lending credence to the suspicion that Thurber's works are insufficiently weighty to support or sustain systematic critical examination. Richard Tobias' The Art of James g Thurber is, alone among the books on Thurber, an exclus­ ively critical study, a study of what Tobias conceives to be Thurber's comedy. The difficulty with Tobias's treat­ ment is that, with a few conspicuous exceptions, Thurber is not a conspicuously comic writer. There are few clear- cut victories in his writings, few problems that can be solved by wedding bells or hidden codicils or psycholo­ gists or politicians or, when one comes down to it, by anything else. Thurber's is the humor not of triumph but

of the tension of the mind cut loose from its traditional moorings, the tension, it may be, of the modern world.

For that reason, then, his humor is serious and

significant, at least as serious and significant as T. S.

Eliot suggests:

It is a form of humor which is also a way of saying something serious. There is a criticism of life at the bottom of it. It is serious and even somber. Unlike so much humor, it is not merely a criticism of manners— that is, of the superficial aspects of society at a given mo­ ment— but something more profound. His writ­ ings and also his illustrations are capable of surviving the immediate environment and time out of which they spring. To some extent, they will be a document of the age they belong to.9

They may, with luck, be a document of succeeding ages as well, for if it is true, as Charles Holmes has suggested, that Thurber's imagination was "tuned to the discords of the twentieth century with preternatural accuracy,it

is just as true that, as Peter DeVries has observed,

"Poetry is sometimes an antenna by which the race detects actualities at which it has not quite arrived"^ and that

Thurber is, in that sense, a poet of exquisite sensitivity

and penetration. It is doubtful, then, that we have out­ grown Thurber as much as we have simply ignored him.

And for good reason, since the actuality at which we have not quite arrived is the actuality that we cannot

arrive at actuality, as Thurber persistently reminds us in

stories like "The Interview." As with most of Thurber's short stories, the theme of "The Interview" might be said

to be the theme of lost mastery, including the mastery of meaning. As its title suggests, the story concerns an

interview, in this instance between George Lockhorn, an

oft-married aging alcoholic writer of successful novels,

and a reporter named Price. In the later stages of the

interview, Lockhorn's current— and probably terminal— wife,

Martha, is also present. Early on, Lockhorn attempts, as, of course, only a man who knows better would, to define

"the wonderful": "the body of a woman, the works of a watch, the verses of Keats, the structure of the hyacinth, 12 the devotion of the dog." Seeming to recall, however, that he has, in his worldly way, already "tossed those off casually for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch man, or the

Rochester Times-Union man" (p. 59), he drops the matter as the trifle it is, only to make another attempt later, after his resolution and his powers have been further stiffened and fortified by Scotch: "A woman crying, children calling over the snow— across the snow— dogs barking at a distance, dogs barking far off at night" (p. 67). Frustrated, even

furious, Lockhorn changes the subject to

"Things I've wanted to do. . . . Bat baseballs through the windows of a firescraper from a lower roof across the street. ..." "Skyscraper," said Mrs. Lockhorn. To Price's secret delight his host, after a slow stare at Mrs. Lockhorn, repeated with great authority, "Fire-scraper." . . . "I want to open a pigeon. All my life I've wanted to cut a dove open, looking for the goddamndest omens in the history of the world. Like the Romans performing the ancient assizes. I want to find two hearts in one of the sons of bitches and go crying through the night, like another Whozis, 'Repent, ye sinners, repent. The world is coming to an end 111 (pp. 67-68).

In "The Interview," then, as in Thurber1s writings in general, the theme of lost mastery comes down not to a celebration of chaos but to the recognition, repeated again and again, that we are unable, finally and forever, to know or to be certain of anything. If "The Interview" builds to that recognition, most of Thurber1s stories begin and end with it, in an ongoing cycle of discovery and rediscovery.

The problem, then, for Lockhorn and for most of Thurber's fictional protagonists is not, alas, that the world is coming to an end but that their ability to believe that they can comprehend it has come to an end, hard as they try.

As hard, for example, as Lockhorn, wishing to believe that he can define the wonderful, wishing, in essence, to believe his own beliefs, tries to define the wonderful only to dis­ cover that what he has defined is not so much the wonderful as his own impotent wish to define the wonderful. Under such circumstances thoughtful men grow desperate, and Lock­ horn, much like his author, is a desperate man, a man driven to drink to escape his own pain. And also, of course, to blot out the recognition that he does not know what he is talking about, a realization most devastating

(or at least debilitating) to a writer. Thus Lockhorn speaks of desperate actions, of batting baseballs through the windows of a firescraper or of cutting open a pigeon in the hope of finding two hearts. Yet like the devotion of the dog or like a woman crying or the works of a watch or the verses of Keats or the structure of the hyacinth, the presence of two hearts in pigeon has no necessary sig­ nificance. It may, of course, be an omen, a sign that we should repent, or it may signal nothing more than an un­ toward wrinkle in the poor pigeon's double helix. The problem is how to tell the difference between all the pos­ sible meanings or interpretations and how, if we cannot tell the difference, to know how to think or to act or to make sense of anything.

If that is a problem that never occurs to the antagon­ ists in Thurber's fictions— to the garage mechanics and parking lot attendants, to the wives, women in general, and manly men in general (the latter being distinguishable from the former by dint of their smaller size and comparative ineptitude with machinery)— it is very much at the center of "The Race of Life," a less somber and perhaps more serious work than "The Interview," a work in which we find ourselves at the center. "The Race of Life," a work 13 that Thurber modestly calls only "A Parable," is dif­ ficult to quote from since it consists of only seventy- one words (two of them French), three punctuation marks (two exclamation marks and a colon), and thirty-five full- page drawings. It is even more difficult to synthesize

since, on the surface at least, it makes no sense. Yet

for all its elegant economy (of meaning no less than of means), "The Race of Life" is a work of epic implications,

implications that seem to chart the progress of human life on earth in either historical terms (the ascent of man) or in individual terms (the progress of the soul), the two being much the same since ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

The work, obviously, is nothing if not flexible: "This sequence of thirty-five drawings represents the life story of a .man and his wife; or several days, a month, or a year in their life and in that of their child; or alternately interflowing and diverging streams of consciousness over any given period. It seems to lend itself to a wide variety of interpretations. Anything may be read into it, or left out of it, without making a great deal of difference."

If, even at this early juncture, the wise reader begins to experience a certain uneasiness over the other­ wise liberating notion that he is free to interpret the work in any way that he chooses, he is not likely to be reassured by the author's caution that we not repeat the sad experience of those "two or three previewers [who] were brought up short by this picture or that— mainly the

Enormous Rabbit— and went back and started over again from the beginning. This mars the flow of the sequence by interrupting the increasing tempo of the action. It is better to skip pictures, or tear them out, rather than to begin over again and try to fit them in with some precon­ ceived idea of what is going on." To summarize, then, we can read anything in, leave anything out, skip whatever we want, or go a step further and tear out whatever we wish.

Perhaps the wisest course would be to tear all the pictures out and shuffle them like a deck of cards or, better yet, burn them and draw our own. But that would, no doubt, in­ terrupt "the increasing tempo of the action" and play havoc with the surely significant evidence that the work begins, unlike the garden-variety epic, with "The Start"

(Panel 1) and ends with the attainment of "The Goal" (Panel

35)— with, that is, something like the New Jerusalem, glit­ tering (albeit in black and white) upon yon hill. In any event, we may take comfort in knowing that we are not wholly alone as we venture upon our interpretative quest,

since the author does offer "a few words of explanation" concerning the previously mentioned Enormous Rabbit: "It can be an Uncrossed Bridge which seems, at first glance, to have been burned behind somebody, or it can be Chickens

Counted Too Soon, or a ringing phone, or a thought in the night, or a faint hissing sound. More than likely it is an Unopened Telegram which when opened (see Panel 12) proves not to contain the dreadful news one had expected but mere­

ly some such innocuous query as: 'Did you find my silver-rimmed glasses in brown case after party Saturday?1"

As for "Dogs in the Blizzard" (Panel 22), "The snow in which the bloodhounds are caught may be either real snow or pieces of paper torn up." Similarly and by much the same

reasoning, the dogs themselves may be either real dogs or black lines on a piece of white paper. In any case, with

the explanation of "Dogs in the Blizzard" we are on our own, or roughly where we always are in matters of the higher thought. The author, who is merely the medium through which the vision has, as it were, revealed itself, can help us no further. It is up to us, purified in mind and heart, to divine whether, say, the crazed crossing-sweeper depicted in "Menace" (Panel 20) is a refugee from Bleak House, Too

Many Cooks, Rampant Materialism, International Communism, the angel Raphael, an indeterminate intimation, or, as seems likely, all of these or something else altogether. He appears, judging strictly from the evidence of his quavery outline, the dark rings around his eyes (or the dark rings which are his eyes), and the crushed condition of his stove­ pipe hat, to be rather more menaced than menace and thus to be for us, the innocent readers, a guide or-prophet or at

least a hint. On the other hand, he is, whatever the condi­ tion of his garments, fully clothed while his presumed adversaries are not. Perhaps, then, he is Experience con­

fronting Innocence. Or possibly the reverse. 10

But such conjecture is pointless. Or perhaps it is the point since "The Race of Life" is simultaneously a paradigm of something like the raw, unassimilated, dis­ parate, unconnected data of existence and a parody of the way in which we, for the most part unconsciously, assimil­ ate, connect, and unify those data, of the way, in short, that we experience them. Much the same can, of course, be said of Thurber's other drawings or "cartoons," for if, as Dorothy Parker pointed out in her "Introduction" to

The Seal in the Bedroom, they deal "solely in culmina- 14 tions," that is one way of saying that they represent situations that have been untimely ripped from the womb of consciousness, from the warm, soothing bath of continu­ ity, coherence, causality, consonance, connection, and other such comforting constructions. If that is the case with Thurber's individual drawings, each of which is not so much a thing as it is a latency which we might fill up with an infinite number of meanings or interpretations, each precisely as correct or erroneous as the other with no possible way to tell the difference, it is much more the case with "The Race of Life," a work with a beginning, middle, and end, a work which provides us with the illu­ sion of necessary order and thus reinforces the necessary illusion of order we bring to it.

"The Race of Life," then, is not only a parody in which we are the victims but a parody in which we are, to 11

a large extent, our own victimizers as well— our own

victimizers insofar as all our attempts to persuade our­

selves that we have at last made sense of it end by re­

minding us that, as Denis Donoghue put it in his review

of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, "when we have demon­

strated the coherence of a structure we have merely revealed 15 the force of a desire." Thurber, of course, tells us

much the same thing when he informs us that "The Race of

Life" may be interpreted in any way we choose, telling us,

in effect, that the work has no necessary significance,

that, in a word, it is meaningless, utter nonsense. Yet

if we are forewarned and, to that extent, the victims of

our own need to make sense even of nonsense, the author

is not, needless to say, the innocent he pretends to be.

If we are our own victims, he is nonetheless our seducer,

as, for example, when he tells us not to read or inter­

pret the work "with some preconceived idea of what is

going on" and thereby reinforces the fondest preconcep­

tion of all: that we are or can be free of preconceptions,

that interpretation, indeed thought itself, is possible without preconception. If it is beguiling to our sense of

intellectual virginity to pretend that we can know what

something is without having any prior idea what it is,

Thurber1s advice that we simply ignore whatever evidence

is displeasing should give pause, since it implicitly acknowledges the necessity of some preconceived standard 12 of judgment. It also mocks the illusion that the interpre­ tative process, consciousness itself, is impartial and unselective, that we do or can take account of all the facts and consider all the variables. In short, then, we are being twitted— twitted, for example, by the author's mock supposition of his own innocence, his pretension that

"The Race of Life" is something that simply happened, free of design, prior calculation, preconception, artifice, or even human agency.

If Thurber himself repeatedly undercuts that pretense, telling us, for example, that "The snow in which the blood­ hounds are caught may be either real snow or pieces of paper torn up," thereby calling attention to the artifice, the contrivance, the sheer and deliberate nonsense of the X 6 whole construct, we nonetheless, as the criticism attests, need to believe otherwise, much as George Lockhorn needs to believe that his bits and tatters somehow equal "the wonder­ ful." Yet if it is possible to distance and even to dismiss

Lockhorn's difficulties as somehow peculiarly his, it is not so easy to dismiss "The Race of Life," for the only real story it contains or suggests is our story. It is not, after all, for the benefit of his pilgrims that Thurber

"attempts" to explain the significance of the Enormous

Rabbit since his pilgrims cannot simultaneously exist both inside and outside the text of which they are a part. 13

Still, they must somehow read and interpret that text, much as we must read it and much as we too must read the

larger text of which we are a part. Their predicament,

then, is a mirror image of our own, and it is arguable whether we read "The Race of Life" as much as it reads us,

for in reading it we are compelled to read ourselves,

taking whatever comfort we can from Thurber's glosses,

cautions, and explanations, all of which serve to make

the same general point. The point that there is no point

except those of our own manufacturing. That is, for example, the point of Thurber's "explanation" of the Enor­ mous Rabbit, a creature, a thing, or a fact which is

simply there, unconnected with anything else, representing no knowable reality or significance beyond itself. That, of course, is why his intellectual rag bag of an explana­ tion includes two well-known cliches, for in the subver­

sive vision of "The Race of Life" interpretation is itself

a kind of clich£, a way of likening the unknown to the

known (or the unknown to the unknown, for that matter), of reducing and incorporating it, of closing the circle,

and of confirming what, consciously or otherwise, we set out to confirm.

If, then, "The Race of Life" is rich in what might be called nihilistic potential, it is, like the rest of

Thurber's work, rich in a good deal else besides, for if 14

Thurber's art at its best is designed to provoke in us the glimmer of self-recognition and to show us to ourselves as we secretly know ourselves to be rather than as we pre­ tend, even to ourselves, to be (see, for example, "The

Secret Life of Walter Mitty"), its purpose is at bottom moral, at least as moral in its way as, say, The Pilgrim's

Progress is in its. Here again the chief example must be

"The Race of Life," a work which Charles Holmes suggests is a "parody"— or "twentieth-century version"— of "the form and values" of The Pilgrim's Progress" and, more generally, "of the whole tradition of symbolic narratives in which man's life is represented as a spiritual jour- 17 ney." In a formal sense, "The Race of Life" does, of course, parallel Pilgrim's Progress while in what might be called a doctrinal sense it is worlds removed from it, for if anything, everything, and ultimately nothing can be read into "The Race of Life," only God can be read into

Bunyan's masterpiece. Similarly, if for Christian and presumably for Bunyan and his original readers all things bespoke the will of God and His immanence in the world, if the world was for them a kind of book whose single and indissoluble meaning could be apprehended by the believing heart, for Thurber, his pilgrims, and his readers the world has become not Revelation but a bewildering multi­ plicity of conflicting signs, any of which can be con­ nected with any other, any of which, singly or in infinite 15 combination, can mean anything, everything, or nothing, with no way this side of madness to tell the difference.

Life for Thurber's pilgrims and followers, life in Thur- ber's art, has thus become life not in the Christian King­ dom but life in Kafka's Castle. Thurber's art, then, can perhaps most profitably be viewed as a reaction to or conse­ quence of what J. Hillis Miller has, following Nietzsche, 18 conceived of as the death of God and the consequent shrink­ ing of the world to the limits of the individual mind which seeks nonetheless to understand, to order, and even to in­ corporate the larger reality of which it is merely an infin­ itesimal part, much as Thurber's pilgrims do, much as we all do. Or, to vary the metaphor, we might say that Thur­ ber 's art is one of the fruits of the second fall of man, for if the consequence of the first fall was the forbidden knowledge of good and evil, the consequence of the second fall is the forbidden knowledge— the knowledge that we forbid ourselves to know— that there is no knowledge.

Yet the similarities between Bunyan's epic and

Thurber's are at least as arresting as their differences and stem from much the same source, the central problem in each being the problem of, in Wolfgang Iser's phrase, 19 "subjectivity within an objective context." In the case of Christian, that problem stems, as Iser points out in 20 his brilliant treatment of The Pilgrim's Progress, from the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and for Christian 16

that problem assumes distinctly Thurberian proportions,

since the question of his knowing finally and for certain

that he is, though unworthy and merely a dutiful instrument

of the Divine Will, among the elect of God, comes down to

the accuracy— the unverifiable accuracy— of his interpreta­

tion of the revelatory signs, an interpretative process in

whose outcome he, though obedient and unworthy, is not wholly

disinterested. If, then, Christian's problem is the impos­

sible one of distinguishing between perception and projec­

tion, one of determining whether he is reading Revelation

or Self Writ Large, one of believing his own beliefs, credit­

ing his own interpretations, one, ultimately, of determining whether he can know anything, that is very much the same

problem faced by Thurber's pilgrims and, for that matter,

by u s .

Yet if, as Iser suggests, the epochal development in modern self-consciousness that is depicted in The Pilgrim's

Progress marks the beginning of the novel and marks more

generally, we might add, the inward turning, the self- conscious consciousness of consciousness, that characterizes

the work of such acute non-novelists as Donne, Herbert,

and Thurber, it also marks for Thurber the only possible basis for moral behavior. With God having disappeared for­

ever behind the clouds and with all hope of salvation or divine illumination having disappeared with Him, the only possible basis for moral behavior in Thurber's view is 17

humility, intellectual humility, the honest recognition

that, in Thomas Edison's homely phrase, "We don't know one- millionth of one percent about anything," and, what is more, we never will. Original sin thus consists in man's

folly, his self-admiring hubris at the full, to have made

"His mistaken selection of reasoning as an instrument of 21 perception," for reason xs an xnstrument only. That

fatal step taken, whenever in Thurber's timeless cosmology

it was taken, man effectively severed himself from the

natural order and from creation itself, for what reason re­ veals, what we perceive through reason is not nature or

creation or reality but merely our ideas about reality re­

flected back at us, ideas which necessarily derive from our abstract preconceptions about reality. When we hold

the vaunted mirror up to nature, what we inevitably see

reflected back is not, as the implausible metaphor would

have it, nature itself, not even nature reversed, but our­

selves. That is why Thurber could say that he has "never

been able to maintain a consistent attitude toward life 22 or reality or toward anything else" and, more generally,

that

Abstract reasoning, in itself, has not bene­ fited Man so much as instinct has benefited the lower animals. On the contrary, it has moved in the opposite direction. Instinct has been defined as "a tendency to actions which lead to the attainment of some goal natural to the species." In giving up instinct and going in for reasoning, Man has aspired higher than the attainment of natural goals; he has developed 18

ideas and notions; he has monkeyed with concepts. The life to which he was naturally adapted he has put behind him; in moving into the alien and complicated sphere of Thought and Imagination he has become the least well-adjusted of all the creatures of the earth and, hence, the most be­ wildered. It may be that the finer mysteries of life and death can be comprehended only through pure instinct; the cat, for example, appears to know (I don't say that he does, but he appears to). Man, on the other hand, is surely further away from the Answer than any other animal this side of the ladybug.23

If Thurber here gives a new twist to the intentional fallacy, if his language is fanciful and teasing, his point is nonetheless serious, central, and sobering, for if man is"the most bewildered" of the animals, he is also the most dangerous, as Thurber makes plain later in the same essay:

If it is hard to Believe, it is just as hard, as our poet's Bishop Blougram points out to the cyn­ ical Mr. Gigadibs, to "guard our unbelief." You remember: "Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, a fancy from a flower-bell," and all that sort of thing— and we believe again. And then there's a man with a little mustache, and a man with an umbrella, and all that sort of thing, and we are safe once more in our convic­ tion that there can be no God watching over this sorrowful and sinister scene, these menacing and meaningless animals.24

We may be safe in our conviction, but we are safe in little else, for what makes this scene sorrowful and sinister and menacing is precisely our failure to guard our unbelief, our failure to doubt our fabrications and abstractions and our corresponding willingness to act upon them, sometimes fatally, more often with God knows what consequences. 19

This can be seen clearly in the internal drama of "The Race

of Life/" where the woman, trusting her every supposition,

pushes confidently, inexorably, and even manfully on, unre­

flecting and unquestioning, deterred by nothing, stymied by nothing, while the male, "The Laggard," though plainly baf­

fled, unsure, and afraid, consents uneasily to be led along

from non-sequitur to non-sequitur and to leap with her from

conclusion to conclusion.

If, in a just reckoning, "The Laggard" finally has little choice in the matter, his dilemma points up the central ten­ sion in Thurber's art: the tension of the mind as it seeks to discriminate between its own reality and the reality that is external to it and, that effort yielding nothing but con­ fusion and bewilderment, being compelled nonetheless to pro­ ceed and to act as though it could make the discrimination, the alternative being paralysis and even death. It is for that reason, then, that Thurber everywhere suggests both implicitly and explicitly (in the fables, for example) that, since we seem neither to know what we are doing nor what we are about, we summon forth a certain humility, a wise thoughtfulness, and proceed, when we must proceed, cautiously, reflectively. As a practical matter, this is not a very practical solution. But there are few practical solutions to impossible situations, and Thurber's amounts to a kind of paralysis, a charged stasis not unlike that advocated in

Donne's third satire: 20

. . . doubt wisely, in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; To sleepe, or runne wrong, is. . . .25

This, of course, is very much the situation— even the pos­

ture— in which we find many of Thurber’s fictional heroes,

including, as often as not, his authorial personae. If they are meek and unassuming, "little men" as they are often and

irritatingly called, they are just as often, like George

Lockhorn, men of considerable irritability and impatience.

In either case, if they are men who seem hardly to act at all and, hence, to do no great good, neither do they do any great harm, and that by comparison with their heedless adversaries amounts to a positive good. Furthermore, it is not entire­ ly accurate to say that they do not act. They do act, but their actions are confined, for the most part, to acting in imagination, which betokens both a certain thoughtfulness and a certain reticence. If it is true that they cannot drive or dance or throw a javelin as far as Babe Didrikson or do a thousand other things that others seem to do effort­ lessly, and if they fantasize about being able to do all these things, that is the source of their appeal, for in them we see ourselves not as we pretend to be nor, perhaps, as we appear to be, but as we secretly know ourselves to be— apprehensive, unsure, unable, at bottom, to believe our own lies. That is, in the Thurberian reckoning, a moral recognition. 21

Thurber's is, then, a deeply moral art of exquisite tension in which his protagonists, paralyzed by the self- conscious consciousness of their own limitations and inabil­ ity either to master the world or to comprehend it, live almost exclusively in their own minds. Although the moral content of Thurber*s art does not become fully apparent, in the collections, until the appearance of The Middle-Aged

Man on the Flying Trapeze in 1935, there are certain moral constants in his work, all of which bespeak, like the inwardness of his heroes, the necessity of restraint, and, particularly, as a later fable would have it, of intel­ lectual restraint: "Get it right or let it alone. The 2 6 conclusion you jump to may be your own." Of all the moral constants in Thurber*s art perhaps the most obvious is, as this reference to the fables would suggest, his repeated adversions to and, in a sense, retreats into the world of nature, the natural order, the world that is not man. These are seldom sentimental excursions, for animals function in

Thurber*s art as an astringent reminder of otherness, of everything that is beyond our comprehension and control, of, in short, the mysteries. But, more tha*n that, animals serve to remind us of our effective stupidity, of the extent to which we inherently mistake our ideas for actual­ ity. Because animals are incapable of abstraction, they are incapable of imposing any abstractions upon experience and are therefore incapable of either folly or evil. Those 22 distinctions belong to man alone, and Thurber treats of dogs and ducks as often as he does to remind us of that elemental fact. We are the intruders in this world. But we are not all, of course, equally intrusive, and thus it is that the world of nature and of the natural order serves in Thurber's art as an implicit moral norm, as something like an absolute moral standard by which we may be measured.

Those who run afoul of that standard are themselves con­ stants in Thurber's art: the literalists, on the one hand, and the abstractionists on the other. The literalists par­ take of villainy because they do not think at all and hence do not suffer at all; the abstractionists because they trust their thoughts too much and hence do not suffer enough.

Both, in Thurber's view, are forms of stupidity, and stupid­ ity is, in Thurber's art, a moral fault. If the literalists of Thurber's short stories are most often simply fixtures who stand in sharp contrast to his heroes and figures about whom little can be done, the abstractionists and their grand designs tend to figure as the subjects of his essays, the function of which is, quite often, to expose the higher stupidity of higher thought. Thurber's test in this regard is, much like Johnson's and Swift's, the test of common sense, the test of empiricism, of a reliance on the evi­ dence of the senses and of experience and simple probability.

His characteristic method of dealing with those manifesta­ tions of quackery which have obtruded themselves onto his 23 consciousness is, therefore, simply to put them to the test of imaginative experience— to "take" a typical worker to a meeting of the Marxist intellectuals who would save him, for instance.

If, then, Thurber's concern is with the mind and if, in that connection, his bent and bias are essentially moral, his work is richer, more complex, more serious, and more worthy of serious study for its own sake than the critical evidence accumulated thus far would seem to suggest. And it is that point which this preface seeks, perhaps above all, to make, for it is merely a preface in the dual sense that it attempts to suggest an approach by means of which

Thurber's complexity might be more fully and more profitably explored and in the sense that it deals only with his ear­ lier works. It is also a preface in the hopeful sense that other and better treatments will follow. Yet the prospects, in that regard, are not bright. For one thing, much— even perhaps most— of Thurber's post-War work suffers by compar­ ison with the work that precedes it chiefly because his increasing moralism became something like an end in itself, swamping and overwhelming the delicate play of mind that is characteristic of the best of his earlier work. For whatever reasons— and there were reasons aplenty: personal, historical, political, psychological, and, perhaps above all, physiological— Thurber lost his sense of humor, and for a humorist that can be devastating. For another thing, it seems to be an irremediable habit of the critical mind to equate length with weight, size with significance, and the simple fact is, of course, that, the fairy tales,

The Years with Ross, and the collaborations with E. B. White and Elliott Nugent aside, Thurber wrote in none of the longer forms. In his defense it can and should be argued that

Thurber wrote no novels or (by himself) plays because those forms presuppose or imitate or at least implicitly consent to an over-arching order, pattern, structure, or purposive­ ness to events which he could not believe in, hard as he 27 tried. The relatively lengthy and always coherent nar­ ratives that Thurber wrote in the form of fairy tales are another matter, because they are inherently irresponsible, because, that is, as works of pure imagination and unen­ cumbered ideality, they neither imply nor purport to imi­ tate any order beyond themselves.

If, then, it is significant that Thurber wrote in none of the "major" forms, if his forms were peculiarly his own, it is equally significant that the two major misfires of his early career were both his longest works of the period and the result of collaborations, which is to say of compro­ mise. The title of the first, Is Sex Necessary? (1929), bears the true Thurberian stamp, for it betokens a world in which reality has become entirely a construct of the mind, a world in which even the most basic facts of physical existence have become little more than ideas. Unfortun­

ately, however, it is one of those books in which the title

is better than the work itself or, more precisely, one of

those books in which the title is the book, with the alter­

nating chapters by Thurber and E . B. White being little more

than labored and often lame footnotes to the central joke.

The book is, of course, bright with promise, and it estab­

lished Thurber as a writer and an artist, both thanks large­

ly to White. But the significance of the work remains more

historical and biographical than critical— for in critical

terms it is, to parody the diction of Thurber1s then-unborn

lemming, sophomoric, superficial., smug, smirky, shallow,

slapstickish, self-conscious, self-congratulatory, self- 2 8 indulgent, and silly— to use only the "s's." If one of the hallmarks of Thurber1s later work is the informing recognition that nothing can be assumed, nothing known final­ ly and for certain, the artistic working out of that central perception is almost invariably self-reflexive, self-

inclusive. That is not the case with Is Sex Necessary?, a work which is informed by an implicit and facile knowingness that can be as irritating as it was later to be uncharacter­ istic of either author. In much the same vein, the apparent

immunity of the authors from the universally benighted condition that they describe and ambivalently deplore serves

to disunify the book. 26

That underlying disunity, however, is as nothing com­

pared to the obvious surface disunity, for as a satire the

book is aimed by turns at the sentimental or romantic ideal­

ization of love and at the scientific or "Freudian" reduc­

tion of sex, which is to say that the work has no aim at all

and seems to exist for the sole purpose of making us guffaw

like so many rib-nudging fraternity brothers at a burlesque

theater. As a satire, then, the book cannot succeed since

the objects of its derision are antithetical, leaving it without any central position and, hence, without any neces­

sary principle of coherence. Insofar as the book might, by way of synthesis, be said to be a parody of society's tedious

obsession with sex (sex, at the time the book was written, 29 being, according to White, "less than fifty years old" ),

it becomes tedious itself.

None of this is, of course, to suggest that the book is without its moments, but they are moments merely, as they almost inevitably must be in a work so amorphously focused.

It offers little to engage, challenge, or stimulate the mind on anything other than a sporadic basis. As might be expected, it is White who, on the whole, proves better adapted to the kind of mock treatise that he and Thurber

apparently had in mind, for his is the more orderly sensi­ bility, the sensibility of an essayist and an aphorist:

"She saw life (and sex) through a lyrical haze which tended to accentuate its beauty by softening its truths" (p. 125). 27

Though fully as capable as White of the isolated aphorism—

"Freedom is as.essential and primary an urge with a man as the loss of it is with a woman" (p. 141)— Thurber was as impelled toward anarchy as White was toward order, and his attention and imagination were continually arrested by the isolated, the incongruous, the absurd: ". . .in those days men were unable to develop a neurosis because they didn't know how" (p. 44). If wild incongruity is the chief glory of Thurber's drawings (as, for example, in "UNCONSCIOUS

DRAWING: PLATE 1," which "represents the Male Ego being importuned by, but refusing to yield to, Connecticut Beau­ tiful" p. 51), it is also perhaps the chief deficiency of

Thurber's chapters which, being chapters and having to fill up a certain amount of space, are often kept alive by arti­ ficial means long after the plug should have been pulled.

Some of them are as toothless and innocuous as his drawings are penetrating and subversive. It is doubtful, for example, that "The Lilies-and-Bluebird Delusion," which is based on

"the case of a young lady whose silly mother had taught her to believe that she would have a little son, three years old, named Ronald, as soon as her husband brought a pair of bluebirds into a room filled with lilies-of-the-valley"

(p. 107), has any particular destination in mind or that it merits the fifteen pages it must fill up with variations on a not inexhaustible theme. 28

Like Is Sex Necessary?, The Male Animal (1940) is, of course, the result of a collaboration, this time with

Elliott Nugent, a close friend of Thurber's since his days at Ohio State, and like it, The Male Animal is senten-

tiously superficial and has accordingly been a resounding commercial success. It neither merits nor asks for sus­ tained critical analysis, since there is little, the names of the authors aside, to distinguish it from countless other popular entertainments of the period. It does, how­ ever, offer an unusual mix of the ponderous with the far- cial that enables an audience to feel that it has been

instructed and improved instead of merely amused, but if, according to Nugent, "the domestic comedy plot was Thurber's and the theme of academic freedom was his," the end result of the mix of authors and aims was such as to make it

"impossible to say who was chiefly responsible for which parts.It would seem, then, to be neither fair nor pos­

sible to criticize the work, as most of the books on

Thurber have done, as if it were his alone. Yet though

the work is not wholly his, it is indicative of a desire of

his that grew stronger as his vision grew weaker to force his imagination and talents into forms and even into senti­ ments for which they were not particularly well suited.

His repeated attempts, for example, to write a play on his 29 own and his published attempts to deal with the surface issues of the day and to simplify and sentimentalize his own past indicate nothing quite so much as his own resist­ ance to the deeper, darker, and more complex cast of his own mind. Thurber could not collaborate or compromise, even with himself, and remain Thurber. Still, the frequent 31 fights between the authors notwithstanding, The Male

Animal would, in all probability, never have been finished were it not for Nugent, since Thurber could not adapt him­ self to externally imposed forms, whether of popular drama or political orthodoxy, simply because they did not ex­ press reality as he fundamentally perceived it and because they were not sufficiently spacious or elastic to accommo­ date his imagination. The result is, paradoxically, that the more conventional or realistic he tried to be, the less convincing he was, for the reality of Thurber is not so much the reality we publicly agree on as it is the reality we privately know.

If, in that connection, the significant action of a typical Thurber story takes place on the inside and in the depths, and if the victories that are won are either imagin­ ary triumphs ("The Secret Life of Walter Mitty") or triumphs of the imagination ("The Catbird Seat"), the most persistent problem with The Male Animal is that it is all surface.

The problems it raises are not those of the perplexity or integrity of the mind as it seeks somehow to mediate between 30

its own reality and the reality that is external to it, but

the public issues of a publicly-agreed-upon, altogether

right-minded, and utterly conventional reality. It offers

no problems which cannot be solved, not. even the problem of

its own plot, which combines the fluff of something border­

ing on situation comedy with the harder stuff of academic

freedom or, more grandiosely, the search for truth. The play manages, as a technical matter, to reconcile the two by reducing the central issues— the threats to Professor

Tommy Turner1s marriage by a superannuated football player and to his inflated professional integrity by the board of

trustees of his university (Ohio State disguised as Mid­ western)— to a test of his manhood. It is a test whose

issue is never in doubt. Following an inebriated epiphany which strains the pathetic fallacy to its limits, Turner

fights the fatuous football player. Two days later, having healed his largely self-inflicted wounds and totally self-

inflicted hangover, he marches manfully, defiantly, proud­

ly, off to class, there to read Vanzetti's famous letter to minds thirsty for truth— or at least for eloquence,

since it is not clear precisely what higher truth Turner

sees revealed in the letter beyond its symbolic value as an unmistakable sign of his own high-mindedness.

