SOURCE: “The Further Range: Thurber's Other Stories,” in James Thurber, Continuum Pub., 1988, pp. 75–106.

[In the following essay, Long surveys both the best known stories of Thurber and some of the lesser known.]

Thurber's tales of the “little man” culminate in “Walter Mitty,” but this type of story does not disappear exactly with the end of the 1930s decade. Shortly after the onset of his blindness in 1941, Thurber published two other stories, “The Catbird Seat” (1942) and “The Lady on 142” (1943), that are of a similar nature and are among his best. “The Catbird Seat” is in some respects a more ample version of “The Unicorn in the Garden,” and like the earlier fable combines humor with fantasy. Erwin Martin, the story's hero, is the epitome of the little man, a timid clerk who has worked for the same company for years and has become head of its filing department. One day, however, a Mrs. Ulgine Barrows is hired by the president of the firm, Mr. Fitweiler, as an efficiency expert. An aggressive, dominant woman, she fills Mr. Martin with apprehension and fear. Eventually, when she plans radical changes in his department, he realizes that he must act to save himself. Drinking his habitual glass of milk before retiring, he plots to murder her.

In the original draft, Martin had gone to Mrs. Barrows's apartment and carried out the killing, but Thurber was dissatisfied with this version because Martin does not really seem capable of murder. In the published version, he goes to the apartment taking care not to be observed by others, but when the critical moment arrives cannot act and instead flaunts concocted vices before Mrs. Barrows—secret smoking of cigarettes, drinking, and use of cocaine, and abuses his employer Mr. Fitweiler as a “windbag.” Mrs. Barrows orders him out of her apartment and the next morning reports him to Fitweiler. Fitweiler, however, fully conscious that Martin's abstemious habits are legendary in the firm, concludes that Mrs. Barrows has lost her mind. After conferring with a psychiatrist on the telephone, he has her forcibly removed from the office and his employment. She is expelled screaming and imprecating, never to return, and Martin's fantasy of revenge upon the powerful Ulgine Barrows is realized.

Although possessing a veneer of realism, “The Catbird Seat” is essentially a fable or fairy tale, and in many ways is a retelling of “The Unicorn in the Garden.” Mr. Martin and Ulgine Barrows are not husband and wife like the couple in the fable, but they are similar to them as combatants in a male-female power struggle, Mrs. Barrows large and intimidating, Mr. Martin meek and enfeebled in his masculinity. Rather like the wife in “The Unicorn in the Garden,” Mrs. Barrows plots against the hero and looks forward to his removal from his special sanctuary where he finds security and peace, but is outwitted by him. Mrs. Barrows is not removed to an insane asylum, but is shut out of Mr. Martin's world forever and shorn of her power. Her expulsion from the office, like the wife's from the home in the fable, involves the collective action of men, notably including a psychiatrist, against her.

One feels, moreover, that her expulsion is warranted. Her officiousness has already cost a number of inoffensive people their jobs at A & F before she lays plans against Mr. Martin, and she has no compassion and no pity. A strictly mental and self-centered type, she is out of touch with the natural rhythms of life and everything about her is made to seem repellent. Even her name Ulgine is an approximate anagram of “ugly.” She has a loud, brassy voice and “brays” rather than talks. Her expressions, like “tearing up the pea patch” (for going on a rampage) and “sitting in the catbird seat” (for sitting pretty, like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him) are taken from the sportscaster Red Barber when he covered the baseball games of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Her frequent use of these expressions suggests that she regards life in terms of struggle and competition, and there is poetic justice in her being ousted and losing authority over others. On a deeper level of emotive response, she is an ogre or witch, whom Martin slays in order to restore peace and amity to the world. The fairy-tale happy ending, however, is ironic in some ways. In the real world Ulgine Barrowses are not so easily disposed of, and Mr. Martins do not normally slay Goliaths. Moreover, Martin's triumph is more problematic than that of the husband in the fable whose unicorn and rose-garden affiliations were with ideality and spiritual truth. Mr. Martin at the end merely returns to his safe but sterile filing system that will shield him from self-recognition.

If “The Catbird Seat” revives the situation in “The Unicorn in the Garden,” “The Lady on 142” is in some ways a retelling of “Walter Mitty.” It is narrated in the first person by a man who is nameless and is accompanied by his wife Sylvia as they take a trip by train from Cornwall, Connecticut to Gaylordsville, about twenty minutes away—a tiny excursion. His wife has her feet firmly on the ground while her husband, who searches ineffectually for Chiclets in his pockets yet enters into romantic adventure in his daydreams, does not. On the hot, sticky midsummer afternoon, as they wait for the train, he hears the station master on the phone saying that conductor Reagan has the lady “the office was asking about,” and tells his wife that he feels there is some deep mystery about her. It is wartime and he feels that she may be a spy, a notion at which Sylvia scoffs.

As he leans his head against the back of the seat and closes his eyes, he falls into a kind of reverie in which he and his wife, because they “know too much,” are snatched off the train by the lady and taken to the lair of her sinister associates. At the point at which they are about to be killed, he wakes to the reality of their arriving in a totally normal way at Gaylordsville. At the station, they are met by a female friend to whom Sylvia tells her husband's suspicion of the “lady on 142” as a German spy, and the women laugh at him. The dream sequence is introduced so quietly that the reader does not recognize at first that it is only a dream; only later, with their arrival at Gaylordsville, does it become apparent that the events described belong wholly to the narrator's romantic dreaming—dreaming that ends in anticlimax and humiliation, just as it does in “Walter Mitty.”

One of the special features and delights of “The Lady on 142” is Thurber's use of parody. Early in the story when the narrator speaks of spies, his wife tells him that “Alfred Hitchcock things” don't happen on the New York, New Haven & Hartford railroad. But it is exactly Hitchcock that one is made to think of in the “dream” appearance of the lady with the pearl-handled derringer who spirits the narrator and his wife off the train to be met by a long black limousine with a heavyset foreigner at the wheel; in their sequestration in the remote house in the country where the group of spies gather; and in the suspense, huggermugger, and intrigue having the distinct styling of 1930s mystery films.

At the same time, Thurber parodies Dashiell Hammett's mystery novel The Maltese Falcon. The work is even alluded to quietly at the beginning when Sylvia tells her husband jestingly that the conductor on the train looks as if he knew “where the Maltese Falcon is hidden.” As in Hammett's novel, the characters in the dream sequence are all strongly typed. The heavyset foreigner with “cruel lips and small eyes” is a stereotype, as is the lady from the train as she paces up and down at the house smoking a cigarette in a long black holder. The group includes a tall man with heavily lidded eyes and a lean young gunman with a “drawn, sallow” complexion and cigarette hanging from his lower lip who looks at the others “incuriously.” The role played by the narrator in the dream sequence proves to be antiheroic. When he foolishly and self-destructively tells the tall man that he recognizes him as a tennis star who had lost to Tilden in Zagreb in 1927, he seals his own fate. The gunman hands his automatic to the tall man, who remarks, “I theenk I bomp off thees man myself,” and the narrator wakes from his reverie “moaning.” Yet he is not as radically estranged as Walter Mitty, and the story is a gentler, less disturbing version of a Mittyesque escape into fantasy.

