INTRODUCTION
PART 15
“Snapshot of a Dog” is the first piece that shows how much Thurber cared about dogs—a portrait of his beloved Rex, who actually belonged to his brother William, which Thurber never tells us. Thurber portrays Rex, an American bull terrier, as a virtually godlike beast, who lived his life with a purity and a passion that no human could ever match. “He was big and muscular and beautifully made.” In addition, “He was a tremendous fighter, but he never started fights.” If you are over the age of twenty and you can believe that it is possible to determine who “started” a dog fight, well, I guess you are James Thurber.
But that hardly matters. Here is Thurber describing Rex’s first encounter with water, leaping into Alum Creek from a height of “eight feet or more.” “I shall always remember that virgin, shining dive. Then he swam upstream and back for the pleasure of it, like a man.”
For Thurber, Rex lived life with a more than human vigor, and he faced death with a more than human courage. He returns home suffering massive wounds that he apparently incurred in a dogfight, either from the dog or its owner. Two of the Thurber brothers are there, but the third is not. Rex waits for an hour. “During that hour the bull terrier fought against death as he fought against the cold, strong current of Alum Creek. … When the person he was waiting for did come through the gate, whistling, ceasing to whistle, Rex walked a few wabbly1 paces toward him, touched his hand with his muzzle, and fell down again. This time he didn’t get up.”
Thurber continued his reminiscences of his Columbus childhood with “A Portrait of Aunt Ida” and “The Luck of Jad Peters,” Thurber relatives whose eccentricities were often creepy rather than funny. Both Aunt Ida and Aunt Emma Peters were obsessed with death, illness, hidden secrets, and other matters that lay “beyond.” “I used to see her [Aunt Emma] now and again, at funerals, tall, gaunt, and grim, but I never talked to her if I could help it. She liked funerals and she liked to look at corpses, and that made me afraid of her.” Yet Aunt Ida at least faces death at age ninety with a grace almost equal to that of Rex, lying on her deathbed impatient with her visitors and longing to get back to her begonias. “Aunt Ida” here appears really to be Margery Albright, Thurber’s great aunt, whose story he would tell in more detail in The Thurber Album.
Almost a third of Thurber’s next book, Let Your Mind Alone!, is taken up with pieces ridiculing the endless stream of self-help books that inundated America then as they do now. These pieces strike me as a bit lazy and repetitive—find a fatuous author, quote a fatuous chunk of advice, and then imagine how it would play out in “real life.” Thurber, however, enjoyed writing them very much and originally planned to do an entire book using this format. Fortunately, he didn’t.
I find the remainder of Let Your Mind Alone! to be fairly uneven, and definitely a step down from the almost continuously high quality of The Middle-Aged Man. It does contain “A Couple of Hamburgers,” which I remember as perhaps the first “adult” story that I understood intuitively—the snarling, unnamed couple with no purpose in life other than to irritate each other. Reading it is like watching a photograph develop. There is no real movement—just a gathering resolution that ripens to show each feature of the picture in perfect detail—a sketch rather than a story, but a perfect sketch, the perfect depiction of a moment in time, unencumbered by either past or future.
Let Your Mind Alone! also has two superior reminiscences, “Remembrance of Things Past” and “Doc Marlowe,” that achieve much of the quality of the famous pieces from My Life and Hard Times without relying on comic exaggeration for primary effect. Thurber wrote a number of pieces on his experiences in France, but, to my mind, none of them gets much beyond a dry recital of facts except “Remembrance of Things Past,” largely devoted to a portrait of his sou-squeezing landlady, Madame Goriaut, from whom he rented the top floor of a farm house in Normandy. Thurber doesn’t remember a lot of important things—for example, that he was living with his wife in the farm house, rather than alone, and that he was attempting to write a novel—but Madame proves to be enough.2 She is ignorant, ugly, and rapacious, but she is also real. She is alive, and she is perhaps even Life itself, and the narrator, perhaps, only an onlooker.
- I take it this is not a typo. Thurber frequently used “Lewis Carroll” coinages—not to great effect, I think—but it’s curious that he would use one here. In a late piece, “What’s So Funny?” he warns against making up new words. ↩︎
- Thurber discarded the novel—which apparently was quite autobiographical—after 5,000 words and never tried again, which I find a bit amazing, coming from a man who, relatively untutored, read The Ambassadors with enthusiasm and ease. I labored hard to read The Ambassadors even though I enjoyed The Bostonians immensely. The closest I ever came to throwing a book (I would never throw a book) is when I came to a passage concerning a letter on Strether’s bureau, held in place by “the superincumbent weight of his watch.” Never had an adjective seemed so superfluous as that “superincumbent,” and I placed my 45¢ Washington Square Press paperback on my footlocker with a reproving thump. ↩︎
