Collected Fables, Page 2

  “The story is placed in a country called Confusia. In it, everybody is suspected of the wrong thing. One person has seen the spoodle, another has heard it, and a third has even tasted it. The prosecutor is sure that the spoodle is un-Confusian and has to find it. If he can’t find one, the prosecutor says, he will have to build one. It’s a satire on the Un-American Committee’s worst confusions.”*

  It’s the return to the fables that provided Thurber a plainspoken, accessible, and satiric way to “protest against the American assault on its own culture.”* And it’s our return to them—collected here with several that have never seen the printed page—that proves his fables as cogent and necessary today as they were in his era of uneasiness and uncertainty. These fables are, indeed, for our time.

  A Note About the Contents

  All the fables in Fables for Our Time, along with Thurber’s accompanying drawings, first appeared in The New Yorker during 1939 and 1940. The collection, published as a single volume by Harper & Brothers in 1940, included some alternate versions of drawings, as well as Thurber’s “Famous Poems Illustrated,” a suite of nine treasured poems of the era.

  Of the forty-seven fables in Further Fables for Our Time, ten did not appear in The New Yorker prior to book publication by Harper & Brothers in 1956: “The Sea and the Shore,” “The Lion and the Foxes,” “The Hen Party,” “The Bears and the Monkeys,” “The Chipmunk and His Mate,” “The Trial of the Old Watchdog,” “The Godfather and His Godchild,” “Tea for One,” “The Lady of the Legs,” and “The Shore and the Sea.”

  The line drawings for Thurber’s second fable collection were all adapted from miscellaneous illustrations Thurber had completed before blindness overtook both eyes. The majority of his pen-and-ink work ceased by 1940; until 1950 or so, he occasionally tried a broader pencil or chalk on poster-size sheets of paper . . . and even used white chalk on black paper that the printer would reverse before printing. Most of the Further Fables images were selected from larger drawings, shrunk, enlarged, or otherwise manipulated, and assigned to one or another fable. It is not known what role Thurber, his wife Helen, or the publisher’s editor or designer had in selecting and presenting the drawings.

  The continued archiving and cataloging of Thurber’s art by both the Thurber Estate and The Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library provided renewed options for illustrating Further Fables for Our Time that better maintain the integrity of Thurber’s line quality and more aptly match the fables’ subject matter.

  Of the fables that were never collected in a book prior to Collected Fables, three were published in The New Yorker. “The Bright Emperor” (August 20, 1932); “The Princess and the Tin Box” (September 29, 1945, subsequently included in Thurber’s collection The Beast in Me and Other Animals, 1948); and the late, lengthy tale, “The Last Clock” (February 21, 1959, and included in Lanterns and Lances, a collection published months before his death in November 1961).

  Among the folders of Thurber’s manuscripts is a collection of fables in various states of composition. Some exist in multiple drafts such as “The Hepcat and the Barkeep (A Fable in Animal Slang),” an aural feat that I sense would fall on mostly deaf ears in this era (i.e., “If you can’t outfox that mouse, you’re a pussycat. Give her a cock-and-bull story. Tell her you were skylarking and fell among wolves. Don’t sing your swan song like a lame duck, and stop drinking like a fish.”).

  Some of the folder’s pages are little more than notes: a title such as “The Cardinal and the Turtle,” followed by a working paragraph or two. (This one happens to contain this zinger: “‘You look like an accident coming back from where it happened,’ said the cardinal. ‘I get along,’ said the turtle.”) A few sheets have titles and morals waiting for a story such as, “This we all should learn and teach, loose talk is not free speech.”

  It’s worth pointing out that for the last two decades of his life, Thurber composed in one of two ways: by scrawling increasingly large and fewer words on stacks of typing paper that his wife or secretary would transcribe, or by dictating from memory. He could write and revise upwards of three thousand words in his head and then recite them to be typed. Even so, Thurber still had little means of revisiting and reviewing all that he continued to create unless he specifically recalled it and had it read back to him.