“The Catbird Seat” and “The Lady on 142” are the last in Thurber's series of stories dealing with such men. Other stories do not fall into any single pattern and are of unpredictable types. “The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery” (1932) opens upon the scene at night of a man on his hands and knees before the headlights of a car while he barks like a dog. A motorcycle cop pulls up “out of Never-Never Land” to ask for an explanation, and it comes out that the husband and wife have been arguing about whether a man's eyes can be seen in the dark like a cat's, and that the husband has attempted to prove they can by placing himself on all fours by the side of the highway before the headlights of their car. There is no great point to the story: in a fantastic way the “bewildered, sedentary” husband has merely managed to make a fool of himself before his wife and the policeman. The situation, with its lunar quality, is reminiscent of Thurber's cartoons depicting men who have been shorn of sense and dignity.

In a later, frequently anthologized story, “The Figgerin' of Aunt Wilma” (1950), Thurber deals with a woman who, like a gallery of others from his Columbus past, is an oddity and an eccentric. Set far back in the Columbus past to 1905, when John Hance had run a neighborhood grocery store, the tale draws on the tradition of local color. The look and atmosphere of the store, the customs and manners of the people who gather there, are meticulously and exactly rendered. But the local color element is introduced partly to give verisimilitude to what is essentially a tall tale. John Hance and Aunt Wilma Hudson, to whom thrift is a religion, are both notoriously close with money. When they come together to settle a grocery bill of ninety-eight cents, a male-female duel ensues that becomes a family legend. It is authenticated and witnessed by the narrator, then a boy of ten. The problem comes about when Hance discovers that he has no pennies in his till, and proposes that Aunt Wilma give him a dollar plus three pennies and that he give her a nickel. Aunt Wilma is immediately suspicious, and becomes increasingly flustered by the mathematics of the complex transaction.

Hance's frustration and Aunt Wilma's confusion escalate as the tale continues; and when the boy returns to the Hudson house with his Aunt Wilma he cannot resist telling his uncle of Mr. Hance's ordeal. His uncle, who is implied to have been mismatched with his wife, at first chuckles and then breaks into “full and open laughter,” part of a chorus of derision since male loungers in the store have smirked at Aunt Wilma too. His laughter convinces her that men cannot understand anything and are in league against her. One of the notable features of the story is the care with which all the characters, however incidental, have been drawn. But the most perfectly drawn is Aunt Wilma herself. She is similar in type to Aunt Ida in Thurber's reminiscent sketch “A Portrait of Aunt Ida,” since her enclosure in settled feminine biases and deep suspicion of life beyond the narrow scope of her experience prevent her from recognizing her own confusion. “The Figgerin' of Aunt Wilma” is particularly revealing when placed against “The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery,” the comic vision of which is distinctly urban, while the humor of “Aunt Wilma” belongs to regional or small-town literature. The stories could have been written by two entirely different authors.

Thurber's short fiction is especially puzzling in its diversity, its lack of any consistent approach or predictable subject matter. “The Black Magic of Barney Haller” (1932) is so original that nothing else exactly like it exists in American fiction, or even elsewhere in Thurber. The story is narrated in the first person by a man who lives in the country and has a hired man, Barney Haller, whose thick Germanic accent distorts what he says so that it seems ominous. Moreover, whenever he appears he is followed by lightning that alarms the narrator and makes him feel that Barney Haller trafficks with the devil. When the story opens on a hot, sultry summer morning, Barney appears at the narrator's house with lightning playing about his shoulders and tells him that “bime by, I go hunt grotches in de voods.” What he means by this is that he will look for forked branches or crotches to use as supports for saplings. But the narrator, who has an excitable imagination, can only envision “grotches” horribly as ugly little creatures “covered with blood and honey and scrapings of church bells.” He goes with him to the woods, frightening himself by imagining Barney in the “voods” shedding his farmhand's garments and incanting diabolical phrases to conjure up “grotches.” At the edge of the woods lightning suddenly slashes across the sky, thunder booms menacingly, and the narrator turns and flees while Barney stands impassively, staring after him.

That evening at six o'clock, while alone in the house and napping in an upstairs room, the narrator is awakened by the sound of rapping at his door. It is dark for six o'clock, with heavy rumblings of thunder and flickerings of lightning in the sky. The narrator is now convinced that the hired man has come to “get” him, even imagining him at the other side of the door standing barefoot with a “wild animal's skin” slung over his shoulder. Opening the door, he finds Barney at the other side, with lightning at his back. When Barney remarks, “We go to the garrick and become warbs,” by which he means that it is time to clear the garret of wasps, the narrator is terrified. He has no intention of accompanying the eerie hired man to a garrick to become a “warb,” and acting on a wild impulse quotes lines from Lewis Carroll, apparently hoping to ward off Barney's black magic. “Did you know,” he says, “that even when it isn't brillig I can produce slithy toves? Did you happen to know that the mome rath never lived that could outgrabe me?” Barney backs slowly away from the porch, his eyes staring wide, and never returns to work for the narrator.

Part of the humor of the story involves the recognition that the hired man finds the narrator as strange as the narrator finds him. The narrator, a reader rather than a doer and a man of high-strung nerves, projects onto Barney all manner of fearsomeness. It is no coincidence that he reads Proust, and is disturbed from his dream of Proust's characters by the appearance of Barney at his door in the early evening. Proust's delicate nerves were so agitated by the slightest impressions, such as the taste of madeleines dipped in tea, as to set in motion a whole world of his imagining; and the narrator's nervous susceptibilities cause him to “imagine” things about Barney. Barney is in fact a simple man—stolid, slowly competent, and amiable. Almost nerveless, he walks about when there is thunder and lightning, unconscious of any danger. His indifference to thunder and lightning makes him incomprehensible to the narrator, who is as civilized as, to his mind, Barney is pagan. Barney Haller's name, which has the connotations of “barn” and “hell” (a word evoked quietly at the beginning) suggests a dual identity, half familiar and half weird. Ironically, Barney possesses no black magic, indicated in the story's title; it is the narrator who by the end becomes a sorcerer, fending off Barney's supposed threat to him by incanting fantastic phrases from his reading—the desperate gesture of a man without defenses. “The Black Magic of Barney Haller” is one of Thurber's superb stories, strikingly original and finely crafted.

