The Man Who Was Walter Mitty, page 25
dressgrader: A woman who stares another woman up and down, a starefrock; hence, a rude female, a hobbledehoyden.
lassgraphic: Of, or pertaining to, the vivid description of females; as, the guest was so lass-graphic his host asked him to change the subject or get out. Also said of fathers of daughters, more rarely of mothers.46
This story originated in Bermuda, in 1951, Charles S. Holmes, writes when Thurber was challenged by the “sgra” combination. After the story appeared in The New Yorker, Thurber received considerable mail with readers’ variations on Thurber’s new dictionary. The best were from English actor, Richard Haydn, who suggested
pressgrappler: a celebrity who resents being photographed when entering or leaving nightclubs, City Halls or apartments tenanted by the opposite sex; Colloq., a smackbrownie (American), a bashbeaton (Brit.)
and ...
prissgrammer: 1. One who deploreds slovenly speech in others. A pedantic fellow. 2. A wife who, at social gatherings, kills the punchline of her husband’s stories by correcting is English; an ainthater, a talkdainty. 3. One who is acutely discomforted by certain Anglo-Saxon words or risque stories, a smutwince.47
“A Final Note on Chanda Bell (After Reading Two or Three Literary Memorials to This or That Lamented Talent, Written By One Critic or Another)” is yet again, one more time, Thurber’s tribute to James, with some Joyceian touches here and there.
“A Friend of the Earth” is another Barney Haller story, in which Thurber is undone by Zeph Leggin, New England handy-man and rustic philosopher. Thurber needs work done at his place and engages, if that is the correct word, Zeph. In a hardware store, Thurber offers Leggin a saw:
Zeph examined it carefully and put it down. “Can’t use it,” he said, “left-handed saw.”
Zeph has his own view of the world:
My father gave me a flashlight for Christmas one year and the batteries wore out, like they is bound to do if a man aims to see more in this life than the good Lord wants him to.48
In the end, Thurber is as much done in by Zeph Leggin as he was by Barney Haller.
Critics saw much in Thurber Country that was first rate:
If this is the best book by Mr. Thurber that I have read I am not saying; but I rather suspect that it is. May the day never come when Thurber country yields to the bulldozer and the ranch house.
—David McCord,
The Saturday Review of Literature49
No, it is no more use trying to explain in other words the flavor or the meaning of what Mr. Thurber says in words. As well as try to explain the fun and the funniness of Mr. Thurber’s illustrations. We have the author’s own word for it in the preface that you cannot explain what is funny. One’s whole duty is done in reporting that this book is funny in the special and triumphant Thurber way.
—Irwin Edman, Book Review section
The New York Herald Tribune50
Throughout our journey in Thurber Country, our guide and traveling companion is probably the best living humorist a wise and likeable observe, very sad but never bitter, slightly disappointed but never cynical.
—The Times (London) Literary Supplement51
The Christian Science Monitor demurred:
This book is another pastiche of pieces ... As a whole the collection seems to this certainly prejudiced reviewer—being an old Columbus hand himself—a little labored in comparison with those earlier collections, the incomparable “Thurber Carnival” and the later “Thurber Album.” The pieces are full of skill and true to the inimitable Thurber formula. But they seem less warm, less friendly, less interested.
— Neil Martin52
Perhaps it was the loss of Harold Ross ... or perhaps it was just The Christian Science Monitor.
Ten
James Thurber, 1953–1961
... a brilliant book about an eccentric editor,
or an eccentric book about a brilliant editor ...
Throughout the early 1950s, Thurber was plagued by thyroid trouble. The condition which he suffered then is now called Graves’ disease, which exhibits few symptoms in some patients but which can cause wild mood swings in other victims. Thurber was surely in the later category.
