The Thurber Carnival

by James Thurber

  Nor were the city offices dull and colourless places. Secretary Killam of the Civil Service Commission had a tuba, on which I learned to play a few notes, an exciting and satisfying experience, as anyone who has brought forth a blast from a tuba knows. The lady dance-hall inspector was full of stories of the goings on in the more dubious clubs about town, in one of which, she reported, the boys and girls contrived the two-step without moving their feet. And the Mayor’s office was frequently besieged by diverting and passionate taxpayers: an elderly gentleman who could get KDKA on the steel rims of his spectacles, a woman who was warned of the approach of earthquakes by a sharp twinge in her left side, and a lady to whom it had been revealed in a vision that the new O’Shoughnessy storage dam had not been constructed of concrete but of Cream of Wheat.

  So ran the mornings away in the years of my servitude on the Columbus Dispatch. The afternoons, after three o’clock, I had to myself. I used to spend a great many of them at home, lying down. That tuba took quite a little out of me.

  Now we come to the six months of drudgery on the New York Evening Post, back in the days of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Hall-Mills case, and Daddy Browning. The city editor of the paper, a gentleman with a keen eye for the frailties of men and a heart overflowing with misericordia, apparently decided I did not look like a man capable of handling spot news – that is, events in the happening, such as warehouse fires and running gun fights. He therefore set me to writing what he called overnight feature stories. These were stories that could be printed anytime – tomorrow, or next week, or not at all, if the flow of important news was too heavy. They were designed to fit in between accounts of murder trials and train wrecks, to brighten the ominous page and lighten, if possible, the uneasy heart of the reader. So it came about that when other reporters were out wearing themselves down in quest of the clangorous and complicated fact, I could be observed wandering the quiet shore above the noisy torrent of contemporary history, examining the little miracles and grotesqueries of the time.

  I wrote only one story a day, usually consisting of fewer than a thousand words. Most of the reporters, when they went out on assignments, first had to get their foot in the door, but the portals of the fantastic and the unique are always left open. If an astonished botanist produced a black evening primrose, or thought he had produced one, I spent the morning prowling his gardens. When a lady in the West Seventies sent in word that she was getting messages from the late Walter Savage Landor in heaven, I was sent up to see what the importunate poet had on his mind. On the occasion of the arrival in town of Major Monroe of Jacksonville, Florida, who claimed to be a hundred and seventeen years old, I walked up Broadway with him while he roundly cursed the Northern dogs who jostled him, bewailing the while the passing of Bob Lee and Tom Jackson and Joe Johnston. I studied gypsies in Canarsie and generals in the Waldorf, listened to a man talk backward, and watched a blindfolded boy play ping-pong. Put it all together and I don’t know what it comes to, but it wasn’t drudgery.

  It was not often, in the Post or no Sturm-und-Drang phase, that I wandered farther afield than the confines of Greater New York. On the occasion of the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Washington’s crossing the Delaware, however, I was sent over to Trenton to report the daylong celebration. (Once in a long while I got a spot news assignment like that.) At a little past ten in the morning I discovered the hotel room which a group of the more convivial newspapermen had set up as their headquarters, and at a little past twelve I was asleep in a chair there. When I woke up it was dark, and the celebration was over. I hadn’t sent anything to my paper, and by that time it was too late. I went home. The Post, I found out, had used the Associated Press account of what went on in Trenton.

  When I got to work the next morning, the city editor came over to my desk. ‘Let’s see,’ he said, ‘what did I send you out on yesterday?’ ‘It didn’t pan out,’ I told him. ‘No story.’ ‘The hell with it, then,’ he said. ‘Here, get on this – lady says there are violets growing in the snow over in Red Bank.’ ‘Violets don’t grow in the snow,’ I reminded him. ‘They might in Red Bank,’ he said. ‘Slide on over there.’ I slid instead to a bar and put in a phone call to the Chief of Police in Red Bank. A desk sergeant answered and I asked him about the violets. ‘Ain’t no violence over here,’ he told me, and hung up. It wasn’t much to hang a story on, as we say, but I hung one on it. But first I had a few more drinks with a man I had met at the bar, very pleasant fellow, captain of a barge or something. Shortly after the strange case of the violets in the snow, I left the newspaper game and drifted into the magazine game.

  And now, in closing, I wish to leave with my little readers, both boys and girls, this parting bit of advice: Stay out of the magazine game.

