(4 of 8)
Club Life. The five Thurbers constituted a family unit, but they were also a kind of club. Things were apt to be quite electric around the house; just how electric Jim has described in My Life and Hard Times, a book which many Thurberites consider his most durable, masterpiece. * Sometimes it got a little overwhelming for Charley Thurber. In Jim's story, The Night the Bed Fell, occurs the sentence, "It happened, then, that my father had decided to sleep in the attic ... to be away where he could think."
Thurber family sessions were marked by plenty of mimicry. William and Robert were good mimics (and still are), but Jim was even better. One day, during their young manhood, he phoned William and pretended to be a tailor, claiming in dialect to have made a suit for him which had not been called for, and demanding to be paid. Flabbergasted, William swore he had never ordered the suit and finally put his mother on the phone. After some angry argument, she challenged the tailor to describe William.† "Ha!" said Jim. "It's a fine mudder dat don't even know her own son."
Outside the family, Jim was shy through grammar and high school and his first two years at Ohio State University, where he did little else than sit reading in the library with his hair in his eyes, looking like an emaciated sheep dog. After testing him, the psychology department reported that he had a remarkable memory. Unkempt, unloved and unknown, he was on his way to a Phi Beta Kappa key, perhaps to a life of scholarship.
But one fateful day in a junior-year English class, the professor, William Lucius Graves, read aloud a student theme entitled, My Literary Enthusiasms, in which the dime novels of the day were wittily treated. Before he had a chance to announce the writer's name, the bell rang, and the students streamed out. Thurber found himself walking alongside Elliott Nugent, who was everything on the campus that Thurber was not—athlete, social success, best actor in the dramatic club, class president, idol of the coeds.
"Gee, that was a swell piece, wasn't it?" Nugent remarked to the weedy stranger beside him. "I wonder who wrote it." Thurber swallowed. "I did," he said in a dim voice. Nugent stared at Thurber, then introduced himself. The two became best and lifelong friends.*
Nugent made Thurber get his hair cut and buy a new blue suit, then got him into his own fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi. Thurber blossomed and expanded. He became an editor of the college daily and editor in chief of the humorous monthly, acted for the dramatic club, was elected to the senior honor society.
He did not wait to graduate, for by then the U.S. was at war with Germany and he wanted to do something about it. Unable to enlist in the armed forces because of his eye, he entered the State Department and served a year and a half as code clerk at the American embassy in Paris. With that memory of his, Jim was an outstanding code clerk. One of his colleagues in the code room was a young Yale poet named Stephen Vincent Benét.