Book Review: The Saturdays

Title: The Saturdays

Author: Elizabeth Enright

Date: 1941

Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston

ISBN: 0-03-035760-8

Length: 175 pages

Illustrations: drawings by the author

Quote: "Why don't we put all our allowances together once a week and let one of us spend them?"

In 1941, children who were ten, twelve, and thirteen were considered old enough to spend $1.60 all by themselves in New York City, doing "something really good...something we've always wanted to do." Although they later decide it might be even better fun to take these outings as a family, their father finds this "An excellent idea...I was going to suggest it myself but I much prefer having it come from you."

Mercy. Why does a book as old and quaint as this one even have an ISBN? Because it's a good book; because children liked it, and kept it in print up into the 1980s.

One of the kids goes to an art museum where she bonds, for the first time, with an old family acquaintance who grew up in France and once ran off with Gypsies. One goes to the opera and, on the way home, adopts a dog. (Both the dog and the old lady reappear in the three sequels to this book.) One gets her hair professionally "styled" and meets a woman who ran away from an abusive home at thirteen. Their younger brother goes to the circus, gets lost, and makes himself sick on junkfood. During one of their shared adventures they explore Central Park, where one of them falls out of a boat.

Then their Saturday adventures take a more alarming turn, with a furnace disaster and an unrelated fire. After that they really are "luckier than other people," as one of them observes in a sequel, because the old lady comes to their rescue and they'll never have to live in New York City again.

When I was eight, ten, twelve, I thought the four "Melendy Family" books were the best series ever written for children. I still do. (Tom Sawyer and its sequels have child characters, but the books were written for adults.)

One thing I enjoyed was that Enright refused to write down to the child reader. I first read her books, stretching my mind around the unfamiliar words, at age eight. My brother made me read them aloud to him when he was six. We thought a good story was worth learning to understand phrases like "rust-colored buds on the ailanthus trees" and "prickling of camphory fur" and "leaping and pirouetting." Actually, I thought that was a major part of the pleasure these books offered.

Enright did this even in Thimble Summer, the one of her books that won the Newbery Award--possibly because it was about normal children. The Melendys, and the children in Gone-Away Lake, are definitely gifted and talented. I think my brother and I enjoyed these books so much more than Thimble Summer because we appreciated the message that there were other talented freaks like us in the world. In The Saturdays the children are merely interested in the "classical" arts; in sequels one becomes a professional actress, one a church musician, one a dancer, and there's never any doubt that even the baby brother will eventually be a brilliant engineer. More refreshingly, there's never any hint that a talent for engineering rather than the arts makes him inferior to or different from his artsy siblings, either.

The Saturdays is recommended to all fans and collectors of this author, and to all gifted and talented children.

Book Review: Please Excuse My Daughter

Reclaimed from Blogjob...

Title: Please Excuse My Daughter

Author: Julie Klam

Author’s web page: http://www.julieklam.com/

Date: 2008

Publisher: Penguin / Riverhead

ISBN: 978-1-59448-980-8

Length: 257 pages

Quote: “[T]he only argument against retiring that I could come up with was that no one would really notice.”

This is a well written book that I happened not to like, but you might like. I want to run on at some length about the reasons why.

Julie Klam was a spoiled rich girl. She married a man who didn’t make enough money to suit her. They produced a baby. It took Julie 257 pages to decide that, rather than trim her budget to fit her husband’s income, she wanted to put more energy into “pitching” her writing.

Blurbs on the jacket of this book, supplied by people to whom Klam “pitched” the book, claim that Please Excuse My Daughter is funny, poignant, original, droll, hilarious, happy, sad, touching, terrific, a must read, always endearing, exhilarating, unstintingly honest, very smart, and slyly moving.

With the kind of build-up reviewers and blurb writers are expected to give a book these days, books can hardly help being disappointing. I didn’t notice who uttered the title line, in the book, or which daughter was the embarrassment—the young Julie to her mother, because she hadn’t married a richer man sooner, or the baby whose gestation period is the subject of so many toilet jokes? When the baby learns to read, she’ll have something to be really embarrassed about. People who are old enough to have babies are supposed to have outgrown toilet jokes.

There are women who’ve written about their pregnancies and their babies’ infancies in such a way that squeamish revulsion was not my predominant reaction to their writing. Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions comes to mind, or Erma Bombeck’s I Lost Everything in the Postnatal Depression. It’s not the mention of body fluids that turns a whole book into one big gross-out; it’s the failure to mention any other thoughts but the body fluids. There are women whose ability to sustain cerebral lives amidst the baby spew makes us all proud, and there are women whose submersion in baby spew needs to be kept away from young girls because it makes them dread growing up to be women.

Which is, of course, a tragic mistake. What put me off Please Excuse My Daughter has nothing to do with gender, or even with pregnancy. At some points, like pages 127 to 222 inclusive, there is a certain obsession with icky medical details (first his diabetes, then her pregnancy), which are narrated in second-grade toilet-talk language. There’s also a throwaway line about a full month of mourning for a dog who died of old age—by humans who have human families, and you realize that the characters in this book don’t really have lives.

