The Case For Thurber

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The Case for Thurber

Copyright © 2003Robert G. Ferrell

I spent what an old bread commercial used to refer to as myAformative years

@in a

small town called Iowa Park, a few miles West of the city of Wichita Falls in North CentralTexas. It was a fairly sleepy little hamlet, with no real alarms or brouhahas that I canrecall (other than one bizarre phantom racial contretemps, but I=ll save that for anothertime). To be sure, there were diversions such as the annual water hose fight betweencompeting teams of volunteer firemen, who tried to push a bucket suspended from a wirestretched between two buildings over their opponent=s goal line with streams of water.The occasional carnival would also stop in the A&P Grocery parking lot for a few days onits way from Lubbock to Fort Worth.

I remember an exhibit in the side show of one such traveling amusement park. Itfeatured an extremely waxen figure of a man in a box made up to look like an iron lung

(complete with excessively wheezy electrically-operated bellows), except that thetransparent lid gave the effect of a man lying under a glass-topped coffee table. Thefigure was supposed to represent a victim of syphilis, of which disease I had never heardat the time. The impression I came away with indelibly etched on my consciousness wasthat syphilis made your skin look like wax. The cautionary horror of the contrived ironlung was completely lost on me.

One of the principal attractions in Iowa Park, from my point of view, was the publiclibrary. It was only five or six blocks down Cash street from my house, easily withinwalking or biking range. I had to pass the funeral home on the way, which was a bitdisturbing, but whenever possible I used the sidewalk on the other side of the street andthus slipped by outside the range of the majority of whatever sinister forces might be

lurking there. There was an old hotel, the tallest building in town, next to the funeralhome, and I used to think it must be the tallest building in the world. It was about 8 or 9stories, which seemed impossibly altitudinous to me.

The library was in the same building with city hall, the police station, and thevolunteer fire department. I think there might have been a church in there somewhere,as well. The entire building couldn=t have been more than 2,000 square feet, lookingback on it, but it seemed large and complex to a seven year old. I would wander up anddown the dozen or so rows of bookshelves, marveling that there could be so many booksin one place. While I might peruse widely though the collection, I always ended up in thehumor stacks. This was where I felt truly at home.

I no longer recall the title of every book in this section, although I could have rattled

them off without effort when I was younger and more mentally acute. The books thatstick out in my mind to this day, and through whose pages I crawled literally dozens oftimes during my childhood, are such tomes as AThis Simian World@ and ALife with Father@ by Clarence Day, AInside Benchley@ and AMy Ten Years in a Quandry@ by RobertBenchley, ALost in the Horse Latitudes@ by H. Allen Smith, and, most importantly,ALanterns and Lances,@ AMy World and Welcome To It,@ AAlarms and Diversions,@ andAThe Middle Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze@ by James Thurber. These are the menwho, more than any others, lent form and substance to my childhood, and sparked in me



a lifelong interest in setting pen to paper (or, these days, fingers to keyboard).Thurber, especially, seized hold of my imagination with such an iron grip that I

have not loosened it yet, nor would I wish to. I grew up thinking that life as an adult wouldbe spent in hotel lobbies and bars, drinking brandy or scotch (which are my two favoritelibations, incidentally) or having dinner at the Algonquin, whatever that was, exactly. I

thought the norm was spending three months out of the year in Bermuda, or at someresort such as The Hot Springs. I expected to be dealing with publishers and editors andlinotypists in my professional life, and trading witty comments with other writers atinnumerable cocktail parties.

I didn=t realize at the time that Thurber=s life was neither typical nor, truth be told,reproducible in the turbulent post-Vietnam era. His was a simpler time, with more easilyidentifiable villains and heroes, and he moved in circles that were so far removed from thepublic library in Iowa Park, Texas that they might as well have been in another galaxy.

Not only did I decide at an early age to be a writer, I wasn=t really aware there wereany other careers available. Sure, I saw the firemen and accountants and doctors andauto mechanics around me, but they all seemed somehow less real than the people in my

books. In Thurber I found not only peace, charm, wit, and grammatical competence, buta way of thinking about and looking at the world that seemed to me much saner than theones I saw around me. Jim was at peace with the contradictions of this mortal existence,and wasn=t afraid to write about them in glowing terms that set my little head spinning onnumerous occasions. He never went in for the gag, the pratfall, or the whopper; thelaughter he engendered was not the loud and boisterous expulsion that died away asquickly as it had come up, but rather the prolonged recurrent chuckle that washed overme time and time again, often reawakening hours or days later, apropos of nothing at all.Thurber got into my brain cells so deeply I could never dislodge him, even if I were unwiseenough to desire such a thoroughly execrable exorcism.

Thurber=s writings seem quaint and archaic to the modern reader, conspicuously

lacking as they are in shallow word-play, italics, extended episodes of capitalization, orthinly veiled (if veiled at all) references to sex. Thurber=s literate (in the traditionalsense), classically educated characters are as far removed from our current crop ofvocational school graduates as the Medieval battlefields were from the polite drawingrooms of Victorian England. Education in Thurber=s time meant not only learning skillswith which to earn one=s livelihood, but garnering an appreciation of society and the artsnecessary to live a gracious and full life, conscious not only of what may lie down the path,but of what has gone before.

Today college is about learning a trade, and nothing else. History, art, music,literature, and even political science are relegated to sparse electives, or even ignoredaltogether on the grounds that they are >irrelevant= to the degree plan. Life today is far

too hectic to devote the time to reading, absorbing, and reflecting that true literaturedemands. As a result, we have a generation whose average member probably couldn=teven finish one of Thurber=s books, let alone get any meaning out of it. If it isn=t availableas a AFlash@ presentation on a Web page or on DVD, it won=t get any exposure in ourthirty-second attention span species. We are a society of the moment, living as it wereconstantly on the edge of the future, unaware and contemptuous of the past. We are anation of semi-literates, a significant proportion of whom can =t even find our own countryon a globe. Is it any wonder we fall prey to politicians and other self-serving officials who



seek to mislead us about the threats posed by foreign governments or rogueorganizations? Ronald Reagan, for example, managed to capitalize on this ignorancewhen during the Iran-Contra scandal he argued that Nicaragua was somehow animminent threat to the United States, despite the fact that it lies nearly a thousand milessouth of the nearest U.S. border. As I write this, soldiers and civilians from not only our

own country but numerous others are dying daily, pointlessly in pursuit of a poorlyconceptualized and badly miscalculated goal of instilling the American form ofAdemocracy@ in a country which had been ruling itself successfully for millennia before ourgrand experiment in government of the poor by and for the rich began.

Thurber celebrated the little man even as he ridiculed him. He elevated the trialsand tribulations of an uncertain life to the status of social mythology for the commonpeople. Not for Jim the terrifying demons of sudden mortality, the violent conflict, thegrave injustice, but rather the mischievous imps of too cryptic technology andinterpersonal fumblery. He genuinely cared about events that were not at allnewsworthy, in the commercial senseBevents that characterize 99% of our lives. Whateffrontery.

In doing so, he allowed us to laugh at ourselves and at the absurd situations inwhich we daily find ourselves enmeshed as living testament to the sense of humor of theAlmighty. I am not so sure that history should not judge Thurber, or us, too harshly.

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The Case For Thurber