SOURCE: "James Thurber and the Hazards of Humor," in Sewanee Review, Vol. XCIII, No. 4, Fall, 1985, pp. 597-601.

[This rapid overview of many of Thurber's most famous works aims to dispute Thurber's critical reputation as the foremost American humorist of his time.]

While he was still alive, James Thurber was judged to be the best humorist since Mark Twain—if not something more. After calling him his "favourite humorist," T. S. Eliot weightily pronounced Thurber's writing and illustrations to be "a document of the age they belong to." Ernest Hemingway appeared on Thurber dustjackets, declaring that here was the "best writing coming out of America."

Nothing kills a soufflé like praising it in terms of a roast-beef dinner. The pleasures of Thurber are still there for the rereading, but one savors them moderately. The superlatives applied by Thurber's colleagues and contemporaries seem excessive to the point of embarrassment today, especially when applied to his essays. In retrospect the essays of New Yorker humorists—those famous "casuals"—come across as group representatives of a journalistic genre. Frank Sullivan, Russell Maloney, E. B. White, Thurber—there is something institutional and anonymous, something interchangeable, about the way these writers and others domesticated madness into mere whimsy and clothed it in the finest English-tweed prose native Americans could produce.

In fact Thurber's first success was a collaboration with White, in which the authorship of chapters is nearly impossible to spot. Is Sex Necessary? was published just weeks after the 1929 stock-market crash. The book sold 50,000 copies in that first dark year and still remains in print. The titles of the chapters are self-explanatory: "A Discussion of Feminine Types," "What Should Children Tell Parents?", "Frigidity in Men," "The Sexual Revolution: Being a Rather Complete Survey of the Entire Sexual Scene." Thurber and White had their sitting target—the sexpert, even then filling the air with solemn jargon that reduced passion to a clinical exercise. The two satirists made up extravagant case histories, inventing names like Lt. Col. H. R. L. Le Boutellier, C. I. E., Schlaugenschloss Haus, King's Byway, Boissy-Le-Doux sur Seine.

Thurber first served as illustrator in this volume, tamely and realistically by later standards. A typically literal cartoon bore the caption: "Occasions arise sometimes when a girl presses her knee, ever so gently, against the knee of the young man she is out with." This is clearly superior college humor, but it does not wholly escape the category of lampoon; and there is a sense that the brilliant bumbler Robert Benchley, clearing his throat and waving a pointer at his charts, had mocked The Authority more wittily before. Benchley was the original for the New Yorker humorists who followed.

When an ambitious case is being made for Thurber, My Life and Hard Times (1933) almost invariably gets nominated as his masterpiece. The comparison with Mark Twain is a little too glibly justified by this fanciful autobiography, pitting a boyhood in Columbus, Ohio, against a boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri. "I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father," Thurber began, and the hyperbole flowed freely from there.

Thurber was not a subtle inventor. When he set out to invent confusion, he invented chaos. When he set out to invent a character, he invented an eccentric. The chaos verged on slapstick humor; the eccentric verged on a comic-strip cartoon. Take first-cousin Briggs Beall, apparently a total fabrication. Beall kept a glass of camphor by his bed from fear that he might suffocate in his sleep one night without the aid of this pungent reviver. Instead he almost suffocated from the camphor.

The "night the bed fell" is neatly bracketed with the "time I fell out of the gun room in Mr. James Stanley's house," an anecdote Thurber introduces in the last chapter and then coyly evades. But the general pattern remains constant. Our raconteur is a man to whom the oddest people, the most personable dogs, and the orneriest automobiles are attached. There is a charm to Thurber's manner—offhand and meandering, setting up one tall tale after another by making a virtue of the non sequitur. In effect he is a snob of the comic disaster, taking every mishap as "one of those bewildering involvements for which my family had, I am afraid, a kind of unhappy genius." The more fantastic, the more grandly muddled, he makes his Columbus and his people, the more he is able to love them.

Thurber's short stories share the same simple if not simplistic outline of his essays and autobiography. His most famous short story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," is a single joke ingeniously sustained. The Caspar Milquetoast, dreaming of heroic deeds as a navy commander or a surgeon while waiting meekly for his wife to finish shopping, is the raw material of a New Yorker cartoon. Thurber stories provide few second insights. A rereading of "Walter Mitty" only makes Thurber seem excessively tender and indulgent toward the Small Boy he treasured in men—and found threatened by Thurber women.

"The Breaking Up of the Winships" explicitly treats the war between the sexes as an absurd escalating argument over the merits of Greta Garbo and Donald Duck as cinematic geniuses. Thurber maintains an evenhanded position through most of the story, before tipping the balance against the wife at the end.

"The Catbird Seat" measures, even more starkly than his cartoons, Thurber's animosity and fear toward women. The discrediting of poor Ulgine Barrows, the office efficiency-expert, is savage revenge beyond any reasonable provocation within the story.

Even in a memoir of his days in France, the unmistakably menacing Thurber woman appears, "large and shapeless and possessed of an unforgettable toothiness. Her smile, under her considerable mustache, was quick and savage and frightening, like a flash of lightning lighting up a ruined woods."

"Jim had it in for women," E. B. White, perhaps his closest friend, conceded.

