INTRODUCTION
This is the 20th 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 20 continues the discussion of The Male Animal, Thurber’s one and only Broadway play, subsequently made into a film starring Henry Fonda.
What both the play and the movie do display, with surprising consistency, is the resentment that both Thurber and (one assumes) Nugent felt towards the Middle Western philistinism that they both fled, a society ruled by hard-nosed, red-baiting businessmen, who knew the value of a dollar and nothing else. The structure of the play is fairly simple: gridiron legend “Whirling Joe” Ferguson is coming back to Midwestern University on the occasion of the homecoming game with Michigan, staying with his old pal Tommy, whose wife Ellen dated Joe before ending up with Tommy. When Joe arrives he casually announces that he and his wife are getting a divorce. No big deal, really, and no hard feelings. It’s the modern way.1
Although Tommy is supposed to be “no pussycat,” his behavior, and that of his wife Ellen, isn’t very impressive. He passively lets Joe come on to his wife—“remember the Spring Dance. We danced in the rain and didn’t even know it was raining”—and, when she doesn’t bother to put up much of a fight, sourly and self-pityingly surrenders her to Joe, sending them off to the pep rally so he can sit and pout alone. “You look better dancing with her than I do.”
Tommy comes off as a condescending and unpleasant stage manager, analyzing both Ellen and Joe and “explaining” them to themselves—“you were always in love with him. You just married me on the rebound.” Fortunately, there’s a subplot to counterbalance all of this. One of Tommy’s students, Michael Barnes, has learned that Tommy plans to read Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s once-famous sentencing statement to his composition class as an example of excellent writing done by a non-professional.
Sacco and Vanzetti, two Boston anarchists convicted of murder in 1921 and executed in 1927, were the subject of an enormous outpouring of liberal and left-wing angst all over the western world, unmatched until the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the early fifties. The case is explored in detail by Wikipedia here, largely arguing that the two were guilty.2
Barnes praises Tommy as the one professor on campus with the guts to stand up for free speech. The trustees have just fired three professors for being “reds,” but Tommy at least isn’t going to knuckle under and submit to the forces of evil, Big Ed Keller, the chairman, in particular, whom Michael calls a “fascist.” Ed is put out enough to make a call on Tommy, who proves sufficiently evasive to convince or at least confuse Ed enough to back off. Anyway, going to the pep rally with Whirling Joe Ferguson is enough to put any red-blooded Ohio boy in a good mood!
There’s additional blowback from the article, this time landing on Michael’s head, because he’s been dating, or trying to date, Ellen’s younger sister, Patricia, who, like her sister, now seems to be ready to trade intellect in for instinct. Tommy and Michael, the two rejects, join in the just about inevitable drunk scene, during which Tommy suddenly shifts gears, deciding that he is a male animal, after all, and it’s time he started acting territorial. Why he didn’t think of this before is never explained.
When Joe returns with Ellen, Tommy is in a fighting mood. The actual set-to takes off-stage, so that we don’t have to see Tommy get his ass kicked. In the morning, Ellen and Tommy agree: she’s free to run off with her cave man. But in the cold light of day, the cave man has second thoughts. He can’t really bring Ellen to live with him in Pittsburgh. What would people think? Most of all, what would Mother think?
A cave man with a Mother? Huh. How does that compute? Well, they didn’t have computers back in those days, but ultimately Ellen doesn’t need one, not when she sees Tommy stand up to Ed Keller and the combined forces of capitalistic philistinism by saying that he damned well will read Bartolomeo’s famous sentencing statement, come hell or high water. Not that he’s endorsing anarchist thought or tactics, mind you. He just thinks the thing’s well written.
Bartolomeo’s statement, which is read in both the play and the movie. goes like this:
Vanzetti certainly knew how to play the martyr, and the line “I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men” shows some shrewd self-knowledge. But what Vanzetti was preaching on street corners was not tolerance or justice but revolutionary violence. He and Sacco were followers of the anarchist Luigi Galleani, who published a guide to bomb-making to assist in the coming of violent revolution. And, Tommy, in pretending that he’s only interested in style, and not content, is engaging in gross hypocrisy. Would he have read an excerpt from Mein Kampf if it had been “well written”?3
- In a play, anything described as “modern” is almost assuredly bad. ↩︎
- The trial judge, Webster Thayer, was unquestionably prejudiced. Robert Benchley was having dinner at a country club where he heard Thayer tell his friends that he was going to “get those anarchist bastards.” However, socialist author Upton Sinclair, who wrote a book about the case, did not declare his belief in their innocence, confounding the Left, and, according to Wikipedia, suppressed information as to their guilt. In 1977, then governor Michael Dukakis issued a “proclamation” saying that their conviction had been unjust, but did not go to the length of saying that they were innocent. ↩︎
- Nugent and Thurber had originally planned to make Karl Marx rather than Vanzetti the “controversial” author to be championed by Tommy, but discovered to their chagrin that Karl was being taught at Ohio State. ↩︎
