‘Things Close In’: Dissolution and Misanthropy in ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is quite possibly the best known American short story. “Walter Mitty” as a character type has penetrated the popular imagination: we speak of a person inclined to day dreaming as a “Walter Mitty.” Mitty, by consensus, represents the American little man, comfortably suburban, but bored to death with a middle-class, middlebrow life. Clearly his life is severely conventional, and it is obvious that Thurber is suggesting that American middle-class life offers little in the way of opportunities for romance, heroism, “a life full of passion, poetry, and hate,” as a song written eight years before “Mitty,” “As Time Goes By,” puts it. The story has become folksy—Mitty is seen as endearing, the amiable little man, who dreams his dreams like all of us, and who triumphs in his dreams over the dull, gray world of suburban (and for that matter urban) America. The feature film made of the story in 1949 presents him thus; and two generations have seen him as a character rather like Dagwood Bumstead: the American middle-class everyman, presented to us with a wry but friendly smile.
But the story itself, and the story when set within the context of Thurber's life and career, can be read quite differently and, I think, in terms truer to Thurber's comic imagination. Mitty's rejection and withdrawal from the world are more radical than can be denoted by the idea of “daydreaming.” In fact, we witness the descent of Mitty into ever increasing preoccupation with his fantasy life and increasing rejection of the so-called real world. His withdrawal is symptomatic not of mild-mannered exasperation with a trivial world, but of anger and misanthropy.
Although the story is charming, critics have not done justice to what lies below its surface laughter: clearly Mitty is gradually withdrawing into his daydreams, into an interior reality progressively stronger and more satisfying. The so-called real world becomes increasingly distant and unavailable for Mitty: “things close in.” A note of unjustified critical optimism is found, for example, in the introduction to the story in a popular anthology of short stories: The editors suggest that Walter Mitty “is a changing character,” in the process of change. In his own way, he is coming to grips “with the real world.”1 This is misleading. Yes, Mitty is in the process of change, but it is to misanthropy, withdrawal, and final dissolution. Mitty's feelings of insignificance, his awareness of his own negligibility, his bitterness towards the world, lead him to covert aggression which must be expressed indirectly, or in a hidden manner.
Thurber himself made claims for the essential seriousness of his stories: “In anything funny you write that isn't close to serious you've missed something along the line.”2 The most powerful claim for the seriousness of Thurber's humor came from T. S. Eliot, who called Thurber his favorite humorist and said:
It is a form of humor which is also a way of saying something serious. There is a criticism of life at the bottom of it. It is serious and even somber. Unlike so much of humor, it is not merely a criticism of manners—that is, of the superficial aspects of society at a given moment—but something more profound. His writings and also his illustrations are capable of surviving the immediate environment and time out of which they spring. To some extent, they will be a document of the age they belong to.3
This is well illustrated in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” where the daydreams are seen not merely as momentary escapes from a dull reality into exciting fantasy, but also as an index to Mitty's anger, desperation, and willingness to escape permanently into the more satisfying dream world of his imagination. In his interview with George Plimpton and Max Steele, Thurber remarked that in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” he had “tried to treat the remarkable as commonplace.”4 What is finally remarkable are not the little man's dreams of glory, but what they say about him, about his mental situation.
Bored and suffering from feelings of inadequacy, Mitty compensates and defends himself through fantasies. Within the fantasies there is an element of revenge: against his wife, who is replaced by the lovely dark-haired girl of the courtroom drama; against Dr. Renshaw, who in the operating room fantasy becomes distraught and haggard; against the many petty authority figures that surround and scrutinize Mitty, watchful for signs of deviant behavior. Seemingly his only defense against the scrutiny and tyranny of the world, the fantasies are entirely humorless from Mitty's perspective; Mitty does not use them as a mockery of the real world, but as a means of escape.
