James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide, Part 25

INTRODUCTION

*This is the 25th 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 25 continues discussion of Thurber’s collection *The Beast in Me.

PART 1

PART 24

The Beast in Me also contains “The Waters of the Moon,” the prototype of a story that Thurber would write frequently in his later years, written in the first person with himself as a character, using a deliberately affected style (“I had broken away from an undulant discussion of kinetic dimensionalism”) that would fail to make up for a lack of invention. Illness and age and blindness were having their effect on Thurber. He was beginning to retreat obsessively into word play for its own sake, or, rather, to make this long-running private obsession the subject matter of his work, and this sort of self-reflection tends to exhaust itself in a hurry.

These tendencies are on display in “The Beast in the Dingle,” Thurber’s “definitive” parody of late Henry James. I reread some of The Ambassadors in connection with this piece, and reading real late Henry James irritated me so much that the mere thought of reading faux late Henry broke my spirit entirely. If you enjoy late Henry James, be my guest. You’re probably in for a treat.

But Thurber’s self-absorption wasn’t all bad. “The Lady on the Bookcase,” a discussion of his own cartoons, is a delight. Usually, “Writers on Writing,” not to mention “Writers on Their Own Writing,” is dreadful, but here, as on other occasions, Thurber’s light touch—one of the very lightest in the business—carries it off.

Thurber has another attractive piece, “Look Homeward, Jeannie,” about a dog that was not so lovable or heroic, one who was kind of a bitch, actually. Jeannie was Thurber and Althea’s first dog—the one whose disappearance caused him to delay returning to New York, the “act of a sis” that earned Ross’s great contempt—and, in her own cunning way, perhaps the “worst” dog Thurber ever owned. She didn’t bite people, like Muggs, but she was, most shockingly and undoglike, not “loyal.” She took first the birth of the Thurber’s daughter and then the acquisition of a second dog (the much mourned Medve) as proof that the Thurbers no longer loved her. Well, if the ones you’re with don’t love you, you find someone who does, right? When the Thurbers were summering somewhere—Martha’s Vineyard, or some such—Jeannie took to disappearing during the day, returning each night. Thurber, curious as to her behavior, followed her, and discovered that she was running around to the other cottages and “begging.” She could sit up and beg—her “one talent,” Thurber tells us, ungenerously. Maybe Jeannie was right to leave.

The Beast in Me has the longest example of Thurber’s work as a reporter, “Soapland,” an exploration of the world of radio soap operas that ran as a five-part series in the New Yorker. This was the first serious look at popular culture that I had ever read, stumbling across it as a teenager on Thanksgiving Day in 1960.¹ Radio was a bit like the Internet when it first appeared. It had an insatiable appetite for “content,” and there were people who, as now, were willing to work for nothing simply for the opportunity to get their stuff on the air. In the brief heyday of network radio, running somewhere from the late twenties to the late forties, successful writers churned out enormous quantities of copy and, sometimes, earned enormous sums of money, both topics of great interest to old-fashioned print folks like Thurber.

Writers had significantly more clout in radio than in the movies. Aside from the actors themselves, they were, practically, the whole show, and radio actors rarely achieved the fame of movie stars. The cast of the most famous show on radio, “Amos and Andy,” once immensely “controversial” and now just about forgotten, consisted of two white guys who did the voices for a dozen “lovable” black characters. Although the two—Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll—obviously commanded excellent salaries, they could not achieve the personal fame of movie stars.

In “Soapland,” Thurber chronicles with obvious though restrained fascination the lives of entrepreneurial writers who start out writing five scripts a day for nothing and continue that pace for years while their salaries mount to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. He describes in some detail how the oppressed writers of radio eventually organized, in approved thirties fashion, to obtain better working conditions, better pay, and more control over their own work. The unspoken subtext—which Thurber finally discussed a decade later in his The Years With Ross—is that this did not happen at the New Yorker. By the time Thurber was writing the “Soapland” pieces, it was clear that the New Yorker was 1) quite prosperous, and 2) that it had been that way ever since the early or mid-thirties, when Ross was telling its writers and cartoonists that he was sorry but he just couldn’t afford to pay them as much as he wanted to.

PART 26