That’s what the story is supposed to be about…and with all those other people saying that Please Excuse My Daughter is funny and true and moving and all that, I want to explore my reaction in depth.

The characters don’t read, they don’t think, they don’t get out much. They seem to move around physically, but they don’t observe plants or animals or oceans or historic sites or different cultures in the places they visit. Sometimes they go to jobs, but their work doesn’t seem to mean much to them. They have a vague sense of ethnic background, but it’s only background. They may or may not be registered to vote, but whatever political beliefs they hold mean no more to their daily lives than whatever religious beliefs they hold do. They soak up mindless, passive entertainment from pop culture but don’t create or participate in art.

There’s a funny New York City apartment-hunting story that reveals, not just the pathetic desperation with which urban landlords market anything remotely resembling a view (“a sliver view, not a river view”), but the irrelevance of such marketing. Our characters have conditioned themselves not to look at views, and Klam says, “I hate mountains.” And then I realize what’s really the matter with all these people. They are ingrown. They don’t look at the big wide world beyond the ends of their noses. Probably most of the people they know aren’t exactly like them, but they wouldn’t notice a difference. The inevitable consequence is that they’re boring; the most exciting things that happen, to them, really do involve body fluids.

One of the occupational hazards of being a writer is getting lost in one’s own head. Some writers get lost in erotic fantasies, some in ideological rhetoric, some in vividly visual but meaningless dreamscapes. I tend to get lost in abstract cerebration about the syntheses my mind forms between information absorbed from my madly eclectic reading. Some writers, perhaps especially women from the Northern States—Judy Blume and Gwen Macsai are other egregious examples—get lost in the sensations of not perfectly healthy bodies, which is pardonable if viewed as a disease symptom; given a couple of degrees of fever I find my physical sensations fascinating too, but these writers imagine that everyone else is interested in itches, urine, and nausea as topics of conversation too, which is less pardonable.

If you no longer find yourself shrieking with mirth every time someone says “pea,” Please Excuse My Daughter is not very funny, although it does have some funny lines:

“[M]y cloth­ing…sits in my closet, so hopeful, so disappointed. ‘I’m going to be in a jacket photo of the author!’ spouts the TSE black cashmere sweater.”

“[E]mergency rooms…aren’t happy places…Why don’t you ever see anyone from the society pages?”

“I felt like I could really get behind a good addiction…I googled ‘street drugs’…and [then] typed in ‘wedding dresses’…And very quickly, within minutes, I got hooked.”

There’s also a whole sequence (pages 76 to 100) that made me smile, not because it’s especially funny in its own right and not because I could relate to it personally, but because it’s so exactly like the stereotypes in How to Love Yankees with a Clear Conscience. Earlier in this book, we’ve read about how the Klam parents bought a big house in the country to display their wealth, but the Klam children didn’t like living in the country—“When I say we became accustomed to the wildlife, I don’t mean that I did…Matt still gets green when he recalls the morning he put a coat on to go feed the horses and put his hand in the pocket to find a living, breathing, wriggling mouse, which ran straight up his sleeve.”

Young Julie missed her four-year-old memories of New York City so much that, before marriage, her first long-term relationship was with a Mafia type. Anyone else would rather pick up and stroke the Big Apple’s favorite house pet, the cockroach, than even think about talking to this kind of guy, but Klam describes him in as much length and loving detail as she later gives to diabetes and eclampsia. I kept thinking “One shouldn’t stereotype even New Yorkers this way, this is sooo meeean,” and reminding myself, “But one of them is doing it.” Eww…ick…chortle.

Klam’s description of her rural childhood disturbs me. I always imagined that if people like these characters, the sub-species Homo denaturatus, had spent more time in the country, as children, they would have become more interesting.

Klam thinks the moral of her story is that rich parents should try to teach their daughters not to be princesses. I see nothing wrong with being a princess–it’s not as if any other field of specialized work were wide open these days–but I think Please Excuse My Daughter might be used to illustrate the need to teach daughters not to be self-absorbed denaturati. I can’t help wondering whether teachers who made Klam read more, editors who demanded more thoughtful studies of specific topics, or even a society that wouldn’t allow toilet jokes to be passed off as even conversation (much less as literature), might have molded Klam into the sort of writer who could write a factual memoir at age 40 and make it interesting.

We cannot all be Anne Lamott, Erma Bombeck, Jamaica Kincaid, Lauren Slater, Betty MacDonald, Maxine Hong Kingston, or Margaret Halsey. Perhaps most of us shouldn’t try to publish memoirs about ordinary private lives at early ages, but those of us who do want to write in this perilous genre should at least try to find things to say about the world beyond the ends of our noses.