If, then, the play's resolution is mechanical, it is no more so than the dialogue assigned to Turner, who is not so much a character as he is a set of speeches— so much so that we sense a definite Thurberian subversiveness

when Turner's wife, exasperated beyond bearing, yells,

"Oh, you and your mind! I have to go through such a lot 32 with your mind!," or, when fed up with his histronics

and general air of injured innocence, she tells him not to

"act like the lead in a Senior Class play!" (p. 71). Even

in the parallel subplot, Thurber cannot resist puncturing

the play's pretensions, as when, for example, he has

Patricia, Turner's sister-in-law, tell her suitor and

Turner's protege, the prematurely stuffy Michael Barnes who

is vying for her hand with the current football hero at Mid­

western, "Give me a football player anytime. Give me a

guy without so much intellect or whatever it is. Somebody

that doesn't want to be bawling the world out all the

time— always doing something brave or fine or something"

(pp. 65-66).

And in truth it is merely "something brave or fine or

something" that Turner and Barnes are doing, its transcend­

ent importance being simply assumed, as when Turner, in

dialogue that would embarrass a saint, solemnly informs his wife, "I am not fighting about you and me at all. This

is bigger than you and me or any of us" (p. 126). Later,

with the others hanging on his every word, he makes clear

precisely what it is that is "bigger than you and me or

any of us": "You can't suppress ideas because you don't

like them— not in this country— not yet. This is 32 a university! It's our business to bring what light we can into this muddled world— to try to follow truth!"

(p. 129). "We're holding the last fortress of free thought, and if we surrender to prejudice and dictation, we're cowards" (p. 120). In these ringing affirmations of the obvious, the one thing that is ignored is, of course, what, beyond a self-evidently good thing, truth is, what, even thought is. If good plays do not normally have to explain such things, that is perhaps because they do a good deal more showing and a good deal less telling than The Male

Animal does. Whatever truth and thought are, they were for Thurber far more than the avoidance of cowardice and far more than gaudy symbols to be run up the literary flag­ pole and ceremoniously saluted. They were the starting point, the subject, and the struggle, not the unearned end of his art. Art has to earn its abstractions. No one knew that better than Thurber, and that is why he was nor­ mally so careful with his.

The Male Animal is not, then, Thurber's most success­ ful work, though it does (to the extent that it is, in fact, his) point forward to a tendency of his later art to treat of public issues in an increasingly snappish, strident, and even sanctimonious fashion. Insofar as his later work deals with public issues rather than the private issue of the mind's irremediable perplexity and presupposes those 33

issues to be the real issue and remediable, Thurber's later

art represents a breakdown— almost a snapping— of the cen­

tral tension of his earlier art. Insofar, on the other

hand, as his later art becomes more overtly moral, it is continuous with it, for the progress of Thurber's early art,

from the almost pointless playfulness of Is Sex Necessary? to the all too pointed portentousness of The Male Animal,

is essentially moral. That is not, of course, to suggest that the collections which intervene between Is Sex Neces­

sary? and The Male Animal--The Owl in the Attic (1931),

My Life and Hard Times (1933), The Middle-Aged Man on the

Flying Trapeze (1935), and Let Your Mind Alone (1937)— are increasingly moralistic or didactic, but it is to

suggest that in them the moral basis of Thurber1s art be­ comes progressively more evident. It is to suggest further

that the seriousness of Thurber's early art exists pre­ cisely in the tension— indeed the play— between the playful

and the portentous, for the portentousness— or to give it

its true name, the profundity— of Thurber's early art

derives precisely from the potentially playful notion that we are all, without exception, deluded, that none of us has

or can have a corner on truth or virtue.

It is for that reason, then, that The Last Flower,

with which this discussion ends, is not inherently more

serious than "The Race of Life," with'which it begins. Its

seriousness is only more obvious, in much the same way that, 34 say, tanks are more obviously serious than Enormous Rabbits or marching armies than dogs in the blizzard. In any event, The Male Animal obviously represents a break with all of this. But that break did not happen in an instant, nor was it ever complete. "The Interview," for example, is a much later work than The Male Animal, and many other great things were to follow it as well. The point, however, remains that with the beginning of his own blindness and the War, Thurber began to lose the clear grasp of his own distinctive vision and mission, for his true vision and mission never had fundamentally to do with wars of whatever kind but with those of us who create the wars, again of whatever kind. It was Thurber1s business to show us to our­ selves as we fundamentally are. Few have done it better.

No one has done it in the same way. And nowhere did he do it better than in the years before the onset of his own blindness and the most dramatic eruption of our own. 35

NOTES

"Indignations of a Senior Citizen," The New York Times Book Review, 25 November 1962, p. 5; rpt. Thurber: A Col­ lection of Critical Essays, ed. Charles S. Holmes (Engle­ wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 150-51.

2 See 1977 MLA International Bibliography, I, 189. To put this arresting fact into a kind of perverse perspective, there are twice as many entries for Bob Dylan and Erica Jong, seventeen times as many for Norman Mailer, and twenty-seven times as many for Ken Kesey. 3 Thurber: A Biography (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975). 4 "Introduction," James Thurber!s Men, Women and Dogs (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), p. xiv.

^Robert E. Morsberger, James Thurber (New Haven: College and University Press, 1964).

Charles S. Holmes, The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber (New York: Atheneum, 1972). 7 Stephen A. Black, James Thurber: His Masquerades, A Critical Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1970). g Athens, Ohio: Ohio Univ. Press, 1969. g Eliot's remark originally appeared m a Time cover story in 1951. It is quoted here from The Clocks of Columbus, p. 289.

®" Introduction, " Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 1.

■^"James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock," Thurber: A Col­ lection of Critical Essays, p. 42.

12 Thurber Country: A Collection of Pieces About Males and Females, Mainly of Our Own Species (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), p. 59. All subsequent references will be cited in the text. 36

1 -3 "The Race of Life: A Parable," The Seal in the Bed­ room and Other Predicaments (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932, 1950), unpaginated. "The Race of Life" is Part Three of the work.

"^Parker's "Introduction," dated September, 1932, is, like the rest of the work, unpaginated.

^^The New Republic, 16 April 1977, pp. 32-33.

16 Stephen Black, for example, says that in "The Race of Life" "Thurber's view of modern man and woman, as he actually thinks they are, is explicit" (James Thurber: His Masquerades, p. 27). Like Black, Charles Holmes also sees "The Race of Life" as being Thurber1s fullest expression of "the relation between the sexes" and as the manifesta­ tion of "a highly Freudian view of life in which man [i.e., the male] has lost his heroic stature and is clearly incap­ able of reaching the shining goal" (The Clocks of Columbus, p. 134). More persuasively, Robert Morsberger views the work as a parody of "the stream-of-consciousness fad and the sometimes overloaded symbolic art of the 1920's" (James Thurber, p. 165), while Burton Bernstein helpfully suggests that it "is one of the world's rare examples of a successful merger of pure nonsense with impure philosophy, the Marx Brothers and Lewis Carroll notwithstanding" (Thurber, p. 204).

17 The Clocks of Columbus, p. 134.

18 See, for example, The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy (Notre Dame and London: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 31-36.

19 The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication m Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), p. 9.

20 See, for example, "Bunyan1s Pilgrim's Progress: The Doctrine of Predestination and the Shaping of the Novel" in The Implied Reader, pp. 1-28.

^"Thinking Ourselves Into Trouble," Forum, 101 (1939), 311. 37

22Ibid.

23Ibid., 310.

24Ibid., 311.

25 "Satyre III," The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967), 11. 77-79, p. 25.

2 6 "What Happened to Charles," Further Fables for Our Time (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), p. 118.

27 See, in this connection, "The Secret Life of James Thurber," wherein Thurber, nominally reviewing Salvador Dali's The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, speaks contemp­ tuous ly-of-DaTTHs ("Salvie1s") "desperate little rebellion against the clean, the conventional, and the comfortable," thereby putting as much distance as possible between Dali and himself. The Thurber Carnival (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 32. (The Thurber Carnival was originally published in 1945.) This is symptomatic of Thurber's "regular-guy" syndrome, his life-long effort, stronger by far in his earlier and later years than in the period treated here, to persuade himself that he was just one of the boys, a man among men. Other evidence of Thurber's self-deceiving Rotarian strain can be seen in his 1955 interview with George Plimpton and Max Steele where he says of the utterly life­ less The Thurber Album (1952) that it "was kind of an escape— going back to the Middle West of the last century and the beginning of this, when there wasn't this fear and hys­ teria. I wanted to write the story of some solid American characters, more or less as an example of how Americans started out and what they should go back to— to sanity and soundness and away from this jumpiness." Writers at Work: The "Paris Review" Interviews, First series, ed. Malcom Cowley (Harmondsworth, Middlesex and New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 97. McCarthyism notwithstanding, Thurber's own "jumpiness" (a favorite word of his) was not so much a function of history as it was a preeminent fact of his being, from first to last.

2 8 In "Interview with a Lemming" it is man who, accord­ ing to the lemming, is "murderous, maladjusted, maleficent, malicious and muffle-headed." My World— And Welcome To It (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969), p. 83. The collection was originally published in 1942. 38 29 Is Sex Necessary? (New York: Dell, 1964), p. 161. All subsequent references will be cited in the text.

^ The Clocks of Columbus, p. 203.

31 See, for example, Thurber: A Biography, p. 315, and The Clocks of Columbus, pp. 203-4.

32 The Male Animal: A Comedy in Three Acts (New York and Los Angeles: Samuel French, 1940, 1941, Acting Edition), p. 46. All subsequent references will be cited in the text. CHAPTER II

THE OWL IN THE ATTIC

Like much of the rest of Thurber's fiction, the eight

"Mr. and Mrs. Monroe" stories which make up the first part of The Owl in the Attic (1931) are generally assumed to be about marriage or at least about the battle of the sexes, the vexed and vexing relationship between men and women.

Better than most critics, Charles Holmes expresses what has become the critical commonplace: "In the Monroe stories

Thurber takes full possession of his basic subject— the

American marriage— and in Mr. and Mrs. Monroe he creates the archetypes of his American male and female— the inef­ fective dreamer and the coolly competent realist.This, of course, is of a piece with the notion that Thurber is a humorist who deals in "subjects" and that his dominant fic­ tional mode is realism, realism being, in one reckoning, the notion, to paraphrase H. L. Mencken on democracy, that we know or can know what reality is and that we deserve to get it good and hard. No one can deny, of course, that the battle of the sexes is a dominant theme of Thurber's fiction or marriage its major motif, the principal field of valor, as E. B. White pointed out in his Introduction to The Owl in the Attic almost fifty years ago:

39 40

Into the real quandary of marriage he read a droll sadness. Above the still cool lake of marriage he saw rising the thin white mist of Man's disparity with Woman.

What, however, is principally at issue— in the Monroe stories as elsewhere in Thurber's fiction— is not the obvious matter of man's disparity with woman, but the more basic question of the degree to which that disparity is a measure of and a metaphor for man's disparity with himself. This is not, of course, to suggest that Thurber's men and women are not

"real" men and women, but it is to suggest that if the Thur­ ber male is an "ineffective dreamer," he dreams of being a coolly competent realist"— he dreams, in short, of becoming his wife.

Or so, it would seem, were it not for the fact that the

Thurber woman's very existence is a reproach and a rebuke to the Thurber man's dream of masculine mastery. To the extent, however, that the Thurber woman is an aspect of the

Thurber man's dream self, the battle of the sexes is merely the outward and visible sign of the far more significant battle of the self. For the standards by which the Thurber man judges himself, like the corresponding achievements to which he aspires, are, in all essentials, embodied in his wife. She is at ease and at one with the world and with herself and, like the "heroine" of "The Race of Life," she is masterful and in control in ways that are as effort­ less for her as they are maddeningly elusive for him. She is thrown by nothing, able to adapt to anything, with­ out the slightest hesitation, reflection, or concern. She can achieve unconsciously what he cannot achieve with the greatest effort of will, concentration, and application.

But it is not with her that, in the Monroe stories or else­ where, we or Thurber are principally concerned. It is with him and specifically with his efforts to achieve the same kind of unself-conscious self-mastery and self-possession that come so naturally to her, for what comes naturally to her has become, for him, entirely mental and consequently, as secure, steadfast, and shatterproof as bone china in a hurricane.

Like much of the rest of Thurber's fiction having nominally to do with the battle of the sexes, the Monroe stories have really to do with Mr. Monroe’s efforts to main­ tain his composure, to keep the self-created construct of his self and his soul whole and intact. It is a battle as quietly desperate as it is inevitably losing, so inevit­ ably that in most cases the title tells the tale. In

"Tea at Mrs. Armsby's," the first story in the series, the title does not tell the tale, and it is also exceptional in that it might more appropriately be called "Mr. Monroe

Retains His Composure," for in it he manages to negotiate the submerged shoals and sandbars of a very proper Sunday afternoon tea under the growing realization that his wife is thoroughly potted and bent in a quiet and sinister way 42 on challenging his intellectual, imaginative, and emo­ tional resourcefulness. If the title of the last story in the series, "The Middle Years," is uncharacteristically unrevealing, "The 'Wooing' of Mr. Monroe" is least typical since it is told from his wife's point of view ratner than his and since it reveals him to have, at some point, sum­ moned sufficient self-mastery to have engaged in an affair.

The end result, however, is much the same as it is in the rest of the Monroe stories, since Mrs. Monroe's discussion with "the very blonde" (p. 20) Miss Lurell reduces Mr.

Monroe, his "beautiful sonnets" (p. 21) notwithstanding, to humiliating nakedness: "He's so funny that way, really, 3 I just screamed" (p. 23). In a less literal but no less effective way, the remainder of the Monroe stories— "The

Imperturbable Spirit," "Mr. Monroe Outwits a Bat," "Mr.

Monroe and the Moving Men," "The Monroes Find a Terminal,"

"Mr. Monroe Holds the Fort"— reduce Mr. Monroe to nakedness and expose his terrible vulnerability, his complete defense­ lessness .

Of these stories, the second in the series, "The

Imperturbable Spirit," is the best and almost a prototype or paradigm of the rest. In it Mr. Monroe attempts, as in a sense he always does, to cloak his nakedness in the pro­ tective, shaping embrace of an abstraction and to persuade himself that the cloak is the underlying reality, that the outer and the inner are one. And, in a sense, they are 43

one, for in a world where nothing is given, nothing a fixed

and immutable standard by which to measure the meaning of

anything else, the self, which is itself a riot of conflict­

ing and contradictory tendencies, potentialities, and needs,

as well as the starting point of all larger patterns of

order, meaning, and significance, must first itself be made

up. Consequently, Mr. Monroe makes himself up: He is

imperturbable, a word that accords nicely with the prevail­

ing myth of what a man is supposed to be and a word that is

the perfect antithesis of, and perhaps antidote for, the

underlying state of profound and perennial perturbation

which it is designed to mask and control. No wonder, then,

that "He liked that adjective, which he had been encounter­

ing in a book he was reading on God, ethics, morals, human­

ism, and so on. The word stood staunch, like a bulwark,

rumbled, like a caisson. Mr. Monroe was pleased to find

himself dealing in similes" (p. 8). And why should he not

be pleased, for Mr. Monroe has, perhaps more completely

than most of us, succeeded, at least for the time being, in making himself into a simile, and a very grand one at that,

one that sweeps nearly all the grand similes and metaphors

before it— "God, ethics, morals, humanism, and so on"—

and implicitly suggests his virtual identity with them. When the unaided self has become the arbiter of all things, the

locus of all order and meaning, its own included, all things become an aspect of the self, take on the order and meaning of the self, and when the self is imperturbable, free from— indeed incapable of— all sordid cares and doubts, all things and all distinctions between things must bow before it. In the properly constituted mind of the imperturbable spirit no distinctions are unbridgeable, no difficulties unresolvable, no obstacles insuperable. Thus Mr. Monroe comes to buy "a paper-back novel, in the original French, by Andre Maurois"

(p. 8), even though he does not read French and has no defin­ ite plan to learn French, and thus it is that even though he must look up words like "1eschatological,' 'maleficent,' and 'teleological1" (p. 9), Mr. Monroe returns again and again to his book on "God, ethics, morals, humanism, and so on," for it makes him "feel pretty much the master of his fate. Non-fiction, of a philosophical nature, always affected him that way, regardless of its content" (p. 9).

One can always, of course, supply the content oneself. We all do it all the time, much as Mr. Monroe does, when, as we are told, he "liked to brood and reflect and occasion­ ally to catch glimpses of himself in store windows, slot- machine mirrors, etc., brooding and reflecting" (p. 8).

What he sees reflected back is, naturally enough, exactly what he projects: the image of his imperturbable self, mass­ ive and solid, grappling with those issues of "God, ethics, morals, humanism, and so on"— especially "and so on"— that would turn a lesser man to jelly. 45

The way we see things, ourselves included, is not

always, needless to say, the way they are, and it is for

that reason that we can see Mr. Monroe's denouement coming.

It comes, however, not because he is far gone in delusion,

but because he has, as it were, deliberately created his

delusion; it comes, that is, because he is so self­

consciously aware that his dauntless imperturbability is

an imposture, an incantation, an attempt at self-hypnosis.

Knowing himself to be an impostor and knowing, therefore,

his existence to be a lie, an affront to humanity and to

decency, John Monroe, like Kafka's Josef K., secretly knows

himself to be guilty, guilty of anything and everything,

guilty, at a minimum, of the crime of pretending to be

someone when he is no one, nothing, guilty, at a maximum,

of all crime, since his imposture knows no limits. His

guilt thus awaits only its occasion, an occasion which

comes when his wife, just returned from Europe, informs

him that she is about to smuggle a dozen bottles of Bene­

dictine through customs: "He could see himself in court,

being flayed by a state's attorney. Mr. Monroe had a

phobia about lawbreaking, even about ordinance-breaking.

. . . (Now, gentlemen of the jury . . . ) The state's

attorney put on his nose glasses, brought out a letter and

read it in nasty, slow accents, a horrible, damning letter,

which Mr. Monroe had never seen before, but which,

fiendishly enough, was in his own handwriting. The jury stirred" (p. 11). 46

If the jury and state's attorney are imaginary, the

product of Mr. Monroe's guilty reverie, the trial in his

soul is real enough and the adjournment, when Mrs. Monroe

manages to breeze uneventfully through customs, merely

temporary, for Mr. Monroe's trial is his self, his knowl­

edge that he is guilty of a gross imposture that he is

nonetheless powerless to stop and that he must cover up,

especially from himself. Thus Mr. Monroe's life is his

trial, and it is for his life that he is on trial, the sen­

tence being not so much death as disintegration or, in

favorite Thurberian phrase, "going to pieces" (see, e.g.,

p. 10). That being the case, Mr. Monroe rebounds: "By

the time they reached their house, Mr. Monroe was his old

self, or rather his new self, again. He had even pretty

well persuaded himself that his iron-nerve had got the

Benedictine through the customs. His strange, masterful

manner came back. No sooner had he got into his slippers,

however, and reached for his book. . . . (p. 11). Just

as the book is the imperturbability book, so the "no sooner"

portends yet another episode in Mr. Monroe's unending trial,

a new test of his imperturbability, of his "self." Mrs.

Monroe, it seems, has forgotten her hatbox in which are

three bottles of the contraband Benedictine— nothing, surely,

to faze someone so imperturbable as Mr. Monroe:

In a sort of stupor he went out, hailed a cab, and climbed in. Life got you. A scheme of morals? A shield against menace? What good did 47

that do? Impertur— ha! Menace got you— no bigger than a man's hand at first, no bigger than a hatbox. . . . "Now, gentlemen of the jury . . . conspiracy . . . defraud the government . . . seditious. ..." Mr. Monroe crept whitely through the wide street entrance to the docks (p. 13).

Just as Mr. Monroe used to see his imperturbable visage reassuringly reflected back at him from windows and mirrors, so now he sees the loutish porters around the baggage plat­ form turned into prosecutors and prison guards. The panicky chase through the streets, a surreal blur of Kafka and the Keystone Kops, is, of course, not a chase at all but merely Mr. Monroe's flight from the riot of guilt, uncer­ tainty, and panic in his own brain. And so, having at last caught himself and recaptured his composure, having caught his breath and put himself back together, "That night Mr.

Monroe read to his wife from the morals, ethics, and imper­ turbability book. He read in a deep, impressive voice, and slowly, for there was a lot his wife wouldn't grasp at once" (p. 14) .

Quite so, for if Mrs. Monroe, the archetypal Thurber woman, takes things as they seem to be, Mr. Monroe, the archetypal Thurber man, is aware that the way things seem to be is the way we individually and collectively make

them seem to be, that this is a world of seeming rather than being, and he is as paralyzed in the one as she is proficient in the other. If then, at the end, Mr. Monroe

is filling up the emptiness by listening to himself much 48 as he was earlier filling in the blank by looking at him­ self, it is not so much, as Robert Morsberger asserts, because

"He represents the ultimate in pathetic impotence of person- 4 ality," as because he represents the ultimate insubstantial­ ity of personality, to say nothing of what passes for real- 5 ity. If Mr. Monroe "evokes a shudder as often as a smile," both betray the recognition that for us too the jig could be up.

Like pure reason, realism is simply fantasy which has been sanctified by convention. That is, of course, a sub­ versive notion, but then Thurber is a subversive writer, a fact which he disguises— not least of all, perhaps, from himself— through his treatment of familiar— even cozy and ingratiating— subjects: marriage, for one example; pets for another. Pets make a particularly rich subject for such treatment because we read so much into them and at­ tribute so much unverifiable significance to them, and, consequently, the relationship that we have with them con­ stitutes a kind of paradigm of the way in which we har­ monize and humanize the disparate date of reality and at­ tempt to incorporate them into our reality. In the eighteen drawings, letters, and answers which make up

"The Pet Department," the second part of The Owl in the

Attic, the world has become, more markedly even than in the Monroe stories, mind: the "mind" of the pet, the mind of the pet's owner, the mind of the unnamed and apparently 49

uncredentialed pet advisor, and, of course, the mind of

the reader who must somehow make sense of the whole thing.

However mystifying the mix may be, it is perhaps less

accurate to say, as Charles Holmes does, that "'The Pet

Department1 is Thurber's first notable exploration of the

C. world of fantasy" than it is to say that it is his first

extended examination of the efficacy of reason; and if the

result of that examination is the creation of "a strange

and surreal world where things occur and relate to one 7 another as they do m dreams," that is because reason it­

self, in the Thurberian critique, is as surreal and strange

as the Thurberian fantasy to which Holmes opposes Thurber­

ian realism.^

If, then, what is being parodied in "The Pet Depart­ ment" is not so much the pet columns that appear in news­ papers as the mind itself, the particular aspect of the mind that is not so much parodied as it is simply revealed

is that of the ubiquity, necessity, and, often, the utter

fatuity of our assumptions. To the degree that "The Pet

Department" is, as Holmes has suggested, dream-like and

surreal, it is so principally because, even in our most

rational moments, we stand on nothing solider than our

assumptions, because our existence is built on assump­

tions, because, whether we are aware of it or not, we are

often floating in mid-air, trying, as we do in dreams,

to reconcile the irreconcilable. In some instances in 50

"The Pet Department"— the case of the neurotic police dog,

for example— the irreconcilability is often deliberate and

merely verbal in nature. The police dog seems, to bring

the original diagnosis (1931) up to date, to be suffering

from what nowadays we would call an identity crisis, since,

as the letter writer explains, every night for the past

two years her father has come home from work and said to

him, "'If you're a police dog, where's your badge?,' after which he laughs (my father)" (p. 58). The advice of the presumed specialist is as unexceptionable as it is unex­

ceptional, unimaginative, and uninspired: "The constant reiteration of any piece of badinage sometimes has the same

effect on present-day neurotic dogs that it has on people.

It is dangerous and thoughtless to twit a police dog on

his powers, authority, and the like" (p. 58).

If it is dangerous to twit a police dog, it is perhaps

almost equally dangerous to suppose that the subject about which one twits him (authority, sexual prowess, intelli­ gence, manners, etc.) matters much. In any event, if the misfortune of the police dog derives from mere badinage, we get down to more serious matters with the case of the

"moose." It seems that Mrs. Oliphant Beatty's "husband paid a hundred and seventy-five dollars for this moose

to a man in Dorset, Ontario, who said he had trapped it in

the woods" (p. 71). The problem, she goes on to explain

(as if she had not already somehow penetrated to the heart 51 of the matter), is that "Something is wrong with his ant­ lers, for we have to keep twisting them back into place all the time. They're loose" (p. 71). The antlers, as the accompanying illustration of the smiling (or grimacing)

"moose" shows, are fastened to a kind of skullcap which, in turn, is strapped to the animal's head, rather in the manner of a World War One doughboy helmet. The basic prob­ lem, obviously, is that the Beattys are mired down in an untenable primary assumption, a major premise that they have not begun to question, so intent are they on dealing with the more proximate problem of the "moose's" antlers. The pet advisor, to his professional credit, knows a horse when he sees one, even a horse with antlers strapped on, and that is no doubt why he does not advise them to bolt the antlers to the animal's skull. But, understandable as his outraged professionalism is, his initial response seems curiously wide of the mark: "You people are living in a fool's paradise" (p. 71). This obviously is a case of form dictating substance (in veterinary terms, of the tail wagging the dog or the cart being put before the horse), for though the Beattys are, beyond doubt, fools, their lot can hardly, as the briefest acquaintance with the facts shows, be called paradise.

In the case of Mrs. Grace Voynton and the accompany­ ing response from the pet advisor, we see the kind of unconscious conspiracy of folly that reason often amounts 52 to and why it has come into disrepute. The problem, to be clear at the outset, concerns a horse who really is a horse and not a moose in disguise. Mrs. Voynton writes:

"How would you feel if every time you looked up from your work or anything, here was a horse peering at you from behind something? He prowls about the house at all hours of the day and night. Doesn't seem worried about anything, merely wakeful. What should I do to discourage him?"

(p. 61). The pet advisor, his keen mind aware of all the variables and his trained eye alert to all the pertinent details, notices the floral design of Mrs. Voynton's wall­ paper, rug, and pictures and, deciding that "The horse is probably sad" (p. 61), advises that she change her decorations "to something less like open meadows." Though he subsequently qualifies his advice (and to a consider­ able degree undercuts it) by noting that it might not be "a good idea to discourage a sad horse" (p. 61), the reader still feels that a major factor— perhaps even the major factor— has somehow been overlooked, even that the pet advisor has entered, if such be possible, too completely, too sympathetically into Mrs. Voynton's mental universe, that in his exemplary attention to all the details and all the variables he has somehow lost sight of the one over­ powering constant: that the horse is in the house.

With the case of Mrs. Eugenia Black's dog (p. 64), however, the diagnostician seems not only to venture beyond the area of his professional competency but actually to enter into a universe all his own. Mrs. Black wonders merely what kind of dog she has since it has only two posi­ tions, the other one being in the opposite or reverse direc­ tion from the one she has sketched. Based on the evidence of her rudimentary line drawing, the advisor suggests that what she has "is a cast-iron lawn dog" and marshals his evidence accordingly: "The expressionless eye and the rigid pose are characteristic of metal lawn animals. And that certainly is a cast-iron ear. You could, however, remove all doubt by means of a simple test with a hammer and a cold chisel, or an acetylene torch. If the animal chips, or melts, my diagnosis is correct" (p. 64). And if the animal does not chip or melt . . . ?

That, fortunately, is not a problem in the rest of the normally bloodless world of "The Pet Department," nor is it a problem with Joe Wright's fish (p. 60), which is a real fish with real ears, not a cast-iron fish with strapped-on ears. Recognizing the rarity of the phenom­ enon, Mr. Wright naturally wonders if the fish is valuable.

That, however, is too crass a concern for someone who favors the purity and clarity of science: "I find no trace in the standard fish books of any fish with ears. Very likely the ears do not belong to the fish, but to some mammal.

They look to me like a mammal's ears. It would be pretty hard to say what species of mammal, and almost impossible to determine what particular member of that species. They 54 may merely be hysterical ears, in which case they will go

away if you can get the fish's mind on something else"

(p. 60). To summarize and simplify, then, we who are

unschooled in science and unaccustomed to its rigors might

say that the fish cannot be a fish since fish do not have

ears; the ears, therefore, must a mammal's ears and the

fish a mammal, though "it would be pretty hard to say what

species of mammal"; assuming, however, the fish to be a

fish, it would be almost impossible to determine to what particular member of the unknown species of mammal the ears belonged, much less, one gathers, how the fish came to be

in possession of them. (Both of these difficulties would presumably disappear in the unlikely event that we happened to encounter a mammal with two missing ears.) Assuming,

in conclusion, the fish to be in fact a fish, the ears

"may merely be hysterical ears," a condition easily reme­ died if one simply follows the advisor's prescribed treat­ ment.

Not perhaps so easily remedied is the condition under­

lying the advisor's analyses, for if "The Pet Department" is on one level a kind of illustrated catalogue of logical errors, it is on another level an illustration not simply of the failure of logic but of the failure of mind itself.

The mind is indeed its own place, and in "The Pet Depart­ ment" we see, in slightly exaggerated form, the circular and self-confirming nature of its processes. In the end 55 we find what we are predisposed to find (hysterical ears in fish, for example). Our predispositions or assumptions inherently limit or preselect both the questions we ask and the answers we accept, and this is at least as true of science as it is of the muddier and murkier modes of intel­ lectual inquiry. Comedy— if comedy it is— on the level of

"The Pet Department" is, no more a mere "game"— something 9 we need not "pay attention" to— than Gulliver's Travels is a mere game. Nor is it something that we can view "with the detachment of a biologist studying amoebae,since we are both the biologist and the amoebae. "The Pet Depart­ ment" may not be grim, but it is nonetheless serious.

If, as we have seen in "The Pet Department," Thurber found in the world of animals an ironic metaphor for our predicament, he found, as we shall see in his "Ladies' and

Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage," an equally inexhaustible vein of irony in the world of language, a world, in Thurber's view, almost as autonomous and inde­ pendent of us as that of animals. His vision of both reached their finest expression in "A New Natural His­ tory,"'1'^ a work, fittingly enough, beyond words, a work in which words have become things and things words, and our fondest dream, the dream of unity, of perfect con­ gruence between the inner and the outer has been realized, if only in the uncertain lines of a man for whom the lights were going out. 56

If the "Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern Eng­

lish Usage," a much earlier work, is a good deal more sub­ versive than sublime, it nonetheless serves a constructive purpose since, as Richard Tobias has put it, it "questions 12 our basic assumptions about life." More, perhaps, to the point, it questions our assumption that language, the symbolic representation of thought, is a reliable instru­ ment for the apprehension and expression of reality rather than an independent reality all its own with, as it were, a will of its own and a mind of its own. This is not, of course, to suggest that the "Guide" is not, as Charles

Holmes indicates, a parody of“H. W. Fowler's Dictionary of

Modern English Usage with its view of usage as "a branch 13 of manners." Thurber himself acknowledges that the "Guide" was "inspired" by Fowler (p. 73), and the results of that initial inspiration are evident in such things as the insistence of Thurber's grammarian that the expression,

"'Whom are you, anyways?' . . . is, of course, strictly speaking, correct— and yet how formal, how stilted!"

(p. 75). Elements of social parody are equally evident in the wilder, more improbable, and distinctly unstuffy scenes from formal dinner parties that appear, to illus­ trated accompaniment, in, for example, the chapter on

"The Split Infinitive": "It is all but impossible to sit quietly by when someone is throwing salad plates" (p. 88).

Yet the point of such chaos— and Thurber's "Guide" is 57

nothing if not chaotic, even trying to the mind and taxing

to the patience— is that we do not so much control language

as it controls us. The question then becomes not so much whether the "Guide" is a parody of Fowler as whether Fowler, with his assumption that we can be in command of language and the associated linguistic facilities of the mind, is a parody of us. The question, in short, is whom is using whom, anyways?

The chapter on "The Split Infinitive" may shed some light on the matter, for it begins with the writer fully in command: "Vford has somehow got around that a split infin­ itive is always wrong" (p. 84). With the next sentence, however, things begin to get out of hand: "This is of a piece with the sentimental and outworn notion that it is always wrong to strike a lady." With that he is off and running, and there is nothing we can do but ride it out, since we obviously cannot outlaw analogies, the funda­ mental building-blocks of the mind without which we could learn nothing and know nothing. Analogies, metaphors, digressions, diverging and converging streams of con­ sciousness, call them what we will, will have their way with us, and thus we ride the rapids of the grammarian's thought, with the previously noted salad plates flying through the air to accompanying "cries of 'Whammy!' and

'Whoop!'" Several pages later we mercifully run aground with someone "caught over the eye by a badly aimed plate and rendered unconscious" (p. 87), at which point the

thinker can come to his senses or return to his thought

and proceed with Mr. Fowler on the subject of the split

infinitive. A sentence later, however, the thinker inter­

jects, half-apologetically and half-defensively: "The fact

that there was no transition at all between the preceding

paragraph and this one does not mean that I did not try,

in several different ways, to get back to the split infin­

itive logically" (p. 87). To make his point more clearly,

the thinker begins to illustrate it by means of an analogy

to a bridge hand, but, recognizing that he is in imminent peril, he pulls up short: "To say more would only make it more difficult than it is now, if possible, to get back to

Mr. Fowler" (p. 87). This, of course, is the syntactical

equivalent of the familiar geographical joke, the last line of which runs, "You can't get there from here."

But the analogy, to enter upon treacherous terrain,

is perhaps apt, for Thurber1s point about the mind, the

seat of, among others, the linguistic and rational facul­

ties, is similar to the joke's: you can't get anywhere

from in there. For consciousness, as we have seen in the

long digression in the chapter on the split infinitive,

is not so much a reflection of reality as a reality unto

itself, a reality that is merely internal and, to say the least, at variance with the reality that is external to it. The order, then, that we impose on it— as, for 59 example, when we think we are thinking— is, leaving aside

divine inspiration and the promptings of the muses, a

product of the same phenomenon and brings us not, as we

fancy, closer to reality but at a double remove from it.

