JAMES THURBER
WRITINGS AND DRAWINGS
THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
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Volume compilation, notes and chronology copyright © 1996 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 96-5833
For cataloging information, see end of Notes.
ISBN 1-883011-22-1 (Print)
ISBN 978-1-883011-22-2 (Print)
The Library of America—90
James Thurber’s Writings and Drawings is kept in print by a gift from
THE GEOFFREY C. HUGHES FOUNDATION
to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, established by The Library of America to ensure that every volume in the series will be permanently available.
GARRISON KEILLOR
SELECTED THE CONTENTS FOR THIS VOLUME
Contents
from Is Sex Necessary? (1929)
The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism
The Lilies-and-Bluebird Delusion
from The Owl in the Attic (1931)
Mr. Monroe Holds the Fort
The Pet Department
The Seal in the Bedroom (1932)
Women and Men
The Bloodhound and the Bug
The Race of Life
Miscellany
The Bloodhound and the Hare
Tennis
Parties
The Collapse of Civilization
My Life and Hard Times (1933)
Preface to a Life
The Night the Bed Fell
The Car We Had to Push
The Day the Dam Broke
The Night the Ghost Got In
More Alarms at Night
A Sequence of Servants
The Dog That Bit People
University Days
Draft Board Nights
A Note at the End
from The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935)
The Departure of Emma Inch
There’s an Owl in My Room
The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery
The Private Life of Mr. Bidwell
Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife
A Portrait of Aunt Ida
The Luck of Jad Peters
I Went to Sullivant
If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox
How to See a Bad Play
The Funniest Man You Ever Saw
The Black Magic of Barney Haller
Something to Say
Snapshot of a Dog
The Evening’s at Seven
The Greatest Man in the World
One Is a Wanderer
A Box to Hide In
from Let Your Mind Alone! (1937)
Let Your Mind Alone!
Pythagoras and the Ladder
Destructive Forces in Life
The Case for the Daydreamer
A Dozen Disciplines
How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work
Anodynes for Anxieties
The Conscious vs. The Unconscious
Sex ex Machina
Sample Intelligence Test
Miscellaneous Mentation
The Breaking Up of the Winships
Nine Needles
A Couple of Hamburgers
Aisle Seats in the Mind
Mrs. Phelps
Wild Bird Hickok and His Friends
Doc Marlowe
The Admiral on the Wheel
The Last Flower (1939)
from Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940)
The Mouse Who Went to the Country
The Little Girl and the Wolf
The Two Turkeys
The Tiger Who Understood People
The Fairly Intelligent Fly
The Lion Who Wanted to Zoom
The Very Proper Gander
The Moth and the Star
The Shrike and the Chipmunks
The Seal Who Became Famous
The Hunter and the Elephant
The Scotty Who Knew Too Much
The Bear Who Let It Alone
The Owl Who Was God
The Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing
The Stork Who Married a Dumb Wife
The Green Isle in the Sea
The Crow and the Oriole
The Elephant Who Challenged the World
The Bird and the Foxes
The Courtship of Arthur and Al
The Hen Who Wouldn’t Fly
The Glass in the Field
The Tortoise and the Hare
The Patient Bloodhound
The Unicorn in the Garden
The Rabbits Who Caused All the Trouble
The Hen and the Heavens
Excelsior
Lochinvar
Curfew Must Not Ring To-Night
Barbara Frietchie
from My World—And Welcome To It (1942)
The Whip-Poor-Will
The Macbeth Murder Mystery
The Man Who Hated Moonbaum
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Interview with a Lemming
You Could Look It Up
The Gentleman in 916
The Letters of James Thurber
Here Lies Miss Groby
A Ride with Olympy
from Men, Women and Dogs (1943)
Selected Cartoons
The Masculine Approach
The War Between Men and Women
from The Thurber Carnival (1945)
The Catbird Seat
The Cane in the Corridor
from The Beast in Me and Other Animals (1948)
The Princess and the Tin Box
The Lady on the Bookcase
A Call on Mrs. Forrester
A New Natural History
The 13 Clocks (1950)
from The Thurber Album (1952)
Daguerreotype of a Lady
Lavender with a Difference
from Thurber Country (1953)
File and Forget
Do You Want to Make Something Out of It?
