The Staying Power of James Thurber


James ThurberNobody talks much about James Thurber, anymore. I wonder why that is. When you look back at most of the great short-form literary humorists of the early/mid 20th century – from S. J. Perelman to Woody Allen – their stuff is almost impossible to read now. I remember laughing out loud when I first read them, but when, on re-reading them today, I can’t remember precisely why.

Thurber’s different – his short stories (especially those gathered in 1933’s My Life and Hard Times) are as funny today as they must have been when he first wrote them. I’m reminded of this over and over as I’ve read the stories out loud (on demand) over and over during the past five years to my son at bedtime.

Yes, he’s 13 now, and could be reading them to himself, but, let’s face it, the old man does a bang-up job recreating the voices of Thurber’s bewildered and beleaguered father, his senescent and bellicose grandfather, and the omnipresent harbinger of the apocalypse known as “The Get-Ready Man.”

“The Day the Dam Broke”…“The Night the Bed Fell”…“The Night the Ghost Got In” – all stories, by the way, in which none of those events ever really occur – showcase Thurber at the top of his form. Concise, sly, ironic, and, most of all, human.

This, from “The Car We Had To Push,” about his family’s early experiences with automobiles in the 19-teens:

…One of my happiest memories of it [the car] was when, in its eighth year, my brother Roy got together a great many articles from the kitchen, placed them in a square of canvas, and swung this under the car with a string attached to it so that, at a twitch, the canvas would give way and the steel and tin things would clatter to the street. This was a little scheme of Roy’s to frighten father, who had always expected the car might explode. It worked perfectly. That was twenty-five years ago, but it is one of the few things in my life I would like to live over again if I could. I don’t suppose that I can, now. Roy twitched the string in the middle of a love afternoon, on Bryden Road near Eighteenth Street. Father had closed his eyes and, with his hat off, was enjoying a cool breeze. The clatter on the asphalt was tremendously effective: knives, forks, can-openers, pie pans, pot lids, biscuit-cutters, ladles, egg-beaters fell, beautifully together, in a lingering, clamant crash. “Stop the car!” shouted father. “I can’t,” Roy said. “The engine fell out” “God Almighty!” said father, who knew what that meant, or knew what it sounded as if it might mean.

It ended unhappily, of course, because we finally had to drive back and pick up the stuff and even father knew the difference between the works of an automobile and the equipment of a pantry. My mother wouldn’t have known, however, nor her mother. My mother, for instance, thought – or, rather knew – that it was dangerous to drive an automobile without gasoline: it fried the valves or something. “No don’t you dare drive all over town without gasoline!” she would say to us when we started off.

Maybe Thurber couldn’t relive this, as he wrote it, and he certainly can’t now, being dead more than 40 years. But my son Philip and I relive it – that “lingering, clamant crash” – every few weeks, before I turn off his light and he goes to sleep…hoping, praying, that the bed doesn’t fall.

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January 18th, 2007
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Viewing 14 Comments

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    Stephen, thanks for reminding me it's time to pull out my Thurber collection again. God, you're right, he's still so funny. I'm glad you and your son read it together.
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    I am a fan as well. The Years With Ross is also hilarious, though I have a vague memory of reading that it angered some New Yorker writers. (But it seems that any writing about the New Yorker is bound to anger some New Yorker writers, doesn't it?)
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    I first became aware of Thurber's work in eighth-grade English class (thanks Miss Cronin!). She read such stories as "The Night The Ghost Got In" and "The Night The Bed Fell," prompting me to get the "Thurber Carnival" collection from the library. I have two particular favorites. The first is "Something To Say," a satirical piece about a supposedly brilliant writer named Elliot Vereker who sponges off his friends, drunkenly insults everyone he comes into contact with, and produces no writing except for a handful of pages of a supposed novel entitled "Sue You Have Seen" (punnily derived from "see you soon!"). The second is "The Remarkable Case of Samuel Bruehl," an ironically grim tale about an ordinary man with a pronounced resemblance to an infamous criminal (both even have identical scars shaped like a tiny footprint on their faces). The latter is a very eerie piece that Poe might have written. Either Alfred Hitchcock or Rod Serling could have put it in their famous TV shows.
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    Bravo. I grew up on Thurber myself, and am grateful for that fact. Also I'm currently wading through The Most of S.J. Perelman, and its 650 pages contain fewer real gems than the considerably shorter My Life and Hard Times. In fact the only complaint I have about Thurber is that he spoiled me, and I spend more time than I like to admit being polite to other people about things that just...are...not...that...funny. Plus, Thurber broke my heart when I read his biography and understood what an unhappy life he had. One of the stories in the Bernstein bio is about the time shortly after his death when someone sat in Thurber's favorite chair at a party, and everyone else turned and glared at the man until he got up. Thurber may have been deeply difficult at the end, but he was still deeply loved. I hope I'm that lucky.
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    The Library of America volume of Thurber is a welcome addition to the library of me. Garrison Keillor chose the selections, and includes the familiar, the unfamiliar (previously unreprinted New Yorker pieces), and the drawings, reproduced better than I've seen them in years. It doesn't replace my shelf of Thurber books, painstakingly acquired, but it's a lot handier to take on trips.
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    Thank you for this lovely reminder of one of my favorite authors.

