Thurber Recollected in Tranquillity

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 431, 26 September 1947, Page 20

Thurber Recollected in Tranquillity

THE THURBER CARNIVAL. Written and illustrated by James Thurber, Hamish Hamilton, Melbourne. N a! Wordsworthian rather than a Pickwickian sense, James Thurber has defined humour as "a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect,".and so far as it is applied to James Thurber’s humour this definition is both succinct and adequate. There is a lunatic poetic quality about his essays and short pieces for which it is difficult to find a parallel in the work of other writers. But this does not explain what it is in Thurber that makes us laugh, or what it is that sets him apart from his contemporaries and his predecessors. The essence of Thurber is a mixture. of the timeless and the timely. It is difficult to imagine him living-far less teaching full flower-other than in the complex environment of New York. He writes a lot about Columbus (Ohio), but his thoughts are the thoughts of the ‘Manhattan commuter, the dilemmas in which he is continually trapped are those of a push-button existence; he is most horribly ‘involved in civilisation. His characters do not possess cars, or radios, or automatic lighters, or any of the myriad other gadgets of 20th Century cwilisation. They are possessed by them. This modern comedy of frustration was summed up adequately enough by Thurber himself when he wrote the preface to My Life and Hard Times. It was difficult, he said, for the shortpiece writer to paint a picture of his ‘time. Your short-piece writer's time is not Walter Lippmann’s time, or Stuart Chase’s time, or Professor Einstein’s time. It is his own personal time, circumscribed by the short boundaries of his pain and his embarrassment, in which what happens to. his digestion, the rear axle of his car, and the confused flow of his relationships with six or eight persons and two or three buildings is of greater importance than what goes on in the nation or in the universe. He knows vaguely that the nation is not much good any mofe; he has tead that the crust of the earth is shrinking alarmingly and that the universe is growing steadily colder, but he does not believe that any of the three is in half as bad shape as he is. But if Thurber and his characters ' are the peculiar products of our own time, the secret of his appeal is as old as comedy itself. He delights us because we feel we are-never likely to be in half as bad shape as he is and to that extent he fortifies us in our own self-esteem. But we love him because we know, even if we do not admit it, that we are caught in the same net. We are (most of us) short-piece writers, and as Thurber points out, "the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end." The Thurber Carnival is a comprehensive selection of his best work. There are six new stories and an autobiographical preface which his admirers will read and re-read with delight. For the balance of the 350-odd pages, Thurber has contrived to be paid at least twice before, which is more than a lot of longpiece writers can say for themselves, | or their work. Almost all of the book good. The coyscious moralising of the

Fables for Our Time tends to elbowout their humour and some readers may find the illustrated poems (Excelsior, Barbara Frietchie, etc.), a bit laboured, but these suffer only by comparison with the-rest, The book is extensively illustrated by the author and about 50 pages at the end are given over to the quaint drawings-"they seem to have reached completion by some other route than the common one of intent’--which he has contributed to The New Yorker for some years past. ; In spite of the austerity of the paper and printing (which almost amounts to sabotage), The Thurber Carnival is a worthwhile purchase for anyone intefested in preserving some sense of pro«

portion in a turbulent world.

J.

M.