Two
James Thurber: 1901-1918
"... the restless imagination of a one-eyed sensitive boy of
fourteen in Columbus, Ohio ..."
When Jamie lost his left eye, he also lost all chances of having a normal childhood-and a normal adult life. He spent the next year at home, missing a year of school, then the family moved back to Columbus. His father began his job as recording clerk for the Ohio Senate and they lived in a boarding house called the Park Hotel. But in 1904 Charles developed an lengthy illness they called "brain fever" and the Thurbers were forced to move into William M. Fisher's mansion, until Charles recovered. But the genetic stew that were the Fisher and Thurber families was a toxic mix.
When the Thurber boys played, they often irritated Grandfather Fisher. He went after Jamie first. "He didn't like Jamie 'playing the fool,' as he called it. And Jamie never liked Grandfather," Robert later recalled.1
So for five years, from 1905 to 1910, Jamie spent much of his time living with his "Aunt Margery" Albright, the widowed midwife who delivered him. He received the warmth and affection with Aunt Margery that he clearly lacked in the mansion of William M. Fisher. He spent much of his time away from his grandfather but also away from his Mother and Father and brothers. They didn't have a word for it then-but we do now. The Thurber family was clearly dysfunctional. And not just for their own relationships-during the period from 1892 to 1918, the Thurbers moved fourteen times, but nearly always within the same square mile in Columbus.2 Clearly, they moved one step ahead of a landlord's demand for the next month's rent but years later, the Thurbers professed they could not explain why they moved so often or why they stayed within the same area.
The loss of his eye and the move from his family to Aunt Margery's isolated Jamie.
Then a wonderful thing happened: he discovered language.
He rolled words over his tongue. He tasted them. He savored them. He held each up to the light of meaning and examined every facet like turning a diamond in the sun. He devoured words and definitions-he considered meanings, adverbs, adjectives, tenses, puns, obscure words, dramatic ones, out-dated usage, rhyme, rhythm and syntax.
And he filed them all in the vast catacombs of his memory.
Charles S. Holmes writes:
He was always fascinated by words and in his fantasy he constructed a "secret world of idiom" in which the commonplace was constantly being transformed into the strange and the wonderful. Sometimes, for example, the sleeping metaphors in everyday phrases would suddenly spring to life, and the businessman tied up at the office, the man who left town under a cloud, the little old lady who was always up in the air, and the man who lost his head during a fire would take shape for him as literal realities. Such word games were an important part of what he later called "the secret surrealistic landscapes" of his youth imagination, the private world into which he escaped as often as possible.3
Eventually he returned to his home, but he never forgot Aunt Margery and wrote about her years later in The Thurber Album.
Both his brothers were athletic; Jamie was not. When his eye was removed, the doctor warned his parents not to let him run, jump, race or roughhouse like other boys.4 He was not a participant, except in later life, when he played an erratic game of tennis. But he liked to claim championships in "sports," hand games of his own devising, such as pitching playing cards into a hat. Left to his own devices, he turned to reading. For a time his father sold, or attempted to sell, Underwood typewriters. Jamie taught himself to type at the age of six. (About two years after he received his artificial eye, he began to also wear glasses, in part to protect the glass eye.) At least one Thurber biographer, Charles S. Holmes, believes that
Something of the intense competitiveness which marked his character throughout his life obviously derived from this childhood injury and his natural desire to make up for it.5
Like many other young boys and girls affected with some physical problem or ailment, Jamie learned to observe and remember. When his father felt that life in the Thurber household was far too manic, he slept in the attic to get away from Mame and the three boys. Later Jamie used that as the fulcrum of his story, "The Night the Bed Fell," just as he used other incidents, real or almost real from his childhood as the basis of other stories.
His father followed sports in the local Columbus papers and he and Jamie memorized batting averages, team records and histories. It was something a introverted one-eyed boy with a good memory could do well-and enjoy with his father. Years later, Thurber would brag about his memory for major league and minor league teams, the players, their careers and their statistics, particularly the home team, the minor-league Columbus Senators and their rivals, the Toledo, Ohio, Mud Hens.
Children grow up eventually seeing different traits in their parents. "The more acceptable features of his lineage," Thurber always believed,
"were from his Mother. Charles had an encyclopedic capacity for names, dates, and events, which made him an expert solver of newspaper contests and puzzles. Yet Thurber credits his own remarkable memory to Mame alone."6
Eventually, the Thurber man, as James pictured him in cartoon and story, was to be bamboozled by life, defeated in his relationships with women, confounded by automobiles and other machines, and in general barely able to survive the winds of strife swirling around him.
The Thurber man was his Father as Thurber saw him-and his brothers-and to a large extent himself, for he shared many of his father's characteristics. They were both nervous; neither had any aptitude for automobiles and even less aptitude for any other machinery (except for the manual typewriter); Thurber the father was dominated by his wife Mame; James by his first wife Althea; Charles had a career marked only by its very mediocrity; for years son James feared that he would share the same fate. Only when he joined The New Yorker did he find his true metier.
(Many of the men in Thurber drawings wear derby hats. Thurber himself wore no hats for he lost them as fast as he bought them, but the hats in many Thurber drawings match the hats his father wore.)
Eventually Jamie attended the Sullivant school, in Columbus, for grades two through six which he also wrote about later, with almost a Charles Adams touch of gothic horror. The Sullivant School was years beyond its useful life when Thurber attended and to make matters worse, many students were much older (he claims one was 22 when he was still in grade school) than Thurber, and many were, charitably, thugs. It was in a working class neighborhood and Thurber, as the awkward boy with the glass eye, was at the bottom of the pecking order. Fortunately, he was protected by a older black boy named Floyd who was impressed that Thurber could correctly pronounce "Duquesne" correctly. At Sullivant, Thurber needed such protection. He was given to daydreaming and one teacher at Sullivant thought Jamie was so inattentive that she told his mother he might be deaf.7
In early pictures, Jamie was gawky and awkwardly dressed and, significantly, he turned his head so his glass eye would be canted away from the camera.
There were always dogs, in the Thurber household and years later when he moved from New York City to live in New England, Thurber always had dogs. At one time he claimed to have owned 70 dogs, surely an exaggeration.8 French poodles eventually, but strays and mutts mostly when he and his brothers were little. He wrote about them with the greatest affection. Dogs offer love without qualification and no dog that Thurber ever had cared that he was the awkward boy set back in school, plagued with eyeglasses covering a blind eye. He loved them all and they loved him. (It can be suggested that he was so close to dogs throughout his life because in his early years he was awkward, introverted and not close to other people.) When one of his favorites, such as Rex, died, he mourned as if he had lost a brother, which in fact he had. His book Thurber's Dogs, published in 1955, contains some of his most poignant writing, especially considering he was remembering dogs that had died decades earlier.
He escaped into books. He read the pulp novels of the day:
The first nickel novel I read was called Jed, The Trapper. Jed was a mild tale of winter treachery, but it gave me a taste for the genre and in a year or so I had a formidable collection-frowned upon by Aunts Lou, Hattie and Melissa-of The Liberty Boys of '76, Young Wild West, Fred Fearnot and Old King Brady.9
He progressed to a better quality western, including Owen Wister's The Virginian, but he never forgot he dime novels of his youth. Later, as a code clerk in France, he was secretly amused at how French writers abused the American western. Reportedly, his first short story was "Horse Sandusky, Intrepid Scout."10
In fact, his early self-education was in dime novels, comic strips and live theater in Columbus. His infatuation with Henry James...
