Word: thurberism
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...Charley Thurber, the boys' father, was tall, thin, an inveterate wearer of derby hats, and by profession an unsuccessful politican. Although he kept running for various offices until he was nearly 65, he never got elected to any. When there were six leading candidates for five offices, Charley Thurber would invariably finish sixth. Too honest to play ball with a political machine, and too amiable and gentle to be a winning maverick, he was a chronic also...
...contrast to her mild, quiet husband, who never scolded the boys, Mamie Thurber was a hurled hand grenade. The class comic in school, a star at amateur theatricals, for a while she considered running away from home and going on the professional stage. Her stern Methodist father scotched that, clamping down on even the amateur theatricals, but it made no difference. Mamie kept right on performing...
...Mamie Thurber has gone on performing. Her husband died in 1939 at the age of 72, but she is still at it, an amazing old lady of 85, with piercing grey eyes under black brows, and none of her staggering faculties impaired. Wolcott Gibbs, of The New Yorker, has written of Thurber's "sure grasp of confusion." Nobody who ever heard Jim's mother tell a long, detailed, uproarious misadventure story would wonder where his sureness of grasp came from. There are oldtimers in Columbus who insist that Jim is but his mother's pale copy...
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...