The Man Who Was Walter Mitty, page 16
“The Admiral on the Wheel” couldn’t have been a clearer public admission of Thurber’s near-blindness.
The critics continued to praise every Thurber book.
The learned Doctor James Thurber as his publishers call him, is at present, I think, the most original and humorous writer living, so it is interesting to see what will become of him.... “Memories of D. H. Lawrence” and “Doc Marlowe” and “The Wood Duck” make me believe that Thurber will have sufficient strength of character and is enough of an artist to refuse to be forcibly made a Twain of, and that he will develop along his own lines as a first-rate writer and not as a funny man or prophet.
—David Garnett, New Statesman and Nation36
What a trial lawyer Mr. Thurber would have made if circumstances had not turned his high talents to writing and drawing! He is one of our great American institutions, and the sooner more people realize it, the better off they will be.
—Stanley Walker, Books Section,
The New York Herald Tribune37
Harper & Brothers published Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More Or Less Inspirational Pieces in September, 1937, with a first printing of 5,000 copies. Harper went back to press for the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth printings before the end of 1937; The book was reprinted again in 1940, in 1942 (twice); in 1943, 1944, twice again in 1945, 1946, 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953. Hamish Hamilton published a British edition in 1937; there was an Armed Forces paperback edition in 1944, and a Universal Library (Grosset and Dunlap) edition in 1960.38
The first four or five years following his marriage to Helen were, perhaps, the best years of his entire life. They would not last. Troubles with his good right eye were beginning. Dr. Gordon Bruce, Thurber’s ophthalmologist, had examined him in 1935 and discovered a cataract growing in his good eye. By 1937, he could no longer see at night and often saw images that were not there ...
the gay old lady with the parasol who walked through the side of a truck ... the cat rolling across the street in a small striped barrel and the bridges that rose lazily in the air like balloons.
Seven
James Thurber, 1937–1940
“Throw on the power lights! We’re going through!”
The pounding of the cylinders increased:
Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa ...
Despite his eyesight, James and Helen spent much of 1937 traveling; they left the United States in the spring of 1937, traveling first to France, where they toured Normandy, then drove to Paris where they met Janet Flanner, who wrote the “Letter from Paris” column for The New Yorker (whom they had known previously); they also met Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, Vincent Sheean and Dorothy Parker. Thurber vividly remembered one night in Paris, where he tried to convince James Lardner, son of Ring Lardner, that if he wished to witness the Spanish Civil War, he should go as a reporter, not as a combatant. Hemingway, at the same table, urged Lardner to go as a soldier. Lardner went to Spain and was killed in the conflict. It lodged in Thurber’s memory:
I was one of the last to plead with him in Paris not to go to Spain, but he just gave me the old Lardner smile. Hemingway and Jimmy Sheean were pulling against me.1
The Thurbers then traveled to England, where he had become something of a legend. Thurber’s brand of quirky self-deprecating humor very much appealed to the British. With his weak eyesight, foibles, and Thurber Man image, he was very much in vogue in England, especially with those who had discovered his art. “The hallmark of sophistication is to adore the drawings of James Thurber,” said The London Daily Sketch.2 The newspaper referred to the “wild nonsense through which gleams a nightmare logic.”
The British began to crown him the next Mark Twain. Novelist David Garnett, writing in The Observer said that Thurber was “the most original and humorous writer living,” and “it is fatally easy for the humorist to turn from attacking half-baked ideas to attacking ideas as such ... I utter this solemn word of warning thinking of the terrible fate of Mark Twain, whose genius was deflected into ridiculing history and all forms of art everywhere.”3
Alistair Cooke met Thurber during that visit to England. Cooke was as proud as Thurber of his memory—they baited each other with memory games: when was Hitler born? When was Charlie Chaplin born? The memory contests were usually draws—neither could gain much advantage over the other. Cooke’s memory of Thurber offers a striking picture:
My impression of the physical Thurber ... was that of a grasshopper finally come to earth. He had a spiderly stance, enormous feet that may have been only the type of shoe he wore, and he had glasses as thick as binoculars. When I first saw Harry Truman, his glasses reminded me of Thurber’s. They gave both men a Martian quality, and I used to think, when I saw Truman as president, that he could well be the president of Mars and Thurber the poet laureate. There was a terrific gentleness to Thurber, sitting there ... .4
Thurber couldn’t resist re-using some of his material. In The Sunday Referee, he wrote about staying in Felicity Hall, in Bermuda, and claimed, to visiting tourists from the states, that he was writing Anthony Adverse backwards.5
He had a show at the Storran Gallery, where 30 Thurber drawings were sold and he made enough to rent a flat where they stayed until August. He covered the Davis Cup matches at Wimbledon for The New Yorker, using the pseudonym “Foot Fault” and appeared on a new invention, television, where he draw typical Thurber men, women and dogs on large white paper with crayon.
Thurber had arrived. He and Helen met H. G. Wells, Charles Laughton, David Garnett, and producer Alexander Korda (father of American publisher and author Michael Korda) and artist Paul Nash.