  The Cane in the Corridor

  ‘Funny thing about post-operative mental states,’ said Joe Fletcher, rocking the big brandy glass between the palms of his hands and studying the brown tides reflectively. ‘They take all kinds of curious turns.’

  George Minturn moved restlessly in his chair, making a new pattern of his long legs. ‘Let’s go to Barney’s,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to Barney’s now.’

  Mrs Minturn walked over and emptied an ashtray into the fireplace as eloquently as if she were winding the clock. ‘It’s much too late,’ she said. ‘I’m sure everybody we’d want to see has left there and gone home to bed.’

  Minturn finished his brandy and poured out some more.

  ‘You remember Reginald Gardiner’s imitation of wallpaper,’ continued Fletcher, ‘in which he presented a visual design as making a pattern of sound? Many post-operative cases make those interesting transferences. I know one man who kept drawing on a piece of paper what the ringing of a telephone looks like.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about him,’ said Minturn.

  Fletcher drank the last of his brandy and held up his glass; after a moment his host walked over and poured in a little more.

  Mrs Minturn found herself finishing her own drink and getting another one, although she seldom touched anything after dinner. ‘Here’s to the Washington Bridge,’ she said. ‘Here’s to some big dam or other. Let’s talk about some big dam. After all, you’re an engineer, Joe.’

  Fletcher lighted a cigarette, holding his brandy glass between his knees. ‘Which brings up an interesting point,’ he said. ‘I mean, if occupational experience gives a special shape and colour to the patient’s perceptions, then the theory that it is not really a hallucination but a deeper insight into reality probably falls down. For instance, if the number eighteen clangs for one patient and whistles for another – say for George here – ’

  Minturn spilled ashes on the lapel of his dinner coat and rubbed them into it. ‘I don’t want to hear any numbers,’ he said thickly. ‘I don’t want to hear any more about it.’

  His wife, who had been trying to get Fletcher’s eyes but couldn’t, since he continued to study his brandy, spoke up sharply. ‘George is just getting over a frightful cold,’ she said, ‘and he’s prettily easily shaken. He would worry frightfully about people, but he doesn’t dare think about them. They upset him so.’ Fletcher did look at her now, and smiled. She realized she had not said what she had meant to say. Something oblique but cleverly phrased and nicely pointed had got lost on its way to her tongue. ‘You think you’re so darn smart,’ she said.

  Minturn got up and began to pace. The brandy had run out. He sat down and lighted a cigarette.

  ‘Of course, the people that doctors refer to as squashes,’ pursued Fletcher, ‘the invertebrates, you might say, just lie there like vegetables. It is the high-strung cases that manifest the interesting – manifestations. As you just said, Nancy, you think you’re so darn smart. I mean, hospitalization moves the mind toward a false simplification. A man gets the idea that he can hold processes in his hand, the way I’m holding this glass. He lies there, you might say, pulling the easy little meanings out of life as simply as if they were daisy petals.’

  ‘Da
isy petals,’ said Minturn. ‘Where’s brandy? Why isn’t there any more brandy?’

  ‘He gets the idea,’ Fletcher went on, ‘that he knows as much about life as Alfred North Whitehead or Carson McCullers.’

  Minturn said, ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Carson McCullers makes George nervous,’ said Mrs Minturn, ‘and you know it.’

  ‘I ask you to remember I have scarcely seen you people since Carson McCullers began to write,’ said Fletcher stiffly. ‘I know “Sanctuary” upset George so he had to go away to the mountains. I do know that.’

  ‘He didn’t go away to the mountains at all,’ said Mrs Minturn. So you don’t know that.’

  ‘I want to go away to the mountains now,’ said Minturn. He began pacing around again, picking up things.

  ‘There’s more brandy in the kitchen, darling,’ said Mrs Minturn. ‘In the kitchen,’ she repeated as he started upstairs.

  ‘Oh,’ said Minturn. He went out to the kitchen.

  Mrs Minturn went over to Fletcher and stood looking down at him. ‘It’s very sweet of you, Joe, to keep harping on hospitals and sick people and mental states,’ she said. ‘I know why you’re doing it. You’re doing it because George didn’t come to see you when you were in the hospital. You know very well that George is too sensitive to visit people in the hospital.’

  Fletcher stood up, too. ‘Is that why you didn’t come to see me?’ he asked. She was taller than he was. He sat down again.

