Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1974 The World of James Thurber: An Anatomy of Confusion Catherine McGehee Kenney Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Kenney, Catherine McGehee, "The World of James Thurber: An Anatomy of Confusion" (1974). Dissertations. 1425. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1425 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1974 Catherine McGehee Kenney THE WORLD OF JAMES THURBER: AN ANATOMY OF CONFUSION by Catherine McGehee Kenney A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 1974 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people have helped make this dissertation possi­ ble. I wish to express my thanks to the members of my commit­ tee, Dr. Joseph Wolff and Dr. James Rocks, and especially to my director, Dr. Agnes Donohue, fo~ her many hours of reading and criticizing the text and sharing insights with me. I would also like to thank Sister Rita Stalzer of the Cudahy Library of Loyola University for her efforts in locat­ ing many hard to find Thurber materials and the librarians at The Twentieth Century Collection of the Northwestern Uni­ versity Library for giving me access to first editions of Thurber's work and rare critical publications. A special thanks must go to Mrs. James Thurber, who has generously answered my questions and helped me understand Thurber's mind and art better. I am also grateful for the financial and less tangible forms of assistance provided by my family during a year of re­ search and writing. Finally, to my husband, who has given me great encouragement and assistance in my research, an impos­ sibly inadequate thanks for not only sharing with me an un­ failing enthusiasm for Thurber's work, but for having the courage and humor to live through it. ii VITA Catherine McGehee Kenney was born October 3, 1948, in Memphis, Tennessee. She was graduated from Lepanto High School, Lepanto, Arkansas, in 1964 and in the same year was awarded a certifi­ cate in piano and music theory from the DeShazo College of Music in Memphis, Tennessee. The author attended Siena College, Memphis, from 1964 until May, 1968, when she received the Bachelor of Arts degree in English. At Siena College she was a member of the Student Government, the Theatre Guild, and was editor of the campus newspaper. In September, 1968, she began graduate studies in English at Loyola University and was awarded the Master of Arts in English in June, 1970. She was a teaching assistant in the English department of Loyola University from 1968 until 1972. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . • . • . • . ii VITA................................................. iii CONTENTS OF APPENDICES. v CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. • . • . 1 II. MAN AND SOCIETY: THE MACROCOSM OF CONFUSION................... 27 III. MAN AND WOMAN: CONFUSION DISTILLED.......................... 79 IV. MAN AND OTHER BEASTS: CONFUSION IN PERSPECTIVE..................... 129 V. MAN, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY: CONFUSION EXTENDED. 154 VI. ILLUSION AND RE.ALI TY: ENDLESS PERMUTATIONS......................... 198 VII. THE LANGUAGE OF CONFUSION.................... 257 VIII. CONCLUSION. 333 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY. 343 APPENDIX I. 355 APPENDIX II.......................................... 376 iv CONTENTS OF APPENDICES Page APPENDIX I Confusion's Reign: Thurber's Melancholy Sense of Time ................. 355 APPENDIX II The Elements of Thurber's Style A. Conunon Literary Devices in Thurber's Prose ..... 376 B. Analysis of Selected Passages .................. 404 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION More than a decade has passed since the death of James Thurber, master prose stylist, critic and creature of the human predicament, and imagination extraordinaire, and yet there remains a relative dearth of informed comment on his work. During. his lifetime Thurber enjoyed financial suc­ cess and was particularly admired by a great number of contem- porary writers and critics; he could be called, therefore, a 1 "writer's writer" although unfortunately most of the critical comments of his contemporaries concerning his work are limited to short book reviews and random comments in interviews and conversations. It is an indication of the wide range and fine­ ness of Thurber's craft and vision, however, that some of the best comments on his art to date are from other writers, a mixed group which ranges from T. S. Eliot to John Updike, in addition to Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Dorothy Parker, Malcolm 2 Cowley, Robert Benchley, W. H. Auden, and others. 1Malcolm Cowley, The Literary Situation (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), p. 193; recommends Thurber for other writers. 