INTRODUCTION
Thurber follows “One Is a Wanderer” and ends the book with a brief sketch, “A Box to Hide In,” about a man who wants a box he can hide in, Kirk deciding to make his implicit isolation explicit. The narrator particularly wants his box so that he can hide from his cleaning-woman, who is so unhappy that he can’t stand to be around her. She’s sick and her husband is sick and her children are sick. If he just had a box big enough to get into, he wouldn’t have to deal with all of that.
The suffering cleaning-woman of “A Box to Hide In” seems somehow related to another suffering servant, whose story is told earlier in “The Departure of Emma Inch,” written by Thurber as a first-person casual in the manner of “The Black Magic of Barney Haller,” which may not be all that factual either. Thurber biographer Burton Bernstein says that Thurber used a “real-life” vacation he took with his second wife Helen to Martha’s Vineyard as a frame for “Emma Inch,” but that Emma herself was entirely imaginary.1
Emma is a cook, a poor, lonely woman whose emotional life revolves entirely around Feely, her aged bulldog, whom she carries wherever she goes. Emma appears to be a woman of painfully limited intelligence and education who can only be even remotely comfortable when her life is governed by a familiar routine. The journey from New York to Martha’s Vineyard is a nightmare to her. At every turn there is something to upset her, about which she complains bitterly, constantly driving the narrator and his wife to drink2. “Each move was like getting a combative drunken man out of the nightclub in which he fancies he has been insulted.”
When the boat stops at Wood’s Hole3 on the way to Martha’s Vineyard, Emma decides that Feely is sick and she must take him home to her hotel room in New York. Thurber can’t imagine how Emma can manage the return trip home on her own, but she insists, and even takes money from him with great reluctance. She gets off the boat with great relief, thinking that somehow she won’t have to get back on one: “We like to walk, Feely and me.”
The last sentence of “The Departure of Emma Inch” reads “I had never seen her smile before, but she was smiling now,” which sounds a bit tacked on to me, unless you prefer the seriously “dark” interpretation that the “point” is that her smile is the smile of an idiot, that Emma is so pathetically deluded that she actually thinks that she can walk all the way from Wood’s Hole to Manhattan. Thurber has often been justly criticized for getting too much “fun” out of funny servants, many of them “colored,” but here, as in “A Box to Hide In,” Thurber is almost saying that you have to laugh at servants and their amusing, ignorant speech, to avoid been driven mad by pity and guilt.
When Thurber was pulling together My World and Welcome To It the book was so short, even with both a preface and an “A Note at the End,” that he wrote a special piece for it that had not appeared in the New Yorker, “The Dog That Bit People,” the very first of his dog stories, atypical in that Muggs, the dog that bit people, effectively bears the mark of Cain, neither giving nor asking for quarter. The Thurbers accept Muggs, uneasily, as a force of nature that they have to contend with, though in today’s more settled society a dog like Muggs would probably have to be put down. Thurber’s mother felt sorry for Muggs because she thought he was sick. “‘He’s not strong,’ she would say, pityingly, but that was inaccurate; he may not have been well, but he was terribly strong.”
In The Middle-Aged Man, Thurber includes two more dog pieces (the famous Thurber dogs were already appearing in the cartoons4). He and his wife Althea raised dogs rather desperately, as an escape from not having much of a life together, which gave Thurber the opportunity to observe the species rather more scientifically than before. “A Preface to Dogs” is a rather simple piece, devoted to describing how a female dog takes complete care of her puppies for the first six weeks of their lives, and then loses all interest in them afterwards. There is, perhaps, just an unspoken suggestion that human lives would probably go a lot more smoothly if we were reared in a similar manner.
- Bernstein interviewed Helen extensively, so presumably this account is accurate. In the course of the story Emma addresses the narrator as “Mr. Thurman,” the name of the narrator of the previous story “The Gentleman Is Cold.” It isn’t entirely clear if Emma is supposed to be mispronouncing Thurber’s name or if the narrator is supposed to be the same Mr. Thurman—probably not, because Thurman is clearly not married. ↩︎
- Thurber doesn’t do his new wife much of a favor by depicting her as responding to servant problems by guzzling “straight Scotch,” which Thurber folk always resort to when things really get rough. ↩︎
- If you’re as ignorant of Cape Cod geography as I am, you may want to know that Wood’s Hole is on the southern tip of the Cape Cod Peninsula, a few miles away from the island known as Martha’s Vineyard. ↩︎
- With their big heads, short muzzles, short legs, and big paws, Thurber’s dogs are quite “neonate”—that is, they look like big puppies. Thurber treads very close to sentimentalism here. ↩︎
