[published in The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth Century Short Story, Columbia University Press, 2001]

JAMES THURBER 1894-1961

by Robert H. Bell

  Author of many witty, elegant sketches, memoirs, fables, parodies, and spoofs, James Thurber was perhaps America's preeminent twentieth-century humorist. Born in 1894 in Columbus, Ohio, the middle of three boys, he was the child of a civil servant and a playful, theatrical mother. When James was seven years old, he was blinded in his left eye in a bow-and-arrow accident. Despite his infirmity he had a relatively unremarkable youth, certainly less zany that his autobiographical recollections indicate. In 1913 he enrolled at Ohio State University where he began his career as a journalist. After a brief stint in France as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, he settled in New York City and began writing for the fledgling New Yorker Magazine. Thurber won renown as the quintessential New Yorker humorist, the heir of Robert Benchley and peer of E. B. White, with whom he collaborated on the 1929 best-seller Is Sex Necessary?, a satiric spoof of self-help manuals. Books such as My Life and Hard Times (1933) found a large, appreciative audience in America and England. His character Walter Mitty became an archetype of the yearning Romantic, hen-pecked husband, and put-upon citizen. In 1945, his retrospective collection of humorous writings and drawings, The Thurber Carnival solidified and expanded his reputation. He was married twice, once to Althea Adams in 1922, and to Helen Wismer in 1935. Despite eye operations, near total blindness after 1941, heavy drinking, and increasing gloom about contemporary life, Thurber remained remarkably prolific and popular until his death in 1961.

  Thurber's favorite subject was himself, his family history, and his travail, most gloriously exposed and celebrated in the 1933 collection My Life and Hard Times, which includes such comic masterpieces as "The Night The Bed Fell" and "The Day the Dam Broke." Recounting "those bewildering involvements for which my family had, I am afraid, a kind of unhappy genius" ("A Sequence of Servants"), Thurber depicts eccentricities, his own and those of his ludicrous relatives, with affection, amusement, clinical detachment, and understated irony. The spontaneous overflow of flustered feelings is recollected in tranquillity: "Until a man can quit talking to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings," remarks Thurber in "A Note at the End" of My Life and Hard Times, "he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress and the careful ordering of events so necessary to a calm and balanced exposition of what, exactly, was the matter."

  Thurber also excelled at parody and satire, such as the demolition of psychology in Is Sex Necessary?, the meticulous impersonation of Southern Gothic in "Bateman Comes Home," and the wacky obsessions of a crime aficionado in "The Macbeth Murder Mystery." His two most memorable stories remain "The Catbird Seat" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," widely anthologized and reprinted pieces which view unexceptional characters from multiple angles, including affection, tenderness, and sympathy. Both stories demonstrate Thurber's mastery of competing styles, the inflated, clichéd idiom of fantasy, the ragged rhythms of everyday life, and holding it all together, the commanding poise of the narrator. At its best, James Thurber's writing rises from modest mirth to modern myth.

  Walter Mitty is the epitomal Thurber figure, whose inner world is as dramatic and heroic as his real life is mundane and pathetic. Bossed about by his overbearing wife, yelled at by parking-lot attendants, laughed at by passers-by, aimless, timid Mitty imagines himself as a fearless Naval Commander, an ingenious surgeon, an intrepid fighter pilot. Like Joyce's Leopold Bloom he is all-too-human, outwardly undistinguished but gifted and redeemed by his richly imaginative sensibility. As in Joyce, the clashes and incongruities between inner and outer worlds are painfully amusing. A leitmotif of Mitty's secret life-- the "ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa " of the befuddling machines mastered in his fantasies-- became a popular slogan and tag-line during World War II. Everybody, it seems, knew and was Walter Mitty. By the end of this brief, unforgetable story, the little man has, indeed, become "Walter Mitty the Undefeated," a humorous hero "to the last," occupying a permant place in our imagination and in the Random House Dictionary of the English language.

  A typical Thurber piece begins with something prosaic, such as a domestic spat, a pet's misbehavior, a maid's malapropism, or an aggravating colleague. Whatever produces "all the confusion which his disorderly mind so deplorably enjoyed," as he says of his character Bert Scursey in the story "Destructive Forces in Life," Thurber gleefully embroiders, exaggerates, and caricatures. Regularly professing simplicity, he cherishes perplexity: "Whereas we had been one remove from reality to begin with," he comments with evident satisfaction in "A Ride with Olympy," "we were now two, or perhaps three, removes." These "interesting transferences" ("The Cane in the Corridor"), or ascents from the mundane to the sublimely ridiculous, provide "a form of escapism that is the most mystic and satisfying flight from actuality I have ever known. It may not always comfort me, but it never ceases to beguile me" (as Thurber reflects in "What Do You Mean It Was Brillig?"). Such leaps from the ordinary to the bizarre are provoked or enabled by "twitchiness," a perpetual discomfort or dread, contemplated with as much poise as Thurber (or his protagonists and various personae) can muster.