I suspect that Please Excuse My Daughter may contain valuable clues for parents who want to make sure they don’t inadvertently rear denaturati, but I can’t tell you what they are. This bothers me. I’d been comfortable with the belief that, if parents lived in the country, made their children play outdoors, and didn’t have television, they’d be safe.

Anyway, Please Excuse My Daughter is recommended to anyone who wants to laugh about body fluids and/or about Northerners and/or about denaturati.

Posted on September 11, 2015 Categories A Fair Trade Book, Humor Tags denaturati

Book Review: Heaven on the Hudson

Title: Heaven on the Hudson 

Author: Stephanie Azzarone

Date: 2022

Publisher: Fordham

ISBN: not yet

Length: 250 pages

Quote: "There are secrets in this city." 

Yes, this is another preview copy I received in exchange for a brutally honest review. The brutally honest truth is that I think this is a gorgeous guide to one of New York's most expensive neighborhoods. Azzarone has lived there for thirty years and thinks every single block can be regarded as an attraction. 

If you don't like New York City, you could say that Riverside Park is where NYC tries to look as nice as where you live, and almost succeeds. Too many people are still crowded into too many tall buildings but in Riverside Park you can still see the river, trees, and sometimes a wild bird or animal. In the classic phrase, it'd be fun to visit, once, but you wouldn't want to live there. Well, that's fine! Lots of other people do. 

In the first half of the book Azzarone traces the history of the neighborhood, generally. In the nineteenth century this was the history of Victorian capitalist "society" at its most extravagant. Millionnaires established "the 400" list, based on the number of people who could fit into their ballrooms, but not everyone on the list was wealthy; the upper middle class were on the list too. Still, there were standards; "failure to own your own home was a confession of shabby antecedents or disreputable habits." 

In the twentieth century big houses were chopped up into "French flats," and people gradually adjusted to the idea that multiple families under the same roof could leave one another alone. (There were initially fears of burglary and sexual sin.) The choppers-up of houses tried to make each apartment building sound grander than the next one. No matter how expensive the flats were or how many services came with the building, though, the bottom line was that people were living in squalidly crowded conditions. National news from the Park at first focussed on celebrity crimes, but by the late twentieth century Riverside Park was the site of mugging and "ordinary New York" street crime. The river became polluted. 

Nevertheless, people who wanted to live in New York City still coveted those flats with the view of the river, and in the second section, the block-by-block walking tour, Azzarone names some of the celebrities who have lived in almost every building. Efforts to clean up and rehabilitate had some success. (Azzarone resists the temptation to quote Pete Seeger's song about the Hudson River: "The river may be dirty now, but it's getting cleaner every day.")

In addition to a glossary of architectural terms to explain what the descriptions of the buildings mean, the book has a long section of endnotes and a long index. 

Its big attraction is, of course, the pictures. Readers can see the buildings, as well as the park, and some of the historic figures of the neighborhood, in color photos or reprints of vintage paintings. 

If you or someone you know live in Riverside Park, you or your friend must have this book.

Book Review: Revenge of the Wannabes

Title: Revenge of the Wannabes

Author: Lisi Harrison

Publisher: Little Brown

Date: 2005

ISBN: 0-316-70133-5

Length: 296 pages

Quote: “I’m not being a grump. I just don’t like it when things are messy, okay?”

The most encouraging line in this book occurs on the front flyleaf. “All characters are fictional and any resemblance to any real person is coincidental.”

In this installment of the adventures of the world’s least lovable teenaged girls, Alicia gets tired of being second to Massie. She invites two girls who want to be in Massie’s Clique, “the Pretty Committee,” to a Friday night sleepover, thereby creating space that Massie invites the new girl, Claire, to fill. Then Alicia remembers that that Friday’s taken: she won a contest and has to go into New York City to meet with the editor of Teen Vogue to plan a modelling session.

All the Clique girls are cute enough to be teen models. Claire’s the only one who’s been offered a tiny part in a movie, yet, but eventually the editor invites all seven brats to choose their own fashion looks from a selection of trendy NYC boutiques and pose for a photo shoot.

But they’re The Clique, so they repay this career break with a display of irresponsible rich-brat bad manners worthy of David Hogg. Massie, the speaker quoted above, creates a spectacular mess.

When I was in grade seven publishers wouldn’t have touched a series about such Bad Role Models, but the Clique series achieved bestseller status. So, eventually the books have been handed up to me. I can’t find much to like about books or characters, and when these books are funny it’s more slapstick comedy than fine-edged satire. This is one of the volumes that offers slapstick comedy. If you think an answer to the question “How badly is it possible for teenagers to do on their first grown-up job?” can be funny, you’ll laugh. 