That the fantasies are risible in themselves is obvious: they derive from period Hollywood films and popular fiction and are manifestations of the mass American culture that has formed Mitty but not sustained him. Mitty's fantasies may reveal a longing for the heroic, but much of the delight of the story comes from our perception of how formulaic, superficial, and false to life they really are. Thurber has great fun with the conventional situations and dialogue of popular movies and fiction. The point is that the little man dreams the little man's fantasies—he is not creative enough, not sufficiently individual enough to create his own—and in that sense he is representative of the American middle-class everyman: someone more singular would have more singular fantasies. Given Thurber's constant privileging of the creative imagination in his fiction, the comedy must be directed at Mitty, a middle American devoid of creative imagination, who must take even his inner life from pop fiction and the moviemills of Sam Goldwyn and Jack Warner. Thurber's satire is thus directed partly at the thinness of popular art as well as its product, Walter Mitty.
Thurber had ambivalent feelings about American popular art; he seems to have relished such entertainments, and at the same time to have been contemptuous of them.5 This may be sensed in Mitty's fantasies: hilariously familiar and predictable, they are the prime source of the story's laughter, and it seems clear that Thurber had some affection for the tinpot dramas of Hollywood. Clearly Mitty's fantasies are cardboard, predictable, synthetic; one need only compare them to the glorious fantasy of the man who sees a unicorn in the garden to see a contrast between a creative (although deluded) imagination, and the reliance of the dull little man, Mitty, on pasteboard fantasies. In Thurber's earlier “Unicorn in the Garden,” the fantasy is unique; and as the figure of the unicorn suggests, rich and strange. Here the little man is opposed by his dominant, hostile wife, but triumphs over her, first through his experience of the beauty and rarity of his vision, and second through his wit in denying his vision. Mitty's fantasies are comic-book stuff—the humor in them is not his, but that of his creator, Thurber, who parodies the formulaic and cliche-ridden format to perfection.
There are thus strong limits on our ability to sympathize with Mitty. The thinness, the prefabricated quality of the fantasies, are hardly seen as superior to the real world, but as childish and badly made.6 Moreover, he accepts passively the absurdity of the popular movies and fiction; lacking a critical sense, he passively lives out in his fantasies the nonsense of bad art. This latter is important, for Thurber suggests here the insidious and subversive quality of popular culture—all-pervasive, ever present, attacking us from many strong sources: movies, fiction, radio (and of course even more so today through television). Mitty is the product of this culture: passive, withdrawn, resentful, anxious. Defeated by life, damaged in self-esteem, he is a receptive target for the fantasies of the group mind.
Mitty, representative of a certain social condition, has a dreadful choice: the real world, Waterbury, known for the manufacture of clocks, and thus suggestive of the routinized, quotidian life, or the fantasy world supplied him by incompetent and venal “artists” through the agency of highly competent distributors like Goldwyn and Warner, advertising people, radio executives, and so on. In short, Mitty can choose the pointless and unsatisfying tick-tock of everyday life, or the sound and fury of popular culture. Mitty shuttles between the two worlds, drawn from one to the other largely through chance and opportunity: a newsboy's cry draws him into the world of courtroom drama; the fantasy is interrupted by a chance remark of a passerby. Mitty feels himself under scrutiny: his wife, Dr. Renshaw, the passerby, the traffic cop, the parking lot attendant, all watch him, ready to note his deviance, his incompetence, his withdrawal.
The degradation and humiliation that lead eventually to his dissolution, the dissolving of his already tenuous identity, are represented by the inglorious parcels he carries through the streets of Waterbury: overshoes and puppy biscuit. In his outward life he is almost inarticulate; Mitty doesn't say anything other than “I was thinking” or “puppy biscuit” or “oh gee.” And the silent little man—his thoughts are inward—doesn't act, except to plod forward on his degrading errands. His resentment of his wife's treatment of him, his own sense of negligibility and feelings of inadequacy, are covert, but there. About to be dismissed by Mrs. Mitty as she leaves the family car (reminding him to wear the hated gloves—“You're not a young man any longer”), Mitty “raced the engine a little.” He takes off the inglorious gloves as soon as he pulls away from her, only to put them back on hurriedly when snapped at by a traffic cop. Later, in the operating room drama they will again appear, transformed into symbols of his competence and authority, as the surgeon's rubber gloves. Near the end of the story, Mitty rebels once more; to Mrs. Mitty's barrage of irritating questions, Walter snaps: “I was thinking … Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?” Mrs. Mitty is the foremost and most formidable of the many petty authority-figures Walter must put up with forever: the cop, the parking-lot attendant, the garage mechanic—and of course there are many more offstage. Mitty's plea for some recognition of his inward life, his being, is ignored by his wife as a matter of course. And even the revolving doors of the hotel “made a faintly derisive whistling sound” when Mitty meekly follows his wife from the hotel to the parking lot.
