Introduction
Part 3
Mary, or “Mame,” Thurber was the more aggressive of the pair.1 She was extremely fond of elaborate practical jokes, and threw herself into them with a fervor that, not too surprisingly, could unsettle her son. When she learned that the owner of a nearby house, a man named Harry Simons, had been struggling to sell it, she disguised herself, “her hair and eyebrows whitened with flour, her cheeks lightly darkened with charcoal to make them look hollow, and her upper front teeth covered with the serrated edge of a soda cracker,” and paid the man a visit, proclaiming herself to be a rich widow in search of a new home. Naturally, the house was exactly what she was looking for, and she offered to buy both it and the furniture for an enormous sum. When she departed, she grabbed a few items to take with her, on the grounds that they were in effect already her possessions. The next day she wrapped up the items and sent them back to Mr. Simons with a note saying “To Harry Simons from Mame Thurber with love.”
Thurber comments that “I had watched her transformation from mother to witch with a mixture of wonder and worry that lingered in my memory for many years.”
James Thurber was the middle brother. Both William, the elder, and Robert, the younger, were athletic and outgoing while young, though Robert lived his adult life largely as an invalid, while William seems to have fallen victim to his father’s malaise, surely exacerbated by the spectacle of his younger brother’s triumph. What Thurber “would have been” as a boy cannot be imagined, because the loss of his left eye at age six, the result of an arrow fired by William, left him, in the pitiless standards of the day, a cripple. Genetically, Thurber was unlikely to be “normal.” The loss of one eye, and only limited vision in the remaining one, almost guaranteed it.
The Thurber household was not an orderly one, and for years Thurber struggled, with very mixed success, to escape from it. He graduated with honors from the best high school in Columbus and, what is more, got himself elected class president, usually the sign of a young man who wants to go places. But because of the limited family finances, he ended up living at home and attending Ohio State, where, after more than five years, he had completed less than three years of course work.
But despite this mediocre record, Ohio State was his Yale College and his Harvard, although it took a lot of trying. The break of Thurber’s life occurred at age twenty-two, when, enrolling as a sophomore for the third time, he met and fascinated Elliott Nugent, the precocious child of an acting family. Nugent’s enthusiastic sponsorship converted a one-eyed misfit into a big man on campus, a fraternity brother who sang and drank and cheered at football games, who wrote and appeared in collegiate theatrical productions and served as co-editor of Ohio State’s student newspaper, The Lantern. Nugent had a touch of the poet in him, and a strong eye for the main chance. He somehow recognized that Thurber had a stronger touch than his own, and he was generous enough to draw Thurber along in his wake, both encouraging and challenging Thurber by his example.
The fraternity atmosphere released the performer in Thurber, which he had previously only shown to his family. He was an excellent mimic and discovered that he could hold the floor at parties and informal gatherings, though, unlike his legendary predecessor Mark Twain, he was never comfortable onstage as a professional entertainer.
There was more to Thurber’s new life at Ohio State than undergraduate high spirits and hijinks. In The Thurber Album, he devotes several very loving essays to his professors there, who taught him a love of literature and a pride in the idea of a life devoted to beauty rather than profit. His great literary love was Henry James, to whom he was introduced by one of his professors, Joseph Russell Taylor. Thurber read James thoroughly and easily, absorbing even the “all subtle” late novels without conscious effort. He knew a great deal about James, and comments on him frequently and confidently in his letters. He wrote several pastiches of “the Master” and in the last years of his life, when he was bitter, blind, and dying, wrote an excellent essay about theatrical adaptations of his work.
Despite his new-found success as an undergraduate, Thurber never obtained a degree. But he found another way to get an education, obtaining a position as a code clerk with the State Department, which took him to France just as the war was ending. Thurber was in Paris just after the Armistice was declared, and was witness to that massive outpouring of emotion that followed the greatest conflict in human history. He loved France as much as James did, though it seems it was the countryside more than Paris that touched him most deeply.2
It is not surprising that a prudish, one-eyed virgin from Ohio had an experience in Paris for which not even a close reading of The Ambassadors would prepare him. Once Nugent left Ohio State, ahead of Thurber, Thurber formed the habit of writing him long letters, cries for attention if not for help, tediously written in heavy-handed, self-congratulatory prose that generally don’t reveal Thurber’s true emotions but do contain a great deal of beating around the bush, which can suggest, but only suggest, what is really on Thurber’s mind. Thurber would write surely thousands of such letters throughout his life, both to Nugent and to others. Many of the letters to Nugent concern Eva Prout, the “One,” whom Thurber fell in love with when in the seventh grade. Thurber never even attempted to reveal his feelings for Eva until he was in Paris, waging an epistolary romance at very long distance.
1Mame came from a wealthy family and had received a large gift of stock in the family company, which appears to have kept the family afloat during those frequent occasions when Charles Thurber was out of work. By the Thirties, Thurber was supporting both his parents and his two brothers, and continued to do so as long as they lived.
2Like Melville in the South Seas, Thurber was both fascinated and frightened by the unimagined freedoms that he found away from home. His real affection for France developed when he lived there in the Twenties with his first wife, working for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. What he remembered most was a stint in Nice putting out a “Riviera” edition of the paper, perfect day after perfect day, the nights spent drinking wine and putting together the paper, making up the “Social Notes” out of thin air.
