Collected Fables

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Foreword by Keith Olbermann

  A Fabulist for Our Time by Michael J. Rosen

  Preface by James Thurber

  Fables for Our Time

  The Mouse Who Went to the Country

  The Little Girl and the Wolf

  The Two Turkeys

  The Tiger Who Understood People

  The Fairly Intelligent Fly

  The Lion Who Wanted to Zoom

  The Very Proper Gander

  The Moth and the Star

  The Shrike and the Chipmunks

  The Seal Who Became Famous

  The Hunter and the Elephant

  The Scotty Who Knew Too Much

  The Bear Who Let It Alone

  The Owl Who Was God

  The Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing

  The Stork Who Married a Dumb Wife

  The Green Isle in the Sea

  The Crow and the Oriole

  The Elephant Who Challenged the World

  The Birds and the Foxes

  The Courtship of Arthur and Al

  The Hen Who Wouldn’t Fly

  The Glass in the Field

  The Tortoise and the Hare

  The Patient Bloodhound

  The Unicorn in the Garden

  The Rabbits Who Caused All the Trouble

  The Hen and the Heavens

  Further Fables for Our Time

  The Sea and the Shore

  The Truth About Toads

  The Butterfly, the Ladybug, and the Phoebe

  The Foolhardy Mouse and the Cautious Cat

  The Rose and the Weed

  The Bat Who Got the Hell Out

  The Lion and the Foxes

  The Wolf Who Went Places

  The Bluebird and His Brother

  The Clothes Moth and the Luna Moth

  The Lover and His Lass

  The Fox and the Crow

  Variations on the Theme

  The Bears and the Monkeys

  The Father and His Daughter

  The Cat in the Lifeboat

  The Bragdowdy and the Busybody

  The Human Being and the Dinosaur

  The Hen Party

  The Rose, the Fountain, and the Dove

  The Bachelor Penguin and the Virtuous Mate

  The Peacelike Mongoose

  The Godfather and His Godchild

  The Grizzly and the Gadgets

  The Goose That Laid the Gilded Egg

  The Trial of the Old Watchdog

  The Philosopher and the Oyster

  Tea for One

  The Mouse and the Money

  The Wolf at the Door

  What Happened to Charles

  The Daws on the Dial

  The Tiger Who Would Be King

  The Chipmunk and His Mate

  The Weaver and the Worm

  Two Dogs

  The Lady of the Legs

  The Kingfisher and the Phoebe

  The Turtle Who Conquered Time

  The Lion and the Lizard

  The Tigress and Her Mate

  The Magpie’s Treasure

  The Cricket and the Wren

  The Crow and the Scarecrow

  Ivory, Apes, and People

  Oliver and the Other Ostriches

  The Shore and the Sea

  Uncollected Fables

  “The Flaw in the Plan,” illustrated by Laurie Rosenwald

  “A Farewell to Mandibles,” illustrated by Seymour Chwast

  “Many Pigeons,” illustrated by Victoria Chess

  “The Ordeal of No. 137,968,” illustrated by Victoria Roberts

  “The Pigeon Who Wouldn’t Go Home,” illustrated by Victoria Roberts

  “The Possum Who Wasn’t Playing Dead,” illustrated by Mark Ulriksen

  “The Starling and the Crow,” illustrated by Eric Hanson

  “The Generalissimo of All the Field Mice in the World,” illustrated by Edel Rodriguez

  “The Bright Emperor,” from The New Yorker, August 20, 1932, illustrated by R. O. Blechman

  “The Princess and the Tin Box,” published in The New Yorker, September 29, 1945, reprinted in The Beast in Me and Other Animals, 1948, illustrated by Blair Thornley

  “The Last Clock,” published in The New Yorker, February 21, 1959, reprinted in Lanterns and Lances, 1961, illustrated by Calef Brown

  About the Author

  About the Editor

  Praise

  Also by James Thurber

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  Keith Olbermann

  It doesn’t come up in conversation much, but I have a tattoo on my right arm of a moth flying toward a star.

