Collecting Himself

by Michael J. Rosen

  II

  Before we can pronounce any judgments on Man’s destiny, we must have a peek at the dilemma into which he has got himself. We must examine his nature before we can measure his hope of Heaven.

  For some curious reason Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. There is, of course, nothing at all with which to sustain this view. Man is simply the highest form of life on his own planet. His superiority rests on a thin and chancy basis: he had the trick of articulate speech and out of this, slowly and laboriously, he developed the capacity of abstract reasoning.

  Abstract reasoning, in itself, has not benefited Man so much as instinct has benefited the lower animals. On the contrary, it has moved in the opposite direction. Instinct has been defined as “a tendency to actions which lead to the attainment of some goal natural to the species.” In giving up instinct and going in for reasoning, Man has aspired higher than the attainment of natural goals; he has developed ideas and notions; he has monkeyed with concepts. The life to which he was naturally adapted he has put behind him; in moving into the alien and complicated sphere of Thought and Imagination he has become the least well-adjusted of all creatures of the earth and, hence, the most bewildered. It may be that the finer mysteries of life and death can be comprehended only through pure instinct; the cat, for example, appears to Know (I don’t say that he does, but he appears to). Man, on the other hand, is surely further away from the Answer than any other animal this side of the ladybug. His mistaken selection of reasoning as an instrument of perception has put him into a fine quandary.

  The survival of almost any species of social animal, no matter how low, has been shown to be dependent on Group Co-operation, which is itself a product of instinct. Man’s co-operative processes are jumpy, incomplete, and temporary, because they are the product of reasoning and are thus divorced from the sanity which informs all natural laws. The lower animals co-operate in the interest of the preservation of their species. Man no longer has the natural, earthy sense which would interest him in the preservation of his species. The cooperation of the lower social animals is constructive; that of man, destructive.

  “Group struggles to the death between animals of the same species, such as occur in human warfare, can hardly be found among non-human animals,” says W. C. Allee in his enormously interesting The Social Life of Animals.

  The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road. One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. His grip on the earth and its realities began to lessen in that hour; he could walk but he had lost the opposability of his hallux, and his feet were no longer prehensile. Two of his parts increased enormously in size: his gluteus maximus and his cerebrum. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.

  Man, the aloof animal, has deteriorated in everything except mentality, and in that he has done no more than barely hold his own for the past two thousand years. He no longer understands the ways of the lower animals, and they no longer understand the ways of Man. Here again it is Man that has suffered the loss.

  Next to reasoning, the greatest handicap to the optimum development of Man lies in the fact that his planet is just barely habitable. Its minimum temperatures are too low, and its maximum temperatures too high. Its day is not long enough, and its night is too long. The disposition of its water and its earth is distinctly unfortunate (the existence of the Mediterranean Sea in the place where we find it is perhaps the unhappiest accident in the whole firmament). These factors encourage depression, fear, war, and lack of vitality. They describe a planet which is by no means perfectly devised for the nurturing or for the perpetuation of a higher intelligence.

  The effect of all this on Man is everywhere apparent. On his misfit globe he has outlasted the mammoth and the pterodactyl but he has never got the upper hand of bacteria and the insects.

  “This is not even the age of Man, however great his superiority in size and intelligence,” writes Mr. Allee, “it is literally the age of insects.”

  It is surely not going too far, in view of everything, to venture the opinion that Man is not so high as he thinks he is. It is surely permissible to hazard the guess that somewhere beyond Betelgeuse there may be a race of men whose intelligence makes ours seem like the works of an old-fashioned music box. The Earth, it seems to me, may well be the Siberia or the Perth Amboy of the inhabited planets of the Universe.

  III

  Now that we have got Man down on his back, so to speak, let us look at the tongue of his intellect and feel the pulse of his soul.

  There is a great deal to be said for his intellect, in spite of the fact that it is unquestionably coated. It has produced Genius, and out of Genius has come Art—the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised. Most of the faint intimations of immortality of which we are occasionally aware would seem to arise out of Art or the materials of Art.