Thus thought, in the Thurberian reckoning, is not so much

a road-map by which we track the known and chart the ter­

rain of the unknown as it, coupled with its vehicle, lan­

guage, is a roller-coaster ride through the mind that

brings us back to where we started from. The question posed

by the "Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English

Usage" is not, then, so much whom is using whom as it is

do we think or are we thought?

If that is a question perhaps best left to epistemolo-

gists and theologians, the fact remains that Thurber's

"Guide" serves primarily to point out how hopelessly lost

we are and to lead us to the realization that thought and

its handmaiden, language, are not so much an illumination

of reality or an expression of it as they are an inde­

pendent reality that in turn determines our reality, as we

see, for example, in the chapter on "Exclamation Points

and Colons." It is evident, of course, from the outset

that there is no necessary connection between exclamation marks and colons and that only someone giddy with reason would set about to write a chapter in which the two are

yoked together, as the writer of the chapter must inevit­

ably discover. Thus, after a page or so of "don'ts" 60

and only a few digressions concerning the uses and mis­

uses of the exclamation mark, he arrives at the moment of

truth, the transition, and, finding himself forced to rely

on "That brings us to the colon" (it does not, of course,

bring us to the colon or anywhere near it), he confesses,

"or, if it doesn't, we'll drag in the colon" (p. 103).

So much, a lesser mind might say, for reason, but the writer is made of sterner stuff and the Theoretical Spirit

is upon him: "It is my contention," he continues defiantly,

"that a colon could almost always be used in place of an exclamation point" (p. 103). Determined to brazen it out,

the writer's "could," as is the way with theories and as

the writer discovers too late, inexorably takes on the

force of "should," a potentially disastrous turn in matters of an "amatory nature":

Take the sentence "You are wonderful!" That's trite, and it's made triter by the exclamation point, but if one writes it thus: "You: .are wonderful," it's certainly not trite and it has a richness that the other hadn't or hasn't— "hadn't" is better, I guess. Nothing so closely resembles the catch in the voice of the lover as that very colon. In­ stead of shouting the word "wonderful," as the exclamation point does, it forces a choking pause before that word, thus giving an effect of tense, nervous endearment, which is certainly what the writer is after. Of course whether he should be after that effect, no matter how the sentence is punctuated, is a separate problem. Sentences of the kind, especially when written by a gentleman to a lady, are never altogether safe. They are almost sure to lead to some further encomium, to some definitely compromising confession. If the gentleman then marries someone else, the lady may sue. Even if he marries someone else and she doesn't sue, he is likely to worry and fret, be­ lieving that she will, and the effect on his 61

general health will be about the same as if she did (p. 104).

Some, of course, would argue that the gentleman could have resolved the whole problem by simply marrying the lady, a resolution fraught with even more disastrous potential since he obviously did not find her sufficiently ":wonder- ful" to marry in the first place. In any event, it is to just such ends that all attempts to impose such seemingly small distinctions as that between the exclamation point and the colon must lead. Since all reported efforts in the

"Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide" to exercise rational con­ trol over our thoughts or the expression of our thoughts lead inevitably to disaster in one form or another and since all efforts to impose order only compound the orig­ inal chaos, the best course for the gentleman and the gram­ marian alike would clearly have been to forget the whole thing— exclamation marks, colons, women, meaning, inten­ tion, the works. Some, of course, learn the lesson too late, like the eminent grammarian, Dr. Amos Crawley, M.A.,

LL.D., "who, in his invaluable but, alas, uncompleted monograph,'Clarified Expression,' unaccountably got involved, while his wife and servants were away and he was alone in the house, in a construction beginning:

'Whether or not "whether or no" is ever preferable to

"whether or not" depends on whether or not . . .' at which point he was stricken" (pp. 94-95). "The best 62

advice," says the present grammarian, "is make up your mind

and avoid doubt-clauses" (p. 95).

In short, then, forget all vain notions of meaning or

intention. Let the rules rule; that, after all, is what

they are for. Thus, when one has confronted oneself with

an intentional construction such as "Our object is to fur­

ther cement trade relations" (p. 87), he ought not to try

to recast the sentence in such a way as to weasel out of

the split infinitive, which can only lead to more grief and

confusion (placing the "further" before "to cement" might

give it "the weight of 'moreover' rather than of 'increas­

ingly'", p. 89); one ought rather to bow before the rule

forbidding split infinitives, to forget what one vainly meant to say, and to say instead, "Our object is to let

trade relations ride" (p. 89), an elegantly simple and

inviting solution certainly, were it not somehow an affront to one's sense of mastery, to say nothing, of course, of trade relations.

But one thing at a time. Better by far to forget one's pride and surrender to meaninglessness than to in­

sist on meaning and invite madness, as the poor chap who called with his wife on some friends found out. Find­

ing no one at home, he decided to leave a note of regret and soon became caught up in the perfect infinitive after

the past conditional: "We would have liked to have found you in" Cp- 107) . A wiser man would, needless to say, 63

have dropped the matter there, knowing that to push it any

further, to poke and probe around, would inevitably be to

surrender whatever illusion of autonomy or control he had

left. Our man, however, sensing that something is amiss

and thinking it to be solvable, pushes on; daring the

furies and deciding finally on a couple of alternatives,

takes to mumbling them to himself, first one and then the other— '' We would have liked to have found you in," "We would have liked to find you in." After he does this several times, both expressions begin to sound mean­ ingless. They don't make any sense at all, let alone make precise sense. His mental feeling is analogous to the terror that strikes into children's minds when they get to repeat­ ing some common word, like "saucer," over and over again, until it sounds idiotic and legend­ ary (p. 108) .

With us, as with children, that is the beginning of the end,

or rather the beginning and the end, for words, which are

symbols only, inherently place us at one remove not only

from the reality they ostensibly represent but also from our

fancied intentions of meaning, as the present wretch dis­

covers to his dismay. In syntactical combinations, however, words set in motion trains of symbolic associations and

connections which careej: and collide crazily through the

synapses. The rules of grammar and syntax, then, only give

us the frail illusion that we, vain switchmen, are in con­

trol in the roundhouse of the mind. If that is, from an

egocentric point of view, a discovery best left 64 undiscovered, it is also the discovery of the "Ladies' and

Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage." 65

NOTES

^The Clocks of Columbus, p. 125.

2 The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities (New York: Universal Library, Grosset and Dunlap, 1931), p. xv; all subsequent references here are to the Perennial Library edition (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, and London: Harper and Row, 1965) and are noted in the text. 3 Even the "'Wooing'" of the title of the story refers less to Mr. Monroe's amatory successes than to his habit of yelling "'Woo! Woo!' when things go wrong.with machinery" (p. 21), as they do, roaringly, in the "shower" episode recounted by Mrs. Monroe. 4 James Thurber, p. 67.

^Ibid.

/T The Clocks of Columbus, p. 127.

^Ibid.

^Ibid. g "The wit in the 'Pet Department' is delightful but no one needs to pay attention; the game of comedy is played because it is an obvious game and we can enjoy it." Rich­ ard C. Tobias, The Art of James Thurber (Athens, Ohio: Ohio Univ. Press, 1969), p. 36.

■^Ibid. , p . 35 .

~^The Beast in Me and Other Animals: A Collection of Pieces and Drawings About Human Beings and Less Alarming Creatures (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), pp. 151-168; The Beast in Me was originally published in 1948.

12 The Art of James Thurber, p. 36. 13 The Clocks of Columbus, p. 128. CHAPTER III

MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES

If there are any fears or doubts concerning Thurber's reputation, they ought to be dispelled by My Life and Hard

Times, for it is, as Malcolm Cowley has succinctly put it,

"permanent writing."^ Of all Thurber1s books, it was 2 Charles Holmes's favorite, and John K. Hutchens has, with­ out undue hyperbole, called it "a classic— which is to say, 3 a work that defies time and may even be enriched by it."

Burton Bernstein has acknowledged Thurber's My Life and

Hard Times to be "the most celebrated work of his career" and "also his best work,"4 though Bernstein's praise is characteristically tempered— some might say dulled or blunted— by his apparently omniscient observation that the book was Thurber1s "way of exorcising the devils of his family and his Columbus childhood" and was, consequently,

"another cheap psychoanalysis, more rewarding for the 5 readers than for the author." However that may be, indiv­ idual selections from My Life and Hard Times have received the silent praise of being regularly anthologized,

"University Days" appearing in, say, every third English reader for college freshmen and either "The Night the Bed

66 Fell" or "The Night the Ghost Got In" in perhaps every other high school reader.

Like most of the work of Thurber's early maturity,

My Life and Hard Times is a collection of pieces that orig­ inally appeared in The New Yorker, in this case from

July 8, 1933 to September 30, 1933.^ Unlike most of his collections, however, My Life and Hard Times has at least the appearance of some kind of unity, with Bernstein say­ ing that "never again was there a single series on one 7 theme so immaculate." Holmes sees the collection as "the g definitive image of Thurber's special comic world," while Robert Morsberger views it as "a study in anticlimax, a series of variations on the theme of much ado about 9 nothing." Stephen Black, on the other hand, seems to sug­ gest that its value, and presumably the source of its unity, is educational or therapeutic, "An Education for Hard Times" by means of which Thurber prepared himself "more effectively to cope with life after the war and the depression." It is by no means clear, however, whether that preparation consisted in the writing of the work or in, as it were, the living of it some fifteen to twenty-five years earlier, since, in Black's use of the term, the narrator simultan­ eously includes both the articulating voice of the series and its much younger hero, a phenomenon which leads to constructions like, "The narrator has just got out of the 12 bathtub when. ..." Perhaps Morsberger defines the 68 work, at least in a general way, as well as it can be de­ fined by calling it Thurber1s "burlesque autobiography,"^ though it is not plain whether, as Morsberger seems to mean, it is Thurber's biography that is being burlesqued or, more persuasively, the notion of autobiography itself that is in some manner being burlesqued. Whatever Mors- berger's exact meaning, My Life and Hard Times seems to be 14 not so much "a mock-heroic" treatment of Thurber's early 15 life and "family adventures" as it is more nearly a mockery of the grander pretensions of autobiography itself, for if the book lacks any overall progression, chronolog­ ical or thematic, it also lacks a clearly defined central figure or hero whose progress we can chart and applaud.

The basic materials of the book are, of course, auto­ biographical in the sense that the central characters and incidents are, as Thurber's older brother William has 1 attested, part of the author's past, but the treatment is not, since the telling is at least as important as the teller, since, indeed, the teller is the telling.

At the outset, of course, Thurber pretends otherwise, for it is his position, initially at least, that he exists, and, in his favor, it must be said that the notion of auto­ biography does presuppose the existence of an author. Yet the authorial pretense is soon betrayed by the authorial practice since he begins by alluding to Benvenuto Cel­ lini's advice "that a man should be at least forty years 69

old before he undertakes so fine an enterprise as that of

setting down the story of his life" and that he also 17 "should have accomplished something of excellence." The pretension, then, must bow before the awful facts, for not

only has the author not attained the age of forty, he has

"accomplished nothing of excellence except a remarkable and, to some of my friends, unaccountable expertness in hitting empty ginger ale bottles with small rocks at a distance of thirty paces (p. 9). Since, then, he cannot write his autobiography, he can hardly be said to have existed, and what follows in Thurber's remarkable "Preface to a Life," his introduction to My Life and Hard Times, is an autobiographical account in which the nominal subject of the autobiography virtually disappears or, more accur­ ately, in which he appears only through his voice and is otherwise absorbed into the species of which he is a member, the species of humorists. As a distinct and separable individual, as anything other than a voice, he ceases to exist, which may lead some to wonder whether the title, "Preface to a Life," refers to the writing of it or to the living of it— assuming, of course, that at a remove of twenty years, more or less, the living and the writing, the remembrance and the reconstruction, are distinguishable. If they are distinguishable, the distinction seems almost completely to be lost, which may explain why the literary humorist, the memoirist 70

lives in dread of losing his way to the publish­ ing house and wandering down to the Bowery or the Battery, there to disappear like Ambrose Bierce. He has sometimes also the kindred dread of turning a sudden corner and meeting himself sauntering along in the opposite direction. I have known writers at this dangerous and tricky age to phone their homes from their offices, or their offices from their homes, ask for them­ selves in a low tone, and then, having fortunate­ ly discovered that they were "out," to collapse in hard-breathing relief (p. 10).

Obviously the problems of writing an autobiography are

enormously compounded for the humorist— "a loose-fitting

and ugly word" (p. 11)— who must continually verify his own

existence, whose self is itself in question, and whose

writing cannot therefore be "a joyous form of self-

expression but the manifestation of a twitchiness at once

cosmic and mundane" (p. 10). Such a person cannot heed

Ford Maddox Ford's dictum concerning "the sole reason for writing one's memoirs: namely, to paint a picture of one's

time" (p. 12), since he cannot be certain of his own per­

sonal time, let alone "Walter Lippmann's time, or Stuart

Chase's time, or Professor Einstein's time" (p. 12). He

has difficulty enough persuading himself that he exists

and, that temporarily accomplished, making sense of that

existence. Thus,

He talks largely about small matters and smally about great affairs. His ears are shut to the ominous rumblings of the dynasties of the world moving toward a cloudier chaos than ever before, but he hears with acute perception the start­ ling sounds that rabbits make twisting in the bushes along a country road at night and a cold 71

chill comes upon him when the comic supplement of a Sunday newspaper blows unexpectedly out of an areaway and envelopes his knees. He can sleep while the commonwealth crumbles but a strange sound in the pantry at three in the morning will strike terror into his stomach. He is not afraid, or much aware, of the menaces of empire but he keeps looking behind him as he walks along darkening streets out of the fear that he is being followed by little men padding along in single file, about a foot and a half high, large-eyed, and whiskered . (p. 11).

Such sounds and sensations are startling, of course, not simply because they may signal danger but because they jar us into a sudden awareness of external reality and make us aware that we exist, just as the specter of little whiskered men following us is a measure of how completely we are absorbed in our own private reality and of how dif­ ficult— perhaps even impossible— it is to distinguish be­ tween fact and fantasy, self and non-self. For the two have much the same ontological status, the perceived being a function of the perceiver. Given the awareness of such circumstances writing one's autobiography begins to seem even less possible than it was for poor Tristram. If, then, that is the problem that is suggested in the "Preface to a

Life," the solution is equally suggested in "A Note at the

End," the two parts of My Life and Hard Times which, in

Richard Tobias's words, "set the comic tone and give the 18 book its unity." The solution, more easily realized in fiction than in fact, is essentially the same one that many of Thurber's heroes— Mr. Monroe and Walter Mitty, for example— have arrived at long before we meet them: one simply makes one's life and one's self up. One simply seeks, rather like poor Tristram, to combine the internal with the external reality, to turn one's self simultaneously into the author of and chief character— hero would not be too strong a word— in one's life, and, as much as possible, either to ignore or to transform whatever does not fit into one's design. That is largely what Thurber does in My Life and

Hard Times, and that is why in "A Note at the End" we find the Thurber persona weary of trying to come to grips with reality, weary of "talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings," weary of "the painstaking examination of distress and the care­ ful ordering of events so necessary to a calm and balanced exposition" (p. 112), and dreaming of "spending the rest of my days wandering aimlessly around the South Seas, like a character out of Conrad, silent and inscrutable" (p. 113).

Unfortunately, life, of course, presents us with certain obstacles, often of a distressingly trivial nature, that are beyond our authorial control, like, for example, "the necessity for frequent visits to my oculist and dentist:"

You can't be running back from Singapore every few months to get your lenses changed and still retain the proper mood for wandering. Further­ more, my horn-rimmed glasses and my Ohio accent betray me, even when I sit on the terraces of little tropical cafes, wearing a pith helmet, staring straight ahead, and twitching a muscle in my jaw. I found this out when I tried wandering around the West Indies one summer. 73

Instead of being followed by the whispers of men and the glances of women, I was followed by bead salesmen and native women with post­ cards. Nor did any dark girl, looking at all like Tondelayo in "White Cargo," come forward and offer to go to pieces with me. They tried to sell me baskets (pp. 113-14).

Better then not to try to live out one's fantasies but

instead to live in and through one's fantasies. Thus, if

"Nobody from Columbus has ever made a first rate wanderer

in the Conradean tradition," the best of them having been

only "fairly good at disappearing for a few days to turn up in a hotel in Louisville with a bad headache and no

recollection of how they got there" (p. 114), that is not to

say that someone from Columbus is prevented from living through his dreams or from transforming his dreams into the reality of art. And that, as much as anything, is what

Thurber does in and through My Life and Hard Times, a work which is not so much his Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man as it is his Portrait of the Artist as Artist and

Dreamer, a work which shows us not so much reality as the creation of reality,.the two being, in the Thurberian analysis, much the same thing.

If, then, Thurber's "Preface to a Life" shows us some­ thing of the undifferentiated chaos of the humorist's relationship to reality and of his inner self or inner life, the nine chapters which make up the body of My Life and

Hard Times can perhaps most profitably be viewed as an illustration of the way in which that chaos is transformed 74

into the reality of art and as a series of examples in sup­

port of Thurber's definition of humor as, following Words- 19 worth, "emotional chaos recollected m tranquillity,"

which is to say chaos collected, chaos shaped, chaos con­

trolled, chaos contained. And nothing in My Life and Hard

Times is more noticeable, more- transparent, .than the way the

individual selections are shaped, set up, stitched together, and controlled. It is, in fact, the shaping fully as much

as the ostensible subject which unifies the book, for the

subject, like the shaper, is finally not so much the life of James Thurber as it is the mind of James Thurber. At bottom, there are two general categories of recollections

in My Life and Hard Times. Both are, however rooted in fact, equally fabrications or fictions, works of imagina­ tive selection and reconstruction, and both have to do, in one way or another and to one degree or another, with the failure of mind. In one general group, then, are those accounts which center around an event that did not, in fact, happen: "The Night the Bed Fell," "The Day the Dam

Broke," "The Night the Ghost Got In." In the other group are those recollections concerning dissimilar or at least not necessarily related events which are made to appear as if they were necessarily related: "The Car We Had to Push,"

"More Alarms at Night," "A Sequence of Servants," "The Dog

That Bit People," "University Days," "Draft Board Nights."

In the first group the action is concentrated and sharply 75 focused; in the second it is diffuse, more nearly panor­ amic. In both, however, the action lies in the ordering, in the way disparate elements are brought together: in the first, it is the setting up; in the second, the stitching together. Similarly, in the first it is the destruction of created order; in the second, the creation of decon­ structed order.

In either case, if the ordering, reconstruction, selection, shaping of the individual selections in My Life and Hard Times is obviously Thurber's, it is the burden of the book to show us, indeed to point up, much the same ordering, selection, and construction on the part of his

"characters" as they too attempt to interpret, make sense of, and reconcile experience. In that respect, form and matter are, if not precisely mirror images of each other, at least complementary aspects of the same thing, and since

Thurber's characters are, to say the least, rather limited in the variety and flexibility of their interpretations, the governing vision of the book as a whole is of the world as a lunatic asylum with all of the inmates locked more or less permanently in the darkened cells of their individual minds and forever cut off from contact with objective reality, except for those rare instances in which their individual lunacies coalesce in some spectacular riot of mutual misinterpretation, the most spectacular, of course, being that in the mass hysteria of "The Day the 76

Dam Broke."

In its most pristine and elemental form Thurber's vision of the world is perhaps most clearly revealed in such diffuse accounts as "A Sequence of Servants,11 a selection which concerns ten or twelve of the more memor­ able servants from among the approximately one hundred and sixty-two hired by his mother (see p. 68). In Thurber's depiction the servants whose peculiarities he recounts are not so much persons as they are humors, individuals whose behavior is the result of some ruling passion or dread or, more disturbing, whose behavior seems to be completely self-derived, spontaneously generated, without relevance to anything other than itself. Dora Gedd's is a relative­ ly mild instance in point. She was "a quiet mousey girl of thirty-two" who one evening "dressed up in a lavender evening gown," put on "a mass of jewelry," and proceeded to shoot at her suitor, "a morose garage man," after which she "kept shouting something from Shakespeare" (p. 68) .

When the police arrived, she "was shooting out the Wels- bach gas mantles in the living room" (p. 69). Unlike Miss

Gedd's single erratic episode, Mrs. Robertson's behavior was, we are told, rather more consistently unnerving, if less elaborate. She would simply shout, appropos of nothing in particular, "Hahk!"

We would all hark; there was never anything to be heard. Neither, when she shouted "Look yondah!" and pointed a trembling hand at a 77

window, was there ever anything to be seen. Father protested time and again that he couldn't stand Mrs. Robertson around, but mother always refused to let her go. It seems that she was a jewel. Once she walked, unbid­ den, a dishpan full of wrung-out clothes under her arm, into father's study, where he was en­ grossed in some figures. Father looked up. She regarded him for a moment in silence. Then— . "Look out!" she said, and withdrew (p. 74).

Like the servants who were compulsive, those who were merely obsessive differed in the degree of danger they posed to the family, Juanerrma Kramer and Vashti being among the more innocuous. Juanemma, sister to Juanita, Juanhelen, and

Juangrace, was a danger principally to herself, for she simply "lived in constant dread of being hypnotized" (p. 69) and finally had to be let go when "It got so finally that any buzzing or whirring sound or any flashing object would put Juanemma under" (p. 71). The threat posed by

Vashti, who was convinced that her stepfather had married her mother only to be near herself, proved finally to be non-existent when her stepfather likewise proved to be non-existent, which, of course, only proved to her that she had at last vanquished him (see pp. 72-73). If the threat posed to Mr. Thurber by Edda Millmoss, who was persuaded that he had "done her out of her rights to the land on which Trinity Church in New York stands" (p. 76), was perhaps legal in nature, that posed by Mrs. Doody was more nearly lethal. Convinced that Mr. Thurber was the

Antichrist and prepared to act upon her conviction with 78

a bread knife, she had to be disabused of the notion by

means of the forcible administration of "a piece of

Libby's cut-glass" (p. 73).

In "The Dog That Bit People" it is not so much Muggs,

the Airedale, who proves to be a humor— though he is that,

and a foul, unaccountable, and altogether "choleric" ? ft (p. 78) o n e — it is the author's mother. As the more

rational of the two, it was her mission to divine those

reasons which would justify Muggs's biting people through­

out his eleven-year life or, reason failing, to fall back

upon her major premise that Muggs was not by nature malic­

ious. Thus, "He was always sorry, she said, after he bit

someone, but we could not understand how she figured this out. He didn't act sorry" (p. 79). In any event, "he never bit anyone more than once at a time. Mother always mentioned that as an argument in his favor; she said he had a quick temper but that he didn't hold a grudge. She was forever defending him. I think she liked him because he wasn't well. 'He's not strong,' she would say, pity­

ingly, but that was inaccurate; he may not have been well but he was terribly strong" (p. 80). On most occasions, however, Mrs. Thurber did not, in her son's recollection, have to fall back on such all-purpose defenses. When, for example, Muggs bit a congressman who had called to see her husband on some vital matter of business, she, hav­ ing discovered that the congressman "was Saturn with the 79

moon in Virgo" (p. 79), allowed that she "wouldn't be as­

sociated with such a man" and explained that "Muggs could

read him like a book" (p. 80). As might be expected,

corroboration for her pet theory seemed to come from all

quarters. Thus, the morning after hearing "a woman mental

healer" lecture on the subject of "Harmonious Vibrations,"

she attempted to heal the wounds of the freshly bitten ice­ man with the explanation that "If you didn't think he would bite you, he wouldn't" (p. 82).

Often, of course, people were deceived by the unre­

liable evidence of their senses and were merely under the

impression that Muggs had bitten them. Such was the case with the previously bitten Mrs. Detweiler who, while sit­ ting on the Thurber's davenport and hearing "a great growl­

ing and scratching of claws," was suddenly under the im­ pressions that she has been bitten again: "Mother examined the bite and put arnica on it and told Mrs. Detweiler that

it was only a bruise. 'He just bumped you,' she said"

(p. 83). Even when Muggs had, beyond doubt, bitten people, as, she confessed to the police, he had, beyond doubt, bitten Mrs. Rufus Sturtevant and Lieutenant-Governor Malloy,

"it hadn't been Muggs' fault but the fault of the people who were bitten. 'When he starts for them, they scream,1

she explained, 'and that excites him'" (p. 83).

Mrs. Thurber (or "Mother," as she is called throughout

My Life and Hard Times) is, then, like the servants and 80

indeed like Muggs himself, an eccentric who, like the auth­ or, views reality with extreme partiality, interpreting

the phenomena of experience according to her own lights and acting upon those interpretations. In that respect, she differs little from the other "characters" in the book, which has at bottom to do with the problem of interpreta­ tion and is an interpretation of interpretations— a highly selective and hence inventive accounting of experience, with the sense-making of the author both mirroring and measuring the sense-making of his characters. Thus in an account like "University Days," for example, we see the famous botany professor whose vision of the world has shrunk to what can be seen (by him at least) through a microscope: "'We are not concerned with beauty in this course,1 he would say. 'We are concerned solely with what 21 I may call the mechanics of flars ' " (p. 89). What the young Thurber ultimately sees through the microscope is, of course, his own eye (p. 90), an image that might serve as the governing metaphor for his later predicament in 22 My Life and Hard Times. Like the militant botany profes­ sor, the martinet, General Littlefield, commandant oE the cadet corps at the University, suffers— and causes others to suffer— from his somewhat restricted view of the military arts, a view that comes down to military drill, which so far as he is concerned, is the measure of all things, a view manifestly not shared by the narrator: 81

"It was good training for the kind of warfare that was

waged at Shiloh but it had no connection with what was

going on in Europe. Some people used to think there was

German money behind it, but they didn1t dare say so or

they would have been thrown in jail as German spies. It

was a period of muddy thought and marked, I believe, the

decline of higher education in the Middle West" (p. 96).

While the author's view of his own higher education

is, of course, more flexible and expansive than the private

visions of the botany professor and General Littlefield,

it is no less selective, since it obviously excludes vast­

ly more than it includes. For reasons known only to him­

self, it includes and connects the botany and military

drill episodes with accounts of Bolenciewcz's difficulties with economics ("while he was not dumber than an ox he was

not any smarter" [p. 90]), the author's embarrassments

in gymnasium, and the journalistic flair of an agricultural

student named Haskins, who, in his lead sentence, asks,

"Who has noticed the sores on the tops of the horses in the

animal husbandry building?" (p. 96). Nothing, of course,

connects these otherwise unrelated things except for the mind and the articulating voice of the author himself,

and it is in the embodied mind of the author himself—

and nowhere else, except in the responding mind of the

reader— that the action of My Life and Hard Times takes

place. This can, perhaps, be seen most clearly in accounts like "The Car We Had to Push" and "Draft Board Nights," works which, unlike "University Days," "The Dog That Bit

People," and "A Sequence of Servants," deal at best only sporadically with the subjects announced in their titles.

To much the same extent as in those selections, the nominal hero of the nominal autobiography is not so much the sub­ ject of "The Car We Had to Push" and "Draft Board Nights" as his accounting or recounting is itself the subject, his characters being, for the most part, little more than per­ sonifications of one governing idee fixe or another around which they seek to orient themselves and order their exper­ ience. Thus "The Car We Had to Push" has very little to do with a car and a great deal to do with misinterpreta­ tion, misunderstanding, and the inability of persons whose mental universes were shaped in a non-mechanical age to adjust to the non-animistic age of the machine and to reconcile the new phenomena of the one with preconceptions formed in the other. As a result, they live in fear: the fear of the "Get-Ready Man" that the world is coming to an end (pp. 29-30), Father's fear that "the car might explode"

(pp. 30-31), Mother's multiple fears that driving the car without gasoline "fried the valves, or something," that

"the Victrola," animated by God knows what, "might blow up"

(p. 31), and that unspeakable catastrophe was certain to 83 follow if the telephone was not taken off the hook during electrical storms, an apprehension that she seems to have inherited from her mother, who was certain that elec­ tricity "leaked . . . out of empty sockets" (p. 33).

In both "The Car We Had to Push" and "Draft Board

Nights," however, as throughout much of My Life and Hard

Times, it is Grandfather who is the central figure because of the extremity of his aberrations and because his sudden fits of lucidity cast the prevailing madness into sharp and unexpected relief. Thus, at the end of "The Car We

Had to Push," when the ill-parked Reo has finally fallen victim to a streetcar, Grandfather, for whom time was a jumble ("automobiles and the like he never remembered hav­ ing seen" [p. 34]), gathers from the weeping and general consternation that someone has died. Persisting in his delusion and refusing to believe that the automobile has been smashed, he is finally told by his humoring family that his brother, Zenas, has died. (Zenas, in fact, had died in 1866, a victim of the chestnut blight: "It was the only case in history where a tree doctor had to be called in to spray a person" [p. 34]). After a week or so in which the family "strove mightily to divert him" and in which he swore "that it was a sin and a shame and a disgrace on the family to put off the funeral any longer" (p. 34),

"it became increasingly awkward to go on living in the same house with him as if nothing had happened. He would 84 go into towering rages in which he threatened to write to

the Board of Health unless the funeral were held at once" (pp. 34-36). Trapped by their own good intentions, the family persuades a friend to impersonate Zenas "in order to set grandfather's mind at rest" (p. 36):

The imposter looked fine and impressive in side­ burns and a high beaver hat, and not unlike the daguerreotypes of Zenas in our album. I shall never forget the night, just after dinner, when this Zenas walked into the living-room. Grand­ father was stomping up and down, tall, hawk- nosed, round-oathed. The newcomer held out both his hands. "Clem!" he cried to grandfather. Grandfather turned slowly, looked at the intru­ der, and snorted. "Who air you?" he demanded in his deep, resonant voice. "I'm Zenas!" cried Martin. "Your brother Zenas, fit as a fiddle and sound as a dollar!" "Zenas, my foot'" said grandfather. "Zenas died of the chestnut blight in '66!" (p. 36).

If "Draft Board Nights" contains no similar or other­ wise striking grandfatherly epiphanies, it nonetheless deals more fully and persuasively with him than with the ostensible author/subject, and it does so from its mar­ velously balanced and contrived first sentences: "I left the University in June, 1918, but I couldn't get into the army on account of my sight, just as grandfather couldn't get in on account of his age" (p. 100). From that begin­ ning we are led with all the inevitability of masterful artifice to a consideration of the family's fear that

Grandfather might go to Lancaster to talk over his problem with his old friend "'Cump'— that is, General William

Tecumseh Sherman" (p. 101) and, worse yet, that he might 85

try to get there by driving Grandmother1s electric runa­ bout. That this and all that follows flow as naturally as a river from Thurber's first sentence is testimony to his remarkable artistry, to his ability to create the appear­

ance of sequential reality in a way that comments signifi­ cantly on the way that we conspire to create or at least to approximate it. What follows is, of course, an account, far-removed from the draft board, of Grandfather's attempts to master the electric, to master it, as it were, by anal­ ogy: "A famous old horseman, he approached it as he might have approached a wild colt. His brow would darken and he would begin to curse. He always leaped into it quickly, as if it might pull out from under him if he didn't get into the seat fast enough. The first few times he tried to run the electric, he went swiftly around in a small circle, drove over the curb, across the sidewalk, and up onto the lawn" (p. 102). When "Pulling too savagely on the guiding- bar— to teach the electric a lesson— " only took him, in a literal demonstration of circular logic, around in a circle yet once more, Grandfather pulled still more savagely:

"He had the notion that if you didn't hold her, she would throw you" (p. 102) . All attempts "to explain the differ­ ences between driving a horse and carriage and driving an electric" falling on deaf ears, Grandfather remained con­ vinced that the car was simply willful, "that when he took the driver's seat the machine flattened its ears on him, so to speak" (p. 102), and that it was necessary "to break

the car's spirit" (p. 104). Similarly, in the remaining,

and perhaps less interesting, half of "Draft Board Nights"

it is the draft board which is, with seeming mindlessness,

bent upon breaking the fictionalized Thurber's spirit by

calling him up "almost every week" (p. 104) and by reject­

ing him almost every week. It is that vision of institu­

tionalized inflexibility, that view of rigid, almost mechan

ical adherence to system— whether, in fact, institutional or individual— and the consequent imperviousness to new experience and inability to assimilate it appropriately,

that, as much as anything else, unifies "Draft Board Nights as indeed it unifies My Life and Hard Times.

If Grandfather, the presiding spirit of My Life and

Hard Times, is absent from "The Night the Bed Fell" (prob­ ably to return some days later, "growling and out of temper with the news that the federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads and that the Army of the Potomac didn't have any more chance than a fiddler's bitch" (p. 18), his physi­ cal absence is more than compensated for by the presence of the other major— and a few minor— characters and their attendant prejudices and preconceptions. The chief glory of "The Night the Bed Fell," and of "The Night the Ghost

Got In" and "The Day the Dam Broke" lies in the exact placement, physically, psychologically, and even epistemo-

logically, of these characters and in the subsequent 87 unraveling of that careful ordering as they attempt to com­ prehend and to cope with an event that did not in fact happen. All of which is to say simply that the glory of these accounts lies in their plotting and design as well as in the brevity, simplicity, and consistency of their charac­ terizations. If, then, the accounts thonselves border on farce, on physical comedy, it is farce of a high order, farce that is informed by a serious and complex vision in which the principal characters do not so much interact as they simply react, clashing and colliding both physically and intel- 23 lectually like so many atoms in the void.

