[This essay views Thurber's baseball short story "You Could Look It Up" as an "ironic, modernized retelling" of a biblical tale.]

A basic characteristic of James Thurber's short fiction is that many of his stories are ironic treatments of established literary conventions, fables, and tales. Thurber imposes his own brand of satire on the adventure story in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," the perfect crime story in "The Catbird Seat," and the American success story in "The Greatest Man in the World." Fables for Our Time represents a sustained effort in the ironic, modernized retelling of ancient stories and tales. Several critics have noted Thurber's technique of transferring the basic' plot line of such legends and conventions to a modern milieu and then cluing the reader to what he is doing by scattering puns and allusions to the original story throughout his retelling.

Usually the story behind the story is quite obvious and easily pointed out. However, no one has ever noted this basic Thurber device in his Lardner-like idiomatic baseball story, "You Could Look It Up," where the legend beneath the legend is more subtly embedded. Anthologized in, among several other collections, Warren and Erskin's best-selling Short Story Masterpieces, the story has surely been read by enough students and teachers for someone to have spotted the game Thurber is playing here; yet, as far as I can tell, his joke has remained private.

Thurber once said that history and legend are so close in his world that he often walks with one foot in each. Consequently, the reader who tries to follow the repeated suggestions of Doc, the narrator of "You Could Look It Up," and look up the story behind the story might, after failing to find it in history, try legend. An analysis of the plot and central characters of the story as well as the many puns and allusions throughout suggests that Thurber wants us to "look it up" in the New Testament. The story is an Americanized retelling of the scapegoat Christ story. In a country where baseball is the national sport, followed religiously every weekend, the record books of the game might easily parallel the Bible for those true believers who can quote scores and name players the way some preachers can quote scripture.

The plot of the story is quite simple. The manager of a baseball team in a slump signs a midget that no one can pitch to. However, the midget loses an important game by bunting (which, given his size, is the only kind of hit he can get) into an unintentional sacrifice play; his sacrifice and subsequent disappearance bring new spirit into the team. At first glance, this might seem a poor parallel to the coming of Christ whose sacrifice infuses a new spirit into mankind. However, the many puns and allusions throughout the story suggest that this is indeed Thurber's intention. The midget, Pearl du Monville, pops up "outa nowheres," a mysterious freak that the manager Squawks Magrew must touch to find out if he is real. Of no determinate sex ("Most people name of Pearl is girls," says Doc, "but this Pearl du Monville was a man, if you could call a fella a man who was only thirty-four, thirty-five inches high.") and of no determinate age ("He might 'a' been fifteen or he might 'a' been a hundred, you couldn't tell."); Pearl's name suggests who he is.

Pearl is the Pearl of Great Price, a metaphor that many Biblical commentators see as a prefigurative reference to Christ. Furthermore, Pearl is du Monville, that is, of the City of Man. Magrew introduces him as a "monseer," i.e., "man seer," of the "old, old school." Doc's favorite malapropism, repeated several times throughout the story, is "Bethlehem broke loose"; the phrase takes on added significance at the climax of the story when Pearl makes his sacrifice play: "Bethlehem broke loose on that ball field and in them stands. They ain't never been nothin' like it since creation was begun." This broadly comic scene symbolically enjambs both the birth and the death/ascension of Christ, as Pearl toddles toward first base "yelping like a stuck sheep" and Magrew sends him flying high into the air toward center field where the center fielder pulls him down "like he was liftin' a sleeping baby from a cradle."

Just as Christ "fails" in a literal sense while on earth, yet "succeeds" when he sacrifices self and ascends, so does Pearl lose the game, yet, after vanishing "into the thin of the air," truly "win" for the ball club by infusing a "new spirit" into them, thus ending their slump. Thurber's ironic game in this story then is not only to satirize the "golden days of the national pastime," but also to retell within a modern American myth and idiom, the story of the golden days of the Christian religion.