The Seal in the Bedroom & My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber

I've got the big Library of America Thurber volume, Writings and Drawings - I find the way LoA books have such obvious, bread-and-butter titles endearing - and want to read it. But it's a thousand pages, and it includes some complete books but a lot more excerpts, both of which aspects don't line up well with the way I read and write about books these days.

(First: I like relatively short things, so I can actually finish them. Second: I like to read actual books, not bits and pieces of different books.)

So what I'm going to do is read a wodge in Writings and Drawings, a wodge that includes at least one actual full book, and use the full book as my post title, and then just hit any other random material along the way. It's my blog, I can do it however I want.

Also, a note - I'm pretty sure I read this big Thurber omnibus once, back in the late '90s when it was published. But I lost my first copy in my 2011 flood, and it's been nearly thirty years, so I have no solid memory of any of it.

Writings and Drawings is in chronological order, which is standard for books like this. So it starts out with two chapters from Is Sex Necessary?, which Thurber wrote with E.B. White. (As I understand it, they wrote discrete chapters separately, and pulled them all together.) I reviewed the whole book back in 2018, so I'll just direct any interested parties there.

Next up is two pieces from the 1931 book The Owl in the Attic. "Mr. Monroe Holds the Fort" is an amusing story of a man left in an isolated country house and overrun by nerves when his wife has to run back to the city. Even more Thurberesque, and magnificently so, is "The Pet Department," a question-and-answer column (both sides written by Thurber) about various animals, all illustrated with his drawings. It is goofy and quirky and a lot of fun.

The Seal in the Bedroom was Thurber's first book of drawings and cartoons - most reprinted from The New Yorker, where he was a fixture - and it appeared in 1932. It's got a lot of funny stuff in it, but I was most struck by its organizational structure: this short book is broken into eight sections, a few of which (especially "The Race of Life") are sequences of drawings that function something like strip comics. The rest are thematic sections, from "Women and Men" (obvious) to "Miscellany" (very honest) to "Tennis" (well, it was the Thirties).

Thurber was nearly blind, which makes the fact that he was a popular cartoonist amusing in an odd way. His line is shaky and all the same weight but very distinctive - he's a major example of the cartoonist who is technically weak but works within his abilities to do great work.

And then My Life and Hard Times was Thurber's autobiography, written when he was just under forty and two decades before he died. It has ten chapters, each telling a separate, distinct story - not unlike his other pieces, in fact - from his youth, and ends, as Thurber explains, with him as a young man, because everything after that is too new. Each chapter is a gem, and, if it doesn't really add up to a full autobio, well, we should have expected that from Thurber, shouldn't we?

I like this LoA package so far, and think another 3-4 chunks about this size will see me through it. With luck, I can take a run at it every few months, and look back in amazement at '90s Andy, who just read the damn thing straight through in a few days. I miss being that guy, more than a little.