  This brings us to God and Heaven, the last stop which this exploration into the known and the unknown shall make.

  Everybody is supposed to have some opinion as to whether there is life after death. Intelligent persons are expected to formulate “an integrated and consistent attitude toward life or reality”; this is known as “a philosophy” (definition 2c in Webster’s International Dictionary).

  Unfortunately, I have never been able to maintain a consistent attitude toward life or reality or toward anything else. This may be owing entirely to nervousness. At any rate, my attitudes change with the years, sometimes with the hours. Just now I am going through one of those periods when I believe that the black panther and the cedar waxwing have higher hopes of Heaven than Man has.

  The dignity of Man and the Divine Destiny of Man are two things which it is at the moment impossible for me to accept with wholehearted enthusiasm. Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority. That which is only sporadically realized can scarcely be called characteristic. It is impossible to think of it as innate; it could never be defined as normal. Nothing is more depressing than the realization that nobility, courage, mercy, and almost all the other virtues which go to make up the ideal of Human Dignity are, at their clearest and realest, the outgrowth of Man’s inhumanity to Man, the fruit of his unending interspecific struggle. The pattern is easily traceable, from Christ to Cavell.

  In spite of everything, it is perhaps too easy to figure Man as merely an animal of the earth whose cerebrum developed extraordinarily, like the peacock’s tail or the giraffe’s neck, and to let it go at that. There is always Browning’s “grand Perhaps.” If it is hard to Believe, it is just as hard, as our poet’s Bishop Blougram points out to the cynical Mr. Gigadibs, to “guard our unbelief.” You remember: “Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch, a fancy from a flower-bell,” and all that sort of thing—and we believe again. And then there’s a man with a little mustache, and a man with an umbrella, and all that sort of thing, and we are safe once more in our conviction that there can be no God watching over this sorrowful and sinister scene, these menacing and meaningless animals.

  We come back, in the end, to all that we can safely feel we know: A monkey-man in the eolithic times, wandering through the jungle, came upon a jewel and stuck it into his head. Since that day his descendants have given off light, sometimes a magic and blinding light. The question whether the jewel was carelessly flung off from a whirling star or carefully planned and placed by a supernatural hand has engaged the interest of mankin
d for a million years. The question will go on and on: Is this light a proof of God or is it no more remarkable than the plumage of a bird of paradise?

  “Come, come, it’s best believing, if we can,” says the jovial Sylvester Blougram, over his wine. “Why not,” he asks, “the Way, the Truth, the life’?”

  Why not, indeed? “It is all right with me,” I say over my wine. But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?

  “Well, folks,” the cheery guard may say, as the train rushes silently into a warm, dark tunnel and stops, “Here we are at good old Oblivion! Everybody out!”

  “Come, come—what is the matter with that?” I ask, over my Scotch and soda.

  A Biographical Sketch of James Thurber

  BY JAMES THURBER

  James Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio, where so many awful things happened to him, on December 8, 1894. He was unable to keep anything on his stomach until he was seven-years old but grew to be 6 feet 1 1/4 inches tall and to weigh a hundred and fifty-four fully dressed for winter. He began to write when he was ten-years old (“Horse Sandusky, the Intrepid Scout”) and to draw when he was fourteen. He has not worked as a cow-puncher, ranch-hand, stevedore, short-order cook, lumberjack, or preliminary prizefighter. Quick to arouse, he is very hard to quiet and people often just go away. Fond of rifle shooting but unable to concentrate, he usually fires the gun off into the air when handing it to the next marksman.

