INTRODUCTION
PART 10
Thurber pursues the theme of homoerotic invasion and violation remarkably far in another story, “The Black Magic of Barney Haller.” Thurber doesn’t bother to construct an explicitly fictional frame to the story, so that in the piece Thurber appears to be speaking directly to us, in the manner of humorous writers. But what he has to say isn’t funny:
It is a hot summer day and “Thurber” is trying to read Swann’s Way, but for some reason Barney is hanging around him. Thurber reads his Proust: “I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francis I and Charles V,” but it’s no good. Barney speaks: “Dis morning bime by, I go hunt grotches in de voods.”
In numerous future “casuals,” Thurber would repeatedly explore the malapropisms of servants to (limited) comic effect, but he isn’t having a lot of fun here. Visualizing “grotches,” he comes up with a remarkably unsavory riff: “They flittered in my mind: ugly little creatures, about the size of whippoorwills, only covered with blood and honey and the scrapings of church bells.”
For whatever reason, Thurber decides he wants to hunt grotches in the woods with Barney, which does not sound like a good idea, and Barney doesn’t want Thurber with him. But Thurber wants to show off, and (for some reason) quotes Robert Frost at him:
I’m going out to clear the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may)
I shan’t be gone long—You come too.
They go off, Thurber’s imagination racing ahead once more, entirely out of control:
There was a great slash of lightning and a long bumping of thunder as we reached the edge of the wood.
I turned and fled.
As it turns out, what Barney had in mind was not so lurid as Thurber imagined/desired. He was looking for crotched saplings to use as props for the limbs of peach trees growing heavy with fruit. Thurber retreats to his Proust, safe for the day, though dreaming of madeleines and the church at Combray, as though he had become the subject of Proust’s book. The next day, of course, Barney calls again, summoning Thurber to an even darker errand: “We go the garrick now and become warbs.”
The thought of becoming a warb with Barney flings Thurber off the deep end. In a bizarre rant, he quotes, and mangles, Lewis Carroll, the single and only master of dream English:
“Listen! Do you know that even when it isn’t brillig I can produce slithy toves? Do you know that the mome rath never lived that could outgrabe me?”
There’s more, but to my mind no one can keep up with Lewis Carroll, and no one should try. In any event, Barney, who only wanted to clear the wasps out of the garret, is dismissed, to Thurber’s subsequent regret. This is not the last time that whippoorwills, dream words, and madness will come together in Thurber’s work.
When he isn’t going mad or making us laugh, Thurber is chronicling marital dysfunction, describing the arc of his failed marriage with Althea, dyadic humiliation transforming itself into first resolution and then solitary despair, the white dwarf produced by the supernova of divorce. Married angst first appears in “The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery,” which is not about topaz cufflinks but rather a married couple, referred to as the “man” and the “lady,” who argue compulsively over trivia, in this case about whether humans’ eyes shine in the dark when struck by light the way animals’ eyes do,1 going to absurd lengths to “settle” the argument, which neither of them is willing to allow to happen.
What Thurber is showing us is the tip of a frozen marriage. The couple argues over trivia because they must argue, but cannot afford to argue over anything “important” because that would destroy their marriage, something they are not yet ready to accept. To disguise their hostility they try to resolve their arguments “rationally”—the frame of the story is that the man is crouched on the ground while his wife drives slowly towards him to see if his eyes will shine (they’re interrupted by a cop)—though no matter how “rational” the test, neither will ever give in.
Thurber wrote a very similar story several years later—“The Breaking Up of the Winships”—about a couple who break up ostensibly because the husband insists that Donald Duck is a greater “actor” than Greta Garbo.2 In real life, Thurber was known for his compulsive argumentation, very often taking the “other side” as a way of irritating whoever he was with.
“The Private Life of Mr. Bidwell” strongly prefigures one of Thurber’s most famous fables, “The Unicorn in the Garden,” without all the magic or the happy ending. Mr. Bidwell starts doing stupid things, like trying to see how long he can hold his breath, causing Mrs. Bidwell to inform him that he’s acting like a “goop,” a word that, not unreasonably, Mr. Bidwell does not care for. Mr. Bidwell will not stop his breathing exercises, engaging in them at parties, and even, it appears, in his sleep. Eventually, they divorce but Mr. Bidwell does little with his new-found freedom. Instead of feeding lilies to a unicorn in the garden, he has a new hobby: trying to see how many steps he can take with his eyes closed.
- The answer, if you’re curious, is “no.” Humans lack “tapetum lucidum,” the reflective tissue that causes the phenomenon. The evolutionary purpose is to increase the animal’s ability to see in “darkness.” ↩︎
- Mrs. Winship is a “Garbomaniac,” a recognizable type in the thirties, who insisted that Garbo was an actress of essentially superhuman talent. ↩︎
