SOURCE: "The Cottage of Smugness," in The Threepenny Review, Vol. XV, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 26-8.

[In the following mixed assessment, Seligman finds that some of Thurber's work retains a peculiar charm but that most of it is overwrought and dated, the product of a talent that never achieved its potential.]

In reviewing these skeptical reflections on the centenary of James Thurber, I find there is an aspect of his output that I've tended to slight, and so I had better acknowledge it up front: his charm. I can't deny Thurber's charm. His work is full of it; his silly drawings, especially, are rife with it. You have probably encountered the story, told in many places, of how in the late 1920s E. B. White retrieved some of his friend's doodlings from the floor of the office they shared at The New Yorker, inked in the penciled squiggles, and submitted the results to Harold Ross, the magazine's founding editor. Ross was skeptical; so was Thurber. But Thurber's drawings, like his stories and essays, have taken their place in the pantheon of American humor. They are disarmingly unforced and, technically, disarmingly primitive. "If you ever got good you'd be mediocre," White told him astutely. The fact that he never got good is probably the reason that his artwork now seems so much more idiosyncratic and so much less dated than most of his prose: the naïveté that Matisse achieved by overcoming his artistic training Thurber attained by never having had any. I don't draw the contrast out of the blue; it was made in Thurber's heyday, and not altogether preposterously. White, in fact, came to regard the drawings as his friend's greatest work. I don't agree, because they have none of the power of the writing. But they also have none of the problems: they treat the same themes that in Thurber's stories make me want to leave the room, and yet they feel whimsical, painless—fantastic.

Thurber's writing is not fantastic. Even when it takes the form of fables or fairy tales, its homely, quotidian detail (which is often an intentional deflating device) keeps it down to earth. And while at its loveliest, as in "The Catbird Seat" and "The Unicorn in the Garden," it, too, is beautifully unforced, you certainly couldn't call it primitive. Some of the essays amount to writerly attempts at doodling—bagatelles whose aimlessness is largely the point. But they never attain the purity of the drawings, because they've been too painstakingly hammered out, and labor is the surest way to kill a joke.

Thurber died in 1961, the year of Hemingway's suicide, and three decades later his name is practically as resonant. If Hemingway gave voice to a native fixation on manliness and self-reliance, then Thurber, in some odd way his counterpart, came to enunciate a native emasculation. Any reader who has perused more than a few of his stories or leafed through the many drawings of harridans and meek little men knows how transfixed he was by the vision of male ineptitude before female assurance and strength. His caricatures could make the conflict funny, pathetic, or ugly, but in every case his discomfort—his terror—is evident. One reason that "The Catbird Seat" and "The Unicorn in the Garden" stand out among Thurber's stories is that the meek little men in them prevail, which is such a rarity in his universe that they seem more like fairy tales than his fairy tales do. Much more often, almost too often to enumerate, the little man is crushed. (The Bert Pendlys and Walter Mittys retreat into the only available refuge, neurosis and fantasy.) Thurber's fear of women runs so deep that it teeters on the verge of feminism, since his women are the equals—no, the betters—of the weaklings who are supposed to dominate them. But it never occurred to him to explore this paradox by questioning the scheme of things. If the women weren't subservient, then there was something the matter with the men.

You don't have to dig to unearth the evidence of Thurber's insecurity. It isn't buried. The mortifying moment in "The Thin Red Leash" when he is walking his pert little Scottie and a "huge steamfitter" addresses him, "What d'y' say me an' you an' the dog go somewheres and have tea?" is typical. His only major fight with Harold Ross erupted after Ross called him "a sis." "Jared L. Manley," the pseudonym he took for the "Where Are They Now?" series he worked on for the magazine in the 1930s, was a reference to "the manly art of self-defense"—an art that the delicate writer, blind in one eye (and in later years in both), could never practice himself. But he loved the idea of using his fists. When Dorothy Parker declared, "Humor is a shield, not a weapon," he bristled. "Humor is as big a fist as any other form, or maybe bigger," he protested to White. And when a reader wrote The New Republic complaining that a review by Thurber had been "a slap in the face," he snapped back triumphantly, "I didn't realize my hand was open."

