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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 something closer to dread. He went blind in one eye as a young man and lost most of the sight in the other later in life; the drawings got simpler as his vision failed, and the comedy, if you look closely, was always shadowed by exactly the kind of quiet catastrophe that never quite arrives in the stories but hovers at their edges. That’s the Frankfurt School question lurking under the American humorist surface: what is comedy doing when it keeps catastrophe just offstage?

He sits, for me, in that peculiarly American lineage of humorists who are actually elegists — Twain’s heir in some ways, Wodehouse’s opposite number in others. Less warmth than Wodehouse, more nerve exposed. You laugh, and then you notice the laugh was doing some work for you that you hadn’t asked it to do.

A fine find for two pounds. Some books you buy to read once; this one you buy to keep returning to on the nights when you want to remember that comic writing can also be exact, and that exactness can be its own form of tenderness.