  Obviously, James Thurber did not draw this on my arm and he certainly did not tattoo it there either, but nevertheless the Moth and the Star are his, in the same way that the Peacelike Mongoose is his and the Bear Who Let It Alone is his and the Unicorn in the Garden is his. They, and all his other animal stand-ins for the pageant of humans—brilliant and dim alike—are his, eternally, indelibly, and never to be duplicated. Of course, if you are really serious about Thurber’s animals and the fables they populate, you can get tattoos. But as a first step I would recommend reading this first-ever, authoritative compilation of the fables. Tattoos can wait.*

  But reading the fables can’t. They remain startlingly appropriate to the human condition, and as someone who has read them for half a century and read them aloud for a decade, I can testify that they remain precisely relevant to the freshest political and cultural quicksand of each new year. We keep making the same mistakes, practically begging Thurber’s Very Proper Gander and his Bat Who Got the Hell Out and his Chief of Police Dogs to keep rotating to the front of the stage to say, “We told you so.”

  * * *

  I first tried to do verbal justice to Thurber’s writing in 1979 as part of a public-speaking class in college. I had seen the great William Windom’s one-man Thurber show on PBS, and in those pre-DVR (indeed, pre-VCR) days, I managed to record most of it on audiocassette. After I did a bad impression of Windom’s spectacular interpretation, a classmate told me I should abandon my intended career in sports and newscasting and instead make my living by reading Thurber aloud. I said I’d be happy to but, all things considered, I was likelier to be asked to pay for the privilege than be paid for it.

  I was finally proved wrong by the very person who had introduced me to Thurber: my father. During his last illness, I read to him every night in the hospital for seven months, and one night after I had read about twenty Thurber fables to him, he asked me to read “The Peacelike Mongoose” for a second time. He then told me to stop for a moment, and after long thought he said, “You should do that in your newscast.” I said that didn’t seem to make sense and besides, there were copyrights and such to worry about. That’s when my dad said, “How many times have I ever suggested anything to you about your shows?” I couldn’t recall him ever having done so. “Try it,” he said. “What’s the worst that can happen?” He slipped into a coma not long after, and in his honor I went on television and read “The Peacelike Mongoose.”

  His conviction that reading the story would appeal to my audience was correct. The ratings went up, and soon the Thurber segments became the most-watched quarter-hour on MSNBC every Friday. But my conviction that reading the story would precipitate a proprietary response from Thurber’s literary estate was also right.

  The email arrived within days of my reading “The Peacelike Mongoose”—but it bore no resemblance to my fears. Instead it contained a story from two of my regular viewers about how they had been wrestling with an impossible dilemma over that very fable. They had been approached by a
publisher who wanted to include “The Peacelike Mongoose” in a textbook—but only if they agreed to remove one word. The two viewers? James Thurber’s daughter, Rosemary, and his granddaughter, Sara Thurber Sauers. And the worrisome word? One entirely and deliciously of Thurber’s creation: mongoosexual.

  Nothing Thurber ever wrote was a throwaway or designed to be edited a half century later. Rosemary Thurber would testify to her father’s daylong agonies over whether the comma should go after the fourth word of the thirty-third sentence or after the fifth. He wrote—or as his vision vanished, he dictated—each word and punctuation mark to be published as planned. In “The Peacelike Mongoose” he wrote mongoosexual and he meant mongoosexual.

  Thurber’s immediate fame continued after his death in 1961, extended into the seventies and eighties by those who had grown up with him, and then into the nineties, as scholars began to analyze his work and chronicle his life in biographies. But by 2010, when I first read Thurber on my show, his work had fallen into an inevitable dormancy, and the time was ripe for rediscovery. Should Rosemary Thurber really keep her father out of a textbook and out of the minds of a generation of potential new addicts just because of one word?

