INTRODUCTION
This is the 23rd 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 23 continues the discussion of Thurber’s 1942 collection, My World and Welcome to It.
In a mood precisely the opposite of “The Whip-poor-will” is absolutely my favorite Thurber casual “Backwards and Downwards with Mr. Punch.” (The title is a parody of a New Yorker “Department,” “Upward and Onward with the Arts.”)
Some readers these days may not even be familiar with Punch, the once legendary comic British weekly that flourished throughout the long reign of Queen Victoria and, remarkably enough, almost managed to make it into the third millennium, not expiring until 1992, despite being repeatedly outflanked during the series of cultural revolutions that have occurred since the “Sixties.”1 On vacation in Bermuda, which had become a favorite haunt for him and his second wife, Thurber stumbled across “two dozen immense bound volumes” of the magazine, running from 1841 through 1891, an incredible treasure trove for a bookish lad. Fifty years of ephemera on which to float! Thurber enjoyed himself immensely, savoring the frequent put-downs of American gaucheries and, most of all, the endless old gags. Early Punch cartoons were essentially illustrated jokes with several lines of dialogue below the drawing, and Thurber provides several classics.
The Curate: O dear! O dear! Drunk again, Jones! Drunk again! And in broad daylight, too!
Jones: Lorsh (hic) Whatsh the oddsh? Sho—Sh—Sho am I!
Ticket Collector: Now then, make haste! Where’s your ticket?
Bandsman (refreshed): Aw’ve lost it!
Ticket Collector: Nonsense! Feel in your pockets. Ye cannot hev lost it.
Bandsman: Aw cannot? Why, man, Aw’ve lost the big drum!
To which I will add an Edwardian cartoon that showed two grinning working class lads surrounded by a crowd of aloof toffs in a first-class railway carriage.
Tom: Lor, Bill, we’re in a first-class carriage!
Bill: And me with me odd socks on!
About a third of My World and Welcome to It is given over to a collection of Thurber’s casuals set in France, a salute to that country now overrun by Nazis, a source of great horror to all Francophiles like Thurber. To my mind, these are “typical” New Yorker casuals, well written but trivial. Harold Ross desired these to be like “dinner conversation,” and they are.
Thurber followed My World and Welcome to It with Many Moons, the first of his children’s books, which were quite successful, though I’ve never liked them. Writing for children, Thurber allows the Walter Mittys of the world to win—the exact opposite of his “adult” humor. The fantasy and word play, not always held in check in his “real world” work, tend to be over-indulged, and, often, both sadism and despair seem to be waiting in the wings, to consume the actors once the play is over.
Much better was Men, Women, and Dogs (1943), a cartoon collection that contained many of his most brilliant cartoons, and including both “The War Between Men and Women” and “The Masculine Approach,” a rare (for him) look at the absurdities that women must suffer at the hands of men.
For a variety of reason—Thurber’s increasing fame, the passage of time, and his decreased output as a result of his frequent illnesses—a Thurber compendium made sense, and A Thurber Carnival (1945) surpassed all expectations, selling over 500,000 copies and allowing Thurber to enjoy “real” financial success. The book contained only six new pieces, including one of his most famous comic stories, “The Catbird Seat,” enshrining the country boy metaphors of the once legendary “Red” Barber, who did the radio coverage of the Brooklyn Dodgers, as an insect is preserved in amber.2 Another of the six, “The Cane in the Corridor,” is quite interesting and autobiographical, a concealed attack on Wolcott Gibbs, whose terror of hospitals caused him to not visit Thurber during any of his stays, which unsurprisingly infuriated Thurber.
Gibbs was an almost sacred figure to Thurber, scarcely second to Ross and E.B. White in his affection. In fact, Gibbs was easier for Thurber to like, because Gibbs did not represent authority, as Ross did, or competition, as White did. But those who are helpless with pain find it difficult, if not impossible, to forgive the healthy for not sharing their burden. Because Gibbs did not even attempt to do so, Thurber felt, or at least showed, no compunction in taking his revenge.
- Punch’s advantage in its early days was that it was much more “respectable” than most of the satirical publications of the time, which still had the unbuttoned flavor of the eighteenth century. ↩︎
- I don’t know if Thurber found Barber irritating in real life. Like many humorists in the twenties and thirties he was envious of the enormous success of another country boy, Will Rogers, the “Cowboy Philosopher.” Rogers did know how to sell himself, but he was a genuine talent as well, his career cut short when he was killed in a plane crash with once legendary aviator Wiley Post. (The further back you go, the more the once legendarys pile up.) ↩︎
