Word: thurberism
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...WORLD-AND WELCOME TO IT- James Thurber - Harcourt, Brace...
...latest collection of stories, essays, profiles, Humorist James Thurber gives us another glimpse into the weird Thurberian world- that closed circle within which the male animal plods foolishly round & round, hopefully, "cutting down elm trees to put up institutions for people driven insane by the cutting down of elm trees." Thurber's colored maid Delia has figured out the mind of this foiled, circuitous wanderer. Thurber, she explains, "used to work in an office like anybody else, but he had to be sent to an institution; he got well enough to come home from the institution...
Practically all characters in My World are mentally on all fours. Those who struggle into an erect position are mercilessly beaten over the head by a pixillated fate until they squat. Within the prison of life, says Thurber, are "smaller prisons" erected by bureaucrats. In them, man is caught "like a mouse in a trap in Sing Sing...
Chief trappers are experts and bureaucrats, says Thurber, and gives some examples. Once he tried his hand at sailing and a Bermuda lady-expert promptly asked: "Do you reef in your gaff-topsails when you are close-hauled or do you let go the mizzentop-bowlines and crossjack-braces?" Author Thurber did not know, partly because he just sailed for the hell of it, partly because the lady was so nautical that what she really said was: "Do you reef in your gassles when you are cold or do you let go the mittens and crabapples...
...Humorist James Thurber ("This little book needs more guts and less moon. . . If these are German officers ... I will eat the manuscript of your next play...