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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.