Strength, virility, dominance is Thurber's running subtext—his running text. His marriage tales (stories like "Am I Not Your Rosalind?," "The Breaking Up of the Winships," and "The Case of Dimity Ann") presage and sometimes rival the venom of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which owes a great deal to them. When it comes to character, though, Thurber isn't much of a psychologist; his defensiveness (and he never claims to be a disinterested observer) keeps him from getting very far beneath the surface of others. There is only one character he is really interested in probing, and the spectacle of his self-exposure can be riveting. On a few occasions—as in "Teacher's Pet,"—he takes it to frightening lengths.

Kelby, the fifty-year-old protagonist of "Teacher's Pet," has never gotten over his eighth-grade humiliation at the hands of a bully. Thirty-seven years later his cowardice still preys on him. Near the end of the story, he happens upon two boys repeating the same ugly, age-old scenario; incensed, he chases off the bully. Then he turns to the sniveling victim, whose name is Elbert, and suddenly he flips:

"Shut up!" shouted Kelby. "Shut up!" But the boy kept on. Kelby looked at his quivering lower lip and at the convulsion of his stomach. Elbert was fighting to gain control of himself, but he lost the battle and began to weep unrestrainedly. Kelby was suddenly upon him. He grabbed him tightly by the shoulders and shook him until his head bobbed back and forth. He let go of the boy's left shoulder and slapped him on the cheek. "You little crybaby!" sobbed Kelby. "You goddam little coward!"

A few paragraphs later, the story is diminished by a neat, ironic close. But the rawness of the self-loathing that breaks through at this climax is almost sickening. For the brief moment that you see clearly into Thurber's torment, you can sense the power that he had at his disposal—or might have had, if his gaze had always been so unflinching.

But even when he flinches he's revealing. The Male Animal, the 1940 comedy he wrote with Elliott Nugent, is probably the work that lays his anxieties most cruelly bare. The central figure is a milquetoast academic whose wife nearly leaves him for his former rival, a onetime football hero who has returned to the campus for a big game. Professor Tommy Turner displays his moral fiber in a fight for academic freedom against a redbaiter on the Board Trustees. But his moral fiber doesn't give off much of a sexual scent, and the academic-freedom side of the story, which was Nugent's contribution, fades before the more elemental conflict between the physically timid male and the strapping, confident one, which was, naturally, Thurber's. Thurber often does what he can to shore up his morale by making his strong men stupid, but he can't ignore their seductiveness. The play's title comes from a speech in which a sloshed Tommy proclaims that a man has to fight when his mate is lured away:

The sea lion knows better. He snarls. He gores. He roars with his antlers. He knows that love is a thing you do something about. He knows it is a thing that words can kill. You do something. You don't just sit there…. A woman likes a man who does something. All the male animals fight for the female, from the land crab to the bird of paradise. They don't just sit and talk. They act.

Tommy's wife, Ellen, represents one of Thurber's few attempts to set forth a woman who's not a caricature. She doesn't stand 6′6″ or look ready to wrestle, but she turns out to be, in her primped, demure way, as ruthless a castrating bitch as any of the viragoes in the cartoons. (Olivia de Havilland read the role perfectly in the 1942 movie, in which, opposite Henry Fonda's Tommy, she gave one of the hardest performances of her career.) Of course, Tommy finally proves that he's a "scrapper"—which is the same word Thurber uses in "The Thin Red Leash" to defend his little dog. But the way he prevails is so corny, so equivocal, and so lacking in conviction that it does much to explain why both the play and the movie have been forgotten.

Though Thurber got out of Columbus for good when he was thirty, it stayed with him; later on he could never quite decide whether he was a man-about-town or a hick at heart. He despised the narrowness and philistinism of the place ("Millions for manure, but not one cent for literature" was a barb he was fond of quoting). In 1951 Ohio State, his alma mater, offered him an honorary degree right on the heels of issuing a gag rule subjecting all campus speeches to prior scrutiny—weirdly paralleling the outrages he and Nugent had thought up a dozen years earlier for The Male Animal. He declined it in disgust.