  It’s the ongoing consideration of Thurber’s canon over the last thirty-five years—a partnership I’ve had the honor to undertake with James’s daughter, Rosemary Thurber, his granddaughter, Sara Thurber Sauers, and the Estate’s literary agent, Barbara Hogenson—that has prompted the inclusion of the following seven fables: “The Flaw in the Plan,” “The Starling and the Crow,” “The Possum Who Wasn’t Playing Dead,” “A Farewell to Mandibles,” an incomplete draft of “The Generalissimo of All the Field Mice in the World,” and three versions of another fable: “Many Pigeons,” “The Ordeal of No. 137,968,” and “The Pigeon Who Wouldn’t Go Home.”

  The year 2019 is the 125th anniversary of James Thurber’s birth. As such, his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, has designated it as “The Year of Thurber”—an occasion to acquaint or reacquaint readers with Thurber’s canon. One major event will be an exhibition of his artwork at The Columbus Museum of Art (August 2019 until March 2020). It’s to be accompanied by a monograph, A Mile and a Half of Lines: The Art of James Thurber, that will feature some 250 drawings, a third of which have never been published.

  This volume of fables, likewise, offers a chance to show Thurber’s continuing influence on contemporary artists: New Yorker cartoonists and beyond. It’s key to pause here, and remember that it was Thurber who instrumentally shifted the cartoon’s nature from being an artfully drawn depiction of a humorous situation or observation with some commentary or badinage, into an article of humor itself: the lines themselves, both drawn and written, were the humor. It was Thurber who invited spontaneity, unpremeditated compositions, and a style of drawing that had little to do with accuracy, preliminary sketches, or training. As veteran New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin has written, “Thurber’s drawings dropped into the pages of The New Yorker like graphic boulders in a placid pond.”

  The ten contemporary artists and cartoonists invited to illustrate Thurber’s works here all credit Thurber as an inspiration or influence. Their works are a championing chorus that proves the endurance of Thurber’s line—both the physical line on the page as well as the lineage of his genius that continues to liberate and excite new creators in the graphic arts.

  —MICHAEL J. ROSEN

  Preface

  The human family, of which I am a sometimes reluctant, but often proud, member, has always invited a story, resented a lecture, and yawned at a sermon—as La Fontaine put it—while needing all three, and so the literature of our surprisingly extant species is a history of the fine art of making the three voices speak with one tongue. This synchronizing can be traced, if you have an idle year on your hands, all the way from the pre-Christian fables that warned men of the traps and pitfalls of their follies and passions, up to today’s singing commercials, which tell people how happiness can be brought to the home through the use of mild detergents, or by the smoking of cigarettes. The ancient apologues, to use a neatly alliterative academic synonym I kept stumbling over while browsing in the verbiage of literary historians, are not only wiser, but easier to listen to than the other genre. I can follow pretty well most of the simpler Latin fables, when they are read aloud, but it took me three weeks to make out what it was the little girls were saying in the Contadina Tomato Paste* commercial, although the lyric seemed to be written in English.

  Fable production, as marketing statisticians would call it, by which I mean the turning out of new fables in told traditional form, has fallen off in our time about as much as the production of wood burning sets or surrey fringe. Most literary formulas thrive best in the climate of their particular periods, and this was true of the fables of Aesop, the early Romans, and the medieval French and Brahmins. You c
ome out of the dusty alcoves of fables, coughing from stuffiness, confusion, and the contrary speculations of scholars, and the experience gives you a perverse desire to throw around some conjectures and generalizations of your own, or at least it gave me one. If you will kindly not scrape your chairs, I shall get through with this prefatoration (my own classical word) in nearly no time at all. Twenty-five centuries ago, fables were made in order to shorten a journey, lighten a burden, amuse a monarch, instruct a class, comfort or exhort a friend, mock a tyrant, or society itself, in a kind of metaphorical cipher code, harangue, or, best of all, please the narrator himself.

