INTRODUCTION
This is the 28th episode of “James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide,” a rambling consideration of Thurber’s works, examining his life and work in some detail. Generally, these appear every Friday. The links to the first part and the most recent part are given below. Part 28 continues the discussion of stories in Thurber’s 1953 collection Thurber Country.
“The Interview” cuts even deeper, not merely a self-flagellation but a self-flaying, bearing both significant similarities to, and significant differences from, the Henry James novella, The Lesson of the Master. In James’s leisurely story,1 Paul Overt, a young writer, is discouraged from marriage by “the master,” the renowned novelist Henry St. George, who suggests that his own marriage has taken him from the true paths of art. For all his success, he has forfeited one thing, the one great thing—“The sense of having done the best—the sense which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or he doesn’t—and if he doesn’t he isn’t worth speaking of.”
Overt renounces his plans to marry the enchantingly healthy Marian Fancourt,2 going on vacation to concentrate on art rather than passion, returning to discover that St. George, whose wife had died in the meantime, is now to marry Marian himself! St. George even has the gall to tell Overt that he married her to save him! “I wanted to save you, rare and precious as you are.” So what is the lesson of the master—that a true artist must be celibate, or that a true artist is relentlessly appetitious and never to be trusted?3
“The Interview” is much shorter and more brutal. An aspiring writer, “Price,” has obtained an interview with a renowned novelist, George Lockhorn, whom, he quickly discovers, is a complete monster, guzzling bourbon and offering “shocking” intimacies that he first takes back—“you can’t use that”—and then “confessing” that everything he said was a pack of lies. He ridicules his current wife and all the past ones as well, quotes Henry James—“spiritual hope is my tiny4 stock in trade”—while certainly offering none. He praises James as “the greatest master of them all,” while confessing himself to be “the loneliest man in the United States.”
When his wife shows up Lockhorn plays the usual bullying drinking games that are the cunning Thurber man’s stock in trade, finally shuffling off to bed at his wife’s urging while rephrasing Joyce’s rather too cute “Is life worth leaving?” (from Finnegan’s Wake) into “Is love worse living?” which I don’t think I get. As Price drives away, he hurls first his notebook from the car and then, in the final renunciation, his pencil as well! Never meet your heroes!
Thurber does very, very little to disguise the autobiographical nature of “The Interview.” Lockhorn is not blind, of course, and he has more wives than Thurber did, and he is the author of a dozen “great” novels (Thurber unsurprisingly promoting himself from humorist to novelist), but it’s hard to imagine that anyone reading this would not think that this was a portrait of Thurber himself. If Lockhorn were a mere poseur the effect would be different. It’s the fact that he’s the “real thing” that makes the despair genuine.
Thurber Country offers another “drunken writer” story, “The Case of Dimity Ann,” slightly less depressing and perhaps even more intriguing. The story depicts the aftermath of a typical Thurber evening, the host “Ridgeway” in an endless seethe over the departed guest “Bennett,” who remarkably enough escaped killing despite devoting the entire evening to “fascinating” anecdotes about his marvelous cats—surely Thurber’s own idea of the ninth, or perhaps the tenth, circle of Hell.
It is the final cat anecdote of the evening, about Alex, who could tell time and had a fancy for imported Chianti, that pushes Ridgeway over the edge, provoking him into relating a cat anecdote of his own—“I was just reminded of a cat my first wife had, which I used to tie up.”
It’s a little surprising, given Bennett’s devotion to felines, the evening didn’t end in fisticuffs, but as a cat man, perhaps he just wasn’t up to it. I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I?
For Alice, Ridgeway’s wife, with the guests gone, the evening is just beginning, because she didn’t know about the cat tying, and, for a second wife, any revelation, particularly a public one, about the first wife creates an issue that demands resolution.
Alice, like many though not all Thurber wives, is immensely aware of her husband’s moods,5 and she quickly senses that he is unresolved as well, though he seeks to disguise it through the aimless, passive-aggressive pugnacity that is also the cunning Thurber man’s stock in trade.
- The novella begins in a manner almost identical to The Portrait of a Lady, with a group of genteel Anglo-Americans relaxing under the trees of an elegant estate on a summer afternoon. I don’t know if James actually enjoyed such gatherings, but he certainly wished that he did. ↩︎
- Like Verena Tarrant, heroine of The Bostonians, Marian has red hair. ↩︎
- Surely James knew that artists come in both varieties. In his travels he once met Richard Wagner and his band of acolytes. He was predictably stunned by their “fantastic immorality,” but isn’t Wagner a greater composer than James a novelist? Perhaps James meant that a wife and family destroy an artist only if he’s fool enough to care for them. If he doesn’t give a damn it’s a different story. ↩︎
- “His small stock in trade,” his wife corrects. ↩︎
- Thurber wives tend to be either immensely sensitive, like Alice, or crushingly insensitive, like Mrs. Mitty. ↩︎
