I just finished Alarms and Diversions by James Thurber. I think Whip-poor-will was my favorite, although his descriptions of Paris were also marvelous. I don’t know how this book escaped me before now.
Any othe Thurber fans out there?
P.S.
And of course, File and Forget is unforgettable.
I was when I was younger, but it gradually dawned on me how racist (even for his time, IMO) and misogynist he was, and I lost interest.
I haven’t read any for a long time, but we loved the fables, especially “The Shrike and the Chipmunks.”
I’m pretty quick to jump on misogyny, and I don’t find it in Thurber. What specifically bothered you?
Could you also elaborate on how he showed racism?
I love James Thurber. I have The Thurber Carnival and The Beast in Me and Other Animals. “Here Come the Tigers” is my favorite; it changes.
We seem to be lacking in witty writers of the same calibre as Thurber and Oscar Wilde.
Ditto on missing the misogony and racisim–I’ve been reading and re-reading Thurber for about 30 years now, and I can’t think of an example of either. He wrote some great pieces about his family’s black maids, but there is nothing in any of them that couldn’t be attributed to a woman of any race in a similar situation. He wrote about odd people, or people with strange habits, and in my eyes, he gave the real people he wrote about (with much embellishment, I’m sure) a type of quiet dignity. No, I’d be hard pressed to read racism into his works, especially because of the time he ws writing in.
As for women, well, it was obvious to me when I started reading him at age 10 that he was befuddled and confused by women, and that opinion only grew stronger as I aged, but I’ve never felt anything malicious or hateful about it. Even his marvelous cartoon series The War Between Men an Women (which I just re-read to check my perception) strikes me as more satiric (and a playful satire at that) than misogonistic. Of course, I’m a woman’s lib generation woman, so I may be more sensible about these things.
I adore Thurber. I’ve got a bunch of his books, and I keep the Library of America collection on my bedside table. One summer I made it my task to read everything he’d ever written; that was a great summer.
Count me as another who missed the un-PC aspects, or at least found them innocuous enough to write them off as the ethos of the time. He writes from an era when gender roles were different, and far more rigid, but I never perceived anything mean in his writing. I do recall Roger Ebert, in his review of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, saying of Robert Benchley:
That stuck with me; Thurber “not nice”? Maybe there’s some huge subtext I’m missing.
Is anyone else familiar with the story “Teacher’s Pet”? A strange, uncharacteristically dark little piece about a grown man who was bullied as a schoolboy and his encounter with a young boy who’s being bullied himself?
OK, I’ve now deleted about two-thirds of what I’ve written here about Thurber. Let’s just let it go at “Yeah, I’m obsessed.”
One that I loved was a story about his maid that revolved around language, dialect, and pronunciation (“The reeves fuh tha windas???”). It was really funny, sweet, and actually an insightful study of different uses of the same language.
I suppose it could could be seen as racist if you think that it is racist to observe that there are lots of people in the world with different experiences and different backgrounds and different views on things.
I was just at his house a little over a month ago! It’s in Columbus, Ohio, in a half-block of other preserved Victorian houses, and is part museum, part literary center: http://www.thurberhouse.org/
I’m not a big fan, but the friend I was with is and insisted that we visit Thurber’s home while we were in town. It was interesting to see the actual place where the family stories were set, to be in the dining room with the light fixtures “that leaked electricity,” see some of Thurber’s actual drawings (which are enormous) on the walls. There are also statues of the dogs in the garden.
Like Thurber a lot. He also wrote some clever fantasy novels; I think one was The Thirteen Clocks, but it’s been about thirty years so I may be wrong about the title.
I’m a huge Thurber fan. I first read My Life and Hard Times when I was in high school, and was hooked from that point. The man could write like nobody’s business.
My Life and Hard Times is a favorite of mine. I read a biography of him and came to understand why he got to be such a bitter, old coot (going blind, alcoholism).
I was in a community theater production of “The Male Animal,” a play credited to James Thurber and Elliot Nugent. Since Thurber’s is the bigger name, we kinda assumed he wrote the bulk of it and Nugent put in some structure/stage-y stuff. It turned out that Nugent was actually the primary playwright, and that Thurber’s contribution was mainly inserting the broad ethnic humor of the black maid (Perfectly acceptable stuff in 1942, but a little hard to listen to with a modern ear), as well as lending his literary prestige to the project.
Honestly, I’m a bigger fan of his surreal New Yorker cartoons.
I’m a huge humor fan and I have almost everything that Thurber put out in his lifetime. (He’s been extremely prolific after death, a point that would probably appeal to his black sense of humor.)