But it is one of a kind. Nothing quite like it appears again. Instead one finds stories reflecting an almost bewildering virtuosity. “Am I Not Your Rosalind?” (1947) is a quintessential New Yorker story. Lucid and highly polished, it deals with familiar America as represented by two married couples, the Thornes and the Stantons. When the Stantons spend an evening at the Thornes, it comes out that their wives had each played Rosalind in As You Like It in senior-class high-school plays. They were born in the same year and had played the part at the same time. George Thorne insists that they recite some of Rosalind's lines into his tape recorder and they finally do so, overcoming their reluctance with additional cocktails. Each of the women praises the other's reading, modestly deprecating her own. Yet when the evening is over and the couples are alone, each scoffs at the other's reading and laughs with her husband over the hopelessness of her rival's physical appearance and various pretensions. As Thurber notes at the beginning, Rosalind had been one of the first “aggressive ladies in literature,” a forecast, it would seem, of inmost aggression in the wives. “Am I Not Your Rosalind?” is a suave story, coolly amused and acidulously ironic.

“The Man Who Hated Moonbaum” (1940), on the other hand, has an almost surrealistic quality. Thurber's only Hollywood story, it was written after he had visited Elliott Nugent in Hollywood to work on the first draft of The Male Animal, and been introduced to various producers and directors in the film industry. The story has only two characters, a Hollywood producer who is unnamed and always referred to as “the little man,” and a man named Tallman. Strangers to one another when they met over drinks at the Brown Derby, the producer had invited Tallman back to his home, a palatial estate of incredible pretentiousness. The story, which takes place at night and largely in darkness, opens upon the scene of their walking past a high, grilled gate for what seems a quarter of a mile to the producer's house. After fumbling in the dark, the producer flicks a switch (possibly concealed in a tree) that throws a rose-colored radiance over the façade of a building so imposing that it resembles “the Place de la Concorde side of the Crillon.” Entering through an enormous door, Tallman discovers a marble staircase that tumbles “like Niagara” into a grand canyon of a living room.

The producer pours brandy for himself and his guest while he talks compulsively about his conception for a movie based on medieval legend that involves a scene in which a spy, concealed behind the forty-foot tapestry hanging on his wall, is shot with an arrow. The scene has been bungled, he raves, by his assistant Moonbaum and Moonbaum's marksman. The more he talks, the more garish his movie seems. A motif of stifling heat is introduced, and the deep living room is evoked as a version of hell. Finally, Tallman leaves “the little man” talking to himself and finds his way out of the house into fresh air and the early light of day, able to see now “where he was going.” In his use of the baroque Hollywood house that seems as empty and unreal as a movie set, Thurber seems indebted to Nathanael West. But the tale—in its vignette-like form, capturing of the producer's crass speech, and evocation of inner tensions and underlying ugliness—is also reminiscent of the Hollywood stories of Thurber's friend John O'Hara.

Two other stories, “The Greatest Man in the World” (1931) and “You Could Look It Up” (1941), suggest the influence of Ring Lardner. The central figure in “The Greatest Man in the World,” like the prizefighter in Lardner's “Champion,” is self-centered and vacant. By a quirk of fate, he becomes America's greatest hero when, in 1937, a decade after Lindbergh, he flies nonstop around the world in a secondhand, single-motored Bresthaven Dragon-Fly III monoplane. Jack (“Pal”) Smurch is the product of a small Iowa town and a family looked upon askance and feared by local people. At the time of Smurch's flight, his father has been jailed for stealing spotlights and lap robes from tourists' automobiles, and his weak-minded younger brother had just escaped from a reformatory where he had been sent for the theft of money-order blanks from post offices.

Smurch's own earlier years there had been one of the town's uglier memories. He had knifed the principal of his school, and surprised in the act of stealing an altar cloth from a church had bashed the sacristan over the head with a pot of Easter lilies. For each of these offenses he had served a sentence in a reform school. Naturally, when reporters talk to townspeople and to Smurch's mother, a short-order cook in a shack restaurant who tells them that she hopes her son drowns, they realize that they cannot print the true facts of Smurch's life. Instead they describe him as a modest fellow, blond, and popular with girls. A cheap amusement park photo of him is touched up so that the “little vulgarian” looks handsome.

The first half of “The Greatest Man in the World” has the grotesque irreverence of Thurber's spoof “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomatox,” in which the greatest hero of the Union Army is depicted as a clownish rumpot. The second half becomes pure fantasy. A national crisis develops, and Smurch is sequestered in a nursing home for two weeks ostensibly for exhaustion but actually to keep him away from the press. Finally, when he is conducted to a conference room in New York to be coached on how to comport himself—with a “test” reporter from the New York Times, and with the president of the United States and other top officials present—Smurch makes it clear that he will flaunt his true self before the world. As he stands before a window exulting in the sound of his name as it floats up to him from a newsboy hawking papers nine floors below, the President nods grimly to the mayor's secretary, a powerfully built former football player, who seizes Smurch and throws him out the window.

His death, covered up as a tragic accident, is the occasion of a solemn funeral and national mourning. Two minutes of silence are observed throughout the land, supervised in Smurch's hometown by Secret Service men. In the story's splendid ending, a line that had been introduced earlier, in which Smurch's “twisted leer” in the amusement park photo is retouched into a pleasant smile, is brought forward with the effect of a coda. Smurch's mother, in the shack restaurant, bows her head reverently but turns her face away so that the Secret Service men cannot see the “twisted, strangely familiar leer on her lips.” “The Greatest Man in the World” combines many elements of Thurber's writing in the 1930s. It is a satire, a parody, a fantasy, and a “dark” fable.

“You Could Look It Up” is similar to “The Greatest Man in the World” in that it relates fantastic incidents as if they were factual. A baseball story with a first-person narrator reminiscent of the worldly-wise deadpan narrators in Ring Lardner's sports tales, it is related in the present but concerned with events occurring thirty years earlier that the narrator keeps reminding the reader are contained in newspaper files and can be looked up. The trainer at that time for a baseball club expected to win the pennant but fallen upon a slump, the narrator speaks in a hard-bitten vernacular so skillfully rendered that it clinches the authenticity of the tale. In a dejected state when the club loses to Columbus, the team's crusty manager, Squawks Magrew, meets a bizarre individual named Pearl du Monville. Du Monville is a midget with a “sneer on his little pushed-in pan” who swings a bamboo cane and smokes a big cigar. Drinking with him after the loss to Columbus, Magrew enjoys his razzing of the team and decides to adopt him as the team mascot.

To the consternation of the narrator and the members of the club, Magrew even signs du Monville as a player—a kind of goad to the team that du Monville could do no worse than they have been doing lately—and in the game against St. Louis sends du Monville in to bat for them. Certain that no pitcher can throw a ball low enough to strike him out, Magrew carefully instructs him to stand at the plate, take four balls, and walk to first base, enabling their man on third base to score a run. Du Monville does as he is told, but when a fourth pitch is thrown level to his chest he swats the ball and scrambles toward first base. He is out at first but, the bases loaded, the other players score runs and Magrew's team wins the game.

