INTRODUCTION
PART 12
“The Indian Sign” continues the theme of wifely oppression in a striking manner, recounting the fate of one Henry Bentley, who had the severe misfortune to marry into an old Connecticut family dominated by the legend of Cora Allyn, an indomitable Puritan woman who, it is said, killed nineteen unfortunate Pequot1 Indians in a single day. In every Allyn family, and in every quasi-Allyn family, the first-born daughter must be named “Cora,” which means that Mr. Bentley is not allowed to name his own daughter (he wanted to name her Rosemary, “after a dream”).
Thurber and his first wife Althea had a daughter, who was in fact named Rosemary (whether after a dream I don’t know), but you will search the collected works of James Thurber long and hard before you find the words “my daughter.” Late in life Thurber wrote a not very funny piece about his granddaughter, but about his daughter, no.2
Daughter Cora is spoken about in “The Indian Sign,” but does not herself speak.3 Instead, the frame of the story is Mrs. Bentley’s excited discussion of some new historical evidence of the deeds of the great Cora, which Mr. Bentley of course finds endlessly irritating. He wishes he had the nerve to question the greatness of Cora’s mighty deed, whether the slaughter of nineteen helpless human beings (as he imagines it) might be considered deplorable rather than the stuff of legend, but of course he lacks the courage to do so. But then, in the middle of the night, he gets up and goes into his daughter’s room, watching her sleep, as parents do. When he returns to his bedroom, for some reason, his wife half-awakens and calls out his name. “There was uneasiness and drowsy bewilderment in her voice.” A sudden compulsion forces him to deliver what he fancies to be the Pequot war whoop: “Ah-wah-wah-wah-wah!” “at the top of his voice,” “with a profound sense of relief.”
“The Curb in the Sky” is another story that pre-figures “The Unicorn in the Garden,” but it’s brutally unfunny, one of the cruelest stories Thurber ever wrote. It is the story of Charlie and Dorothy Deshler, and how Dorothy drove Charlie to madness by constantly correcting him. At first, Charlie avoided constant correction by always talking about his dreams. Since Dorothy didn’t know what happened in his dreams, she couldn’t correct him. But by constantly talking of nothing but his dreams, poor Charlie loses contact with reality, speaking of nothing but the same strange dream over and over. Unlike the fellow with the unicorn, Charlie is sent to the booby-hatch, which is fine, for a month or two, because Dorothy can’t get him. But then even madness fails. Dorothy pursues him, correcting him as he recounts his dream, which by now she knows better than he does.
“The Funniest Man You Ever Saw” is a brilliant Thurber short story, told largely through dialogue, a babble of alcoholic voices striving to explain to the nameless narrator exactly why Jack Klohman is the funniest damn man you ever saw. The narrator himself is not very likable—“looking around the group I found I didn’t like any of them very much, except Joe Mayer”—but he (and Joe) emerge as not quite the fools as the rest of the gang. At point the group attempts to identify the date of one of Jack’s happiest nights:
“Was it ‘Simple Simon’?” asked the blonde girl, who was with Creel.
“No, it was a couple of years before that,” said Potter.
“Oh, I know!” said the blonde girl. “It was—now wait—it was ‘The Madhatters’!”
“Ed Wynn wasn’t in that,” said Creel. “Ed Wynn wasn’t in that show.”
“Well, it doesn’t make much difference,” said Porter. “Anyway, in this scene, he has a line where—“
“‘Manhattan Mary’!” cried Griswold.
And so the conversation proceeds, almost by Brownian motion, distracted from distraction by distraction, as the narrator, suffering from his own superior sort of ennui,4 endures and even masochistically encourages the recounting of a dozen you had to be there moments, each emptier than the last, reminiscent of the parties that Evelyn Waugh was chronicling on the other side of the Atlantic, though Thurber was simpler and more to the point, and lacked the theological framework to damn his poor fools to Hell for the sin of being unhappy.
“The Remarkable Case of Mr. Bruhl” is a tale of quiet desperation, a sort of real life Walter Mitty, as the Mittyesque Samuel Bruhl, in a series of trivial coincidences, becomes identified as the false identity of a notorious gangster, George “Shoescar” Clinigan, who has disappeared after a mob hit directed at his person proved less than fatal. Mr. Bruhl becomes obsessed with his alter ego, to the extent of taking the bullets meant for him, maintaining the gangster’s code even to the very end, accepting death with the sang-froid with which Mitty would later display before a firing squad:5
In a world dominated by women, Thurber women in particular, it is impossible to live like a man. You can only die like one.
- Melville spelt it “Pequod,” of course. ↩︎
- Since his marriage was falling apart, it’s not too surprising that Thurber wasn’t much of a father in the early going. According to E.B. White, Thurber was a bad husband but not that bad a father to Rosemary, particularly considering “he was the most self-centered person I ever met.” He did dedicate The Last Flower to her and, late in life, she was the only person he was never rude to. ↩︎
- She’s just learning to talk. ↩︎
- Who is unhappier, those who do not know how desperate they are, or those who do? ↩︎
- Since Bruhl stays in character after being shot while Mitty is only awaiting the bullets, one has to give the palm to Sammy. ↩︎