People Who Don't Carry Cash

It's no longer news: In July, a young man shoved his way behind the counter in a small store, the kind called a bodega, and began manhandling a cashier called Jose Alba. Mr. Alba had a large knife behind the counter for use in situations like this. On the video clip you can see the young man attacking the older one first; you can see the white-haired (61 years old at the time) cashier aiming the knife. The video stops short of the part where Mr. Alba stabbed his assailant repeatedly, and emergency workers arrived to find the young man dead from loss of blood. Things that happen in big crowded cities...this was in New York. Where else?

https://www.rebelnews.com/tags/save_jose

It was unmistakably self-defense, and Mr. Alba walked. Rightly so. But one has to wonder what, besides the solar flares and the local warming effect, was going on. According to a Canadian news blogger whose e-mail I received very belatedly: 

"

In that video, a man named Austin Simon was seen going behind the counter and physically assaulting store clerk Jose Alba. The dispute was reportedly over a bag of chips that Simon's girlfriend was unable to purchase because her card was declined.

During the altercation, Jose tried to leave, but Simon continued to aggressively block his path inside the cramped confines of the store.

" 

The assailant had a girlfriend. Probably he had other friends. Likely he had a family. Probably a lot of people miss him. If it had happened in Washington the assailant might have been the subject of one of those mournful write-ups in the Sunday essay section, written for family members to save, detailing how he used to be a Boy Scout and so on and so forth, and an unknown assailant shot him in the back. Nobody ever claimed those stories weren't true, so far as they went, but they did skim lightly over the fact that a lot of those young men were shot in the back because they had become involved in the drug trade. 

The store's security camera doesn't show us what was said but we have to wonder at what point it might have been different.

AS: "Give'r the bleeping chips, man! I will bleeping kill you!"

JA: "For a bag of chips you want to go to prison?"

Bystander: "Here, Miss, I've got the $1.49. Enjoy your chips."

JA: "Thank you. Have a nice day. Next?"

Or perhaps:

AS: "Wossamatta her card, man? She just deposited money in the bleeping bank yesterday?"

JA: "I don't know. Banks are slow. I cannot charge the $1.49 to her card."

AS: "Well that stinks, that blank bloop bleeping stinks! Here, sweetie-pie, I'll pay for your chips."

Or perhaps:

Girlfriend: "I just put my paycheck on that card! I want those chips. I want those chips!" (Pouts.)

AS: "Well bleeping blank, Trinket, I got no money either!" (Turns out his pockets.)

JA: "Oh for pity's sake. Kids. Take your chips. Pay when one of you's got $1.49 in cash. Another time maybe you won't put your whole paycheck on the card." 

I've seen each of those scenes play out. Many times. It's downright embarrassing for people who pay with cash to dig into a purse or pocket for change. Some bystander is likely to imagine that they don't have enough change, or can't spare it, and offer to pay for them. 

People who don't carry cash, it seems, are a whole different culture.

Book Review: Why Not Join the Giraffes

Title: Why Not Join the Giraffes?

Author: Hope Campbell

Date: 1968

Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap

ISBN: 0-448-21290-0

Length: 223 pages

Quote: "Why would he be interested in the first place? Don't you know the impression your family gives rubs off on you?...And I don't want to wind up with a starving artist...I want a--a regular, ordinary life!...The kind of boy who buys you a chrysanthemum for football games, and you sit around afterwards talking about stuff by a roaring fire."

Probably the easiest way to summarize this farce is to describe it as a teen-romance version of Irma's Big Lie. That's a short review; can I throw in some more words? Why not? I've laughed at this book for forty years; I can throw in as many words as you want...

Money's getting tight in the Henderson household, with father John "Mark" Henderson between script sales and mother Helene having had another baby instead of a visual art show. (This is not, however, a family that's ever been poor. Their New York City flat is positively posh, and when Suzie talks to other kids at a nightclub she's instantly tagged "Uptown." The alert reader may surmise that one reason why the Henderson parents don't have enough money to send their kids to camp is that they seem to hand out enough of it from week to week for just about anything--faddy clothes, restaurant meals--sixteen-year-old Suzie and fourteen-year-old Sam want.)

Still, Suzie's not exactly thinking far enough ahead to be considered a gold-digger. She's not looking for a rich young husband; how icky, she's only sixteen. She's looking for the sort of nice boy who's interested in (and can afford) the sort of nice dates that interest Suzie and impress her girl friends, of whom only one, Natalie Goldman, is close enough that Suzie hangs out with her in summer. Art museums, medieval flute concerts, meals at her family's favorite restaurant, football games in fall, and proms in winter...as opposed to hanging out and playing with or listening to Sam's rock band. Suzie's the rare baby-boomer (yes, we did exist) whose favorite musical genre does not happen to be rock, though like most of us she appreciates a really good rock song.