  Fables, in their genuine state, were as popular with ancient slaves and freedom, patricians and philosophers, kings and commoners as bleated love songs, gooey with ungrammatical yearning, are popular today among teenagers and emotionally underprivileged adults. The mistaken idea that fables were originally for children has bored children for a good thousand years, and nowadays they shiver a bit in the austere presence of Aesop, however big the type or gaudy the colored illustrations, as they would shiver in the cold interior of a Gothic summer house. If Jean de La Fontaine, of Paris, Château-Thierry, and the seventeenth century, greatest of the translators and adaptors of fables, had not given them a new light touch, they might have died out of modern languages some two hundred and thirty years before the invention of the teddy bear.

  Literature owes a great debt to La Fontaine, surely the most translated poet since Horace, for the liveliness he brought to a staid old pattern. He didn’t take to fables, at first, like a duck to water, but more like a man to a dentist’s chair, as far as I can make out, and if this old pious believer in precept and precedent had not found authority for liveliness of narration in Quintilian, he might not have done his famous tales. Old Quintilian, it seems, had once observed that liveliness is good for narratives. Now, millions of children and adults can recite La Fontaine’s fables of the grasshopper and the ant, and the fox and the crow, and these and the others have been translated by everybody from God Knows Who to the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Marianne Moore.

  La Fontaine, who always had a child audience in mind (after all, fables have been used as textbooks for at least eighteen hundred years) takes a mild, but violent, liberty with the one about the fox and the grapes. He gives the frustrated fox a touch of philosophy, almost of benign resignation, making him out neither a complainer nor a whimperer. Fortunately, the power of old Aesop has outlived the Frenchman’s tampering. The Fox is the sly rascal of Fable, and one of the great whiners in the history of words, and nobody can change him and nobody ought to try, for Reynard’s place in Story is as firmly founded as Man’s. Might as well try to make the kingly lion cowardly, like L. Frank Baum’s in The Wizard of Oz or the ass a creature of discernment and wisdom.

  If you really want to have a lot of turgid and exasperating fun, plunge into the cloistered comparative definitions of apologue, myth, allegory, folklore, parable, fairy tale, nursery rhyme, and proverb. You will come out of it babbling. The Britannica, for instance, opines that a proverb is a fossilized fable. Nonsense, gentlemen, the proverb is a distinct literary form, at its best and purest, as different from a fable as an arrow from an arquebus.* To be sure, you can take a proverb and write a fable around it, and many fabulists have, but such proverbs as “It’s a long lane that has no turning,” and “If wishes were horses beggars would ride,” need a narrative context about as much as Dulles needs a kiddy car. Fossilized fables, if there are any, turn up in such play titles as “The Lion and the Mouse” and “The Cat and the Canary,” and in detached Aesopian phrases like “the lion’s share” and “sour grapes”—to get back to that fox. When the Colonel’s lady and Judy say “sour grapes” they imply, properly, a feigned scorn for the unattainable, and flat contempt for those who can attain it. “The lion’s share” is fossilized to the extent that it no longer means all of anything, but merely the larger part of it, when it is mentioned by the Colonel or by Judy’s man. It may fall to dust before long, or gain a revived currency, depending on how Man comes out in the war against Himself. The dusty definitionizers, by the way, probably caused Horace’s fable of the country mouse and the city mouse to fall into nursery tales, and out of fables except when only the scene in the house of the city mouse is used. Horace, who got it from a neighbor, who had heard it from an old woman, put it down in two scenes, beginning with the one in the house of the country mouse. To the academicians this violates a misguided feeling for the unities of time and space. The definition of fables should not be cramped. There is only one valid recipe and it is simple. Take a pointed and recognizable aspect of human behavior, stir it up with talking animals or trees or persons or piggy banks or anything else, and turn it out in a concentrated narrative. Cover with sauce a la maison, piquant or didactic, sardonic, saturnine, sarcastic, sanguine, or any other kind except pedantic and pontifical. Serve sparingly. Fables should be consumed a few at a time, like oysters, or perhaps even chocolate nut sundaes. Add, of course, a twist of moral, which can come anywhere, or, for that matter, nowhere: as topic sentence, final rhyme, stuck in the middle, or merely implied.