Whatever emotion Thurber's short stories possess derives from two chief plots: men harassed by women; and men abandoned by women, like the protagonist of "One Is a Wanderer," drinking himself into a fit state to retire to sleep in his lonely hotel room.

When all is said and done, Thurber may have loved only his dogs and his idealization of writing-men-in-groups, Our Crowd at the New Yorker. And the latter were totally safe in his affections only when dead. He praised John McNulty posthumously thus: "The angel that writes names in a book of gold must long ago have put McNulty down as one who delighted in his fellow man." Robert Benchley also brought out heavenly choirs from the otherwise skeptical Thurber. He quotes a Benchley friend saying of the angels: "They're going to have to stay up late in heaven now." Then Thurber goes on to top even that tribute: "Yes, they're staying up late, I know, and, what is more, they must be having the time of their infinities. Lucky angels."

The self-perception of New Yorker writers, especially the humorists, is a fascinating subject. Benchley condemned himself because he failed to become a scholarly critic of English poetry, as he presumed his Harvard professors intended him to be. S. J. Perelman hung a portrait of James Joyce on the wall of his study, signaling him as the exemplar for his own surrealistic prose. To those readers simply after a good laugh, E. B. White announced that humor "plays close to the big hot fire that is Truth." Thurber spoke so often of Lewis Carroll and Henry James that a reader could take these allusions as self-referrals.

The connection between what Thurber was writing and what he thought he was writing is not always clear. In his preface to My Life and Hard Times, after providing ballast with a passage from Benvenuto Cellini, Thurber mused characteristically about the destiny of the humorist: "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…. The little wheels of their invention are set in motion by the damp hand of melancholy."

Toward the end of his life Thurber wrote more and more pieces with titles like "A Farewell to Speech" and "The Decline and Fall of the King's English." His preoccupation with language became fastidious to the point of being cranky. An insomniac, he counted words the way other men counted sheep, winding up with lists of words beginning with "P, the purloining letter, the stealer of sleep." He struck the posture of a Minister of Culture in a very small republic.

The social critic Otto Friedrich accused Thurber of becoming obsessed with trivia. Thurber did not deny it, but huffily defended himself with his latter-day loftiness: "Trivia Mundi has always been as dear and as necessary to me as her bigger and more glamorous sister, Gloria."

He called anger "one of the necessary virtues," but he seemed to get angry about less and less. His life became a litany of gripes. A reader found Thurber besieged and beleaguered by rock music, radio news broadcasts, junk mail, and unwanted phone calls. Everything shoddy flourished, while worthy institutions, like the railroad, went to hell.

Thurber constantly complained about the decline of humor, even in the New Yorker ("the magazine is turning grim and long"). But while criticizing glumness in others, he wrote, "I cannot confine myself to lightness in a period of human life that demands light."

The allusions to Henry James went up and up. Within a few pages he used the same tag from Horace twice. "He was pompous and unbelievably humorless when he decided that he was a man of letters," his longtime friend Ann Honeycutt complained.

His prose fell into a new richness. He referred to aging as suffering "the silent artillery of time," and to his insomnia as "the white watches of the woeful night." The Last Flower, his obvious and sentimental fantasy about future world wars, became his favorite work.

"The Last Clock"—a "Fable for the Time, Such As It Is, of Man"—holds up far better today. This less ambitious (and less famous) fairy tale of an ogre who eats up all the clocks in his castle and then in his town plays lovely variations on the conquest of time. It reads as if it were being told—improvised.

Was Thurber ever quite the writer he and his contemporaries took him to be? As a writer Thurber generally slaved over his revisions. He had a penchant for clean copy, and he was forever typing his pages, again and again. For Thurber as an artist there was serendipity from the start when he drew one of his most celebrated illustrations of a seal on the headboard of a bed because he was having difficulty drawing a seal on a rock.

The proof of Thurber's minor genius as an artist may be shown by the success of his illustrations to some of poetry's most tired warhorses in "Famous Poems Illustrated." In "The Sands o' Dee" Charles Kingsley wrote: "The creeping tide came up along the sand"—and what a "creeping tide" Thurber drew, all baleful eyes and round paws—a hopelessly overweight, waddling puppy of a tide.

Young Lochinvar, swinging his grumpy and plump "fair lady" aboard his charger, is a sight to see. But it is the Thurber charger, wide-eyed and apprehensive at his double load, that carries the scene.

When he came to Longfellow's youth, bearing through an Alpine village the "banner with the strange device—Excelsior!", Thurber had the inspiration to draw an Ivy Leaguer with a bow tie, carrying the sort of pennant waved by undergraduates on the fifty-yard line.

In a childhood accident Thurber was blinded in one eye by his brother's arrow. As he slowly went blind in the other eye, he was left to his dark fancy, and he summoned up the vividly rounded blurs of his inner vision. His response was an act of courage and imagination.

When Thurber cultists who admired his art threatened to turn his head by overblown comparisons, mostly to Matisse, E. B. White sensibly told him: "If you ever got good you'd be mediocre." A reconsiderer of Thurber almost a quarter of a century after his death might extend White's clever observation to argue that Thurber "got good" as a writer, and became as other writers. But as an artist he remained blessedly unimproved, and today his squiggled lines still say witty, quirky, and revealing things beyond the power of his words.