INTRODUCTION
PART 9
In “More Alarms in the Night,” Thurber broaches a subject that he would return to endlessly in his work, words and darkness, which tend to go ill together for Thurber. A simple word game, played in the head, can distract one from insomnia—a distraction from distraction—and ease the sleeplessness away. But all too often word games feed insomnia rather than subduing it—words become babble, meaning becomes nonsense, and instead of ordering the mind destroy it, leaving the darkness triumphant and complete.
Things aren’t so bad as that in “More Alarms in the Night.” Thurber goes to bed after spending much of the day struggling to recall the name of the town “Perth Amboy,” knowing only that it’s located in New Jersey (apparently, the Thurbers lacked an atlas).
Long after I had gone to bed, I was struggling with the problem. I began to indulge in the wildest fancies as I lay there in the dark, such as there was no such town, and even that there was no such state as New Jersey.
Thurber would have many such nights in his life, most of them not as funny as this one.
One of the reasons My Life and Hard Times is so short is that Thurber left all the bad parts out, both in the past and the present. Thurber’s marriage to Althea had already fallen apart before My Life and Hard Times* was published, and the “contemporary” pieces that Thurber was writing for the New Yorker had a much different flavor—dry, almost pitiless sketches of emotional and marital dysfunction set in the Manhattan/Connecticut milieu that was Thurber’s world.1
These pieces were collected in Thurber’s next book, The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, which contains a great deal of his best work.2 The book leads off with “The Gentleman Is Cold,” one of the most curious, and most interesting, stories that Thurber ever wrote. The narrator identifies himself as “Jacob Thurman, eccentric essayist.” The pseudonym is deliberately revelatory, and it is rare for a Thurber protagonist to actually be a writer, though Mr. Monroe is, of course, somehow a poet.
Mr. Thurman is cold because he won’t wear a hat or an overcoat in the winter.3 He can’t bring himself to explain why he won’t wear a hat—that’s apparently too personal—but he will tell us why he won’t wear his overcoat, because the reasons are so obvious and so reasonable. First of all, the clerk who sold it to him was rude, and second of all it doesn’t fit him very well, and third of all it doesn’t have any buttons. But these aren’t the real reasons.
First of all, there’s the hotel doorman, who’s always helping Thurman with his coat. Describing one occasion, “Thurman” says, “He is a powerfully built man, who brooks no denial of, or interference with, his little attentions and services. He didn’t exactly throw me, but I took a pretty bad tossing around.”
There’s more tossing from a “colored porter and bootblack” who works where Thurman gets his hair cut. “The porter is not so powerfully built as the doorman at my hotel, but he is sinewy and in excellent condition.” And then there are also waiters at fancy restaurants, who insist on holding your coat for you and stare at you contemptuously if you happen to get your fist caught in a sleeve.
Again we have the poor sensitive gentleman of Jamesian fiction, enduring the sorts of humiliation that James himself never mentioned, vaguely homoerotic invasion and humiliation at the hands of the lower classes. Thurber is pushing, lightly, into Pinter territory here, though of course he would not go nearly so far as Harold. The final humiliations of Mr. Thurman are more comic than brutal—mistaking a sock for a handkerchief, for example—so that the story ends humorously, more or less—but the first half as the flavor of true desperation, and this will reappear in stories to follow.
- Harold Ross liked the “mean Thurber” very much, and was a little distressed by Thurber’s remarriage, to his second wife, Helen, fearing that a happy Thurber might not be so mean. He needn’t have worried. Thurber had plenty of bile left in him, and the various pains of aging and blindness provided more than enough to counteract all the support he received from Helen. ↩︎
- Since both The Owl in the Attic and My World and Welcome To It were both “theme” books, of a sort (The Owl in the Attic consists of three unrelated chunks), The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze pulled together all the best of Thurber’s writing from about 1929 to 1934 that didn’t fit into the first two books. ↩︎
- It appears that Thurber himself did not wear an overcoat until his second wife Helen took him in hand. ↩︎