And yet he stayed loyal. You would never know from any of his written recollections how much he looked down on his boyhood home. What mockery he does indulge in is fond: he treats Columbus as the norm—heartland America, unsophisticated but honest and practical. He devoted two very different books to recollections of Ohio, and both of them are, in their own ways, sugar-coated. My Life and Hard Times (1933), the source of some of his most widely anthologized stories (including "The Night the Bed Fell" and "The Night the Ghost Got In"), reorganizes his troubled childhood into a comic idyll, depicting the Thurbers as wildly eccentric but at the same time solidly normal—a prototype for the zany-but-healthy families that would infest TV sitcoms a couple of decades later. The America of these pseudo-memoirs is the same picket-fence Eden that the Hollywood studios hawked to their audience; and in both cases a public enchanted by the sweetness of the vision let itself be conned into nostalgia for something that had never been.

Thurber's second Ohio book, The Thurber Album (1952)—fifteen portraits of family pillars, local eccentrics, college teachers, and other early mentors—is far less antic than My Life and Hard Times, but no tougher. The crinkly smiles do give it a lovely surface, though. Thurber's gift for candying the past stood in inverse proportion to his prudishness and priggishness about the present, and the Album made an ideal setting for his bumpless prose. The same gift put satire beyond him: his best humor is whimsical, not satiric. The typical pattern is for an artist to learn from one or more mentors, pull away, and finally—in some fashion, at least—repudiate them. But Thurber was never able to put anybody behind him; he was fatally easy on his memories and his ideals. He soft-pedaled the flaws in the people he wrote about (and still got howls of protest from his family), and what criticisms he did offer were so gentle they amounted to caresses, even in the case of one professor who at an advanced age took up fascism. He was no scrapper—there was something fundamentally passive in his nature. He was a born protégé, which is what made him putty in the hands of Harold Ross and E. B. White.

Thurber, of course, had a large part in creating The New Yorker, and it had a larger part in creating him. The man and the magazine split rather bitterly in the years after Ross's death, but by then they were destined, like Rogers and Astaire, to be remembered as a couple. Thurber arrived on the premises when he was thirty-two, an advanced age for a writer to fall under someone else's shaping influence. But there can be little doubt that it was Ross who set the stamp on his output. By all accounts Ross had the true editor's genius for finding people who could give him what he wanted—a genius he demonstrated in hiring White and Thurber, whose previous careers had not been stellar and whose later ones probably wouldn't have amounted to much without him, either. The New Yorker, so the story goes, saved Thurber from the demands of journalistic topicality and from the intimidation of the larger forms. Working in the smaller ones, he could let his restless imagination swing like a weather vane, toward cartoons, stories, essays, sketches—whichever way the wind was blowing. He was the consummate doodler, and in letting him doodle, The New Yorker made Thurber possible.

That, at least, is the standard version. But isn't there another possibility: that the sparks that flash intermittently from his hundreds and hundreds of pages are just hints of his genius? When lightning strikes in Thurber, it mainly illuminates the surrounding expanse of flat terrain. Granted, "The Catbird Seat"—to take the story he acknowledged as his best—is perfect, on its small scale. But it isn't For Whom the Bell Tolls, and if you gather up all the scattered flashes of Thurber's brilliance, they still don't add up to a For Whom the Bell Tolls. A stale scent of disappointment wafts out from between the covers of his many books. They're charming, they're fine, but when you come upon a lethally powerful story like "A Couple of Hamburgers" or "Teacher's Pet," you get a sulfurous whiff of what might have been. Taste, decorum, and good humor were always dangers for New Yorker writers, and in Thurber they neutralized something that was ugly but potentially great: the rage, which wasn't so much controlled as suppressed.

