The Ameri can Lodger
Alarms and Diversions. By James Thurber. (Hamish Hamilton, 18s.) POPPING up from behind the most 'contemporary' furnishings of American minds—Manhattan, Hollywood, Pentagon minds, even--frequently appears (disconcertingly, if you have believed the mental travel literature) the bothered, wry visage of a displaced moujik from the corn-fat steppes of the Middle West, or a refugee looking for the temps perdu between the buggy and the flivver. Americans are used to this lodger on the third floor back of their heads. Sometimes his antics drive them to the psychiatrist.
But men with great moujik spirit use this nostalgia. this feeling that we were better off in our old-time Siberia on the Missouri, this convic- tion that the city-slickers and the FBI have done something not very nice to 'the American dream,' to produce some of the finest writing—certainly the finest comic writing—in English. Among such great ones is Thurber, and it is all of thirty years since he first started fingering the new American curtains and bouncing on the new chairs to test them for durability and comfort.
When a man in a saloon. this book records, said
he owned a dog like the dog Thurber drew, 'a lovely stranger . . . snarled . . . "The, only dog that looks like the dog this guy draws is the dog this guy draws."' Nobody can go further in reverent enthusiasm than to say that the best Thurber prose is very nearly as cosmically comical as that dog which—like a noise which might be a laugh, and then again might be a shriek—has been engaging the attention of civilised people since days when Hitler was just a false alarm.
This collection contains a large number of the funniest drawings Thurber ever drew, and a num- ber, not large enough, of the funniest pieces, which means that it contains much of the best Funny Stuff of our time. We also have some bits and pieces, unearthed from old files and dusted off, which could better have stayed where they were—not because they are bad but because better specimens of the genre have been produced since (quite possibly because Thurber showed the way). And unless you enjoy munching an already chewed doughnut with a message in it. tear out and burn the last thirteen pages—as a tribute to the real Thurber.
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