    You and your son are quite correct, the stories in My Life and Hard Times require reading aloud.

    My younger brothers and I used to read them to one another, and we all cracked up laughing in the same places every time.

    I'm pretty sure I could still send either one of my brothers into stitches by calling one of them up and shouting, 'Get Ready! Tom's aCOLD!' or something equally randomly chosen, into the telephone. And I have used, 'The Theater, in our time, has known few such moments.' as a catch-phrase for years, particularly those years I spent in The Theater. It was always a joy when someone's eyes lit up, and I recognized a fellow Thurberphile.

    Sadly, my copy of The Clocks of Columbus, that lovely Thurber biography, has disappeared (never lend cherished and hard to replace books, boys and girls!). I still hope to find another in the next used book store, just around the next corner...
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    Don't forget that Thurber also wrote funny fantasies like "The Wonderful O" and beautiful, poetic ones like "The Thirteen Clocks." But I agree that "The Night the Bed Fell" is one of the crowns of American literature. "I'm coming!"
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    And don't forget his literary criticism. My all-time favorite Thurber quote is from his review of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's "The Wave of the Future": "Mrs. Lindbergh's prefiguring of what is to come gives me the creeblies; it sets the weeping wailwice scuttering along the edges of my dreams."
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    Thanks so much for this. I consider myself extremely lucky to have seen the great Broadway revue "A Thurber Carnival" the week that Mr. Thurber appeared in it. I shall never forget it.
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    Thurber's a genius. A very nice package of Thurber cartoons and articles (excepting my own, which sucked,) is in the Comics Journal Winter 2003 Special, the one with a William Stout cover. Ivan Brunetti's biographical faux-Thurber cartoons are especially stunning.
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    I'm now a retired journalism professor, but it was Thurber (or more accurately my fifth-grade teacher's reading of Thurber) that turned me on to the magic of writing -- of whimsey, of creating an alternate reality.

    The teacher, whose name I've sadly forgotten, read "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomomatox". I was the only one in class who laughed out loud, and I did so repeatedly. The others in class looked perplexed and I thought them to be dolts.

    It was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes. Writers could do more, Thurber showed, than traditional narration and description: they could imagine.

    That experience was, I guess, about 51 years ago. It remains one of the most formative days of my life; it made me want to become a writer.
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    Yay! A piece on Thurber - what a pleasure. I'm with the other commenters and am also a HUGE fan and was so happy to be reminded of stories I haven't read for a long time (and now, will have to re-read soon.) I thought Karraker's experience of being the 5th grader who was laughing in the classroom was interesting because I don't any friends who like Thurber. I don't know if they really haven't been exposed in the right way - I was laughing so hard reading one of them "File & Forget" (where the book "Grandma was a Nudist" played a prominent part), I'm not sure she even got it or was just laughing because I couldn't stop.
    BTW, since my blog is about my pit bull Honey, I would like to point out Thurber was a fan of this very maligned breed. Sorry - just had to get that in there...
    Thanks so much for this post!!!
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    I read only My Life and Hard Times after my friends recommendation and I liked it very much. I'm looking forward to reading more of his books when I'll have more time.
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    In 2008, The Library of America selected Thurber’s New Yorker story “A Sort of Genius” for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.
 

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