Bibulography

THURBER by BURTON BERNSTEIN 532 pages. Dodd, Mead. $15.

To some extent a great man can control his autobiographer. With biographers he must trust to luck, and James Thurber has not been lucky. A couple of years ago, an academician named Charles Holmes produced a solemn literary biography called The Clocks of Columbus, in which he discerned, for instance, three levels of language in the 2,500 words of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Now comes New Yorker Writer Burton Bernstein with a drink-by-drink analysis, or bibulography, of the humorist's sometimes agonizing life.

Holmes' book was merely plonking and dull, and thus ludicrously inappropriate; Bernstein's is plonking and offensive. What offends is not the old news that Thurber had sexual problems, drank a lot and toward the end was often outrageously abusive at parties. That description fits half the writers listed in Books in Print. No adult should expect a humorist, or anyone else for that matter, to have a funny life.

What is unforgivable is that Thurber's life, which was his subject matter, has been smeared with tedium. It is little service to Thurber or the reader to print windy, dozen-page letters of no high literary quality when a few quoted phrases and a sentence of summary would have conveyed the nature of most of them. Bernstein prints them, almost without excision. Bernstein, moreover, is the kind of writer who tries for breeziness by referring, for instance, to New York City as "Gotham," to England as "Albion" and to Hollywood as "the fabled Tinseltown." He sees nothing wrong, either, with writing "his scrupulously guarded virginity, hidden for so long on that same lofty pedestal where American Womanhood dwelled, was surrendered to a semiprofessional demimondaine, a Folies-Bergere dancer named Ninette, and was continued with another." (What, exactly, was continued?)

Another lapse may or may not have its source in the fact that this is an authorized biography. The author's view of Thurber himself appears to strike a fair balance between necessary admiration and necessary candor. But Thurber's first wife Althea, a campus beauty at Ohio State during his years there, appears as an unpleasant caricature--by no coincidence closely resembling her ex-husband's caricature of the engulfing Thurber Woman. Second Wife Helen Thurber, who shared his life through his years of dimming eyesight and blindness (and who did the authorizing) is treated with warmth. Clearly she deserves it, but the disparity between the two portraits nevertheless smacks of the dreary side-taking that follows any suburban divorce.

For those who want to disassemble Thurber as an eight-year-old would a broken alarm clock, the gears and springs are all here: the bow-and-arrow accident that cost him one eye at the age of six, the loopy Columbus boyhood, the insuperable Midwestern chauvinism, the sexual shyness, the days as a code clerk at the U.S. embassy in Paris, the two dozen straight rejections by The New Yorker, the friendships with Playwright-Actor Elliot Nugent and E.B. White, the odd adversary relationship with New Yorker Editor Harold Ross.

By careful count, there is one good original line in this book: Thurber scribbled his marvelous drawings by the hundreds and, says Bernstein, "he gave them away like smiles." There is a good wisecrack by Hemingway: "Even when Thurber was writing under the name of Alice B. Toklas, we knew he had it in him." And there is a good anecdote not previously told: at one point after Thurber became blind, a New Yorker office boy was detailed to lead him to the apartment of a woman he was meeting on the sly, and then to dress him again when he was ready to leave. One day the office boy got Thurber's socks on wrong side out, and Helen Thurber noticed. The young man's name, Bernstein swears, was Truman Capote. qed John Skow

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