During a visit to Bermuda once, in 1952, a physician could find nothing wrong and concluded that the cause was pregnancy, although he had to admit that diagnosis was unlikely in Thurber’s case. He fought with everyone, could not handle liquor—a sure sign to Helen that he was ill—and gave up smoking. While in Bermuda, he wrote to Hamish Hamilton agreeing to some slight changes in the upcoming British edition of The Thurber Album and when Hamilton replied, citing the changes which were going to be made, Thurber accused him of “tampering” with his books.1 Had he known he had Graves’ disease, he could have received proper medication for it, and adjusted his life to it. But not knowing what he had (other than an “Ohio thyroid” condition which his brother Robert had also suffered for years), caused him, and many others around him, severe trauma. He was lucky to get out Thurber Country during that period of wrestling, on and off, with his “Ohio thyroid.”
In October, 1953, the Ohio Library Association awarded him a special Ohio Sesquicentennial Career Medal; Thurber wanted have to accept it in person, but could not travel to Columbus, because this time Helen Thurber was the one having eye trouble. He wrote the speech and at first wanted his brother Robert to deliver it (an obvious attempt to end the Thurber family feud), but George Smallsreed, who had been a younger reporter on the staff of The Columbus Dispatch with Thurber and who eventually became editor, gave the speech for Thurber.
In the speech was a line which became memorable: “The clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus ...” Many assumed he meant chimes on the campus of Ohio State University or some unspecified clock in downtown Columbus, but he probably meant a church steeple diagonally across the intersection from (or catty-cornered, as they said in Ohio and elsewhere) the home of Aunt Margery Albright, his refuge when he was thrown out of William M. Fisher’s mansion. (Charles S. Holmes used The Clocks of Columbus as the title of his 1972 literary biography of Thurber.)
Helen Thurber’s eye trouble was a crescent-shaped cloud in her left eye and Thurber wanted his own doctor Gordon Bruce to operate, but Bruce could not be found. He was vacationing in Colorado and the telephone lines were down because of an A. T. & T. strike in Colorado. Thurber enlisted the aid of the Associated Press, who tracked down Bruce, who suggested another eye man. Helen had an operation for a detached retina (a first operation failed, a second one was successful) and was a month at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, then moved to the Algonquin Hotel, then eventually back to Cornwall. For that time, Thurber was without his seeing-eye wife and while she was in the hospital, he stayed in the next room.
After her eye trouble, the Thurber’s again traveled to England, where James was interviewed time and time again, and met (again) Janet Flanner and Mollie Panter-Downes of The New Yorker, Hamish Hamilton, Art Buchwald, whom Thurber gave an interview, A. J. Liebling, visiting abroad, T.S. Eliot, J.B. Priestley, Walter de la Mere, Sir Compton Mackenzie, and others ... he was unable to meet Max Beerbohm, who was in Italy nor was he able to meet Somerset Maugham, who was living in France.
Thurber, who had long been fascinated by Houdini, was also fascinated by the legend of the Loch Ness monster and visited the Loch for an article (“There’s Something Out There!”), published not for The New Yorker, but in Holiday magazine.2
The Thurbers then journeyed to Paris, where he was interviewed by George Plimpton and Max Steele for The Paris Review series, “Writers at Work.” Thurber thought little of the interview, calling it “done while I was on physical and mental vacation and I think (it) has no real value.3
They returned to the states just in time for the 1955 publication of Thurber’s Dogs, a collection of 24 Thurber articles and essays about man’s (and Thurber’s) best friend, the earliest pieces dating back to the mid-nineteen twenties. The pieces for the book had been chosen by Thurber and Jack Goodman of Simon & Schuster. At almost the same time, Hamish Hamilton published A Thurber Garland, a collection of his drawings. Thurber’s Dogs was not quite as widely reviewed as other recent Thurber books, but Kirkus, the library reference service said “respect and affection accompany his drolleries and a nicer way to go to the dogs you can’t imagine.”4
At the end of 1955, James and Helen traveled to Ohio; they ended up spending a month in Columbus at Mame’s bedside, as she slipped into a coma and died just before her ninetieth birthday. She had not recognized Thurber as he stayed at her bedside.
For relief, or to escape, or to let his imagination free, Thurber again turned to fables. He wrote one or two a day, short fables, and later wrote S. J. Perelman, “I wish everything were as much fun.”5 The New Yorker took most of them: 37 out of 47. Thurber believed that rejection was of the other ten were because the editors of the magazine, following the death of Harold Ross, didn’t like his work. William Shawn later denied that charge, but Thurber believed it anyway.