Du Monville's appearance on the diamond causes pandemonium in the stands, but the wildest scene occurs at the end when Magrew, enraged by the midget's defiance of his orders, seizes him, whirling him in the air like a discus thrower and hurling him across the field. Du Monville is never seen again but the team has been inspirited and goes on to take the pennant. “You Could Look It Up” is particularly effective in its use of the grotesque, and its smart-talking, cigar-chewing midget is one of the liveliest features of the story. The story may also involve an element of sly parody, however, since Squawks Magrew has a certain likeness to Thurber's editor at the New Yorker, Harold Ross. Drinking with the midget, he uses Ross's expressions, crying, “How I pity me,” and like Ross he is overworked, gruffly melancholic, and constantly goading those under him to reach new heights of excellence.

Yet other Thurber stories are not satirical at all and some, like “Menaces in May” (1928), his first story published in the New Yorker, reveal another side of his sensibility. Evidently autobiographical, “Menaces in May” concerns a man who is never named and who resembles Thurber himself during the time that he was getting started in New York and his first wife Althea Adams had not yet returned from France to join him. It begins moodily with the man in a hotel room at one o'clock in the morning with another man and woman whom he has just met by chance in the city and had known eighteen years before. He had, in fact, been in “puppy” love with the woman, who is now in vaudeville. As he looks at the two together, he remembers that in school he had been studious and shy, no way to have won Julia, and wonders what his life with her would have been like. The situation comes out of Thurber's own experience. Eva Prout, who had been his first boyhood love and whom he idealized for years, had dropped out of school to go into vaudeville and movies; and it is she, really, who is Julia.

The first part of the story is suffused with a sense of regret, of lost romance; but when the man leaves the couple and makes his way in the dim hours to his room in the Village another motif begins to emerge. On the subway an incident occurs between a roughneck sailor and his girl, and the man is tempted to intervene but does nothing. Other sights en route fill him with a sense of fear, and he feels condemned to a lonely isolation. When he reaches his room, he thinks of the imminent return of his wife Lydia. Had he come between the sailor and the girl, he might have been killed, and it had been the thought of Lydia returning to such a thing that had kept him from acting. His inability to act, and the “nameless terror” he feels, now become focused by the woman he married. The somewhat-vague romantic opening is followed by the sharper realism of his fear of Lydia in which Thurber discovers his true subject.

Another early story, “The Evening's at Seven” (1932), is also remarkably evocative. It opens with an unnamed man sitting alone in darkness. It is early evening and he is in his office lost in reflection. Before long he goes out into the street where it is raining, and darkness and rain are thereafter alluded to frequently with motiflike effect. What troubles the man is hinted at when a siren sounds somewhere and its frenzied scream makes him think of “anguish dying with the years.” For reasons he claims not to understand, he takes a cab to the apartment of a woman with whom he had once been in love. The scene between them is Fitzgeraldian in its evocation of lost romance. As they talk, he is conscious of the rain outside, of the “soft darkness” of the room, and of “other rooms and other darknesses.” Just as he is about to kiss her, however, her sister arrives and the moment is lost.

But it has been a romantic occasion and the man, when he arrives at his hotel for dinner at seven-thirty as always, obviously still feels the glow of his evening at “seven.” In the dining room of the hotel, the waitress tells him that she believes his wife, the existence of whom has been withheld until this moment, will be down soon. “And the waitress,” Thurber remarks in the last lines, “said clam chowder tonight, and consommé: you always take the clam chowder, ain't I right. No, he said, I'll take the consommé.” The strain of romance and nostalgia in the tale, and the dominance in it of sentiment, suggest a direction that Thurber's fiction might have taken but did not.

“One Is a Wanderer” (1935), another story of loss, has the form of a sensitive atmospheric sketch. Written while Thurber was living apart from his wife Althea and staying at the Algonquin Hotel, it is as autobiographical as “Menaces in May.” The protagonist, a writer named Kirk, lives apart from his wife in a New York hotel room where he leads a desultory existence, throwing his soiled shirts (as Thurber had done) on the floor of his closet and allowing them to pile up for months. On a dark, dank Sunday evening in February, he feels particularly at sea and is lost in the gloom of his thoughts. Not knowing what to do with himself on this Sunday evening, he walks the city's streets for five hours. When he at last returns to the hotel, he asks at the desk if there are any messages for him, but there is nothing. For a time he goes to his office, imagining that he can occupy himself by writing some letters, but he cannot concentrate and returns to the hotel through the slush and the “damp gloom.” Seated in a lobby chair still wearing his overcoat, he has several brandies, but no one comes into the lobby that he knows. He thinks of calling on the Graysons, with whom he and his wife Lydia had once shared a vacation, but it would be awkward to see them, since their friends are all couples. “Two is company,” he tells himself, “four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.”

Finally he goes to his room to rest, and after midnight takes a cab to a bar on Fifty-third Street, staying until three o'clock in the morning. On the way back to his hotel in a taxi, he talks to the driver, a man named Willie who has driven him before, and Willie tells him that it is good he is going home because home is the best place there is, after all. Returning to his room, which is hardly a home, he smokes a cigarette and begins to sing “Bye Bye Blackbird,” the lyrics of which evoke an escape from woe that Kirk cannot achieve and that has everything to do with Lydia, who has apparently left him, finding him “unbearable.” Kirk's evening describes a movement in circles, from the hotel and back again, and then out and back to the room that is as desolate as Kirk's single life. The story has many finely muted effects, like the conversation Kirk holds with the bartender George that is reminiscent of such downbeat exchanges in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but the final effect of the story is that of a cry of pain.

“The Other Room” (1962) published posthumously in Credos and Curios and one of the last stories Thurber wrote, is autobiographical only obliquely. It is set in the bar of the Hotel Continental in Paris and involves a set of Americans who are staying in the city. When a compatriot of theirs appears, a man named Bartlett whom they have never met and is a friend of friends, he confides to them his early experience of Paris—a story within the story. Bartlett had been in the American army during World War I and been wounded at Fère-en-Tardenois, one of the fiercest and bloodiest engagements of the war. While at the base hospital, stricken with homesickness and disoriented by the drugs he had been given, he had gone AWOL. In a hazy mental state, he had found himself in Paris, where a French girl took him to her small apartment. After going into the other room to undress she calls to him, and Bartlett is seized by panic. Young and inexperienced, from a sheltered background in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and in love with a virtuous local girl of seventeen named Martha, he flees from the apartment in a daze. MPs find him and bring him back to the base hospital, but later he goes into a “nose dive” and has experiences with prostitutes in Paris. Later still, after recovering from his breakdown, he returns to the US, marries the good Martha, and has ever since been a faithful, conventional husband.