  ‘Yes, it was, if you want to know so much,’ she said. ‘George would have sensed it and he would have worried about you all the time. As it was, he did worry about you all the time. But he can’t stand things the way you can. You know how sensitive he’s always been.’

  Fletcher tried to drink out of his empty glass. ‘He wasn’t so goddam sensitive when we were both with the Cleveland Telephone Company. He wasn’t so goddam sensitive then. No, he was practically a regular guy.’

  Mrs Minturn drew herself up a little higher. ‘It is just quite possible, perhaps,’ she said, ‘that you were just not quite perceptious at that time.’ She went slowly back to her chair and sat down as Minturn came in with a bottle of brandy and a corkscrew.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing them to Fletcher. Fletcher put down his glass, inserted the corkscrew accurately into the centre of the cork, twisted it competently, and pulled out the cork. ‘Wonderful thing, technology,’ said Minturn, ‘wonderful thing, wonderful thing. I want a drink.’ Fletcher poured a great splash of brandy into his host’s glass and another into his own.

  ‘He doesn’t happen to mean he believes in it,’ said Mrs Minturn. ‘The trouble with you is you can’t tell when a person is allusive even.’

  ‘You’re thinking of Technocracy,’ Fletcher told her, taking her glass and pouring a small quantity of brandy into it with studious precision.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Mrs Minturn, darkly, ‘and just maybe not.’

  ‘Why can’t we go home now? Why can’t we go home now, Nancy?’ said Minturn from deep down in his chair.

  ‘We are home, dear,’ said Mrs Minturn. She turned to Fletcher. ‘Anybody that thinks I can’t appreciate a game that two can play at is definitely,’ said Mrs Minturn, hiccuping, ‘crazy.’ She held her breath and tried counting ten slowly.

  ‘Why don’t you try bending over and drinking out of the opposite side of your glass?’ asked Fletcher.

  Minturn sat up a little in his chair.

  ‘Don’t have to say things like that,’ he said, severely.

  To compensate for her hiccups, Mrs Minturn assumed a posture of strained dignity. Minturn slid farther down into his chair. They both watched Fletcher, who had set the brandy revolving in his glass and was studying it. He took a sip of his drink. ‘It is a common misconception,’ he said, ‘that post-operative mental states disappear on the patient’s advent from the hospital. Out of the hospital, they might recur at any time, and some pretty strange phenomena could happen – as in the case of the hospitalization of a friend.’

  ‘If you’re just trying to get George down, it’s not going to be of the least consequence. I can assure you of that,’ said Mrs Minturn. ‘He’s stronger than you are in lots of more important ways.’

  ‘Phenomena,’ said Minturn.

  ‘I’m talking of what I might do, not of what George might do,’ said Fletcher, ‘in case you consider the manifestation what you choose to call weakness.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Minturn, ‘I certainly do – that and meanness.’

  ‘I want to see Mrs Trimingham,’ said Minturn. ‘I want to go to Bermuda.’

  ‘I suppose it would be too much to say that you can’t very well disprove what I’m saying till I say it,’ said Fletcher.

  ‘No, it wouldn’t,’ said Mrs Minturn. ‘I don’t see why we can’t talk about the Grand Coolidge Dam, or something.’ She laughed. ‘That’s really frightfully funny. It really is.’ She laughed again.

  Minturn had closed his eyes, but he opened them again. ‘Can’t say I do,’ he said. ‘Can’t say I do.’

  Fletcher went over and splashed some more brandy into Minturn’s glass. ‘Let us say that George is lying in the hospital,’ he said. ‘Now, because of a recurring phenomena, I call on him every day.’

  ‘That’s cheap,’ said Mrs Minturn, ‘and that’s pompous.’

  ‘It’s no more pompous than it is predictable,’ said Fletcher, sharply. ‘It’s a condition. It just so happens that it might take the turn of me calling on George every day, from the time he goes in until he gets out.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ said George. ‘There’s such a thing as the law.’

  ‘Of course he can’t,’ said Mrs Minturn. ‘Besides, George is not going to the hospital.’

  ‘I’m not going to the hospital,’ said Minturn.

  ‘Everybody goes to the hospital sooner or later,’ said Fletcher. His voice was rising.

  ‘Nine hundred million people don’t,’ said Mrs Minturn, ‘all the time.’

  ‘I’m stating a pathological case!’ shouted Fletcher. ‘Hypothetical. George has been lying there in that bed for six weeks!’

