THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 26, 1994 TAG: 9406240478
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Medium
DATELINE: 940626 LENGTH:
Unfortunately for us, the great humorist is gone, having passed away in 1961. Of course his 28 books and two dramatic presentations remain, in one form or another, if not in print, at least easily accessible in the public library. Such enduringly familiar titles as My World - And Welcome to It, The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze and The Beast in Me and Other Animals belong to the ages and, gratefully, have been suitably preserved for them.
{REST} It was Thurber who observed, inarguably, ``Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.''
It was Thurber who counseled, ``You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.''
And it was Thurber who warned, ``Don't count your boobies until they're hatched.''
Not only that, he could draw. His New Yorker cartoons changed the way we saw men, women and dogs - through his eyeglass, darkly.
``Well,'' Thurber had one 'toon snap at another, ``if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?''
Good question!
That's history; but just when we thought our only prospect - and a not unpleasant one - was to go on rereading old Thurber, along comes the 100th anniversary of his birth, an excuse to exhume some of his stuff not previously collected between hard covers.
Welcome to People Have More Fun Than Anybody: A Centennial Celebration of Drawings and Writings (Harcourt Brace, 169 pp., $22.95), collected by Michael J. Rosen.
Rosen, an accomplished poet and fiction writer, is also literary director of The Thurber House, the humorist's restored boyhood home and literary center in Columbus, Ohio. This compilation under his editorship is clearly a labor of love. It even includes, in honor of the birthday celebration, a recipe for Thurber's favorite cake - an 8-inch devil's food that is appropriately named.
The devil is also loose elsewhere in these pages.
Contained here are typically exasperated examples of Thurber's sharp but sugar-coated tongue. In answer to a spiritual essay by Mary Pickford in Liberty magazine titled ``Why Die?'', Thurber posits his own arch analysis, ``Why Not Die?'' Responding to Eleanor Roosevelt's crowded column, ``My Day,'' he supplies an account of his own diurnal doings, during which absolutely nothing of substance takes place.
Thurber is always unsparing of himself.
``I am interested in forming a little club of miserable men,'' he writes. ``No man can belong to it who can fix anything or make anything go. No man can belong to it who is handy around the house - or the garage, or anywhere else.
``I was born with an aversion to tools.''
Still, his baffled stance amid the storm of 20th century technology seems to afford plenty of elbow room for the rest of us, who are - or ought to be - equally daunted, but who remain less candid about it.
``The only thing I can really do,'' Thurber confides, ``is change the ribbon on a typewriter, but it took me twenty-two years to learn that and every now and then I have to call in a friend or neighbor to help unravel me.''
Let me see the hands of all those of you out there who have ever regarded a computer screen with, if not inutterable rage, at least acute suspicion.
Thurberites!
Once, while being interviewed on television by Edward R. Murrow, Thurber offered up an assessment: ``The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.''
Thurber successfully embodied all three.
Now, 100 years after his birth in Columbus, the country has seen fit to issue a James Thurber postage stamp. There will be parties and picnics at that boyhood home, a launching of Thurber-related memorabilia and an exhibit of original Thurber works down the road at Ohio State University. And there is this slender, funny book.
So who needs it?
Especially now, we do. by CNB