The Reeves and The Grotches

THE THURBER CARNIVAL--James Thurber--Harper ($2.75).

Since his birth in Columbus, Ohio on "a night of wild portent and high wind in 1894," James Thurber has seemed to live in a world where the edges of reality are fuzzy, the edges of fantasy insanely sharp. The principal forces at work in this world are confusion, frustration, madness and doom, the final crack of which all Thurber characters seem constantly --and justifiably--to be expecting.

The focal character of most Thurber-prose and drawings is a reticent, befuddled, thwarted little man who tries sadly to preserve himself and his reason against a practically worldwide onslaught. Grim psychiatrists, gadgets that "whir and whine and whiz," erratic servants, domineering women, unfriendly dogs, ghosts, foreigners --all are in league to crush the Thurber Male. This harried biped, like Joyce's Leopold Bloom or Mann's Hans Castorp, represents 20th-century Man. To Thurber's devotees, who rate him the greatest U.S. humorist since Mark Twain, his blankly exaggerated reports of their own qualms and misadventures are recognizable and (since nobody considers himself quite as badly off as a Thurber character) reassuring.

Flight from Reality. The Thurber Carnival is a well-edited selection of Thurber's stuff (he selected it himself). Most of it appeared originally in the New Yorker. The anthology includes stories from My World and Welcome to It, My Life and Hard Times (his best book, reprinted complete), The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, and drawings from Fables for Our Time, The Owl in the Attic, Men, Women and Dogs, and The War Between Men and Women.

Occasionally, a Thurber Male copes with dreadful reality by fleeing from it. Walter Mitty (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) is, in his escape, the dauntless Commander Mitty ("Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We're going through!"). He is also the world-famed Dr. Mitty, taking over the crucial operation when other specialists are baffled, and the Defendant Mitty who is afraid of nobody.

The servants in Thurber's world are never servants one can deal with reasonably. They are agents of the devil, users of abracadabra, alarming in their slightest gesture. "They are here with the reeves," said Delia, his colored maid. "The lawn is full of fletchers," she announced on another occasion. Barney Haller, the Thurber handy man, had "thunder following him like a dog." His language, like Delia's, was from the nether world. "Dis morning bime by I go hunt grotches in de voods."

The Existence of Evil. Thurber is as sensitively aware of the existence of evil --i.e., of stupidity and cowardice and self-love--as any American writer of his time. The knowledge pervades his lightest work; and in one small corner of his world, in such stories as The Cane in the Corridor and The Breaking Up of the Winship, evil unmasks itself in grim tragedy.

The goings on in Thurber's deceptively casual cartoons range, from the neurasthenic to the pathological. But, like a psychic distorting mirror, they reflect reality--well-locked in the subconscious though it may be. Little boys bite little girls; men hear seals barking in the middle of the night; shapeless women spring into rooms crying, "I come from haunts of coot and hern." Doctors abandon restraint ("You're not my patient, you're my meat, Mrs. Quist!").

The Author supplies readers of his Carnival with an illuminating biographical sketch, My Fifty Years with James Thurber (he is 49, "but the publishers felt that 'fifty' would sound more effective"). "Not a great deal," says the autobiographer, "is known about his earliest years, beyond the fact that he could walk when he was four." After several years of newspaper work, he turned up on the New Yorker in the late '203--starting out, according to New Yorker custom, as managing editor. He edited so unmanageably and wrote so well that he was soon made writer of the "Talk of the Town."

He left the staff some years ago to become a free-lance contributor. Because of his dim sight (one eye was ruined when, in boyhood, his brother accidentally shot an arrow into it) he has written comparatively little in the last two or three years. He is forced to draw on huge sheets of paper, wearing special glasses (see cut). His last big writing job was a play, The Male Animal, done in 1940 with Elliot Nugent. From time to time, he shows up at the New Yorker offices, to stand in the corridors and shout "Nuts!" He still tells friends that he is "being followed softly by little men padding along in single file, about a foot and a half high, large-eyed, and whiskered."

Writes Thurber: "Thurber goes on as he always has, walking now a little more slowly, answering fewer letters, jumping at slighter sounds. . . . He [moves] restlessly from one Connecticut town to another, hunting for the Great Good Place. There he plans to spend his days reading Huckleberry Finn. . . ."

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