INTRODUCTION
This is the 24th 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 24 is given over almost entirely to discussions of two of Thurber’s “serious stories, “The Cane in the Corridor” and “Am I Not Your Rosalind?”.
“The Cane in the Corridor” is classic late Thurber, depicting, very largely through dialogue, an alcohol-laden collision among old friends, the action usually being pushed by a cunning male towards some sort of catharsis, though often a very unattractive one, very much in the manner of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It seems that Thurber became a mean drunk as soon as he learned that he could get away with it. When he wasn’t being “unbearable,” à la Kirk in “One Is a Wanderer,” he was being manipulative, provoking fights and discord, or, occasionally, whiny, bemoaning his fucked-up family and fucked-up childhood.
“The Cane in the Corridor” has only three characters, “Joe Fletcher,” freshly out of the hospital, “George Minturn,” the friend who didn’t visit him, and George’s wife, who I believe is never given the dignity of a first name, rather like Mrs. Monroe. Fletcher rambles on with feigned artlessness about “post-operative mental states”—how a man can lie in bed “pulling the easy little meanings out of life as if they were daisy petals”—while Minturn writhes defenselessly, maimed by guilt.
Minturn suggests that they go to a club, but of course Fletcher won’t hear of that. Mrs. Minturn keeps trying to change the subject, but of course Fletcher won’t hear of that either. He just wants to browbeat poor Minturn into guzzling more and more brandy until he’s drunk enough and vulnerable enough for Fletcher to achieve the final humiliation.
As a joke Thurber makes Fletcher and Minturn stolid, practical men, who first met not at the New Yorker but the Cleveland Telephone Company, where they or at least Fletcher were employed as engineers, although George is so high strung that the mere mention of Carson McCuller’s name is enough to upset him, and surely in 1944 not many people even knew who Carson was.
Fletcher’s final revenge is to imagine his revenge—at a time when George is in the hospital. Fletcher, unlike George, will visit his friend every day, bringing him those inane things that people bring you in the hospital—“puzzles that won’t work, linked nails that won’t come apart, pigs in clover in which the little balls are glued to the bottom of the box. I bring you mystery novels in Yiddish, and artificial flowers made of wire and beads, and horehound candy.” But the final touch will be Fletcher’s cane, going “tap, tap, tap,” in the corridor, to which George will have to listen.
But what sort of cane goes “tap, tap, tap”? The cane of a blind man. We’re never given a hint that Fletcher might be blind. At the end of the story he goes out to hail a cab—not a very easy task for a blind man. The point of the story is essentially a private joke.
Thurber’s next book, The Beast in Me and Other Animals (1948), has a rare, “happy/serious” story, “Am I Not Your Rosalind?,” about two couples, George and Ann Thorne and Fred and Lydia Stanton, awash in alcohol and intrigue, which surprisingly leads to contentment rather than grief. George is the Thurberish schemer, both relentless and fastidious in his analysis of the infinite foibles of women, particularly those with both cash and leisure. The big twist comes when it’s discovered that both women, who are the same age, played Rosalind as seniors in high-school productions of As You Like It. George immediately hatches a scheme to have the girls record a speech from the play on his new wire recorder, or “sound mirror.”
It appears at first that the scheme will go nowhere, but George is once more relentless, herding the others along and plying them with a flood of alcohol, boxing them so that they won’t be able to escape without provoking an open, obvious, loud, and prolonged “scene,” a sort of gamesmanship that Thurber describes with obvious pleasure and in which, it appears, he frequently indulged in real life. Because what counts is winning. “Good sport” is simply the polite term for “loser,” which is what most people are, and which is why the term is so popular. Losers can’t handle the truth, which is why they’re losers. Thurber idolized his guileless Dad, but did not want to be like him.
As George inches his guests towards his desired goal—everyone gathered around the “sound mirror” too drunk to resist his blandishments—Thurber throws in a variety of ephemera—repeated mention of Cincinnati Reds pitcher Ewell Blackwell, whose odd name probably appealed to him, and a reproduction of Dufy’s “Marne,” whatever that is, not to mention an editorial in the Phi Psi Shield on “The Meaning of Fraternity in Wartime,” as well as a “Jane Cowl gesture.”1 Once George actually gets the folks around the machine ready to record something—obviously, he can’t launch his “Rosalind” plot immediately—he’s confronted by a Thurberish problem: how to operate the damn machine, particularly when drunk. Ann, of course, is sure that he’ll screw it up, but George, it seems, is ready to disassemble and reassemble a Swiss watch if it will allow him to get the “girls” to record. And so he does get the damn thing to work, despite Ann’s repeated and obviously resented giggles.
Thurber gives bravura accounts of the two renditions, relying heavily on metaphors drawn from boxing, that seem to give the palm to Ann, though, since we understand Lydia’s version largely through George’s perception of it—“It reminded Thorne of the first few rounds of the second Louis-Conn fight”—it’s not absolutely clear that Ann’s the winner.
Once the speeches are over and the two couples go their separate ways, Thurber waxes suddenly misogynistic, portraying both women as vulgar and catty and castrating, humiliating their men and taking even greater delight in ridiculing each other, while the men are not much better. But George at least is in a good mood, quoting Shakespeare and snickering at Fred. He an Ann enter their bedroom “arm in arm.” Most remarkable of all is that this Thurber couple actually sleep in the same room, something I can’t recall in any of his other stories.
The genesis of “Am I Not Your Rosalind?” was the discovery by Thurber that both of his wives had performed the role in high school, along with, perhaps, an occasion when he had lunch with both of them and managed to get them both drunk, something that surely amused him.
- Jane Cowl was a Broadway actress of the time. It’s hard to imagine that many people would know what a “Jane Cowl gesture” could be. ↩︎