Dark and cynical, the new fables attacked, by turns, pure optimism, mankind, bureaucracy, impetuous youth, passion, the F.B.I., Communism, cats, the D.A.R., hypochondriacs, radicalism, witch-hunting, womanhood, Southern justice, intellectualism, teleology, war, informing, greed, and—most brilliantly—the lyrics of “Tea for Two.” The political fables had the keenest cutting edge and pleased Thurber the most
Thurber biographer Burton Bernstein said.6
Mr. Thurber’s lucid prose is a pleasure to peruse. His stylistic changes of pace and his verbal legerdemain—tricks pulled off with the deadest of pans—are a delight to observe. He is expert at twisting old commonplaces into fresh, amusing pretzels of meaning, and no one knows better than he how to put a new biting edge on old saws.
—B. R. Redman,
The Saturday Review of Liberature7
For piecemeal reading—never more than three at a time—this is the most succulent book of the fall.
—Edward Weeks, The Atlantic Monthly8
Simon and Schuster printed a first edition of 30,000 in October, 1956; and The New Yorker ordered a special printing of 5,000 copies to use as complimentary copies, with the phrase “With best wishes from your friends at THE NEW YORKER October, 1956”; Simon and Schuster then printed 3,000 copies of a boxed (slip-case) edition in November, 1956; and there was second printing of the original edition in January, 1957 and The Book Find Club ordered a printing of 15,000 copies in November, 1956.
Hamish Hamilton published the book in England in 1956 and Penguin Books published a paperback edition in England in 1960. But the book ultimately wasn’t as successful as Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated, published sixteen years earlier; Thurber had simply been through too much hurt and pain and loss to repeat the joy and pleasure of the first set of fables.
The dark tone of Further Fables does not represent a sudden change in Thurber. His humor was always inextricably intertwined with fear, anguish, and desperation. As far back as 1933 he observed that the source of humor was “the damp hand of melancholy”; and in 1955, when Alistair Cooke cited the old Roman saying that a man could not be a great comedian unless he was well acquainted with the sadness of things, Thurber agreed, saying, “It’s very hard to divorce humor from the other things in life. Humor is the other side of tragedy” He was well aware of the gloomy strain in the fables and in a letter to Katherine White he noted that seventy percent were about death—“I am the deadliest of fable writers,” he said.
Charles S. Holmes wrote.9
Thurber felt even more separated from The New Yorker when Gustave “Gus” Lobrano died in early 1956. Ross and Lobrano knew how to edit Thurber and knew even more how to appease him. The newer editors, Thurber thought, simply edited his copy wrongheadedly, or rejected it out of hand.
The book that was “seventy percent about death” then won a five thousand dollar prize, the Liberty and Justice Award given by the American Library Association. The A.L.A. judged Further Fables for Our Time the book that did the most that year for the principles of liberty and justice. “The deadliest of fable writers” couldn’t have been prouder.
He followed Further Fables ... with another fable, simpler, richer, more ingenuous: The Wonderful O.
A pirate named Black, sailing in a ship named the Aeiu, hates the letter O ever since his mother got stuck in a porthole and since they could not pull her back in, they pushed her out. And so he wished to banish the letter O (and incidentally, do as pirates always do, hunt for jewels). And so they stopped on an island in the ocean ...“I’ll get rid of O, in upper case and lower,” cried the man in black. And he took the O out of every musical instrument: no violins or cellos, trombones, horns or oboes, pianos, harpsichords or clavichords, accordions and melodeons, bassoons or saxophones, or woodwinds.
A poet named Andreas led the citizens of the island into the woods, away from Black and his pirates. “We live in peril and danger,” Andreas said. And Black and his minions then destroyed all the books
especially those dealing with studies and sciences that have O’s in their names: geography, biography, biology, psychology, philosophy, philology, astronomy, agronomy, gastronomy, trigonometry, geometry, optometry, and all the other ologies, and onomies and emetries.
