Introduction
PART 6
Thurber was raised on the dividing line of the middle and lower classes. While his mother’s family were wealthy and his father’s manner of life was entirely middle-class, the family’s finances were not so lofty. Thurber attended a “tough” elementary school, where, he said, he would not have survived without a “protector,” a black kid named Floyd who was impressed that Thurber knew that the printed word “Duquesne” was pronounced “Dukane.”1
For Thurber men, contact with the working class male is always fraught with peril. Thurber envied and resented the working man’s physical self-confidence, his ease with machinery, his ability to make the real world submit to his commands. When Mr. Monroe arrives on the dock, he sees the fateful hatbox sitting on the pier, with two porters standing around it. He supposes them to be guards. “That your box, brother?” one of them asks. “Oh, no. Nope,” says the terrified Mr. Monroe. He waits until their backs are turned, then grabs the box and races away.
In the next story, “Mr. Monroe Outwits a Bat,” Mr. Monroe obviously does not outwit a bat. He pretends to beat it to death, but instead is just thumping a doorjamb with a rolled-up newspaper. He then sleeps in the hallway until the early morning, when he creeps into his bedroom after being sure the bat is gone.2
It’s striking that not only do Mr. and Mrs. Monroe have separate bedrooms, their bedrooms aren’t even close to one another. Thurber doesn’t explain this, no doubt because he didn’t want to. Thurber men have a terrible time sleeping. The slightest noise drives them to distraction, and even when it’s quiet they’re likely to drive themselves to distraction anyway, playing word games in their head in a self-defeating attempt to fall asleep.
“The ‘Wooing’ of Mr. Monroe” presents Mr. Monroe rather shockingly as a successful poet, so successful that a designing woman is out to take him away from Mrs. Monroe. Mr. Monroe is not physically present in the story, which consists of a conversation between Mrs. Monroe and the cunning blonde. Mrs. Monroe manages to convince her that “John’s” mechanical incompetence and general helplessness in any practical matters whatsoever outweigh the cash and prestige that his “lovely sonnets” are somehow able to deliver.
“Mr. Monroe and the Moving Men” presents poor Mr. Monroe in full collision with the working class. His wife leaves him in charge of directing the packing for the summer, some things going to the summer house and some in storage. Why she should do this, knowing his supreme ineptness, is another matter.
When the moving men show up, Mr. Monroe quickly loses control of the situation. They start moving pieces without being told which goes where, while Mr. Monroe stands idly by, figuring that, since they’re moving men, they know where stuff should go.
It gets worse. They stop calling him “chief” and call him “buddy,” or even “sonny.” Agonizing over the china, he asks “Does this look like summer china to you?” “Naw, dat’s winter china,” one of them tells him. When at last the men are gone, Mr. Monroe starts to relax, only to realize that, of course, he’s screwed everything up. He’s sent everything to storage, and there will be nothing at the summer house, and Mrs. Monroe will be furious with him, and he will have no defense against her. Comedy is tragedy viewed from a distance, and here we’re too close to Mr. Monroe’s humiliation and pain for it to be entirely funny.
“The Monroes Find a Terminal” may owe something to Thurber’s wanderings in New York City, searching for topics for “Talk of the Town,” which he wrote while turning out the Monroe stories. New York City in the Twenties was a manufacturing metropolis, and the fringes of the city were a rabbit warren of docks and rail yards. The Monroes are sent a Scottie by railway freight and have to locate the correct terminal, one of, apparently, several dozen in the city.3 Mr. Monroe (of course) wants to throw up his hands, but Mrs. Monroe perseveres and tracks the Scottie down. Thurber tacks on a last line, having Mrs. Monroe kiss Mr. Monroe with the line “My great big wonderful husband,” to cover his emasculation.
- Thurber’s description of his school, Sullivant, still boggles the mind. Although the grades ran 1 through 8, according to Thurber, there were many black “kids” in their late teens or even their early twenties, who treated the school as a sort of social club, playing on the school baseball team, which was presumably their real purpose for attending. According to Thurber, they avoided school when they were young, and never got past the fourth grade. Apparently, the school was afraid to kick them out, since they could beat up anyone on the staff, and, anyway, the baseball team would have suffered. ↩︎
- Once when I was sleeping alone in a strange house I was bedeviled, not by a bat but a cricket. I searched under the kitchen sink and found a can of insect spray. Then I lifted up the floorboards in the bathroom and sprayed the little bastard. Piece of cake. ↩︎
- Although the Thurbers owned Scotties, they were in fact sent a poodle, not a Scottie, in this manner. ↩︎