2 Cf. W. H. Auden, "The Icon and the Portrait," Nation, CL (Jan. 13, 1940), p. 48; C. S. Holmes, The Clocks of Colum­ bus (New York: Atheneum, 1972), pp. 136, 148; Edmund Wilson, "Book," New Yorker, XX! (October 27, 1945), pp. 91-94; Doro­ thy Parker, Introduction to Men, Women, and Dogs (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1943), pp. vii-x. 1 2 Thurber himself was understandably gratified by the admiration of many fellow artists but still was plagued by the sparsity of serious critics and the superficiality of other connnentators: "The comparatively few who really read 3 me know I'm not just 'zany' and 'whimsical'" he often pub- licly lamented. In a 1960 letter to Dr. James E. Pollard of Ohio State University, Thurber gave a retrospective conLrnent on his artistic intention: I try to make as perceptive and helpful connnent on the human predicament as I can, in fables, fairy tales, stories and essays. I am surprised that so few people see the fig~re of seriousness in the carpet of my humor and comedy. T. S. Eliot described that figure in the carpet, however, in a statement which was Thurber's own favorite criticism of his work: It is a form of humor which is also a way of saying some­ thing serious. There is a criticism of life at the bottom of it. It is serious and even sombre. Unlike so much hu­ mor, it is not merely a criticism of manners--that is, of the superficial aspects of society at a given moment--but something more profound. His writings and also his illus­ trations are capable of surviving the innnediate environ­ ment and time out of which they spring. To some extent, they will be a document of the age they belong to.5 Interestingly, it was through a comparison of Eliot and Thurber 3 "Thurber, an Old Hand at Humor with Two Hits on Hand," Life, XLVIII (Mar. 14, 1960), p. 108. 4 Samuel Bernard Baker, James Thurber: The Columbus Years (unpublished M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1962, p. 67. 5 T. S. Eliot, quoted in "Priceless Gift of Laughter," Time, LVIII (July 9, 1951), p. 88; Harvey Breit, "Talk with James Thurber," New York Times Book Review, June 29, 1952, p. 19. 3 in "James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock" that Peter De Vries pioneered serious Thurber criticism in 1943. In attempting to place Thurber in the continuum of American literature, De Vries related him to Eliot, modern poetry, and serious social com­ mentary of the day, characterizing him as a "jester in Axel's 6 Castle." Both Eliot and De Vries address themselves to one of the reasons for a scarcity of criticism on Thurber or any wri­ ter of comic literature, the notion that anything genuinely humorous cannot also be serious--in many cases, it is deadly serious--and therefore, the predjudice runs, humor and comedy are not worthy of detailed study. It seems an obvious point, but one that many literate people ignore, that a comic vision of the world is perhaps different in mode from more ostensi- bly "serious" or unfunny forms, but often in fact addresses itself to the same real questions about human life; just as often, it is produced by an artist who is supremely serious about his craft. James Thurber was such an artist, for as he said to New Yorker editor Harold Ross after his unsuccess- ful eye operations had left him almost totally blind and unab- le to draw, "If I couldn't write, I couldn't live, but draw- 7 ing to me is little more than tossing cards in a hat." 6Peter De Vries, "James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock," Poetry, LXIII (Dec., 1943), p. 158. 7Henry Brandon, "A Conversation with James Thurber," New Republic, May 26, 1958, p. 12. 4 He was also fond of saying to many interviewers and friends that perhaps blindness was an advantage for a writer which would equip him with a greater power of concentration and less interest in the things of the world. Thurber understood humor both serious and tragicomic: "It's very hard to divorce humor from the other things in life. Humor is the other side of tragedy. Humor is a serious thing." (In this statement as elsewhere in interviews and criticism, Thurber seerns to use the terms humor, comedy, and tragedy rather loosely.) Wylie Sypher, one of the foremost critics of modern comedy, similarly concludes about "Our New Sense of the Comic:" Perhaps the most important discovery in modern criticism is the perception that comedy and tragedy are somehow akin, or that comedy can tell us many things about our situation even tragedy cannot. At the heart of the nineteenth cen­ tury Dostoevsky discovered this, and Soren Kierkegaard spoke as a modern man when he wrote that the comic and the tragic touch one another at the absolute point of 8in­ finity--at the extremes of human experience, that is.