The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Magic from the Mid-West My relations with James Thurber were slight and scattered. Once or twice we met by chance at parties, and last year I saw him on...
...Once, many years later, an inquisitive young lady inquired of Thurber: "Why didn't you ask him how he happened to be there at just the moment with precisely what you needed...
...But there was also tragedy in the sightlessness of one who could have continued to make such wonderful double use of his eyes...
...The knowledge that I will see no more of his drawings or sketches in the New Yorker leaves me with a great sense of vacancy...
...Once or twice we met by chance at parties, and last year I saw him on Broadway in The Thurber Carnival...
...Whenever a new piece appeared, we Ohians stuck out our chests and exclaimed: "There's our boy...
...Interpreted thus by a sensitive and imaginative man, we are better creatures, richer and more sensitive fellows than we ever manage to be in our stiff everyday world...
...These writers created their characters...
...they did not pick them up ready-made...
...His casual references to the streets, parks, hotels, teachers, university buildings and other features of life in Columbus often seemed to me like passages in a letter from home...
...His predicament in that lonely spot was desperate...
...But there was the same sort of gentleness in Thurber's treatment of characters...
...My feeling of closeness to the sparkling humorist is partly due to the fact that we shared a common background...
...My brother and I entered Ohio State University in 1899...
...He had, first of all, a similar sharp and easy style...
...Neither had the attitude of an emancipator...
...I have always felt that Jim Thurber was dealing with my own world...
...I recall a passage in Recollections of the Gas Buggy...
...But now that James Thurber is gone, I have begun to think of him in a different way...
...Thurber tells us over and over again in scores of different ways that things are not as simple and as stupid as they seem to be, that there is something terrific down at the heart of life which we have not yet figured out...
...But, as if in prompt answer to a prayer, a man appeared out of a thick wood and announced: "It just happens that I have a can of petrol...
...Because he took the commonplace world of the Mid-West, dressed it up in simple but lively style and displayed it in a high-toned New York magazine, we knew he had given us class...
...Even his myriad drawings of beasts and humans suggest some profoundly significant concept of life and fate...
...Thurber enrolled there in 1913...
...There was, unquestionably, a sort of magic about the man...
...We can laugh at it, of course, as he laughed bravely at his blindness...
...Take, for example, the way both men presented the Negroes whom they wove into their tales...
...He was probably hardly conscious of my existence...
...He produced his gasoline, poured it into the tank, accepted his pay and then disappeared...
...It is true that Mark Twain carried his imaginings further and created longer and larger constructions...
...Our man Thurber was driving one of his characteristically comic cars deep in the wilds of Scotland...
...I lighted a cigarette," answered the humorist, "and said, ? was afraid he would vanish...
...They saw colored people with Southern eyes, but pictured them with infinite kindness and understanding...
...In addition, both seem to have had the same sort of relatives—especially female relatives — and both went about the business of turning them from life to literature in much the same way...
...We both came from Ohio...
...Looking through his books again, I realize that Thurber was a lot better than many of us gave him credit for being...
...Perhaps it is because Thurber did not stretch and pull each one of his ideas into a full-length novel that we take them so naturally and apply them to our experiences...
...Yet his passing is more important to me than that of many a relative or intimate friend...
...He was, in fact, something like Mark Twain...
...Suddenly, and to his great surprise, the tank indicator which had recently registered "Full" jumped to "Empty...
Vol. 44 • December 1961 • No. 39