Suzie is one of those tall, cute blondes who never have to worry much about finding a date, but in 1968 even those girls couldn't afford to relax. This was the era of an active effort to distract girls from serious competitions for grades, scholarships, or jobs, by obsessing over every detail of their appearance. Not only other teenagers but even adults are judging where Suzie fits into society by whether she puts on the Levis (in which she herself feels grungy and sexless) or the white dress (she must be on her way to be a bridesmaid!) or the pink one (that gets respectful attention) or the tight purple slacks (that make her look to rude boys "like a traffic light that just turned green"). Suzie can't just smile at a boy and expect him to smile right back. Likely he wouldn't smile right back if she weren't dressed for his social circle. Suzie has just said goodbye to last school term's boyfriend Bill, who moved to the suburbs, and now she needs to pay attention to her look in order to attract a similar sort of boyfriend, like new neighbor Ralph, instead of one of Sam's friends and admirers.

Well...Ralph. And he almost deserves it. I didn't care for Teen Romance much as a teenager, and I think my tolerance for this spoof of Teen Romance may explain why. I knew all about physical attraction, as a teenager. Usually it worked only one way, and if a person had any brain she or he kept quiet about it, and it ran its course and went away, like flu. When it was mutual it always seemed to turn out very inconvenient and embarrassing for all the kids I knew who actually achieved couplehood, who were (thank goodness) a minority; whether they just realized that during the next phase of the hormone cycle they didn't even like each other, after having told everyone they were In Love Forever, or whether they actually eloped and were stuck for...oh, pity.

In any case, by and large, the girls I knew didn't idolize teenaged boys. Some of us told friends which boys we thought were cute, meaning they didn't mind being teased about and might even want to be annoyed and disappointed by, and some of us just quietly watched the ones we thought had the potential to become attractive men in who could imagine how many years. Maybe we liked them; some of them were likable enough. What I found hard to believe that any sane teenaged girl could imagine was that a teenaged boy is, or even resembles, the hero of a grown-up romantic fantasy. A teenaged boy can be hard-working and well-meaning and polite and intelligent and a good friend but he is still, dash it all, growing. You can love sharing snarky doodles in math class or recycling aluminum with a teenaged boy, just the way he is right now; you cannot extrapolate any realistic idea of what he's going to look like, sound like, or behave like ten years from now, although you can be reasonably sure that it won't be a knight on a white horse. I remember feeling terribly clever about writing to a friend, "Abdul-Bulbul" (yes, we knew that's not a Muslim name) "has looked into the crystal ball and foreseen -- entering a courtroom with another man, but which carried the briefcase and which the ball-and-chain Abdul-Bulbul seeth not."

What I like about Ralph's and Suzie's romance is that, although the story itself is hard to believe, their relationship isn't. Ralph doesn't seem to be very intelligent in any way; he's certainly not sophisticated enough to interest Suzie for long, and he's apparently no match, as a potential musician or as a potential man, for fourteen-year-old Sam. But he doesn't need to be! Teenaged girls are not, or shouldn't be, stupid enough to set up teenaged boys as parent-substitutes, the way they're always doing in really bad teen romances. A boyfriend is not your counsellor or life coach, she says, sternly, to those of The Nephews who are in literal fact nieces. He's a boy who is, let us hope, a friend, or at least someone you won't die of embarrassment to claim as a friend after the hormone tide rolls out. What Suzie wants Ralph for is to have a nice, clean-cut-looking accessory to take up to the Cloisters for a medieval flute concert, before summer's over, and to watch an occasional football game with or dance with at the prom, after they're back in their separate schools. For that he'll do. Suzie has time to realize that what she feels for Ralph as a person, once she gets to know him, is compassion; that she's going to be even more of a "big sister" to him than she is to Sam. That's how a lot of best-case teen romances go, actually.

The plot? Frankly, even at fourteen I never believed the plot. Suzie thinks Ralph must have come to complain about the noise Sam's band are making, so in order to seem as different from Sam as possible--although they look alike--she pretends to be the baby-sitter, a much more sheltered and overprivileged girl from an even posher block--namely, Natalie's. Trying to think of a name, she thinks of Ginger Rogers and says her name is Ginger, then thinks better of it and says her real given name is Patricia...Goldman. Ginger P. Goldman. She gives him Natalie's address; he looks up Natalie's parents' phone number and tries to call Suzie every fifteen minutes until he can get her to meet his parents, because if they see that he knows a really nice, sheltered girl like her, they'll let him join Sam's band.

Naturally it doesn't take Ralph's parents long to identify this as a lie. Suzie fights back with another lie, but one she can make true--that she's a writer, like her father, doing research. All she has to do is write something someone will publish. Meanwhile, Ralph still needs to be shown up as the immature little brat he is, so the story goes on and gets goofier; Suzie buys a pair of really dreadful purple slacks that are so tight, and so cheap, they fall apart at crucial moments, and she and Natalie ask a couple of homeless boys from "the Village" to be their fake dates at a rock concert...It all ends happily, of course.