It would be possible to regard Walter Mitty as another example of a thousand henpecked hubbies, the very stuff of popular humor. But the order of the story's events goes beyond simply portraying the little man and his dominant wife. A strong suggestion in the story is that Mitty is slowly withdrawing from life, living more and more in his tinseltown fantasies. This is apparent at the abrupt conclusion of his first daydream, when he is drawn away from his huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy Hydroplane by Mrs. Mitty: “‘Not so fast. You're driving too fast.”’
“Hmm?” said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd.
(p. 47)
It is clear even in this first fantasy that Mitty has withdrawn to the point where his return to reality is shocking, unfamiliar, and unsatisfactory; he returns to everyday life slowly and with regret, “the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind.”7
As the story proceeds, we note a pattern of suggestion that he has become strikingly withdrawn; this is apparent to the casual observer as well as Mrs. Mitty: “‘You're tensed up again,’ said Mrs. Mitty: ‘It's one of your days. I wish you'd let Dr. Renshaw look you over.”’ The garage attendant looks at him closely; the passerby in the street is amused by the abstracted Mitty, and notes, “that man said ‘puppy biscuit.”’ Near the conclusion Mrs. Mitty looks hard at her husband and says “I'm going to take your temperature when I get you home.” This suggestion of progressive withdrawal is seen in the fantasies and increasingly he becomes preoccupied with loss of control and death. Each successive fantasy places Mitty in greater peril and possessing less control. Yet death is always delayed; before the climax of each fantasy, the dream is intruded upon by the outside world and destroyed.8
In the first fantasy, Commander Mitty, the “Old Man,” guides the eight-engined SN202 at 8500 rpm through a hurricane of ice in full dress uniform. Here, despite the danger and threat of death, Mitty is entirely in control; “the old man ain't afraid of Hell,” the crew knows the Commander will bring them through. In the second, Dr. Mitty is asked to take over the difficult operation on the millionaire banker Wellington McMillan (“and close personal friend of Roosevelt”) who is suffering from “obstreosis of the ductal tract. Tertiary.” Later, we learn the case worsens, “coreopsis has set in.” In both fantasies, Mitty's competence with machines, his grace under pressure, are associated with life—with saving the lives of his crew, then the life of the millionaire banker.9
In the third fantasy, Mitty is no longer entirely in control. On trial for murder, defendant Mitty is badgered by the DA. He remains cool, calmly acknowledging (and thus compromising his defense) that “this is my Webley-Vickers 50.80,” and calms the bickering attorneys by pointing out that he “could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand” (“With any known make of gun”). Mitty now is on the defensive, threatened with imprisonment and death—although we are to assume in accordance with the conventions of pop fiction that Gregory Fitzhurst had it coming and Mitty will be acquitted, vindicated, and rewarded with the “lovely dark-haired girl.”
In the fourth fantasy, RAF Captain Mitty must fly “forty kilometers through hell.” Here, however, the implication is that he may not survive. Captain Mitty's war-weary tragic whimsy is impeccable: forty kilometers through hell? “After all, what isn't”—a line to which Ronald Colman or Richard Burton could do justice. As the sound of the cannon, machine guns (“pocketa-pocketa-pocketa”), and the new flame-throwers grows louder, Mitty, who holds his brandy well and needs to now, turns to the door of the dugout: “He turned and waved to the sergeant. ‘Cheerio!”’ This cheerio may be his last; the situation seems hopeless. The last fantasy shows Mitty the Revolutionary passive, defenseless, on the point of death. Always the hero, he handles his imminent death with stiff upper lip—“To hell with the handkerchief”—but from the rifles of the firing squad there seems to be no escape. And here at the conclusion of the story there is no interruption and return to life—instead, there is the suggestion that Mitty will ultimately withdraw, irrevocably, into his interior world.
