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Thurber Perfects Mind Cure

Let Your Mind Alone! and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces by James Thurber. Harper and Brothers

The New Republic, September 1937, 220–221

That skillful literary man, St. Augustine, has warned that one should never smite an opponent in bad grammar. Applying a loose interpretation, we could translate his wise teaching thus: If a man would carry a discussion through points A, B, C and D, don’t let him think he has got anywhere, in the way of cogency, simply by lining up a good argument. For should he have a lisp, or should someone in his audience periodically sneeze in a notable way, or should there be an irrelevant voice echoing from the corridors, our hero is all Achilles’ heel. Especially when there is a Thurber about.

In fact, if he should make a statement that requires as many as three sentences, and there is a Thurber about, he is as vulnerable. For Thurber may choose to hear only the first sentence, proceeding joyously and outrageously to build upon it. We generally think of funny men as irrational. But they are as rational as the constructor of a Mother Goose rhyme (who gets to his crooked house via a crooked man, crooked smile, crooked sixpence, crooked stile, crooked cat and crooked mouse). And one thing they learn early is that, if a thought requires three sentences for self-protective presentation, they would be disloyal to their method in hearing out the three. Where three parts are needed, the professional funny man just knows that he should stop at part one. His one Marquis of Queensberry rule is: Belts are to hit below.

A Thurber, having singled out part one, will next proceed, with perverse rational efficiency, to ponder this broken part. He will invent “case histories” with which to try it out—and of course, they won’t fit.

But a mere bad fit is not enough. The funny man will also seek a situation such that his readers want a bad fit. If they are good Catholics, for instance, he knows it will be hard to make them meet him halfway should he decide to play havoc with an encyclical. He will lay off such dynamite, leaving it for the news itself to provide the outrageous incongruities, as when, reporting a Papal blast on communism at the time of Mussolini’s triumph in Africa, the dispatch proceeded: “On the subject of Ethiopia, His Holiness was less explicit.” On the other hand, readers of The New Yorker, in which all but two of the articles in Let Your Mind Alone! appeared, are likely to be less problematical when leftward-looking politics is the subject—so we get “What Are the Leftists Saying?” I thought it tearfully lame; but for all I know it may be judged by typical New Yorker readers the most devastating bit of fun since the discovery of the banana peel.

The first ten pieces, which give this volume its title, are a very amusing burlesque of psychoanalysis. The field offers a good opportunity for Thurber’s phenomenal gifts. The study of the mind has brought to the fore many paradoxes. A man may think he is doing one thing when he is actually doing another. This state of affairs outrages common sense—the thought of it makes one uneasy—hence we are glad to meet that man halfway who will expend his jocular enterprise to vindicate the judgments of common sense.

There are pages that make one laugh very hard. One is glad that Thurber does his part to keep the leftward-lookers on their toes. I am even willing to concede him his constitutional right, as funny man, to start too soon, to remain dumb on purpose, dying that others may live—though he tends somewhat to flatter stupidity, making it a kind of accomplishment within reach of all, like getting drunk, as in his soothing challenges of this sort: “I know very little about electricity and I don’t want to have it explained to me” (the medicinal effect of such trivializing bravado being necessary, since there are so many things now to know very little about, and we might feel like worms if we didn’t have people of Thurber’s authority to help mend our humiliation).

His skill at turning little domestic rows into transmogrifications of themselves is picturesque. In such scenes, I believe, the perception of his draughtsmanship is carried over. You see the people in watching the drama. Tight shoes, he says, make one walk “with the gait of a man who is stalking a bird across wet cement.” And he hates women “because they throw baseballs . . . with the wrong foot advanced.” There’s something I had been working on since the eighth grade, and never understood until Thurber brought it clearly into consciousness by his combined skill as draughtsman and verbalizer. (Incidentally, I here select examples that I think are good—but I might illustrate his own method by adding that, were I to employ it here, I should pick out some of the weakest quips in the book and hold them up for rapt admiration.)

His drawings are good always for the perception his writing has sometimes. But I do wish he’d go after bigger game. He shoots too many cockroaches. To get such heightened value, I’d even be willing to hand him over to the reactionaries. Let him hound the “socially conscious” more consistently, in case he finds their attitude of “uplift” too much for his antinomian perversity. He need not join the author of Redder Than the Rose. But let him at least make an indirect contribution, in serving to keep the statements of the Left alert (though they could never be alert enough to forestall all possibility of Thurberization). I have just been reading Jacques Barzun’s book on theories of racial superiority. I think fondly of what a Thurber might do by examining these documents on crooked thinking and translating them into the idiom of hilarity. But that would be asking too much (at least until his waggish remarks on cocktail parties run out—and he is so ingenious and fertile with them that I doubt whether they ever will run out). So I am willing to have him become our Lord Macaulay of fun-making, a reactionary keeper-thin of the Left. Unction must be made difficult—so let him be the deunctifyer. But as things now stand, he too is purveying a patent medicine. The trivial has its medicinal aspect—but too often he expends his talents to load the trivial with all the traffic can bear.