Can today's teenagers relate to Suzie's adventures? I don't know. I know this story should guarantee a nostalgia trip for anyone who's ever owned a pair of snug-fitting, garish-colored, bell-bottomed polyester slacks. It'd be fun to share and discuss it with a teenager, if any of the teenagers you know has time to read a trivial work of fiction that's neither a new fad nor a "classic" from some reading list or other. I don't imagine many of them do, so I don't imagine Why Not Join the Giraffes is a good candidate for a reprint...but it's still funny enough that we adult readers might laugh the buttons right off our own bell bottoms. Wear something newer and remember your bell bottoms while reading this book.

Sunday Book Review, Belated: The Reckless Way of Love

I've had a review copy of this book, courtesy of the publisher, for much more time than it took to read. I put some time into the review, had it ready to post last Sunday...and then stayed home on Sunday with a wet, messy head cold. Plough deserved to have this review live three weeks ago. Here it is. 

Title: The Reckless Way of Love

Author: Dorothy Day

Editor: Carolyn Kurtz

Date: 2017

Publisher: Plough

ISBN: 978-0-87486-793-0

Length: 148 e-pages

Quote: “If you have two coats, you have stolen one from the poor.”

What you may not like about this book is that of course Dorothy Day didn’t write it. It’s a collection of snippets from the books she did write and from some private notebooks and letters, so the words are hers. The selection and arrangement of her words come from Carolyn Kurtz, who works for a publisher owned by the church associated with the Bruderhof.

You’ve probably seen “Bruderhof” as a name stamped on furniture. If you looked it up you know that it’s not a family name, but the company name of a small “brotherhood” of German immigrants. They make nice wooden furniture but I didn’t know that there are Bruderhof communities around the world, that they also own a publishing house and publish a’zine, or that they’re evangelical.

Dorothy Day was not a member of the Bruderhof. Nor was she a member of any Catholic order of nuns. She was born in New York in 1897, brought up Episcopalian. In youth she turned to socialism. She attended a journalism school, wrote for a while, was married, was divorced, then joined the Catholic church and devoted herself to urban mission work. Her missions were independent, funded neither by church nor state but by people who saw the good they were doing in their neighborhoods. She lived with depression, probably caused by lack of solitude, and wrote Catholic-masochistic warbles about altruism being a good thing. She probably helped poor people as much as she hurt them, in her lifetime, but she never managed to impoverish herself enough to be able to see from poor people’s perspective that they need a fair balance between giving and taking that reintegrates them into the same society to which the “helpers” belong. It remained for later generations to learn that her generation’s hopes of reconciling socialism with Christianity just didn’t work in the world where we live. Day died in 1980, while two major countries were still hopeful about the prospects of large-scale socialism.

In historical fact, though nation-sized efforts at enforced socialism or communism have failed, household or small neighborhood-sized versions of voluntary communism (or “communalism”) have worked for individuals who sincerely united in a common cause. Day’s New York communes were the model for Washington’s Community for Creative Non-Violence—often in the news for the difficulties that seem built into their cause and lifestyle, but remarkably able to solve their problems and survive for years. The price of their success is of course the difficulties that are built into their efforts. When everyone agrees to sell most of their belongings, pool enough of their resources to survive for a few years, and live in one big frugal household or even a neighborhood of frugal households, what they have may be an awesome social network, but it’s a network of poor people. Since their poverty is voluntary they may be considered to have climbed from a middle-class to an upper-class lifestyle; voluntary poverty is something aristocrats do. Nevertheless they’ve chosen to limit the resources they have for their work and, if they want to accomplish much, they soon find themselves spending much of their energy either on their own survival or on fundraising. If the former they may be happy in their vocations even as low-wage workers; if the latter they will inevitably be patronized, and almost certainly be forced to serve the purposes of, their wealthy sponsors. Communal living suits some people, especially the very young and the very old, who aren’t married and find it difficult or discouraging to face life alone. It can make room for the long process of social rehabilitation that lies ahead of recovering addicts. Because it suited some members of the early Christian church, many of whose members were thrown out of their homes and/or had lost their homes and joined for the free food, communal living worked for many of the great saints and still appeals to people who want to identify with the great saints.

On a large scale...though the apostolic church had communal groups sometimes in the thousands, it also had room for families like Peter’s and independent single adults like Paul. Communalism is sometimes perceived as the way primitive clans, tribes, or villages survived, but in practice, as successful primitive communities grew from villages into towns, they redefined boundaries between individual and family property and living space. At the same time, people have often reverted to the benefits of communal lifestyles for students, missionaries, and old people.

I’m not sure that Christians should have a formal process of canonizing saints. The word “saints” means people who have dedicated their lives to some form of religious practice. The early Christian church used it of people who were still active, apparently meaning something closer to what we mean by “fellow believers” or “church members.” Today the word is usually applied to departed Christians, and has been a source of schisms. Christians who believe that departed saints are “watching us from Heaven” now pray to the saints, or for them, that they will carry petitions to God; from this belief have grown many abuses. Christians who believe that departed saints are “at rest” don’t pray to them, but we try to carry on their work. Along with this dissent about how we relate to “the saints,” and the problem that a focus on departed saints can discourage living people from fulfilling their vocation to be saints, we also disagree about who our “saints” should be, whether we need to believe that they were perfect people—which of course they were not—or, if we accept their mortal imperfections, how we can regard people who made major mistakes as the “saints” who inspire our work. In some ways I see Dorothy Day as a bad example, but some people still see her as a “saint” and some Catholic Christians have petitioned to have her canonized.