It did eventually surface, poisoning his personality (which had never been very pleasant), but by that time it had corroded into resentfulness. In his later work, he abandoned humor for grandstanding and turned into a windbag. "How many years will it take to convince people that I'm not a clown?" he demanded the year he died. His last books make grotesquely unpleasant reading: the misogyny grew rancid, and the attempts at satire dissolved into angry carping, aimless word games, and a generalized geriatric bitterness.

But in his prime he suppressed that anger. His prose is so held in that it practically aches. Thurber's humorous writing too often carries you for long expectant periods in a state of pre-laughter, waiting for the sneeze of hilarity that never comes. And though he wasn't a one-note writer, he sounded one note at a time. There's not much ambiguity in Thurber: when he's breezy, it's unalloyed, as it is when he's touching or cruel or pensive, but he seldom brings conflicting responses into play, and a single piece almost never demonstrates his range. That's trap for the writer of casuals; and Thurber, whose youthful attempts at a novel and later forays into dramatic writing after The Male Animal all came to nothing, was always conscious of his failure in the larger forms. The locus classicus of this discomfort is his preface to My Life and Hard Times, in which he bemoans the plight of "writers of light pieces running from a thousand to two thousand words":

The notion that such persons are gay of heart and carefree is curiously untrue. They lead, as a matter of fact, an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats: Afraid of losing themselves in the larger flight of the two-volume novel, or even the one-volume novel, they stick to short accounts of their misadventures because they never get so deep into them but that they feel they can get out. This type of writing is not a joyous form of self-expression but the manifestation of a twitchiness at once cosmic and mundane…. To call such persons "humorists," a loose-fitting and ugly word, is to miss the nature of their dilemma and the dilemma of their nature. The little wheels of their invention are set in motion by the damp hand of melancholy.

Prose that fresh and delicately balanced is a peculiar medium for a message of such insecure gloom, but that's Thurber—and, of course, the passage really has nothing to do with other "writers of light pieces." Instead it's a frank evaluation of his own artistic (and personal) limitations, something close to a confession of failure.

And yet none of his contemporaries would have dreamed of calling him a failure—he was a household word, the most celebrated luminary on Ross's celebrated staff. (Auden and Eliot were among his fans.) Nor would he have called himself a failure, though the defensiveness and pugnacity of his later years suggest a self-doubt that he never honestly owned up to. He couldn't: failure was anathema. He had to be on the winning team. At Ohio State he had been a nobody until Elliott Nugent, five years younger but already a campus mover, took him under his wing, got him into his fraternity, and buoyed his confidence so effectively that Thurber went on to become a honcho in the drama society and to edit the college newspaper and the literary magazine. Later on, when he had the good fortune to be invited onto The New Yorker, it was the same story writ bigger. Belonging was everything; sometimes his clubbiness about the place is enough to set your teeth on edge. Hence his feeling of loss in the late 1930s when he returned to the office after a long absence in Europe. He was incensed at the changes, and he bitched and grumbled about them to his dying day, convinced that everyone who had a hand in shaping the magazine after he did was taking it in the wrong direction. It was no longer his club.

Thurber had opinions on all the controversies of the era and was always readier than White was to dive into the fray. Ross didn't take him seriously as a critic, though—a light that shows that his famous instinct could sometimes fail him. Thurber's book reviews for The New Republic and other magazines exhibit a contemplative appealingly confident side that's very different from the glib, ironic voice of the stories and casuals. Like White, Thurber considered himself an average Joe and narrowed his eyes at theory. His jabs at psychoanalysis suggest that above all he thought Freudians took everything (including themselves) too solemnly. And as for Marxists, "Why, in God's name," he demanded of Malcolm Cowley, "can't they have one or two likeable, genial, humorous, natural human beings to espouse their cause?"

Much more than White, he loved playing the litterateur. He never got over his infatuation with Henry James; during the course of his career he made several attempts to imitate his style that are too affectionate, and too dull, to qualify as parody. But as he always acknowledged, the decisive turn in his career came when Ross, shortly after Thurber's arrival at The New Yorker, put him in a tiny office with White (who was, like Nugent, five years his junior). Thurber said later that he "learned discipline in writing from studying Andy White's stuff"; it helped him escape the involuted rhythms of James and the other florid models he had come of age on. "I would use 'in fine,' 'as who should say,' and the like…. The precision and clarity of White's writing helped me a lot, slowed me down from the dog-trot of newspaper tempo and made me realize a writer turns on his mind, not a faucet."

