Thurber made obvious and predictable

Press, 14 August 1976, Page 15

Thurber made obvious and predictable

Thurber: A Biography. By Burton Bernstein. Victor Gollancz. 532 pp. N.Z. price $16.65. (Reviewed by Richard Pascal) Speaking generally, there are three possible reasons for writing a biography of a well-known writer. The writer may have led an extraordinarily interesting life; it is also possible that some knowledge of that life (extraordinary or otherwise) will lead to greater understanding of the writer's work; and finally, the writer may be either of Olympian stature or so highly regarded by so many persons that any and every last scrap of biographical "data seems worthy of reverential scrutiny, like a movie star’s bra strap or the relics of a saint. Biographies of famous writers are almost invariably adorned with flowery justifications based on the first two reasons. Burton Bernstein's book about James Thurber is a case in point. “With his death in 1961," Bernstein savs, “it occurred to me that Thurber would be a grand exception to the conventional wisdom that biographies of writers are superfluous. He would be an engrossing subject for an unfettered biography by somebodysome day.” Perhaps. But whatever it is that Bernstein finds so “engrossing” about Thurber’s life never becomes evident in this overly long (“unfettered?”) piece of journalistic hackwork. All that does become evident is that Thurber led a rather unexciting life. This is news which should surprise

no-one who has read his work. For Thurber’s wry imagination thrived upon the vagaries of ordinary middleclass existence, drawing humour from the stonily uneventful. He had a remarkable ability to set the ordinary in sharp relief against the unusual, and somehow make the two seem to change place. Consider his response to a reading of the memoirs of Salvador Dali: Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley. Superficially, it is the memory of the flamboyant Spaniard which should strike us as the more fascinating when contrasted with its mundane equivalent in the recollections of the small-town boy from Ohio. Yet there is a subtle implication that those who, like Dali, claim to have had lifelong experience of unusual doings, have in consequence an underdeveloped — you might say spoiled — sense of what is interesting. Only a person intimately acquainted with the ordinary, and forced to fight with it for his or her Imaginative life, could appreciate the outlandishness of having as one’s earliest, memory not

the womb — for that would be of routine interest — but a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio. Set beside the strange, the ordinary is stranger, a funny thing. Context is all. No-one knew this better than Thurber. Bernstein, however, fails to realise it. Working with the same raw material as Thurber — the latter's rather uneventful life — he treats it as though it is interesting in itself, naively mistaking the ukelele in the attic for the piano with breasts. Failing to document his claim that Thurber is “an engrossing subject,” he fails also to deliver a work which is “a grand exception to the conventional wisdom that biographies of writers are superfluous.”

Seldom do his attempts to illuminate the work by relating it to the life get far beyond the obvious and the predictable. We are told, for example, that the bitchy female characters in Thurber’s stories and drawings were modelled on some of the bitchy women in Thurber’s life, which is like having impressed upon vou the enlightening fact that C. F. Goldie saw a few real live Maoris. At times, Bernstein seems not merely obvious, but surprisingly obtuse. Commenting on Thurber’s “Is Sex Necessary?” a parody of 1920’s sex manuals, Bernstein says: “Thurber quite naturally ground some of the edge off his own sexual troubles by making fun of the psychological cures for them. Strangely, it helped him in a psychological sense: what he could laugh at didn’t hurt so much.” Strangely. Anyone who could find laughter’s well-known cathartic effect “strange” is the wrong person to be attempting an analytical biography of a great humorist. Unjustified on the first two counts, then, this work must, look to the third for its raison d’etre, buying its way into the hearts (and selling its way into the hands) of Thurber addicts as a trove of memorabilia glittering with inside info on the Great Man’s troubled personal life. Judy Garland’s admirers now have several such books; Thurber’s ought to have at least one.

Would that Thurber were still alive to give us his parody of it. [Or Pascal teaches English at the University of Canterbury. He gained his doctorate at Cornell after studies at the universities of Notre Dame and Virginia.]