The fantasies portray, then, a progressive lack of control: from “the Old Man will get us through” and the hopeful request that Doctor Mitty will save the wealthy patient; to Mitty as defendant, questioned on the stand, warding off the sneering DA; to Captain Mitty going out to face death; and finally, the last fantasy, where the only control he has left is seen in the stiff upper lip. That the fantasies all have to do with loss of control and death seems to indicate his increasing withdrawal from the real world in favor of his fantasies, and his longing for death as the ultimate escape. “Things close in,” says Mitty “vaguely,” sunk in the big leather chair in the lobby, where he has hidden himself. Mitty is gradually withdrawing from an unsatisfactory life to the solace and fulfillment of his dreams.
Certainly we can sympathize with Walter Mitty; like his, our world is made up of traffic cops, garage mechanics, parking lot attendants, and the dulling quest for Kleenex, Squibb's toothpaste, razor blades, “bicarbonate, carborundum, initiative and referendum”—the very rhythm of the mundane life in the Clock City. But Mitty's fantasies, inadequate and shabby, suggest that Mitty himself is the primary target of Thurber's satire. Certainly the story implies a bourgeois America, where opportunities for heroic action are nonexistent, a world of overshoes and puppy biscuit. And Thurber's anger, later in his career to become obsessively misanthropic (with a special vein of misogyny), is clearly present here, as directed primarily toward the officiously mothering wife as well as the surrounding host of petty authority-figures.10
The final lines of the story are ironic. Rather than validate Mitty because we understand that by means of his dreams he conquers the unsatisfactory world, the final lines (“Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last”) diminish and ridicule him. Mitty is all too scrutable: not the amiable little man, conquering the bullying stupid world through his guilelessness, but very much the failure he and the world think him. Even so accomplished a critic as Tobias sees Mitty as one of those Thurber heroes who “can conceive of a larger order than a simple formula.”11 But Mitty's ability to conceive the heroic is negligible; his fantasies are on the order of those dreadful radio adventure shows like “Captain Midnight” that Thurber mocks in the story “Thix.”12 Many critics have seen Mitty's fantasies as a triumph of affirmation. Robert E. Morsberger suggests that through his fantasies Mitty triumphs over a “sense of inadequacy and a nagging wife,” and Charles S. Holmes suggests that in fantasy, Mitty finds “the means to reshape outer defeat into inner victory.” Robert H. Elias maintains that beginning with “Mitty” in 1939, Thurber enters a period of “a humanistic affirmation.”13 Mrs. Mitty stands as an enemy of the imagination, but, says Elias, in the fantasies Mitty achieves a victory, even if qualified, “that contributes to self preservation.” But Mitty's fantasies are hardly works of the creative imagination, rather those of an imagination derivative and sterile. Far from leading to self-preservation, Mitty's fantasies indicate his increasing withdrawal into the silence of his interior life. Thurber's implication is that Mitty and those like him are not the victims of “the world”—unsatisfactory as it may be—but of a fatal passivity, a lack of courage and imagination. Mitty's failure is the failure to accept the world, and live his life in it, even knowing his own unimportance in it. Thurber does not want us to sympathize with Mitty's neurosis, for such a condition is not in itself pitiable or inevitable in modern life. Mitty is an adult; he should use such resources as he has to live out his life.14
That Mitty is made into a comic character by the shabby quality of his fantasies, fantasies understood as the means of withdrawal and covert means of aggression, would seem confirmed by a glance at three analogous stories by Thurber: “The Lady on 142,” “The Catbird Seat,” and “The Curb in the Sky.” The first of these, another story set in wartime, again presents the little man's Hollywood fantasies. Here, while waiting for a local train in rural Connecticut, the protagonist and his wife overhear a chance telephone message from the stationmaster from the train, number 142, from New York. “Conductor Reagan on 142 has the lady the office was asking about.”15 On this slender basis, the little man projects a Hollywood fantasy of spies. He tells his wife he is convinced that the woman on 142 is a spy and that the FBI has hunted her down. His wife dismisses such bizarre stuff, suggesting the alternative that the woman has simply been taken sick on the train. She wittily deflates the little man's fantasy.