Of course, as Charles S. Holmes points out in his excellent 1972 study, The Clocks of Columbus, one of the principal reasons Thurber was able to learn so rapidly from White was that they were so much alike to begin with. They brought, a curiously parochial voice to The New Yorker's sophistication, reflecting and amplifying Ross's own suspicion of anything highfalutin. They believed in good writing, certainly—good and plain; fancy thought and fancy verbiage made them wary. Thurber, though, had loftier ambitions and a grander, if wobblier, self-image. There can be no doubt that White—the same White who later, in The Elements of Style, would declare flatly, "The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity"—helped Thurber get rid of some youthful excesses. White's cleanness is a relief after the curlicued journalism that preceded it, and you can't deny its purity even if you find it (as I do) placid. But what may not be so apparent at first glance, and may never have been apparent at Ross's New Yorker, is that it's also a highly personal style. It fit White as neatly as complications and involutions fit James; but it was a style designed to simplify, and Thurber was anything but simple. Here was a man who would get soused and bully his friends, who pursued women and then couldn't perform with them, who broke down and cried at his own wedding, who missed his daughter's birth because he was out on the town with an old girlfriend—a volatile, self-destructive, complicated, sloppy man. (If Burton Bernstein's sour 1975 biography demonstrates anything, it demonstrates that.) Yet he cramped his antic imagination into the bland, inhibited, moderate-to-a-fault Yankee manner that had been perfected by White and sanctified by Ross. The unruffled, unruffling tone may have suited the teacher's pet who yearned to please; but it denied, or tried to deny, the sociopath who was spoiling to bloody every psyche in the room—the creepy, not-nice but not-dull side of Thurber, the side where all the powder was stored.

The White style works best for Thurber in the reportorial pieces, like the five-part series on soap opera that was reprinted in The Beast in Me. And that's what it remains best for. Years after the passing of Ross, a writer as eccentric and strong-willed as Truman Capote could be cowed by the aura of The New Yorker into sacrificing his peculiar voice for the neat, spare White style when he reported In Cold Blood for Ross's successor, William Shawn. We owe Ross a debt of gratitude for some of the century's best reporting, but his ideas about literature were modest: witness the rise, under the tutelage of Katharine Angell (another instance of his knack for locating people who could put his vision into practice), of the understated, under-plotted prose form that was to become known as the New Yorker story. Modesty, though, didn't become Thurber; he was an egomaniac, a braggart, and a messy, oversized talent, born, like so many of his tormented generation, to go too far. But he never went far enough.

Hemingway, to be fair, had it easier. He could inhabit his macho men with such unwavering, aching conviction because he was giving form to a cultural ideal; the culture was behind him all the way. Thurber didn't have the wherewithal to challenge the ideal, but he knew that he didn't live up to it, and he could look around him and see that not many others did, either. His work is all about getting pushed around, and about how the pushed-around shuffle through their lives deprived of conviction and self-respect. And that's why, for all the smugness and the simmering nastiness, he is still so resonant (more resonant, in the sense that he deals with the ground-down actual, than Hemingway): he enuciated the resignation, the deflation, the dull gray tragedy of American manhood. But funny?

The "mannerisms, tricks, adornments" that White warns the young writer against, given time and nurture, can grow into profound expressions of personality, as they did with James or, in a very different fashion, with Hemingway. The New Yorker style carried Thurber to fame, but it left him there, stranded down below the heights there is every indication he could have scaled. Did Ross and White give him the means to climb them, or did they hold him back? Or did he let them hold him back when, breaking away, he could have ascended beyond their view? If The New Yorker made Thurber possible, it also bound him down to the dismal earth. He had the talent but he lacked the nerve. The road of modesty led to the cottage of smugness.