[In the following review the critic deems that Thurber's posthumously published essays and sketches in Credos and Curios are a representative summary of Thurber's career.]

My introduction to graduate studies consisted, in part, of a mournful account, by a seminar director, of how the next of kin of practically all literary figures were permitted to lay ignorant hands on whatever papers were lying about and, even more unthinkably, were permitted to throw them into the trash barrel or the fireplace in the name of cleaning the place up for the realtor. The seminar director felt, very strongly, that law should protect all papers for the eventual arrival of the graduate student to count, collate, and publish what in his lifetime the subject himself had not published.

On the other hand, I know a lady in Milwaukee who has a long-standing agreement with her next-door neighbor: whichever of them dies first, the other is pledged to rush into the house, empty the bureaus and desks, and burn everything.

Both attitudes have been evoked by the posthumous publication of Thurber's last collection of short pieces with a foreword by Mrs. Thurber, which at first gives the impression of being a conventional memorial. The fact, however, seems to be that Credos and Curios was planned, and titled, by Thurber himself and is not a sweeping up of manuscripts left lying around. Moreover, all of the 21 pieces were previously published in a wide variety of magazines or books. The present selection is his own and clearly represents an assembled statement he felt worth repeating.

"Credos" in the title is an alarming word and it may have been the cause for the alarm some reviewers have expressed about the book. In the last decade of his life Thurber's gloomy pronouncements about modern times caused a lot of people to sigh for the carefree life in old Ohio, where football players were transported to the state university on scholarships, where electricity was thought to leak from empty light sockets, and where a memorable Thurber uncle was cut down in his prime by the Dutch Elm disease.

Thurber himself suffered the diminishing of faith and the lack of prudence to state publicly that McCarthy, in addition to his other crimes, had pretty well killed comedy. In this Thurber was wrong. He had himself taken on McCarthy—and bested him—a good decade and a half before McCarthy became a menace. There is no single character in the show to correspond directly with the late Senator, but the whole spirit of bumbling evil that is the antagonist of The Male Animal is the spirit of the times that made McCarthy, incredibly, a formidable figure.

Yet the evidence of the book is not that the Ohio days represent the golden youth of the writer, with gloom and doom closing in with the closing years, or, for that matter, with the closing in of eyesight. On the contrary, the earliest piece in the book, dated 1928, is a lot gloomier than anything that comes from more recent times.

A good part of Thurber's credo is expressed in the form of tributes to his friends—Benchley, McNulty, Elliott Nugent, George S. Kaufman. They all behaved professionally in the way Thurber regarded as ideal. They had the gifts of sharp observation and precise phrasing which he had himself. To a man they were and still are underrated. Thurber was writing for all of them and for himself, though not deliberately, when he wrote, "The heavier critics have underrated Benchley because of his 'short flight,' missing his distinguished contribution to the fine art of comic brevity. He would thank me not to call him an artist, but I think he was an artist who wouldn't give up to it, like a busy housewife fighting the onset of a migraine headache."

Probably the most beautiful of the many beautiful drawings in the book is the one on the jacket, "Thurber and his Circle," which shows the author, arms aloft, talking enthusiastically to a roomful of slumbering men, women, dogs and pictures on the wall. The core of the book seems to be a series of pieces about talk, or of talk. Sometimes they are stories of people talking about talking in one context or another. Throughout the section, Thurber is enchanted by what can be done with words and appalled by what is being done to them by forces as different as television, psychoanalysis—another old opponent, early bested—and the national determination to get to the moon. Or are these topics all that different? Possibly Thurber, at the risk of being denounced as a senile punster, is, besides getting off a steady stream of word-play, seriously defending language itself from the encroachments of barbarian hordes who have in common only their ignorance of language and their easy assumption that they own it.