INTRODUCTION
PART 11
“Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife” is a not very interesting “fantasy,” well below Thurber’s best, about a man who sets out to murder his nagging wife, who proceeds to continue to nag him even as he sets his plot in motion. The story ends with Mr. Preble leaving his wife in the basement while he runs outside to find a chunk of metal, which, she has informed him is what he should use to bash her head in, instead of something in the basement, which would link him to the crime.
“Everything Is Wild” introduces us to the other side of the Thurber man, not at all hen-pecked but rather oppressing his wife with an endless flow of bitterness, directed at everything and everyone, with a particular hostility for anything that is new, because we all know that the world is going to hell, and nothing is as good as it used to be.
One of Thurber’s well-known lines is that every humorist worries that what he is writing was written better and shorter by Robert Benchley in 1923. I wonder if he was thinking of “Everything Is Wild” when he wrote that, because the central gimmick of this story is lifted bodily from a pre-New Yorker “casual” by Benchley called “Ladies Wild,” deploring the modern fad for extravagant poker games with cutesy names and at least a dozen wild cards—due entirely, of course, to the unnatural influx of women into the most quintessentially masculine of games. In Thurber’s story, Mr. Brush endures, with notable ill grace, several hands of “Duck in the Pond” and “Poison Ivy,” leading Mrs. Brush to expect a ride home filled with poisonous recrimination. Remarkably, however, Mr. Brush turns the tables on his tormenters, inventing a ridiculous new game, “Soap in Your Eye,” which he of course wins with an ace-high royal straight flush. There are, in fact, three ace-high royal straight flushes on the table, but his is in spades, Mr. Brush informs the party: because his two opponents called him, he gets to pick his suit. Mr. Brush returns home in high spirits and Mrs. Brush rejoices silently for her unexpected good fortune.
There are more party games in “The State of Bontana,” but here party games lead to angst and humiliation, as they so often do when Thurber folk gather to drink themselves blind and savage each other’s egos. Here it’s a trivial word game, as it so often is: How many states, birds, bodies of water, etc. begin with a given letter. Here the humiliations are random rather than intended, but the sting is just as great for the poor fellow who called out “beagle” when asked for a bird that begins with “b” and had to watch the prettiest girl at the party laugh herself silly at his stupidity. Alcohol, competitiveness, and fragile egos are a dangerous mix, and a Thurber party seldom offers anything else.
“Mr. Pendly and the Poindexter” introduces the topic of cars and Thurber men, which appears to significant effect in several stories in The Middle-Aged Man, culminating in “The Smashup.” The “Poindexter” is an imaginary luxury car that Mrs. Pendly wants to buy. Like Mrs. Monroe, Mrs. Pendly is ruthlessly efficient, and like Mr. Monroe, Mr. Pendly is not. He’s intimidated by the sleek, dark cars in the showroom, but most of all he’s afraid of the contempt he will receive at the hands of the salesman, when his wife is the one who asks all the questions! “A man whose wife drives the car!”
Back in the day, the segregation of the sexes was much stricter, and cars much harder to drive, than today. Without power steering or power brakes or automatic clutches, cars required much more physical effort. They were also much more complicated to operate, and much less reliable.1 Many women refused to drive cars, and many men refused to let their wives or girlfriends drive, or indeed even to be driven by a woman. Well into the sixties, “women drivers” were regarded with derision and contempt by many men.
In real life, Thurber, as a man with one eye, had no business driving a car, but he did.2 A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, after all. In his stories, of course, men never have the excuse of bad eyesight. Poor Mr. Pendly is just a man who is afraid of cars, who doesn’t know anything about them, and is humiliated by his ignorance. Describing Mr. Pendly’s agony, Thurber finds yet another twist in the intersection of words and meaning: expressions like “vacuum pump” that sound meaningless because you can’t imagine what they would refer to although they obviously do refer to something, and expressions like “winch gasket” that, though meaningless, sound meaningful because they sound technical. If a vacuum pump can exist, why not a winch gasket? To sooth his injured pride, Mr. Pendly retreats to fantasy and imagines impressing “Mac,” a mechanic, with his mastery of the internal combustion engine.
“Try her now,” he said indifferently. Mac tried her. She worked beautifully. The big mechanic turned slowly to Mr. Pendly and held out an oily hand.
“Brother,” said Mac, “I hand it to you.”
- Starting a car on a cold morning could be almost impossible. The “choke”—thankfully, no longer on the dashboard—had to be manually adjusted to achieve the “correct” mixture of fuel and air. ↩︎
- Driving was “safer” back then because there were fewer cars. Driving at night, Thurber would pull over to the side of the road and stop whenever he saw the headlights of an oncoming car, because, as the car approached, he would be blinded. ↩︎