  Thurber fears many persistent perils: menacing machines, mortal frailty, the hullaballoo of misunderstandings, the pathetic timidity of men and the threatening encroachments of women. Because of the incessant confusion between the inconsequential and the significant, and the tendency of minor muddles to catalyze chaos, the humorous writer "of light pieces," says Thurber, "talks largely about small matters and smally about great affairs" ("Preface to a Life" in My Life and Hard Times). Stressing his constant anxiety, Thurber adds that humorists generally "lead an existence of jumpiness and apprehension, They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats." In a much-quoted formulation, Thurber said, "The little wheels of their invention are set in motion by the damp hand of melancholy."

  A story titled "The Secret Life of James Thurber" shows how artful and resonant Thurber's humor can be. It begins: "I have only dipped here and there into Salvador Dali's 'The Secret Life of Salvador Dali' . . . because anyone afflicted with what my grandmother's sister Abigail called 'the permanent jumps' should do no more than skitter through such an autobiography, particularly in these melancholy times." Thurber establishes himself as a casual dipper into life's profound mysteries, not because he is unable to dive deeper but because he is precariously balanced. Typically, Thurber bestows a family idiom, the "permanent jumps," or what more solemn writers might term existential dread. Yet despite his uncertain equilibrium, Thurber's authority is enabled by his precise language-- his "secret world of idiom"-- and his humor. Much of what Thurber observes he finds laughable and lovable, the object of mild humor rather than savage satire, because it reminds him of something in and of himself. While mocking at Dali's absurd pretensions and bizarre idiosyncrasies, Thurber also implies a covert affinity with folly.

  Thus the apparent dichotomy between Thurber's plain common sense and Dali's fantastic nonsense becomes more interesting and complicated than first appears. Thurber's discourse, ostensibly about Dali, is flagrantly subjective, though in My Life and Hard Times he claimed the opposite: "The trouble, quite simply, is that I told too much about what went on in the house I lived in and not enough about what went on inside myself." As opposed to Dali's romantic and exotic materials, the stuff of Thurber's memories is ordinary--his father's derby, the Ohio Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft. But the amusing discrepancies suggest deeper connections: "Salvador Dali's mind goes back to a childhood half imagined and half real, in which the edges of actuality were sometimes less sharp than the edges of dream." In My Life and Hard Times, Thurber seems to say the same about himself as he tells how he "was born halfway along the road to paranoia, the soft Poictesme of his prayers, the melting Oz of his oblations, the capitol, to put it so you can see what I am trying to say, of his heart's desire." Defining himself as a man of plain good sense, Thurber reveals himself to be as imaginative, fantastic, visionary as Dali, though he displays his cursed gift without the famous artist's self-aggrandizing fanfare. Gradually we perceive the link between the great, strange Dali and the simple, mundane Thurber, and to value their follies. No less than Salvador Dali, he too revels in "the enchanted private world" and wanders "in the secret, surrealist landscapes," a wonderful, frightening, and amazing place: "It was a world that, of necessity, one had to keep to oneself and brood over in silence, because it would fall to pieces at the touch of words." Like Wordsworth's poetic vision, it "gleams, flickers, and vanishes away," but may return or be recalled, with nervous jumps, imagination, and joy.

  Thurber's work is happily, permanently available in Thurber: Writings and Drawings, selected by Garrison Keillor (1996). If Thurber the man existed apprehensively in the house of Life, the author surely sits comfortably on the chair of Literature.

---Robert H. Bell (Williams College)

There are several biographies: Burton Bernstein, Thurber: A Biography (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1975); Neil A. Grauer, Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Charles S. Holmes, The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber (New York: Atheneum, 1972); Harrison Kinney, James Thurber: His Life And Times (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995). See also Edwin T. Bowden, James Thurber: A Bibliography (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968). There is also an edition of correspondence, Selected Letters of James Thurber, edited by Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1981).

Criticism of Thurber's literary art includes Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Charles S. Holmes (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974).

Besides the Library of America anthology, edited by Keillor (New York: The Library of America, 1996), Thurber's stories are to be found in the following collections.

Thurber, James and White, E. B. Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929.

Thurber, James. The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities. New York: Harper & Bros. 1931.

--------. The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments. New York: Harper & Bros. 1932.

-------. My Life and Hard Times. New York: Harper & Bros. 1933.

-------. The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze. New York: Harper & Bros. 1935.

------. Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces. New York: Harper & Bros. 1937

----. The Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures. New York: Harper & Bros. 1939.

-----. Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated. New York: Harper & Bros. 1940.

-------. My World--And Welcome To It! New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1942.

-----. Men, Women and Dogs: A Book of Drawings. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1943

--------. The Thurber Carnival. New York: Harper & Bros. 1945.

------. The Beast in Me and Other Animals: A New Collection of Pieces and Drawings About Human Beings and Less Alarming Creatures. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1948.

------. The Thirteen Clocks. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1950.

-------. The Thurber Album: A New Collection of Pieces About People. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1952

--------. Thurber Country: A New Collection of Pieces About Males and Females, Mainly of Our Own Species. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1953.

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

--------. Further Fables for Our Time. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1956

--------. Alarms and Diversions. New York: Harper & Bros. 1957.

---------. The Years With Ross. Boston: Little, Brown and Company 1959.

----------. Lanterns and Lances. Harper & Bros. 1961

---------. Credos and Curios. Harper & Row. 1962

---------. Thurber and Company. Harper & Row. 1966