James Thurber

...He is beset by the malicious antics of dogs and children, in-laws and washerwomen...

...It was his feeling that if he were not awakened every hour during the night, he might die of suffocation...

...Cousin Briggs "believed that he was likely to cease breathing when he was asleep...

...That literary persona was so indelibly, so exquisitely created that he became known in time as the Thurber Man, and he is still with us, trembling on every page of Thurber's best writing...

...When I heard the news, I couldn't decide whether it represented an elevation of Thurber or a lowering of the Library of America...

...White as a humorist to Mark Twain, too...

...And of those, a good 50- or 60,000 are as fresh as the day they were first offered to the world...

...White...

...About the nuclear Thurber family, the brothers and the father and James himself, we learn very little, though they are always on stage...

...And so we've had the James brothers (Henry and William, not Jesse and Frank), Melville and Twain and Francis Parkman, the pre-Demi Moore Hawthorne, Cather to Cooper to Crane, all of them handsomely dressed for posterity and deserving no less...

...But there were still flashes of delirious brilliance, and all of them are here: "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and "You Could Look It Up" and "The Catbird Seat...

...Thurber renders this world without apparent effort, as a fact of nature, in a plain prose as lovely as any American writer has given us...

...I think this is a very high percentage...

...It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on...

...But why the seeming disorder...

...The Thurber who appears in Kinney's book is not the Thurber of the collected works...

...And of course he has been plumped by the academic inflation of the times— too many eggheads chasing too few authors...

...Untoward details are let drop at random...

...Thurber not only created the Thurber Man in words but drew him, too, in his inimitable cartoons, more than 500 of which are reprinted in the Library of America volume...

...Thurber's mother "thought—or, rather, knew—that it was dangerous to drive an automobile without gasoline: it fried the valves, or something...

...The world of My Life—and, I suppose, the larger world, as Thurber wants his readers to understand it—is a queer place, where the odd and the normal are hard to distinguish, a place that fairly jumps with the potential for embarrassment and mortification...

...Kinney guides us through one ugly scene after another— drunken brawls, serial infidelities, and the betrayal of friends...

...Columbus was later to become home to the Thurber Museum, Thurber Drive, the Thurber Square Apartments, even the Thurber Village Shopping Center, but in the days when it was merely home to the unknown Thurber family it had fewer claims to fame...

...In the early years of the nineteenth century," Thurber wrote, "Columbus won out, as state capital, by only one vote over Lancaster, and ever since then has had the hallucination that it is being followed, a curious municipal state of mind which affects, in some way or other, all those who live there...

...The Thurber Man is dressed in a suit...

...White probably preferred E.B...

...My Life, as all the critics have said, is a "classic of American humor," but it draws you in as only the best books do, funny or not, and it doesn't let go for a long time...

...There is simply no way to predict what lurks around the next corner, and no reason to assume it won't be trouble...

...the Thurber Art Works Division of James Thurber Literary Properties, Inc., recently authorized a product line of clothing, china, and note cards...

...Against this shivery municipal backdrop, the Thurber family undergoes a series of quotidian alarms—mysterious footsteps half-heard in the night, a variety of uncooperative automobiles, the troubles surrounding a surly dog, a civic disruption caused by an imaginary flood...

...The unambiguous benefit of the Library of America's James Thurber: Writings and Drawings is that now readers can decide, in the literary equivalent of one-stop shopping, whether James Thurber is really worth all this trouble...

...As he himself hardened in bitterness, so did his attitude toward his work, and he began to talk grandly, in interviews and elsewhere, about "humor as an art form," and the pomposity showed...

...Much of Thurber's later writing was "writer-conscious" and, worse, not at all funny...

...One aunt lives in terror that a burglar will blow chloroform under her door through a straw while she sleeps...

...You've seen the Thurber Man...

...His maternal grandmother, for example, "lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house...

...But James Thurber...

...To be fair, not all of these outbursts reflect badly on Thurber...

...Around him the dog to a "mental healer," the reference is offhand...

...The Library, as book-lovers know, is our answer to the French Pleiade series, dedicated to preserving the work of the greatest American authors in stately, definitive editions...

...This is true of most humor writing, very little of which endures in any case...

...They would be quotidian, that is, if they happened to some family other than the Thur-bers, or were remembered and embellished for the rest of us by someone less talented than their son James...

...As a young man, he was high-spirited, eccentric, kind, given to wild clowning and practical jokes...

...Mother's obsession with astrology is mentioned only in passing, and when she takes her irregularities for a full, and fleeting, belly laugh...

...He is small and balding, although sometimes seen with a hat pushed back from his brow...

...Kinney even mentions in passing—without, it seems to me, sufficient horror—a professor of Thurber Studies operating out of Ohio State University...

...It is a big sprawling mess of a book, often cleverly written and full of fascinating detail, and anything anyone would ever want to know about James Thurber can be found rolling around in there somewhere...

...His lack of physical impres-siveness is all the more impressive when he is pictured, as he often is, cowering next to a woman, usually his wife, who is invariably large and imposing...

...My Life and Hard Times is not so much a full-dress memoir as a series of episodes from Thurber's boyhood in Columbus, Ohio, immediately before and during the First World War...

