I don't know exactly where James Thurber lived around here, but it was clearly around here. As I was reading through Let Your Mind Alone I couldn't help noticing the local color. In fact, when at one point he describes his usual squabbling married couple, the wife doesn't let the husband stop at a diner in Torrington, because the diner is set at an angle to the road. I had, that morning, passed by a diner in Torrington which was set at an angle to the road. Might be the same one. Hard to tell. Perhaps I'll go in and find out whether it has been there since 1936, but I think I'll take the wife's advice and stay the hell out.
The bulk of the book, by the way, is a series of notes Thurber takes off from self-help books, and he does his usual Thurber thing, crazy and nonsensical and grouchy and somehow endearing anyway. The best bit, the most Thurbery, is where he notes the advice to write a letter without using the first person. Mr. Thurber can't think of any reason why he would want to do that, or any topic that wouldn't require the first person somewhere along the line, except (he says) a letter instructing a boy how to build a rabbit hutch. On the other hand, he doesn't know how to build a rabbit hutch. The boy could easily build a better hutch himself, without the letter. He never was any good at building rabbit hutches, although he did have rabbits as a boy. In fact, one day...
The marvelous part is how aggrieved he appears to be by the absurd insistence that he write about rabbit hutches. In fact, nobody had said anything about rabbit hutches. It's a nice double-reverse, which is a delicate kind of joke. Woody Allen, in his stand-up, used to have a nice line where he would brag about his sexual prowess in a manner designed to tell the audience that he had no sexual prowess whatsoever. The audience likes to see through the facade, but it's a fake facade, after all, and the audience is supposed to see through it. Similarly, Joel Grey's magnificent Emcee in the movie of Cabaret feigns prudishness and sophistication, but he feigns them very badly, so that the joke for the audience is that he is seething with lust and depravity while he extols the virginity of the dancing girls. The audience gets to look through. For Thurber, of course, it's that we all know he just wanted to tell us what happened when his father got into the rabbit hutch, and the lightness of the connection between that and the self-help book is the joke.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.