THE YEARS WITH THURBER.(the life and work of James Thurber)(Critical Essay)

From 1933, "Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife," by James Thurber

From 1933, "The Night the Bed Fell," by James Thurber

Is the name of James Thurber, once a byword for humor, slowly slipping from the national consciousness? Only half a dozen years ago, the Library of America published a thousand-page volume of his work, edited by Garrison Keillor, and very recently a massive collection of his letters has appeared. But, despite all this official appreciation, a doubt arises: Is Thurber still being widely read and enjoyed? The nod from the Library of America was meant as a coronation, but nobody can be funny for a thousand pages, and Thurber's writing--occasional by definition--resists so exhaustive and formal an act of exhumation and canonization.

As for the new collection of his letters, your pleasure in it will probably depend on how much of the Thurber literature you've been exposed to--I mean the literature about him, not the literature by him. If this is your first dip, you're likely to be both fascinated and disturbed. But if you've been exposed to Harrison Kinney's twelve-hundred-page biography, or Burton Bernstein's five-hundred-page biography, or even Neil A. Grauer's derivative two-hundred-page biography, to say nothing of Brendan Gill's rancid portrait of Thurber in "Here at The New Yorker" and a previous collection of letters co-edited by Thurber's second wife, Helen, you're in familiar territory. Because the structure of the new book is chronological, it reads like a highly selective and unsatisfactory autobiography, and because the Kinney and Bernstein biographies made such heavy use of the letters, it can't help echoing them. Still, although "The Thurber Letters"--edited by Mr. Kinney "with Rosemary A. Thurber," Thurber's daughter (Simon & Schuster; $40)--doesn't add much to the over-all story, it does add to our understanding of this complicated and tormented man.

Thurber's letters aren't crafted, ornamented, polished. They're completely natural--as relaxed as conversation. They're the overflow of a professional writer to whom writing is so basic, so easy, and so necessary that he can't stop just because he's not being paid for it. Any experience or idea that comes to him is instantly down on paper and in the mail. One starts to get the impression that nothing was real for Thurber until he had written it out, and that the writing was more important to him than whatever it was he was writing about. Even when his sight was almost entirely gone, he was scrawling away, a few words to a page. "There is no substitute for the delight of writing," he wrote to a friend. And he told Harold Ross, "If I couldn't write, I couldn't breathe."

The letters don't stint; they rush forward headlong, especially when he's writing to people he cares about, like E. B. White, to whom, at least in the early years, he burbles on and on, throwing in anything and everything that's happened to him. In a letter written from Paris in 1937, for instance, he informs White that "what we need is writers who deal with the individual plight and who at the same time do not believe in [Walter] Lippmann"; that "David Garnett has come out with the quiet announcement that I am the most original writer living"; that his brother William is "losing one of his testicles at 43"; that he has figured out a way to bring Helen fresh orange juice every morning from the Cafe de Flore; that he hasn't had a common cold "since [Colonel] House and [Woodrow] Wilson were friends"; that he's arranged it so "that when the bombs start to fall Helen will lean out the window and say, 'Cut that out! My husband is trying to write a letter!' "; that H. G. Wells "has got the idea that he is three or four writers"; that "the sheep tick knows what he is doing"; that he's been told that Rosemary "looks like me now, poor child, but then it's possible for a girl to look like Ross or [Joel] Sayre and still be lovely. This is one of God's great dispensations." And he adds--as if we hadn't noticed--that "this letter has not held together in any way." Yet it does hold together, through its high spirits and sureness of touch. Even at top speed and at his most offhand, Thurber can hardly put a word wrong.

His need to communicate by letter revealed itself from the start. Through his early and mid-twenties, he was pouring out his heart to his closest friend, Elliott Nugent, who had rescued him from failure and oblivion at Ohio State University. Nugent--who went on to become a successful actor, director, and playwright (he and Thurber were to co-write the hit play "The Male Animal")--was by far the more worldly of the two young men, and it's painful to imagine what he made of Thurber's endless callow effusions about his sadly ineffectual love life, torn between two women with neither of whom he had more than a fantasy relationship. "I once wrote this wonderful girl a letter, 7 years after we parted back in the grammar grades, --or three years ...