The fantasy of spies in Connecticut is made ludicrous, as are the fantasies of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” by its clichéd quality, and the comic appeal is to our recognition of these threadbare formulas of popular movies. The little man of “The Lady on 142” creates through his unoriginal imagination a sappy fantasy, peopled by figures who look too much like characters in a B movie. Although his fantasy is funny, it is not the product of a creative imagination and the conscious mockery of a threadbare entertainment, but a stale recreation of such second-rate stuff.
There is more to be said about this B Film fantasy. The little man falls asleep and his fantasy of espionage continues as a dream. The dream ends with the husband about to be executed—he knows too much—but as in “Mitty,” the dream is interrupted by the outside world before its climax; the little man returns to consciousness. There is a dogged and resentful quality in the little man; awake he holds on to his fantasy tenaciously—it is not private, as is Mitty's; instead he insists upon its reality to his wife and her friend. We are not to see this little man as insane, or progressively withdrawing; awake he is self-consciously projecting a fantasy situation to amuse himself in a boring situation and to once again irritate his wife. They know each other too well; each possesses a laugh known to annoy the other, and clearly they are long-time antagonists. To insist on the absurdity—spies on the clunky little local—is to annoy his spouse in that indirect but effective manner that Thurber's marriage partners use to perfection. The fantasy is a means of aggression.
“Mitty” is further clarified by a second interesting contrast: Thurber's famous story of “The Catbird Seat.” This story portrays the colorless life of the head of the Filing Department at F & S, a seemingly mild-mannered little man whose life is routinized to the point of absurdity. Unlike Mitty however, Martin is supremely happy with his situation: he does not dream of glory; he is entirely fulfilled within the offices of Fitweiler. This satisfaction with the ghastly routine of his life, his satisfaction in the dignity of his position, makes him a figure of fun, as suggested in Mr. Fitweiler's quite serious praise: “Man is fallible but Martin isn't.”16
He, like Mitty, is opposed by a large or large-seeming woman, Mrs. Barrows. She represents a threat to his place, identity and dignity. Everything Ulgine Barrows is threatens Mr. Martin's sense of his world: she is loud, vulgar, incompetent—a circus horse he calls her, and moreover, one with “a quacking voice and braying laugh.” But unlike Mitty, Martin is able, through an odd quirk of imagination, through a bizarre use of fantasy, to oust Mrs. Barrows and regain the serenity of his once threatened position. His fantasy, that he is a drinking, smoking druggie, he plays out to the destruction of his enemy.
This story also begins within the matrix of popular fiction: in this case, the detective story. The little man plots and will execute the perfect crime. This conventional scenario is discarded by Martin midway through its enactment, as he realizes that there is a much better way to destroy Mrs. Barrows. By creating and acting out a fiction, a wild-man persona, he can discredit Mrs. Barrows in the eyes of the Boss. Mr. Martin is aware that he has created a fantasy. Playing it out—“I'll be cooked to the gills when I bump that old buzzard off”—Martin acts to secure his position. That the fantasy is the machinations of a dim, unadventurous little man is part of the joke, but Martin is in a sense admirable; beneath the typical look of studious concentration lurks not Mitty, the passive little man, but the ruthless desperado.17 Here the fantasy is clearly a means of aggression, and is not used as an escape, but to secure Mr. Martin's sense of himself as confirmed in his real life. In both “The Secret Life of Mitty” and “The Catbird Seat,” the little man struggles to maintain a sense of self-value. Martin fights to keep the sense of himself inherent in his position at F & S, which he finds of supreme value; his anger turns outward towards the despicable Ulgine. Mitty attempts to create and sustain some sense of power and value in himself in his increasingly more profound withdrawal into fantasy; his anger turns inward and becomes sterile. Martin creates and acts; his unoriginal detective story compromises our estimation of his imagination, but his spontaneous ability to create a marvelous trick to oust his antagonist makes his triumph admirable.
