Books in Brief: Selected Letters of James Thurber

Selected Letters of James Thurber, edited by Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks (Little. Brown, 269 pp., $15). There is a tendency to treat James Thurber as a literary figure rather than as a humorist like Robert Benchley or S. J. Perelman. In the literary pantheon, Thurber will get a fullbodied statue instead of just a head, to judge from the stir created by the publication of his letters. As meticulously written and as funny as his magazine prose, the Selected Letters are confined in subject to the familiar classics of the Thurber domain. He studies The New Yorker’s use of the comma; he hilariously unrolls the horrors of playwriting for Wolcott Gibbs; he records (invents?) his cook’s malapropistic way with words: “Margaret . . . says one of her sons works into the incinerating plant where they burn the refuge; has had the job since the Armitage. . . . You begin to feel insane after an hour or so of this. Margaret lost only one child. … I asked what carried the girl off and Margaret said, ‘Tuberculosis. She got it from her teeth. Went all through her symptom.’ ” Arranged according to the person to whom they were sent and in very rough chronological order, the letters are mostly to old friends, many of them writers: the Whites, John O’Hara, Kenneth Tynan. Thurber’s correspondence with H. L. Mencken and T. S. Eliot was too thin, it seems, to be included. (Eliot, an early and ardent admirer of Thurber’s, sent him clippings from British newspapers with headlines like “two bitten by ape.” Thurber, whose appreciation for Eliot was only lukewarm, reported their only meeting in his letters by noting that Eliot smoked Kools.) In putting together this collection the editors, Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks, have sacrificed biographical genuineness in the putative interests of producing an entertaining book. They have elided much of Thurber’s self-doubt and querulosity, traces of his adulterous libido, antisemitism, anti-Communism, and other social gaucheries. While most of the omissions are justifiable, the editorial exigencies behind others are vague. Why, for instance, was the earliest letter to be included written in 1935, when Thurber was 41? He had by that time already been at The New Yorker for eight years and was about to embark on his second marriage, to Helen Thurber. The editors’ decision to exclude Thurber’s dazzling, if self-protective, anti-Communist letters to Malcolm Cowley is also questionable. Sample: “I read all kinds of threats and prophecies of disaster, but I have not put my eye yet on a succinct statement of just what it is that the Communists, or the socialists in this country want. Where can I go to find out what they want? … If it all came out the way Gold [a “proletarian” writer] wants it, and everything is hotsy-totsy, then would it be all right for a Lardner or a Wilder or a New Yorker writer to write what he wanted to write or wouldn’t it?” As historical documentation of New York’s literary milieu of the time, these letters are extraordinary. Their slight difference in tone from other letters in the volume could have been accommodated easily by the hook’s arrangement in chapters. But despite these complaints, the editors have done an excellent job of editing and shaping the letters into an extremely diverting book. Buy it: read it: enjoy it. For letters not included in this collection, go to Burton Bernstein’s authorized biography, at least 20 per cent of which consists of letters.