I was on a James Thurber kick for a while, so I got out Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor, and Himself (New York: Harper 1989), a collection of heretofore unanthologized bits and pieces. Unsurprisingly, there was a reason why most of this stuff wasn’t put into one or another of the anthologies, over the years. It’s Thurber, so there are quite a few gems scattered in the crankiness. Gems? I don’t know that I’d call them gems. Thurber’s greatest moments aren’t hard and brilliant, like gems. They’re gumdrops, really, and you can chew ’em over for a while.
The best thing in there, I think, is “The Banquet Speaker”, a description of the whole confusing business of being invited to speak at, and speaking at, and escaping from banquets. As with the perfect Thurber story, its conclusion is both absurd and somehow inevitable; having accidentally impersonated Mr. Septimus R. Groves at the banquet of the, um, we’re not sure, he then naturally checks into the Pennsylvania Hotel as Septimus R. Groves, telling the clerk (who is surprised to discover another Septimus R. Groves when they already have one registered) that the other Septimus R. Groves is actually Horace R. Morgner.
I just hope that when the bitter blind old man died, he had had a chance to use up all the names he had set aside. Probably not, but there it is.
Oh, and just because it surprised me: what year, gentle reader, would you expect Mr. Thurber to have written of the “dark decade now coming happily to a close”? He was born in 1894 and died in 1961, so that’s in theory seven decades to choose from. First to guess right gets absolutely nothing; but if you know an amusing story about Beethoven, I can give you half marks.
,
-Vardibidian.