A story less well known perhaps, but one of Thurber's best and one that is illuminating in its parallels to “Mitty,” is “The Curb in the Sky.”18 Here Charlie Deshler, dashing, widely traveled, and experienced, a great story teller—just the opposite of Mitty—is reduced to despair and finally incarceration in a mental hospital by his wife, a perky, vivacious woman with the annoying, indeed infuriating, habit of finishing people's sentences for them. Charlie's friends look on with resignation as he, characteristically impetuous, marries Dorothy; they know that the outcome will be Charlie's decline and fall. She begins to interrupts his favorite stories, correcting them, and finally taking over and telling the story herself. Charlie realizes what is happening to him, and after two years of this begins to defend himself by recounting to his guests one of his own dreams, knowing that his wife cannot correct and preempt these flights of a singular imagination. His fantasies are to save his sanity: “They became the only life he had that was his own” (p. 79).
He tells a bizarre dream of his flight to the moon in an airplane “made out of telephone wires and pieces of old leather.” He is stopped by “a man who looked like Santa Claus, only he was dressed in the uniform of a customs officer.” This figure tells Charlie that “‘you can't go to the moon, if you are the man who invented these wedding cookies.’ Then he showed me a cookie made in the shape of a man and woman being married—little images of a man and a woman and a minister, made of dough and fastened firmly to a round, crisp cookie base” (p. 79).
But Charlie's device is futile; the narrator tells us that “any psychiatrist will tell you that at the end of the way Charlie was going lies madness in the form of monomania. You can't live in a fantastic dream world, night in and night out and then day in and day out, and remain sane. The substance began to die slowly out of Charlie's life, and he began to live entirely in shadow” (p. 79). Worn and desperate, Charlie begins to tell obsessively this one story of the interrupted flight to the moon over and over, and after a month or two, “Charlie finally had to be sent to an asylum.” Apart from Dorothy, Charlie seems to improve, but when the narrator visits Charlie in the asylum, he finds Dorothy seated beside her husband's bed, “bright-eyed and eager.” “I was somehow surprised to see her there, having figured that Charlie had, at least, won sanctuary from his wife. He looked quite mad” (p. 80). Charlie tells his story, only to be—inevitably and fatally—interrupted and corrected by his wife. “‘So I pulled over to a curb—’ ‘No. You pulled over to a cloud,’ said Dorothy. ‘There aren't any curbs in the sky. There couldn't be. You pulled over to a cloud”’ (p. 80).
Charlie is finished. The once vital male is reduced to despair and madness. His hope to find room for his imagination and story-telling skills, to dominate and please, is futile. Seemingly concerned and helpful, but effectively domineering and egotistical, the wife triumphs. Fantasy involving hostility toward the wife, obsessive living within fantasy, fantasy leading to withdrawal and passivity, these are analogous to the story of Walter Mitty. The comparison suggests that finally Mitty's fantasies (far less imaginative and creative than Charlie's) will be similarly futile and will lead finally to a similar fate.
Although “The Lady on 142,” The Catbird Seat,” and “The Curb in the Sky” are delightful stories, “Mitty” appears to be the more profound: the secret inner life, a defensive and aggressive tactic at the same time, the suggestion of Mitty's universality, but also of his progressive dissolution and increasing awareness of death, carry the story beyond the others. The mockery of the impoverished imagination formed by an inadequate culture, and the failure of Mitty's will to act, cause Mitty to be more memorable than the protagonists of the other stories. Mitty is not simply the little man, representative of our desire to dream of glory in reaction to a dull world, but suggestive of a situation far more troublesome: one may see in Mitty misanthropy—his disgust with the banality of his everyday life is unbearable. Traditionally, the misanthrope figure withdraws: Timon of Athens to the wilderness; Gulliver to his stable; Alceste of Le Misanthrope to the “desert,” in three classic versions. Mitty is no less a misanthropist; his disgust and bitterness emerge again and again in lines of fantasy dialogue: “‘It's forty kilometers through hell, sir,’ said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. ‘After all,’ he said softly ‘what isn't?”’ But he is the misanthrope demystified and made middle-class; obviously the suburban man can neither imagine nor afford the drama of a retreat into the wilderness. Mitty's retreat is inward, to the remote, intimate airways of his mind.
