INTRODUCTION
PART 5
Thurber’s second book, The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities, consisting entirely of pieces done for the New Yorker, is a great step forward and presents Thurber almost fully formed, both as a humorist and as an observer of marital and mental dysfunction.
The book begins with a collection of short stories labeled “Mr. and Mrs. Monroe.” Thurber would work and rework the themes introduced in these stories—“Tea at Mrs. Armby’s,” “The Imperturbable Spirit,” “Mr. Monroe Outwits a Bat,” “The ‘Wooing of Mr. Monroe’,” “Mr. Monroe and the Moving Men,” “The Monroes Find a Terminal,” “Mr. Monroe Holds the Fort,” and “The Middle Years”—but never go beyond them.
The Monroes are of course James and Althea Thurber, a scarcely middle-aged couple who oscillate between the worlds of New York City and Connecticut. John Monroe is timid, absent-minded, and generally incompetent, but yet enough of a success in the fashionable world that a “very blonde lady” seeks to steal him away from Mrs. Monroe. Thurber invariably refers to them as “Mr. Monroe” and “Mrs. Monroe,” slightly depersonalizing them. Mr. Monroe has the blandest masculine first name in the English language, “John”,1 while Mrs. Monroe’s first name, I believe, never appears in the stories, perhaps an unconscious (or conscious) desire of Thurber to diminish or even erase her significance.
If I reread Bernstein’s biography of Thurber more thoroughly, I might know why he started writing “serious” stories, but, well, I haven’t. Thurber only completed about five thousand words on his abortive novel before giving up. Since there are any number of writers less talented than Thurber who made a living writing novels, he must have felt truly lost in the long form. He wrote serious sketches, none of them much longer than the longest of the “Monroe” stories, throughout his career, and could have put together an excellent volume with the title “Manhattan Sketches,” “Town and Country,” or “Cigarettes and Sorrows,” but he never did. With some effort, he could have written twenty-five Monroe stories and published a book called “The Monroes,” but he never did that either.
The tone of the eight Monroe stories that do exist vary significantly, and Thurber could have written them about “different” couples if he wanted to, but there was evidently a certain sense of identity with the Monroes that he wanted to hold on to. In the last story, Mr. Monroe is described as “tall and thin,” which was definitely Thurber, but Mrs. Monroe is supposed to be “little” (sometimes “little and lovely”), while Althea was five nine, well above average height for a woman.
The first story, “Tea at Mrs. Armby’s,” is unusual in that it is the wife who is misbehaving, and Mr. Monroe who surprisingly steps up to the plate and takes matters in hand. Mrs. Armby is an “old New York” lady and people are supposed to behave themselves at her teas, but the Monroe’s have already started drinking. Mrs. Monroe suddenly announces that her husband is a “collector,” saying first that he collects handkerchiefs and then pencils, expanding on this to say that “My husband has eight hundred and seventy-four thousand pencils,” a seriously awkward statement. She then goes beyond this to say “He has seventy hundred and eighty-nine hundred thousand.”
Mrs. Monroe is obviously looking for a fight. But Mr. Monroe, for the first and only time, is up to the challenge. He quickly claims that while he does collect pencils, his real passion is match folders, which “present a certain chronicle of the present—trend.”2 He not only seizes control of the conversation but manages to steer his wife into a taxi. Advantage, barely, Mr. Monroe.
The second story, “The Imperturbable Spirit,” is extremely funny, almost entirely comic, depicting the vanity of the “Thurber man.”
Mr. Monroe’s finicky, self-congratulatory imperturbability is about to be shattered, of course, by Mrs. Monroe, who cares little about God or ethics but does care about the dozen bottles of Benedictine that she intends to smuggle through customs. Since this story was written during the days of Prohibition, she’s not merely trying to evade the customs duty, but committing a crime. In a prefiguring of Walter Mitty, Mr. Monroe imagines himself on the dock, not of the New York harbor, but in court, as the state’s attorney reads out loud a “damning” letter, a letter of which poor Mr. Monroe has no recollection, yet a letter that is indisputably written in his own hand!
Fortunately, it does not come to that, and the Monroes return home with Mrs. Monroe’s treasure undiscovered. When they get there, however, Mrs. Monroe realizes that her hatbox—a pretty big one, apparently, because it has three bottles in it—though it passed through customs, was left on the dock!
Mr. Monroe bravely, though not very wisely, decides to assert himself and volunteers to get the hatbox. His journey gives us one of Thurber’s most persistent, sometimes brutal, themes: the relationships between poor, sensitive gentlemen like Mr. Monroe and the lower classes.
- He is never addressed as “John,” but his wife refers to him by that name when having a conversation with a woman who is trying to steal him away from her. ↩︎
- Back in the heyday of cigarette smoking, virtually every establishment, from the Waldorf-Astoria to Woolworths, gave away what I would have called matchbooks with personalized covers and I’m sure many people collected them. Matchbooks from high-end clubs and hotels could be very fancy. ↩︎
