Thurber was a marvelous comic writer, but alone among such he was able to sketch the phantasmagoric goo from which his funny ideas came. If Henry James or Dostoevsky had done their own illustrations, the results could hardly have been stranger or more illuminating. Men, Women and Dogs is like a writer's head with the back open; the fact that it's funny back there is as spooky as anything in Jung. Thurber did not make up his jokes in his mouth, like so many clowns, but somewhere between the optic nerve and the unconscious, an area where the slightest tilt can lead to torment and madness.

As it did, we now know, in his last years. But this book belongs to the sunny period before he literally lost his sight and had to move into his own skull for good, with no fresh images to lighten the nightmares. At this point his defective eyesight was still an asset conjuring up useful if scary visions of rear admirals on bicycles and dogs guarding window ledges…. (p. 229)

Although Thurber's prose had its own unique glories, it could not endure the loss of his sight … but fell off tragically and bewilderedly. There was a brief, gallant period in the early 1940s when he mustered his last clear visual memories and produced at frantic speed his finest work. Then a period of wild word-play in which he strove vainly to make the words do it all but couldn't quite swing it. And finally those last stories in which people pour drinks upon drinks, and the author can no longer see things for them to do.

So his comic genius hung by a thread to his flickering vision, which had already been cruelly reduced by a childhood accident involving a bow and arrow. His life was in fact a sickeningly literal enactment of The Wound and the Bow theory (namely, that to draw the magic bow of art, one must have a disabling wound). Thurber's wound gave him a funny-looking world to draw and write about, and then his wound took it away again.

Thus the beguilingly blurred figures undercut by the incisive voice of the half-blind man, perhaps not quite sure where he is even in his own drawings. Some of these pictures are downright accidental. The notorious first Mrs. Harris was supposed to be crouched on a staircase not a bookcase: but it seems the artist's perspective failed him into a masterpiece. No wonder Thurber downplayed his art. Yet an openness to the accidental is a mark of genius. And precisely because it is accidental, Thurber blunders into effects beyond the reach of controlled draftsmanship. (For the last months of Walt Kelly's noble life, someone else did his drawing for him. But who could imitate Thurber's mistakes?)

Yet if his eyes were a crucial part of his comic machine, they were not the only part; his ears were in there too. The blurry women who menace the Thurber male, and the shaggy dogs that comfort him, are respectively strident and quiet as snow. In real life, Thurber was surrounded by his share of menacing women, starting with his mother, who set the trend, and one imagines their voices crackling out of the fog as harshly as the blind man's crackles back at them. But it is too simple to say that Thurber hated women. A close look at the creatures he drew suggests a fondness and a bizarre companionship. If some of his women are a bit on the tough side, they need to be to help the Thurber male across the street. This would be a screaming grievance later when, in real life, he had to be led to the bathroom, but shouldn't be read back too far. In [Men, Women and Dogs] men and women carry each other inexplicably home about equally often, and the monsters are more than made up for by gentle spirits "from haunts of coot and hearn" and good-hearted blondes and nude pianists. Although the Thurber woman is most triumphantly herself as the back part of a house lunging toward an apprehensive male, she is not always herself.

At his crudest ("Goddamn pussycats"), Thurber reflects the hearty misogyny of the frontier, echoing Mark Twain and his own boss, Harold Ross, who periodically blamed the state of the nation on women schoolteachers. As such he is merely a footnote to social history: sensitive boys from the macho country, blaming their mothers for making them sissies and lunging around speakeasies getting even with Wellesley girls and other effete Easterners.

But his feeling for women is usually more complicated than that. Their abiding gift is the power to baffle; Thurber's women may be illogical, but they are seldom stupid—and there is always a sense that they are probably right, that they "know" something. This imputation of mystical qualities may still be maddening to feminists, but at least Thurber's women are never inferior, and his response to them is closer to fear than contempt.

Furthermore, in emphasizing his alleged hatred of women, commentators have overlooked his equal and similar hatred of men. Riffling through the cartoons again, one notes that the males are just as liable to wild flights of illogic and of fiendish malice as the females. The only constant is warfare, culminating in the crashing cadenza in the back, "The War between men and women." Yet even this is complicated by strange collusions and crossings of sex lines. The dreadful Thurber couple hunting in pairs puts in several appearances: e.g., the unholy twosome who have broken into someone's apartment to perform their mad dance. ("I don't know them either, dear, but there may be some very simple explanation.")

Checking with Thurber's prose pieces, one finds the same people with the gloves (Thurber's) off: the couples who stay all night, zestfully wrecking homes and marriages, the swinish practical jokers and dotty women poker players, and—significantly often—a goodly measure of men picking on men. Life for Thurber was as competitive as it was for any hustling Midwesterner or for those compulsive games players in the Algonquin set, but it was softened by his goofy eyesight; as he said of the drawing captioned "Touché," "there is obviously no blood to speak of in the people I draw."

In his stories they bleed and bleed, and without the gloss of the drawings he would be remembered as a sardonic provincial in the Ring Lardner manner—a valuable American tradition in its own right, but Thurber didn't bite clear through like Lardner. Yet the stories plus the drawings give us the extra angle that reveals a genius. The stories are like the engine behind the drawings. Thurber came east with his mouth as wide as Scott Fitzgerald's, and for a while he reveled in what he took to be the glamor of it all. But then under pressure of booze and intelligence the mouth collapsed in a snarl and he became unfathomably bitter. When his eyes closed for good, he lost his most cheerful feature and joined the Lardner-Fitzgerald stream of disappointed Americans—than whom there is no one in the world more disappointed.

But thank God, he compiled Men, Women and Dogs first, while youthful high spirits could still put funny hats on his nightmares and the intoxication of humorous invention was glamor enough. The dark themes are there in embryo—in especial, the husband and wife who, having exhausted the competition, round on each other for the finals, the death struggle, But he could still be diverted by jokes that had nothing to say about anything, and Thurber is at his best when he isn't saying anything about anything. (pp. 230-32)