Thurber

...Nicholas R. Clifford This past fall, the Economist (September 28-October 4, 1996) published an article suggesting that men, having performed their sociobiological function of propagating the race for tens of thou-sands of years, are now ready to be con-signed to the trashbin of history...

...Ulgine Barrows, the effi-ciency expert his boss has brought in and who now threatens his department...

...Walter Mitty is, of course, the most fa-mous but by no means the only exampie of a man who seeks refuge from his life and his wife in another world, where the imagined pocketa-ta-pocketa of mas-culine technology drowns out her chid-ing...

...Though in his memories of growing up in Columbus, Thurber can show a kind of Keilloresque nostalgia about the Ohio of his child-hood, he draws mostly from a world that was very real to his contemporaries, the New York and sometimes the New England of the 1930s and '40s...

...Certainly in "The Masculine Approach" (which, like the "War," is also part of Men, Wom-en, and Dogs [1943]), the women are most-ly in control, and it's not hard to guess what's going to become of the tiny man who, approaching his enormous house, sees it already being transmuted into the devouring figure of his wife...

...In reading and re-reading the thou-sand pages of stories, cartoons, and es-says that have been selected for the Library of America's volume, it becomes clear once again that gender battles (what would Thurber have made out of our prudish replacement of the word "sex" with "gender," I wonder...

...And in Is Sex Necessary...

...so, for instance, in "The Amorous Penguin and the Virtuous Mate," a would-be Don Juan finds himself reduced from confi-dent lover to general fix-it handybird by his love object's standoffishness, manifested by her "shy look, and a faint blush as phony as a parrot's laugh...

...Still, that's a minor com-plaint...

...Those who know Thurber will find nothing particularly astonishing in these reflections...

...Moreover, the laws governing human behavior apply to the animal king...

...Sometimes the men manage-just barely-to pull off small victories, like Mr...

...Perel-man...

...Some might find their own favorites are left out (me, I'd have chosen "What Do You Mean, It Was Brillig...

...The thousand pages here contain many of the best-known essays, fables, short stories, and cartoons...

...1929) and Let Your Mind Alone (1937), Thurber takes on the Freudians and the writers of self-help books, who must have been just as loony in the late 1920s and '30s as they are today...

...The dif-ference is that he plays on the nostalgic memory of a rural America (Lake Wo-begon) that perhaps never was, or at least never has been in the experience of most of his radio listeners...

...dom as well...

...Yes, yes, I know there's a difference) occupied a prominent place in his nervous imagi-nation...

...Though not all of them are humorous by any means ("Whip-poor-will," for example, or "One Is a Wan-derer," or "The Evening's at Seven"), most are, and they have a kind of sub-tlety and understatement that seem out of fashion in an age of electronically amplified laugh tracks and raucously ob-vious stand-up comics...

...Men, as he sees them, are going to need all their wiles, all their guile, not to win, but just to stay more or less even...

...Preble, the "plump middle-aged lawyer in Scarsdale" who wants to run off with his stenographer, can't even plan his wife's demise (he's going to knock her over the head in the coal cellar) without her insistence that he needs her help to keep from messing it up...

...A won-derful series of excerpts from The Years with Ross (1958) reminds us of the days when the New Yorker was a journal of na-tional importance, rather than the mere reflection of a particular kind of Man-hattan buzz it has recently become...

...Although they apparently emerge as victors in the cartoon sequence called "The War between Men and Women," it's pretty clear from the last panel that while the female commander may be sur-rendering her baseball bat to a man, the women have suffered only a tactical de-feat and history is on their side...

...Martin, the meek protagonist of "The Catbird Seat," who succeeds in ousting Mrs...

...Mill-moss, and who is now being upbraided by a woman who may or may not be his wife...

...Garrison Keillor, the editor, has the same kind of gentle and civilized humor himself...

...Nor would I want to put any money on the fortunes of the hippo-like creature who may or may not have done away with Dr...

...Thurber, I think, would have taken a gloomy pleasure in that prophecy, for it takes no deconstructionist to catch some-thing of the same fears in his work...

...The complete text of The Thirteen Clocks (1950) is here, for example, notable for the Duke of Coffin Castle, who- sounding like someone from our own guilt-free age-exclaims, "We all have flaws, and mine is being wicked" (this, just before being destroyed by the Todal, who "looks like a blob of glup...,makes a sound like rabbits screaming, and smells of old, unopened rooms...

...But what, on the eve of the twenty-first century, will the reader who's new to Thurber make of these pieces...

...Yet by themselves they're likely to be both impotent and incompetent, and Mr...

...Not only have they become unnecessary to the species but indeed they are an outright danger, since on the whole they are more violent and less intelligent than women...

...Men, if they are to survive such a world, need either an interior life of fantasy, or an underhanded cleverness...

...Now that the Library of America has graced Thurber with this edition, is it too much to hope that they might do the same for his contemporary, S.J...