The sad happy clown that tickled our intelligence, James Thurber

The Middle-aged Man on the Flying Trapeze by James Thurber

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read "Middle Age Man on the Flying Trapeze," at 29 years old, on the brink of manhood and middle age, and I adored every story. I'd been reading a lot of the heavyweights up until this time - Dostoevsky on the Russian front, Jean Genet on the French front, Joyce and Beckett on the Irish front, though both had exiled to Paris - but I started lowering my expectations of myself as a reader, perhaps intuiting the future of my fiction, because I'm not sure I have a big novel in me, or as I used to say 'big books, big belly's.' I'm more of a sketch writer at heart, and Thurber is a master of the form, and to emphasize it he's also one of the great 'doodlers' of the 20th century, maybe the greatest that didn't have the pretense to call himself an Artist (capital A),' just a doodler, nothing more. Yet he defined the iconic "New Yorker" cartoons based on abstract humor that pre-dated 'The Far Side' by a good thirty of forty years, and I'm sure a good argument could be made that Thurber is really best remembered as a drawer, not a writer, or a humorist at best. His prose almost lacks style, though it has a lot of substance, voice, and vision, but just not a new literary style like Gertrude Stein writing, "A rose is a rose is a rose," but Thurber's drawings, say 'Thurber.' I'm sure he's been copied by millions of 'doodlers' including John Lennon and me.

Most of the stories in this collection are pretty light like in all of Thurber's collections, but he was one of the most deceptive light-hearted writers of all time, because almost all of his stories are imbued with a real dark humor, or love of life, that cuts to the soul, as effectively as a romantic poet, even if the conceit of the stories is relatively mundane, and why they are more like sketches than actual stories, because very little happens, nor do I remember suspenseful endings. Two stories really stand out in this book and taught me that you could tell as much in a few pages as you could in a novel, and that a story could be like a song, filling the reader's mind with impressions for years to come, even if it lacked the moral depths implied in a novel, and maybe why I write novellas, or long stories, told quickly. I never really wanted to be a moralist with a point of view, just an observer of life in all of its emotional highs and lows like Thurber - a great comic clown, with a dark underbelly, that secretly drove America mad, with his insightful 'humorous' tales delving into the human soul, albeit whimsically, making us not afraid to look, even while he was rearranging our thoughts about life. He was a truly important artist to me for a year of my life, making me see the world anew, and when he wrote his longer story 'My Years with Ross,' to the great cardinal seminal editor of the "New Yorker," it was a memoir, seen through another man's eyes, a great point of view, but still a sketch, just a very long one, reordering the years.

I can't find my copy of "The Middle Age Man" right now, but it's in my head forever and especially 'One is a Wanderer,' about a lonely man living in a flea bag motel after work on a typical day with nothing to do but kill time in post war America, living on the fringe, without the delights of a suburban wife tickling his fancy, an almost early kind of "Midnight Cowboy," if that's possible; though it's more like a Bukowski story of a wannabe writer in the Forties ambling into the big city for a little adventure, but finding only loneliness and the bottle to get him through the night, an incredible sketch. The other story was about his best friend that was the great 'unknown genius' of his times, and just a warm touching thought response to a great but maddening individual that changed Thurber forever, a mild mannered man by comparison, but I can't remember the title, and it's driving me crazy.* What struck me most was that in six or seven pages Thurber managed to write a story as good as the tome that my mentor was working on for half his life that was also about his best friend, a great unknown genius of the world, and a character type that every artistic/creative group of friends must have, or at least a version of it, and everyone always thinks that their undiscovered genius is the greatest of all, and the most worthy of posthumous praise. It's a hilarious, sad, and unforgettable story of an idle zeitgeist, one of the great themes of art.

*I'd lent the book to a friend and he reminded me that the title was "Something to Say."



View all my reviews