Talk . About Laugh - "Tim ingredients may not be new,
but the hand that mixes them is as steady and deft as ever" is the kind of stuff 'it may be difficult to choke back on opening Thurber Country and greeting the same pop-eyed baldpates, truculent or worried dogs and tow-haired viragoes, the same sort of difficulties in communication with foreigners, officials, 3 and almost anyone else who happens to come along, and the same charting of the border-lines of sanity:
The city editor answered the phone one day, and then sent for me. "The oral surgeons in convention here are about to operate on a mouse," he said. "Slide over and watch it." 1 went away and came right back. "What's the matter?" snarled the editor. "Wouldn't the mouse open wide?" "It wasn't a mouse," I snarled. "It was a mouth, it was a guy's mouth."
But nobody complains of the mixture as before if they like the mixture, and the inventiveness and brilliance that devised this mixture are unchanged. Indeed, this is one of the very best Thurber collections. The humour of inventing words like "grabcheck" and its gloss "one who quickly picks up a tab, a big spender, a generous fellow" might draw from some the damaging sneer "Pre-Muggeridge Punch"; there were many such things I knew I oughtn't really to be laughing at, but found I was. We have three "serious" stories, again built on Thurber formulae; the neurotic and his long-suffering wife, the little rifts in social decency, the extra highball that is always the symptom of degradation; but, again, the muffled horror comes through as clear as a bell. These three, and a good half-dozen of the others, will prevent me from flogging my review copy.
Performing Flea shows Mr. Wodehouse purveying ingredients new for him: it consists of a selection of letters to a close friend and extracts from the author's account of his internment by the Germans. The letters give an impressive picture of literary indus- triousness and an even more impressive one of its financial rewards before 1939. Throughout the book the reader is in contact— curiously remote contact—with an attractive personality, cheerful, generous, affectionate and humble. Although the critical judgments are, to put it gently, erratic (Conan Doyle and Edgar Wallace, Kipling and Warwick Deeping, Mr. Maugham and Mr. Priestley are all respectfully mentioned), Mr. Wodehouse's account of his work on his own books, and his advice to his correspondent, should be relevant to anyone interested in writing. His generalisations are so just, his conception of his own field as a writer so exact (and the power of those titles from one's adolescence—Big Money, Bill the Conqueror, Hot Water, Thank You, Jeeves—so hypnotic), that the reader feels he really must look out those books. How disappointing to find an extract from one printed here, to recognise the facetious- ness, the slim gag-book, the lack of wit and even vocabulary, the frigid remoteness from any normal interest which no dexterity could hide.
Mr. Thurber is at his best when his stories, from their double starting-point of farce and horror, converge most closely upon life; Mr. Wodehouse pleases his admirers best, as he himself recognises, when life is left farthest behind. The old lesson, that it takes a serious writer to be a really funny writer, is rubbed in once more. Over here we have either popular entertainers who when scrutinised cease to entertain, or serious novelists,.like Mr. Evelyn Waugh and Mr. Anthony Powell, who entertain as well. It is with the second type, not the first, that Mr. Thurber deserves to be compared, but we have nobody like him any more than Punch (even post-Mug- geridge Punch) has a Mr,. Charles Addams. Our funny writers aren't neurotic enough to be funny. There ought to be a moral in that.
KINGSLEY AMIS
Previous page