With the opening sentence of "The Night the Bed Fell,"

"I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus,

Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father" (p. 17)—

"the finest first line in all casualdom," according to 24 Burton Bernstein — the central joke of all three stories is established. For if the bed did not fall on Father, if no ghost got in, and if the dam did not, in fact, break, the point is that everyone— or nearly everyone, in Thur­ ber 's telling— assumed that these or equally horrendous things did, in fact, happen and proceeded to act upon the strength of his own peculiar misinterpretation. At the center of each account, then, is a non-event around which is clustered a variety of equally inappropriate and equally deluded reactions, the grand design being one of subjective disorder within objective order. The central 8&

notion of "The Night the Bed Fell" is, of course, Mother's

opposition to Father's sleeping in the attic bed on the

grounds that "the old wooden bed up there was unsafe: it was wobbly and the heavy headboard would crash down on

father's head in case the bed fell, and kill him" (pp. 17-

18). What follows in the fiction is, needless perhaps to

say, what never happened in fact, the narrator's assertion

that "it did take place" (p. 17) notwithstanding, for if it

did take place, it did not take place in the presence of

any omniscient observers, and the action, the coherence,

the clarity, the construct that we know and read is a func­

tion of the teller and the telling. The episode itself has become, as the narrator admits, not so much a biographical or an historical event as a "recitation" (p. 17).

Thus when the actual telling begins, we find cousin

Briggs Beall situated in the author's room. Briggs lives— or rather sleeps— in dread that he will suffocate while

sleeping, which eventuality he wards off by setting the

alarm clock to ring at regular intervals throughout the night and by placing a glass of spirits of camphor nearby

(p. 18). Young James's bed is an army cot, a flimsy,

easily tipped affair, with unsupported sides, "like the

sideboards of a drop-leaf table" (p. 21). Seemingly in nearby rooms, but actually present only in the narrative,

only for effect, and not otherwise present in the house

at all, are three "aunts": Melissa Beall, who was born on 89

South. High Street, married on South High Street, and who was certain, therefore, that she was destined to die on

South High Street (pp. 19-20); Sarah Shoaf, who feared that a burglar would blow chloroform under her bedroom door at night while she was asleep and who nightly, therefore, placed her money and other valuables outside her bedroom door with a note to the burglar (p. 20); and Gracie Shoaf, who "also had a burglar phobia" and was certain that burglars "had been getting into her house every night for forty years"; if there was never anything missing, that was because every night for forty years she threw shoes down the hall in either direction and at regular intervals, obviously with telling effect (p. 20). Since "the layout of the rooms and the disposition of their occupants is im­ portant to an understanding of what later occurred" (p. 21), those "actually" in the house include, in addition to James and cousin Briggs, Mother and in the same room, brother

Herman, "Herman being the brother who "sometimes sang in his sleep, usually 'Marching Through Georgia1 or 'Onward,

Christian Soldiers'" (p. 21), but who did not sing on the night in question, any more than the aunts in question were present on the night in question, though history will not, perhaps, be ill-served if the reader assumes that they were or that he did. In a room across the hall from

Briggs and James is brother Roy (Thurber's brothers were actually named William and Robert), with Rex, the tenacious bull terrier of legend, asleep in the hall. What happens in the narrative itself is, of course, simply an unfolding or unraveling of what has been so meticulously constructed, with everyone acting out his pre­ ordained part in chain-reaction fashion and with even those who were not present playing at least an implied part in the carefully orchestrated chaos. Thus, if it is James's bed and not Father's which tips over, Mother concludes, as she must, "that her worst dread was realized" (p. 23).

Herman, in turn, concludes that she has become hysterical and seeks to calm her, their highly vocal misunderstanding waking Briggs, who, sure that he is suffocating, pours cam­ phor all over himself, nearly fulfilling his own prophecy.

Awakening and finding himself entombed under the cot, James begins to shout, while Mother, still shouting, begins to pound on the stuck attic door, awakening Roy and Rex, the latter of whom attacks Briggs. Father, meanwhile, aroused by all the commotion, awakens in the attic and, assuming that the house is on fire, wails, "I'm coming, I'm coming"

(p. 24), thereby proving to Mother that he is going home to his Maker. Finally, of course, he emerges unscathed from the attic, and after "The situation was finally put together"— much as the author had originally put it to­ gether, "like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle"— peace and order return,'with Mother, "who-always looked on the bright side of things," expressing her relief "that your grandfather wasn't here" (p. 26). Order, then, whether within or 91 without, whether individual, civil, or familial, is, in the absence of any mutually shared and more or less stabiliz­ ing assumption, a rather fragile thing.

This point is made again in "The Night the Ghost

Got In" and "The Day the Dam Broke," tales in which the

Thurber family is not blessed by Grandfather's absence. In both, it is not so much any widely held belief that holds individuals together as it is a shared sense of nameless dread that awaits some occasion, whether real or imaginary, that will disrupt the superficial order and send individuals scurrying and colliding, guided only by their individual fears. In "The Night the Ghost Got In," for example, a tale very like "The Night the Bed Fell," the surface calm of a sleeping household begins inexorably to shatter when James, just getting out of the bathtub, thinks he hears footsteps.

After listening to the footsteps for a while, peering into the downstairs darkness, and ascertaining that the sounds were not those of Father and Roy returning from Indian­ apolis, he awakens Herman. When both hear the footsteps coming up the stairs, each barricades himself behind a door, the slamming of which naturally awakens their mother.

After a brief consultation with her greenish-colored sons, she, in turn, concludes that there are burglars in the house and, the telephone being downstairs, elects to throw a shoe through the window of a neighboring house in order to get the neighbors to call the police. What follows 92 after that point is not so much "The Night the Ghost Got

In" as it is "The Night the Police Got In," with police rampaging through the house and making the near-fatal mis­ take of charging into Grandfather’s attic room. Conclud­ ing, as was his wont, that the police were deserters from

General Meade's army, Grandfather smites one with a zither and shoots another in the shoulder with a pistol. With the house a shambles and himself attired in nothing more than a towel and a hastily donned blouse of his mother's, young

James meets the press: "The reporter looked at me with mingled suspicion and interest. 'Just what the hell is the real lowdown here, Bud?' he asked. I decided to be frank with him. 'We had ghosts,' I said. He gazed at me a long time as if I were a slot machine into which he had, without results, dropped a nickel. Then he walked away" (p. 58).

So often in My Life and Hard Times the measure of mental darkness, Grandfather, in one of his sudden lurches into unexpected lucidity, restores light, when the next morning, over his third cup of coffee, he "glared at Herman and me. 'What was the idee of all them cops tarryhootin' round the house last night?' he demanded. He had us there"

(p. 59).

If, then, "The Night the Bed Fell" and "The Night the Ghost Got In" express a kind of microcosmic way Thur­ ber 's vision of the incipient chaos lurking beneath the orderly surface of civilization, that vision finds its 93 ultimate expression as well as its objective correlative and historical confirmation in "The Day the Dam Broke."

Like "The Night the Bed Fell" and "The Night the Ghost Got

In," "The Day the Dam broke" is a reconstruction, but, unlike them, it is a reconstruction that goes beyond per­ sonal reminiscence, a reconstruction, as the narrator puts it, of "the going to pieces of the capital city" (p. 47) .

As such, it is a reconstruction that cannot be so totally contained, controlled, or invented as the other accounts in My Life and Hard Times. The result is a strangely mixed and relatively uncontrolled account in which the approach to rather than the view of the subject seems uncharacter­ istically ambivalent, an account which leaves us with the abiding impression of someone who, even at the remove of twenty years, is appalled, almost dumbfounded, by the spec­ tacle he has set out to recollect, apparently in tranquil­ lity. The unmixedly comic moments are there, of course:

Grandfather's "profound misconception" that Nathan Bedford

Forrest's cavalry was attacking and his adamant refusal to retreat until he was stunned with the ironing board

(p. 39) and Mother's taking to the heights with a dozen eggs and two loaves of bread (p. 43). But such scenes are not the rule, nor is the whole contained within the purely personal perspective that we find elsewhere in the book. If there is a palpable undertow of bitterness that runs beneath the surface of the account, Richard Tobias 94 seems almost determined to ignore it when he remarks that,

"The comedy remains pure, an enjoyment of a social malaise

that need not be compared to the horrors of the modern 25 world." That Thurber himself found little m the exper­

ience to enjoy or that he intended his recounting to be

something more than pure comedy seems self-evident from his

observation in his first paragraph that "if anyone ever

wished a city was in hell it was during that frightful and

perilous afternoon in 1913 when the dam broke, or, to be

more exact, when everybody in town thought that the dam

broke. We were both ennobled and demoralized by the

experience" (p. 38).

Plainly the demoralizing aspects of "The Day the Dam

Broke" outweigh the ennobling aspects, if only because the

subject has to do with a mindless stampede involving

thousands of people, none of whom was, to paraphrase the moral of "The Shore and the Sea," quite sure what he was 2 6 "running from, or to, or why," each of whom was chiefly

intent on nothing more elevating than reaching higher

ground. The real flood, as Thurber makes plain, was the

flood of a witless, hysterical mob: "Black streams of people

flowed eastward down all the streets leading in that direc­

tion; these streams, whose headwaters were in the dry goods

stores, office buildings, harness shops, movie theatres, were fed by trickles of housewives, children, cripples,

servants, dogs, and cats, slipping out of the houses past 95 which the main streams flowed, shouting and screaming"

(p. 43) .

It is to the guttural level of shouts and screams,

then, that the good businessmen, the public officials, the doctors, the lawyers, and the common citizens of Columbus have been reduced (see e.g., p. 42), that reduction entail­

ing nothing more consequential than the loss of all reason, all communal and moral values, all legitimate claim to human dignity. The picture is of a devastation so total that Thurber himself must ascend to the imagina­ tive heights in order to grasp fully its implications:

"All the time, the sun shone quietly and there was nowhere any sign of oncoming waters. A visitor in an airplane, looking down on the straggling, agitated masses of people below, would have been hard put to it to divine a reason

for the phenomenon. It must have inspired, in such an observer, a peculiar kind of terror, like the sight of the

Marie Celeste, abandoned at sea, its galley fires peace­ fully burning, its tranquil decks bright in the sunlight"

(p. 45). The picture, then, is, in a peculiar way, the picture of a wasteland, a land in which human civilization has ceased suddenly to exist while its trappings remain, rather like the vision of San Francisco in the motion picture version of "On the Beach" or Bernard Buffet's paintings of a depopulated Paris. If "The Day the Dam Broke" or My Life and Hard Times the larger work of which it is a part, is humorous, it is humorous in much the same way as the humorist's vision

Thurber described to Max Eastman: "Human dignity, the humorist believes, is not only silly but a little sad. So are the dreams and conventions and illusions. The fine brave fragile stuff that men live by. They look so swell 27 and go to pieces so easily." Silly, they are, and sad they are, the dreams and conventions and illusions, that fine brave fragile stuff that goes to pieces so easily; but without them, what is left? That is Thurber's dilemma the question at the heart of his art— the question his art exposes and can never dispose of, the question he must try to laugh away. 97

NOTES

Transcript of Professor Lewis C. Branscomb's inter­ view with Malcolm Cowley, 27 March 1975, p. 16. CMS 4, Thurber Collection, Ohio State Univ.

2 Transcript of Professor Lewis C. Branscomb's inter­ view with Charles S. Holmes, 27 October 1973, p. 12. CMS 4 580, Thurber Collection, Ohio State Univ.

3 "Introduction," My Life and Hard Times (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), p. 1. 4 Thurber: A Biography, p. 218.

^Ibid. g Edwin T. Bowden, James Thurber: A Bibliography (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 122-23.

7p. 218.

g The Clocks of Columbus, p. 148. 9 James Thurber, p. 24.

^ I n James Thurber: His Masquerades, pp. 76-92.

11Ibid., p. 19.

12 Ibid., p. 87. The construction appears repeatedly in Black's treatment: "A few months later the narrator has insomnia one night . . ." (p. 85), "By the time the narrator enters the university . . ." (p. 90), and so on. Pursued to its logical conclusion, this kind of thing leads to a disturbing vision of My Life and Hard Times as a kind of latter-day Tristram Shandy, with the poor nar­ rator living his life faster than he can write it down.

13 James Thurber, p. 24.

■^Ibid. , p. 25 . 98

^Ibid., p. 24.

16 Transcript of Professor Lewis C. Branscomb's inter­ view with William Thurber, 14-15 February 1972, p. 5. CMS 4 582, Thurber Collection, Ohio State Univ.

17 My Life and Hard Times (New York: Bantam Books, 1961) , p. 9— all further references to and quotations from the work are based upon this edition and will be cited in the text.

18 The Art of James Thurber, p. 43.

19 As quoted by John K. Hutchens m his introduction to the Bantam Books edition of My Life and Hard Times, p. 5.

20 The epitaph on Muggs's tombstone, according to Thurber, was "Cave Canem" (p. 86).

21 Columbusese for "flowers."

22 I am indebted to Professor Thomas Cooley for this observation.

23 Stephen Black takes a somewhat cozier view, saying that "the characters in My Life are bound together in a comic world in which no one is normal, but where everyone is having a good time, and seems deeply involved with other people." James Thurber: His Masquerades, p. 83.

24 Thurber: A Biography, p. 218.

25 The Art of James Thurber, p. 48.

2 6 "All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why." Further Fables For Our•Time (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), p. 174.

27 As quoted m Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), p. 343. CHAPTER IV

THE MIDDLE-AGED MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE

Near the end of "The Gentleman is Cold," the first story in The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), the speaker-protagonist, Jacob Thurman, says, in words of affecting simplicity, "I simply want to be mentally at ease."'*' If the proximate cause of his unease comes down to nothing more consequential than his discovery "after years of experience that I cannot be mentally at ease and at the same time wear an overcoat," that ought not obscure the underlying seriousness of his remark, much less the underlying seriousness of the condition that it simul­ taneously exposes and, by its seeming offhandedness, con­ ceals. The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze is about that condition, a condition that it too simultan­ eously exposes and, through humor, conceals.

A compilation of short stories, essays, and occasional pieces that originally appeared in The New Yorker between 2 1930 and 1935, The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze is the first in a long line of what were to become typical

Thurber collections, and, like most of them, it is, as

Charles Holmes has noted, "impressive evidence of the

99 3 many-sidedness of Thurber's talent." A true miscellany,

The Middle-Aged Man is also linked together by an under­

lying unity of concern of which its variety is itself

evidence: a concern with the fragmentation of human con­

sciousness in an age in which perceived phenomena are bound together by no extra-human or otherwise compelling principle of coherence. That concern, in turn, gives rise to the sense of menace, isolation, irritability, hos­ tility, irony, disorientation, and yearning for stability which, directly or indirectly, informs most of the col­

lection, a collection in which, as Holmes has put it, "the dark side of Thurber's imagination is more evident than 4 before.” By the same token, our subliminal awareness of the darker implications of many of the selections tends to temper any impulse to overt or unambiguous "laugh- 5 ter," as Richard Tobias would have it, and makes even our amused chuckles sound a little hollow, as, indeed, they are supposed to. To the extent that we laugh, we laugh at ourselves for we, no less than the author himself, are the comic victims. We are not, then, so much idle on­

lookers at the rich feast of Thurber's comedy, as we are the feast. Thurber1s is, at bottom, the comedy of pain— ours and his.

If the individual selections in The Middle Aged Man are basically unified by a concern with the afflictions that the mind is heir to (as well as being themselves 101 manifestations of many of the same afflictions) under the modern dispensation, that concern is expressed in a number of different forms. Without attempting rigid exclusivity, we can divide those selections into a number of different categories, all of them more or less distinctively

Thurberian. Thus we have the by now familiar reminiscent pieces, the meditations, the "identity" stories and those which deal with the determining power of language, the parodies and satires, those narratives which focus on the antagonism between the sexes, and those which treat of willed isolation and withdrawal. That there is consider­ able overlapping among these categories or genres does not undermine their practical utility and is itself evi­ dence of the underlying consistency and coherence of

Thurber's work.

Like the purportedly autobiographical pieces of My

Life and Hard Times, the reminiscent selections in

The Middle-Aged Man deal only indirectly or fancifully with the author himself and may, like the pieces in My Life and Hard Times, be viewed as the author's attempt to give shape to his existence by defining its periphery. As in

My Life and Hard Times, the fundamental concern in many of the reminiscent pieces in The Middle-Aged Man is with habits of mind that are inappropriate to radically changed circumstances. Thus in "A Portrait of Aunt Ida" the author1s attention is arrested by his memories of his 102 mother's elderly aunt who thrived on the inexplicable and

the bizarre and, with a kind of innocent perversity, was

reassured by them because they proved the existence of an unseen power which controlled things. The more unaccount­

able things appeared to be, the more her theory was con­

firmed: "She loved the unsolvable and the unsolved. Mys­

teries that were never cleared up were brought about, in her opinion, by the workings of some strange force in the world which we do not thoroughly understand and which God does not intend that we shall ever understand. An invis­

ible power, a power akin to electricity and radio (both of which she must have regarded as somehow or other blas­ phemous) , but never to be isolated or channelled. Out of this power came murder, disappearances, and super­ natural phenomena" (p. 88). And ultimately everything else as well, particularly those things of a catastroph­

ic nature and "especially those of a national or inter­ national importance" (p. 87)— the worse the better. The more senseless things, to our dim understanding seemed,

the more sense they made.

Armed with this universally applicable solution and

fortified by her sustaining faith that bad news was simply good news in disguise, Aunt Ida naturally enough greeted

the unfortunate absence of bad news with prophecies that

.were "invariably intimations of approaching misfortune, 103

sickness, or death. She never had a premonition that every­

thing was going to be all right" (p. 89). Thus whenever

anything went wrong, as sooner or later it always does,

Aunt Ida had already in a sense foretold it. To the ex­

tent that things went wrong, therefore, her belief that

things were going right was confirmed. Much as her closed

system was sufficiently broad to incorporate and account

for what to ordinary mortals was an open, impossible, and

unpredictable world, so her predictions met, sooner or

later and with certain allowances, the test of empirical

verification. Thus if she was certain "that old Mrs.

Hutchins would not last out the year (she missed an old

Mrs. Hutchins for twenty-two years but finally made it),"

she was correct in "foretelling the sex of unborn

children . . . about half the time" (pp. 89, 91). Sim­

ilarly, her prediction "that the world was going to be des­

troyed almost any day" (p. 92), with Paris and New York

going first, awaited only the fullness of time for its

realization.

If Thurber looked to and, to some extent, invented

relatives like Aunt Ida in order to recapture a sense of

solidity and stability, he looked equally and repeatedly

to the world of animals, particularly dogs. For however

much we inevitably invent them, dogs themselves are free

of invention, of dubious theories, of the need to make

things up, free, in short, of doubt and uncertainty. They at least have not lost the "grip on the earth and g its realities" that man began to lose when he let go of the branches. Unfortunately, perhaps, the sureness and single-mindedness of the dog became, for Thurber, assoc­ iated with the simple-minded strengths of a sentimental­ ized masculinity, which enhances his treatment of dogs as much as it occasionally detracts from his portraits of men, especially of such incredibly manly men as his wholly 7 imaginary great-grandfather, Jacob Fisher. Like Thurber himself, we can believe in the nobility of dogs more read­ ily than we can believe in the nobility of men, for human consciousness has become too calculating and self-conscious for us to believe fully in things so unambiguous as the higher virtues. Thus, like Thurber, we believe in the nobility of Rex, the "American bull terrier" and protagon­ ist of "Snapshot of a Dog" because, like Thurber, we need to believe in nobility and because we can find it nowhere else in our lives. That, no doubt, is why the account of

Rex's death has the power to move even the most cynical and skeptical among us, for he with his loyalty and truth, his fierceness and devotion, is the only Achilles we can imagine:

Late one afternoon he wandered home, too slowly and too uncertainly to be the Rex that had trotted briskly homeward up our avenue for ten years. I think we all knew when he came through the gate that he was dying. He had apparently taken a terrible beating, probably from the 105

owner of some dog that he had got into a fight with. His head and body were scarred. His heavy collar with the teeth marks of many a battle on it was awry; some of the big brass studs in it were sprung loose from the leather. He licked at our hands and, staggering, fell, but got up again. We could see that he was looking for someone. One of his three masters was not home. He did not get home for an hour. During that hour the bull terrier fought against death as he had fought against the cold, strong current of Alum Creek,' as he had fought to climb twelve-foot walls. When the person he was wait­ ing for did come through the gate, whistling, ceasing to whistle, Rex walked a few wobbly paces toward him, touched his hand with his muz­ zle, and fell down again. This time he didn't get up (p. 188).

If no similar nobility informs Thurber's account of his years at Sullivant School in Columbus, that is at least partly because what makes for nobility in dogs often makes

simply for stupidity in people. "I Went to Sullivant" is,

to a large extent, a celebration of masculinity, which is

to say of stupidity and toughness. Like "Snapshot of a

Dog," "A Portrait of Aunt Ida," and virtually all of

My Life and Hard Times, "I Went to Sullivant" is an attempt

at self-definition by indirection, an attempt, in the present instance, on the author's part to persuade us and

himself that he is a "regular guy," regular-guyness by

association being a recurring theme (and need) in Thurber's

life and art from first to last. It is simply one manifes­

tation of Thurber's need for simplicity and solidity, clar­

ity and acceptance. Thus the defining characteristic of

the school, in Thurber's telling, is its toughness, and 106 the narrator (and by easy extension the author) takes evident pride not only in having been associated with it but in having been accepted by it, if only by his self- appointed "protector," Floyd, and if only because he "knew how many continents there were and whether or not the sun was inhabited" and how to pronounce "Duquesne" (p. 105).

Floyd, a tad of twenty-one who knew neither whether

Floyd was his first or his last name nor where exactly he lived, was, in Thurber's account, typical of the largely unnamed cast of scholars at Sullivant (pp. 104-^05) . Among those few with names are Dana Waney, a mustached fifth- grader of twenty-two and the school's star first-baseman, and Dick Peterson, who once "licked three boys his own size single-handed, really single-handed, for he fought with his right hand and held a mandolin in his left hand all the time" (p. 107). "When Dick Peterson was in the sixth grade, he got into a saloon brawl and was killed"

(p. 108). "There were," as the narrator puts it with half- satiric solemnity, "boys in those days" (p. 108).

If "I Went to Sullivant" treats of students who are, so to speak*, large for their size and old for their age,

"Back to the Grades" is its satiric corollary and a sub­ versive inversion of the genre of reminiscence. In it

Thurber calls attention not merely to the artifice of his own art or to the selective nature of memory but, more broadly, to the notion that perception is really a species 107 of preconception. Thus, advised by his wife after a tense evening at contract bridge that he ought to return to the fifth grade, the narrator-persona, painfully aware of his ineptitude in matters arithmetical, grammatical, and prac­ tical (p. 116), transports himself "literally" and

"physically" back to the fifth grade and to his childhood home. In both situations everything is predictably the same, with the all but unnoticeable exception that the speaker is now, as he boyishly puts it, "thirty-four going on thirty-five" (p. 116).

This simple fact renders most of his responses as well as most of the responses to him ludicrously inappropriate.

Thus he is greeted by Miss Malloy, the same fifth-grade teacher he had back in 1905, with the remark, "My, you have shot up like a weed!" (p. 117), while his mother, seeing her son1s complaint of stomach pains as an excuse to stay home from school, coaxes him, with flickering insight, to

"Be a big middle-aged soldier and get up!" itp . 119).

Similarly, Father, tired of helping his "boy" with his homework, threatens to take him out of school, while Grand­ father, assuming that it is Father who is reluctant to go to school, yells at him to "get your chores done and hike on to school or I'll whup your hide off!" (p. 119).

Except for bringing Miss Malloy apple-jack rather than apples, the speaker himself fully succumbs to the govern­ ing delusion, responding to a reprimand with a boyish "Aw" and a winning grin, taking secret pleasure in having to clean the erasers (p. 117), and pulling the hair of

Virginia Morrison who habitually laughs at his "answers to the problems" and sticks her tongue out at him (pp. 119-

20). The point, then, is the basic Thurberian precept that the reality we respond to, indeed cling to, is the reality projected by our own minds, no matter how demon­ strably it may be at variance with actuality. That, of course, is equally true, as the form of "Back to the

Grades" makes us aware, of the reality of art. Both are equally fictions.

Much the same point is made in "The Luck of Jad Peters a story that is in approximately equal measure reminis­ cence, mystery, meditation, and tall tale that has funda­ mentally to do with the way in which we, less transpar­ ently and less obnoxiously than the hero, piece together and connect disparate events and experiences in order to construct our on-going theories of life. The basic ingred ients of the story are a curious array of objects kept by

Aunt Emma Peters on a table in the unused front parlor of her home in Sugar Grove, Ohio. Among the objects in the collection is "a large rough fragment of rock weighing perhaps twenty pounds. The rock stood in the centre of a curious array of odds and ends: a piece of tent canvas, a chip of pine wood, a yellowed telegram, some old news­ paper clippings, the cork from a bottle, a bill from a 109 surgeon" (p. 94). Hovering behind the collection is "a heavy-framed, full-length photograph of Aunt Emma's hus­ band, Jad Peters. It showed him wearing a hat and over­ coat and carrying a suitcase" (p. 95).

Obviously these artifacts are all related in some way, if only in the mind of "Lucky Jad Peters" (p. 95), a man so tiresome and so disliked that he had to create his own nickname. The unfolding of the story is the unravelling of the mystery, and a very simple mystery it is. The photograph, for example, dates back to an episode in 1888 when Jad, about to embark on a ship from New York to New­ port, received an urgent telegram telling him to return home. According to Jad he was already aboard ship— hence the hat, overcoat, and suitcase in the photo— when the telegram arrived. In any event, the ship "sailed without him and some eight or nine hours out of the harbor sank in a storm with the loss of everybody on board" (p. 96) .

Thus the photo (showing him "just as he was when he got off the ship, he said"), the yellowed telegram, and the newspaper clippings. Thus also the beginning of a work­ ing hypothesis the possible verifications and manifes­ tations of which are limited only by the imagination of the hypothesizer. Fortunately, Jad's imagination was limited. The doctor's bill, for instance, betokens nothing more consequential than an appendicitis opera­ tion from which Jad awoke, "he would say, just when they had given him up" (p. 98). The cork from the bottle stems

from an incident (or non-incident) in which just as he

was about "to take a swig of stomach bitters for a bad

case of heartburn" one dark night "Something told him . . .

to take a look at the bottle before he uncorked it, so he

carried it to a lamp, lighted the lamp, and he'd be gol-dam

if it wasn't carbolic acid!" (p. 98). Similarly with the

piece of tent canvas, for "Something told him" not to go to

the Fairfield County Fair on a certain Saturday (even

though he had not planned to attend the fair that year and,

when he did go, he habitually went on a Thursday), and,

sure enough, "a tent blew down . . . killing two people and

injuring a dozen others" (p. 98). As for the chip of pine wood, it seems that Lucky Jad avoided certain calamity

when, just as he was about to set out for Pullen's lumber

yard to get some two-by-fours for shoring up the chicken

coop, "something told him not to go a step" (p. 99). He

didn't, and the rest is history. It seems that "it was

that very day that a pile of lumber in the lumber yard

let go and crushed Grant Pullen's leg so's it had to be

amputated" (p. 99).

The twenty-pound rock, the chef d 'oeuvre of the col­

lection, is, alas, another matter. Aunt Lisbeth Banks

had it added to the collection, as it were, posthumously.

On an August afternoon when Jad was tarrying with one of

the few townsmen who could tolerate him, county engineers Ill were widening the channel of the nearby Hocking River, a

job that required considerable blasting. Jad and his companion had just parted company when Jad apparently had an afterthought and turned around:

Clem had taken about a dozen steps when suddenly he heard Jad call to him. "Say, Clem!" Jad said. Clem stopped and turned around, and here was Jad walking back toward him. Jad had taken about six steps when suddenly he was flung up against the front of Matheny's harness store "like a sack o' salt," as Clem put it. By the time Clem could reach him, he was gone. He never knew what hit him, Clem said, and for quite a few minutes nobody else knew what hit him, either. Then some­ body in the crowd that gathered found the big muddy rock lying in the road by the gutter. A par­ ticularly big shot of dynamite, set off in the river bed, had hurtled the fragment through the air with terrific force. It had come flying over the four-story Jackson Building like a cannon ball and had struck Jad Peters squarely in the chest (p. 100).

With Jad barely cold in his grave, several of the hab­ itues at Prentice's engaged in an informal post-mortem, an event not marked, in Jad's case, by excessive solemnity.

Of all the explanations offered, Cal Gregg's was at once the most satisfying and significant: "'Well, sir,' said

Cal, 'I don't suppose none of us will ever know what it was now, but somethin' must of told Jad to turn around'" (p.100).

If "The Luck of Jad Peters" is a simple tale simply told, a tale about simplemindedness, its very sim­ plicity is the source of its savor. Like Gulliver's

Travels, it can be rolled over in the mind, tasted and retasted, with unending instruction and delight. With Thurber's meditations/ however, we move into the darker, more complex, more troubling world of modernity in which the fundamental issues are neither so clearly drawn nor so easily resolvable, in which the private sensibility, al­ ready raw from the abrasions and assaults of modern urban life, is under continuous seige and unable to find any­ thing other than the temporary refuge of drink and dreams.

In form, Thurber's meditations are simply loosely struc­ tured essays in which the Thurber persona presents him­ self as reflecting on something that has insinuated itself into his consciousness, in which something— often, but not always, disagreeable— that he has seen, read, or otherwise experienced has reminded him of something else, setting in motion a train of associations. Thurber's medi­ tations, then, are simply portraits of a man (or a mind) pondering, and most of the reminiscent pieces in The

Middle-Aged Man begin as meditations.

If "Casuals of the Keys" is not, strictly speaking, a meditation, it is something to meditate about. A short story in form, it is a meditation in substance, a portrait of a man, Captain Darrell Darke by name, isolated for more than twenty years on a small remote island in the Florida

Keys. In part the tale is an inversion of Thurber's recurrent Conradean fantasy (see, for example, "A Note at the End" in My Life and Hard Times), for if Darke is a figure reminiscent "of that other solitary wanderer among forgotten islands, the doomed Lord Jim" (p. 24) , he is

also, like Jim, something of a fool, and he is a fool pre­

cisely because he has realized the dream so dear to the

heart of Thurber1s thinkers, the dream of being blessedly

and blissfully left alone. Though "Casuals of the Keys"

is a meditation in substance, it is also a subversive view

of that substance, for if Darke proves in some respects to

be the fulfillment of Thurberian fantasy, he has, by dint

of his prolonged isolation from society, his very freedom

from the impingement of outside information, whether

wanted or unwanted, been left with no ability to sort out

or to understand new experience or to appreciate the

extraordinary. Isolated in the gaudy tropics, he exper­

iences only an undifferentiated grayness. Thus, while

he has had occasional visitors, they have been, so far as

he is concerned, "All of a stripe ..." (p. 25). The

dull and undistinguished list includes, among others,

Mark Menafee, a professional coach of fugitives from jus­

tice (pp. 25-27), and Harrison Cammery, a monomaniac,

"a goldfish holder" and former "professional billiard-

player" who had developed the ability to "balance five BB

shot on the back of each of his fingers indefinitely"

(p. 27). His growing addiction to holding a "wettish

fluttering" goldfish between innings in his billiard matches had, however, finally destroyed "his muscular 114 precision, so he took to the islands" (p. 28). How he took to the islands— he arrived "one night in a storm, dressed in full evening clothes" (p. 27)— and how he finally left, there being in neither case no "sign of a boat or anything" (p. 27), is a matter of supreme indif­ ference to Darke, since Cammery was "a singularly one- track and boring fellow" (p. 28). As was another of

Darke's human callers, a writer who showed up in early

1913, a fellow of seventy-five or eighty who had swum the fifty miles from the mainland. "His name," as Darke recalls it, "was Bierce. Ambrose Bierce" (p. 28).

Leaving aside as too dull to bother with the story of the homing pigeon (C-18769, by name) who was released as a publicity stunt by some concern or other with a thous­ and dollars strapped to it and who arrived on Darke1s island with only four hundred and sixty-five dollars left

(pp. 28-29), we might say that Darke testifies to the truth of Dr. Johnson's dictum that "When a man is tired of

London, he is tired of life," for Darke is tired of life.

Driven nearly insane by society, Darke has fled to his island only to be driven nearly insane by isolation. Unlike

Darke, most of Thurber's thinkers realize that there is no easy escape— surely no physical escape— from the world's psychic assaults. That is why they remain nominally in society, while finding true society only in the world within, in the well-stocked bunkers of the mind and the 115 imagination where they attempt, for the most part unsuc­ cessfully, to take refuge and whence they give vent to their reasoned hostility toward a world which insists upon obtruding itself upon their consciousness. The humorous form of their utterances does not, of course, conceal their hostile intent, humor being, among other things, a socially acceptable expression of hostility, as, for exam­ ple, in the unconvincing and universally accepted demurrer,

"I'm only kidding."

In "Guessing Game," the threat to the speaker's sanity is direct and personal. An example of what might be called the epistolary meditation, "Guessing Game" is the speaker's tormented response to a note from the Hotel Lexington which coyly informs him that an unspecified "article" was found in his room after his departure and which seeks both a description of said article and instructions as to its disposition, a request which requires merely that he ran­ sack the tattered stores of mind and memory, exhausting his not infinite reserves of patience. Inevitably, of course, perturbation gives rise to paranoia, the suspicion that it might all be a hoax, and thence to ugly threats.

"How to Listen to a Play," though not epistolary in form, follows the same general pattern of repeated assaults upon the mind's tender membranes that have brought the speaker to the edge. The essay, of course, has nothing, as the 116

title might suggest, to do with the voluntary act of going

to a play and everything to do with the involuntary non-

act of having the play, in the form of the playwright or would-be playwright, come to oneself, indeed pounce upon

oneself. The speaker's reaction to such assaults and his

root dislike of "having anything read" (p. 150) to him may smack of an un-American and un-modern sense of privacy

and of the self's integrity, of a morbid inwardness and an unhealthy preoccupation with the contents of his own

consciousness, but he is nonetheless desperate for that:

"I am trying to be kind and considerate to everybody, out of repentance for the life I have led, but some day a play reader or a plot outliner is going to push me too

far and I am going to get up in the middle of the first

scene and scream. I am going to scream until the manager comes. I am going to scream until the ambulance and the police and the photographers come. I don't care how much people may talk" (pp. 151-52).