...There is never any doubt who wears the pants in the family of the Thurber Man...

...But the Coward episode had many precedents stretching back to the 1930s...

...The irrelevance of an artist's personal behavior to his public persona is an old story, of course—how else to explain all those sweet little old ladies who still worship Frank Sinatra...

...But the Library of America volume is merely the newest evidence that he survives, even flourishes, 35 years after his death in 1961...

...Books JAMES THURBER AND THE "THURBER MAN" By Andrew Ferguson Last month, the Library of America brought out another of its shiny black volumes, this one collecting the work of the humorist James Thurber...

...another heaves shoes down the hall each night to discourage intruders...

...His great friend and editor, Harold Ross of the New Yorker, invented the adjective "writer-conscious" to describe writing that tips over from the plain and precise into the precious and pretty (like this...

...There is first of all his inventiveness, the ability to people the landscape with wild and clinging characters...

...It is the book that made his reputation, and the Library of America wisely reprints it in its entirety...

...With a humorist, though, the disconnection is especially crucial, since the source of a funnyman's appeal is utterly dependent on the persona that carries through in his writing...

...A writer, as he put it, "of light pieces running from a thousand to two thousand words...

...Sleeping arrangements, for example: In one chapter Father is asleep in the attic, while Mother and a brother are asleep in another room...

...This they do supremely in Thurber's memoir My Life and Hard Times, first published in 1933, when the author was 39, and available, in one edition or another, ever since...

...Thurber never again matched the sustained pleasures of My Life and Hard Times, as the new collection makes clear...

...Most of these vivid characters, except for Mother, are peripheral to the action of My Life...

...Thurber survives, too, as a going commercial concern...

...A word of caution: Those who are new to Thurber, and those veterans wishing to revive their happy memories of his work, would do well to avoid Kinney's biography as they go along...

...But the gifts Thurber displays in My Life are not so much the tricks of the humorist as the skills of a first-rate writer, of whatever kind, working at the top of his game...

...Now don't you dare drive all over town without gasoline!' she would say to us when we started off...

...Generous as Kinney is toward his subject, however, he still can't dilute the truth that Thurber—beloved by book-buyers and critics, encircled with interesting and devoted friends, cared for by a loving wife—became something of a monster...

...I preferred Thurber as a humorist to Mark Twain," said his friend and New Yorker colleague E.B...

...Thurber doesn't, and his deadpan tone only deepens the humor and heightens the manic effect...

...And the effect is comprehensive...

...A lesser writer—say, a mere humorist—would milk the family moves in irregular rhythms, which the author never bothers to explain...

...James appears taking a bath in one story at 2 a.m...

...But just one...

...The drawings work best where they serve merely to illustrate the stories...

...At his death most of his closest friends had long since been estranged...

...And it's high enough, surely, to justify the Library's new collection, and maybe even a professor of Thurber Studies...

...There is, needless to say, nothing in Thurber to match Huckleberry Finn or Life on the Mississippi...

...I am not (if you'll forgive a personal note) a visual sort, so I don't share the enthusiasm of many Thurber admirers for the drawings, and several sections of the new volume devoted to Thurber's cartoons—including such famous pieces as "The Last Flower" and "The War Between Men and Women"—will leave many readers wondering what all the fuss is about...

...A humorist, a magazine writer, enshrined in our literary hall of fame...

...Last year saw the publication of Harrison Kinney's James Thurber: His Life and Times, which was more than 30 years in the writing...

...For all the dark talk of art, Thurber was at heart a journalist, a pro who hacked out copy for the magazines, and as such he must have published several million words, of which perhaps 300,000 are now preserved for the ages by Library of America...

...High praise, except that E.B...

...in the next chapter he sleeps in the front room, Mother down the hall, the brother with James...

...A dozen books and many more dissertations take his work as their subject...

...Columbus is the Thurber City...

...His shoulders are round...

...Perhaps Kinney was waiting for his editor to die: The finished book weighs in, unbelievably, at more than 1,200 pages...

...She would go around screwing bulbs, and if they lighted up she would hastily and fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but a dangerous leakage...

...This is why the Thurber Man has that look of perpetual alarm...

...He made his last public scene by boozily seizing the microphone at a party for Noel Coward at Sardi's, screeching insults at the guest of honor...

...Humor can be dissected, as a frog can," wrote Thurber's friend White, "but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind...

...but with celebrity and acclaim and, preeminently, the eye problems that rendered him blind by age 50, his natural exuberance curdled into wanton cruelty and ferocious resentments...

...He collapsed that night and died a month later of an undetected brain tumor, which was blamed for the extraordinarily cruel behavior of his final years...

...His chin and neck are of a piece, and his eyebrows are arched in perpetual alarm or confusion...

...He once threw a drink at Lillian Hell-man, for instance...

...He has the look of a man who has just awakened in a strange room...

...There's little point, and no percentage, in trying to analyze why My Life is so successful—so endur-ingly funny...

...Father is the Thurber Man: "He was a tall, mildly nervous, peaceable gentleman, given to quiet pleasures, and eager that everything should run smoothly...

...I don't know another American magazine writer, 60 years on, who could touch it...

...But things never do...

...in another, making coffee shortly after midnight...