A Final Note on Chanda Bell
Teacher’s Pet
from Thurber’s Dogs (1955)
from Further Fables for Our Time (1956)
The Bluebird and His Brother
The Lover and His Lass
The Bachelor Penguin and the Virtuous Mate
The Peacelike Mongoose
The Trial of the Old Watchdog
from Alarms and Diversions (1957)
The First Time I Saw Paris
from The Years with Ross (1958)
A Dime a Dozen
The First Years
Every Tuesday Afternoon
The Talk of the Town
Miracle Men
“Sex Is an Incident”
Uncollected Pieces
An American Romance (1927)
A Visit from St. Nicholas (1927)
Tom the Young Kidnapper, or, Pay Up and Live (1933)
How to Relax While Broadcasting (1934)
E.B.W. (1938)
from I Believe (1939)
I Break Everything I Touch (1941)
Chronology
Note on the Texts
Acknowledgments
Notes
FROM
IS SEX NECESSARY?
OR
WHY YOU FEEL THE WAY YOU DO
The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism
IN NO other civilized nation are the biological aspects of love so distorted and transcended by emphasis upon its sacredness as they are in the United States of America. In China it’s all biology. In France it’s a mixture of biology and humor. In America it’s half, or two-thirds, psyche. The Frenchman’s idea, by and large, is to get the woman interested in him as a male. The American idea is to point out, first of all, the great and beautiful part which the stars, and the infinite generally, play in Man’s relationship to women. The French, Dutch, Brazilians, Danes, etc., can proceed in their amours on a basis entirely divorced from the psyche. The Chinese give it no thought at all, and never have given it any thought. The American would be lost without the psyche, lost and a little scared.
As a result of all this there is more confusion about love in America than in all the other countries put together. As soon as one gets the psychical mixed up with the physical—a thing which is likely to happen quite easily in a composing-room, but which should not happen anywhere else at all—one is almost certain to get appetite mixed up with worship. This is a whole lot like trying to play golf with a basketball, and is bound to lead to maladjustments.
The phenomenon of the American male’s worship of the female, which is not so pronounced now as it was, but is still pretty pronounced, is of fairly recent origin. It developed, in fact, or reached its apex, anyway, in the early years of the present century. There was nothing like it in the preceding century. Throughout the nineteenth century the American man’s amatory instincts had been essentially economic. Marriage was basically a patriotic concern, the idea being to have children for the sake of the commonwealth. This was bad enough, but nevertheless it is far less dangerous to get the commonwealth mixed up with love than to get the infinite mixed up with love.
There was not a single case of nervous breakdown, or neurosis, arising from amatory troubles, in the whole cycle from 1800 to 1900, barring a slight flare-up just before the Mexican and Civil wars. This was because love and marriage and children stood for progress, and progress is—or was—a calm, routine business. “Mrs. Hopkins,” a man would say to the lady of his choice (she was a widow in this case)—“Mrs. Hopkins, I am thinking, now that George* has been dead a year, you and I should get married and have offspring. They are about to build the Union Pacific, you know, and they will need men.” Because parents can’t always have men-children when they want them, this led to almost as many women as men working on the Union Pacific, which in turn led to the greater stature of women in the present Northwest than in any other part of the nation. But that is somewhat beside the point. The point is that men and women, husbands and wives, suitors and sweethearts, in the last century lived without much sentiment and without any psycho-physical confusion at all. They missed a certain amount of fun, but they avoided an even greater amount of pother (see Glossary). They did not worry each other with emotional didoes. There was no hint of Pleasure-Principle. Everything was empiric, almost somatic.†
This direct evasion of the Love Urge on the part of Americans of the last century was the nuclear complex of the psycho-neurosis as we know it today, and the basis for that remarkable reaction against patriotic sex which was to follow so soon after the Spanish-American war.
At the turn of the century, the nation was on a sound economic basis and men had the opportunity to direct their attention away from the mechanics of life to the pleasures of living. No race can leap lightly, however, from an economic value to an emotional value. There must be a long period of Übertragung, long and tedious. Men were not aware of this, thirty years ago, because the science of psychology was not far advanced, but nature came to their aid by supplying a temporary substitute for an emotional sex life, to tide them over during the period of Übertragung. This substitute took the form of games. Baseball assumed a new and enormous importance, prize-fighting reached its heyday; horse-racing became an absorption, bicycling a craze.
Fig. 1. Sex Substitutes (Übertragung Period): Baseball.
Now women, naturally intraverts, could not easily identify themselves with baseball or prize-fighting (they admired Christy Mathewson and Terry McGovern, but that was about all); they took but slowly to horse-racing; and they giggled and acted the fool when they first tried to balance themselves on a bicycle. They drew away from men and from men’s concerns, therefore—there was no more of the old Union Pacific camaraderie—and began to surround the mere fact of their biological destiny with a nimbus of ineffability. It got so that in speaking of birth and other natural phenomena, women seemed often to be discussing something else, such as the Sistine Madonna or the aurora borealis. They became mysterious to themselves and to men; they became suddenly, in their own eyes, as capable of miracle and as worthy of worship as Juno and her sisters. This could not go on. The conflict was ineluctable.