  ‘No,’ said Minturn.

  ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ said Mrs Minturn.

  ‘Why?’ asked Fletcher. ‘I’m not saying there is anything the matter with him. He’s convalescing, but he can’t get up.’

  ‘Why can’t I get up?’ asked Minturn.

  ‘Because you’re too weak. You have no more strength than a house mouse. You feel as if you were coming apart like a cheap croquet mallet. If you tried to stand, your knees would bend the wrong way, like a flamingo’s.’

  ‘I want to go home,’ mumbled Minturn.

  ‘You are home,’ said his wife.

  ‘He means from the hospital,’ Fletcher told her, ‘in the corridors of which, by the way, you hear my cane tapping practically all the time.’

  ‘What are you doing there?’ said Minturn thickly.

  ‘I come to see you every day,’ said Fletcher. ‘I have been to see you every day since you got there.’ He had been moving around the room, and now he went back and sat down.

  ‘Can’t stand you calling on me every day,’ said Minturn. He finished his drink and poured a new one with some effort.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, George,’ said Mrs Minturn. ‘We’ll take you to the Mayo brothers or someplace and he’ll never find out about it.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to the Mayo brothers,’ said Minturn.

  Fletcher sat forward in his chair. ‘And what’s more,’ he said, ‘I bring you very strange things. That’s part of it. That’s part of the phenomena. I bring you puzzles that won’t work, linked nails that won’t come apart, pigs in clover in which the little balls are glued to the bottom of the box. I bring you mystery novels in Yiddish, and artificial flowers made of wire and beads, and horehound candy.’

  ‘Terrible, terrible rat,’ said Mrs Minturn, ‘terrible rat Fletcher.’

  ‘Police find something to do
about that,’ said Minturn. ‘Such a thing as law and order. Such a thing as malpractice.’

  ‘And liquorice whips,’ continued Fletcher, ‘and the complete files of Physical Culture for 1931; and matchboxes that go broo-oo-oo, broo-oo-oo.’

  ‘Broo,’ said Minturn. ‘I want to go to Twenty-One.’

  ‘Terrible, terrible, terrible rat,’ said Mrs Minturn.

  ‘I see,’ said Fletcher. ‘You don’t even feel sorry for poor old tap-tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Minturn.

  ‘That’s my cane in the corridor,’ said Fletcher. ‘You are lying there, trying to unwrassle something I have brought you, when, tap, tap, tap, here I come again.’

  ‘Terrible rat, go home,’ said Mrs Minturn.

  Fletcher bowed to her gravely. ‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘It constitutes the first occasion on which I have ever been ejected from this or any other house, but that is as it should be, I presume.’

  ‘Don’t throw anybody out,’ said Minturn. ‘Tap, tap, tap,’ he added.

  Half-way to the hall door, Fletcher turned. ‘That’s right, laugh,’ he said. ‘Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, then.’

  ‘Tap, tap, tap,’ said Minturn from far down near the floor. A new attack of hiccups kept Mrs Minturn speechless, but she stood up as her guest went out into the hall. Minturn was still saying ‘Tap, tap,’ and Mrs Minturn was hiccuping, as Fletcher found his hat and coat and went out the front door into the melting snow, looking for a taxi.

  The Secret Life of James Thurber

  I have only dipped here and there into Salvador Dali’s The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (with paintings by Salvador Dali and photographs of Salvador Dali), because anyone afflicted with what my grandmother’s sister Abigail called ‘the permanent jumps’ should do no more than skitter through such an autobiography, particularly in these melancholy times.

  One does not have to skitter far before one comes upon some vignette which gives the full shape and flavour of the book: the youthful dreamer of dreams biting a sick bat or kissing a dead horse, the slender stripling going into man’s estate with the high hope and fond desire of one day eating a live but roasted turkey, the sighing lover covering himself with goat dung and aspic that he might give off the true and noble odour of the ram. In my flying trip through Dali I caught other glimpses of the great man: Salvador adoring a seed ball fallen from a plane tree, Salvador kicking a tiny playmate off a bridge, Salvador caressing a crutch, Salvador breaking the old family doctor’s glasses with a leather-thonged mattress-beater. There would appear to be only two things in the world that revolt him (and I don’t mean a long-dead hedgehog). He is squeamish about skeletons and grasshoppers. Oh, well, we all have our idiosyncrasies.