I have to admit that I like the other two of the Big Three of American Humor – S. J. Perelman and Robert Benchley – more. I’m not crazy about relationship humor, and that’s what Thurber specialized in. Half of what he wrote was on the war between men and women, and his women were either loud and dominating or befuddled and insistent. Not surprising that he appears misogynistic today.
Was he? My guess is that he was, to a certain extent. He did appear more comfortable in the company of men, not a very unusual bent for a man of his era or for a writer of his era. But most of what he wrote was comic exaggeration rather than an expression of hatred.
I don’t remember him as being particularly racist, even for his time. But humor has always both reflected its time and made fun of those who were different, so there may be lines and scenes that bring us up short today. Certainly Perelman is full of random casual comments about “darkies” and such that cannot be excused. Only Benchley, Sweet Robert, is free from any taint. (He has an essay on black/white relations in one of his early books that is still a classic exposition on the subject.)
One thing about Thurber that is usually forgotten today is that he was a superb non-fiction writer. His book on The New Yorker, The Years with Ross, is a treasure, even if later writers have nudged some of the facts in different directions. His satire on self-help books (yes, they weren’t invented recently), Let Your Mind Alone, is hilarious. And his profiles and articles for The New Yorker were excellent, and have never been collected. He wrote many of the unsigned casuals as well.
The establishment has always dismissed humor as second-rate, but I find the bodies of work produced by the major humorists of the 20s and 30s to stand up to those even of the literary stars. Once you understand that it’s a different form, and that the novel is not the be-all and end-all of literature, humor and humorists are to be celebrated.
Ah, yes, The Thirteen Clocks! The Duke is a fabulous rumination on fairy tale villians. “We all have flaws. Mine is being wicked.”
"His hands were as cold as his smile, and almost as cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made it difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. "
Also The White Deer is not to be missed.
My earliest introduction to Thurber was listening to someone’s LP of the stage show of The Thurber Carnival with Tom Ewell, Peggy Cass, John McGiver, Paul Ford et al. I later bought a copy for myself and, in fact, I still have it. When I finally get a CD burner, it’ll be among the few LPs I’ll rip.
Of course, Thurber was anti-conservation and pro-gun, as clearly shown in “The Little Girl and the Wolf”. 
It just so happens that earlier today I was thinking about Thurber’s story, “The Greatest Man in the World.” In another thread we’re discussing Ken Jennings, who’s now a 12-time Jeopardy! champion, and what a nice guy he seems to be. The Thurber story looks at what might happen if an ordinary guy who attained sudden fame turned out to be an complete jerk.
Like Harpo, I’ve been a big fan of Thurber, Perelman, and Benchley, for decades, and I’d agree with his ranking of them, too.
Benchley was a kind and gentle man, but apparently not so much to his wife and sons, whom he more or less ignored for long periods. I learned this from a one-man show his grandson, Nate Benchley, put on at a local theater. But Bob’s writing was whimsical and delightful, and his numerous film performances give us a hint of the charmer he must have been.
Despite his brilliance, Perelman (the father-in-law of one of my college professors) was apparently not a very pleasant person, a fact I learned not from my teacher, but from a recent biography of him by Dorothy Herrmann. It’s one of the few books I’ve ever regretted reading, because I would have preferred not knowing all that unpleasant stuff about one of my idols. But his humor was a completely inimitable mix of breathtaking erudition and gutsplitting hilarity.
And as plnnr points out, Thurber may not have been a saint, either.
But in all three cases, the laughter continues to ring out long after the pain they caused – and lived – has faded away.
“Don’t count your boobies before they’re hatched!”
BTW, I distinctly recall a shot in a documentary on Thurber from the late 1950s or early 1960s, in which he walks out a door that is being held open by an Oscar. But I can’t find anything in IMDB or the official Oscar Web site that indicates he, or any film based on his work, ever won one. Can anybody help me with this?
If he did, that would be something that he, Benchley, and Perelman all had in common. Benchley for his short, How to Sleep, and Perelman for Around the World in Eighty Days.
Remember Fred Allen’s classic line, “If you took all the sincerity in Hollywood and put it in the navel of a fruit fly, you’d still have room for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart”?
That same fruit fly’s navel would still have room to store all the literary personages in our history who were good and kind, sober and home-loving, and faithful and responsible to their spouses and children.
commasense, The Ten-Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table won the Best Documentary Oscar in 1987. It may very well have had a Thurber bit in it.
But that’s the only Thurber/Oscar connection I can find.
To find Thurber a true racist or a woman hater you’re going to have to have to contort the meaning of those terms to the point of absurdity.