Thurber's speakers do not, of course, ever actually

scream, for screams do not make literature, but the

impulse can be felt nevertheless as the energizing force behind much of his humor. It is there, certainly, in

"The Civil War Phone-Number Association" and "There's an

Owl in My Room"— works, in which the sensed impingement,

from the rear guard on the one hand and the avant garde

on the other, is not merely personal, not merely frontal and fortuitous, but general and cultural and therefore

more alarming and insidious. In "The Civil War Phone-

Number Association," for example, the meditation begins

quietly enough as a reflection on Rudy Vallee's observa­

tion— prompted by the dismaying sight of his musicians

spending their idle moments in such frivolous occupations

as reading detective stories— that, "'They should try to

improve their memories . . . by associating telephone

numbers, for instance, with the date of the Civil War'"

(p. 109) . What, beyond the bottomless ignorance suggested

by the statement, galls the speaker and drives him almost

to distraction is the underlying assumption that the mind

should always be engaged in useful or productive pursuits,

the notion that the mind is merely a tool, a utilitarian

instrument rather than the seat of the passions, the

source of our solace and delight, the soul, our home. Such was Thurber's own root assumption, his sense of the heart of the matter, and he did not suffer gladly any ignorant

suggestions to the contrary, particularly none of such surpassing stupidity as Vallee's. The ultimate question raised by such suggestions was, so far as Thurber was con­ cerned, the question ultimately of where, finally and fun­ damentally, we live, in what dimension we exist, for if the mind is simply an empty filing cabinet at best or a bottomless pit at worst, a vacant receptacle that is to be 118

stocked infinitely and endlessly with telephone numbers

or with data equally banal, what and where is human exist­

ence?

Thurber's humor in such matters is, as much as any­

thing, the result of his heat, and thus what begins as a

simple reflection on Vallee's ignorance (the notion, for

example, that the Civil War has a date) becomes in slow

increments a fugue of faintly disguised fury, for tele­

phone numbers, as the speaker rightly observes from

Vallee's use of the qualifying phrase, "for instance"

(p. 109), are only the beginning. There is literally no

end to what can be associated with whatever else— one's

"bank balance, his automobile license plates, and the total

amount of his debts, with the date of the Civil War," for

instance (p. 109)— infinitely, endlessly, and to no pur­

pose, except perhaps the purpose of distracting oneself with the comforting illusion that one is doing something

purposeful rather than avoiding all real considerations

of purpose. Beginning with observations on the simple prac­

ticality and purpose of such a pointless system, then,

"The Civil War Phone-Number Association" gathers steam

until the speaker, able to stand it no more, represents

himself "as one of the oldest surviving members of the

Civil War Telephone-Number Association" (p. 110). What

follows from that point is a reductio-ad-absurdum treat­ ment of the whole notion, with the authorial persona 119 inventing his own systems for remembering certain numbers.

In one instance, for example, he allows that

to remember one number, I figured myself as an officer in the war with Mexico (a certain Lieu­ tenant Chelsea) who sent a baseball nine to the aid of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. The key number was 4615; the correct reading 3724. I simply sent my 9 from *46 to '15, you see. The danger of this kind of preoccupation lies in the likelihood of confusing fact with fancy, shadow with substance, one's imaginary character with one's actual character. My reactions and reflexes in the workaday world began to be prompted now and then by the nature of my respon­ sibilities as an officer in wars that ended long ago. I would sometimes, in the office, bark commands at my superiors. Things finally got so bad that for more than two years I never phoned anybody. In this way I managed to slough off from my overburdened subconscious something in the neighborhood of a hundred and eighty numbers. Along with these vanished a lot of wearisome maneuvers, such as the activities of a golfing foursome in the Seminole Indian War, and the extra­ ordinary advent of three basketball teams at the Battle of Saratoga. Now I am back to a fairly normal basis, with the phone numbers of only about ninety-five people thundering in the indexes of my mind. (p. 113)

To ordinary minds, it is a considerable leap from the philosophy, as we might call it, of Rudy Vallee to the poetry of Gertrude Stein, but to sensitive natures like

Thurber's it is no leap at all. Each in its.way sends shock waves thundering through the indexes of the mind, tearing its tender tissues, affronting its hard-won integ­ rity, its dearly purchased sense of what is so and what is not so. In the case of Miss Stein (as related in

"There's an Owl in My Room,"), the assault on the speaker's overburdened consciousness begins in a newsreel theater, 120

where he is sitting innocently one afternoon when he hears

her read

that famous passage of hers about pigeons on the grass, alas (the sorrow is, as you know, Miss Stein's). After reading about the pigeons on the grass alas, Miss Stein said, "This is a simple description of a landscape I have seen many times." I don't really believe that that is true. Pigeons on the grass alas may be a simple description of Miss Stein's own consciousness, but it is not a simple dexcription of a plot of grass on which pigeons have alighted, are alighting, or are going to alight. A truly simple description of the pigeons alighting on the grass of the Luxembourg Gardens (which, I believe, is where the pigeons alighted) would say of the pigeons alighting only that there were pigeons alighting. Pigeons that alight anywhere are neither sad pigeons nor gay pigeons, they are simply pigeons (p. 14).

And that, as the speaker goes on at length and in much the same words to suggest, is irreducibly that. And only that.

All there is to say. The end of the matter. Period.

It is not, of course, that the speaker has anything against pigeons, but, as in the case of Rudy Vallee, he does have a great deal against the willful trivialization of our sense of experience and, by extension, of ourselves, and the more influential that trivialization is apt to be, as in the profound-seeming utterance of Miss Stein, the more he has against it. Our linguistic grip on reality, our verbally determined sense of value, meaning, and pro­ portion, is uncertain enough without undermining or trivial­ izing it further in the name of poetic novelty. The pur­ pose of language and literature is, as best we can, to define and enhance and ennoble our sense of what is real 121 and significant, not irresponsibly, thoughtlessly, even stupidly to subvert and debase it. The problem, then, is that if pigeons are "alas," nothing is "alas," for if pigeons are "alas," everything is "alas," and if every­ thing is "alas," nothing is "alas," and all experience and all meaning are equally significant or insignificant, depending on individual whim or fancy, and all experience is reduced to undifferentiated banality. The threat, then, is not merely to individual sanity, but to civilization

(or what is left of it) and to the ordering and values, already permanently undermined, upon which its continuance depends. The integrity of civilization thus depends upon the integrity of our minds, and the integrity of our minds depends upon our maintaining the integrity of language.

Thurber does not, of course, say that in so many words in

"There's an Owl in My Room"— he is, after all, a humorist, by which we commonly mean merely a humorist— but he does, through his attack on Miss Stein's hapless pigeons, sug­ gest it, and it is the source of his growing obsession with the mysteries and magic and meaning of language. If, then, to approach things on the basic level where Thurber customarily approached them, a rose is a rose is a rose, so much more a pigeon is a pigeon is a pigeon: "No other thing in the world falls so far short of being able to do what it cannot do as a pigeon does. Of being unable to do what it can do, too, as far as that goes" (p. 18). 122

None of this is, of course, to suggest that language

was for Thurber the ultimate reality or even close to it,

but it was for him about as close to it as we are likely

to get. That is why he was in matters of language as in

matters of logic exactly as Paul Jennings has described

him, "a precisian," one who "was always building neat walls

O against old Chaos." Yet he was also— and for much the

same reason— fascinated by the power of language, particu­

larly when it was misused or mispronounced, deliberately or

otherwise, to distort and disorder our conception of real­

ity, as it does for the narrator of "The Black Magic of

Barney Haller," "the most original piece in The Middle-

Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze," according to Charles g Holmes. In "The Black Magic of Barney Haller," as later

in "What Do You Mean It Was Brillig?,"^ it is the casual

remark of a servant which sets things in motion, a fact

which has led one class-conscious critic in a classic misreading to complain that servants and other manual

workers in Thurber are almost invariably shown to be less

"mentally healthy" than those "neurotic persons with more

money and book-learning" who employ them.^ (How they

are shown to be less mentally healthy than the neurotics

who employ them is one of the unresolved mysteries of our

time.) In any event, in the later story it is, of course,

Della, a "colored" maid, who threatens the narrator's

sanity with the remark that "They are here with the 123 reeves" (p. 3), an utterance which sends him scurrying to his dictionary: "'Are they here with strings of onions?'

I asked. Della said they were not. "Are they here with enclosures or pens for cattle, poultry, or pigs; sheep- folds?' Della said no sir. 'Are they here with administra­ tive officers?' From a little nearer the door Della said no again. 'Then they've got to be here,' I said, 'with some females of the common European sandpiper'"(pp. 3-4).

Finally, of course, it dawns upon the narrator that the "reeves" are nothing more exotic or menacing than

"Christmas wreaths for the windows" (p. 4). In "The Black

Magic of Barney Haller," on the other hand, things appear immeasurably more sinister, infinitely more unspecific and dreadful. As with Della, it is a chance remark of

Barney Haller's, the narrator's hired man, which sets the narrative and the narrator spinning: "Suddenly he said the first of those things that made me, when I was with him, faintly creepy. He pointed at the house. 'Once I see dis boat come down de rock,1 he said. It is phenomena like that of which I stand in constant dread: boats coming down rocks, people being teleported, statues dripping blood, old regrets and dreams in the form of Luna moths flutter­ ing against the windows at midnight" (p. 160). If he lives in dread of such bizarre and improbable phenomena, so much the more does the narrator live in dread of those linguistic sorcerers who can conjure them up. Barney 124

Haller is one of them. In "reality" "strong and amiable,

sweaty and dependable, slowly and heavily competent"

(p. 159), a physical presence, solid and reassuring, Haller

is, so far as the narrator is concerned, a creature made

of nothing more substantial than his own language, and it

is his language which inspires in the narrator a new and

awful sense of reality, a reality not only more compelling

than Haller's physical or empirical reality, but a reality which transforms and transcends it. If, then, the narrator,

a reflective country gentleman, is completely disoriented by the spectacle of boats coming down rocks and only later realizes that Haller was referring to "a bolt coming down the lightening rod on the house," he is further estranged from corporeal reality by Haller's equally innocuous, "Dis morning bime by . . . I go hunt grotches in de voods"

(p. 160): "If you are susceptible to such things, it is not difficult to visualize grotches. They fluttered into my mind: ugly little creatures, about the size of whippoor­ wills, only covered with blood and honey and the scrapings of church bells. Grotches . . ." (p. 161). "Grotches," it later turns out, are crotched saplings used to support the branches of peach trees when they are bearing, but for the narrator the notion of Barney's grotch-hunting inspires a hideous vision of him, "at some proper spot deep in the woods, prancing around like a goat, casting off his false nature, shedding his hired man's garments, 125 dropping his Teutonic accent, repeating diabolical phrases, conjuring up grotches" (pp. 161-62).

When Haller appears one evening at the narrator's door, his rapping acting in counterpoint to the electrical storm that seems to follow him everywhere, the narrator, who has been asleep, innocently "dreaming of Proust and the church at Combray and madeleines dipped in tea" (p. 162)f imagines

Haller as "standing at the door barefooted, with a wreath of grape leaves around his head, and a wild animal's skin slung over his shoulder" (p. 162). In that frame of mind, he is naturally not disposed to heed the hired man's suggestion that, "We go to the garrick now and become warbs" (p. 163). His semi-hysterical response to Haller's spell is instead to create— or to attempt to create— a counter-spell of his own: "'Listen1 I barked, suddenly.

'Did you know that even when it isn't brillig I can pro­ duce slithy toves? Did you happen to k n o w t h a the t mome rath never lived that could out-grabe me? Yeah and further­ more I can become anything I want to; even if I were a warb,

I wouldn't have to keep on being one if I didn't want to.

I can become a playing card at will, too; once I was the jack of clubs, only I forgot to take my glasses off and some guy recognized me. I . . .'" (p. 163). With that he is quit forever of Haller, having become for Haller what Haller has been for him. He is not, however, quit 126

of the wasps in the garret that Haller wanted to clear

out (p. 164).

If then, external reality or, what amounts to much the

same thing, our conception of it, is not so much something

cast in concrete as it is more nearly the stuff that, say,

dreams are made of, something that is largely shaped by

and suggested to our suggestible natures by language and

by the associations following almost automatically there­

from, it follows that that reality is, at least on a conceptual— which is to say human— level, no more fixed and

certain than the reality of language. What is true of

external reality, of what is "out there," is also true of

internal reality, of our sense of ourselves, of what is "in

here," the latter being, if not a function of the former,

at least in reciprocal relation to it.

And thus, in another distinctively Thurberian genre,

the identity story, as we might call it, identity or per­

sonality is not the fixed and immutable thing we normally

assume it to be, a point made earlier in "The Imperturb­

able Spirit," later in such stories as "The Whip-poor- 12 will" and "A Friend to Alexander," and, in the present

collection, in "The Remarkable Case of Mr. Bruhl." In all

of these stories character is not so much destiny as it is

a dream, a dream that is capable, under certain circum­

stances and with only the slightest stimulus or suggestion,

of dissolving into nightmare. Thus the neat and orderly 127

existence of Samuel 0. Bruhl, "a man who has been guilty

of nothing worse than an accident in his childhood"

(p. 166), the treasurer of nothing more sinister than the

Maskonsett Syrup and Fondant Company (p. 170), goes to

pieces because of a "singular shoe-shaped scar on his left

cheek" (p. 166). Bruhl's undoing stems from his resem­

blance to George ("Shoescar") Clinigan, a notorious gang­

ster who is the object of a manhunt by both the police and

the "mob," the subject, meanwhile, of a good deal of

publicity. Since he is often mistaken for Clinigan and

often the victim of practical jokes by those who should

know better, Bruhl's own identity begins to come unstuck

as he begins to crack: "As the hunt went on for Clinigan

and he still wasn't found, Mr. Bruhl lost weight and grew

extremely fidgety. He began to figure out new ways of

getting to work, one requiring the use of two different

ferry lines; he ate his lunch in, he wouldn't answer bells, he cried out when anyone dropped anything, and he ran

into stores or banks when cruising taxi-drivers shouted

at him. One morning, in setting the house to rights, Mrs.

Bruhl found a revolver under his pillow" (p. 169). Reduced to something like his elemental protoplasm (and despite

Stephen Black's curious objection that "one cannot change 13 his identity," ), a new Mr. Bruhl begins to take shape, and he begins to become "Shoescar" Clinigan— or at least a passable popular-culture imitation. He begins to talk ouf of the corner of his mouth, to call his wife (or "moll")

"Babe," and to kiss her "in a strange, new way, acting rough, almost brutal." He becomes "mean," "overbearing," and generally foul-mouthed toward his associates, and he takes to lounging around the house wearing "a pair of scar­ let pajamas" (p. 171). When, ultimately, he is gunned down by four "silent men, wearing overcoats, and carrying what appeared to be cases for musical instruments" (p. 173),

Bruhl's transformation is nearly complete. Questioned as he lies dying in the hospital, Bruhl refuses to be a stool- pigeon, to answer the police commissioner's questions:

"He asked Bruhl what the men looked like. 'I don't know what they looked like,' snarled Bruhl, 'and if I did know I wouldn't tell you." He was silent a moment, then: 'Cop!' he added, bitterly. The Commissioner sighed and turned away. 'They're all like that,' he said to the others in the room. 'They never talk.' Hearing this, Mr. Bruhl smiled, a pleased smile, and closed his eyes" (p. 173).

For men, the painful and confusing process of identity— in Thurber, it is a process, a continuous process— becomes fixed and final only in death.

In the case of dogs it is, of course, otherwise, and therein lies one of the sources of their perennial appeal for Thurber. A dog's identity, like his basic perception of reality, is fixed, untroubled and uncomplicated by the refractory mediation of ideas, theories, concepts, 129

language, and other such fol-de-rol. The dog's conscious­

ness, free of the curse of self-consciousness, is at one with his immediate experience, and it is for that reason

that Thurber's pieces about dogs serve a normative purpose and have normative value. Besides being works of great affection and remarkably free of the taint of sentimental­

ity, Thurber's essays and stories about dogs provide a use­ ful measure of, if no antidote for, our condition. In the sense, then, that they are not principally intended to edify us about dogs, they are not about dogs at all, any more than, say, his fables are (to borrow a title of Mal­ colm Cowley's) about "lions and lemmings, toads and 14 tigers." "A Preface to Dogs," for example, is explicit­ ly designed to support "the theory that dogs have a saner family life than humans" (p. 30) because they are free of those illusions about themselves and the world which we humans call ideas. At bottom the essay is about the prob­ lem of identity, which, of course, is no problem at all for dogs, since the mother dog, for example, not having read Dr. Spock or any other theorists, has herself no theories about motherhood and, consequently, does not spend years worrying and fretting about all possible contingencies and potential calamities or calculating the incalculable consequences of her every act. She simply does her job, as nature intended, automatically and instinctively for six weeks— no more and no less— at the 130 end of which "she snarls at the puppies after breakfast, and routs them all out of the house" (p. 31). Her period of motherhood over (at least until next time), "She is now," as Thurber puts it in one of his most delicate sentences ever, "free to devote herself to her career and to the novel and astonishing things of life" (p. 32).

As with her "children," so with her "husband," for if

"He doesn't write, makes no provision for the care or maintenance of his family, and is not liable to prosecu­ tion because he doesn't," she "doesn't care where he is, never wonders if he is thinking about her, and although she may start at the slightest footstep, doesn't do so because she is hoping against hope that it is he. No lady dog has ever been known to set her friends against her husband, or put detectives on his trail" (p. 31).

It is, of course, a different matter in nearly all respects with humankind, and if that great difference is

Thurber's great subject, it is small wonder that he returns again and again to the world of dogs for solace, stability, and sanity, all notably absent from the world of man as Thurber conceives it. Nowhere perhaps is their absence more noticeable than in his parodies and satires, but then trace elements of parody and satire are to be found in nearly everything Thurber wrote— in works, for example, as apparently diverse as "The Luck of Jad Peters",

and "The Remarkable Case of Mr. Bruhl." Yet some works 131

are more obviously or overtly parodic or satiric than

others, and "The Funniest Man You Ever Saw," though not

pure parody, is of the species.

A first-person recollection in form, the piece con­ cerns the generally enthusiastic reception accorded the wit of one Jack Klohman, an enthusiastic reception from which the speaker obviously absents himself. Klohman's purely derivative humor, which might be said to be of

the lamp-shade school, consists in large measure of bor­

rowing someone else's idea or invention and running it

into the ground. Thus, borrowing from a routine of Ed

Wynn's in which Wynn appears with a piece of rope and ex­ claims, "I've either lost a horse or found a piece of rope— " (p. 154), Klohman, to take but one example, goes to a bathroom, unscrews a bathtub faucet, reappears, and, waving the faucet aloft, proclaims, "I've either lost a bathtub or found a faucet" (p. 155). And so on, to the

infinite amusement of all. Among Klohman's other displays

of wit are such routines as removing a pencil from his pocket, pointing to the eraser, and calling it,"Just a

little gadget I thought up the other night" (p. 157), or

offering his admirers a Lifesaver and asking them whether

they "thought they'd go or not" (p. 157). If none of

these gags represents any noteworthy triumph of wit, it

is not so much the programatic predictability or the utter 132

banality of such humor that troubles Thurber as it is the

avidity with which others lap it up in a kind of orgy of mindlessness. This, of course, was to be one of Thurber's

major themes in his cranky old age, "The Funniest Man You

Ever Saw" being, then, a kind of precursor. Early and

late, true wit, true humor was for Thurber a way of con­

fronting, thinking about, assessing, and representing our woeful condition— not evading it.

That is, of course, as true of his literary parodies as of his other efforts, although some of his literary parodies presuppose rather specialized knowledge on the part of the reader. "The Man Who Was Wetly" (pp. 127-131) and "One More April" (pp. 137-41)— the first prompted, as the parenthetical subtitle has it, by "Reading An Anthol­ ogy of British Short Stories" and the second begun as "An

Effort to Start Another Novel about the Galsworthy Char­ acters, Taking Them Up Where He Left Off"— are of that type. Their defect is the excess of their virtue, since they are excellent parodies of works with restricted aud­

iences .

" If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomatox" on the other hand, a spoof of three articles published in Scribner's

("If Booth Had Missed Lincoln," "If Lee Had Not Won the

Battle of Gettysburg," and "If Napoleon Had Escaped to

America"), requires nothing more than a general notion of the outcome of the Civil War to be appreciated. Its 133

limitation is that it is a one-joke piece, but it is a

droll joke. The governing (and not historically improb­

able) hypothesis is that General Grant had been drinking

heavily the night preceding April 9, 18 65 and had to be

aroused by his aide, Corporal Schultz, when General Lee

appeared at his tent:

"I should like to have this over with as soon as possible," said Lee. Grant looked vaguely at Schultz, who walked up close to him, frowning. "The surrender, sir, the surrender," said Corporal Schultz in a whisper. "Oh sure, sure," said Grant. He took another drink. "All right," he said. "Here we go." Slowly, sadly, he unbuckled his sword. Then he handed it to the astonished Lee. "There you are, General," said Grant. "We d a m 1 near licked you. If I'd been feeling better we would of licked you" (p. 136).

The best of the literary parodies in The Middle Aged Man, at least for present purposes, is "Hell Only Breaks Loose

Once." It was written, as the parenthetical subtitle puts it, "After Reading James M. Cain's 'The Postman Always

Rings Twice'" (a work perhaps best known for the film per­ formances of John Garfield and Lana Turner rather than for its own intrinsic literary worth). The problem with such works, as Thux*ber's parody reveals, is not that they are excessively realistic or unliterary but, on the contrary, that they are unrealistic, ludicrously improbable, simul­ taneously simple-minded and pretentious. Here, for exam­ ple, is the narrator-protagonist of "Hell Only Breaks

Loose Once": 134

When the Dean went out to lunch I walked into a rear office and she was there. I began to tremble all over like a hooch dancer. She was fussing with some papers but I could see she wasn't really doing anything. I walked close to her. It was like dying and going to Heaven. She was a little like my mother and a little like the time I got my hip busted in a football scrimmage. I reached over and let her have one on the chin and she went down like a tray of dishes. I knew then I would be beating her up the rest of my life. It made me feel like it was April and I was a kid again and had got up on a warm morning and it was all misty outdoors and the birds were singing (p. 122).

Such writing, in which each image cancels out the other and in which the abandoned use of metaphor, alternately tough and tender, belies the laconic style, is, like the prose of

Mickey Spillane, its own parody. It does not so much reveal the hidden depths of meaning for which, like Gertrude

Stein's "pigeons on the grass, alas," it strives as it exposes the emptiness which it simultaneously seeks to cover. 15 . "How to See a Bad Play," the first of the satires m

The Middle-Aged Man, takes as its subject the less- distinguished, indeed, the bad, plays of the 1934-1935 season. As in "There's an Owl in My Room" and "Hell Only

Breaks Loose Once," the implicit normative standard behind the criticism is simply that of empirical probability, for

Thurber had, in the absence of any other reliable measure, a healthy respect for probability and was, like his dis­ tinguished eighteenth-century predecessors, Johnson and Swift, an empiricist, at least in matters of judgment

(see, for example, "The Little Girl and the Wolf"). Con­

sequently he finds it remarkable that "a desperate young

man" in "Reprise" is stayed from leaping off a penthouse

balustrade by another young man who persuades him first

to consider the matter over "three or four shots of what

he describes as 'excellent brandy1": "the other man asks

him if he still wants to jump. 'No,' says the desperate

young man. 'Your brandy has taken my courage.' That marked the first time in the history of the world when

three or four slugs of excellent brandy took a desperate man's courage. I find myself thinking about it" (p. 143)

He also finds himself still thinking about, among other

improbabilities, "the elderly lady who is a good sport,

a hard drinker, and an authority on sex," the kind of old lady, known only in the theater and in more rarefied

literary circles, who "could get away with half a quart of brandy between dinner time and bedtime (3 A.M.)" and then take the bottle to bed with her: "'I'm going to put a nipple on this thing and go to bed,' she announced as she made her exit. This type of old lady was alsp given to a stream of epigrams, such as: 'At twenty, one

is in love with love; at thirty, love is in love with one; at forty, one is in love with two; at fifty, one does not care what two are in love with one; and at sixty 136 etc., etc. It doesn't have to make a great deal of sense; the sophisticates in the audience always laugh, and one or two who have been through a lot applaud" (p. 146). Thurber, as he says, broods about such things, finding that "the situations, characters, tactics, . . . strategies," and

"lines of dialogue . . . come back at night to roost above my chamber door" (p. 142).

It is, however, in "Something to Say" and "The Greatest

Man in the World" that the author's brooding results in the most devastating satire in the collection, satire that sweeps through the world of high culture, on the one hand, and the world of mass culture on the other. Yet it is not with either extreme that Thurber is chiefly concerned so much as it is with the determining role that cultural as­ sumptions in general play in our conception or creation of admissible reality, and that underlying concern, in turn, links "Something to Say" with "The Greatest Man in the

World." In both narratives it is not the nominal protag­ onist— Elliot Vereker in the first; Jack ("Pal") Smurch in the second— who is the satiric victim; it is really ourselves or, what amounts to much the same thing, the ubiquitous human tendency to invest disparate signs or attributes with a single predetermined unifying signifi­ cance and to ignore, as if our very lives were somehow threatened (as, in a sense, they are), all the contrary 137 signs. Thus the burning genius of Elliot Vereker, the hero of "Something to Say":

Vereker was a writer; he was gaunt and emac­ iated from sitting up all night talking; he wore an admiral1s hat which he had stolen from an admiral. Usually he carried with him an old Gladstone bag filled with burned-out electric-light bulbs which it was his pleasure to throw, unexpectedly, against the sides of houses and the walls of rooms. He loved the popping sound they made and the tinkling sprinkle of fine glass that followed. He had an inordinate fondness for echoes. "Halloooo!" he would bawl, wherever he was, in a terrific booming voice that could have conjured up an echo on a prairie. At the most inopportune and inappropriate moments he would snap out frank four-letter words, such as when he was talking to a little child or the sister of a vicar. He had no reverence and no solicitude. He would litter up your house, burning bed­ spreads and carpets with lighted cigarette stubs, and as likely as not depart with your girl and three or four of your most prized books and neckties. He was enamored of breaking phonograph records and phonographs; he liked to tear sheets and pillowcases in two; he would unscrew the doorknobs from your doors so that if you were in you couldn't get out and if you were out you couldn't get in. His was the true artistic fire, the rare gesture of genius (pp. 174-75) .

And the gesture— and gesture alone— it is, or rather a series of gestures, since Vereker's literary production,

"His entire output, I had discovered, consisted of only twenty or thirty pages, most of them bearing the round stain of liquor glasses; one page was the beginning of a play done more or less in the style of Gertrude Stein.

It seemed to me as brilliant as anything of its kind"

(p. 180) . 138

Yet despite the near non-existence of his doubtless

brilliant achievement, Vereker's multitudinous admirers,

the narrator being an obvious exception, remain con­

vinced of his genius: "certainly nobody else we ever met

had, so utterly, the fire of genius that blazed in

Vereker, if outward manifestations meant anything" (p. 180).

The problem, of course, is not whether outward manifesta­

tions mean anything, but that, in the case of Vereker,

they mean everything. The perceived whole, as is not un­

common in such cases, is, then, in the case of Vereker, much greater than the sum of the demonstrable parts, as outrageous behavior is the virtual equivalent of original

achievement and the empty aphorism is— like an occasional

"alas" or like the intellectual violence of "Hell Only

Breaks Loose Once"— the sign certain of unplumbed, per­ haps unfathomable, depths: "Breaking lead pipe is one of

the truly enchanting adventures in life" (p. 177);

"Achievement . . . is the fool's gold of idiots" (p. 177);

"American women . . . are like American colleges: they have dull, half-dead faculties" (p. 178); "Goethe . . . was a waxed figure stuffed with hay. When you say that

Proust was sick, you have said everything. Shakespeare was a dolt. If there had been no Voltaire, it would not have been necessary to create one" (p. 178). And so on.

On the surface, the problem posed by "The Greatest

Man in the World" would appear to be almost the reverse 139

of that posed by Elliot Vereker in "Something to Say."

But it is much the same, only on a grander and hence more

serious scale, a scale that transcends the misplaced

reverence of a small coterie. The problem has, of course,

to do with stereotyping or, more generally, with the fact

that it is not so much reality which determines our ideas

of it as it is our ideas of it which determine reality.

Thus if Elliot Vereker is a genius because he is a rotter,

Jack ("Pal") Smurch, the protagonist of "The Greatest Man

in the World," cannot be a rotter because he is a hero,

and any data, no matter how compelling, which would indi­

cate otherwise must either be interpreted in such a way

as to support the foregone conclusion or ignored. "Pal"

Smurch, the first man to fly non-stop around the world,

cannot, then, be a loathsome, leering lout because the universal fiction or myth which pre-dates and predeter­

mines the reality will not permit it, and the maintenance

of order, decorum, social and psychological stability,

even of civilization itself, depends upon the myth's nurturing and preservation. Yet certain of Smurch1s less

affecting attributes— his personality, for example— are

as impossible to ignore or overlook as they are to contain

or control. Thus, as the village must be destroyed in

order to be saved, so the hero must be disposed of in

order to be preserved, for, like the pigeons who are not

"alas," Smurch is not, cannot be, and never will be 140

Lindbergh. An "erstwhile mechanic's helper in a small garage in Westfield, Iowa" (p. 205) , Smurch is not the

"modest chap, taciturn, blond, popular with friends, pop­ ular with girls" (p. 208) that myth demands but a member of a family that "was despised and feared by its neigh­ bors," a man who "had come to be regarded in Westfield as a nuisance and a menace": "He had, the reporters dis­ covered, once knifed the principal of his high school— not mortally, to be sure, but he had knifed him; and on another occasion, surprised in the act of stealing an altarcloth from a church, he had bashed the sacristan over the head with a pot of Easter lilies; for each of these offences he had served a sentence in the reforma­ tory" (p. 208). The mother, from whose womb he sprang, was a "sullen short-order cook in a shack restaurant on the edge of a tourists' camping ground near Westfield," while "His father appeared to be in jail somewhere for stealing spotlights and laprobes from tourists' automo­ biles; his young brother, a weak-minded lad, had but recently escaped from the Preston, Iowa, Reformatory and was already wanted in several Western towns for the theft of money-order blanks from post offices" (p. 206).

Clearly, the Smurches are not the stuff that inspires.

It is not surprising, then, that, upon alighting from his improbable plane after days, perhaps weeks, in the air, 141

Smurch, who has himself been fueled only by "a gallon of bootleg gin and six pounds of salami" (p. 205) , should prove to be every bit as vulgar, tawdry, crude, uncouth, and foul as high government officials and the responsible press had feared and suspected. Nor is it any surprise that they, the guardians of the public weal, should spirit him away to a secluded nursing home "for the purpose of being instructed in the ethics and behavior of heroism"

(p. 209) . His first press conference, after two weeks of instruction, suggests, however, that Smurch is not a fact to be easily changed. His sneering mouth stuffed with chewing tobacco, "Smurch did not wait for questions.

'Youse guys,1 he said— and the Times man winced— 'Youse guys can tell the cockeyed world dat I put it over on

Lindbergh, see? Yeh— an1 made an ass o' them two frogs.'

The 'two frogs' was a reference to a pair of gallant

French fliers who, in attempting a flight only halfway round the world, had, two weeks before, unhappily been lost at sea" (p. 209). The story given out "to a panting and restless world" was that "'Jacky,1 as he had been arbitrarily nicknamed, would consent to say only that he was very happy and that anyone could have done what he did. 'My achievement has been, I fear, slightly exag­ gerated, ' the Times man's article had him protest, with a modest smile" (p. 210). 142

Presented somewhat later to a group of dignitaries and high officials, including the President, who, it was hoped

could impress upon him the importance of behaving in more decorous fashion, Smurch proves as intractable as ever and his leer as obscene as ever:

In the tense little knot of men standing behind him, a quick, mad impulse flared up. An un­ spoken word of appeal, of command, seemed to ring through the room. Yet it was deadly silent. Charles K. L. Brand, secretary to the Mayor of New York City, happened to be standing nearest Smurch; he looked inquiringly at the President of the United States. The President, pale, grim, nodded shortly. Brand, a tall, powerfully built man, once a tackle at Rutgers, stepped forward, seized the greatest man in the world by his left shoulder and the seat of his pants, and pushed him out the window (p. 212).

Thus, in Thurberian metaphor, are inconvenient and intran­ sigent facts dispensed with, a disposition which has led

Stephen Black to exclaim, in apparently no small moral anguish, that "no decent man can believe, as the narrator does, that it was necessary to push Smurch out the 16 window." Perhaps not, but the alternatives doubtless seemed messier.

But Smurch, of course, never existed. Thurber, on the other hand, did, and at the time that most of the selec­ tions in The Middle-Aged Man were written his marriage of more than a decade to Althea Adams was breaking up, a

fact that, in the eyes of some, explains a good deal, par­ ticularly the appearance of the largest group of stories

in the collection, the stories which have, in one way or 143 another, to do with the battle of the sexes, as it has been called at least since the days of Chancer. Thus

Burton Bernstein, speaking of "the constant, sometimes bitter - skirmishing between the sexes" in many of the stories, says that, "Since almost all the pieces were written during his marital combat with Althea, the theme ' 17 is patently autobiographical." Similarly, Charles Holmes, speaking of Thurber1s obsessive treatment of "the incom- patability of Man and Woman," says that "his preoccupa­ tion with this subject is an obvious projection of his 18 feelings at the time his own marriage was breaking up."