They traveled by car (they had their Ford shipped along) to Loch Ness, where Thurber was infatuated with the Loch Ness saga. He promised to write a full-length treatment of the Loch Ness story, but never did. A short version, “There’s Something Out There!” was subsequently published in Holiday magazine. (And we can easily visualize how an odd sighting of the snake-like monster, in the murky, dark cold Loch would be perfect for a Thurber drawing. One Thurber person to another: “alright, have it your way, you saw a monster ...”)
They traveled to Holland, then back to Paris, where the traveling, and the French, finally got to both Thurbers; they each fell ill with heavy colds. Thurber had to deal with French waiters, as he was the one to go out and get Helen orange juice and such. Thurber’s French and the typical arrogance of the local restaurants made him moodier then usual. As did the Americans he saw and overheard in France. Ohioans in Ohio were one thing; Ohioans (and Hoosiers and Iowans and such) in France were another matter entirely. He wrote about those he saw, an untitled poem which remained unpublished for years until Burton Bernstein published it in his biography of Thurber:
What was it happened to France la Doulce?
The Americans know, my friend; drink up, quit talking and listen:
Listen to the tapping of a thousand typewriters,
Listen to the moving of a thousand tongues;
The Americans know, and they will make you know,
they will get you told;
They are still talking, they are still tapping: listen:
Listen to the lady on your right at dinner:
for two years every year
for ten years she spent two weeks in Paris buying dresses from
Francevramant and Mainbocher.
Listen to her, she knows, she’ll make you know, she’ll get
you told.
Listen to your tapping of the thousand typewriters, listen to the
lady on your left.
Her great grandmother was born in Alsace, in a town, she
thinks, near Strasbourg.
so she knows, she will make you know, she will get you told.
Listen to the man who drove his own car from Paris to Juan les
Pins and back in 1937.
he knows, he will make you know, he will get you told.
What was it happened to France la Doulce?
Are you deaf, my friend, don’t you get around, don’t you hear
the Americans talking?
don’t you listen to the tapping of a thousand typewriters?
Hark to the man who owns a Juan Gris:
“Listen, will you listen to me? I was in Paris in ‘34.
two other times I was there before.
Listen, my friends, listen to me.”
(Hark to the man who owns a Juan Gris.)
What was it happened to France la Doulce?
Stop in the bars, stoop in the clubs,
Talk to Mr. and Mrs. George Stubbs,
“Well, we stopped at the cafe in Dijon and George said to me
and I said to George,
and you couldn’t help seeing, you just felt they were there,
and she says to me and I says to her –”
What was it happened to France la Doulce?
Listen my children and you shall near
of Mrs. Bert Robertson’s wonderful year.
She kept her eyes open, she knew what was up,
The things that she saw made her sick as a pup.
(Oh it wasn’t the Chambertin mixed with the rye;
the coffee is lousy, they can’t make a pie).6
Then, off to Italy. Thurber was never infatuated with Italians; he profoundly disliked fascist Italy, Mussolini, and the para-military redtape he saw round him.
He had the time to write long, introspective letters to Andy White; Thurber always saw White (although he could not bring himself to admit it) as his older brother; a sane, intelligent, wise brother figure he never had (god knows!) in the Thurber menage in Columbus. To Andy White, he could speak his innermost voice, as in this frank self-portrait:
I got shot in the eye at six years old .... And even then it was the luckiest shot in the eye that medical science, optical branch, has probably ever known. Ten million men out of ten million and two would have lost the sight of both eyes as a result of what I stepped into. Oculists love my eye, since it is the only one they ever saw in which an unstoppable infection, having passed the sixth stage, stopped just so short of utter blindness that the naked eye cant figure out what mine sees with. Marquis goes blind playing pool, and for a strange reason. I see for an even stranger reason. This does not prove my argument about anything; but I often wonder what I would be like now if I had gone blind at the age of seven. I see myself as kind of fat, for some reason, and wandering about the grounds of a large asylum, plucking at leaves and chortling.7
His reference to “Marquis” was Don Marquis, best known for his archy the cockroach stories who subsequently died.
Let Your Mind Alone! was published in September, 1937, while Thurber was abroad; the fact that he was in Europe when the book was published was of little consequence. What was of more consequence was that during Thurber’s absence from The New Yorker, Andy White decided to leave New York and contribute to the magazine from a farm in Maine.