Bartlett's experience was not exactly Thurber's, since he had never been in the army or wounded in France. But he had known Paris as an inexperienced young man from the Midwest at the same time as Bartlett; and he, too, had had his sexual initiation there and had suffered a nervous breakdown. The clash between a sheltered and provincial idealism and the reality of sex results in a never-quite-forgotten trauma for Bartlett, as it had apparently for Thurber. What is striking in Thurber, in many of the stories as well as in the drawings, is the traumatic nature of sexuality. A Midwestern puritan strain in Thurber constantly prevents him from confronting sexuality directly. There is hardly any direct responsiveness to the erotic in his stories, as there is, for example, in D. H. Lawrence, but rather a kind of backing away, a conversion of sexuality into grotesque parody or a deflection of it to a more cerebral concern with inner states of anxiety.

One finds a carefully achieved detachment in Thurber, even in his compassionate stories. “The Departure of Emma Inch” (1935), for example, has a tender texture yet Thurber preserves a distance between himself and the woman the story is about. The tale is narrated in the first person by a man who is apparently meant to be Thurber, since Emma Inch refers to him as “Mr. Thurman,” one of the garbled versions of his name that people use in his humor sketches. He and his wife are about to leave New York to spend the summer at Martha's Vineyard and are in need of a cook. The only one they are able to find, recommended by a friend, is a peculiar woman named Emma Inch. She is middle-aged and featureless, and appears with a suitcase and a seventeen-year-old bull terrier named Feely who is all she has in the world. The old dog whines and sniffles, and is pitiful. After engaging Emma Inch, the narrator's wife spends a restless night, feeling vaguely uneasy about the woman and her peculiar dog. The next day they leave with the cook for Martha's Vineyard.

En route, many odd things come out about Emma Inch. They learn, for example, that she has not spent the night before at the hotel room they had arranged for her but with her landlady on the West Side. She has never in her life stayed at hotels, which are foreign to her and frighten her. For another, they learn in the cab taking them to the pier that she has never before been inside a car. Although she is reluctant to take the boat, they manage to get her and her dog aboard, but at the last connection to Martha's Vineyard she tells them that she must go back because Feely, who “talks” to her in low grumblings and snufflings, is ill. Even though she is at the end of Massachusetts, she plans to walk back to the city, a prospect that appalls the narrator but seems to make her happy. Obviously she will be returning to a sanctuary of the familiar, where she and the dog will be “safe.” But it will be virtually no life at all. Her name “Inch” intimates her minimalness of identity and of place, but the dog's curious name “Feely” is also revealing, implying as it does an almost-total absence of intelligent thought or cognition. What is particularly disturbing about Emma Inch is her lack of relation to the world around her, so much so that her existence can hardly be imagined by the reader. By her departure, although she has been observed with a close realism, Emma Inch has a dreamlike quality.

Thurber's stories frequently employ a closed form. Even in the sketchy “One Is a Wanderer,” the man's return in the dim hours to his room indicates the blank wall he faces in his life, and is a perfectly appropriate and revealing ending. But in “The Departure of Emma Inch,” Thurber makes use of an open ending that coaxes the reader to imagine the unimaginable. A similar open-ended technique can be noticed in “The Wood Duck” (1936), a work of an extremely low-key realism in which very little actually happens. The narrator and his wife who live in the Connecticut countryside drive out to a roadside produce stand, and as they approach the building the narrator applies his brakes suddenly to avoid hitting a duck that has been walking about the driveway. It isn't a barnyard fowl, however, but a wild duck from the nearby woods that for some reason has loitered there for two weeks.

As the narrator asks a man who has pulled up in an old sedan about the duck, a car racing by strikes the wild duck, tossing it into the air. It lies on the concrete highway, stunned at first, and then struggles to its feet. At the same time the white setter in the truck of some hunters goes after the bird, pursuing it as it scrabbles lamely toward the woods. The hunters catch up with the dog and restrain him just as he is about to seize the duck, which flutters toward the woods, “going home.” Yet later, when the narrator and his wife revisit the stand that day, they find that it has returned. At the end of the tale, the narrator's wife remarks that she is glad the duck has come back, hating to think of it “alone there out in the woods.” Ironically, the wood duck is more truly endangered and out of its element in a man-made environment. But perhaps the key word is “alone.” At the beginning, as it is seen on the driveway, the duck is “immensely solitary,” and its solitude is emphasized by its belonging not quite one place nor yet another, making it a puzzling anomaly. With a power of suggestion, Thurber's open ending forces the reader to reflect on what placelessness means.

In “Teacher's Pet” (1949), the protagonist Kelby is not a solitary, being married and having a comfortable-enough suburban life. Yet all is not well with him. His wife drinks too much, and having just turned fifty he has begun to reflect on the painful sense of limitation and failure that comes to people in middle age. He is even seized by a moment of panic when he finds it difficult to breathe, and deeply repressed experiences break through into his consciousness. The painful memory of his childhood comes over him, for example, when he had been the smartest boy in school but a physical weakling, teased by other, stronger boys as a teacher's pet. The athletic Zeke Leonard had taunted him by calling him “Willber, dear,” like his teacher; and twisted his arm behind his back until he sobbed and a crowd of other boys laughed and jeered.

When the Kelbys attend a cocktail party at the house of their neighbors, the Stevensons, Kelby notices irritably that the Stevenson son takes after his athletically built father. History repeating itself, young Bob Stevenson has taunted and harassed another boy named Elbert, who is “terribly sensitive,” the brightest boy in his school but frail and unable to stand up to the other boys. One day after the party, in a sulky mood, Kelby comes upon the Stevenson boy mocking Elbert by calling him “Ella.” When he begins attacking Elbert physically, Kelby intervenes and drives him off. But when Elbert will not stop sniffling and whimpering, Kelby shouts to him to “shut up.” As Elbert breaks into weeping, Kelby loses all rational control, shaking and cuffing the boy and “sobbing” that he is a “goddam little coward.” In the story's ironic ending, Mr. Reynolds, who has witnessed the incident, tells Stevenson what had occurred, and Stevenson remarks musingly that you “never know about a man.” They, of course, miss the point for Kelby in attacking Elbert has struck out in helpless rage at a surrogate of himself. That his early trauma has not, after all, been overcome in adulthood is implied in the resentment he feels toward Stevenson, who makes little jibes intimating his lack of manliness; and in his wife's alcoholism, which gives an impression, although touched upon only lightly, that she has perhaps found him an inadequate husband.