Certainly there is much to support such conclusions, not least the stories themselves, since they are laden with a good deal of intersexual bickering and rancor and since, further, an enduring, if not altogether unambigu­ ous, anti-feminism was an insistent feature of Thurber's life and writings to the end of his days. Yet Thurber was no simple-minded misogynist. The battle-of-the- sexes motif is not so much a vehicle for "sexist" vitup­ eration as it is his richest, most complex, most all- encompassing metaphor for all the ills, spiritual, social, epistemological, and psychological of modernity. All of which is to say simply that while such stories do deal, often powerfully, with the antagonism between the sexes, they deal with a good many other things besides.

"The State of Bontana" (pp. 48-55), for example, dishes 144

out only glancing blows in "The War Between Men and 19 Women," as his famous sequence of drawings is called,

and is, as Bernstein has noted, the first in "a long string 20 of word-game casuals" — "casuals" being the all-inclusive

New Yorker house term for the kinds of essays and short

stories that Thurber and others wrote, essays and stories which were approximately as "casual" as a Renaissance

sonnet cycle.

Like "The State of Bontana," "Everything is Wild" deals with competitiveness in the form of party games, in this case poker rather than word games. The protagonist, Mr.

Brush, is, as his name suggests, brusque, out of patience with the world in general, and generally irritable, a man who, quite reasonably, "never liked anybody he hadn't met before" (p. 42) and who "hated any silly"— which is to say

feminine— "variation of the fine old game of poker"

(p. 43). Although Brush plainly dislikes women and effem­ inate men, his irritation and annoyance has to do with their role as symbols of whimsy and caprice, of mindless, almost giddy change and with his own acutely unhappy sense of the maddening variability of modern life. Thus his

impatience with the ladies' insensitive enthusiasm for

such cutesy games as "Duck-in-the-Pond" and with Mr.

Cartwright's for "Poison Ivy" (p. 43) in which wild cards are chosen with tittering abandon. And thus Mr. Brush's choice, when it comes his turn to deal, of a wholly 145

manufactured game of "Soap-in-Your-Eye": "Out West they

call it Kick-in-the-Pants" (p. 44). The game, the rules

for which Brush obviously makes up as he goes along, is a

reductio-ad-absurdum parody of "Duck-in-the Pond" and

"Poison Ivy" and includes a bewildering array of wildcards, one of which— it hardly matters which— he calls "Splinter-

Under-Your-Thumb" (p. 45), in case anyone— reader or player— should miss his hostile intent. Needless to say, Brush wins the game, with "a royal flush in spades" (p. 45)— which is to say with "the four of diamonds, the eight of hearts, and a pair of sixes" (p. 45). "Everything is Wild" is, then, one of Thurber's more resonant titles as it is one of his more resonant stories, a story that has less to do with the battle of the sexes than it does with the strug­ gle of more sensitive souls to hang onto their sanity in an increasingly insane world.

Like "The State of Bontana" and "Everything is Wild,"

"The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery" deals with a competitiveness of modern life that has nothing to do with capitalism or economics and everything to do with the atomization of society, with, that is, its disintegration as a community of mutually shared, mutually sustaining belief. Thus

"The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery" treats not at all of cufflinks but addresses the problem of why, late at night, a middle- aged man should be on his hands and knees, crawling along a roadside, barking like a dog, while his wife is driving 146 their automobile slowly toward him with its headlights shining on him. That, at least, is the mystery insofar as it initially concerns the motorcycle policeman who comes upon them (p. 19). The real mystery— the man's explana­ tion that he is, sans eyeglasses, searching for a lost pair of cufflinks being merely an alibi— is whether a human's eyes will shine like an animal's eyes when they are struck by the light from an oncoming car. The husband says they will not; his wife that they will. The issue has suddenly become a matter of great contention between them, with money riding on the outcome. The outcome, however, need not concern us, especially since there is none, neither being willing to concede.

But what ought to concern us in this story and in the many like it is the essentially trivial nature of the argu­ ment and the vehemence with which it is prosecuted by the contending parties, usually, but not always, husband and wife. They are not, after all, arguing about theology, or philosophy, or politics, or the arts, or about any­ thing generally considered to be of consequence, and the fact that they are not proves not that they agree about such matters but that they— almost invariably well-educated and intelligent sorts— find such subjects and the issues they raise neither knowable nor discussable. Thus their attention to and arguments about details, about triviali­ ties, bespeaks a disbelief in any kind of larger coherence, 147

an implicit recognition of the selective nature of per­

ception which leads them to believe only in the emptiness,

the pretentiousness, and finally the hopelessness of all claims to larger patterns of understanding and knowledge.

The vituperative character of their arguments and the sheer obstinacy with which they cling to untenable positions and propositions (such as, for example, the proposition that a human's eyes will, under identical conditions, shine like a cat's) are evidence of two relatively constant features of human nature and of Thurber's art: the need to salve one's own pain by inflicting it on others ("misery loves company") and the need simply to prevail, to have one's beliefs, however arbitrary, and, hence, one's self confirmed.

Both needs, in Thurber's view, have taken on increased ur­ gency: in the first instance because the pain intelligent persons suffer in an increasingly unintelligible world grows increasingly greater; in the second instance, because there is so little to believe that each little belief becomes relatively more important, for if one is to be able to function at all, one must believe that he knows some­ thing, and he is apt, therefore, to cling to what he thinks, he knows with apparently unwarranted vehemence, with a vehemence that is born, when one comes down to it, of desperation.

If, then, Thurber writes "largely about small matters and smally about great affairs" (My Life and Hard Times 148

[p. 11]), the point is not that he is a small-.or unimport­ ant writer. It is rather that the very trivialities he so often writes about are a measure of and a metaphor for the lost sense of what is important— transcendently important.

The trivialities that Thurber deals with and the desperate heat with which his characters contend for their seemingly trivial points and trivial goals are, then, a measure of their transcendent importance to them and to their sense of meaning and coherence, place and purpose— none of which are pre­ cisely trivial matters, no matter how trivially they are compelled to deal with them or to attempt to satisfy them.

The battle of the sexes, then, is not so much a literal enactment of a pedestrian anti-feminism as it is Thurber's way of clarifying, embodying, working out— for himself, it may be, as much as for us— what is perhaps the central fact of the modern epoch. To the extent, then, that the battle of the sexes represents a real conflict, that conflict is not between male and female so much as it is between competing or antagonistic epistemologies or modes of knowing (or not knowing) and, hence, of existence.

These competing or antagonistic modes of existence are sufficiently different as to amount almost to different

(spheres of existence which can be variously labeled as the inner versus the outer, the meditative versus the mechanical, or even, to put the matter in terms of "isms," 149

as Mittyism versus what Phillip Wylie called "Momism."

However we call them or even conceive of them, it is finally

important only to recognize that the battle of the sexes is not ultimately about the sexes at all, which, no doubt, explains why Thurber, nominally one of the greater "sexists" of our age, has not been the object of any noticeable feminist outrage.

Part of the reason, of course, why Thurber has prompted no particular feminist rancor is that he has taken the pre­ emptive step of reversing the sexual stereotypes, evidence in itself of his vision of a world turned topsy-turvy. In

Thurber's art it is generally the woman who embodies the active principle while the male is passive, withdrawn, lost.

She is the master of men and machines, the literalist, at home with garage mechanics, traffic cops, and parking lot attendants— at home in the world as it is and undismayed by the world as it is. She is the practical one, the one who takes reality as given, the one who is, as the world measures such things, more often right than wrong. And thus, to the extent that the Thurber male dreams, as he very frequently does, his dreams of mastery, he dreams not of being more masculine but of being more feminine, which, of course, is to say more masculine.

So much, then, for the battle of the sexes. Yet a battle there is, and if the Thurber male is awed and humiliated by those, be they male or female, who can somehow master things, he is also uncertainly contemptuous 150 of them, envying them (as Walter Mitty, for example, does) and sensing at the same time that they are a trifle stupid, unaware of the variability of things, unaware even of physical danger— a lack of awareness which perversely seems to shield them from it, as it shielded the legendary Cora

Allyn in "The Indian Sign." The great-great-great-great- great-grandmother" (p. 63) of Cora Allyn Bentley, she is the epitome of, as such things are measured in Thurber, the womanly woman, and Henry Bentley, the father of young

Cora, naturally looks upon his daughter's namesake with a mixture of fear, awe, and loathing. The original Cora

Allyn, family legend has it, single-handedly slew nineteen

Pequot Indians near New London, Connecticut in 1643 or 1644, a spectre that continues to haunt Bentley since among his wife's connections "There were literally hundreds of Coras," a name that keeps "recurring, like leaf blight, among the spreading branches of the Allyn family" (p. 64). Though he harbors some well-concealed doubts on the "dimly authen­ ticated" (p. 63) episode, Bentley is plainly disturbed and dismayed by it, his fearful preoccupation with it being the index of his character as Cora Allyn's fearlessness is of hers.

In "Mr. Pendly and the Poindexter" and "Smashup" we enter the age of the machine, but the central problem remains much the same. The issue is still one of mastery— not, as it is in Chaucer, of one sex over the other, but of mind over matter. In both stories, two themes which are usually conceived of as separate and distinct, the battle of the sexes and, what Charles Holmes has called 21 "the menace of the machine," are shown to be interrelated and, equally, to be related to still a third nominally 22 distinct theme, the theme of fantasy, of withdrawal into the world of the mind. For the Thurber male or, to be more precise, the Thurber hero it— masculinity, machinery, matter— is all mind. Thus in both stories it is not so much women who arouse the hero's hostility and inspire his awe, fear, and secret loathing, making him feel humiliated and inadequate, as it is people, male or female, for whom physical and mental reality are much the same thing, people who have no imaginable interiority, whose minds, as Norman

Mailer once said of Kate Millett's have all the curves of a flat-iron. Such people are adept with machines because so the implicit metaphor goes, they are themselves machines.

Bert Pendly, by contrast, the hero of "Mr. Pendly and the Poindexter," and Tommy Trinway, the hero of "Smashup," are creatures of the mind, men who, by the world's standard and the standards of their wives, are distracted, absent- minded, and inept, men who live on the inside, in their thoughts. Aware of the problem and of his limitations,

Mr. Pendly has not "driven the family car for five years, since, to be exact, the night of the twenty-third of

October, 1930, when he mistook a pond for a new concrete 152 road and turned off onto it." "You can't," as the narra­ tor points out, "drive toward a body of water thinking it's made of concrete without having your grip on yourself permanently loosened" (p. 56). Having their grips on them­ selves permanently loosened, not being precisely certain who they are or where they are or what is what is the attri­ bute that makes the Thurber hero an object of condescension to his wife and of contempt to others— to others, that is, like the car salesman named Huss in "Mr. Pendly and the

Poindexter" (p. 58) and the unnamed mechanic who refers to

Mr. Pendly as "Bud," as in "Look out, Bud" (p. 59):

"Mr. Pendly had the same feeling in the presence of mech­ anics that, as a child, he had had during church sermons: he felt that he was at the mercy of malignant powers beyond his understanding" (p. 58). Given the power that such people have to intimidate, it is small wonder that Mr.

Pendly's reveries, like those of all of Thurber's Walter

Mittys, run to fantasies in which, with studied nonchalance, he beats them at their own game:

. . . Mac got out from under the big car he was working on and said: "Well, it's got me licked." Mr. Pendly smiled. "Yeah?" he said, slowly removing his coat and vest. He handed them to Mac. Then he crawled under the car, looked the works over coldly, tinkered delicately and ex­ pertly with a couple of rods and a piston, tightened a winch gasket, blew softly into a valve, and crawled out again. He put on his coat and vest. "Try her now," he said, indifferently, to Mac. Mac tried her. She worked beautifully. 153

The big mechanic turned slowly to Mr. Pendly and held out an oily hand. "Brother," said Mac, "I hand it to you"(p. 61).

In "Smashup," Tommy Trinway's victory over the malig­

nant powers of literalism is more than merely imaginary—

or at least he chooses to believe it is, which amounts to

much the same thing. Like Bert Pendly, Trinway is acutely

aware of his limitations when it comes to things mechanical

and has been ever since, at the age of fifteen, he knocked

the lamp off the carriage when he was trying to maneuver

Maud and the family surrey into a livery stable. Again,

like Bert Pendly, he is, if not content, at least gratefully

resigned to letting his wife, Betty, do the driving. She,

of course, is extraordinarily competent and confident

behind the wheel, at one, so to speak, with the machine:

"She drove very fast herself, with keen concentration, quick

reflexes, and evident enjoyment. Tommy would find himself

studying her, when she was driving. There was an assured

set to her mouth and a certain glint in her eyes. It dis­

mayed him slightly" (p. 196). Trinway's dismay, however,

turns to panic when, because of his wife's sprained wrist,

he must take her place and drive the car back from Cape

Cod to New York, an event for which he practices with the

intensity of one who is about to enter a decathalon of the

soul. The dread day arrived, the actual event, ordinary

enough for most, is for Trinway a nightmare come to life: 154

His shoulders ached from leaning tensely for­ ward. The Bronx loomed up before him, like an ether nightmare he had had as a boy. Only there had been, that time, finally oblivion, and here now were unending shouts and banging, and the roaring of elevated trains overhead, and a snarl of broad, ugly streets curving off in every direction, and big, sweaty women push­ ing baby carriages, and scowling men in shirt sleeves jabbering, and trucks rumbling and pounding by, and taxis rushing around him, and lights turning red and green under their iron hoods, and policemen making formidable gestures with their huge hands (p. 198).

The nightmare is not eased by his wife's impatient expostula­ tions, nor by the apparition of an old woman lurching sud­ denly into his path:

He had a quick, hot sense of horror, buildings and people writhed around him, the brakes of cars screamed. Then all the noises of the city stopped. Everything stopped. "Nice piece of drivin1, mister," a voice was saying, and Tommy looked up at a policeman standing beside the door of his car. The policeman walked toward the back of the car, and Tommy opened the door and leaned out and followed him with his eyes. A man was supporting the angular old woman. She was grinning idiotically. "I guess she's all right," the man told the policeman. "I seen it. He didn't hit her. He just grazed her." "You're lucky, lady," said the policeman. "You can thank your stars that fella can drive like that" (p. 199).

His manhood redeemed at last, his felt inadequacies become no more than a bad dream from which he has just awakened,

Trinway naturally chooses to disbelieve his wife's mean- spirited claim that she pulled the handbrake, she who saved them all: "She stared at her husband over the cigarette and, striking another match, still stared. He stared back at her. He tossed off his Scotch with a new, quick 155

gesture, set the glass down, got up, and lounged over to

the desk. 'We'll want two single rooms, tonight, Mr. Brent,'

he said to the man at the desk. Mr. Brent looked over his

glasses in some surprise as Tommy signed the register and

then walked jauntily out the revolving doors into the

street, whistling" (p. 200).

Trinway's victory will, of course, be short-lived, for women in Thurber's caricature are finally indomitable,

shielded by a metallic, linear literalism of such durability and inflexibility that they can no more be changed or de­ feated or even killed than an automobile can be changed or defeated or killed. They are simply blind, unblinking facts as we see in "Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife," the plot

(in both senses of the word) of which is elegantly simple:

Mr. Preble, a lawyer, wishes to run off with his sten­ ographer— to the South Seas, no doubt, where, in the

Thurberian manner, he will wander like the mysterious Con- radean figure he knows himself at heart to be. That his dream is doomed we know from the start, since his

stenographer responds to his lurid suggestion by chirp­

ing, "all righty" (p. 81). Aware that his wife will not grant him a divorce, Preble knows that he will have to kill her, and to that end he attempts to lure her down to the cellar. She, of course, knows that he wants to murder her, but she is too literal-minded to grasp the

abstract notion of her own death. Thus - she objects to the whole idea only because her husband never does anything

right, because he is inept, because he botches everything.

Once in the cellar, she does not plead for her life but protests instead that it is too cold, that "Any other husband would have buried his wife in the summer" (p. 85),

that any other man "would have fallen in love [with the

stenographer] long before" (p. 86), and that his choice of a shovel as the lethal instrument is entirely wrong:

"Do you want to leave a great big clue right here in the middle of everything where the first detective that comes snooping around will find it? Go out in the street and find some piece of iron or something— something that doesn't belong to you." "Oh, all right," said Mr. Preble. "But there won't be any piece of iron in the street. Women always expect to pick up a piece of iron anywhere." "If you look in the right place you'll find it," said Mrs. Preble. "And don't be gone long. Don't you dare stop in at the cigarstore. I'm not going to stand down here in this cold cellar all night and freeze." "All right," said Mr. Preble. "I'll hurry." "And shut that door behind you!" she screamed after him. "Where were you born— in a barn?" (p. 86).

Charles Deshler's resolution to the intolerable and incessant irritations of marriage is not, like Preble's, to murder his wife nor even, like Trinway's, to walk away.

It is instead, as we see in "The Curb in the Sky," to withdraw. Deshler, "a truly excellent raconteur" (p. 76), is in the unhappy position of having his wife constantly correcting minor details in his stories or of having her, just as he is approaching the climax of an account, come 157 barging in, "like a tackier from behind, [and] throw him just as he [is] about to cross the goal-line. There is nothing in life," as the sympathetic narrator puts it,

"more shocking to the nerves and to the mind than this"

(p. 77). To save his sanity, therefore, Deshler decides to tell stories only about his dreams, "knowing that

Dorothy could not correct him on his own dreams." He finds instead that his dreams "became the only life he had that was his own" (p. 79). Thus does Deshler lose his sanity in order to save it, descending into monomania, losing touch altogether with reality, with substance, beginning "to live entirely in shadow" (p. 79). But as

Mr. Preble could not escape his wife through murder, so

Deshler cannot escape his through madness. Telling a mad story of his trip to the moon, he describes the part where a man who looks like Santa Claus waved at him to stop:

"So I pulled over to a curb " "No. You pulled over to a cloud," said Dorothy. "There aren't any curbs in the sky. There couldn1t be. You pulled over to a cloud." Charlie sighed and turned slightly in his bed and looked at me. Dorothy looked at me, too, with her pretty smile. "He always gets that story wrong," she said (p. 80).

If Charlie Deshler's withdrawal is purely defensive, hopelessly and self-destructively defensive, George Bid- well 's is simultaneously aggressive and defensive and, hence, infinitely more satisfying as it proves more 158

injurious to those whom he is bent on-escaping— particu­

larly his wife. There is, in fact, some question in "The

Private Life of Mr. Bidwell" whether Bidwell enjoys hold­

ing his breath— at home, at parties, and elsewhere— for

its own sake or only because it annoys his wife, driving her, in supremest insult, to tell him that he is acting

"like a goop." Evidently it is the latter, for he even­ tually gives it up when it fails to provide the desired results and takes instead to multiplying numbers in his head, a stratagem which proves successful when his wife notices him sitting alone at a party and senses that he is up to something:

"What are you doing?" she demanded. "Hm?" he said, looking at her vacantly. "What are you doing?" she demanded, again. He gave her a harsh, venomous look, which she returned. "I'm multiplying numbers in my head," he said, slowly and evenly, "if you must know." In the prolonged, probing examination that they silently, without moving any muscles save those of their eyes, gave each other, it became solidly, frozenly apparent to both of them that the end of their endurance had arrived. The curious bond that held them together snapped . . . (p. 74).

In the brief coda which ends the story, we are treated to a vision of George Bidwell in heaven— the heaven of solitary unconcern for anything beyond the most inconsequential trivialities, the heaven of simply not caring, of release from all the conflicts that characterize our lives:

"Geoge Bidwell lives alone now (his wife remarried). He 159 never goes to parties any more, and his old circle of friends rarely sees him. The last time that any of them did see him, he was walking along a country road with the halting, uncertain gait of a blind man: he was trying to see how many steps he could take without opening his eyes" (p. 74).

Better, then, so runs the logic of the marriage stories, to keep one's eyes closed and create a world within, how­ ever impoverished and empty, than to open one's eyes and one's self to the chaos, confusion, and conflict that, for the sharp-eyed and sensitive, lurk without. Yet these stories of isolation and even desolation are an inverted expression of a suppressed desire— a desire that gives them point and potency— for an end to isolation, for oneness with someone. That need is revealed in what, for want of a better term, we might call the mood stories, which, in turn, are simply the marriage stories turned inside out.

In these stories, the underlying theme is, very much as it is in the marriage stories, the pain of isolation, pain for which the union of marriage is not so much a solu­ tion as an incessant reminder of its insolubility. In short, then, the marriage and mood stories, the stories of isolation, are, to vary the metaphor, mirror images of each other. Thus the theme of a story like "The Gentleman is Cold" (pp. 1-6) is the emptiness and aimlessness of the solitary life, while in "The Man on the Train"

(pp. 201-03) it is the mysterious, perhaps self-reflecting 160

sympathy that individuals who do not know each other can

feel, they know not why, for one another, even if they are of the same sex— or perhaps especially if they are of the

same sex. In the best and best known stories of the type,

"One is a Wanderer" and "The Evening's at Seven," the need

for a sense of congruence, of unity and belonging, receives, respectively, its fullest and its finest treatment. In

"One is a Wanderer" (pp. 215-23), however, the title is perhaps too close an approximation or expression of the plot, a plot (or more exactly absence of a plot) which

lacks Thurber's customary compression and control and which strikes the reader as perhaps too literally autobiograph­ ical, even self-indulgent. If "One is a Wanderer" treats in rambling— albeit appropriate— fashion the loneliness of a writer who is divorced or separated, the more successful

"The Evening's at Seven" treats in a manner reminiscent 23 of Hemingway matter reminiscent of Fitzgerald: "She asked him for a cigarette and he walked over and gave her one, not touching her fingers but very conscious of her

fingers. He was remembering a twilight when it had been raining and dark, and he thought of April and kissing and

laughter. He noticed a clock on the mantel and it was ten after seven. She said you never used to believe in clocks. He laughed and looked at her for a time and said

I have to be at the hotel by seven-thirty, or I don't get anything to eat; it's that sort of hotel. Oh, she said" 161

(p. 191). If the manner of "The Evening's at Seven" is not typical of Thurber (except, perhaps, in his parodies), the mattgr is, for underlying and informing this brief, extremely controlled, utterly poignant glimpse of a lost affair and marital emptiness is a deep sense of longing to be at home in the world and at one with it, a deep sense of longing for place and permanence that is more spiritual than physical, a sense that, in the works of Thurber as in our lives, can only be known through its absence.

It is that debilitating— even paralyzing--sense of absence that is behind Thurber's treatment of the theme of withdrawal or willed isolation and consequently behind two of the more remarkable stories in the collection, "The

Departure of Emma Inch" and "A Box to Hide In." Although each deals differently with the sense of being overwhelmed by a confusing and frightening world, their effect is to cast that world in a new light., Whatever else it is, that light is not, as Richard Tobias would have it, the light of comedy, for there is little that, in a sober appraisal, is funny about either story. Certainly Emma's new-found employers in "The Departure of Emma Inch" (pp. 7-.13) do not find her especially amusing, though Tobias characterizes her as "one of that long line of Thurber servants who do not have the brain to cope with ordinary experience" and asserts that "her inability to comprehend" is "funny in the tradition of that familiar comic type, the country 162 24 bumpkin." If the matter is as simple as that, we can only

wonder why, from the moment of her arrival to the moment of

her departure, Emma leaves the literate and urbane Thurmans

so bewildered and distressed that they must seek refuge in

huge swigs of Scotch in order to escape her haunting

presence. Emma is not so much a comic stereotype or, in

singularly ill-chosen phrase, a creature without "the human 25 dross" of personality as she is a personality-less spectre who casts grave doubt on the existence of personality itself, the existence of the self itself. Because she is innocent and ignorant and afraid, a human blank except for her fear,

she is a threat to the precarious stability, the uneasy urbanity, and self-deluded sophistication of the Thurmans, for she sees the modern mechanized world with its modern mechanized inhabitants as the frightening and bewildering place that the studied mannerisms and witty conversation of the Thurmans and their numerous tribe are designed to hold at bay. Emma, then, is a kind of ghost— the kind of ghost who is so afraid of us that she makes us suddenly afraid of ourselves, the kind of ghost who calls our own existence into question precisely as we try to reassure her about her own. Thus all of the Thurmans' attempts to persuade Emma of the unreasonableness of her boundless fear prove not to reassure her but, instead, to prove to them that the world as we would experience it without the mediation of our myths and mental mannerisms is not an especially reassuring 163

or reasonable place.

The knowledge that the world is not a reassuring or

reasonable place constitutes the informing principle behind

the final narrative in The Middle-Aged Man, "A Box to Hide

In," a story that casts a retrospective light over the entire collection. The story itself is not so much, as Burton

Bernstein has characterized it, "the most disturbing piece" 26 in the collection as it is simply its logical extension.

In seeking a box large enough to hide in, the narrator of "A

Box to Hide In" is doing nothing more than acting out in a physical and literal way what many of Thurber's characters have attempted to do in an intellectual, psychological, or metaphorical way, a point which the narrator tries to explain to an uncomprehending grocer:

"Whatta you mean you want to hide in this box?" one grocer asked me. "It's a form of escape," I told him, "hiding in a box. It circumscribes your worries and the range of your anguish. You don't see people, either." "How in the hell do you eat when you're in this box?" asked the grocer. I said I had never been in a box and didn't know, but that that would take care of itself. "Well," he said, finally, "I haven't got any boxes, only some pasteboard cartons that cans come i n ." It was the same every place. I gave up when it got dark and the groceries closed, and hid in my room again. I turned out the light and lay on the bed. You feel better when it gets dark (pp. 224-25).

The box sought for in vain by the narrator is, of course, merely some way, short of the darkest way of all, for con­ taining and controlling his own consciousness and, hence, 164

of circumscribing the range of his anguish. Here as else­ where in The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze— as

elsewhere, for that matter, in the works of James Thurber—

the mind is at once the source of all our difficulty and

our only refuge. It is all that we have left. 165

NOTES

The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (New York: Perennial Library, Harper and Row, 1976). All subsequent references and quotations are based upon this edition. The Universal Library edition (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, n.d.) employs the same pagination, and both are paginated exactly as the original edition.

2 See Bowden, James Thurber: A Bibliography, pp. 118-26.

^The Clocks of Columbus, p. 177.

^Ibid., p. 178.

^See, for example, The Art of James Thurber, p. 59.

"Thinking Ourselves Into Trouble," p. 310. 7 See, for example, "A Good Man" in My World— And Welcome To It (New York: Harbrace Paperbound Library, Har- court, Brace and World, 1969), pp. 123-33, subsequently re­ printed with revisions as "Adam's Anvil" in The Thurber Album: A Collection of Pieces About People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), pp. 23-35. My World— And Welcome To It was originally published in 1942.

o "Thurber: Man Against Monster," Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Charles S. Holmes (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 168. Jennings' article originally appeared in The Observer, November 5, 1961, p. 10. 9 The Clocks of Columbus,- p. 177.

^ I n My World-And Welcome To It; all quotations are from the edition cited in n. 7.

"^Norris Yates, "James Thurber's Little Man and Liberal Citizen," Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 34; rpt. from The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century (Ames, Iowa: The Iowa State Univ. Press, 1964) . 166

12 Both are collected in My World— And Welcome To It (1942), pp. 18-32 and 139-53, respectively, in the edition cited above.

13 James Thurber; His Masquerades, p. 58.

14 "Lions and Lemmings, Toads and Tigers," Thurber; A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 138-43; rpt. from The Reporter, 15 (December 13, 1956), pp. 42-44.

15 The basis for the distinction between parody and satire used here is simply one of specificity: the parodies are satiric imitations while the object of attack in the satires is broader and more general. The terminology is doubtless a little loose, but Thurber himself seldom, except in the fables and fairy tales, hews closely to any preestablished literary forms or conventions.

16 James Thurber: His Masquerades, p. 53.

17 Thurber: A Biography, p. 260.

1 O The Clocks of Columbus, p. 173.

19 In Men, Women and Dogs (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977), pp. 187-205. Men, Women and Dogs was originally published in 1943.

20 Thurber: A Biography, p. 26.

21 See, for example, The Clocks of Columbus, p. 197.

23 Holmes says much.the same thing, only he.says it about "One is a Wanderer" which is, he says, "reminiscent of the method of Hemingway, while the subject matter, the pain of lost love, is closer to Fitzgerald." The Clocks of Columbus, p. 172. 24 The Art of James Thurber, pp. 49-50. 167

25 See Tobias, p. 59.

2 6 Thurber; A Biography, p. 26, CHAPTER V

LET YOUR MIND ALONE

If The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze is a darker, more various, and more serious book than any of the collections that precede it, Let Your Mind Alone (1937) is still more mature work. Though it has no narratives to equal "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," "The Catbird Seat,"

"The Cane in the Corridor," or, in their grim way, "The

Whip-Poor-Will" and "A Friend to Alexander,"'*' it is, in the uniform excellence of its essays and in the deep serious­ ness of many of its narratives, the crowning achievement of

Thurber's early period. It may even be the best of all the standard collections, for, whatever else it is, it is a work of superb balance, exquisite tension, and great equil­ ibrium, a portrait, in the end, of a man on an intellectual tightrope, of a man who refuses to succumb to the lure of new doctrine, the bliss of not thinking. Regardless, then, of the subject or form of individual sections, Let Your

Mind Alone is, in its total effect, one long meditation, a meditation, as the title suggests, on the mind. In its resistance to all received ideas and all fashionable assumptions, Let Your Mind Alone is the work of a first- rate thinker and, equally rare, of a courageous man, 168 169 qualities for which Thurber has never been sufficiently valued. Putting aside the terrible irony of the blindness

that was soon to darken and ultimately almost to blacken his vision, Thurber1s chief distinction is that at his best he teaches us how to see, and in Let Your Mind Alone he is at his best the better part of the time.

The title of the work derives, of course, from a series of nine articles under the same general heading

(i.e., "Let Your Mind Alone!") that Thurber wrote for The 2 New Yorker between November, 1936 and May, 1937. The tenth article, "A Dozen Disciplines" (the fourth as it ap­ pears in the book), was written specifically for the col­ lection. While these articles deal with the books of— to glorify them— applied psychology that then as now litter the American intellectual landscape and pollute the American mind, the effect of reading and, after his fashion, review­ ing them seems to have clarified or even crystallized

Thurber*s thinking, albeit not in ways intended by their authors. Having gone, as it were, to the well and drunk deeply of the waters therein, Thurber returned strengthened in mind and spirit, his attention more alert and alive than ever before to the stupidity problem— the problem, to sum­ marize the unsummarizable, of assuming that because our perceptions, however dim and incomplete, are a reflection of external phenomena, external phenomena are a function of 170 our perceptions and can therefore be controlled by con­ trolling our perceptions, as, for example, through positive thinking or more generally, through blind adherence to any dogma or doctrine or system, from, say, science on the one hand to Marxism on the other. If the books of mental uplift and inspiration that seem to prosper in periods of doubt and despair— periods like the Depression, periods like the present— amount, in Thurber’s view to a golden invitation to tap-dance through life's minefield, the distinctive feature of Let Your Mind Alone lies in Thurber's greater willingness to enter the minefield himself and there to do combat with such works and with such other objects or systems of man's desperate allegiance as call themselves to his attention. In short, in Let Your Mind Alone Thurber begins, tentatively, to enter the world— at first, for good; later, for ill.

Yet even when he is dealing with matters of psychologi­ cal or political prescription, Thurber's basic concern in

Let Your Mind Alone is much the same as it is in The Middle-

Aged Man and in the earlier works. His concern is with the prefabricated, more or less systematic thoughts and beliefs we live by, the stuff w’e try to believe, the stuff we call our ideas, the stuff we call ourselves— for at bottom they are much the same, the one serving as the subject of

Thurber*s essays, the other as the subject of his short stories. Thurber's point— if he can be reduced to such a 171 thing— is that both are equally made up, both equally fictions, both at variance with actuality, and both, in consequence, equally fragile, as Thurber's heroes, for example, well know, since they are men who cannot— as the rest of us can— persuade themselves of their own fictions or even, when one comes down to it, of their own existence, let alone of their right to exist. Thus they live (to use the word loosely) in a perpetual state of dissolution, a perpetual reminder to the rest of us that whatever is made up can be just as easily unmade up, that in the funhouse of the mind nothing is done that cannot be undone, that nothing is fixed and final, nothing for certain and forever.

And thus Thurber's vision is of our fragility no less than our fatuity, for they are much the same after all.

This is not, of course, to suggest that Thurber1s nar­ ratives and essays are disguised treatises on the problems of epistemology and identity, but it is to insist that nearly everything in Let Your Mind Alone is the result of an acute awareness of and sensitivity to precisely those 3 problems. In "Guns and Game Calls," for example, we have the typical Thurber hero (in this case the narrator) and the typical Thurber situation in the confrontation between the hero and the "muscular, keen-eyed salesman who knew all about guns" (p. 173), those ultimate symbols of forth­ right, unambiguous masculinity. It follows, of course, that the narrator-hero cannot bring up the subject of the 172 broken, rusty derringer that he has found and that he has been carrying around in his pocket, impotently "clicking it at people" (p. 172). Confronted by the salesman, the embodiment of everything he feels he ought to be, pretends

(to himself) to be, and knows, at bottom, that he cannot be, the hero finds himself confronted with his own imposture.

Rather than expose it to others by exposing his broken, pathetic little weapon— he would as soon drop his trousers or take off his shirt and flex his inadequate muscles— he purchases a copy of Stoeger's "Catalog and Handbook" and subsequently seeks simultaneously to regain his lost sense of mastery by mastering the subject of "English and Amer­ ican game calls" (p. 175) and to fill up the self's sudden emptiness with something else, thereby concentrating the mind and distracting its attention away from the painful subject of itself.

