Thurber Carnival
A Writer's Own Selection The Thurber Carnival (Penguin Fiction/Humor) — £2, secondhand, London Some books earn their price back before you've even opened them. A battered orange-spined Penguin, two pounds, picked up on some London pavement table — that's the right way to meet James Thurber. He was never a writer for pristine first editions. He belongs in the pocket, dog-eared, passed hand to hand. The Thurber Carnival is the best kind of anthology: a writer's own selection of his favourites, made in 1945 when he could look back at fifteen years of New Yorker work and choose what would last. It has "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," of course — the henpecked daydreamer who conducts imaginary surgeries and flies imaginary bombers between trips to the parking garage, a story so precisely observed that "Mitty" entered the language as a type. But the real pleasure is in the surrounding pieces: the fables, the My Life and Hard Times chapters, and above all the drawings — those wavering, almost childlike ink lines that somehow carry more psychological accuracy than pages of description. A Thurber dog looks more anxious than most human faces in fiction. What strikes me rereading him now, decades into teaching literature and language, is how deceptive the lightness is. Thurber writes American domestic comedy — marriages, misunderstandings, the small humiliations of ordinary men — but underneath it runs…