INTRODUCTION
Both Thurber biographers are embarrassed by Thurber’s early, and not so early, effusions on sport. “Thurber’s lingering adolescent, sentimental worship of the athletes of his day continually trapped him into maudlin reporting,” Harrison Kinney says scornfully. At age 28, Thurber wrote a piece for the Columbus Dispatch recalling an epic football game of his youth, pitting “East” (his high school) against “North”:
On the day of the game the orange and black of East blazed out defiantly against the sullen, more impressive maroon and gold of North. There was something unbreakable, masterful, ineluctable in maroon and gold, something gay and brave as youth, and as finely futile, in orange and black.
One can wonder, from the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first century, how in hell Jim Thurber got “ineluctable” past tough Gus Kuehner, his editor at the Dispatch. And one can also remark that Thurber tended to write like a bottom. One of the highlights of his days writing for the Riviera edition of the French edition of the Chicago Tribune was his coverage of a celebrated tennis match between the American Helen Wills and the French woman Suzanne Lenglen in 1926, a match that the 20-year-old Wills lost. Thurber portrayed it as a morality play, with Wills as the high-strung artist, doomed to go down before the “ineluctable” Lenglen. In fact, Wills, known to less excitable sports writers as “Little Miss Poker Face,” was pretty damn ineluctable herself, winning 31 Grand Slam titles, the same number as Lenglen.1
When Thurber was at Ohio State, however, he actually had the chance to identify with the winning side, thanks to “Chic” Harley, an outstanding athlete who was two years behind Thurber at Sullivant. It was Harley who first led Ohio State to football glory, and Thurber reveled in it. While working at the Dispatch, he wrote a poem that looked back on Chic’s triumphs, titled “When Chic Harley Got Away,” published to coincide with the dedication of the university’s new football stadium. In The Thurber Album, Thurber manages to work in a casual reference to Chic in almost every piece, though, for whatever reason, he never attempted a portrait of the great man himself.
But Thurber’s fascination with the athlete’s swagger was definitely two-faced. He hated them for being “better” than he was. He greatly admired Professor Taylor, who introduced him to Henry James, for not kowtowing to the athletes. Most professors seated the athletes in a special, “don’t call on these boys” section, but Professor Taylor did not. In one of his most famous pieces, “University Days,” Thurber recalls the agony and hypocrisy involved in pretending that college athletes were actually capable of doing college work. According to Kinney, the hapless “Bolenciecwcz”—“he was not dumber than an ox but he was not smarter than one either”—was actually based on Chic himself, who apparently was not much for book-larning, but Thurber rather ignobly chose to make fun of a Slav instead of admitting that an “American” could be stupid. Americans were “innocently” nativist2 back in those days, and the fact that young men with names like “Bolenciecwcz” were playing college football was considered intensely amusing by “real” Americans, because of course anyone with a funny name must be stupid.
Like many other authors, Thurber thought it important to prove that being a writer did not mean that one was a “pussycat” (his word). The fact that is second wife had been actively courted by a former college football player before marrying him was a point of some satisfaction to him, and it seems he felt like re-enacting his triumph on the stage. Surprisingly, it was the far more commercially minded Nugent who came up with the idea of adding a “message” to the play. (He also came up with the title.)
Actually writing the play, and seeing it through tryouts before bringing it to Broadway itself,3 was an exhausting process, but The Male Animal proved to be a sold hit, which surely must have been extremely satisfying to Thurber, who, for the rest of his life, dreamed of coming up with another one, something he never quite accomplished, unless you count A Thurber Carnival, which ran for close to a year in 1960, with Thurber playing himself in one sketch for 88 performances.
Back in the seventies, I was lucky enough to see a not-bad undergraduate production of The Male Animal at the University of Maryland. The film version, which Nugent directed, and which stars Henry Fonda as the non-pussycat English professor Tommy Turner, is a pretty good approximation of the play itself. But despite this praise, one has to say that the play is little more than a period piece, an example of eat your cake and have it too liberalism, proudly defending the right of free speech but not actually saying anything.
- Lenglen, six years older than Wills, had her career interrupted by World War I, and probably would have won more. She only played Wills once, avoiding a rematch on the advice of her father (or so says Wikipedia). ↩︎
- Word can’t spell “nativist,” which surprises me. They’re not exactly scarce. ↩︎
- In the old days, Broadway shows would receive tryouts along the East Coast—typically in New Haven, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, before daring to face the first night crowd in the Big Apple. ↩︎
