Quote of the Day (James Thurber, As ‘The Pet Dept.’ Discusses Hypnotizing a Bloodhound)

“Q. My husband, who is an amateur hypnotizer, keeps trying to get our bloodhound under his control. I contend that this is not doing the dog any good. So far he has not yielded to my husband's influence, but I am afraid that if he once got under, we couldn't get him out of it. A. A. T.

“A. Dogs are usually left cold by all phases of psychology, mental telepathy, and the like. Attempts to hypnotize this particular breed, however, are likely to be fraught with a definite menace. A bloodhound, if stared at fixedly, is liable to gain the impression that it is under suspicion, being followed, and so on. This upsets a bloodhound's life, by completely reversing its whole scheme of behavior.”—American humorist, cartoonist, and playwright James Thurber (1894-1961), “The Pet Department,” in The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities (1931)

Sixty years ago today, perhaps the most popular American humorist of the first half of the 20^th century, James Thurber, died, a month after being stricken with a blood clot in his brain. It was a miserable end for a writer with more than his share of private torment—notably, increasing blindness, alcoholism, a thyroid condition, and orneriness that could morph into malicious mischief-making.

The quote I selected was written before the worst of Thurber’s health issues began to plague him. It reflected a lifelong affection for dogs that was in direct opposition to his cynicism about their masters: “If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.”

Quote of the Day (James Thurber, on a Fine Point of Exclamation Point Use)

"Don't use an exclamation mark in a moment of anger. If you insert one in a fit of temper, lay aside the letter until morning. You will be surprised how silly it will seem then -- not only the exclamation mark but the whole letter."—American humorist, cartoonist and playwright James Thurber (1894-1961), The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities (1931)

Quote of the Day (James Thurber, on Gym, A Horror of His College Experience)

“If I went through anguish in botany and economics – for different reasons – gymnasium work was even worse. I don’t even like to think about it. They wouldn’t let you plays games or join in the exercises with your glasses on and I couldn’t see with mine off. I bumped into professors, horizontal bars, agricultural students, and swinging iron rings…. In order to pass gymnasium (and you had to pass it to graduate) I had to pass a swimming test. I did not like swimming and the swimming instructor, and after all these years I still don’t. I never swam but I passed my gym work anyway, by having another student give my gymnasium number (978) and swam across the pool in my place….Another thing I didn't like about gymnasium work was that they made you strip the day you registered. It is impossible for me to be happy when I am stripped and being asked a lot of questions.”—American humorist James Thurber (1894-1961), “University Days,” in My Life and Hard Times (1933)

Quote of the Day (James Thurber, on How Women ‘Always Know Where Things Are’)

“I hate women because they always know where things are. At first blush, you might think that a perverse and merely churlish reason for hating women, but it is not. Naturally, every man enjoys having a woman around the house who knows where his shirt-studs and his brief-case are, and things like that, but he detests having a woman around who knows where everything is, even things that are of no importance at all, such as, say, the snapshots her husband took three years ago at Elbow Beach. The husband has never known where these snapshots were since the day they were developed and printed; he hopes, in a vague way, if he thinks about them at all, that after three years they have been thrown out. But his wife knows where they are, and so do his mother, his grandmother, his great-grandmother, his daughter, and the maid. They could put their fingers on them in a moment, with that quiet air of superior knowledge which makes a man feel that he is out of touch with all the things that count in life.”—American humorist, cartoonist, and playwright James Thurber (1894-1961), “The Case Against Women,” in Let Your Mind Alone and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces (1937)

Quote of the Day (James Thurber, on a Medical Situation Often Occurring in Winter)

“There is, of course, a special problem presented by the type of person who looks well even when he doesn’t feel well, and who is not likely to be believed if he says he doesn't feel well. In such cases, the sufferer should say, ‘I look well, but I don't feel well.’ While this usage has the merit of avoiding the troublesome words ‘bad’ and ‘badly,’ it also has the disadvantage of being a negative statement. If a person is actually ill, the important thing is to find out not how he doesn’t feel, but how he does feel. He should state his symptoms more specifically — ‘I have a gnawing pain here, that comes and goes,’ or something of the sort. There is always the danger, of course, that one's listeners will cut in with a long description of how they feel; this can usually be avoided by screaming.”—American humorist and cartoonist James Thurber (1894-1961), The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities (1931)