Two other stories of the 1940s, “The Whip-Poor-Will” (1941) and “A Friend to Alexander” (1942), involve trauma that results in violence and come out of Thurber's personal experience. Both were written shortly after the series of eye operations that left him blind and in a state of nervous collapse. In “The Whip-Poor-Will,” no explanation is given for Kinstrey's anguished state of mind. Unable to sleep, he has somehow developed terrible fixations and begun to hallucinate. As he lies awake restlessly, he hears the call of a whippoorwill, the nocturnal bird whose singing by a house was regarded in old folk wisdom as a harbinger of death. His drowsing is troubled by dreams in which striking images and symbols appear and evoke his deep inner disturbance. At times the images have a surrealistic quality. Kinstrey is beset, for example, by trios of little bearded men who roll hoops at him. He tries to climb up onto a gigantic Ferris wheel whose swinging seats are rumpled beds. A round policeman with wheels for feet rolls toward him shouting, “will power … whip-poor-will!” At other times the call of the whippoorwill becomes the sound of the fatal bell on the night of the murder in Macbeth. Poe is brought in, too, in a dream in which Kinstrey is attacked by an umbrella that, when clutched, clutches back and becomes a raven crying “nevermore.” As Kinstrey wakes from one of these nightmares he leaps from his bed to the window, pounding on the windowpane and running the blind up and down, shouting and cursing. He becomes violent and incoherent.

Others in the house—his wife Madge, Margaret the cook, and Arthur the butler—all enter into Kinstrey's dreams. Madge appears as a little girl in pigtails and a playsuit who points a finger at him in a hospital room that is filled with “poor men in will chairs.” One of the sick men is Arthur, who grinningly holds a pair of spectacles before Kinstrey, but at a distance so that he cannot grasp them. He is powerless even to move his arms or legs. Appearing as the umpire at a tennis match, his wife cries “whip him now.” Kinstrey's feet are stuck in wet concrete, and the maid Margaret peers at him over the net, holding a skillet for a racquet. Arthur then pushes him down until the concrete covers his head, and his wife Madge laughs. Then in a sudden transition Kinstrey is in his pajamas in the kitchen removing a long, sharp bread knife from a drawer, muttering hoarsely, “Who do you do first?” In another transition, perplexed by what may have brought about such slaughter, the local police and state troopers are at the house grimly investigating the triple murder and suicide. At times Kinstrey's dreams seem perhaps too literary (do nightmare sufferers really dream of Macbeth?), but the intensity of his obsession is powerfully felt, and the story may be the more effective by leaving the cause of Kinstrey's despairing madness unspecified.

The unspecified crisis in Kinstrey's life is explained, however, by Thurber's experience of blindness and his terrifying anxiety that his creative life was imperiled. Martha's Vineyard, where Thurber recuperated from his operations, even provides the unnamed setting, the island where Kinstrey and his wife are summering. Thurber once told an interviewer that the story “came somewhere out of a grim fear in the back of my mind,”¹ but this grim fear is not difficult to pin down. The long, sharp knife Kinstrey uses to dispatch the others and himself seemed to Helen Thurber “a symbol for all the cutting Jamie had gone through that year. He thought he was being castrated with all that cutting.”² Kinstrey's paralysis in the hospital dream, his inability to act, is linked with Arthur's holding out the pair of spectacles while keeping them out of reach. He is deprived of the power of “will” that would restore him to what he was before being overtaken by his terrible dreams, and his frustration finally turns into indiscriminate rage. His rage, however, seems directed principally against his wife. At the beginning he hears a “blind man tapping,” while his wife screams, “Help! Police!” as if she knew she were the focus of his anger. Later in his dreams, she is his chief tormentor, and she laughs when he is buried alive in wet concrete. In this story, too, one has the impression of a male-female conflict at the deepest level of the hero's anguish.

Written only a year after “The Whip-Poor-Will,” “A Friend to Alexander” also deals with neurotic obsession and recurring bizarre dreams. Henry (known as Harry) Andrews, an architect, begins dreaming every night of Alexander Hamilton. In one dream he is a witness to Aaron Burr's assassination of Hamilton in their famous duel, and in another is sneered at by Burr as a man of no account. Burr even threatens to give him a “taste” of his riding crop. Disturbed when he tells her of his dreams, his wife arranges for them to take a vacation in the country at the home of their friends the Crowleys. On their first day in the country, Crowley takes Harry out with him to shoot at targets, but while shooting becomes alarmed when Harry measures off paces, turns, and fires in his direction. At dawn the next morning, Mrs. Andrews is awakened by the sound of shots being fired beyond the house, and discovers that her husband has been out practicing for a duel “with Burr.”

That day the couple leaves for the city, and Harry is examined by a doctor who finds him in perfect health. Yet on an evening soon after, Harry raves again about meeting Burr in a duel, and his wife feels a dark foreboding. The next morning he is found dead in his bed—of a heart attack. Strangely, the three fingers next to the index finger of his hand are stiffly closed on the palm as if gripping a pistol, and his index finger is curved slightly inward as though about to press the trigger. He has, as it were, been shot in the heart. On the surface at least, the story might have been written by Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce. But Thurber has provided a Freudian explanation for Harry's behavior that searches into his subconscious conflicts. In a dream early in the tale, Harry looks into Hamilton's face to discover the face of his brother, killed by a drunkard in a cemetery. The moment of recognition is passed over quickly and is not referred to again, but its presence seems intended to suggest the neurotic sources of Harry's obsession. His unbearable guilt over his failure to have protected his brother turns into a desire to die, as Hamilton and his brother had died.

“A Friend to Alexander” is one of Thurber's slighter tales, rather too fantastic to be quite credible, but it is interesting in what it suggests of Thurber's psychology after losing his sight. His sense of guilt was very strikingly evident during his convalescence at Martha's Vineyard when, in a fit of weeping, he told Mark Van Doren that his blindness was a punishment upon him for having written meanly and mockingly of mankind. The idea of self-betrayal and self-punishment are also implied in the inner story of the tale and in its puzzling character configurations. Why, for example, should Harry develop a fixation with Alexander Hamilton in particular? And in recognizing his brother in Hamilton does he not also perhaps recognize himself? Hamilton died young, at forty-seven, the very age of Thurber when he lost his vision. Moreover, Hamilton had been at the height of his powers and of his professional life when he was struck down; and so, with a solid body of work behind him in the 1930s and the recent success on the Broadway stage of The Male Animal, had Thurber.

The inner story of “A Friend to Alexander” can be read as a parable of self-condemnation in which Thurber, or a character projection of him, is not only victim but also destroyer. In his fixation with meeting Burr in a duel that seems likely to lead to his death, in reenacting Hamilton's fate, Harry punishes himself for the baser and more unworthy part of himself represented by the drunkard in the cemetery and the brutal and meanly self-assertive Burr. Having an “unworthy” side to his nature and being “guilty” of having mocked humanity in his work, Thurber was possessed by the notion, at least for a time, that he had been responsible for his blindness, that he was being very properly punished. In “A Friend to Alexander,” this idea is explored in a fictional situation in which a hero is obsessed by a sense of guilt associated with the destruction of a worthier self, and ultimately wills his own death. Thurber's fictional themes in the crisis of his blindness take diametrically opposing forms. In “The Whip-Poor-Will,” Kinstrey projects his despairing aggression outwardly upon others, while in “A Friend to Alexander” Harry Andrews directs it inwardly upon himself.

