November 2, 1961 - Fifty-one years ago today, the literary
world lost an eccentric but clever character, James Thurber. Thurber was a writer, a cartoonist, and a
humorist extraordinaire. Though Thurber
was a dysfunctional adult, like many grown men of his time, there are a few
fascinating things about the man that give him iconic status in my mind.
First of all, his mother was a self-described born
comedienne. She had a sick, borderline psychotic
even, sense of humor. She once pretended
to be handicapped, attended a faith healing service, offered to be
"saved," then jumped up and declared herself cured -- just to fuck
with the healer and the audience. Even I
haven't gone that far for a practical joke.
I am in awe, and I bow to her dearly departed sense of irony and
anti-political correctness.
Second, Thurber's father
was a bit of a Casper Milquetoast. Sporadically
employed and often trying on new careers, dear dad became a model for many of
the timid but unlikely protagonists in Thurber's work. Without this man's creative wishy-washiness,
we may never have met some of Thurber's tragic but sentimental failures such as
Walter Mitty, nor known the pleasure of the father's mistaken death when the
bed did not (but presumably had) fallen apart in the attic and killed him.
Third, Thurber's perpetual visual problems fascinate me for
two reasons. One reason is the assertion
that his near-blindness caused an often documented condition where the brain
invents visions to compensate for that which he could not see. In other words, the man hallucinated
naturally and with regularity. Lucky
fucking bastard! James Thurber was the
Dalai Lama of non-medicated psychedelic experience. Too bad he didn't live longer into the
sixties; he may well have been Timothy Leary's personal guru.
The other reason why I find his vision problems absolutely
fan-frikkin-tastic is how he got that way in the first place. When James was a kid, he and his two brothers
played with arrows. ARROWS. Like real, honest to goodness arrows. Just like I did as a kid. (Truly, we had a bow, a target, and several
metal-tipped, quite deadly arrows that we used to shoot around unsupervised all
the time. All. Time.
Unsupervised.) One day they were playing William Tell. James had the apple on his head; one of his
brothers shot the arrow toward the apple… and missed. Instead, he shot the arrow through James's
eye, which he lost as a result.
Seriously. I mean, what the holy hell. How cool is that? Imagine all the weenie elementary school kids
coming to class with their Scooby-Doo bandaids and their fiberglass casts and
their ace bandaged wrists, and in walks James with an eye patch the size of
Detroit and he announces his brother shot his eyeball out. With an arrow. Arrow. Eyeball.
Even an emergency kidney transplant isn't that awesome.
The last reason why I believe we should all honor the late
James Thurber is because he wrote one of the greatest short stories of all
time, and after I read this story in school, it changed my life. That story is "The Catbird
Seat." This is the ultimate revenge story, the greatest and craftiest gotcha of all time, and it makes The Sting look like Dr. Seuss. The catbird seat is an idiom for anyone in a
sitting-pretty position, and it was invented by Thurber and refers to an
expression used by his hateful character, Mrs. Ulgine Barrows. Whenever life starts pissing me off, like
when dealing with clownish bozo-assholes (or bozeholes) at work or in general,
I think of smarmy little Erwin Martin and remember that revenge often hinges on
a pack of Camels, a highball, and the catbird seat.
This may not have been the humorous post you expected, but,
by God, if you're having one of those
days, especially at work where people totally and completely suck, google
"The Catbird Seat", spend ten minutes reading it, and get your head
back in the game. If you work it just
right, you'll come out smelling like a rose and you won't even drop a petal.
Mr. Thurber, this scotch-and-soda is for you.
