The 13 Clocks by James Thurber

This is the third of what looks to be four posts on the big James Thurber Writings & Drawings volume from the Library of America. My reading rules and plans are a bit quirky: I keep track of books read, which (since every metric turns into a target, as marketers like me well know) means that I tend to prioritize both short books and discrete books. So when I wanted to read Writings & Drawings again, for the first time since the late '90s, the fact that it's mostly made up of excerpts from Thurber's various collections was annoying to me and threatened to mess up my carefully-organized system.

But! Thurber wrote a few short books, which were incorporated in toto into Writings & Drawings by the compiler, Garrison Keillor, and so I'm able to name the separate posts - and, more importantly, write down actual books finished in my reading notebook - after those books. So the first post was named after The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times, while the second was named after The Last Flower.

And this one, which will cover almost three hundred pages of miscellaneous Thurber, including excerpts from Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated, My World - And Welcome To It, Men, Women and Dogs, The Thurber Carnival, and The Beast in Me and Other Animals, is named after the short 1950 fable The 13 Clocks, which is at the end of that sequence of stuff.

This clump of Thurber covers the Forties, and it's largely similar to the selections I mentioned in my first two posts: autobiographical snippets pitched in the humorous mode, officially fictional sketches that are often very similar in tone and matter to the aforementioned, Thurber's quirky simple drawings, light satire of various things.

The first big group of pieces are from the 1940 collection Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated, which is made up of two kinds of pieces, exactly what the title promises. First we get twenty-eight fractured fables, of the kind that others have done since but none done better. Among them is the famous "The Unicorn in the Garden," and a handful of others that might seem vaguely familiar, either from actually reading them or just because others have "borrowed" Thurber's ideas since. Then there are four famous poems, in the heroic mode - three of them are "Excelsior," "Lochinvar," and "Barbara Frietchie" - made somewhat bathetic by Thurber's drawings.

My World - and Welcome To It has a clump of the usual Thurber pieces, including "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." There's also "You Could Look It Up," a baseball story in light dialect that's reasonably famous and somewhat outside of Thurber's usual narrow bounds. Like earlier collections, some - like "Mitty" - are pitched as fictional and others, like "The Macbeth Murder Mystery," are framed as stories from Thurber's life, but both styles have very similar tones and styles and plots.

Next up is Men, Women and Dogs, which opens with a big group of captioned cartoons and also includes my tag-defining "The War Between Men and Women" and one other piece. The Thurber Carnival (which I think was partially reprint anyway, way back in 1945) with two pieces and The Beast in Me and Other Animals with four come next. Of these, "The Princess and the Tin Box" is interesting as either a late addition to the Fables cluster or a precursor to 13 Clocks, and "A New Natural History" is another one of the distinctive Thurber pieces that combines writings and drawings - in this case, using a lot of jargon or technical words and drawing the odd creatures Thurber thought appropriate for those names.

Then comes The 13 Clocks, which I expect was originally aimed at younger readers. Thurber's old New Yorker buddy E.B. White had published Stuart Little in 1945, which I think was a success from the beginning, which may have inspired him. (Or, as I see from some digging, it could be that 13 Clocks was the fourth of Thurber's eventual five books for younger readers, all in the fairy-tale mode, the first of which was previous to Stuart. So that's a nice theory that doesn't fit the facts.) Clocks is another fractured fable, told at greater length and with more detail. Somewhere unspecified and medieval, there is an evil Duke, in whose castle dwells the beautiful Princess Saralinda. As is typical, princes appear regularly to ask for her hand; the Duke either just kills them (slicing them from zatch to guggle) if they break his many and quirky rules, or sets them to impossible tasks so they never return.

But one prince - Zorn of Zorna, disguised as a wandering minstrel named Xingu - arrives, and is aided by a magical person called the Golux, son of a witch and a wizard, and not a mere device, in a tag that's repeated several times without ever becoming entirely clear to this reader for all its punchy specificity. With the Golux's aid, Zorn wins the hand of the princess, restarts the titular clocks - stopped at ten minutes to five years before by the evil of the Duke - and generally sets things right in the world. As a fable, it's substantially less fractured than the short ones, for obvious reasons.

This is another good clump of Thurber work, including several of his most famous pieces, including "Mitty," the "War Between Men and Women" and 13 Clocks. I'm still recommending the overall Writings & Drawings as a great single-volume Thurber; if you want more, though, you will have to go to the individual books and dig through for the pieces Keillor left out of this one. So the question for a reader is: do you want one big thousand-page clump of Thurber, or do you think you'll want to read it all? If the latter, probably start with Thurber Carnival or something similar, and then chase after all of the other books individually.