Though it is a more literal and less fanciful "piece" than "Guns and Game Calls," "Doc Marlowe" also deals with the theme of identity and imposture, the two being in

Thurber's view— as, indeed, they were in Doc Marlowe's— much the same thing. A first-person reminiscence in form,

"Doc Marlowe" treats of the speaker's youthful worship of the aging (and finally dying) Wild-West hero and "medicine- show man" (p. 191) who lived in a Columbus boarding house in the early years of this century. More important, it treats as well of the speaker's stunned reaction to the 173 discovery that Marlowe, who had been for him a paragon of masculine strength, solidity, and substance, was in fact a man of purely self-created legends, all of them false, an impostor who was at the same time a thoroughly bewildering mix of cynicism and strange adherence to principle, selling people "doctored" cars on the one hand, refusing to water- down his Blackhawk linament on the other. Doc Marlowe, in short, was the speaker's— Thurber's— initiation into the ambiguities, an initiation which, as the present collection attests, continues to provide him with endless matter for 4 reflection.

The ambiguities are, on a more imagistic level, very much a part of "The Admiral on the Wheel," a fanciful ac­ count of Thurber's increasingly defective vision (and, in fact, growing blindness) in which, in a manner reminiscent of his drawings, the blurred images that present themselves to his consciousness serve as a kind of metaphor for the incongruities and chaotic collocations of modern experience and of the unaided modern mind: "I saw the Cuban flag fly­ ing over a national bank, I saw a gay old lady with a gray parasol walk right through the side of a truck, I saw a cat roll across a street in a small striped barrel, I saw bridges rise lazily into the air, like balloons" (pp. 241-

42). Yet if the Thurber persona expresses a preference for such incongruous images and a corresponding antipathy toward more pedestrian visions of existence, it is not 174 so much, because, as Charles Holmes would have it, Thurber seriously upholds "the superiority of fantasy and daydream 5 to logical thought" as it is because he conceives of them as belonging to different, though complementary, realms, with fantasy serving not only to provide surcease from the pressures, constraints, and sheer difficulty of logical thought but serving equally to provide a check against its rigid, exacting, and not infrequent falsifications. Thus the threat: "Some day, I suppose, when the clouds are heavy and the rain is coming down and the pressure of realities is too great, I shall deliberately take my glasses off and go wandering out into the streets" (pp. 244-45).

"Realities," the careful reader will note, is plural, and the difficulty lies in sorting them out, in distinguishing one from another. In that respect, imagination is not so much a hindrance as it is the only possible help, the only possible means of sorting them out.

Imagination or fantasy is, then, not so much the antithesis of logical thought as it is a necessary adjunct.

It is also, of course, a means for creating a more logical or at least agreeable world, as we can appreciate in

"Goodbye, Mr. 0. Charles Meyeri," since there is, for all practical purposes, no Mr. 0. Charles Meyer to whom to say goodbye. 0. Charles Meyer is a construct of the narrator's imagination, a man (if, in fact, he exists at all) whose 175 name appears in connection with an upholstering business on a large sign which the narrator sees, as he can see noth­ ing else except for nondescript, anonymous rooftops, from the window of an apartment which he must soon vacate. The point of the narrative-essay is, of course, that amidst such undifferentiated desolation the imaginary 0. Charles

Meyer provides a focal point, an organizing principle for the mind, providing it with "a sense of peace and assur­ ance," a sense of the "immutable" (p. 209). Meyer thus becomes an "elderly and kindly" Adam, the progenitor of a homely race in the Eden of the narrator’s imagination: "I figure him as having a number of sons: 0. Freddy, 0. Samuel,

0. George, 0. Charles, Jr., and— if it is not too much to ask— 0. Henry. I think there may have been three daughters,

0. Grace, 0. Patience, and 0. Charity, but they all married upholsterers in beaver hats and went away, many years ago.

I do not want to know what the 0. stands for" (p. 208).

That none of this is, as the world measures such things, true matters, of course, not a whit, for some things should be held to be true whether they are or not: "If this is not true, I don't want to be told so. 0. Charles Meyer is, after all, my own creation" (p. 208). And so, the implicit moral runs, our own creation is all that we have left, all that we can hope to possess.

Nor are things much better in what is left of Creation itself, for in the arboreal Eden of the Connecticut 176 countryside, much as in the desolate roofscape of "Goodbye,

Mr. 0. Charles Meyeri," man's insistent need to impose the order of his own mind on the order of Creation is evident in the ugly gash of the "concrete New Milford road, which is black with the dropped oil of a million cars," a road down which cars, another monument to man's supremacy, roar

"with a high ominous whine" (p. 235) . In "The Wood Duck" the jarring incongruity between man's works and ways and those of nature is, of course, heightened by the sight of a wood duck in the busy driveway of a roadside apple and cider stand where, as the speaker and his wife discover, he has been for about two weeks, "immensely solitary,"

"now and then billing up water from a dirty puddle in the middle of the drive" (p. 236). The duck, a figure of al­ most tragic majesty and mystery, a symbol of the remote and unreachable, is, of course, with tragic inevitability hit by a speeding car. Having somehow survived that and the further indignity of being chased by a crippled setter, the duck flutters feebly off, guided, as the speaker spec­ ulates, by "a sure atavistic urge," heading "towards home," wherever in the world that might be. After the witnesses to the spectacle have exhausted their store of reassuring explanations, the speaker and his wife themselves head towards home: "We drove away with a great deal to talk about (I almost forgot the cider). I explained the irony, 177

I think I explained the profound symbolism, of a wild

duck's becoming attached to a roadside stand. My wife

strove simply to understand the duck's viewpoint. She did­

n't get anywhere" (p. 23 9). Later, still having got no­

where, even after a stiff drink, the couple, guided no doubt

by "a sure atavistic urge" of their own, returns to the

stand. The duck, likewise, has returned.

Like "The Wood Duck," "The Breaking Up of the Winships"

is also about a duck— in this case, as befits the urban and

urbane world of Gordon and Martha Winship, the duck in

question is Donald Duck, and the issue at hand, specifical­

ly, is whether Donald Duck is or is not a greater actor

than Greta Garbo (see, e.g., p. 85). In this contest of

wills, the issue of which is only slightly less important

than the question of whether, as in "The Topaz Cufflinks

Mystery," a human's eyes will reflect the lights of an on­

coming car like an animal's, Gordon holds for the affirma­

tive, Marcia for the negative. But the apparent issue is

not, of course, the real issue at all. The real issue is

the fundamental one of whose will will prevail, which is

to‘say whose vision and version of himself and the world

will triumph. The issue is important insofar as once it

is fundamentally joined there is room only for one ver­

sion, as Thurber points out more insistently and incisive­

ly than anyone and as a quick glance at, say, the corres­

pondence columns of The New York Review of Books will 178 instantly confirm. We do not, at bottom, suffer each other's versions gladly, not even when we are being good- humoredly arbitrary. Thus, in the case of Gordon and

Marcia Winship the apparently trivial and certainly absurd disagreement becomes a life-and-death struggle, with the disadvantage that neither of the contending parties agrees to concede or at least to die, thereby permitting the other to live, at least temporarily, in peace, secure for the time being in the solitary solace of his suffusing il­ lusions. With Marcia, the more superficial and hence less admirable of the two, the controlling illusion in her intellectual firmament is nothing more imaginative than the externally derived, utterly artificial, and finally brittle and arbitrary principle of good taste. With Gordon, on the other hand, it is the notion that he is, indeed that he can be, "detached" (see p. 85). Allegiance to the notion of detachment is, in the end, allegiance to nothing, allegiance merely to an attitude and to a deluded attitude at that, since there is no such thing as detachment this side of non-existence, every thought, every utterance being ( an assertion and, hence, insofar as it must inevitably pre­ clude innumerable other possibilities, a kind of commitment, a statement that something is this way and not another.

Thus detachment, as exemplified by Gordon Winship (among others), really comes down to rather simple-minded contra­ diction or counter-assertion, and thus Gordon Winship, 179 iconoclast, comes really to believe that Donald Duck is the superior of Greta Garbo and comes virtually to stake his life on it:

The last time I saw Gordon— he moved his things to the club the next day, forgetting the trousers to his evening clothes and his razor— he had convinced himself that the point at issue between him and Marcia was one of ex­ treme importance involving both his honor and his integrity. He said that now it could never be wiped out and forgotten. He said that he sincerely believed Donald Duck was as great a creation as any animal in all the works of Lewis Carroll, probably even greater, perhaps much greater. He was drinking and there was a wild light in his eye. I reminded him of his old love of detachment, and he said to the [sic] hell with detachment. I laughed at him, but he wouldn't laugh. "If," he said, grimly, "Marcia persists in her silly belief that that Swede is great and that Donald Duck is merely a caricature, I cannot conscientiously live with her again. I believe that he is great, that the man who created him is a genius, prob­ ably our only genius. I believe, further, that Greta Garbo is just another actress. As God is my judge, I believe that! What does she expect me to do, go whining back to her and pretend that I think Garbo is wonderful and that Donald Duck is simply a cartoon? Never!" I could not ridicule him out of his obsession, (pp. 88-89)

Thus, in Thurber, is the noble mind o'er thrown. And thus is "The Breaking Up of the Winships" almost a paradigm of Thurber's great literary art of the period, of its ex­ quisite balance and tension, its dialectic, its deep and nonetheless delicate parry and thrust. Like his character,

Gordon Winship, Thurber places great value on detachment, on balance, on the necessity— even the virtue— of living in and with uncertainty. At the same time, of course, he demonstrates, as in the case of Gordon Winship, its virtual

impossibility, for we cling to our ideas and notions, how­ ever arbitrary, because we are our ideas and notions, and even if, like Gordon Winship, we fancy that we reside on

the Olympian heights of detachment, we find, like Gordon

Winship, that our commitment to the notion that we are un­ committed drives us to attempt to prove it and thus to com­ mit ourselves and our sanity to ludicrous notions and even to stake our lives on them. Ours, then, is in the Thurber- ian view, a desperate lot, for we live in and by the bubble world of the mind's contrived beliefs, and Thurber takes unseemly— some might say sadistic— delight in puncturing our bubbles. Puncturing our bubbles, any and all bubbles, is the function of Fables for Our Time (1940), and, on a less ambitious scale, the function of "My Memories of D. H.

Lawrence" in which the object of attack is not so much

Lawrence as it is the worship and worshippers of Lawrence, a writer whom the speaker sardonically refers to simply as

"the Master" (p. 91). Much the same can be said of

"Bateman Comes Home" (pp. 125-28), apparently a parody of novels like Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre but actual­ ly a disguised attack on the willingness of a great many readers to believe that such novels "tell it," in that deplorably simple-minded phrase, "like it is," that they give us reality with the gloves off, good and hard and in all its squalid splendor. If Thurber does little to succor or otherwise encour­

age such touching innocence, he does, of course, soften

the point through humor. But the point is still there,

and we are meant to feel it and to feel it again and again,

for Thurber's attack is aimed fundamentally at us and at

whatever cherished notions give us the suffusing and self-

congratulatory sense of certainty, or of being right or

"with it" or in possession of the truth or of anything

else— detachment, for instance. This is not, obviously,

to suggest that Thurber's art is unrelievedly grim, his

humor a mere gloss, but it is to suggest that his art is

fundamentally subversive and that it insistently undercuts

all those preconceptions of whatever kind by which we live.

And this is only slightly less true of such seemingly

innocent diversions as "Wild Bird Hickok and His Friends"

than it is of his obviously sinister or menacing narratives

and essays— "A Box to Hide In," say, or "The Breaking Up of

the Winships." Nominally, of course, "Will Bird Hickok and

His Friends" is simply a parody of French counterparts of

American pulp novels concerning the "Far-Ouest" which had delighted Thurber years earlier. And not without reason,

for few things could be more delicious or delightful than

the notion of a sheriff, hearing that a couple of sus­ picious strangers have moseyed into town, heading for the

showdown with the remark, "Alors, je vais demander ses 182 cartes d * identity 1" (p. 190). It is, as the speaker remarks, a thrilling line, but if Thurber's is a parody of

French "ouesterns," French "ouesterns" are equally (if less consciously) a parody of American westerns, and thus "Wild

Bird Hickok" is, at a minimum, a parody of a parody. Here, as elsewhere in Thurber, then, the parody cuts both ways, for there is nothing inherently more ridiculous about the

French language or identity cards than about the American language or the convention of the western. There is, at bottom, nothing inherent at all.

Yet if Thurber could find unambiguous glee in the innocent and unintentional innovations of French "ouesterns" and tales of "les peaux-rouges," he was no friend to inno­ vation itself, and the more contrived, self-congratulatory, or self-important it was, the more unambiguous was his hos­ tility to it. In this respect as in others, it is for

Thurber the small things that signify, the small things that reveal the pervasiveness of the threat— "The signifi­ cant is never, to begin with, larger than a man's hand, and sometimes it is no larger than a hole in a dike— or a three- line item in the New York Times" (p. 231)— and thus in "No

Standing Room Only" and "Highball Flags" we find the Thur­ ber persona contemplating seemingly minor outbreaks of pointless ingenuity in the sophisticated world and brood­ ing darkly, almost menacingly, about them. In "No Standing Room Only," for example, the cause of the speaker's dismay and despair is a "little note"— a trifle that would go un­ noticed and unremarked by those less sensitive to the steady erosion of our collective sanity— to the effect that in honor (self-bestowed honor) of completing fifty-two weeks in the Broadway production of "Victoria Regina" Helen Hayes has decreed "that only 52 standees be admitted into the matinee" (p. 101). Given such a ponderable example of preening pointlessness, the speaker may perhaps be pardoned if he spends much of the remainder of the essay devising a plan of revenge for the hapless fifty-third person who seeks to purchase admission to the standing-room section. In

"Highball Flags" the essay itself is the revenge, as Thur­ ber 's essays often are. The piece, again, concerns a trifle, but as one of the secret sages of Middlemarch reminds us,

"Trifles make the sum of human things— nothing more impor­ tant than trifles." In "Highball Flags" the apparent trifle is the advent of cocktail flags into the formerly "reserved, aristocratic" (p. 163) world of yachting. This remarkable innovation— the latest in a ceaseless series of ideas whose time has come— concerns, at present, merely "'a red glass on a white field1 and it means 'We're serving drinks.' When it is flown upside down, it means 'Who has a drink?'"

(p. 163). But it is not, of course, going to end there, if only because the speaker is not going to let it end there, 184

his hope in suggesting "some further flag signals" (p. 163)

being, in part, to strangle the whole phenomenon in its

infancy and, in part, to make his readers— especially his

more ingenious readers— choke on it. Thus, by way of mak­

ing what in another not unrelated area of endeavor is

called a premptive strike, he proposes an even dozen flag

signals of his own, each more clever than the last, each

suggesting a greater degree of inebriation than the one be­

fore it, each revealing this cunning innovation for the

gross imposition on our sensibilities that it is.

If revenge and hostility are energizing components of

"Highball Flags" and "Mo Standing Room Only," they are equal­

ly the fuel that fires Thurber1s bleak and bitter tale of marital discord, "A Couple of Hamburgers." It is a story of dead­

lock, a metaphorical journey of a life together that is very much in the Greta-Garbo Donald-Duck pattern with the central conflict being, at bottom, that between two opposed versions of the world which are locked in the death struggle that the presumed union of matrimony amounts to in Thurber's grim fictions. It

is because Thurber's fictions most often revolve around the phenomenon of deadlock that his vision is not, as Mark Van g Doren thought, essentially satiric, for at the core his is a vision of the complete and irretrievable breakdown of all unifying assumptions and values, a vision of the isolated and solitary mind as a kind of armed camp which is determined only that its side will prevail. It follows, then, that

the enforced intimacy or bond, as it has been aptly called,

of marriage should prove to be Thurber's principal metaphor

for the expression of that vision. Thus in "A Couple of

Hamburgers" as in "The Breaking Up of the Winships," it is

the woman who has taken the path of least resistance, fol­

lowing the high road of fashion, good taste, and decorum,

while her husband, a man who recognizes the unreflecting

imposture of her course— of any course, for that matter—

takes the lower road of resistance, iconoclasm, detach­ ment, and even, as the world accounts such things, of vul­

garity. Thus he sings "Barney Google" and refers to road­

side restaurants as "dog-wagons" (pp. 112, 117) while she objects and because she objects. The fact that she is

right about the "funny sound" emanating from the car's in­

nards (p. 113) is evidence that in Thurber's tales of mar­

ital misery women are, in worldly matters, more often right

than wrong, their function being not so much to create man's misery— a preexisting condition— as to remind him of

it.

Unable, then, to master the world in the way that the myth of masculinity requires, Thurber's male protagonists become stereotypical women, absent-minded, impractical,

sticking at trifles, rankled by woman's gross failure to observe the niceties, as in "The Case Against Women": "A bright-eyed woman, whose sparkle was rather more of

eagerness than of.intelligence, approached me at a party

one afternoon and said, 'Why do you hate women, Mr. Thur-

berg?'" (p. 95). If Thurberg or any of his male creations

truly hate women, as the disjointed "Case Against Women"

suggests, it is only because women remind them of their

own inadequacy and ineffectuality, because, that is, there

is no real case to be made against them save the fact that

their easy and effortless existence makes the case against

oneself. And that is true even when, as in "Nine Needles"

(pp. 106-11), there are no women present, for ineptitude

being solely the province of the male in Thurber, it is

inconceivable that any woman could find herself in the

superficially roisterous predicament of the narrator-

protagonist. "Nine Needles" is a story which, Burton 7 . . Bernstein to the contrary, has only superficially to do with the American medicine chest and fundamentally to do

with the nightmarish— and, in Thurber, peculiarly mascu­

line— fear that all of one's carefully constructed order will dissolve and that one's self will dissolve right along with it— that one will awaken only to find that one does not exist or, worse yet, that one does. Thus many of Thur­ ber 's stories which have, at least nominally, to do with

the relations between the sexes are actually nightmares in daylight— filled with nightmare images and nightmare 187 people, informed by a suffusing sense of anxiety, dread, and guilt, the sense that one (the hero or the speaker) is completely in error, an impostor, someone without sub­ stance, someone who has no right to exist. Occasionally in Thurber's writings, more often in his drawings, women, like Madame Goriaut in "Remembrance of Things Past," are themselves nightmare figures, figures of overpowering solidity, substance, and sheer physicality. Thus Mme.

Goriaut, a figure physically reminiscent of someone's char­ acterization of Gertrude Stein ("She had practically no beard to speak of"), "was large and shapeless and possessed of an unforgettable toothiness. Her smile, under her con­ siderable mustache, was quick and savage and frightening, like a flash of lightning lighting up a ruined woods" (p.

136) .

More often, of course, the nightmare figures are males— unambiguous authority figures like policemen, garage mechanics, parking lot attendants, car salesmen, figures of imposing substance like the sales clerk in that now defunct bastion of self-assured masculinity, Abercrombie and Fitch.

If women can be dismissed as different (what do they know?), men, manly men, remind one of what one is supposed to be and remind one that one is merely an impostor. That guilty knowledge, in turn, reinforces the very guilty self- consciousness that makes one appear to be an impostor to others. Thus the Abercrombie and Fitch sales clerk in

"Suli Suli" disbelieves, almost with a knowing wink, that the narrator-protagonist truly wishes to buy a javelin or that he is entitled to one, much less two, as the narrator hastily explains, so that he can (likely story) "cross them, like oars, you know, or guns, above a mantelpiece" (p. 152) .

The clerk knows, the narrator is guiltily certain, that he only wants one javelin and that he wants it in order to find out whether he can throw it as far as Babe Didrikson, as both he and the salesman secretly know he cannot. That, of course, is why the narrator ends up buying a set of lawn bowls, though he has no lawn, which, he is certain, the clerk knows too. Thus the intimidating presence of super­ masculine males renders the typical Thurber hero, from John

Monroe to Walter Mitty and beyond, unsure of his existence and equally unsure of his right to exist, and both because he falls so far short of the mark of undoubting masculinity.

That, then, is why the Thurber hero is so anxious and guilt- ridden, why he secretly feels women to be more real and sub­ stantial and even more masculine than himself. And that, of course, is the way they are characteristically viewed and presented in Thurber's writings and drawings, even if, as in the case of Sylvia, a young woman with whom the narrator once went fishing, they are quite feminine and fetching: 189

On this occasion I actually did hook a fish, even before anybody else had a bite, and I brought it into the rowboat with a great plan. Then, not having had any experience with a caught fish, I didn't know what to do with it. I had some vague idea that a fish died quietly and with dignity as soon as it was flopped into a boat, but that, of course, was an erroneous idea. It leaped about strenuously. I got pretty far away from it and stared at it. The young lady named Sylvia final­ ly grabbed it expertly and slapped it into insen­ sibility against the sides and bottom of the boat. I think it was perhaps then that I decided to go in for javelin-throwing and began to live with the dream of being able to throw a javelin farther than Babe Didrikson. A man never completely gets over the chagrin and shock of having a woman handle for him the fish he has caught (pp. 154-55).

Small wonder, then, that the typical Thurber narrator

or hero should have, or profess to have, but scant regard

for women or that he should occasionally feel unkindly

toward them or that, when his courage is up, he should treat

them less than reverently. They are, after all, a per­

sistent reminder of his own felt inadequacy and insubstan­

tiality. No wonder either that he should conclude with

grudging admiration that, as the title of the final essay

on the subject has it, "Women Go On Forever," "that although

Man, as he is now traveling, is headed for extinction,

Woman is not going with him. It is, I think, high time to

abandon the loose generic term "Man," for it is no longer

logically inclusive or scientifically exact. There is Man

and there is Woman, and Woman is going her own way" (p.

. 230). Women, then, are almost a species apart, a superior

species whose existence is a rebuke and a reproof to man's. 190

Proof "that women are tending to become immortal, that the day will come when they will never die" (p. 232) is, says

the speaker, everywhere, and he offers in evidence twenty-

four news items about how ladies who reached the age of one hundred "celebrated their birthdays— by singing, dancing, riding in airplanes, playing kettle-drums, running foot­ races, chinning themselves or entertaining their great- great-great-grandchildren" (p. 231). In further proof, the speaker offers two identical drawings, the only discernible difference between them being— to the untrained eye— that one has hair and the other does not:

They are, you will observe, absolutely identical faces, save that one (Fig. 1) is male and the other (Fig. II) is female. Yet it is easy to discern in the male physiognomy the symptoms of that extinction which threatens his sex: an air of uncertainty, an expression of futility, a general absence of "hold," which are inescapable. There is about the female, on the other hand, a hint of survival, a threat of perpetuation, a general "Here I am and here I will always be," which are equally unmistakable. The male is obviously not looking at anything; he is lost in the moody contemplation of an existence which is slipping away from him; already its outlines are far and vague. The female unquestionably has her eyes on an objective; you can feel the solid, sharp edges of her purpose (p. 233) .

So much, then, for the battle of the sexes which here as elsewhere in Thurber's writings is simply a complex metaphor for our confused condition. If there is no read­ ily available remedy for our confusion, no way that we can out of thin air manufacture a unified, comprehensive, and 191 compelling sense of our existence and of our purpose and significance, part of the solution— the only part that is available to us— lies, Thurber suggests, in simply owning up to the existence of the problem. The creation or incul­ cation of that recognition might, in fact, be said to be the purpose of Thurber's art, for he everywhere advances, in complex ways, the simple proposition that things might improve somewhat if, as the title of the present collection suggests, we would simply let them alone. At least they would not, in all probability, get worse. Occasionally

Thurber advances the proposition by probing briefly into the realm of psychic phenomena as another instance of what we do not understand and cannot explain. The problem here is treated in "Mrs. Phelps," a tale concerning events which transpired "on a blowy night, the kind of night in which the wind moans in the wires, and telephone bells ring with­ out benefit of human agency, and there are inexplicable sounds at doors and windows" (p. 166), the kind of night on which Thurber himself was, as he was later to reveal, o born. If the details of the inexplicable account are not, in this connection, pertinent, the speaker's resolution is: "I took the story for what it was, fuzzy edges and all. . . ." (p. 171).

The unwillingness to take things as they are, fuzzy edges and all, has led, Thurber suggests in the first ten 192

essays of Let Your Mind Alone, to a veritable epidemic of

fuzzy thinking in the form of those ubiquitous books of

mental uplift and inspiration which inherently— and fatu­

ously— presuppose that since external phenomena are per­

ceived by the mind, they can be controlled by the mind, as,

for example, through positive thinking. For Thurber, as

for Swift and Johnson before him, the acid test of all such

assumptions and suppositions is the test of empirical ob­

servation, experience, common sense, and imagination. It

is applied with compelling results in the first essay, an

essay with the intriguing title of "Pythagoras and the

Ladder," which is based on Dr. James L. Mursell's Streamline

Your Mind. The first ponderable example concerns the plight "of a young man who wanted to find out 'how to con­

duct a young lady to a table in a restaurant1" (p. 5).

Leaving aside the improbability of the example and the at­ tendant propensity of such inspirationalists as Dr. Mursell

for helping people out of difficulties they were not aware they had, we find the speaker almost transfixed by the

learned doctor's advice that the young man practice with his sister: "Ninety-nine brothers out of a hundred who were worrying about how to conduct a lady to a table in a res­ taurant would starve before they would go to their sisters and ask them how the thing is done. They would as lief go to their mothers and have a good, frank talk about sex"(p. 7).

What follows is, of course, the imaginative application of Dr. Mursell's advice, the outcome of which we know in advance.

In the second instance, Dr. Mursell considers the poten­

tially pathetic plight of "a professor and his family who were faced with the necessity of reroofing their country house. They decided, for some obscure reason, to do the work themselves, and they intended to order the materials from Sears, Roebuck" (pp. 8-9). The problem of finding out how much roofing material to order, however, proves nearly insuperable since the family has no ladder: "'For several days,' writes Dr. Mursell, 'they were completely stumped'" (p. 9) a fact which might lead the wary to ques­ tion the professor's credentials and the doctor's credul­ ity. In any event, in the midst of this implausible situ­ ation a guest arrives who happens to know the Pythagorean theorem and who also happens to notice that "the angle formed by the two sides of the roof (which were equal in length) was a right angle" (p. 9). Thus, to the relief of all, was the family's problem solved. The great unanswered and unasked question— unasked even.by the stricken speaker— is whether and in what way the Pythagorean theorem would enable the family to get up on the roof in order to install the roofing material. But that, of course, is only one question among many, the larger point being, as this minor instance reveals, that we trust our abstractions at our peril, that no conceivable theory, least of all Pythagoras', 194 can possibly encompass, comprehend, or contain all of the potential variables of existence. And Thurber was nothing

if not alive to all the variables.

In the next three essays, essays in which Thurber takes on "the disciplined mind," there would seem to be an implicit reversal or rejection of the rather level-headed position taken and advocated in "Pythagoras and the Ladder," for in the last of those essays, "A Dozen Disciplines," the speaker makes explicit a principle which is operative in much, perhaps most, of Thurber's writing: "Fantasy," says the speaker, "is the food for the mind, not facts"

(p. 29). This, in turn, has led Burton Bernstein, among others, to suggest that Thurber holds for "the superiority of undisciplined Marx Brothers' logic over the so-called Q streamlined mind." Actually, Thurber's position is that the streamlined mind amounts to Marx Brothers' logic, his own use of fantasy or imagination serving, in that respect, as a kind of check against streamlined thinking, against the grander pretensions of abstract thought, as a means, quite simply, of envisioning and assessing the exceptions to its more sweeping claims and conclusions. That, at least, is its role in "Destructive Forces in Life," "The

Case for the Daydreamer," and "A Dozen Disciplines," in all of which the speaker successfully counters the failure­ proof programs of the success experts— sometimes on the 195

narrow ground of empirical probability, more often on the

related but more expansive ground of imagined possibili­

ties.

Thus, in "Destructive Forces in Life," Harry Connor,

an apostle of Mr. David Seabury's gospel of "Masterful

Adjustment," has to meet the test of Bert Scursey, a prac­

tical joker, a man perversely possessed, like the world

itself, of "a Will to Confuse" (p. 14). It is, of course,

no contest, Connor's disciplined thought proving no match

for Scursey's "Disintegrated Phantasmagoria" (p. 15). The

narrowly focused streamlined mind cannot, almost by defin­

ition, hope to encompass the infinite and unsettling variety

of experience, which leads the speaker to conclude that

"we see that a person might build up a streamlined mind, a

mind awakened to a new life, a new discipline, only to have

the whole works shot to pieces by so minor and unpredict­

able a thing as a wrong telephone number. . . . the undis­

ciplined mind runs far less chance of having its purposes

thwarted, its plans distorted, its whole scheme and system wrenched out of line. The undisciplined mind, in short,

is far better adapted to the confused world in which we

live today than the streamlined mind. This is, I am afraid,

no place for the streamlined mind" (p. 18).

Nor, as in "The Case for the Daydrearner," is it any place for the realist, realists being those extremely unrealistic individuals who are "dedicated to carrying a dream into actuality" (p. 23), instead of realizing, like the rest of us, that our dreams are, if not actuality

itself, about as close to it as we are likely to get. Con­ trary to the prevailing impression, then, realists are absurdly impractical. At least as impractical, at any rate as "the twelve specific disciplines" (p. 26) proposed by

Mrs. Dorothea Brande in her monumental tribute to uplift,

Wake Up and Live I, a work— in Thurberian reckoning— perhaps unequalled in our literature for sheer pointlessness, a work which fails in "A Dozen disciplines" to meet the sim­ plest tests of practicality, purpose, or probability. This no doubt accounts for the speaker's rising irritation as he considers in turn each of the suggested disciplines, disciplines which are designed "to make our minds keener and more flexible" (p. 26). His mind, one suspects, is about as keen and flexible as he can bear. Thus his terse­ ness when, for example, he encounters rule number two:

"'Think one hour a day about one subject exclusively.1

Such," asks the speaker, "as what, for example?" (p. 26).

A man who has found that he "can pretty well cover as much of any subject" as he wants to "in fifteen minutes," more often in six, he is nonetheless fairminded and gives it a try, lighting upon the subject of General Grant's horse

" (as good a subject as any at a time when practically all subjects are in an unsettled state)" (p. 27). It is, of course, a subject which leads nowhere or, what comes to much the same thing, everywhere, not so much because things are in an unsettled state as because we are in an unsettled state. Unsettled enough, at any rate, that more reflective minds, minds like the speaker's, do not relish having their minds further unsettled. Thus, in response to rule number three— "Write a letter without using the first person singular"— the speaker replies testily, "What for? To whom? About what?" (p. 28). Again, however, his innate willingness to try anything prevails, and he begins imag­ inatively to write "a letter to a little boy telling him how to build a rabbit hutch," only to find his disciplined mind suddenly thrown off the track by the forbidden first- person realization that he does not actually know how to build a rabbit hutch and by the equally forbidden first- person memories of his father accidentally locked in a rabbit hutch full of rabbits and of his brother, having misunderstood a set of directions, attempting to wash the rabbits' haunches instead of their hutches.

The pattern of the remaining six essays in the series is very much the same as the first four, with the speaker resorting alternately to fact and to fancy, in his attempt to demonstrate why and in what ways the deductively derived principles of Masterful Adjustment and kindred doctrines will not work and why they cannot work, life 198 being a matter of infinite particularities and permuta­ tions rather than general principles, the mind being one thing and the world another. If the picture of the world that emerges from Thurber's consideration of the desperate drivel that these books represent is a picture of a world cut loose from its moorings and of a race that has lost its internal compass, Thurber himself felt the need to regain his bearings, and in his case that always entails resort to either the natural order or the received order, the order of his imaginary, idealized past. If there is not, as The Thurber Album amply demonstrates, much genuine nourishment in the latter, Thurber nonetheless finds him­ self, after exploring more of the measureless wastes in

"How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work," reminded, he knows not quite why, of his Aunt Kate Obetz, "a woman as far out of the tradition of inspirationalist conduct as she could well be" (p. 39), a woman who "viewed herself as in a single mirror, directly . . ." (pp. 39-40).

Since, however, that kind of simplicity is, except perhaps for the retarded, little more than a sentimental memory, the speaker plunges back into the modern mental . mess of "Anodynes for Anxieties" as prescribed by David

Seabury in How to Worry Successfully and "dear" Dorothea

Brande in Wake Up and Live! As usual he tries imaginatively to apply their advice, only to find himself, reason tottering, holding an imaginary conversation with J. P.

Morgan in which he seeks to borrow imaginary money to ease his real financial difficulties (p. 45). Their literary deficiencies aside, one of the obvious problems with such treatises as Mr. Seabury's and Mrs. Brande's is that the cures they prescribe are often worse than the diseases they seek to treat, that, therefore, they create problems where none existed before, and withal, that they compound the chaos and confusion that they seek to clarify and sim­ plify. The logical paradigm for the kinds of treatments they dispense is, then, says the speaker, the Marx Brothers scene (from "Animal Crackers") in which Groucho says to

Chico, "'It is my belief that the missing picture is hidden in the house next door.1 Here Groucho has ceased whirling, or circling, and has stopped at a fact, that fact being his belief that the picture is hidden in the house next door.

Now Chico, in accordance with Mr. Seabury's instructions, thinks of something as different from that fact as he pos­ sibly can. He says, 'There isn't any house next door.'

Thereupon Groucho 'mixes that contrast into his situation.'

