INTRODUCTION
This is the 20th episode of “James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide,” a rambling consideration of Thurber’s works, examining his life and work in some detail. Generally, these appear every Friday. The links to the first part and the most recent part are given below. Part 21 continues the discussion of The Male Animal, Thurber’s one and only Broadway play, subsequently made into a film starring Henry Fonda, and begins discussion of his 1942 collection, My World and Welcome to It.
Despite its eat your cake and have it too liberalism, The Male Animal can hold the stage today as a semi-functional period piece, with the major exception of the “comic” black maid Cleota, mercifully cut out of modern-day productions, a rare case of political correctness getting it right. In a play designed to uphold the values of intellect and enlightenment, Thurber and Nugent showed a massive lack of both in presenting such a shamefully racist caricature. Cleota is lazy, stupid, ignorant, and rude. One can only suppose that the Manhattan crowd enjoyed chuckling at those unfortunate folks west of the Hudson who couldn’t afford well-trained servants.
Nugent’s influential position in Hollywood helped bring The Male Animal to the silver screen in short order. The first half of the film is slow going, not helped along by either Hattie McDaniels as Cleota or Olivia de Havilland, who’s far too grand to play an Ohio State faculty wife. Surprisingly, things pick up during the drunk scene and continue to improve when the picture takes us to Tommy’s classroom, where his rendition of Vanzetti’s final statement earns him first a standing ovation and then a sort of impromptu pep rally cum victory parade that tops anything the university eve r threw for Whirling Joe! The topper occurs when Big Ed, joining happily if improbably in the revelry, finds Michael insufficiently enthusiastic: “What’s the matter with you? You’re not a fascist are you?” When “Old Hollywood” did happy, they did it right!
In fact, Hollywood was only beginning to screw with The Male Animal. The script was reworked in 1952 as She’s Working Her Way Through College, in which professor Ronald Reagan passionately defends student Virginia Mayo’s rights—specifically, the right to strip, since she’s, well, working her way through college. In real life, the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t catch up fully with Ronnie’s vision for almost 50 years, in Erie v. Paps A.M., 529 U.S. 277 (2000).
Back in 1942, it was a measure of Thurber’s status as a Manhattan-only phenomenon that his name is nowhere to be seen on the poster for the film version of The Male Animal. (The same would be true in 1948 for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.) Still, his notoriety was growing. Unfortunately, his eyesight was failing. By 1940 he was unable to recognize friends’ faces in photographs. In the early forties he would undergo a series of painful eye operations,1 suffering severe headaches and numerous other complaints at the same time. The operations, if they had any positive effect at all, simply delayed the onset of blindness. Thurber drew his last illustration in 1951.
All of this made it into his next collection, My World and Welcome to It, which appeared in 1942. “Mitty” is there, with its wonderful segues in and out of fantasy, along with the overbearing Mrs. Mitty, one of Thurber’s least attractive females and perhaps the most castrating woman this side of Lorena Bobbitt. “You Could Look It Up” is a wonderful exercise in vernacular, a baseball tall tale that reads like a cross between Ring Lardner and Mark Twain.
Thurber first ventured to Hollywood to work on The Male Animal with Nugent and ended up staying for months. One result was “The Man Who Hated Moonbaum,” a deadpan take on Hollywood surrealism as “Tallman” (Thurber) all but silently endures a wildly self-dramatizing monologue by a tiny, megalomaniac Hollywood producer who leads him through a gigantic mansion in pursuit of some Napoleon brandy.
The piece offers more than a whiff of both New York and anti-Semitic condescension. The Hollywood producer is a Sam Goldwyn/Leo G. Mayer-style vulgarian utterly lacking in taste who has, thanks to his limitless wealth, absolutely the best of everything. Tallman listens to his rant, both contemptuous and helpless, because he has only taste and no cash—the writer’s perennial plight.
It’s all a bit unattractive, for several reasons. Hollywood moguls were immensely rich, but no richer than Wall Street millionaires. Thurber had surely been on Gatsby-class Long Island estates that were a match for anything on the West Coast. And, according to Thurber biographer Harrison Kinney, the producer’s florid rap was actually based on the verbal stunting of Leo McCarey, an Irishman, not a Jew. Furthermore, McCarey put together a pretty impressive record as a director for such stars as Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and W.C. Fields. Furthermore, McCarey directed two of Hollywood’s seriously legendary films, Duck Soup and The Awful Truth. Thurber himself had been a near film buff as a young man, but once he went “New York” it was hard for him to admit in writing that anything counted except Broadway.
My World and Welcome to It has two of Thurber’s darkest stories, “A Friend to Alexander” and “The Whip-poor-will,” which especially reflects the agony he endured during his eye operations. Both stories deal with dream worlds, dreams that grow darker and darker and ultimately invade the real world. “A Friend to Alexander” reflects Thurber’s wide reading in American history—getting “behind” the textbook tales of American greatness that his generation grew up on. It’s a long, carefully wrought story about “Andrews,” a man who finds himself dreaming obsessively about Aaron Burr. He associates the story of Burr and Alexander Hamilton with his own life, with the death of his brother, killed by a “drunkard,” a story that makes him so angry that his wife has never been able to understand what actually happened. In his dreams, Andrews sees Burr kill Hamilton in their famous duel, but the dreams don’t end there. Burr insults him in his dreams, and Andrews begins to prepare himself for a final confrontation. He seizes on opportunities for pistol practice, and his bizarre behavior when he has his hands on a gun naturally frightens those around him.
- Thurber understandably told his friends that he had undergone the tortures of the damned. His surgeon, who rather petulantly felt that he had inflicted, if not actually endured, far greater agonies, thought that Thurber exaggerated. ↩︎
