In an afterword to this edition of James Thurber’s “My Life and Hard Times,” former New York Times columnist Russell Baker calls it “possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written.” I cannot speak to the superlatives, not having read all the autobiographies ever written, but I can tell you that, yes, it is short and, yes, it is elegant — and, moreover, it is terribly funny.
The last is the remarkable thing about this book. Literary humor commonly has an expiration date of about two years after publication, but “My Life and Hard Times” has been on the shelves for three-quarters of a century without losing any of its freshness.
“My Life” was first published serially from July through September 1933 in The New Yorker, the magazine with which Thurber was associated nearly all his writing career. The following November the 10 segments were published in book form. It has gone through countless editions since.
A conventional autobiography it is not. Written when Thurber was not yet 40, it is essentially slices of his boyhood and young adulthood lived with his family in his native Columbus, Ohio, in the first and second decades of the 20th century.
The times were not hard; his use of the term in the title is a conscious mockery both of himself and of the idea of autobiography. The times were, instead, nutty, because so was the family.
Family members, besides being slightly off- kilter individually and collectively (Grandfather, a Civil War veteran, dwells mentally within that conflict most of the time), also seem to attract bizarreness, such as the next-door neighbor in “The Night the Ghost Got In” who was subject to mild “attacks.” Thurber writes: “Most everybody we knew or lived near had some kind of attacks.”
Even the quadrupeds defy orthodoxy. In “The Dog That Bit People,” the title canine “acted poisoned once in a while.” Not an easy trick.
None of the pieces is exclusively, or even mainly, about what its title indicates. “The Car We Had to Push,” for instance, starts out describing the family’s difficulties with a recalcitrant Reo, but wanders around to take in his late grandmother’s fear that electricity dripped invisibly and dangerously from empty light sockets, and his great-uncle Zenas, “who caught the same disease that was killing off the chestnut trees.”
My favorite selections are “University Days” and “Draft Board Nights.” Having barely passed biology in college, I can identify with Thurber’s inability to use a microscope. All he could ever see through it was “a nebulous milky substance”; the one time he excitedly thought he had succeeded, it turned out he had mistakenly adjusted the lens to reflect and he saw his own eye.
Because Ohio State was a land-grant university, Thurber had to take two years of military subjects, wearing a uniform that “made me look like an interurban railway conductor.” He never got to wear the uniform outside the university. His eyesight was extremely poor (he eventually went blind), but that did not stop his draft board (this is during World War I) from calling him in for a physical examination again and again.
“The second time I went up, I tried to explain to one of the doctors that I had already been exempted. ‘You’re just a blur to me,’ I said, taking off my glasses. ‘You’re absolutely nothing to me,’ he snapped, sharply.”
There is considerable exaggeration, not to mention fabrication, in here, yet the reader has the sense he is getting a true idea of the nature of the Thurber clan. In “The Day the Dam Broke” — the dam, of course, did not break; that is the core of the humor — Grandfather fleeing the supposed floodwaters surely did not actually catch up “in one arm a small child and in the other a slight clerkish man of perhaps forty- two.” But it is the sort of thing Grandfather would have done, if in fact he was capable of fleeing, and “a slight clerkish man” is just the sort of person who would need rescuing.
It is worth comparing the nutty Thurber family with the nutty Sycamore family of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s “You Can’t Take It With You,” for they are two sides of a coin. Whereas the blithe Sycamores gleefully ignore reality and do as they please, the earnest Thurbers unconsciously construct an unreality and try to wrestle it to the ground. Each is quite happy in its own way.
Roger K. Miller, a novelist and freelance writer and editor, writes the blog .
Nonfiction
My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber, $11
