SHORT PIECES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 779, 25 June 1954, Page 13

SHORT PIECES

THURBER COUNTRY, by James Thurber; Hamish Hamilton, English price 12/6. "4 'T forty,’ wrote Thurber in the preface to My Lite and Hard Times, "my faculties. may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher’s." That was in 1933. Forty has come and gone long since, and the world surveyed through the old boy’s pebble lenses has become even more frantic, but in these 20 years no one has emerged to challenge his position as America’s finest humorous writer. Thurber Country-‘"‘a new collection of pieces about males and females, mainly of our own species"-conducts the reader by paths now delightfully familiar around the lunatic contemporary landscape of frustration and neurosis. Most of it is uproariously funny (Thurber’s owl-eye is one of the saving graces of American civilisation) but it is also firstclass writing. "The Figgerin’ of Aunt Wilma" is a masterly piece of observation and description, as well as a gem of good-humoured story-telling, while "Joyeux Noel, Mr. Durning"’-James Thurber v. the Bureau of Customsneatly presents the problem of Authority and the Individual. One or two of the pieces are a little too sharp and uncompromising in their observation of human frailty to invite laughter. "Teacher’s Pet"’-the best example of these-would, however, grace any modern short-story |

anthology.

J.

M.