Remember Laughter
Grauer, Neil A.
j ames Thurber thought he deserved a Nobel Prize for literature. Sounds crazy, no? But before dismissing his fantasy as quintessentially Mittyesque, pause for a moment to call the roll of Thurber's...
...Perhaps the ultimate artistic achievement is the creation of a unique universe, a place of distinctive characters, sensibilities, and situations, a world of one's own...
...Perelman, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, and even, in extreme cases, Alexander Woollcott...
...In fact, I only found one Thurber title on the shelves of the four well-stocked New York bookstores I frequent...
...With friends like those, who needs megalomania...
...Yet they are period pieces one and all—even White, who continues to command the admiration of ostensibly adult journalists—memorable primarily for the skill with which they bamboozled their contemporaries into thinking they had something to say...
...There is no distinctive poetic quality or point of view about Grauer's treatment of Thurber, save for his occasional nervous nods to the rainbow goddess of political correctness: "But no matter how antifeminist Thurber's work often was—and his misogyny seems undeniable—the human types that he created remain as vivid and true today as ever...
...Thurber's work...
...Thurber, of course, was scarcely the only one of the celebrated New Yorker contributors of the thirties and forties whose work aged poorly...
...Among the heavy hitters cited by Neil A. Grauer in this new biography are W. H. Auden ("It would be as impertinent as it is unnecessary to praise Mr...
...White, Robert Benchley, S.J...
...It captures conflicts, anxieties, and longings inherent in us all...
...James Thurber doesn't get written about much these days, and I have a feeling he doesn't get read all that much, either...
...A few of his stories, especially "The Catbird Seat," "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox," the mordant "The Greatest Man in the World," and the ubiquitous "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," have retained their charm...
...Many aspiring adolescent writers (especially those born REMEMBER LAUGHTER: A LIFE OF JAMES THURBER Neil A. Grauer University of Nebraska Press / 204 pages / $20 reviewed by TERRY TEACHOLIT 70 The American Spectator February 1995 in places other than New York) go through a brief stage of fascination with the likes of E.B...
...Grauer reports that some 20 of the 25 books published by Thurber during his lifetime are still in print...
...This is not a dig at the old New Yorker, whose pages were also graced by H.L...
...His cartoons, several of which are reprinted in Remember Laughter, are a pointed and pithy embodiment of the best qualities of his stories and essays...
...His writings and also his illustrations are capable of surviving the immediate environment and time out of which they spring...
...The rest are an amalgam of sloppy sentimentality, tiresome wordplay, unintelligible period references, and satire manqu...
...Unlike so much 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...
...No doubt they gave great pleasure to New Yorker subscribers of the thirties and forties, Auden and Eliot included, but such pieces rarely outlive their day, and Thurber's are no exception to the iron law of evanescence under which all but the greatest journalists live and work...
...Not even The Thurber Carnival, the 1945 anthology that established Thurber as more than a humorist, seems to be readily available these days...
...To some extent, they will be a document of the age they belong to...
...It is merely a rueful reminder that while great humor is timeless, the output of professional humorists isn't...
...But most are hopelessly flat, the flattest of all being the dour studies of marital discord and incipient psychosis ("One Is a Wanderer," "A Couple of Hamburgers") that Thurber's critics, including Neil Grauer, typically single out for favorable comment...
...Not coincidentally, these are the only books Thurber ever wrote (the five children's fables excepted) that seek to do more than shovel together two or three years' worth of occasional essays...
...s Thurber strictly a back number...
...Rarely has the inadequacy of good intentions been summed up so poignantly...
...it was only when Thurber tried to break free of the restrictive mold of the throwaway comic essays referred to at The New Yorker as "casuals" that he produced work of any lasting interest...
...I wonder...
...I have written as many savage pieces as humorous ones," James Thurber told a British interviewer a few months before his death in 1961...
...f these quotes have a familiar ring, it's probably because Grauer's book covers ground that was tilled two decades ago in Charles S. Holmes's The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber (1972) and Burton Bernstein's Thurber: A Biography (1975...
...But before dismissing his fantasy as quintessentially Mittyesque, pause for a moment to call the roll of Thurber's distinguished admirers...
...Anyone interested in Terry Teachout is the editor of A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, published in January by Alfred A. Knopf a quick, graceful rundown of the grubby facts of Thurber's life will find them here (like most humorists, he was by all accounts a pitiful and disagreeable man), but Remember Laughter is not a true "brief life...
...And two of his books, My Life and Hard Times (1933) and The Years with Ross (1959), are in their very different ways minor classics of reminiscence...
...Liebling, and Joseph Mitchell, to name only a few of that magazine's memorable regulars...
...everyone knows and loves it"), Edmund Wilson (who in 1945 spoke admiringly of Thurber's "rapid elimination of the last vestiges of the conventional humorist and his emergence as a comic artist of the top layer of our contemporary writing"), and T. S. Eliot: There is a criticism of life at the bottom of [Thurber's work...
...The essayist's art is a noble one—but the great essayists, like the great songwriters, never confuse brevity with triviality or lightness with weightlessness...
...Mencken, Edmund Wilson, A.J...
...10...
...Not quite...
...How many years will it take to convince people I'm not a clown...
...It is serious and even somber...
...As a critic, Grauer is strictly pro-Thurber, and his book obsequiously recycles the received view of the author of My World and Welcome To It: His work endures because it is universal...
...Thurber created such a world—and said we were welcome to it...
...Whether or not anybody still readsJames Thurber is a question not accessible to the casual inquiries of book reviewers...
...But I realized with a start on receiving Remember Laughter that it had been years since I'd looked into any of his books...
...We remain grateful for that gift...
...To revisit Thurber in the light of remembered enthusiasm is a jolting experience...
Vol. 28 • February 1995 • No. 2
