INTRODUCTION
PART 16
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.1 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.
Writing in the first person, Thurber doesn’t dwell on this at all, doesn’t suggest that he feels he is less than madame. It is simply the vividness of the portraiture that gives this suggestion, though elsewhere Thurber, both in print and in his private life, would frequently claim that he hated women and thought they were stronger than men and would outlast them, largely because they were stupider and less imaginative.
Madame Goriaut is almost the anti-Madame Vionnet. It is “ironic” that Thurber and Professor Taylor, in their devotion to the Madame, never seemed to notice that she is ultimately exposed as nothing more than a “servant maid crying for her young man,” which is Jamesian politeness for “cunt,” redolent of both misogyny and snobbery. Yet it is the further Jamesian irony that the gift that Madame Vionnet gives poor Strether—the gift of “Paris,” the vision of a larger, more complete, more glorious way of life than is dreamt of on America’s cold Puritan shores—is very real, even though Madame herself is a cheat. Perhaps Thurber and Professor Taylor never recognized James’s misogyny because they shared it so thoroughly.
“Doc Marlowe” returns us to Columbus and the boarding house of Aunt Ida/Aunt Margery, who is here called “Mrs. Willoughby,” and who Thurber pretends is not a member of his family. When Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer, he was able to return to, and recreate, the seamless world of childhood, even though he used the mechanics of Victorian melodrama—an orphan child, a murderous “half-breed,”2 a lost treasure, and a high-born “lady” (Becky Thatcher3)—as the frame for all the marvelous details of how life was lived by small boys on the Mississippi River before the Civil War. Twain cheated a bit by making Tom an orphan. We’re not expected to feel sorry for him, but this “explains” why he has no real emotional attachment to his family. In Huckleberry Finn he took a giant step further (or three-quarters of a giant step, considering the clumsy and dishonest conclusion), showing the adult world through a child’s eyes, and even including, though not resolving, the father figure missing from Tom Sawyer.
Thurber, though he was very well read in the contemporary American novel and attended hundreds of Broadway shows, never trusted himself in the extended narrative. My Life and Hard Times is too farcical to have the ring of reality. But in the reminiscences that began to appear in the mid-thirties, like “A Portrait of Aunt Ida,” “The Luck of Jad Peters,” “I Went to Sullivant,” and “Snapshot of a Dog,” Thurber moved beyond obvious farce and achieved, in most of his pieces, not simply factual recollection but the recapture of emotion as well.
Like Madame Goriaut, Doc Marlowe is not very likable, although Thurber, as he tells it, found him fascinating. Doc is a semi-retired medicine show hustler living in Mrs. Willoughby’s boarding house, all tricked out to look like Buffalo Bill. “Doc Marlowe wore scarred leather leggings, a bright-colored bead vest that he said he got from the Indians, and a ten-gallon hat with kitchen matches stuck in the band, all the way around. He was about six feet four inches tall, with big shoulders, and a long, drooping moustache. He let his hair grow long, like General Custer’s. He had a wonderful collection of Indian relics and six-shooters and he used to tell me stories of his adventures in the Far West. … I thought he was the greatest man I had ever seen.”
The encounter of young Jamie Thurber and Doc Marlowe is quite similar to that of Huckleberry Finn and the King and the Duke, though Huck, of course, quickly sees through the King and the Duke, while the young Thurber remains fascinated by Doc even as he learns unpleasant things about him, like the fact that he cheats at cards—Doc is so small time that he will spend an afternoon trying to win thirty-five cents from an old woman. He gives Thurber a whole dollar to buy fireworks one July Fourth and also cheats him out of the price of a soda using a two-headed coin. The capper in their relationship comes when, in a major con, Doc sells an elderly couple a decrepit Cadillac fixed up by a mechanic to enable it to run perhaps a dozen miles before falling to pieces. The outraged sucker writes a long, bitter letter to Doc, which Doc reads aloud to Thurber, howling with delight at the sufferings of his mark.
Thurber finds it unimaginable that he will ever forgive Doc, but he does forgive him. In a (probably) fictitious final encounter, Thurber visits Doc a few days before his death, and finally learns the truth about two-headed quarter, which, Thurber says, Doc hands him “with a shadow of his old twinkle and the echo of his old chuckle.”
Many of Thurber’s most powerful reminiscences end with the final resolution, that of death, and the deepest compliment Thurber can pay is to portray a character who faces death without fear. That is how Aunt Ida/Aunt Margary dies, and that is how Rex dies, and that is even how Doc dies, at least as Thurber tells it, taking on a brief bravado in the face of death, even though, as Thurber also tells it, Doc is very largely a heartless and deceitful man.
It’s easy for me to believe that a dying Doc Marlowe did not give a young James Thurber a two-headed quarter—a too perfect trinket that is more often read about than seen. Thurber was definitely not above creating death bed scenes that never took place in order to achieve what he regarded as the poetic truth.
- 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. ↩︎
- Prior to WWII, and even after, “half-breeds” were indispensable or at least unavoidable villains in American fiction. So, yes, we have progressed, just a little. Even as a nine-year-old, I wondered how Injun Joe could skulk around St. Petersburg for months at a time disguised as a “deaf and dumb Spaniard.” ↩︎
- As the daughter of “Judge Thatcher,” Becky is from one of the most respectable families in St. Petersburg. ↩︎