White wrote from Maine to his wife Katherine, in New York, who was still working in the offices of The New Yorker:
I am quitting partly because I am not satisfied with the use I am making of my talents; partly because I am not having fun working at my job—and am in a rut there; partly because I long to recapture something which everyone loses when he agrees to perform certain creative miracles on specified dates for a particular sum ... A person afflicted with poetic longings of one sort or another searches for a kind of intellectual and spiritual privacy in which to indulge his strange excesses.8
In the essay, “The Making of E.B. White,” published in The New York Times Book Review on the occasion of the republication of White’s One Man’s Meat, Roger Angell, E.B. White’s stepson said,
When White first removed, with his wife and young son, from a walk-up duplex on East 48th Street in Manhattan, and went to live on a saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Me., he seemed almost eager, in his early columns, to detect even the smallest signs of awkwardness in himself in his fresh surroundings (as when he found himself crossing the barnyard with a paper napkin in one hand), but the surge of alteration that overtook him and swept him along over the full six-year span of the book quickly did away with these little ironies. Despite its tranquil setting, it is a book about movement—the rush of the day, the flood and ebb of the icy Penobscot tides, the unsettlements of New England weather, the arrival of another season and its quick (or so it seems) dispersal, the birth and death of livestock, and the coming of a world war that is first seen at a distance (White is shingling his barn roof during the Munich crisis), then weeps across Europe (he is fixing a balky brooder stove during the German spring drive in the Balkans) and at last comes home (he mans a town plane-spotting post and finds a heron) to impose its binding and oddly exuberant hold on everyone’s attention.
* * *
Freed of the weekly deadlines and the quaintsy first-person plural form of The New Yorker’s “Notes and Comment” page, which he had written for more than a decade, he discovered his subject (it was himself) and a voice that spoke softly but rang true. “Once More to the Lake,” his 1941 account of a trip with his son back to the freshwater lake where he had vacationed as a boy, is an enduring American essay—and could not have been written until its precise moment. “Stuart Little,” “Charlotte’s Web” and 10 other books and collections were still ahead, but the author had found his feet.9
White’s decampment to Maine only served to remind Thurber how long ago the first years at The New Yorker had been, when he and White shared a small, too small office. He was gone from The New Yorker office and so now, was White; their friendship remained on keel, but now only through the mails and occasional visits. If he mourned the rapport they had when they were both beginning their careers together in the same cramped quarters, he didn’t indicate it much in letters.
From Italy back to Paris. And from Paris to England. And there again, Thurber was the toast of London. His British publisher, Hamish Hamilton began the work of editing a collection of Thurber titled Cream of Thurber, published in June, 1939 (a wonderful title, not used on any anthology of his material in the United States). From England to Scotland to visit distant relatives of Helen’s. Then back to England and to Le Havre to catch the ship Champlain to New York. They arrived in the United States the first of September, 1938, a calendar year before World War Two began.
Back in the states the Thurbers settled in a rented house in Woodbury, Connecticut. It took the Thurbers some time to get reacquainted with their assorted friends and families. James and Helen began to enjoy life in New England again, but while driving, Thurber had another attack—his eyesight suddenly went blurry and he had to stop the car. Fortunately his sight returned to normal—that is, the normal state for him, but since the attack occurred in daylight, he was deeply troubled. Previously, he couldn’t see much at night—but now he could no longer risk driving during the day if his eyesight was likely to fail when he was behind the wheel.
In Woodbury, writing upstairs, Thurber wrought his most perfect story—a wonderful distillation or amalgam of all the Thurber Men at battle with all the Thurber Women he had written about, or imaged throughout his life, dating back to his class prophecy in the eighth grade about the “Seairoplane.” The story was “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
It is short—he said it was about four thousand words (but it’s perhaps closer to 2,500 words), only ten pages in My World—And Welcome to It—but as perfectly formed as a diamond:
“We’re going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We can’t make it sir. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander. “Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through.” The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa ... .10
Thus we are introduced to Walter Mitty’s daydreams. He is driving his wife to Waterbury, Conecticut and thinking of the Navy SN202, flying through the worst storm in twenty years. (And the picture is so real that Helen Thurber had to publicly declare she was not Mrs. Mitty. “Of course, I’m not anything like that Mrs. Mitty.”11)
He stopped in front of the hairdressers and dropped his wife off, then drove aimlessly around while his wife was getting her hair done. He drove past the local hospital, on his way to the parking lot ...
... and Dr. Mitty lends a hand to a delicate operation on McMillan, “the millionaire banker and a close friend of Roosevelt.” It was obstreosis of the ductal tract. Teriary. Dr. Mitty was glad to help. But there was a problem with the anesthetizer ...
Mitty sprang to the machine, which was now going Pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep.
He fixed it with a fountain pen. But ... “Coreopsis has set in, said Renshaw nervously, will you take over, Mitty?”
... Mitty had driven his car into the parking lot into the lane marked Exit Only. He backed it out and gave the keys to the attendant to park it properly. He bought overshoes and was on the way out of the shoestore, thinking that the next time, he’d wear his right arm in a sling, and then the parking lot attendant wouldn’t be so cocky. He tried to remember what his wife told him to buy ...
... when Walter Mitty was in the courtroom, being quizzed by the District Attorney. “This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80,” he said.
And while the Judge and the district attorney bickered, Mitty calmly said ... “With any known make of gun, I could have killed Gregory Fitzgerald at three hundred feet with my left hand.”