And her most famous line has become so ridiculous. If you believe that having two coats is stealing one from the poor, you don’t have anything to put on if your one coat becomes unusable. Nor do you have much to give to the poor. You squander everything in the first year and after that you have nothing to give even to disaster victims. You become an example of Rush Limbaugh’s line, “The best thing you can do for the poor is not to be one of them.” You also set yourself up to pass unfavorable judgments on several of the great saints; Abraham, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Joseph of Arimathea, Candace of Ethiopia, and other people whose stories are in the Bible as good examples for us, were called by God to be rich. By trying to institutionalize and make permanent what the apostolic Christians did in response to the need of their time, you ultimately work toward the true purpose and function of large-scale socialism—keeping everyone permanently poor, oppressed, and afraid to complain.

If, on the other hand, you’re blessed with the chance to stockpile coats in a time when it’s hard to give away old coats, you may live to see a day when you or someone else will feel a need for your coats. Christians are not told not to save anything for the future. (In fact that’s precisely what the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis tells us to do.) We are told that the material things we may or may not accumulate are not meant to be the treasures of our hearts.

The United States had a real crisis of poverty in the 1930s. We call it our Great Depression. Even then we were blessed, because the Great Depression was not a true famine. Most people survived the Great Depression with nothing worse than an unchosen and often misguided change in their views of wealth. If they didn’t survive, it was due to either the contagious diseases that were still ravaging our land, or the wrong ideas that caused failed investors to commit suicide. Nevertheless, when Dorothy Day uttered her infamous line quoted above, many people did know someone who, through failure to have bought or made a second serviceable coat, really had worn out one coat while unable to afford another coat. Not in my lifetime but in my parents' lifetime, when you saw someone wearing less winter gear than you, the question was not whether the person had been exercising and shed some layers or had been caught unprepared as the weather turned cold, but whether the person owned the coat person wanted.

Dorothy Day should only have lived to see me struggling to sell some of the coats people have pressed upon me, now, because I’m hyperthyroid and rarely wear an overcoat. Some of them are good ones, too. In March a used-clothes seller, going out of business, gave a friend a whole gentleman’s wardrobe including a real camel-hair topcoat. The store had had a leak; some of the clothes had been rained on and become musty, so we took them to a laundromat in a poor neighborhood. While we watched the cotton shirts go around and around, two homeless men and two working-class families also used the laundromat. We tried to sell or even give away the things fresh out of the drying machines. We were able to get rid of a shirt and a jacket. We ended up leaving the camel-hair coat, and also a London Fog in good condition, in the drying machine where they’d been freshened up for five minutes with a scented “dryer sheet.” Nobody wanted them. It was not a cold wet night, and nobody wanted to bother with overcoats that would need dry cleaning. In today’s world, if you have two coats, or two dozen coats, you have failed to find people who were charitable enough to help you clean them out of your closet, freeing up space for the cotton shirts you actually wear.

Dorothy Day also uttered once-conceivably-relevant twaddle about carving up big houses to include rentable apartments, as if there were homes in the neighborhood of a university that hadn't been carved. It would at least have been healthier if she’d warbled about pulling down more apartment blocks to restore green space. And Dorothy Day also soaked up a lot of other bad ideas from the old socialists of her day, but enough is enough. Let us draw the curtain of charity over the errors of a good, misguided soul.

In The Reckless Way of Love,  as an introduction by another Bruderhoffer says, we don’t see any individual poor person whom Day helped; we learn nothing about the good or bad effect her handouts had on their lives. We don’t see Day carrying on like the good left-wing radical she always was, either, apart from a brief reference to time she spent in jail for a demonstration. Here are her most fundamentally “Christian” remarks, which the introduction describes as “more sustainable” than her more “radical” remarks. (The writer of the introduction was apparently unfamiliar with the idea of “radical Christianity,” a completely separate thing from any ideas described as radical politics. With all her faults Day was a radical Christian, one who seriously attempts to do what Jesus would have done, every day.) “If I could not understand scientific truths” like how a radio works, Day wrote, “why should I worry about understanding spiritual truths...?” So here we find none of the theological discourse for which her contemporary Dorothy Sayers was known, either. 

