nourishing obscurity: [james thurber] memories of a humane writer

Jonathan Yardley reviews "My Life and Hard Times" in the Washington Post and introduces Thurber thus:

Probably it's difficult for readers today to understand just how much Thurber meant to readers then, even though many of his books are still in print and enjoy respectable sales.

Thurber in my youth wasn't something you went to the bookstore for -- though of course you could -- but something that came in the mail almost every week, as regular and reliable as the clocks of Columbus, Ohio, which he wrote about in the pages of the New Yorker.

Today the New Yorker still comes in the mail, but it isn't the same magazine.

One does indeed turn to Thurber for the drawings, but the great glory is his prose. Whether he was the funniest of all American writers can be debated to the end of time, but he was much more than funny. Like his friend White he was wise, and there was a soft spot to him. As John K. Hutchens writes in his introduction to this book:

"He loathes cruelty. His sympathy for the out-of-luck man is as intense as his contempt for the pretentious and stupid one. He sees that children, being closer to the natural world than their elders are, have more true wisdom than adults. He finds the family life of dogs to be more rational than that of humans, and their courage and loyalty generally superior."

Two pieces by Thurber I particularly like include The Catbird Seat, which begins like this:

It was just a week to the day since Mr. Martin had decided to rub out Mrs. Ulgine Barrows. The term “rub out” pleased him because it suggested nothing more than the correction of an error – in this case an error of Mr. Fitweiler. Mr. Martin had spent each night of the past week working out his plan and examining it.

As he walked home now he went over it again. For the hundredth time he resented the element of imprecision, the margin of guesswork that entered into the business. The project as he had worked it out was casual and bold, the risks were considerable. Something might go wrong anywhere along the line. And therein lay the cunning of his scheme.

… and The Little Girl and the Wolf, here in its entirety:

One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother.
Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food.
"Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?" asked the wolf.
The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.

When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother's house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on.
She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.

(Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.)