James Thurber's life displays the full range of contradictions commonly associated with the careers of prominent American writers.
He was a sophisticate from the provinces, a lad from Columbus, Ohio, who developed into one of the formative voices of the New Yorker during its glory days. His achievements were mainly those of youth, followed by a painfully dry and embittered age. His great abilities -- a prodigious memory and an unmatched ear for language -- were counterbalanced by a disabling wound -- the childhood accident that left him blind at midlife. And he cultivated a beloved public persona at odds with the private man, who was a heavy drinker, a hogger of the limelight, an abuser of friends, lovers and spouses.
The ugliness of which Walter Mitty's creator was capable and the painfulness of his last days came to light in detail in Burton Bernstein's biography of 1975. That work caused a great stir on its publication, Americans being a people avid for the dirt on national idols but disenchanted at the discovery.
Now Neil Grauer, a Baltimore author, seeks to redress the balance with a biography, "Remember Laughter." (The title and epigraph come from Thurber's "The 13 Clocks": "Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.") He has culled biographical material, mainly from Bernstein, and literary criticism, principally from Charles S. Holmes' "The Clocks of Columbus" and a couple of recent studies, to sort out what Thurber yet means for the national life and national letters.
Though as a biography Mr. Grauer's work is largely a recapitulation of Bernstein's fuller work, he has dug up some intriguing nuggets of information: for one, that Thurber's daughter, Rosemary, was 8 years old before her mother, Thurber's divorced wife, Althea, told her that "this tall guy who used to come to visit" was her father; and for another, that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI maintained a dossier on America's foremost humorist as a suspected Communist.
As a piece of literary criticism to set up Thurber on a plinth in the national pantheon, this work is less effective.
The concluding chapter on Thurber's art and reputation raises a number of useful points. Thurber's humor does rise from the same source as our anxieties and sadnesses, from depths of fantasy and wordplay -- but saying that alone leaves a great deal unexplained. Though returning repeatedly to the misogynist strain in Thurber's work, for example, and touching on obvious explanations (the forceful mother, the two strong-willed wives), Mr. Grauer does not arrive at any profound understanding of the psychological origins of such humor, or the cultural attitudes that made it funny for so long.
All these years later, there survives in Thurber's writing about humor a tone of defensiveness. (He thought at one point in later life that he should have had the Nobel Prize in literature and was bitter at humor's obscure place in the temples of art.) Some of that defensiveness survives as well in writing about Thurber. When an author's work becomes a cause to plead, something has gone badly awry.
This book is a look back at an author who has shaped our perceptions of human experience and is a dogged defense of his enduring claim on our imagination. It is less a critical work than a loving appreciation; and, while any reader who loves to laugh will enjoy the reminders of Thurber's work at the top of his form, that same reader may emerge mildly disappointed at a book that has said so little that is new.
For those of us who read Thurber in youth and have reread those stories, Neil Grauer has provided a compact reminder of the pleasures that came out of Columbus all those years ago and are part of our national inheritance: the night the bed fell, the bickering spouses of "A Couple of Hamburgers," all those cartoons -- "That's my first wife up there, and this is the present Mrs. Harris."
A Thurber wife says grudgingly to her husband, "All right, have it your way -- you heard a seal bark," as a seal rises above the headboard of their bed. Mr. Grauer has also heard a bark, from as grand and gorgeous a seal as has ever made us laugh.
Mr. McIntyre is a deputy chief of The Sun's copy desk.
Title: "Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber"
Author: Neil A. Grauer
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Length, price: 204 pages, $20