Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated, James Thurber (365 Books, Day 232)

[rushthatspeaks]

I suppose it has been a while since I read a really terrible book. It is probably good for the karma.

Seriously, though, Thurber wrote The 13 Clocks, which is one of the greatest fantasy novels for children ever written, and could someone kindly tell me whether I should read anything else the man wrote? Because 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' is all an incredibly famous story which I hate, and the essays everyone says are funny aren't, and this, look.

It's not just that this has been visited by the Sexism Fairy. It has been visited by, like, the Sexism Reissues Of All Of Andrew Lang, or the Sexism Cast Of Iolanthe, and no matter how far I overextend this metaphor (too far already) it is not going to tell you how aggravating I find Thurber on the topic of, specifically, wives. Because as far as I can tell he is psychically channeling Ernest Hemingway at his worst and that is all there is to it. A wife is an accoutrement who bothers a man and why do men put up with them anyway, is the gist here.

Anyway these are little fables or reworked fairytales from The New Yorker, and while I do actually appreciate the one in which the little girl takes out an automatic and shoots the wolf at twenty paces because it is incredibly easy to tell a wolf apart from your grandmother, the rest of them read like Dorothy Parker on a particularly self-hating hangover day, except that Parker would actually be funny. The moral of ninety percent of them, explicitly spelled out, is 'WOMEN SUCK AMIRITE?'

The illustrations, by Thurber, are perfectly lovely, and have in many cases nothing to do with the subject matter. A lot of the poems that he illustrates in the latter half of the book are not poems I like, but the illos are very fun anyway, especially for the one about how curfew must not ring tonight, which has an amazing cartoon of Our Heroine wrapped desperately around the tongue of a giant bell and swinging out into space over the churchyard. Also, if you have ever felt a need in your life for James Thurber illustrating 'Lochinvar', here you go, and I have to say I think it would make a nice little kid's book in excerpt.

But as for the rest, well. Desperately as I love The 13 Clocks, I think it is significant that Our Heroine spends the entire book enchanted to be able to say only one word and there are no other female characters. I would require serious persuasion to pick up any more Thurber at this point, unless we are talking a collection of drawings.

Comments

[boxofdelights]

All his children's books are worth reading. Many Moons, The Wonderful O, The Great Quillow, and The White Deer. There's something really interesting that I haven't figured out about men(there are so many of them) who love little girls and hate women. And something maybe even more interesting to be learned about the effect on little girls who love the work of said men, when they turn into women.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I did sort of like 'The Wonderful O', but it's not nearly as amazing as The 13 Clocks, so all in all, I think not.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Well, with me, it's just that I had The 13 Clocks read aloud to me at age 6 (and I re-read it often), and I only ever read The Wonderful O as an adult, so as Mr. Hammer says, it's part of my reptilian brain programming. But I can certainly /see/ loving The Wonderful O?

[sovay]

It's not just that this has been visited by the Sexism Fairy. It has been visited by, like, the Sexism Reissues Of All Of Andrew Lang, or the Sexism Cast Of Iolanthe,and no matter how far I overextend this metaphor (too far already)

Possibly, but while my reaction to the content of this sentence is agh, oh my God, my reaction to its form is I love you.

I am actually quite fond of "The Night the Bed Fell," which is the only one of his essays I can remember in detail. Avoid "The Unicorn in the Garden" at all costs, unless it's in this collection, in which case I am sorry. It is because of James Thurber that I learned about Dutch elm disease, but I haven't a clue where or how.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I love "The Night the Bed Fell" and also enjoyed "The Dog that Bit People".

[larryhammer]

The Dutch elm disease is from My Life and Hard Times, IIRC: a great uncle supposedly died of it.

---L.

[pameladean]

Wasn't that the chestnut blight?

P.

[larryhammer]

Er. Yes, you're right. I plead muzzy head the morning after a Seder.

---L.

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

more or less total agreement. The 13 Clocks is an amazing book. Thurber didn't like women very much, and the rest of his work suffers greatly because of that.

[daharyn.livejournal.com]

I deeply enjoyed Keith Olbermann's "Fridays with Thurber" read-alouds on his MSNBC show, but scanning the stories afterwards convinced me that I was perhaps more comforted by the act of reading aloud than by the stories themselves. In any case, I have yet to find anything in Thurber's oeuvre that doesn't have the stench of sexism somewhere.

