December 2004

The man who liked dogs

by Lindsay Thompson, Bar News Editor

’Midst the hubbub of the holiday season, take some time, find one of James Thurber’s books, and read a while. Thurber wrote, in the preface to The Thurber Carnival (1944), “James Thurber was born on a night of wild portent and high wind in the year 1894, at 147 Parsons Avenue, Columbus, Ohio. The house, which is still standing, bears no tablet or plaque of any description, and is never pointed out to visitors. Once Thurber’s mother, walking past the place with an old lady from Fostoria Ohio, said to her, ‘My son James was born in that house,’ to which the old lady, who was extremely deaf, replied, ‘Why, on the Thursday morning train, unless my sister is worse.’ Mrs. Thurber let it go at that.”

That’s Thurber for you. Life — slightly off-kilter. His masterworks are mainly stories of his youth in Columbus, like “The Night the Bed Fell,” “The Day the Dam Broke,” and “The Night the Ghost Got In.” Adam Gopnik’s midsummer appreciation of Thurber in The New Yorker called these stories “the Western Reserve of Kafka Country, a world of premonitions and stretched nerves and — there is no other phrase for it — constant existential dread. The point, of course, is that Thurber’s people are funny to us exactly because their dread is out of proportion to their essential security. But they don’t know that. He worked with material that he knew always touched the outer edge of craziness.

And yet the same edgy, complex mind came up with that simplest of creatures, the Thurber Dog. It began as an accident in a sketch: he drew a bloodhound’s head too big. To get the rest of the dog on the page, he had to park it on the stunted body of a basset hound. But it worked. “He may not be as keen as a genuine bloodhound,” Thurber wrote, “but his heart is as gentle; he does not want to hurt anybody or anything; and he loves serenity and heavy dinners, and wishes they would go on forever, like the brook.”

Thurber, widely thought to be the embodiment of the mild-mannered eccentric, cultivated that notion. At 50, he wrote of himself, “Thurber goes on as he always has, walking now a little more slowly, answering fewer letters, jumping at lighter sounds . . . he plans to spend his days reading Huckleberry Finn, raising poodles, laying down a wine cellar, playing boules, and talking to the little group of friends which he has managed somehow to take with him into his crotchety middle age.”

In his roundabout way, that snippet of Thurber autobiography reveals much of the real man while wrapping him in a comic mist. James Thurber was a hard man to live with or be friends with, struggling as he did with blindness, mental upheavals, and drink. He straddled a world that no longer was and a world that got progressively more baffling. Even as he chronicled America’s entry into the nervous, complicated, urban world or the post-war era, he clung to his past. In an elegant evocation of that past, he wrote, “The clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus.”

That’s Thurber for you, too. After you’ve read his stories for their laughter, read them again for his skill in writing. It’s brilliant. His long apprenticeship as a journalist (he didn’t publish anything first-rate until he was thirty-six, Gopnik notes) and sharing an office with E.B. White at The New Yorker, brought a clean, crisp line to his work. His words are as simple and elegant as his drawings — just a few strokes of the pen.

He had a thing about lawyers. Imagine having a client who could write his attorney, as Thurber did in 1949, “Up to 1934 my budget for barristers had consisted of $500 which I paid upon the occasion of my divorce from the Kappa Rosebud I married in 1921, when I was getting $35 a week. With the approach of the arthritic period of life, with its Book-of-the-Month-Club symptoms and its tendency to sell stories to the movies, I suddenly attained that primary mark of the successful casual writer: my annual legal fees assumed the proportions of those of a small business firm hiring fifteen people, nine men and six women. People began to make ballets, print dresses, fired enamel tea trays, beer coasters, recordings and oratorios out of the small things I had written and drawn. Writers began to accuse me of plagiarism, invasion of privacy, libel and un-American activities. This is known as success in America.”

Lawyers turn up in his stories and drawings as well. There’s the famous cartoon of an irritated lawyer standing before the bench, pulling up a life-sized kangaroo and suggesting to the startled witness, “Perhaps this will refresh your memory.”

He liked the line so well, he used it again, in a story.

“A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial.

“.  .  . ‘Perhaps this will refresh your memory.’ The District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. ‘Have you ever seen this before?’ Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. ‘This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80,’ he said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom. The judge rapped for order .  .  .  .”

His fondness for words — the luxurious combination of sounds and images they conjure — meant the verbiage of the law turned up in the most surprising places. In Thurber’s collection of drawings, A New Natural History, “Creatures of the Meadow” features a subterranean “99-year lease working its way slowly to the surface through the years.” Two types of a ferret-like species are billed as the Black Rage and the White-Faced Rage. “A Group of More or Less Pleasant Birds” includes the Barred Barrister. Leaf over a few pages to meet two “widely distributed rodents”: the bare-faced and white lies. There’s the Moot, a fish; and in “Plants of the Temperate Zone,” The False Witness and the Double Jeopardy.

I’ve always wondered that more lawyers aren’t Thurber fans. So much of the practice is like being trapped in one of his concoctions, with all of their bureaucratic mazes, houses that glare at their owners, and inexplicable dead ends, like “All right, have it your way — you heard a seal bark,” or the woman demanding of the hippo, “What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?” Some suggest Thurber is a period piece with no relevance to the present. After all, Thurber himself described The Thurber Carnival as “a selection of the stories and drawings the old boy did in his prime, a period which extended roughly from the year Lindbergh flew the Atlantic to the day coffee was rationed.”

Maybe so. But through it all is a resilience, a wry acceptance and sense of perspective people can use in this season and throughout the year.

“Every time is a time for humor,” Thurber wrote in a letter to E.B. White. “I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.” Looking back on his one-time officemate’s career years later, White disagreed. Quoting that passage in his 1961 obituary for Thurber in The New Yorker, he summed up the genius that was the nervous writer from Columbus: “During his happiest years, Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.”

Maybe I did hear a seal bark.

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Lindsay Thompson can be reached at tradelaw@thompson-law.com.

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