Quote of the Day (James Thurber, Parting Company With Thoreau)

“Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.”—American humorist, cartoonist and playwright James Thurber (1894-1961), Further Fables for Our Time (1956)

Quote of the Day (James Thurber, Parodying the Femme Fatale)

“Then she came into the room. She was tall and thin and had a white frowning forehead and soft eyes. She wasn’t much to look at but she was something to think about….She leaned over the chair where I was sitting and bit me in the ear.”—American humorist James Thurber (1894-1961), “Hell Only Breaks Loose Once” (written after reading James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice), in The Middle Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935)

(The image accompanying this post is from the original film adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, starring Lana Turner and John Garfield. Needless to say, the smoldering Ms. Turner was far closer to the conception of Cain’s femme fatale than the woman in Thurber’s hilarious parody.)

Quote of the Day (James Thurber, on News Management of ‘The Greatest Man in the World’)

“The necessity for printing some account in the papers of the young man's career and personality had led to a remarkable predicament. It was of course impossible to reveal the facts, for a tremendous popular feeling in favor of the young hero [aviator Jacky Smurch] had sprung up, like a grass fire, when he was halfway across Europe on his flight around the globe. He was, therefore, described as a modest chap, taciturn, blond, popular with his friends, popular with girls. The only available snapshot of Smurch, taken at the wheel of a phony automobile in a cheap photo studio at an amusement park, was touched up so that the little vulgarian looked quite handsome. His twisted leer was smoothed into a pleasant smile. The truth was, in this way, kept from the youth's ecstatic compatriots; they did not dream that the Smurch family was despised and feared by its neighbors in the obscure Iowa town, nor that the hero himself, because of numerous unsavory exploits, had come to be regarded in Westfield as a nuisance and a menace. He had, the reporters discovered, once knifed the principal of his high school -- not mortally, to be sure, but he had knifed him; and on another occasion, surprised in the act of stealing an altar-cloth from a church, he had bashed the sacristan over the head with a pot of Easter lilies; for each of these offences he had served a sentence in the reformatory.”— American humorist James Thurber (1894-1961), “The Greatest Man in the World,” in The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935)

This 1931 satire by the New Yorker legend James Thurber came to my attention within the last three or four months. Readers at the time would have recognized his young aviator as Charles Lindbergh pushed to the point of what seemed like absurdity:  the clean-cut American hero as a juvenile delinquent, made palatable for a mass audience by a press corps that should have known better.

(Lindbergh’s real faults—the anti-semitism that blinded him to the ultimate terror of Nazism, not to mention the hectoring of wife Anne and secret fathering of children across the Atlantic with a German woman—would not become apparent at least until the end of the decade—or, in the case of his surprising transatlantic paternity, nearly 30 years after his death.)

But a September 2015 article in The Los Angeles Times by Patt Morrison put a considerably more contemporary spin on this. She wrote this in the early GOP primaries in this last, lamentable Presidential cycle, when a “better-class Jacky Smurch”—matching the aviator in vulgarity and far surpassing him in his bank account—was emerging: Donald Trump.

What could the other Republican White House aspirants, like the most powerful men in the nation in Thurber’s story, do to stop him? Thurber had them rush en masse at Jacky, when the public wasn’t around, and toss him out the window. The Republican establishment, instead of taking him head-on when it could have made a difference, chose to believe that The Donald, most un-aviator-like, would fall of his own weight, and one lucky fellow among them would be around to pick up his disconsolate followers.

Only they waited too long—first through the primaries, then the convention, then the election, and now all the sweet executive-branch appointments to be had. And now they—and, starting January 20, America as a whole—must face the consequences.

(The image accompanying this post shows Brad Davis as Smurch in a 1980 PBS adaptation of the piece.)