[This brief review finds most of the works included in Collecting Himself not worth a new anthology but nonetheless appreciates a few of Thurber's more insightful essays.]

I somehow assumed that James Thurber's literary bones had been picked clean long ago. After all, posthumous collections had been published in 1962 and 1966 (Thurber died in 1961), and even then there was not enough new material to fill the books—both included work from previous collections. How, then, can there be at this late date unanthologized Thurber worthy of yet another volume?

Well, there can't. The fact is that although Collecting Himself contains many drawings never before published—reason enough to buy it—only some of the writing deserved to be resurrected. Several parodies are dated and no longer amuse, and many of the "casuals" (The New Yorker's term for informal fiction and nonfiction articles) are too precious, too ephemeral. The book's editor, Michael J. Rosen, can certainly not be blamed for wanting to bring more of the humorist's work to light—he knows we Thurber addicts will take whatever we can get—but judging by this collection, there is not much choice Thurber left.

Whatever the book lacks in vintage material, however. It does give us Thurber working in a lot of different literary forms. We have book and theater reviews, essays on a wide variety of subjects, letters, reminiscences, satires, gag cartoons and a scathing polemic aimed at a professor of psychiatry who considered Alice in Wonderland too unwholesome for his children. Mr. Rosen, the literary director of the Thurber House—a writers' center in Thurber's Columbus, Ohio, boyhood home—has wisely avoided any attempt at arranging the pieces chronologically. Had he done so, the book would have been too light at one end (Thurber's early copy for The Columbus Dispatch) and too heavy at the other (tendentious, angry letters from his last years).

When both Thurber and The New Yorker were young, they enjoyed poking fun at anything that seemed staid or pretentious. A fine example of the irreverent Thurber is "Recollections of Henry James," which appeared in The New Yorker in 1933. That year Thurber had overdosed on autobiographies that contained reminiscences of James, and he determined to offer his own, undeterred by the fact that he had never met the illustrious novelist. Written in the serpentine style that distinguishes James's prose, this piece gets my vote for the best parody of the much-parodied James, as well as being a marvelous spoof of the reverential memoirs that, praise be, are no longer fashionable. Here, at least, is an example of Thurber in top form.

Still, it is the serious, somewhat bitter essays that Thurber wrote late in his life that most hold one's attention. Many of these sober ruminations are, oddly enough, about the nature of humor and the business of being funny. He gave much thought to what constitutes humor and the different forms it takes. Once, while being interviewed on television by Edward R. Murrow, he extemporized what became a classic definition: "The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself."

Thurber himself was all three, but it was as a humorist mocking his youth in a fictive Columbus that he most endeared himself to Americans. When My Life and Hard Times was published in 1933, it turned everyone from Ernest Hemingway to T. S. Eliot into a Thurber enthusiast. From that time on he was constantly being compared to Mark Twain, favorably as a rule. Like Twain, Thurber had his dark side (see Burton Bernstein's superb biography), and he shared with Twain a low opinion of his fellow man. There is no better example of Thurber's misanthropy than "Thinking Ourselves Into Trouble"—a dark piece, written in 1939, with such an unrelenting sense of doom for the future of man that I would never have taken it to be by Thurber, except that no one else could have written about the cosmos in quite this way.

"It is surely not going too far, in view of everything, to venture the opinion that Man is not so high as he thinks he is. It is surely permissible to hazard the guess that somewhere beyond Betelgeuse there may be a race of men whose intelligence makes ours seem like the works of an old-fashioned music box. The Earth, it seems to me, may well be the Siberia or the Perth Amboy of the inhabited planets of the Universe."

If Collecting Himself has done nothing more than resurrect this anguished, long-forgotten essay, it will have been worth all Mr. Rosen's determined rummaging.