Fig. 2. Sex Substitutes (Übertragung Period): Bowling.
When men, wearied of games, turned to women with that urgency so notable in the American male for its simplicity and directness, they found them unprepared for acceptance and surrender. The process of adjustment in courtship and in marriage became more involved than it had ever been before in the history of the country, if not in the history of the world. The new outdoors type of American man, with all his strength and impetuosity, was not easily to be put off. But the female, equipped with a Defense far superior in polymorphous ingenuities to the rather simple Attack of the male, was prepared. She developed and perfected the Diversion Subterfuge. Its purpose was to put Man in his place. Its first manifestation was fudge-making.
FUDGE-MAKING
“The female, equipped with a Defense far superior in polymorphous ingenuities to the rather simple Attack of the male, developed, and perfected, the Diversion Subterfuge. The first manifestation of this remarkable phenomenon was fudge-making.”
The effectiveness of fudge-making in fending off the male and impressing him with the female’s divine unapproachability can not be over-estimated. Neither can its potentiality as a nuclear complex. The flitting from table to stove, the constant necessity of stirring the boiling confection, the running out-of-doors to see if the candy had cooled and hardened, served to abort any objective demonstrations at all on the part of the male. He met this situation with a strong Masculine Protest. He began to bring a box of candy with him when he called, so that there would not be any more fudge-making. These years constituted the great Lowney’s era in this country. Brought back to where she had started, face to face with the male’s simple desire to sit down and hold her, the female, still intent upon avoidance of the tactual, retaliated by suggesting Indoor Pastimes—one of the greatest of all Delay Mechanisms. All manner of parlor games came into being at this period, notably charades,* which called for the presence of other persons in the room (Numerical Protection). The American male’s repugnance to charades, which is equaled, perhaps, by his repugnance to nothing else at all, goes back to those years. The Masculine Protest, in this case, was a counter-suggestion of some games of his own, in which there was a greater possibility of personal contact. His first suggestions were quite primitive, such as that it would be fun to count up to a hundred by kissing. The female’s response was the famous one of Osculatory Justification. There must be, she decreed, more elaborate reasons for kissing than a mere exhib
ition of purposeless arithmetical virtuosity. Thus Post Office and Pillow were finally devised, as a sort of compromise. Neither was satisfactory to either sex. The situation became considerably strained and relationships finally trailed off into the even less satisfactory expedient of going for long rides on a tandem bicycle, which has had its serious effects upon the nature of the American man. He liked, for one thing, to do tricks on a bicycle. The contraption was new to him, and he wanted to do tricks on it. One trick that he liked especially was riding backwards. But there wasn’t one woman in ten thousand, riding frontwards on the rear seat of a tandem wheel, who would permit her consort to ride backwards on the front seat. The result of all this was not adjustment, but irritability. Man became frustrated.
“There wasn’t one woman in ten thousand, riding frontwards on the rear seat of a tandem wheel, who would permit her consort to ride backwards on the front seat. The result of all this was not adjustment, but irritability. Man became frustrated.”
Frustration wrought its inevitable results. Men began to act jumpy and strange. They were getting nowhere at all with women. The female gradually assumed, in men’s eyes, as she had in her own, the proportions of an unattainable deity, something too precious to be touched. The seed of Pedestalism was sown. The male, in a sort of divine discontent, began to draw apart by himself. This produced that separation of the physical and the psychic which causes the adult to remain in a state of suspended love, as if he were holding a bowl of goldfish and had nowhere to put it. This condition nowadays would lead directly to a neurosis, but in those days men were unable to develop a neurosis because they didn’t know how. Men withdrew, therefore, quietly and morosely, to their “dens.” It was the epoch of the den in America. Some marvelous ones sprang into being. Their contents were curiously significant. Deprived of possessing the female, the male worked off his Possessive Complex by collecting all manner of bibelots and bric-à-brac. The average den contained a paper-weight from Lookout Mountain, a jagged shell from Chickamaugua, a piece of wood from the Maine, pictures of baseball players with beards, pictures of bicycle champions, a yellowing full-page photograph of Admiral Schley, a letter-opener from Niagara Falls, a lithograph of Bob Fitzsimmons, a musket-badge from the G. A. R. parade, a red tumbler from the state fair, a photograph of Julia Marlowe, a monk’s head match-holder, a Malay kriss, five pipe racks, a shark’s tooth, a starfish, a snapshot of the owner’s father’s bowling team, colored pictures of Natural Bridge and Balanced Rock, a leather table runner with an Indian chief on it, and the spangled jacket of a masquerade costume, softly shedding its sequins.