And Black’s pirate crew ...
Set about their task with a will, and before they were through they had torn down colleges and destroyed many a book and tome and volume and globe and blackboard and pointer, and banished professors, assistant professors, scholars, tutors, and instructors. There was no one left to translate English into English. Babies often made as much sense as their fathers.10
Later, digging for treasure in a wood, Black hears Andreas, speaking of books and men:
“Ink can be destroyed,” cried Black, “and men are made of ink. Name me their names.”
They came so swiftly from the skies Andreus couldn’t name them all, streaming out of lore and legend, streaming out of song and story, each phantom flaunting like a flag his own especial glory: Lancelot and Ivanhoe, Athos, Porthos, Cyrano, Roland, Rob Roy, Romeo, Donalbane of Birnam Wood, Robinson Crusoe and Robin Hood; the moody Doones of Lorna Doone, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone; out of near and ancient tomes, Banquo’s ghost and Sherlock Holmes; Lochinvar, Lothario, Horatius and Horatio; and there were other figures too, darker, coming from the blue, Shakespeare’s Shylock, Billy Bones, Quasimodo, Conrad’s Jones, Ichabod and Captain Hook—names enough to fill a book.
“These wearers of the O, methinks, are indstructible,” wailed Littlejack.
“Books can be burned,” croaked Black.
“They have a way of rising out of ashes,” said Andreas.11
And Thurber makes his point about bookburning, McCarthyism, Fascism and Nazism.
But a clock began to strike, an unseen clock.
“I destroyed all clocks,” cried Black.
“All cocks save one,” said Andreas, “the clock that strikes in conscience.”12
And, ultimately, there were four words that defeated Black and his pirate crew. They were: hope, love, valor ... and freedom.
And many years later, an old man and a boy and a girl discover a strange monument, with a single letter that “gleamed and glittered in every light and weather.”
“What a strange statue,” a little boy cried. “A statue to a circle.”
“What a strange monument,” a little girl laughed. “A monument to zero.”
The old man sighed and scratched his head, and thought and thought, and then he said, “It has a curious and wondrous history.”
“Was it a battle? And did we win?” the children cried.
The old man shook his head and sighed, “I’m not as young as I used to be, and the years gone by are a mystery, but ‘twas a famous victory.”
The sun went down, and its golden glow lighted with fire the wonderful O.13
After Thurber’s Dogs and Further Fables for Our Time, critics in general found Thurber at the top of his form:
Believing implicitly in the premise, we have no difficulty in accepting the story of “The Wonderful O” ... At the end I felt sorry for Thurber, because unlike all beautiful things, his name has no O. Then I felt sorry for myself, for the same reason.
—Gilbert Seldes,
The Saturday Review of Literature14
James Thurber has given a generally undeserving world a number of inspiring things, as well as dogs. Chalk up here and today his summary of the debt of the English language to the letter “O.” No one else could think up a fairy story, tale, legend, exercise or what have you, based upon “O” alone. Certainly no one else could bring it off if he had. Mr. Thurber, however, can, did and does.
—Lewis Nichols, The New York Times15
A dazzling feat of verbal virtuosity, with frequent lapses into interior rhyme. Marc Simont’s pictures almost, but not quite, reconcile one to the fact that they aren’t Thurber’s.
— E. F. Walbridge, Library Journal16
Thurber has done it again. The Wonderful O is another of his fables for our time and our children, as fancifully charming as his earlier Many Moons .... It’s not literal, but it’s logical if you enjoy Thurberland.
—Kirkus17
This is an elaborate adult fairy tale in the mode of Mr. Thurber’s previous “The Thirteen Clocks.” It is witty. It is extremely clever, sometimes to the point of seeming synthetically so. It has a moral ... On the whole Mr. Thurber manages to imbue his ingenious cipher-game with that kind of amazed freshness which is so characteristic of the Thurberian world.
—E. W. Foell, The Christian Science Monitor18
Like all good fables, it is told in simple language and in a manner children can delight in. Some of it even proves to be in jingly rhyme when read aloud.