[jesusandrew.livejournal.com]

I'm very fond of The Macbeth Murder Mystery (http://userhome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/anthro/jbeatty/COURSES/Macbeth/thurber.htm). It's very short, if you want to give it a look.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

There's a very funny little one about a policeman finding these people crawling along at the side of the road, one on the verge and one in a car, and a very suspicious and obviously false story, and it turns out they were having an argument about why a cat's eyes glow in headlights when humans don't and were doing empirical testing. But even that is somewhat sexist.

[redbird]

My recollection is that Further Fables for Our Time is better, but I haven't looked at it in long enough to not be sure how much it has been visited by the Sexism Fairy. I just remember bits of the morals, like "All men should strive to learn, before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why." If I recall correctly, the problem here is more absence of women (and some of that is in animal fables where all the humanized sheep and wolves are assumed male). But there's a question of patterns: one story like "The Unicorn in the Garden" is a bad relationship, a woman who refuses to believe in unicorns, and a cop who is all too ready to believe that she's the crazy one. But I suspect it's not just one.

The Wonderful O Was the first Thurber I read, and I liked it a lot; I'm sure it fails the Bechdel test, but it's women-not-on-the-page, with one or two exceptions. The villains as well as almost all the good people and most of the victims of the villainy are male, as far as we see.

[chomiji]

>>Desperately as I love The 13 Clocks ... there are no other female characters.<<

What! How could you forget Hagga, who wept the jewels? (Of course, even more so than the Golux, she is a Mere Device, so that pretty much proves your point.)

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'll put my vote in for My LIfe and Hard TImes, like everybody else. I have an omnibus of Thurber which grew increasingly difficult to get through as I got older, for the very reasons you cite, but when he's talking about actual members of his family his genuine affection for them seems to cancel out his apparent hatred for generalized "women"--they stay eccentric yet fairly loveable human beings, and therefore you can simply enjoy his language and observational humour.

[larryhammer]

I will add another provisional rec for My Life and Hard Times, but that's because I read it so often as a child that it's part of my reptilian brain programming, and as you know, mental programming wants to perpetuate itself, and I cannot tell if this is worth your while or not. FWIW, it has the least sexism of anything of his that I can think of, but that's because he treats the women of his family as individuals with quirks that are just as weird and funny as those of the men, rather than Types of Wimmens. But if you've bounced off these and "Walter Mitty," there is a very good chance that Thurber is simply Not For You.

And for the love of all that is holy, stay away from Is Sex Necessary?, his first book in collaboration with E.B. White, a grindingly unfunny spoof of pop-psych books vintage 1920s.

---L.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Don't bother reading any more. I loved Thurber's stories as a child - especially The Night the Bed Fell on Father, which I thought was hilarious - but when I re-read them as an adult, I realised almost all of them are rife with sexist and racist stereotypes (including, sadly, TNTBF).

[marchharetay.livejournal.com]

I dunno, but I'll chime in and second your hatred of Mitty *shudder.* And that, not even for intellectual reasons, but rather that it was just an unrewarding slog every time I had to read the damn thing which is NOT LONG ENOUGH THAT THIS SHOULD BE AN ISSUE.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

There's another collection of his essays--I don't remember the title--at S's grandparents' house. I picked it up because I love The Thirteen Clocks, and indeed it had precisely the problem you describe here. I think it might be funny if I were a straight white male living in 1950, and also an asshole. So much, said the reader, for that.

[aethereal-girl.livejournal.com]

How is it that you grew up in Columbus, Ohio and weren't exposed to more James Thurber?

I love James Thurber, horrifying sexism and all, I can't really justify it. I imprinted on his essays on grammar and usage when I was a wee thing just starting to think about the way language works.

He sort of fits into the same category in my mind as Dave Sim, horrifying and unabashed misogynists who are nevertheless a) incredibly good at what they do and b)will occasionally come up with these nuanced, sympathetic, believable female characters and you just have to go, "But if you can see that, how is it that you can't . . .?"

I wouldn't say, in my own experience at least, that James Thurber was ever visited by the sexism fairy, because I don't think I was ever unaware of the sexism in his works, even as a wee thing; he was pretty upfront about it. (He actually has an [in my opinion, funny] essay about why he hates women; he starts off by protesting that he doesn't, but it's only a few sentences before he admits that yes, actually, he does.) I can understand not being willing or able to give that sort of thing a pass; it's a little more mysterious to me why I am.