Written during a great distress, “The Whip-Poor-Will” and “A Friend to Alexander” may be untypical of Thurber's stories to the point of aberration, but the use of dreams they employ is not. Obsession, dreams, and a dream sense are pervasive in his work. A dream sense is constantly evoked in his drawings, his reminiscences of Columbus, his reportage, and it appears in various ways in many of the stories just discussed, giving them a point in common. In “The Lady on 142,” the hero dreams his capture by spies and as a dreamer is ultimately humiliated. “The Catbird Seat” has the quality of a dream fable, and so does “The Greatest Man in the World.” The midget Pearl du Monville turns “You Could Look It Up” into a bizarre dream, and the Hollywood house in “The Man Who Hated Moonbaum” has the nature of a waking dream. In “The Other Room,” Bartlett is haunted by the dreamlike experience of his discovery of sex and nervous breakdown in Paris. Emma Inch comes out of a dream and goes back into another. The high incidence of dream structures in Thurber's fiction suggests a repudiation of conventional realism for a more “magical” confrontation of his characters' inmost fears and anxieties.

Yet in other stories Thurber writes without recourse to dreams and almost as a naturalist. “The Luck of Jad Peters” (1934), narrated in the first person by a man looking back to the time when he was a boy in Columbus, deals with an older man, the boy's uncle, who is delineated sharply through his dominant trait of braggadocio. The story opens with the narrator's recollections of his aunt Emma Peters, who before her death at eighty-three liked to attend funerals and look at corpses. In her parlor was a souvenir table containing a rough fragment of a rock weighing perhaps twenty pounds and a heavy-framed full-length photograph of her husband Jad, showing him wearing a hat and overcoat and carrying a suitcase. Later, the narrator had learned the story behind the photograph, the first in his collection of souvenirs that, to his own mind, certified him as having been selected by nature as a man bound to be lucky. On the occasion of the photograph he had just left his hotel in New York to board a ship going to Newport. A few minutes after he had checked out, a telegram arrived at the hotel advising that it was imperative he return home, and a boy was dispatched with the telegram to the dock, where the message was received and the ship sailed without him. Eight hours out of the harbor, it sank with the loss of everyone on board.

As the years passed, Peters bored everyone in his community by referring to himself as “lucky Jad Peters” and by his stories of close, providential escapes. In his later years he drank, let his farm run down, and barely scratched out a living. His wife, who had been compelled to listen to his boastful stories repeatedly, barely managed to endure her life with him. Then one day, after talking with a friend on the street, Jad had walked away, only to change his mind suddenly and begin walking back to where his friend was standing. At that moment he was blown against a building and killed by a rock sent flying by dynamiting going on nearby in the riverbed. The humor of the story, told in a loose-sleeved vernacular style, relies in part on a recollection of the opening. The fragment of the fatal rock set before the grandiosely enlarged photograph of Jad Peters is an ironic comment upon him by his spouse whom he had bored and depressed.

But the story also has a certain autobiographical interest. In The Thurber Album (1952), published eighteen years after the story, Thurber revealed that his grandfather, William M. Fisher, a remarkably self-important man, had had a large photograph of himself displayed prominently in his living room, together with a telegram advising him urgently to return to Columbus, received just as he was about to board an excursion steamer for Catawba Island that sank with the loss of everyone on board. The genial portrait of William M. Fisher in The Thurber Album is undermined devastatingly by “The Luck of Jad Peters,” which if not a portrait of Fisher at least implies an antipathy toward him of some intensity. It exposes his self-centered nature and meanness of spirit that had oppressed his wife and members of the Thurber family.

“Doc Marlowe” (1935) is also set in Columbus in a bygone era and is narrated by a man looking back upon his youth. As a boy of eleven, the individual he had admired most was a Doc Marlowe, who sold a snake oil liniment and was a boarder at the rooming house of Mrs. Willoughby, a nurse in the narrator's family. On weekends, he visited at the house and came to know Marlowe, who fascinated him with his stories of having traveled with a medicine show in the wild West. Over the course of years he came to know him better and to learn the truth of his life. He learned that Marlowe, although capable of surprising altruism and generosity, was a charlatan who took advantage of people and cheated at cards. At the end when he is dying, Marlowe gives him a two-headed quarter with which he had won many coin tosses, a legacy that comments on the nature of life, in which the best and the worst, the admirable and the ignoble, are strangely intermingled.

Like “The Luck of Jad Peters,” the story comes out of Thurber's own experience. There had actually been a man like Doc Marlowe whom Thurber met at the primitive rooming house of his aunt Margery Albright. How closely he resembled Doc Marlowe in the tale is impossible to know, but as he has been imagined, in any case, Marlowe is a rather unsettling figure. Although representing the wild West to the mind of the boy, he had originated in Brooklyn and had never been in the far West in his life. He had been the proprietor of a concession at Coney Island, a saloonkeeper, and a circus man. In his fifties, as a barker and hawker of a liniment for all ailments, he had traveled with a tent-show troupe that included a Professor Jones who played the banjo, and a Mexican named Chickalilli who threw knives. He comes out of a tradition of cheap American chicanery that Henry James had evoked in “Professor Fargo,” and his presence in Columbus dispels many of the boy's earliest illusions of romance in life. The story deals with the necessary adjustment that must be made from the uninformed wonder of childhood to the troubling complexity of adult experience, but what lingers longest in one's mind is the dingy constriction of Marlowe's life, the atmosphere of physical and moral squalor that surrounds him. He makes Columbus seem stifling and ugly. At other points in his career, Thurber reveals an ambivalence toward his native city, which he celebrates as a carnival of eccentricity but at other times intimates as a seedy tragedy from which he can never recover.

Meanness of life or of outlook enters into a number of Thurber's stories, especially those of the later period. “Everything Is Wild” (1932), a kind of extended vignette in which a man reveals his own selfish and unfeeling nature, could have been written by the early John O'Hara. “The Cane in the Corridor” (1943), which came out of Thurber's anger over Wolcott Gibbs's failure to visit him in the hospital during his eye operations, is bitter and vindictive. “A Friend of the Earth” (1949) concerns a cracker-barrel philosopher so cynical that the reader is more repelled than amused by him; and “Shake Hands with Birdey Doggett” (1953), about a vicious practical joker, goes further than Ring Lardner in making human nature seem apalling.

“The Case of Dimity Ann” (1952), a more complicated and psychological story, is unsettlingly morbid. It concerns a writer-researcher named Ridgeway who stays up all night drinking sullenly. His second wife attempts to humor him, but the revived memory of an episode from his past has begun to disturb him profoundly. While married to his first wife Lydia (the name for Althea Adams that Thurber had used in “Menaces in May” and “One Is a Wanderer”), he had tied up her cat Dimity Ann a “hundred times” with the cord from his dressing gown. Clearly the cat is a surrogate for Lydia, who is implied to have been unfaithful and to have excited an anger in Ridgeway so deep that even many years later he can hardly deal with it. Yet the story, unlike the sensitive and moving earlier ones involving Lydia, precludes any identification with the protagonist. Sheathed in neurosis, Ridgeway remains outside one's sympathy or understanding.

