INTRODUCTION
PART 13
In “Something to Say,” Thurber takes aim at that beloved Bohemian character, the loser genius, the passionate soul who has so much to say that he never gets around to saying it, though he does find time to sleep with his friends’ wives, steal their money, puke on their carpets, and smash their furniture. Though he often behaved badly, and wasn’t averse to breaking furniture on occasion, with his Ohio puritanism, and puritan working ethic, Thurber had little patience with those who behaved badly but didn’t pay their own way by writing brilliant short stories.
In the brief “The Evening’s at Seven” Thurber returns to the subject of marital angst. It’s raining, as it often is in Thurber’s Manhattan, and a man prefers to visit an old girlfriend rather than his wife (all three are unnamed). He’s holding her finger when her sister arrives. He knows it’s no good, but, at the end, he is, perhaps, thinking that his marriage is no good either.
“Smashup” puts us back behind the wheel and on the way to divorce. Tommy and Betty Trimway are the unhappy couple, Betty the good driver and Tommy the bad one. Betty usually drives, to Tommy’s relief and shame, but now Betty has a bad wrist, and Tommy has to do it. Driving into the city to spend the weekend, they’re under one of Manhattan’s no longer existent “L” (for “Elevated”) trestles when an old woman runs wildly in front of the car. Tommy swerves neatly to avoid her, winning the praise of a couple of serious regular guys who know from driving—a traffic cop and a cabbie. But it’s only when they’re in the hotel bar that Betty reveals “the truth” over the drinks Tommy ordered to celebrate his triumph: his swerve saved the old woman’s life, but Betty saved theirs, by slamming on the emergency brake, bringing them to a halt inches before one of the L’s steel support beams. So he’s still a chump. Amazingly, Tommy doesn’t care if it’s true or if it isn’t. He tosses off his Scotch and tells the desk clerk “We’ll be wanting two single rooms tonight, Mr. Brent.” The door to freedom is always open, really. You just have to walk through it.
But when you do get through it, what’s on the other side? “One Is a Wanderer” is perhaps Thurber’s most explicitly autobiographical story, a depiction of his life when unofficially, though completely, separated from Althea. “Kirk” is the wanderer, separated from his wife, whose name, as I read the story, is either “Lydia” or “Marianne,”1 living alone in a hotel room and desperately struggling not to drown in self-pity.
He doesn’t want to sit around the hotel lobby and get drunk, so he goes out to his office, hoping for some sort of distraction. Outside, New York is, of course, a world of slush and gloom, New York as painted by Edward Hopper,2 peopled by panhandlers and loonies: “A shabbily dressed woman walked by, muttering. She had what he called a New York Mouth, a grim, set mouth, a strained, querulous mouth, a mouth that told of suffering and discontent.”
Kirk goes to his office, and notices that he forgot to put the cover on his typewriter.
“Out of remembrance comes everything” is a very striking statement. To remember, it seems, is to be overwhelmed. Thurber writes with a careful lack of specificity here, so that we don’t know if the crying voice is a man or a woman’s, nor do we know how far these memories go back. Is Kirk thinking exclusively about his marriage, or is he going back earlier, to his childhood? He leaves his office and returns to his hotel, to do exactly what he didn’t want to do, sit in the lobby and get drunk.
“One Is a Wanderer” is quite unusual for Thurber in that we are given a great deal of information about what the protagonist thinks, about how he wishes he could somehow become the man his wife keeps telling him she wants him to be:
Thurber men are always being criticized by their wives, and they always hate it. Very rare is the Thurber man who admits that his wife is right.
Kirk wants company, but he can’t visit the people he cares about, because they’re happy and he isn’t, and the contrast is too great. Besides, he doesn’t want them to see him like this. He doesn’t want to be understood. He returns to his room and falls asleep for three hours and then gets up and goes to a bar so that he can have some company with people he knows, but not very well. When he leaves, Thurber tacks on the lazy device of a philosophical cabbie, who tells Kirk that, yeah, there’s no place like home, detracting from the story rather than adding to it. Kirk gets “home,” lazily and vaguely pleased with himself for getting through another day, completing that long day’s journey into night and achieving that tired, gently drunken state that will allow him to obtain a decent night’s sleep without feeling too terrible the next morning, singing the song that haunts him and haunted Thurber, “Make my bed and light the light, I’ll be home late tonight, Blackbird, bye, bye.”
- I don’t see how such a monumental blunder could have gotten past Ross, but at one point we read “He [Kirk} saw the Graysons, not as they would be, sitting in their apartment, close together and warmly, but as he and Lydia had seen them, in another place and another year.” Later, Kirk thinks of visiting another couple, the Mortons: “the Mortons had said to him, ‘if you and Marianne would only stop fighting and arguing and forever analyzing yourselves and analyzing everything, you’d be fine.” So which is it? Marianne Fitts was Thurber’s first OSU sweetheart, who actually introduced him to Althea. When Althea filed for divorce, Thurber contacted Marianne, half-expecting her to leave her husband and join him. But she didn’t. ↩︎
- When Hopper wasn’t painting his angst-drenched urban scenes he was painting sun-drenched watercolors of the Massachusetts coast. “Hey, dude, I’m on vacation!” ↩︎