  And then I said that word on national television, and Sara phoned her mother and said, “I think you have your answer,” and sure enough, they told the publishers to print the story intact or not at all—and they printed it intact!

  And there began my formal association with Thurber and the weekly readings on television and online, and as a consequence, the Thurber renaissance transpired a little earlier than expected, and his collections and fables began appearing on Amazon’s “Movers & Shakers” list, and then two reprints of the Library of America edition of Thurber, and then an audiobook they let me perform, and then theatrical advice from William Windom. And ultimately, that tattoo.

  The late Mr. Windom agreed that Thurber’s unique status as the Babe Ruth of twentieth-century humor is probably best expressed in the fables. Remarkably, there is almost no “bad” Thurber, though the short stories often ask a lot from a reader, and the drawings are often simultaneously perfect and yet leave one hungering for the backstory. The fables, on the other hand, combine the best of Thurber the writer and Thurber the artist. The moral that concludes each one underscores Thurber’s intent, and the consistent Aesop-like length permits the reader to anticipate exactly when the payoff of insight and humor or outrage will hit.

  They are also delights to read aloud. I firmly recommend that you try this, even if you’re alone. Thurber did not write to be performed, but there is no mistaking the instincts of the old college thespian and the later Broadway playwright—they resonate in every line.

  If you are in a buoyant mood, you can hear in every anthropomorphic character or see in every Thurber illustration the joy of a life well laughed. If you are less sanguine, you can sense the existential threat of “the claw of the sea-puss”* that gets us all in the end. But either way, you can feel what he felt in his heart—good, bad, but never indifferent. It mattered to him, it moved him, it maddened him, it made him laugh, and he was able to refine it and convey it and leave it for us in a manner no one else has ever done.

  Finally, there is the matter of new Thurber material: a preface and ten fables that never appeared in his books, along with lovingly created new illustrations by other artists that add to the sheer joy of Thurber’s original work, like a lemon twist or just the right nightcap.

  On the subject of newness, I am delighted to admit that when asked to perform the fable “The Flaw in the Plan” at an event in New York, I knowingly and accommodatingly nodded, and then as soon as I was by myself, I said aloud, “The Flaw in the Plan”? What the hell is “The Flaw in the Plan”? I never read anything by Thurber called “The Flaw in the Plan”! The manuscript of this book quickly arrived and I was overwhelmed to learn that there was yet another Thurber fable to enjoy, as topical as if it had been written yesterday. There are fables here that you have never read before! Thus, if you are encountering some, many, or all of these fables for the first time, I envy you. Please relish your rapture and remember that this way lies tattoos.

  A Fabulist for Our Time

  From his early stories and cartoons in that nascent magazine, The New Yorker, to the last works dictated before his death in late 1961, James Thurber negotiated a terrain that was as confounding as it was recognizably our own—most often, in the role of fabulist.

  Thurber’s works were and are the product of a mind bent over backward to make sense—or even nonsense—of a chaotic world. Their range is especially broad, from stories such as the renowned “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” to his suite of boyhood memories My Life and Hard Times (a book Russell Baker said was “possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written”*); from his broadly appealing books for younger readers, to his reminiscences of the familiar figures of his youth (The Thurber Album) or his colleagues at The New Yorker (The Years with Ross). And to this we must add his voluminous work as a cartoonist and illustrator.

  “If you’re like me, and I know I am . . .” was Thurber’s quintessential perspective. He was an acutely, if not painfully, perceptive man, and he counted that on some deep level, the irritation he perceived wasn’t merely a personal pettiness but was, in fact, something rampant in the general population. The blasts of bafflement that chilled Thurber to the bone often became more than cocktail banter: more like battle cries in a common outrage. Thurber used humor to dance through life, offering himself up quite seriously as laughing matter as he shimmied under the lower and lower pole of the ideal.