  Americans, and Englishmen, too, have rarely been very good at the conventional fable formula that scholars love so well, although the English have always had a great skill in legend, folklore, nursery rhyme, and the Goldilocks kind of animal story, and the American air and printed page are filled with informal types of fables: Brer Rabbit, the tall tale, the animated apologues starring Donald Duck and his circle, the recent natural history of animals by Disney and others, such truly authentic fables, rhymed and set to music, as “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Barney the Bashful Bullfrog,” and sharpest and closest of all, the shaggy dog stories.

  The original shaggy dog story—where it actually started I don’t know—is familiar to young and old. It could be adorned offhand with half a dozen morals by any fabulist of the great tradition. The version I know goes like this. A Londoner advertises in the newspapers for his lost dog, describing its looks, and emphasizing its shagginess. An American in New York—or Nashville or San Diego—reads the ad in a paper he picks up in a bar, and shortly afterward encounters a remarkably shaggy dog in his neighborhood, which seems to fit perfectly the description of the lost canine, so the finder boards a ship, taking the dog with him, and knocks at last upon the door of the house in London. It is opened by the bereft advertiser who glances at the dog the American has brought him, and says, “Oh, but it wasn’t that shaggy.”

  The best American narrator of fables in the historic manner of old Aesop himself, was, in my unhumble opinion, the late Bob Burns of Radio’s old Kraft Music Hall. His finest fable, and if you ever heard it you will never forget it, dealt with a little boy and his father and a turtle. The little boy finds his pet motionless and apparently dead in its pan of water and is inconsolable. Neither his mother nor a child psychiatrist who is called in can comfort him, and they finally send for his father (the father was Bing Crosby and the little boy his son Lindsay in the Burns tale, because Crosby was also a Kraft entertainer at the time). The father tells his son that he will place the small turtle in a silver cigarette case, and bury it in a special private grave, complete with tiny headstone, just under the boy’s bedroom window, and arrange to have it light up when the child flicks a switch beside his bed at night. And so the father and his son went out into the kitchen to get the turtle, but they found it swimming about in its pan, not dead at all, but healthy as life itself. And the little boy looked up at his father and said, “Let’s kill him.”

  America’s one immortal written fable, I think, is Mark Twain’s episode of the two boys and the fence that has to be whitewashed. This situation pops up here and there in the literature of ye olde apologues, but Samuel Clemens did it better than any of the old professional fable writer. There have been other American fabulists, of course, and everybody of my advance years knows about George Ade’s experiments in putting fables into slang. The best of recent n
ative fabulists was the late, neglected William March, mainly known for his novel Company K and the more recent The Bad Seed, on which the Broadway play of the same name is based. A dozen of his sharply sardonic fables are included in a volume called A William March Omnibus, but he must have written at least thirty others. They appeared in the New York Post, where they were almost as invisible as top secret documents in Washington.

  Nothing called a fable was ever less like a fable than William Faulkner’s A Fable. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, on the other hand, is a fable in everything except length. The definition of a fable shouldn’t be cramped. It can embrace any pointed and recognizable aspect of human behavior, turned out in a concentrated narrative, with birds and beasts, or people or chimney posts, or anything else, including parts of the human body, talking away at a great rate. Old Horace wrote a deathless fable, the one about the country mouse and the city mouse, but you usually find it only in nursery tales in its original form.

  (Incidentally, I wrote a series of unfabulous pieces for the Post about 1927, warning that the city’s water supply would be in a critical state in 1952 or thereabouts, and I darn near hit it on the head. These pieces didn’t help any, however, because they are probably the least known of any series of articles in the history of the journalistic world.)

  I am happy to have got through this without a single footnote, or the use of such formidable quotations, however apropos as arbores loquuntur, non tantum ferae.*

  This brings us to a few little old new fables of my own. I’m not sure whether they are oysters, or chocolate nut sundaes, or what. That is up to the definitionizers, or such of them as may still be alive and interested.

  —JAMES THURBER

  MARCH 30, 1956

  Ed. Note: Thurber wrote this preface for Further Fables for Our Time, but it was not originally published with the collection.