INTRODUCTION
Thurber was definitely not above creating death bed scenes that never took place in order to achieve what he regarded as the poetic truth. In “Memorial,” a short piece collected in My World and Welcome To It, Thurber pays tribute to “Medve” (Romanian for “bear”), a French poodle that actually belonged to Althea.1 Medve was a prize-winning show poodle and one of Thurber’s most related anecdotes places him in the rear of an open car, a red rubber bib around Medve’s neck as a precaution against car sickness, Thurber with one arm around her, holding a green parasol over her head with the other to ward off the rain. In a fairly outrageous indulgence in anthropomorphism, Thurber claims that Medve would have been happy to exchange her many medals for a few raspberries, of which she was very fond.
Medve is one of the very few females, of any species, for whom Thurber has unreserved admiration. : “The poodle [Thurber, again for whatever reason, does not give her name] was hand in glove with natural phenomena. She raised two litters of puppies, 11 each time, taking them in her stride, the way she took the lightning and the snow.”
In his “definitive” take on Aunt Margery, “Daguerreotype of a Lady,” written by Thurber more than a decade later, Thurber speaks of the wonderful windows on the first floor of Aunt Margery’s house. “The lower sash of one of the windows in the sitting room was flush with the floor—a perfect place to sit and watch the lightning or the snow”—“the lightning and the snow,” Mother Nature’s twin marvels, fire and ice, the one a single crashing blow that appears and disappears in an instant, the other falling patiently for hours, infinite delicacy infinitely accumulated. Images of both—lightning for demonic energy, and snow for beauty—appear frequently in Thurber’s work.
Thurber paints Medve’s death scene perhaps even more nobly than Rex’s: “The poodle kept her sight, her hearing, and her figure up to her quiet and dignified end. She knew that the Hand was upon her and she accepted it with a grave and unapprehensive resignation. This, her dark and intelligent eyes seemed to be trying to tell me, is simply the closing of full circle, this is the flower that grows out of Beginning, this—not to make it too hard for you, friend—is as natural as eating raspberries and raising puppies and riding into the rain.”
Thurber, like so many writers, does not resist using physical vigor in extreme old age as a metaphor and symbol for moral greatness.2 But in fact he wrote to a friend describing Medve’s real death, presenting the painful fact that the poodle’s health had declined so badly that Althea had to have her destroyed. Thurber may have seen her in her last, sad days, but poor Medve’s actual death was far more prosaic than the proud one that Thurber portrays.
Perhaps Thurber “should have” written full-fledged short stories to convey the moral truths that he put in these sketches. In many of the portraits that appear in The Thurber Album, written when Thurber was blind and bitter over the havoc McCarthyism was causing among writers and artists in New York, Thurber is often guilty of leaving out all the bad parts, or at least all the worst ones, particularly when writing about his parents, which is never an easy task. But in the best ones the sure accumulation of telling details anchors and justifies the moral touches, even if, for example, you don’t take dogs quite as seriously as Thurber does.
The New Yorker of the 1930s was famously apolitical, and Thurber himself never took the slightest interest in the ideologies of the time, so it is surprising to find two overtly political pieces in Leave Your Mind Alone! Thurber had gotten into a dispute with a “passionate” young communist author, Mike Gold, who was naturally furious that dickless old geezers like Thurber got all the fame and fortune while he didn’t. Thurber probably should have told Mike that he had more penis than talent, which was probably true, and left it at that, but instead he tried to make a coherent reply, taking Mike seriously when he didn’t deserve it. Thurber was friends with a number of seriously leftist writers, most particularly Ralph Ingersoll, whom he knew from the early days at the New Yorker. Ingersoll left the New Yorker to work for Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine and had the temerity to write an article about his old magazine, infuriating Ross and the rest by giving estimated salaries for all the top people. Later, Ingersoll made a sharp segue to the left, founding the once legendary PM, a frequently but not always pro-communist left-wing daily that accepted no advertising.3 Thurber wrote a series of articles for PM in the early forties, which would have gotten him in a lot of trouble in the McCarthy era if he hadn’t been so famous.
Thurber’s main tactic in “What Are the Leftists Saying?” is to point out that leftists have no sense of humor, which is always true, since orthodoxies detest spontaneity, but leaves us feeling that, since Thurber is a humorist, he could say that about anybody. It also tends to imply that Thurber doesn’t really care about anyone who doesn’t write for the New Yorker, which might even have been true. In any event, Thurber was hardly the man capable of exposing the inner contradictions of Marxist thought, and his attempts to laugh it out of existence inevitably had the flavor of a man trying to laugh at something because he could not understand it.
- It was Medve who arrived in a crate, as described in “The Monroes Find A Terminal”. whom Thurber, for whatever reason, converted into a Scottie for the story. The Thubers had a Scottie, named Jeannie, when they got Medve. ↩︎
- Consider, for example, Tolstoy’s “clean old peasant,” presumably about seventy, with his “even rows of fine white teeth.” In real life, of course, a clean old peasant was likely to be toothless, and dead, at fifty, but, in any event, what does shining dentition have to do with the state of one’ soul? ↩︎
- Ingersoll was converted to the Left during an affair with Lillian Hellman, on whom Thurber once threw a drink. Ingersoll supported U.S. intervention against Hitler while the USSR was still allied with Germany, but after the War pushed a pro-Soviet, anti-British line very similar to that of Henry Wallace. ↩︎