  Humor is the midpoint between boorishly whining and feverishly declaiming, between “woe is me” and “listen to me!” It’s an attempt at equilibrium and homeostasis—that survival strategy that requires the least expenditure of energy for the maximum necessary comfort. Throughout much of his prose, Thurber shrewdly focused on being a human animal, an adaptable being among other beasts. (Indeed, he once considered “The Bestiary in Me” as title for one of his collections.) As the Manchester Guardian wrote of his fables: “It was Whitman who wanted to turn and live with the animals; it is Thurber who has succeeded in the only possible terms, by enlisting them in the endless battle for human sanity.”

  And so we find Thurber’s humor often constructed at the intersection of really? and reality. Bridging such discrepancy, his dreamed-up outcomes lean on the signpost alongside present dramas. That way, one is moving toward the choreography of an imagined future. This way, one sees the muddy footprints of foreclosed facts. Thurber’s pages braid sobering facts and drunken hopes into a thread, a tightrope that spanned the abyss—this abysmal span of his then-current events.

  The fables are thus quintessential Thurber, a distillation, a coup de grâce that share his best cartoons’ puissance: not just “ha ha,” but “aha.”

  Despite the decades that have passed since their composition, the eighty-five fables collected here possess a renewed relevance in this “Life and Hard Times” of ours. Partly, it’s the timeless nature of fables themselves. They’re pastoral windows that exist both within and beyond a particular time. Most of Thurber’s preoccupations, the subjects that pricked and prodded him throughout his various books, are reprised and distilled in these short works with wizened authority: the untidy course of love; the bitterness of lost hope; false speech and the loosening grip on language; mistrust and suspiciousness; the mongering of hate and the fragility of peace. All these topics are at the core of these miniature narratives.

  A fable may be spare in its form, but not in its complexity of ideas, personalities, politics, and applicability. Only a writer of formidable talent can concoct an utterly modest realm, populate it with simple characters (animals, principally), juxtapose their primal motives and conflicts, and craft a work that, much the way a prism separates light into its elemental parts, clarifies a spectrum of our truest natures from the blurriness of daily life.

  Between the writing of Fab
les for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated (1940) and Further Fables for Our Time (1956), two factors altered the character of Thurber’s work. His vision failed. The sight in his right eye that had been progressively diminishing since the bow-and-arrow incident took his left eye in his childhood finally prevented Thurber from seeing at all. Prior to the 1940s, he was able to create the cartoons, illustrations, advertising campaigns, and children’s books with pen and ink. But after a series of difficult and not entirely successful eye operations in 1941, the remaining vision in his right eye clouded and rendered him blind.

  Various biographers and critics have suggested that his partial sight invited more fantasy into his perceived reality—mistaken perceptions whose creative potential Thurber often exploited.

  Likewise, the auditory nature of his work—particularly the fables—increased considerably as Thurber wrote and rewrote the latter fables in his head, polishing passages until each became a cabochon of grammatical finesse, coruscating wordplay, and aural antics. The renowned critic Malcolm Cowley’s review of Further Fables for Our Time suggested that Thurber created “a completely verbalized universe.” Critic David McCord called this “American original” “a wild tyrannothesaurus type when on the hunt for words.”*

  The other significant change simply coincided with America’s postwar climate: the “dark national weather” as Thurber called it, of the Great War, postwar years, and the McCarthy era of distrust, suspicion, and conformity.

  Gerald Weales, in a lengthy review in Commonweal, notes that Thurber’s “fifteen-year journey from Fables for Our Time (1940) to Further Fables for Our Time” reflects “a kind of escape from a world that was becoming increasingly difficult to face.”* And he cites Thurber’s biographical recollections—The Thurber Album and The Years with Ross—and his children’s books—Many Moons, The Great Quillow, The White Deer, and The 13 Clocks—as the more comfortable detours he published in this period.

  In an interview just before his fifty-fifth birthday, Thurber described another of the many projects in the switching yard of his bustling mind. He was hard upon a more extended fable such as “The Last Clock,” featured in this book: “The Spoodle,” a parable of confusion running some twelve thousand words.