INTRODUCTION
This is the 31st and final episode of “James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide,” a rambling consideration of Thurber’s works, examining his life and work in some detail.. Ultimately, I’ll be publishing the whole thing as an ebook. The links to the first part and the most recent part are given below. Part 31 discusses Thurber’s last book Lanterns and Lances.
Although The Years With Ross required a great deal of work, particularly for a blind man weighed down with a wide variety of both physical and emotional burdens, there is no strain in the telling. In spirit, at least, Thurber could escape all those burdens, was free to return to the days of his youth and watch as he and his friends raced heedlessly into the unknown. He saw that world, and it was good.
But now that world was dead. The post-Ross New Yorker had little use for Thurber, particularly after The Years With Ross appeared.1Lanterns and Lances, his last collection published before his death,2 is predictably an uneven collection. Some of the pieces are little more than attempts by an aging humorist to keep his name before the public, with little more to talk about other than that the world doesn’t make sense to him any more.
Many of the pieces are simply frames for a collection of puns and other forms of word-play—the sort of thing that kept Thurber, and many a Thurber man, up all night. Thurber wrote such several pieces in the past—“Here Come the Tigers,” which appeared in The Beast in Me, and “Do You Want To Make Something Out Of It?” in Thurber Country. In Lanterns and Lances, both the frames and the puns have an increasingly random flavor.
Surprisingly, two of the pieces—“The Wings of Henry James” and “My Senegalese Birds and Siamese Cats”—are first-rate, as if Thurber had written them in 1940 and put them in a drawer, though in the case of “The Wings of Henry James” he certainly didn’t, because his jumping-off point was a fifties television adaptation of The Wings of the Dove. In the piece, Thurber reviews treatments of James’ work for the theater and television that he had seen over the years, making us wish that he had done more writing about the stage. For whatever reason, Ross decided that the New Yorker could only have one theater reviewer at a time. But at least Thurber was able to get in one last salute to his beloved Henry.
The other piece—“My Senegalese Birds and Siamese Cats”—is in a way even more touching, a very Thurberish tale of traveling with pets with his first wife (though of course he doesn’t tell us that), which could have appeared as a Mr. and Mrs. Monroe story, waaay back in the twenties. The blind old man, suffering from a thousand ailments, who had outlived or alienated almost everyone close to him, could, when the sun, moon, and stars (and, surely, the planets as well) were all properly aligned, write the way he did in the good old days.
In his private life, Thurber was so desperate for company, and so bereft of friends, that he and his wife would sit in restaurants like 21 more or less as tourist bait. If you came up nervously to pay your respects to the great James Thurber, he would invite you to sit and join him for drinks, even for dinner, regale you with stories about the time the bed fell on his father, and then pick up the tab!3 Death, when it came, was surely a blessing to Thurber. Though his probably too old to get all that excited about JFK, his assassination surely would have shattered him.4
Thurber once told an interviewer that he dreamed of being the greatest writer who ever lived. He didn’t make it, of course. Naturally, posterity will have the last word on Thurber’s continued relevance. The sort of humor that he wrote for a living has almost disappeared, swallowed up by television and movies. If there is a latter-day Harold Ross in New York, it’s probably Lorn Michaels. For me, obviously, Thurber’s humor has a remarkable freshness, and his serious pieces are unfairly neglected. The tall, skinny, bitchy kid from Columbus had the real stuff inside.
- Supposedly the current staff held a meeting in outrage over the book and discussed some form of unified protest, but William Shawn talked them out of it, “explaining,” in a truly malicious passive-aggressive manner, that Thurber was really very talented, as talented, in fact, as S.J. Perlman. Perlman, who wrote scripts for the Marx Brothers, was talented, but he was no James Thurber. ↩︎
- There are several posthumous collections as well. If you like Thurber, a lot, they’re worth exploring, but they’re hardly essential. ↩︎
- Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, was immensely proud of the fact that he never paid, either for his own drinks or anyone else’s. The great ones never do! ↩︎
- After the assassination, Washington writer Mary McGrory told Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irish to Irish, “We’ll never laugh again.” Moynihan replied, “We’ll laugh again, but we’ll never be young again.” ↩︎