  He was recently blackballed when brought up for membership in the Fairfield County (Conn.) Skeet Shooting Club. He has never been defeated at singles in crochinole. At Buckeye Lake, Ohio, in 1923 he won a canary bird throwing baseballs at dolls. He can hold a grand slam hand in contract and be set six, but he has never been taken at fan-tan. He uses the Thurber over-bidding convention and even the most skillful partners have no chance with him. He never listens when anybody else is talking, preferring to keep his mind a blank until they get through so he can talk. His favorite book is The Great Gatsby. His favorite author is Henry James. He wears excellent clothes very badly and can never find his hat. Two overcoats which he left in the New Yorker office last spring were stolen, or else he left them someplace else. He is Sagittarius with the moon in Aries and gets along fine with persons born between the 20th and the 24th of August.

  Notes

  Provided here is information regarding each written piece’s original date and place of publication. For some entries, pertinent items are included to elucidate allusions and contexts and to draw attention to related writings by Thurber.

  Preface

  xvii [BRANDON] Henry Brandon. As We Are. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. “The Tulle and Taffeta Rut: A Conversation with James Thurber,” pp. 257-82.

  1 [ILLUSTRATION] Life, January 29, 1940.

  “James Thurber Finds Revising His Play for Broadway Is ‘A Great Ordeal.’” New York World-Telegram and Sun, January 7, 1940.

  [It represents] myself, Shumlin and Nugent working on [The Male Animal’s] last-minute revisions and being bothered, nonplussed, and dismayed by three concentric circles of troubles. An old lady and the muses are bothering me with ideas for dialogue, Shumlin is receiving directions from a gamin and a policeman’s horse, Nugent is getting some valuable hints from the policeman himself. These represent the creatures who drift into rehearsals.

  Just above them, beginning with the man on the left raising his hand and ending with the man on the right holding his head, are the actors, asking if they can skip rehearsals in order to get married, falling asleep as their cue is given, requesting permission to change their lines, and suddenly being seized with a toothache.

  The upper circle, of course, represents the noise and clamor of New Year’s. And the dogs, those rare moments of peace of mind, hope, happiness, and well-being which make it possible for authors and producer to survive the Great Ordeal.

  Speaking of His Own Writing …

  3 [LIFE] “Thurber.” March 14, 1960, pp. 103-8.

  3, 4, 5, 6, 7 [PARIS] Interview with George Plimpton and Max Steele. “Art of Fiction.” The Paris Review 10 (Fall 1955), pp. 35-49.

  4[COWLEY] Malcolm Cowley. The Literary Situation. New York: Viking Press, 1954, pp. 189, 192.

  4 [FALL AUTHOR] “James Thurber.” (One of a series, “Important Authors of the Fall, Speaking for Themselves.”) New York Herald Tribune Book Review, October 8, 1950, p. 4.

  4 [GELDER] Interview with Robert Van Gelder. “Thurber’s Life and Hard Times.” New York Times Book Review, May 12, 1940, p. 20.

  5, 8 [BREIT] Interview with Harvey Breit. “Mr. Thurber Observes a Serene Birthday.” New York Times Magazine, December 4, 1949, p. 79.

  6, 7 [DOLBIER] Interview with Maurice Dolbier. “A Sunday Afternoon with Mr. Thurber.” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, November 5, 1957, p. 2.

  8 From the late 1940s until the end of his life, Thurber worked at an extended piece of fiction, alternately described as a fantasy, a satire, a fairy tale, a treatment of the anxieties of the married middle-aged male, and a summing up of his anxieties about the moral and political climate of America. The project was a great pleasure and a greater frustration for Thurber, whose continual attempts were abandoned, conflated, recast, and self-pirated throughout those years with various working titles: “The Spoodle,” “The Sleeping Man,” “The Train on Track Six” (which Simon & Schuster announced as a forthcoming book in their listing of Spring 1955), “The Train on Track Five,” “The Spoodle” (again), “The Grawk,” and “The Nightinghoul.”

  8 In this interview of December 1949, Thurber is probably referring to the nineteenth-century saint as depicted in Frances Parkinson Keyes’s Bernadette, Maid of Lourdes (1940), Franz Werfel’s The Song of Bernadette (1941), or Donald Sharkey’s After Bernadette (1945).

