Thurber: Writings and Drawings

I grew up with a couple of little books of Thurber highlights, and had the idea of him as an off-beat humorist, someone who would put surreal seals and hippopotami into domestic scenes and delicately undermine the staid course of mid-century American mediocrity by giving downtrodden husbands an escape into the world of the imagination (“Walter Mitty”) and office-workers a chance to fantasise about taking revenge on evil co-workers (“The cat-bird seat”). When you read him in bulk like this, you get a different perspective: the subversive humour is still there, of course, but it’s part of a systematic, organised journalistic career in which Thurber came to see that making people laugh was a marketable skill he had. Like any show more successful humorist, he had to be a disciplined, organised writer who could cut everything unnecessary out of his work and avoid treading on editors’ or readers’ toes, while meeting deadlines and wordcounts. Seeing “behind the scenes” might take some of the magic away, but it gives you more admiration for his professionalism.

I enjoyed revisiting the celebrated cartoons and comic stories, of course, but some of the most interesting writing here turned out to be from My life and hard times (1933), about his childhood and adolescence in Columbus, Ohio, and The years with Ross (1958), about the early days of the New Yorker when he worked with Harold Ross and E B White. In both cases there is obviously a certain amount of embroidery going on — Thurber is not the sort of person to let boring facts get in the way of a good anecdote — but he manages to give some fascinating glimpses into what it was like living in a provincial US city before the Great War and into how the world of weekly magazines worked in the 1920s and 30s.

Otherwise, there are a few fun things here I didn’t know about, like the apocalyptic graphic fable The last flower (1939), and an earlier graphic fable The race of life (1932), in which a protean family of man woman and child suffers all kinds of normal adventures (weather, hunger, etc.) before coming face to face with a totally unexplained Giant Rabbit. Both of these are also fun because of the way they manage to sneak in large amounts of nudity without ever being prurient or erotic about it. show less

I was in Portland for a week, and reading this book for an hour every morning over coffee in the lobby of Fifth Avenue Suites ranks as one of the most pleasant reading experiences I've ever had. Many of Thurber's stories take place in hotel lobbies, so the synchronicity was palpable. Thurber himself is much more acerbic and witty than I remember him from elementary school. Rediscovering him through this collection of his best pieces, assembled by Garrison Keillor, was a joy. His autobiographical pieces on growing up in Ohio are hilarious stand-outs. Comedic intelligence in American prose does exist, and this is a good place to start exploring it.

Vintage Thurber, collected from his many writings. Includes the entire Last Flower parable, which is a wonderful short work illustrated with the characteristically minimalist drawings that create additional delight in these works of humor. The work is at its best when he's writing about his childhood and the strange shenanigans and goings on of a very chaotic extended family. Although some of the works will not date well, because of the slang of the time, and numerous references to the technology of an earlier era, for those who enjoy turn of the century humor and dry wit, these works are an exercise in sheer delight. Some of his cartoons, though, fall totally flat, probably because they related to everyday events of the time, rather show more than the page-turners that entered the history books. Still, it is unusual that a book of this length (nearly 1000 pages) doesn't begin to feel too long until the final 200 pages, and that is a testament to the talent of the author (and probably the editor, as well). show less