Several of Thurber's other stories that preclude reader identification with a central character are distinctive in deriving from or referring in some way to Henry James. “Something to Say” (1932), the earliest of them, is a grotesque version of James's story “The Coxon Fund,” about a writer of brilliant intellectual gifts and with a genius for talk who has actually written very little. When one of his admirers settles a trust fund upon him, freeing him from the necessity of making a living, he ceases to write altogether. Like James's Frank Saltram, Thurber's Elliot Vereker (whose name derives from that of the protagonist of another James story “The Figure in the Carpet”) is admired by a circle of friends for having the true creative temperament. A writer-nonconformist, he sits up all night talking and is notorious for his erratic behavior. His acquaintances are awed by him as one of the truly original minds of his generation, a man with “something to say,” despite the fact that his output consists of only twenty or thirty pages, “most of them bearing the round stain of liquor glasses.” In the end, when they get up a purse that will enable him to go to Europe, he squanders most of it in a drunken spree that ends with his squalid death on a rooftop, his head crushed by a blow from some heavy instrument, “probably a bottle.” Although usually considered a satire, “Something to Say” is too dark to be really humorous. It is both similar to “The Coxon Fund” and is not. “The Coxon Fund” is genuinely satirical, a detached and ironic exploration of the mystery of the creative temperament as it is revealed in the balked writer Saltram; but “Something to Say” is concerned exclusively with the condition of the balked writer as pure hell, with Vereker's incoherence and guilty self-punishment.

“A Final Note on Chanda Bell” (1949), suggested by James's story deals with a female writer, reminiscent in some ways of Gertrude Stein, whose enigmatic prose attracts a following of individuals from Greenwich Village. Her devotees include a schoolteacher who has resigned from the human race to become a bird and a Miss Menta, a nude Chilean transcendentalist. The narrator purports to be Thurber himself, in the role of a critic who has published an essay in a scholarly journal in which he claims to have found the underlying unity in the apparent meaninglessness of her writing. He quickly becomes part of Chanda Bell's circle, and at her apartment discovers that her conversation is as bewildering as her prose. She begins sentences in the middle, and like Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, which Thurber had been having his secretary read to him, is fond of surrogate words that are like “the words in dreams.” She uses “rupture” for rapture, “pressure” for pleasure, and mistakes her attorney Charles Vayne for a certain Strephon, “a Jung mad I cussed in the Sprig.”

The more the narrator comes to know Chanda Bell, the more it comes over him that he has been mistaken in his essay, that there is no underlying principle of order in her writing at all. Chanda Bell is herself his chief mocker. “You have found the figure, Thurber,” she taunts him, “but have you found the carpet?” Before her death, like James, she burns all her personal papers, leaving behind only a cryptic message for him in her desk drawer—three carefully drawn squares, one inside the other, that have the form of a plinth or base for a statue. At the end, with trepidation, Thurber awaits the exposure of his essay before the entire literary world.

Unlike “The Figure in the Carpet,” Thurber's story does not fulfill the expectations of satire. Its humor is strained and grotesque. “The Figure in the Carpet” involves not merely a critic's discovery of his self-deception after believing that he had possessed certainty but also a serious moral theme of the sin of egotism, of pride checked and punished, of cold logic shown to be insufficient as a measurement of life. Thurber's tale, on the other hand, reveals no moral sense whatever. A cynosure of the avantgarde, Chanda Bell proves to be spurious and incoherent, but no alternative standards have been implied within the story by which to measure her aberration. It is for this reason that the story is ineffective as satire, and that the reader does not know quite how to respond to it.

In “Something to Say,” Elliot Vereker is no genius at all, only a tormented would-be writer with a decided urge toward self-destruction. In “A Final Note on Chanda Bell,” Chanda Bell is probably crazy. The narrators who believe in them are at last disillusioned. The calling of art may be elevated and noble, but all that can be discovered by these narrators is ugliness and brutality (in Vereker's case) or mere deception (in Chanda Bell's). It is the narrators, finally, that “Something to Say” and “A Final Note on Chanda Bell” come to focus upon. Betrayed by their guides, they find themselves alone in incoherent worlds without a sustaining vision in which to believe.

In “The Interview,” Thurber's final story on a Jamesian theme, incoherence appears again and is once more linked with fraudulence. The tale begins with a young reporter's appearing at the home of the novelist George Lockhorn to find him drinking in the afternoon. Having become ugly with seven highballs, Lockhorn raves strangely, asking the reporter if he has noticed that he is a “maniac” and telling him that he is the “loneliest” man in the United States. His anger is directed partly at his previous wives and partly at himself, as a writer who offers “spiritual hope” when there is none. His latest novel with the very Jamesian title The Flaw in the Crystal, which prompts the reporter's visit, has received unfavorable reviews, very likely because it lacks conviction.

But Lockhorn's morose state does not seem due to the unfavorable reviews, as his wife, attempting to smooth over the situation, claims. His bitter inner disturbance and alienation are the truths of his life that in his novels he has attempted to evade. In the earlier stories on Jamesian themes, Thurber portrayed narrators who, seeking access to the sanctuary of art, are betrayed by their guides; but in “The Interview” the guide-betrayer is James himself. Through Lockhorn, Thurber intimates that even in James art is a compensation for a failure of fulfillment in love and personal relationships. From his college years onward, Thurber was fascinated by James, by his psychological fineness and moral elevation. An idealistic strain existed in Thurber himself, an idealism longed for and partly believed in but always proving elusive and out of reach, thwarted by an incoherence in himself and in life. His series of stories on Jamesian themes of artists and writers are a kind of confrontation between Thurber and the admired James, with Thurber rejecting James as a false guide who can provide no escape from ugliness, isolation, and suffering.

“Something to Say,” “A Final Note on Chanda Bell,” and “The Interview” are not among Thurber's most successful stories, and might even be considered aberrations. Yet they do comment on Thurber's stories as a whole. A series of early stories, such as “Menaces in May” and “One Is a Wanderer,” portray men having an autobiographical dimension who cannot handle personal-sexual relationships with women, and by the end, in their tremendous sense of isolation, become cries of pain. In the later Jamesian stories, art proves no redemption from inner suffering and incoherence, and the cry of a painful alienation can be heard in them again. In between these earlier and later stories are tales of a great many different kinds. Yet all have in common a sense of the distance between people, of life as a mystery that yields no answers and offers no security to the individual whose fate it is to be alone, to be among the estranged ones.

Notes

1. Quoted in Morsberger, 158.

2. Ibid.