THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 31, 1995 TAG: 9601020208
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
JAMES THURBER
His Life and Times
HARRISON KINNEY
Henry Holt. 1238 pp. $40.
James Thurber had many talents as a writer, and one of his greatest was as a parodist. No doubt he would have enjoyed this overly long biography - not by reading it, but by poking fun at its immense bulk and nearly limitless trove of detail.
For while James Thurber: His Life and Times has many pluses, and is a scrupulously fair-minded and well-researched book, one has to wonder why author Harrison Kinney needed nearly 1100 pages of text - not counting three appendices, extensive notes and index - to chronicle the life of this supremely gifted writer.
By comparison, two Thurber biographies that appeared in the 1970s - Burton Bernstein's Thurber: A Biography and Charles S. Holmes' The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber came in at, respectively, 532 pages and 360 pages. That's with notes, bibliography and index. Though Kinney touches on areas that the other two biographers didn't, he doesn't measurably change what we know, or believe, about Thurber.
Indeed, we never really learn why Kinney, who worked with Thurber at The New Yorker from 1949 to 1954, believed such a monstrous undertaking was needed. He tells us in the preface that he has been a fan of Thurber's writing for six decades and signed a contract to write a Thurber biography in 1962 (and, presumably, worked on it ever since). He also writes that this volume was published as part of ``the extended celebration'' of the centennial of Thurber's birth, which was Dec. 8, 1894.
But when writing about a subject who has been covered as thoroughly as Thurber, a biographer must explain why his particular book is needed, and how and why his work differs from those that came before it - if new information or research is included, or a radically new interpretation of the writer's works is offered. Kinney merely plunges in, not giving any context for this book. (And, most curiously, doesn't even bother with a bibliography.)
All the same, Thurber is as deserving of a major biography as any American author. He often fretted that, because he never published a novel, he would be considered a minor-league writer. But Thurber was a writer of rare inventiveness and comic brilliance, as his friend E.B. White noted in a 1945 review of The Thurber Carnival:
``Here in the Carnival are mood pieces, reminiscences, social satires, fables, dilemmas, some of the best short stories in the language, by all odds the funniest and most extravagant family memoirs ever written, political and literary comment, parody, burlesque, Americana, fantasies, casual essays, portraits of people and animals, tributes, travelogues, illustrations of famous poems, cartoons, spots, picture sequences, and a lot more stuff so original and strange that they can't be classified.''
As is well known now, Thurber himself was ``original and strange.'' A proud son of the Midwest, born in the quintessential Midwestern town of Columbus, Ohio, he nevertheless became associated with the sophisticated, urbane New Yorker. He was a crazy-quilt of contradictions: How could such a profound writer also get weepy-eyed over his high school's football team a full decade after he graduated? Kinney offers this interpretation:
His life ``was beset by the childhood loss of an eye, a frustrating first marriage, disappointments in love, medical problems, and the blindness that not only ended his drawing but necessitated an irritating dependency on others. The experiences and emotions he processed into art were sometimes so painful they seem to have been cut out of his hide, but they emerge as human commentary that readers find easy to apply to themselves or people they know.''
Although an admitted Thurber enthusiast, Kinney is no cheerleader. Thurber could be most unattractive and unpleasant - mostly late in his life, when he was going blind and drinking too much - and Kinney amply documents this. At the same time, he strives, successfully, to show that Thurber's dark side, about which Bernstein wrote at length in his 1975 book, was but one part of a very complex personality.
The New Yorker and its dizzying collection of great and near-great writers have become the American equivalent of the Bloomsbury crowd - excessively written about and analyzed - but Kinney is excellent in describing Thurber's place at the magazine and his relationships with White, Harold Ross and others. He does, however, seem to feel an obligation to report on nearly every quarrel and bruised feeling in this often fractious crowd. It gets mighty wearisome.
We also learn far too much about Thurber's childhood, his time at Ohio State University and his dating as an awkward teenager and young man. It seems incongruous that Thurber, a model of conciseness and brevity, should be presented in such tedious detail.
When a literary biographer has done an especially good job, he often inspires - or revives - enthusiasm for his subject. Other times, a biography's flaws force readers to conclude they'll capture the essence of the subject better by simply reading his works. There are too many such times in this biography. ``Less is more'' never seemed more appropriate. MEMO: Tim Warren is a free-lance writer and book critic who lives in Silver
Spring, Md. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Thurber
by CNB