THURBER, James (Grover)

Nationality: American. Born: Columbus, Ohio, 8 December 1894. Education: Ohio State University, Columbus, 1913-14, 1915-18. Family: Married 1) Althea Adams in 1922 (divorced 1935), one daughter; 2) Helen Wismer in 1935. Career: Code clerk, American Embassy, Paris, 1918-20; reporter, Columbus Dispatch, 1920-24; reporter, Paris edition of Chicago Tribune,1925-26; reporter, New York Evening Post, 1926-27; editor, 1927, writer, 1927-38, then freelance contributor, The New Yorker; illustrator from 1929: several individual shows. Awards: Litt.D.: Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, 1950; Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1953; L.H.D.: Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1951. Died: 2 November 1961.

Publications

Collections

Vintage Thurber: A Collection of the Best Writings and Drawings.2 vols., 1963.

People Have More Fun than Anybody: A Centennial Celebration of Drawings and Writings of James Thurber. 1995.

Writings and Drawings. 1996.

Short Stories and Sketches (illustrated by the author)

The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities. 1931.

The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments. 1932.

My Life and Hard Times. 1933.

The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze: A Collection of

Short Pieces. 1935.

Let Your Mind Alone! and Other More or Less Inspirational

Pieces. 1937.

Cream of Thurber. 1939.

The Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures. 1939.

Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated. 1940.

My World—and Welcome to It. 1942.

Men, Women, and Dogs: A Book of Drawings. 1943.

The Thurber Carnival. 1945.

The Beast in Me, and Other Animals: A New Collection of Pieces and Drawings about Human Beings and Less Alarming Creatures. 1948.

The Thurber Album: A New Collection of Pieces about People. 1952.

Thurber Country: A New Collection of Pieces about Males and Females, Mainly of Our Own Species. 1953.

Thurber's Dogs: A Collection of the Master's Dogs, Written and Drawn, Real and Imaginary, Living and Long Ago. 1955.

A Thurber Garland. 1955.

Further Fables for Our Time. 1956.

Alarms and Diversions. 1957.

Lanterns and Lances. 1961.

Credos and Curios. 1962.

Thurber and Company. 1966.

Fiction (for children)

Many Moons. 1943.

The Great Quillow. 1944.

The White Deer. 1945.

The 13 Clocks. 1950.

The Wonderful O. 1955.

Plays

The Male Animal, with Elliott Nugent (produced 1940). 1940.

A Thurber Carnival, from his own stories (produced 1960). 1962.

Wrote the books for the following college musical comedies: Oh My! Omar, with Hayward M. Anderson, 1921; Psychomania, 1922; Many Moons, 1922; A Twin Fix, with Hayward M. Anderson, 1923; The Cat and the Riddle, 1924; Nightingale, 1924; Tell Me Not, 1924.

Other

Is Sex Necessary? or, Why You Feel the Way You Do, with E. B. White. 1929.

Thurber on Humor. 1953.

The Years with Ross. 1959.

Selected Letters, edited by Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks. 1981.

Conversations with Thurber, edited by Thomas Fensch. 1989.

Collecting Himself: Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor, and

Himself, edited by Michael J. Rosen. 1989.

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Bibliography:

Thurber: A Bibliography by Edwin T. Bowden, 1968; Thurber: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism by Sarah Eleanora Toombs, 1987.

Critical Studies:

Thurber by Robert E. Morsberger, 1964; The Art of Thurber by Richard C. Tobias, 1969; Thurber, His Masquerades: A Critical Study by Stephen A. Black, 1970; The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of Thurber by Charles S. Holmes, 1972, and Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Holmes, 1974; Thurber: A Biography by Burton Bernstein, 1975; Thurber's Anatomy of Confusion by Catherine McGehee Kenney, 1984; Thurber by Robert Emmet Long, 1988; Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber by Neil A. Grauer, 1995; James Thurber: His Life and Times by Harrison Kinney, 1995.

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Not the least of the difficulties in writing about James Thurber's short fiction is to discover which among the thousands of short pieces covering a number of modes—fable, parody, autobiography, social commentary—can be reasonably defined as fiction. "A Box to Hide In" (1931), for instance, falls somewhere between comic prose commentary and fiction, while stories like "Doc Marlowe" (1935) and "The Wood Duck" (1936) read as if they are personal anecdotes. But the mass of his comic prose writings tends to conceal the fact that Thurber, one of the most famous American comic writers, is a short story writer of considerable distinction and formal adventurousness.