Notes
-
Elliott L. Smith and Andrew W. Hart, eds., The Short Story: A Contemporary Looking Glass (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 48.
-
George Plimpton and Max Steele, “James Thurber,” in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1958), p. 95.
-
Quoted in Burton Bernstein, Thurber: A Biography (New York: Arbor House, 1975), p. 361n.
-
Plimpton and Steele, p. 96.
-
Richard C. Tobias points out that “the comic writer … relies upon stereotypes and clichés of our everyday world. Thurber exploits types and ideas of second-rate movies. All of the imposters in the new pieces in The Thurber Carnival have walked off the stage of drawing room comedies, spy movies, detective stories, or folk dramas into Thurber's comic world.” See The Art of James Thurber (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1969), p. 91.
-
“The Unicorn in the Garden,” in Fables for Our Time (New York: Harper & Bros, 1940), pp. 65–66.
-
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” in The Thurber Carnival (New York: Harper & Row, 1945), pp. 47–48.
-
Compare “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” The analogy of Mitty with Eliot's Prufrock was apparently first noticed by Peter De Vries, then editor of Poetry magazine.
-
Thurber deliberately plants “errors” within Mitty's fantasies: his reference in the courtroom fantasy to a non-existent pistol, the odd, nonsensical names of medical conditions in the hospital drama, and so on. These mistakes spoof the meretricious craft of Hollywood, of course, along with Mitty's uncritical absorption of such nonsense.
-
I quarrel with Stephen A. Black's suggestion that the more Mitty depends on the escape provided by his fantasies, “the less possibility there is of his confronting his real problems—problems with which he could perhaps learn to deal effectively.” See James Thurber: His Masquerades (The Hague & Paris: Mouton, 1970), pp. 42–43. Perhaps; but the good advice seems irrelevant. If Mitty's distant forebear, Hamlet, consulted a therapist, and ceased to moon about Elsinore, perhaps he wouldn't have got into the trouble he did.
-
Tobias, p. 101. For Thurber's terrible anger and misanthropy near the end of his life, see Bernstein, Chapter 19. It is curious and provocative that in his last, terrible year, Thurber formed the notion of having The New Yorker, with which he was at war, print as his obituary “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Did he find in his story, published years earlier, a forecast of his final anger and thus an appropriate final statement? Certainly it suggests that he found in Walter Mitty an echo of what he himself was, early and late in his life.
-
In The Beast in Me and Other Animals (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1948), pp. 42–50.
-
Robert E. Morsberger, James Thurber (New York: Twayne, 1964), p. 44; Charles S. Holmes, “Introduction,” Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 6; Robert H. Elias, “James Thurber: the Primitive, the Innocent, and the Individual,” ASch, 27 (1958), 361.
-
Thurber's impatience with glamorizing neurosis and his belief that we must accept life on its own terms are discussed by Morsberger, pp. 59ff.
-
“The Lady on 142,” in The Thurber Carnival, p. 3.
-
“The Catbird Seat,” in The Thurber Carnival, p. 9.
-
In a letter to John Lardner, Thurber notes that a certain hero of his “was the toughest guy in the world and the gentlest, and so, I think, are most of us. And that is the figure in the carpet of everything I write, from ‘Walter Mitty’ through ‘The Catbird Seat’ to all the fairy tales” (quoted in Bernstein, p. 467). The characterization applies well to and illuminates Mr. Martin; its application to Mitty seems to me less certain.
-
In The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (New York and London: Harper & Bros., 1935), pp. 75–80.
Additional coverage of Thurber's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1929–1941; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 73–76; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 17, 39; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 5, 11, 25, 125; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 4, 11, 22, 102; DISCovering Authors 3.0; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Dramatists, Most-studied Authors, Novelists; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults; Major 20th-Century Writers, Editions 1 and 2; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 1, 10; Something About the Author, Vol. 13; St. James Guide to Children's Writers; and St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.