Arrive - November/December 2013

FILM & TELEVISION

QUOTABLE
THURBER

“My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.” “I admire the person who can write it right o;. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well.

But I don’t think too clearly—too many thoughts bump into one another.” “When I wrote The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I had a scene in which Mitty got between Hemingway and an opponent in a Stork Club brawl. Helen said it had to come out, that there should be nothing topical in the story. Well, you know how it is when your wife is right. You grouse around the house for a week, and then you follow her advice.”

thurberhouse.org
FIRSTCLASS
The Secret Life of
James Thurber
The author’s most famous character, Walter Mitty,
gets another go-round on film

Walter Mitty is getting more juice these days than his creator, James Thurber, dead now 52 years, his name scarcely mentioned today.

Mitty’s name will again be emblazoned on the marquee, adding to regular popu-lar-media references to individuals who live humdrum lives but escape in heroic daydreams of grandeur.

Mitty’s fame springs from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a Thurber short story published in 1939 in The New Yorker and a staple in English classes ever since.

That is also the title of a highly hyped movie due out Christmas Day and starring Ben Stiller (who also directed) and Kristen Wiig, the second go-round for a Mitty movie.

The Walter Mitty in the new movie may bear as little resemblance to the original Mitty as the one in the 1947 movie, which starred Danny Kaye and featured a lot of song and dance to match the star’s skills, never mind poor Walter.

Thurber reportedly hated it. Which is not surprising.

Walter Mitty is anything but a song-and-dance man, not even in his dreams.

And neither was Thurber.

British journalist Alistair Cooke met
Thurber in the late 1930s, according to
Thomas Fensch in The Man Who Was Walter
Mitty, and described his appearance as that
of “a grasshopper finally come to earth.”
Cooke said, “He had a spiderly stance,
enormous feet that may have been only
the type of shoe he wore, and he had
glasses as thick as binoculars.”
Those glasses were partly the result of
a boyhood accident playing William Tell
with his brother, who missed and shot out
Thurber’s eye.

The loss of vision may have primed Thurber’s robust imagination via Charles Bonnet syndrome, which sparks vivid hallucinations in people with vision loss.

That is to say, Thurber had a lot of the Mitty dreamer in him, much of which found its way onto the pages of The Ne w Yorker in short stories and, most famously, cartoons.

He had a lifelong ambition to be on the stage and finally got the chance in 1960, the year before he died, with A Thurber Carnival, a hit Broadway show based on his short stories. He played himself in 88 performances and won a Tony for his script.