The one story for which he is unquestionably famous is "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," in which he established the archetype of the hen-pecked husband who sustains himself on a life of rich inner fantasy. Many of his stories are variations on this theme. "The Catbird Seat" (1942), for instance, involves the conflict between a meek man and a domineering woman, but here they are fellow employees, not a married couple. Mrs. Barrows has won the confidence of the head of the firm and commences a radical reform of it. She goads the meek, long-serving, teetotaling Mr. Martin to the point where he makes private plans to murder her. When he arrives at her apartment he loses the nerve to carry the scheme through but proceeds to engage in wild behavior, drinking and smoking, and finally insulting her employer. Martin has his way after all: the next morning when Mrs. Barrows reports his behavior she is not believed and is assumed to be a cracking up. In another variation "The Lady on 142" shows a train traveler and his quarrelsome wife involved in a heavily melodramatic intrigue about a spy that both parodies and pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock movies and Dashiell Hammett novels (both mentioned in the text). At the end, of course, we find that the husband has dreamt the whole thing. In "The Private Life of Mr. Bidwell" (1933) a man develops eccentric habits—holding his breath for as long as possible, multiplying numbers in his head—possibly to bring about (unconsciously) the event that occurs: his wife leaves him. The gesture of private insurrection becomes a compulsive one; there is a last, pathetic glimpse of him at the end of the story walking along a road—he is trying to see how many steps he can take without opening his eyes. "The Remarkable Case of Mr. Bruhl" (1933) is yet another experiment along the same lines.

If there is one theme that is worth isolating, it is the battle of the sexes, the title of the film made from "The Catbird Seat." Thurber's men—ineffectual, dithering, indecisive—are dominated by their strong-minded wives. For instance, The Owl in the Attic (1931) has a series of eight stories about a young couple called the Monroes. In "Tea at Mrs. Armsby's" Mrs. Monroe is drunk and launches into a monologue about her husband's mania for collecting objects such as pencils ("My husband has eight hundred and seventy-four thousand pencils"). Mr. Monroe is forced into a desperately quick-witted confirmation and even embellishment of the bizarre claim ("I became interested in pencils in the Sudan…. The heat is so intense there that it melts the lead in the average Venus or Faber") until he can get her into a taxi and escape from the gullible guests. It is Thurber's wit at its best—the straight-faced dealing with the most preposterous situations. More often, though, the woman is in charge of the relationship. When Mr. Monroe dares to have an affair his wife calls on the other woman and ends it by pleasantly informing her of Mr. Monroe's gross ineptitude in all practical matters.

Sometimes this ascendancy can take a relatively benign form: "Little Mrs. Monroe, burdened with coats and bundles, rosy, lovely, at length appeared. Mr. Monroe's heart leapt up, but at the same time he set himself as if to receive a service in tennis." (Thurber is also good at the incongruous contrasts between emotional responses and physical situations.) At other times the ascendancy can be painfully humiliating. "A Couple of Hamburgers" (1935) is a chillingly detached portrait—conveyed largely through dialogue—of a failed marriage in which husband and wife take turns scoring points off each other. Thurber is very good, too, in his grasp of how a trivial incident can have disastrous consequences. In "The Breaking Up of the Winships" (1936) a husband's irritation at his wife's worship of Greta Garbo leads to his responding to her challenge to name a better actor by nominating Donald Duck. The absurd argument continues to escalate to the point where both husband and wife feel their whole ego is committed to their respective beliefs, and the marriage ends in tatters. Despite its underlying comedy, the tone of the story is somber.

Many of Thurber's best stories, especially from the 1930s, center around failing marriages and aggressively sparring couples, their antagonism often exacerbated by alcohol, but there is a range of other themes as well. "The Black Magic of Barney Haller" (1932) is a very funny story that rests around the atrocious pronunciation of the narrator's hired man, Barney Haller. Its most attractive feature is Thurber's obvious delight in language and especially invented words and the suggestions they can convey. "The Figgerin' of Aunt Wilma" (1950) is different from most of Thurber's work in its loving conjuring up of an Ohio town in 1905. "The Man Who Hated Moonbaum" (1940) is Thurber's only Hollywood story, but his versatile talents extend even to the apocalyptic satire of "The Greatest Man in the World" (1931), which ends with the president of the United States silently ordering the assassination of an aviator who proves inappropriate as a hero, and "You Could Look It Up" (1941), a grotesque story about a baseball-playing dwarf. There is also the melancholy of "One Is a Wanderer" (1935) and the posthumously published "The Other Room," fine stories in which the usual humor is largely absent. There are also several stories about writing figures, such as "Something to Say" (1932), which read like comic or parodic versions of stories by Henry James on the same themes. Thurber is a subtle, dispassionate observer of American (mostly middle-class, urban) mores. In this and in his use of a style at once comic and sadly ironic, the writer he most anticipates is John Cheever.

—Laurie Clancy

See the essay on "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."