Three Levels of Mitty

THE CLOCKS OF COLUMBUS by CHARLES S. HOLMES 360 pages. Atheneum. $10.

A biographer of James Thurber is almost certain to put himself inexplicably in the wrong, because whatever approach he takes--jocular, solemn, literary, psychological--he is likely to provoke satirical muttering from Thurber's ghost. The tone of the present biography, an examination of Thurber's literary career by a Pomona College English professor, is clonking and scholarly, and sure enough, muttering seems distinctly audible.

The first footnut is squirreled away after the book's first sentence, and the 40th by page 14. But the book clonks with special resonance because it accepts as simple truth Thurber's cheerful misreminiscence (in The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze) that his grade school baseball team in Columbus had a 22-year-old centerfielder and several other athletes who had spent seven or eight years in the fourth grade.

The author is not pompous. A typical sentence, suitable for diagramming, goes like this: "He was a good student, and although he was well liked by his classmates, he was not a joiner or an activist." Solid stuff, with a sensible content exactly suited to its style. Three hundred pages of it produce a book like one of those wistful, timid little men Thurber used to draw.

Thurber transformed his life into anecdotes, however, and most of the familiar stories are here, lumpy with paraphrase but still amusing. We are reminded of Thurber's feats as a rewrite man for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, his 20 successive rejections when he began submitting stories to The New Yorker, and all those cartoons on the walls of Costello's Bar. Harold Ross, The New Yorker editor, reappears in his role as the most woodenheaded genius in modern literature (Thurber made him funny in The Years with Ross, but he did not make him believable, a lapse that Biographer Holmes fails to note).

Holmes does, however, usefully point out the strength of Thurber's Mid-westernism, and his ties with Columbus, his home town. He shows the writer fumbling for a point of view: writing with outrageous sentimentalism, for instance, about a tennis match between Helen Wills and Suzanne Lenglen, then finding a way to blend the sentiment and fantasy in the woolly reminiscence of The Night the Bed Fell.

It may be that Thurber does not need a literary biographer. Holmes asks the reader to sit still and pay attention while he divides Thurber's career into the "period of apprenticeship," the "period of early success," a third category of "blindness and reassessment," and a "later manner." He announces and then proves beyond doubt that he has discerned three levels of language in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Confronted by Holmes, the reader's mind wanders to The Unicorn in the Garden, to The Night the Ghost Got In. He imagines that he is writing Walter Mitty: ta-pocketa, ta-pocketa, go the typewriter keys. He remembers Thurber's unsettling word games--mice in chimes, lips in pistol--and plays a game of his own that he has played before: her, hurt, rue, brute in Thurber; the battle of the sexes, the dogs. What hides in Holmes? SOLEM? No, it doesn't quite work. M-O-L-E does, though.

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