It doesn’t come up in conversation much, but I have a tattoo on my right arm of a moth flying toward a star.
Obviously, James Thurber did not draw this on my arm and he certainly did not tattoo it there either, but nevertheless the Moth and the Star are his, in the same way that the Peacelike Mongoose is his and the Bear Who Let It Alone is his and the Unicorn in the Garden is his. They, and all his other animal stand-ins for the pageant of humans—brilliant and dim alike—are his, eternally, indelibly, and never to be duplicated. Of course, if you are really serious about Thurber’s animals and the fables they populate, you can get tattoos. But as a first step I would recommend reading this first-ever, authoritative compilation of the fables. Tattoos can wait.*
But reading the fables can’t. They remain startlingly appropriate to the human condition, and as someone who has read them for half a century and read them aloud for a decade, I can testify that they remain precisely relevant to the freshest political and cultural quicksand of each new year. We keep making the same mistakes, practically begging Thurber’s Very Proper Gander and his Bat Who Got the Hell Out and his Chief of Police Dogs to keep rotating to the front of the stage to say, “We told you so.”
I first tried to do verbal justice to Thurber’s writing in 1979 as part of a public-speaking class in college. I had seen the great William Windom’s one-man Thurber show on PBS, and in those pre-DVR (indeed, pre-VCR) days, I managed to record most of it on audiocassette. After I did a bad impression of Windom’s spectacular interpretation, a classmate told me I should abandon my intended career in sports and newscasting and instead make my living by reading Thurber aloud. I said I’d be happy to but, all things considered, I was likelier to be asked to pay for the privilege than be paid for it.
I was finally proved wrong by the very person who had introduced me to Thurber: my father. During his last illness, I read to him every night in the hospital for seven months, and one night after I had read about twenty Thurber fables to him, he asked me to read “The Peacelike Mongoose” for a second time. He then told me to stop for a moment, and after long thought he said, “You should do that in your newscast.” I said that didn’t seem to make sense and besides, there were copyrights and such to worry about. That’s when my dad said, “How many times have I ever suggested anything to you about your shows?” I couldn’t recall him ever having done so. “Try it,” he said. “What’s the worst that can happen?” He slipped into a coma not long after, and in his honor I went on television and read “The Peacelike Mongoose.”
His conviction that reading the story would appeal to my audience was correct. The ratings went up, and soon the Thurber segments became the most-watched quarter-hour on MSNBC every Friday. But my conviction that reading the story would precipitate a proprietary response from Thurber’s literary estate was also right.
The email arrived within days of my reading “The Peacelike Mongoose”—but it bore no resemblance to my fears. Instead it contained a story from two of my regular viewers about how they had been wrestling with an impossible dilemma over that very fable. They had been approached by a publisher who wanted to include “The Peacelike Mongoose” in a textbook—but only if they agreed to remove one word. The two viewers? James Thurber’s daughter, Rosemary, and his granddaughter, Sara Thurber Sauers. And the worrisome word? One entirely and deliciously of Thurber’s creation: mongoosexual.
Nothing Thurber ever wrote was a throwaway or designed to be edited a half century later. Rosemary Thurber would testify to her father’s daylong agonies over whether the comma should go after the fourth word of the thirty-third sentence or after the fifth. He wrote—or as his vision vanished, he dictated—each word and punctuation mark to be published as planned. In “The Peacelike Mongoose” he wrote mongoosexual and he meant mongoosexual.
Thurber’s immediate fame continued after his death in 1961, extended into the seventies and eighties by those who had grown up with him, and then into the nineties, as scholars began to analyze his work and chronicle his life in biographies. But by 2010, when I first read Thurber on my show, his work had fallen into an inevitable dormancy, and the time was ripe for rediscovery. Should Rosemary Thurber really keep her father out of a textbook and out of the minds of a generation of potential new addicts just because of one word?
And then I said that word on national television, and Sara phoned her mother and said, “I think you have your answer,” and sure enough, they told the publishers to print the story intact or not at all—and they printed it intact!
And there began my formal association with Thurber and the weekly readings on television and online, and as a consequence, the Thurber renaissance transpired a little earlier than expected, and his collections and fables began appearing on Amazon’s “Movers & Shakers” list, and then two reprints of the Library of America edition of Thurber, and then an audiobook they let me perform, and then theatrical advice from William Windom. And ultimately, that tattoo.
The late Mr. Windom agreed that Thurber’s unique status as the Babe Ruth of twentieth-century humor is probably best expressed in the fables. Remarkably, there is almost no “bad” Thurber, though the short stories often ask a lot from a reader, and the drawings are often simultaneously perfect and yet leave one hungering for the backstory. The fables, on the other hand, combine the best of Thurber the writer and Thurber the artist. The moral that concludes each one underscores Thurber’s intent, and the consistent Aesop-like length permits the reader to anticipate exactly when the payoff of insight and humor or outrage will hit.
They are also delights to read aloud. I firmly recommend that you try this, even if you’re alone. Thurber did not write to be performed, but there is no mistaking the instincts of the old college thespian and the later Broadway playwright—they resonate in every line.
If you are in a buoyant mood, you can hear in every anthropomorphic character or see in every Thurber illustration the joy of a life well laughed. If you are less sanguine, you can sense the existential threat of “the claw of the sea-puss”* that gets us all in the end. But either way, you can feel what he felt in his heart—good, bad, but never indifferent. It mattered to him, it moved him, it maddened him, it made him laugh, and he was able to refine it and convey it and leave it for us in a manner no one else has ever done.
Finally, there is the matter of new Thurber material: a preface and ten fables that never appeared in his books, along with lovingly created new illustrations by other artists that add to the sheer joy of Thurber’s original work, like a lemon twist or just the right nightcap.
On the subject of newness, I am delighted to admit that when asked to perform the fable “The Flaw in the Plan” at an event in New York, I knowingly and accommodatingly nodded, and then as soon as I was by myself, I said aloud, “The Flaw in the Plan”? What the hell is “The Flaw in the Plan”? I never read anything by Thurber called “The Flaw in the Plan”! The manuscript of this book quickly arrived and I was overwhelmed to learn that there was yet another Thurber fable to enjoy, as topical as if it had been written yesterday. There are fables here that you have never read before! Thus, if you are encountering some, many, or all of these fables for the first time, I envy you. Please relish your rapture and remember that this way lies tattoos.