  The Theory and Practice …

  12 Manuscript, dated May 18, 1959. Published in the New York Times Book Review, December 4, 1988. These observations and objections by Thurber are modeled after a piece by Wolcott Gibbs, The New Yorker’s copy editor and drama critic, and, by his admission in the preface to his 1958 collection More in Sorrow, the man who has “contributed more words to The New Yorker than anybody else in its thirty-odd year span.” Gibbs’s letter to Harold Ross listed “a few general rules,” thirty-one to be exact, to help in “bringing order out of this underbrush” of contributors and contains remarks on the treatment of dialect, adverbs, funny names, clichés, and “drunkenness and adultery,” among other topics. Thurber published Gibbs’s notes on editing in his own The Years with Ross (see pages 129-135) and adopted Gibbs’s scolding, unnerved tone for his adaptation. Both pieces were probably intended as in-house memos rather than finished essays, venting frustration in the more acceptable form of offering advice. Two extended tangents from Thurber’s piece are not reprinted here—one dealing with the magazine’s conflicting uses of prepositions and the other with his association as a board member of Bermudian magazine.

  12 E. B. White. Quo Vadimus. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939.

  13 A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, section II, “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now …” The stanza reads, “Now of my three-score years and ten, / Twenty will not come again, / And take from seventy springs a score, / It only leaves me fifty more.”

  13 Gustave Lobrano was the fiction editor of The New Yorker, with whom Thurber enjoyed a productive and respectful relationship throughout his association at the magazine.

  14 Thurber’s reference to Coolidge’s supposed remark is offered not to elucidate the idea of rejection or defeat but to show a sentence with a tautology similar to the penultimate sentence in entry 7. The quote itself is best explained by a letter to Hudson Hawley of July 27, 1954, in which Thurber describes part of his activities while working at the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, a paper that did not especially capitalize upon his talents: “I used to write parody news features mainly for the amusement of the other slaves, and one of these acciden
tally got sent down the chute and was set up…. [The editor] was always hollering up the tube for short filler items of a sentence or two, and I got away with a dozen or more phonies which were printed. The only one I remember went like this, with a Washington date line: “’A man who does not pray is not a praying man,” President Coolidge today told the annual convention of the Protestant Churches of America.’”

  15 “Big Boy,” The New Yorker, May 4, 1929, pp. 304-7. 17 William Ernest Henley, “Echoes,” section XLVII.

  17 H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

  17 See “The Wings of Henry James” (Lanterns and Lances) and the present volume’s “The Preface to ‘The Old Friends.’”

  18 “The Wings of the Falcon” was an earlier title for Thurber’s piece “The Wings of Henry James,” first published in The New Yorker, November 7, 1959.

  19 The Newsweek article to which Thurber is probably referring is “Digest in the Doghouse,” February 21, 1944.

  Unfamiliar Misquotations

  21 The New Yorker. May 20, 1939.

  If You Ask Me

  26 PM, March 17, 1941. PM was published by Thurber’s friend Ralph Ingersoll. In The Years with Ross, Thurber writes: “I wrote a brief column for it… twice a week until I went into a nervous tailspin following my fifth eye operation. Ross read a few of these columns and objected because he said, ‘You’re throwing away ideas on PM that would make good casuals.’ But I was out from under the strict and exacting editing for which The New Yorker was and still is famous….” Indeed, Thurber did consider new and perennial ideas in thirty-three columns during 1940 and 1941. The first twelve were illustrated and appeared with this disclaimer: “Ideas and opinions expressed in this newspaper are presented without regard to their agreement or disagreement with the editorial attitude of this writer.” On January 27, 1941, an additional note accompanied the column: “James Thurber has been absent from the columns of this paper for three months, due to an eye operation. Now he is sufficiently recovered to dictate his copy to a stenographer, but he has not yet found a way to dictate Thurber drawings. His stories will appear once a week.”