He says, 'Then we'll build one!'" (pp. 41-42). The problem with this approach to Masterful Adjustment and other desir­ able states of being, the speaker later suggests, is that the "Success Writers," in effect, proceed to build the house and find the missing picture in it (see p. 44), the train of reasoning reminding him of "one of those elabor­

ate Rube Goldberg contraptions taking up a whole room and

involving bicycles, shotguns, parrots, and little colored

boys, all set up for the purpose of eliminating the bother

of, let us say, setting an alarm clock" (p. 44). As an

example of precisely that kind of practical logic, Thurber

offers in evidence a man described by Mrs. Brande as

"'One of the most famous men in America [who] constantly

sends himself postcards, and occasionally notes'" (p. 43).

To illustrate the practical applications of this ingenious method, she cites a postcard he wrote "one threatening day" which said "'Put your raincoat with your hat'" (p. 43).

His own mental powers temporarily paralyzed by this example of a "muzziness of thought so enormous that it is difficult

to analyze" (p. 43), the speaker is apparently unable to collect himself sufficiently to consider what good such a reminder will do if famous American receives it three days

later, but he does pursue the circular chain down its

spiralling way until he has finally touched bottom with

famous American calling himself on one of his two phones,-

answering the other, picking up the first, and bawling at himself, "'Remember tomorrow is wifey's birthday!' . . .

'O.K.,' he bawls back into the other" (p. 44). If this

is essentially the unconscious method of the mind, it is also, at this level of conscious refinement, the way of 201 madness, but as the speaker remarks earlier in his tormented

deliberations, "I would be the last person to say that mad­

ness is not a solution" (p. 42).

Madness also lies, of course, in the other direction,

in the headier matters of analysis rather than action, diag­ nosis rather than prescription, in the direction charted in

"The Conscious vs. the Unconscious" and "Sex ex Machina."

The works analyzed in both essays are concerned with the nature and source of human motivation, and it is the speak­

er's hard-won conviction that they betray a state of mind

so confused as to miss the obvious, a state of mind which

either complicates preexisting problems, ignores them alto­ gether, makes them worse, or creates new problems. "The

Conscious vs. the Unconscious," then, considers a new

source of inspiration, "the magnum opus of Louis E. Bisch,

M.D., Ph.D., Be Glad You're Neurotic, a work whose chapters

have such arresting titles as "I'm Neurotic Myself and

Delighted," "You Hate Yourself. No wonder!," "No, You're

Not Going Insane Nor Will Any of Your Fears Come True,"

"Are Your Glands on Friendly Terms?," and "Of Course Your

Sex Life is Far From Satisfactory" (p. 49). If the point

of Dr. Bisch's chapter, "Your Errors and Compulsions Are

Calls for Help," "is that the unconscious mind often

opposes what the conscious mind wants to do or say, and

frequently trips it up . . ." (p. 49), the speaker's

point is that the truth is not always something deep and 202

dark and accessible only to the specialist. That point is

made unmistakably clear in "Sex ex Machina" where the

speaker contends essentially that our often jittery reac­

tion to the machine and to things that "whir and whine and whiz and shriek and sometimes explode" (p. 64) is a per­

fectly natural reaction to unnatural phenomena. It is Dr.

Bisch's contention, on the other hand, that sex is somehow

at the heart of it, as in the hypothetical case of a Mr.

C., who, confronted in mid-street by an oncoming car, "hes­

itates, wavers, jumps backward and forward, and finally runs head on into the car" (p. 58). The automobile, says

Dr. Bisch, whose bias in the matter is Freudian, is a common sex symbol. The speaker views the matter differ­ ently, holding that an automobile bearing down on you, even in a dream, "is probably not a sex symbol, but merely an automobile bearing down upon you. And if it bears down upon you in real life, I am sure it is an automobile"

(p. 59). In either event, it is best not to take any chances.

So far as the panicky behavior of Mr. C. is concerned, there

is really no way, the speaker implicitly suggests, to account for it except to resort by analogy to the world of nature, that being the only way to establish the naturalness and hence sensibleness of Mr. C.'s actions.

Thus, by way of exhibit, a squirrel of the speaker's acquaintance, "a fairly tame squirrel, happily mated and not sex-hungry, if I am any judge," who nevertheless fre­ quently runs toward the speaker's car, "then hesitates, wavers, jumps forward and backward," and would apparently

"run right into the car" were it not for the speaker's anticipation and quick reflexes (p. 59). If the uncanny resemblance between the squirrel's behavior and Mr. C's be regarded as mere coincidence, then what, the speaker implic­ itly asks, of his witness, indeed the witness of us all, to "this same behavior in the case of rabbits (notoriously uninfluenced by any sex symbols save those of other rabbits), dogs, pigeons, a doe, a young hawk (which flew at my car), a blue heron that I encountered on a country road in Ver­ mont, and once, near Paul Smith's in the Adirondacks, a fox. They all acted exactly like Mr. C." (p. 59). Indeed, under slightly different circumstances, the speaker himself has, he allows, been known (at least to himself) to act rather like Mr. C. Once, it seems, he had at about 1 A.M. of a black night to go out to his barn, a combined kennel and garage, to quiet his poodles who had been alarmed by something, perhaps, he says, by "a fiend of some sort.

Both my poodles and I believed in fiends, and still do.

Fiends who materialize out of nothing and nowhere, like winged pigweed or Russian thistle" (p. 63). Whatever the cause— and fiends are as plausible as many— he had just succeeded in getting the dogs quiet, a task made doubly 204 and triply difficult as their fear spread to him, thence back to them, and so on, when all of a sudden the klaxon of the car parked just behind him "began to shriek." Every­ one, he allows, has heard a car horn suddenly begin to sound. "But very few people have heard one scream behind them while they were quieting six or eight alarmed poodles in the middle of the night in an old barn" (p. 63). Here, then, we have, as it were under one roof, the world of nature, the world of man, and the world of the machine, and it is not difficult to determine which is out of place.

Nor is it any problem to determine whence the machine sprang, for it is nothing more than a physical manifestation of mind. It is for that reason, then, that "the menace of the machine," like the battle of the sexes and other Thur- berian themes, is really the menace of ourselves, not the cause of our difficulty, but symptomatic of it, symptomatic of our dissociation not merely from the world but from ourselves as well.

Yet that dissociation goes on apace as we become ever more smitten with the seeming liberation of our once con­ fined powers, lose all sense of beginning, end, or purpose, and consecrate ourselves to means alone, to, as it is some­ times called, progress alone. Thus the proliferation of

"how-to" books, books, in the end, of surpassing pointless­ ness, like Sadie Myers Shellows' How to Develop Your Personality, Lest there be any doubt about her creden­

tials, Dr. Shellows was, says the speaker at the begin­ ning of "Sample Intelligence Test,11 "formerly psychologist with the Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company.

These things happen in a world of endless permutations"

(p. 66). In any case, the ostensible purpose of the speaker's treatment of Dr. Shellows' book is to celebrate its reissue in "a dollar edition, which puts the confusion in Chapter XIV within the reach of everyone" (p. 66).

Actually, of course, it is to make a point about pointless­ ness, for Shellows's shallow treatise could only find a receptive audience among readers who have lost virtually all sense of point, obviously a large group since at the time that Thurber wrote his somewhat selective review the book had already gone through six printings (p. 66). If

Thurber's review of the book centers exclusively around problem number twelve in Dr. Shellows' chapter on "Intel­ ligence Tests," that is perhaps sufficient, for the prob­ lem runs thus: "Cross out the one word which makes this sentence absurd and substitute one that is correct: A pound of feathers is lighter than a pound of lead" (p. 68). The sheer pointlessness— not to say stupidity— of this exercise cannot be fully appreciated until one has tried it oneself, which is precisely what the speaker does, from every con­ ceivable angle and for the next three pages. Pointlessness in its infinite variety is also the point of the last essay in the series, "Miscellaneous Men­ tation," a series of observations too miscellaneous in character to be included in the miscellaneous meditations

that precede it. Despite its ubiquity and infinite variety, pointlessness in all its innumerable manifestations finally comes down to the same thing, and two examples will perhaps suffice to make the point. The first concerns Dr. Bisch1s prescription regarding superstitions, like the fear of walk­ ing under ladders. The solution to such fears, says he, is to defy the superstition and to continue to defy it: "After a while you look for ladders; you delight in walking under them; your ego has been pepped up and you defy all the demons that may be!" (p. 72). The speaker's view of the matter is, needless to say, rather less peppy, for in his estimation this way of pepping up the ego can only lead to

an Intensification of the very kind of superstition which the person in this case sets out to defy and destroy. To substitute walking under ladders for not walking under ladders is a distinction without a difference. For here we have, in effect, a person who was afraid to walk under ladders, and is now afraid not to. In the first place he avoided ladders because he feared the very fear that that would put into him. This the psychologists call phobo- phobia (they really do). But now he is afraid of the very 207 fear he had of being afraid and hence is a victim of what

X can only call phobophobophobia, and is in even deeper than he was before” (p. 74). If this is one interesting example of the kind of bottomless circularity (phobophobo- phobophobia is, not, for example, beyond the realm of pos­ sibility) that the mind is heir to, talking to animals is another, for rather like the hero (played by Peter O'Toole) of the movie, "The Ruling Class," who knew that he was

Christ because whenever he prayed he found that he was talk­ ing to himself, one who talks to animals is also ultimately talking to himself. Passing over the dismaying cheerful­ ness, then, of Dale Carnegie, we return to David Seabury and to his somewhat uncritical admiration of a man, the owner of a mother dog, who "identified himself with the mother dog and was accustomed to spend a good deal of his time in conversation with her about the welfare of her young" (p. 78). Clearly, the man is, as we know from "A

Preface to Dogs" and elsewhere, living in a fool's para­ dise, since

no dog man . . . ever identifies himself with the mother dog. He may, to be sure, spend a good deal of his time in conversation with her, but his conversation is never about the wel­ fare of her young. Every dog man knows that there is nothing he can say to any mother dog about the welfare of her young that will make the slightest impression on her. This is partly because she does not know enough English to carry on a conversation that would get very far, and partly because, even if she did, she 208

would not let any suggestions or commands coax­ ings or wheedlings, influence her in the least. (P- 79)

If Thurber here betrays considerable mistrust of what might be called the sympathetic fallacy, the belief that we can somehow know or identify with the infinite variety and

unfathomable mysteries of external reality, he equally mis­ trusts, as we have seen, the prescriptive habit of mind which assumes that we can. And thus he mistrusts science as we see in "An Outline of Scientists," where Thurber, speaking in something like his own voice, goes to the well, to science itself, there to discover once again the extent of our abstracted dissociation from the world of nature whence, ostensibly, we sprang. That we ignore that world or delude ourselves about it at our peril, he makes plain at the outset, for it is at the outset that we find him, laid low by the sting of a bumblebee and subsequent infec­ tion, reading in his involuntary idleness a four-volume compendium called The Outline of Science, A Plain Story

Simply Told, edited by Professor J. Arthur Thomson (p. 157).

The bumblebee sting in itself is, of course, indicative of all those mundane, yet troubling, earthly realities that no theory, however grand, can fully encompass or predict, a humiliating reminder that though our minds may soar— as indeed the lowly bumblebee (who, according to scientific theory, cannot fly) may soar— we are still, like it or not, 209 very much, creatures of the earth. And it is down to earth that Thurber in the remaining selections persistently seeks to bring our pretensions, be they those of simple vanity or those of intellectual arrogance. There is, of course, noth­ ing excessively arrogant about the encyclopedia's explana­ tions of "the Einstein theory" (p. 157) or of "a scientific romance called 'Lumen' by the celebrated French astronomer,

M. Flammarion" (p. 159), but their abstractions are, in

Thurber's reckoning, in need of being brought down to earth.

And that, literally, is what Thurber here does with them, as that, literally, is what the bumblebee did with him. Thus, considering the "problem about a man running a hundred- yard dash and an aviator in a plane above him" (p. 158),

Thurber acknowledges that if the aviator were travelling at the speed of light, the judge's stopwatch "would not, from the aviator's viewpoint, move at all," but he is compelled parenthetically to note the difficulty of believing that the aviator could see the watch in the first place and, in the second, to caution against the inference that "the phenomenon of the unmoving watch hand would enable the runner to make a hundred yards in nothing flat," saying that those who would reach that conclusion "are living in a fool's paradise" (p. 158). That paradise, like the

"paradise of errors" that Thurber discovered in the works of applied psychology, is, of course, the world of our 210 abstractly derived fancies, and to disabuse us of those

fancies Thurber constantly reverts to earthy and earthly figures, like, for example, that prompted by observing that "If the aviator were going twice as fast as light, the report of the track judge's gun would wake up the track judge who would still be in bed in his pajamas, not having got up yet to go to the track meet" (p. 158).

Much the same constant of Thurber's imagination and intelligence can be observed in his remarks on the related matter of M. Flammarion's "lurid little romance" (p. 159) which features a man's soul flying through space at "the speed of thought," "catching up with light rays from old historical events and passing them," and seeing, therefore, the Battle of Waterloo "fought backward." That arresting fact causes the author, who has read that "'Two hundred thousand corpses, come to life, marched off the field in perfect order,'" to observe: "Perfect order, I should think, only backward" (p. 159). To this scientifically sanctioned version of the Battle of Waterloo, Thurber insists on add­ ing, first, the birth of one George L. Snively in 1819 and

"second the founding of the New England Glass Company in

1826," these by way of suggesting that the hero of the romance "passed a lot of other events besides Waterloo"

(p. 160) , a well-nigh incalculable number of events in fact, which in turn suggests that reality is a good deal more 211 complex and various and bewildering than any of our pre­ fabricated theories about it, no matter how grand or com­ prehensive we think them to be. There is, after all, al­ ways the unanticipated bumblebee.

But it is the encyclopedia's treatment of domesti­ cated animals and particularly of the bloodhound which finally impels the meditative Thurber to formulate what he calls "Thurber's Law, which is that scientists don't really know anything about anything" (p. 161). More to the point, perhaps, and more damning, is the implicit suggestion that scientists do not really want to know anything, that science, and by extension all abstract thought, is not so much a way of apprehending reality as it is an escape from it, an es­ cape inspired by nothing more noble than fear of the un­ known. Thus it is more reassuring and therefore better to believe something that is incorrect than to know correctly that it is incorrect. If the author seems here to have gone overboard or even perhaps around the bend, that is because he has been hit on a tender spot, the subject of blood­ hounds. (Thurber's familiar dog drawings are principally of bloodhounds with their lower legs, as it were, sawed off.)

The notion, then, that bloodhounds "repel us," that they are

"Terrible to look at and terrible to encounter" proves to be too much and proves as well the extent to which scien­ tists, nominally the upholders of fact, ignore fact when it 212

conflicts with scientific fear or fancy. The bloodhound,

says Thurber, is "about as terrible to look at as Abraham

Lincoln, about as terrible to encounter as Jimmy Durante"

(p. 160). Thus aroused, he resorts to open ridicule, calling the anonymous author everything but a "fraidy-cat" and likening the infinitely more terrible bloodhounds to

St. Bernards who finish off travellers they find "fainting in the snow" and then drink the brandy "in the little kegs" during the "drunken orgies that follow the killings" (p.

162) .

It is, then, from a perspective firmly rooted in empirical probability that Thurber considers the innova­ tions and prescriptions that from all quarters regularly obtrude themselves upon the receptive and reflective mind, leaving it feeling embattled, surrounded on all sides, struggling to preserve sense and sanity. Thus in "Food Fun for the Menfolk" we find the suddenly sadistic speaker determined that he shall not suffer alone, determined that if he had to endure Elizabeth Harriman's article, "Shower

Parties, Up-to-Date!," an article which forcefully advances the proposition that "it is high time to invite the bride­ groom and his men friends to shower parties for the bridel"

(p. 200), we must endure it too, or, as he ominously puts it, "you and I are now going to face it together" (p. 199).

Contrary to Miss Harriman's prediction that "Imaginations will run riot and hidden talents will come to the fore"

(pp. 205-6), the only thing that runs riot here is the fever in Thurber*s brain, the only thing that comes to the fore is his irritation. Much the same can be said for the equally pained and painful "The Case of the Laughing

Butler," another treatment of that broad segment of our con­ cern with what might be called domestic arrangements— in this case with a strategic problem faced by many a dinner party hostess in a day when "a great number of Americans, instead of giving up cocktails before dinner, are largely giving up dinner after cocktails" (p. 122). The problem as it was posed to Elinor Ames, etiquette specialist of the

Daily News, is how to get such guests to come to the table when dinner is ready. If the speaker's position is that one might as well try to turn back the tides, Miss Ames is, to her credit, undaunted. "Why not," she asks ingeniously,

"try a laughing imitation of a butler" (p. 118)? One simply announces dinner as a butler would, firmly but pleasantly, with perhaps a slight, amused chuckle— a sub­ dued tinkle of self-admiring delight— in the voice, and the guests, so the theory goes, will follow. Not so, says the speaker. It will not work: "One might as well try to dis­ pose of some such problem as 'What shall we do about sex?' by imitating a butler" (p. 118). "Life," in what might serve as the moral for Thurber's work of the period, "isn't that simple" (p. 124). 214

On the other hand, it is probably simpler than "The

Technique of Good Manners” by Mary Perin Barker would sug­ gest. Thus, proving again that he is nothing if not wide­ ly read and equally that there is apparently no end to man's hunger for direction in a directionless age, Thurber once more addresses himself to the matter of manners in

"Footnotes on A Course of Study." Mrs. Barker's pamphlet, which features an introduction by Dr. Dexter S. Kimball,

Dean of the College of Engineering of Cornell University, apparently a lay expert on the subject, is designed to serve as the basis for a course of study taught by Mrs.

Barker herself at the Newark College of Engineering. As in

"The Case of the Laughing Butler" and "Food Fun for the Men­ folk," the speaker is as astonished by the gratuity of some of Mrs. Barker's prescriptions (the notion, for example, that anyone past, say, the age of three needs to be told that he needs a hairbrush or a toothbrush) as he is skep­ tical about the efficacy of others. As an instance of the latter, he takes exception to the general rule that "Ladies always go first except going upstairs, or in a possibly dangerous place" (p. 133), an exception that is based on hard-won experience, an experience, as he describes it, in which he, following the general rule, stepped first into a canoe while holding the hand of a winsome young woman.

Unknown to either, a sleeping Boston terrier lay in the 215

canoe where the author's foot came, very briefly, to rest.

So much, then, for "rule No. 1 under 'A Few Rules to be

Remembered in Your Association with Women1" (p. 133).

Of all the selections in Let Your Mind Alone none per­

haps comes closer to being a summary of the central drift

of the others than "Aisle Seats in the Mind," for if the

collection as a whole has to do with the limits of our per­

ception and, conversely, with our unconscious imposition

of those limits on perceived phenomena, no one better

expresses or more mindlessly embraces the circularity that

Thurber seeks to make us aware of than Mary Pickford, the

heroine, so to speak, of "Aisle Seats in the Mind." It is

Miss Pickford's enduring distinction that she preaches what

others merely practice, when, in deathless words, she says,

"Be a guardian, not an usher, at the portal of your thought"

(p. 146), thereby making a conscious virtue of an uncon­

scious necessity. Thurber, an advocate as ever of wickedness,

holds, of course, for the opposite view, preferring the

"usher" type of mind to the "guardian" type, simply because

it makes use of the imaginative faculty and can therefore

conceive of possibilities which are inconceivable to, and

not to be conceived of by, the "guardian" type. Thurber's wickedness is, if anything, even more evident in "Something

About Polk," where he takes the "guardian" approach into

the hallowed halls of history and there ushers in a 216 proposal for the "formation of a Society for the Inven­ tion of Amusing Anecdotes about James K. Polk" (p. 143).

If Polk is, by universal admission, " man of no arresting achievement" (pp. 141-42), if he comes closer to an abso­ lute zero of existence than any of our Presidents, that is surely, from an historical point of view, a fact in urgent need of rectification, for if history is, as Voltaire held, the joke that the living play upon the dead, the speaker's position is that we should make the most of it. Hence the proposed Society, and hence the speaker's hope that the resulting "anecdotes will begin to appear in histories and biographies" (p. 144).

The larger point here obviously has little to do with

Polk and much to do with the way that we contrive, uncon­ sciously for the most part, to create historical reality and hence our sense of reality itself, the created pattern then serving as a measure of reality itself in an endless, self-perpetuating, self-confirming cycle. Essentially the same point is made in "The Hiding Generation," which is simultaneously an attack on the myth of "The Lost Gen­ eration," and an account of the speaker's-attempt to write his autobiography or myth of himself, an under­ taking which leads to his "discovery" that his life does not, as he had expected, by itself sort itself out, 217 automatically arrange and order itself, or give itself clear progression, point, and purpose. If we must invent our lives much as we must invent reality, no one should be more aware of that than those literary intellectuals who make a profession of both, and their pretensions to the contrary Thurber finds particularly galling. Thus in "How to Write an Autobiography" Thurber adopts his so-called

"little man"'*’^ persona in order to compare his modest cor­ respondence with the more pretentious correspondence of some prominent Marxist intellectuals. Somehow, says the speaker, a sentence like, "It was my idealistic, religious, artistic bias which made me blind to pragmatism" (p. 219), does not sound like a simple, unaffected opening sentence in a letter from one friend to another. If it is, in fact, the "topic" sentence of a letter from one friend to another, from, in this case, Joseph Freeman to Irwin Edman, as it appears in Freeman's An American Testament (pp. 217-19), it

"somehow does not sound like a letter to a friend at all.

It sounds more like an essay written to save in a file and someday print in a book. You get the inescapable feel­ ing that the original was sent to a friend in order to get a well-written essay in return, which also could be used in the book" (p. 220) . His own correspondence, says the speaker (here identified as Thurber), tends, even when it is from well-known writers, to be somewhat less studied, rather less affected, and to run to things like, "Will you

please for God's sake come back with my shoes?" (p. 220).

That, he explains, is the aftermath of an evening in which,

having become spiritually exhausted by "the argument on

idealism, religion, art, and pragmatism" (p. 220), he retired from the company at about five o'clock in the morning and fell asleep on a bed in the apartment of a

famous author. On awakening the next day, he inadvertent­

ly put on a pair of the author's shoes. Thinking only that his feet must have swelled, he proceeded to lurch home­ ward— "I started to walk up Fifth Avenue, with the gait of a man who is stalking a bird across wet cement" (p. 221).

"None of this," he readily admits, "really belongs in a book" (p. 221). What does belong in a book, especially in an epistolary autobiography, are references to grand things like "idealism, religion, art, and pragmatism," and candid observations, like Edman's to Freeman from Dresden: "For me personally . . . the world these last few weeks has been almost romantically perfect. I have been moving, to quote your own phrase, through rich experience, though not swiftly not swiftly because the experiences have been too rich to hurry through" (pp. 217-19). The circularity, elegant and precious, that is revealed here is more than semantic, and

Thurber's objection to it is more than aesthetic. At bottom his objection is moral, for the circularity he sees here is 219

the circularity of the voracious and insatiable self-

confirming self, a celebration of self in the self-

congratulatory guise of a purportedly selfless ideology.

And that essentially is what Thurber had against the Marx­

ist intellectuals of the 1930's, for theirs was, all too

often, solipsism masquerading as selfless ideology, and

that, as the world has repeatedly discovered to its sorrow,

can be a lethal combination.

If our reliance upon abstractions can, in Thurber's

view, be not only fatuous but fatal, that notion, though it

becomes explicit only in his writings of the late 1930's,

is implicit in virtually everything he wrote— not excluding

"The Race of Life"— from the beginning. And it is that which, more than anything else, makes his art serious— morally serious. And it is, of course, serious even when,

as in "What Are the Leftists Saying?," he appears to be

treating more of fatuity than fatality, for if the point of

Thurber's parody is that the literary leftists cannot agree

on anything sufficiently to act in concert— dialectic, for

example, meaning, as a practical matter, "the process of

discriminating one's own truth from the other person's

error" (p. 214)— the further point is that they would, if

they could, transform the world into the image of their

own minds, thereby turning Creation inside out. That, so

far as Thurber was concerned, is the Original Sin, and its 220 manifestations are to be found not only in political ideolo­ gies or in things comfortably remote but at root in the liberated human mind and soul. If Thurber makes the point in "What Are the Leftists Saying?" by "taking" a typical worker "to a hypothetical, but typical, gathering of left­ ist literary critics" (p. 211), to a meeting of those who would save him, the point is nonetheless serious for that— even if the bewildered worker wants simply "to slip out and go to Minsky's" (p. 211).

Insofar, then, as there is no connection whatever be­ tween the competing realities of the critics and the con­ crete reality of the worker, "What Are the Leftists Saying?" can be laughed off as one of Thurber's more effective treat­ ments of fatuity and, perhaps, of little else. In "After the Steppe Cat, What?," however, the connection between fatuity and fatality is made unmistakable, for it treats directly of the ineradicable— even the fatal— tendency of man, cut off from the faith that restrained even as it sus­ tained, to mistake his inherently incomplete and inherent­ ly distorted ideas of reality for reality itself and literal­ ly, physically, to enact them into actuality on an increas­ ingly grand scale. The results that we see or hear about every day Thurber foresaw more than forty years ago.

"After the Steppe Cat, What?" is an explicit expression of what is implicit in all of his art; it is a vision of the 221

interconnectedness of all things and of the approaching

end, an end in which the natural order, the order to which

Thurber so often adverts, the order of things that will

persist despite our inane theories about it, simply re­

claims its own, and us along with them. The signs, says

the speaker, are everywhere for those who have the eyes

and the wit to see them. Thus Stephen Vincent Ben£t has

written "of observing a termite which held in its tiny jaws

a glittering crumb of steel" as Morris Bishop has foreseen

"the time when in the mothproof closet will dwell the moth"

(p. 223). In the age of the super-rat, an age in which pests ingest pesticides like children drink chocolate milk

and come back for more, we know these things to be not so much prophesy as parable. Yet they are merely the outward

and visible signs, the logical extension and physical man­

ifestation of our penchant, our doomed need, to impose our

own order on whatever larger order is out there. And thus

are we inevitably doomed by our own good deeds, our own

grand designs. The impulse behind the posturing of the

Marxist critic is not so different from the vision of those' who opened up the American West, an undertaking which had

led inexorably, by the time of Thurber's writing, to the

transformation of vast sections of the continent "into a

Sahara" (p. 225), and neither is essentially different from

the German National Socialist regime's "draining, land 222

reclamation, and river regulation projects" (p. 225) that

Thurber has read about in a small article, hidden away on

page 8 of the New York Times. According to the report,

Silesians in particular are beginning to complain "of a

veritable plague of rats and mice" (p. 225). It seems

that as a result of those projects "the country's water

economy" has been so interfered with "as to turn Germany

gradually into a steppe," so interfered with "that certain

unmistakable steppe animals and plants are already begin­

ning to make themselves at home in Germany" (p. 225).

Thus in Thurberian metaphor does the world end, with man proposing and nature disposing in endless cycle. And

thus are we doomed, for if, as it turns out, the steppe

cats did not slink stealthily into Berlin, it is only a matter of time until they will. In the meantime, there

have, of course, been the Nazis and the Communists and the

bombs. Similarly, if America did not blow away in the dust

storms of the 30's, it is only a matter of time until it will. Or at least it is only a matter of time until bigger

and better bombs start flying once again or until we choke on the air or the polar ice caps melt or the ozone layer

is destroyed or we all break out in hives and there is a murrain on the beasts. But Thurber's art does not, of course, end so simply or conclusively. It does not, in 223 fact, end at all, and it is not, therefore, very helpful to speak of Thurber's art in connection with the end, with apocalypse, for though he may speak of doom— "A bit of steel glittering here, a moth fluttering there, a handful of dust: these are the signs of doom" (p. 224)— the only doom that Thurber could truly imagine was the doom not of our end or conclusion but the doom, indeed the life sen­ tence, or our condition— the doom, precisely, of being forever on the edge of doom, forever searching for the signs of doom or at least for the sure and unmistakable signs of something. The doom about which Thurber writes is not, then, the doom of the end or the apocalypse, but the doom of the inconclusive and uncertain, of never know­ ing and never learning, the doom, in short, that is depicted 12 in The Last Flower (1939), Thurber's Parable in Pictures.

If it is true, as E. B. White has said in his obituary of

Thurber, that in The Last Flower "you will find his faith in the renewal of life, his feeling for the beauty and 13 fragility of life onr earth," it is equally true that in it you will find Thurber's despair and his feeling for the frequent ugliness and stupidity and even depravity of human life on earth, and you will find both in approximately equal measure. The Last Flower is, then, inconclusive, which is to say that it is like most of the great art of

Thurber's early maturity: like his drawings, for example, 224

or like his short stories and essays and occasional

pieces. It is even like the first book of fables which

was to flower two years after The Last Flower, fables in

which virtually every assertion is met with a counter as­

sertion, fables in which the fables themselves often con­

tradict each other. Only in the fairy tales could the

younger Thurber contravene this pattern, and he could only

do it there because of the inherently imaginative and,

hence, inherently irresponsible nature of the form. For

the rest, The Last Flower might, like the more light­

hearted The Race of Life seven years earlier, serve as the parable and the paradigm because, like much of the rest of

Thurber's art of the period, it shows us ourselves as we are and shows us our lives as they are, with, in Northrop 14 Frye's phrase, "the point of epiphany closed up." It

shows us the pattern of history, even as it shows us the pattern of our minds, for if The Last Flower was written and drawn at the beginning of World War II, the parable

itself begins at the end of World War XII, and if it opens at the end of World War XII, it ends at the end of World

War XIII.

But it does not, of course, end at all, for like the rest of Thurber's greatest art, it is situated in and 15 snatched from what Frank Kermode has called "the mrddest";

it begins as it ends, in medias res, implying and, in a 225 sense, incorporating everything else, except, of course, the end itself. If, then, The Last Flower is a tale of regeneration, it is equally a tale of degeneration, and of degeneration and regeneration in virtually indistinguish­ able and finally immaterial succession until World War __?

(LXVII, perhaps) or the explosion of the sun or, in any event, until the end of time, whenever that might be. If

The Last Flower is, as some might argue, a tale of man's saving rediscovery of nature, it is equally a tale of man's abandonment of nature and of nature's abandonment of him.

If it is a tale of love and of lovers, it is also a tale of lies and of liars— the lies of "the liberators," the lies of the mind. If it is a tale of optimism, it is also a tale of pessimism. And if it is a tale of optimism, it is so only to the extent that, in W. H. Auden's words, 16 "it flatters our conceit," the conceit that we are among the lovers rather than the liars. If Thurber seldom flat­ ters our conceit, it is because, as The Last Flower makes plain, we have so little to be conceited about. If, then,

Thurber himself finally succumbed to self-inclusive misan­ thropy, bitterness, and blind rage, the marvel is not that it happened but that it did not happen sooner.

To return, then, to the beginning of this conclusion,

Thurber's doom is not the doom of The End but the doom of the unending and the unendable, of the unconcluded and the 226 inconclusive. It is for that reason that the world, includ­ ing the world of literary criticism, has not so much by­ passed Thurber as it has not yet caught up with him. It may, of course, someday happen that we will catch up with him and that Malcolm Cowley's fine words about Thurber will come true

The writing game is, oh, so jubrously arranged, You never know what is Avant until the Garde is changed!17

But, as one of Thurber's wise-cracking lemmings might put it, "Don't bet on it." 227

NOTES

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," "The Whip-Poor- Will," and "A Friend to Alexander" were first collected in My World— And Welcome To It (New York: Harbrace Paper- bound Library, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969), pp. 72- 81, 18-32, and 139-53. My World— And Welcome To It was first published in 1942. The Catbird Seat" and "The Cane in the Corridor" were first collected in The Thurber Car­ nival (New York: Harper Colophon, Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 9-17 and 19-24. The Thurber Carnival was originally published in 1945.

2 See Bowden, James Thurber: A Bibliography, pp. 126-31.

3 Let Your Mind Alone and Other More or Less Inspira­ tional Pieces (New York: Universal Library, Grosset and Dunlap, 1973). All references and quotations are based upon this edition. 4 The narrator who wrote the account of Doc Marlowe and the boy who, as it were, lived it are not the same person. Yet Stephen Black characterizes the narrator's reaction to Marlowe as one of "outrage" (James Thurber: His Masquerades, p. 18 2), a characterization which would seem to be at odds with the concluding sentence and sentiment of the account: "For a long time I didn't like to think about it, or about Doc Marlowe, but I do now" (p. 198). 5 The Clocks of Columbus, p. 195. g See The Autobiography of Mark Van Doren (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), p. 255. This is not, of course, to discount what Van Doren calls Thurber's "rages— terrible, fantastic . . . savage, like Swift's, and with as deep a source" (p. 256).

7 Thurber: A Biography, p. 275.

g Thurber himself was, of course, as he puts it in "My Fifty Years with James Thurber," "born on a night of 228 wild portent and high wind" (The Thurber Carnival, p. xi). To make matters worse, he was apparently born at the wrong address— not, as he says in "My Fifty Years," at 147 Par­ sons Avenue in Columbus, but at 251 Parsons Avenue. See Bernstein, p. 14. g Bernstein, p. 275.

■^His solution— one of the few possible, even if it violates the spirit of the exercise while adhering to the letter— is to change "is" to "ain't" (p. 71).

■^Norris Yates, "James Thurber's Little Man and Liberal Citizen." Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Charles S. Holmes (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 28-36.

12 The Last Flower: A Parable m Pictures (New York: Harper Colophon, Harper and Row, 1971), n.p.

13 "James Thurber," The New Yorker, 11 November 1961, p. 247; rpt. Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 172.

14 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Prince­ ton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 237.

15 The Sense of an Ending: Studies m the Theory of Fiction (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, 1968), p. 7.

"^"The Icon and the Portrait," The Nation, 13 January 1940, p. 48; rpt. Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 60.

1 7 As quoted by Robert Tibbetts m "The Thurber Col­ lection at Ohio State University," Lost Generation Journal, 3 (1975), 38. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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