“We may be living on the verge  of eternity,” Day wrote in response to Cold War fears of the destruction of the Earth by nuclear war, “but that should not make us dismal. The early Christians rejoiced” in anticipation of God’s cleansing  reconstruction of the world. (The New Testament concludes with that joyous anticipation: “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”)

“Whatsoever thy hand finds to do,” she quoted Scripture, “do it with thy might.” Her “Catholic Worker” followers found cities in which to organize urban missions. The Bible writer (Solomon, possibly) was addressing audiences more likely to find farm chores, or manufacturing work in the days when things really were manufactured by hand. Christians inspired by mission work sometimes need to be reminded that making pottery, furniture, fabric, even “art,” are all blessed acts of Christian faith if we dedicate them to God—and sinful if we don’t.

“Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem” may have been a general description of her mission life. Day lived in a room of her own (she did recognize a need for boundaries) but spent her days at a mission where she saw “only too clearly how bad people are” and pushed herself to practice what she saw as love for them anyway.

She tried to avoid being doctrinaire or prescriptive. “I am terribly afraid of intruding” on other people’s spiritual lives, she wrote. “Does God have a set way of prayer...He expects each of us to follow? I doubt it.” Kneeling, she notes, came from medieval Europe; “Jews stood,” and Sayers herself often found holy solitude and communion with God while walking through the crowded streets of New York. Nevertheless some form of prayer “is as necessary to life as breathing.” She prayed that sponsors would support her mission, and they did. Once, she said, on the way back from prayer that God would cover her mission’s overdraft, someone she met on the street gave her a check for the precise amount the mission needed.

“To be simple as little children, to live in the presence of God, to love God in his creatures, to do away with all suspicion, anger, contention and lack of brotherly love, to do the little things each day as well as we can and to start in all over again each morning, refreshing ourselves, steeling our wills–this is all we need to keep in mind,” she said. Did she at least relish the irony that this is not a simple list?

An introvert, as most sincere religious people are, Day wrote, “It was...when I was alone and most happy” that she thought most about God. Was it hard to imagine or understand God? Did her early twentieth century contemporaries, especially her socialist friends, angrily reject the idea that God even exists? Then she could talk to them about love; they all seemed to agree that love exists. “All other loves...must be a sample of the love of God,” which “is more intense than any human love.”

“I wish I could just stay in my room and pray,” Day observed about her cluttered life. “Why do we expect happiness?...Never let our moods affect others. Hide any sadness.” For Day herself this was obviously a formula for increased depression. For most of us it’s a formula for a complete breakdown, more often physical than mental. Introverts live longer than extroverts do. The physical difference turns out to be, not that introverts are “weaker” in any way or even “stronger” in any obvious way, but that we develop more complete neurological systems. We perceive more of what is going on, including our physical need for solitude. It seems likely that the reason why extroverts die younger than we do is that they don’t know when they need solitude, nor how to relax and enjoy solitude. We do. Extroverts may experience a crowded life as self-indulgent but, even for them, it is self-destructive.

Day felt harassed by the people she allowed to get too close to her, too much of the time. “I seem angry when I am silent very often because of an expression of eye strain,” she wrote. She was perhaps lucky to live before writing became computerized. I used to be told that my dark heavy eyebrows looked “fierce” or forbidding, when I was looking down raptly at a page of something I was enjoying. Now people who need more work of their own to look at are likely to approach me in the public places where I work, whining “Are you having a good day?” because they see real tears of eyestrain on my face. People who believe they can “read faces” need to have pounded into them more ideas like “The body never lies, but the body of another person is not interested in you.”

The Catholic response, which Day makes here, is certainly susceptible to abuses. “When we suffer, we are told that we suffer with Christ,” she wrote. One corrective to this might be, “...and when we fail to do all that we might be able to do to prevent and relieve suffering, especially if we compound that sin by babbling blasphemy about their suffering being good in some ‘spiritual’ way, we sin and deserve damnation with His torturers.” Day fails to mention this; she parrots the standard phrases, “accept suffering with joy” and “do nothing but love, love, love.” These phrases have their places in the Christian life. Some suffering is inevitable and not subject to relief by fellow mortals. But it seems to me that even Catholics ought to start testing the sincerity of the self-proclaimed masochists they hear spouting this kind of verbiage. Do they “do nothing but love, love, love” when they take up a collection and nobody puts in anything but “love, love, love”?

Of course we might be asked to help people sort out their feelings. When we know the person and the situation this may be appropriate. During the war, Day recommended books—the Bible and Kristin Lavransdatter are still easy to find—and advised someone agitated by war news, “Turn off your radio. Put away your daily paper. Read one review of events a week and spend some time reading such books as the above.” I would guess that that was in a letter. In a book it would have been more appropriate to tell people things like “X now reads the news only one day a week,” or perhaps “By not watching television Y was able to live through the war with equanimity.”

Day’s Catholic Worker communes were urban missions. Did she really need to write about “farming communes,” in comments on a friend’s “vision”? Day had little practical experience of the sort of farming community that can form when Christians appreciate the gift of good land. She didn’t know how different a neighborhood of small farms where, as the Bible sets forth as our goal and reward, each one has one’s own vine and fig tree, can be from the ever-decreasing productivity of the Soviet experimenters’ “collective farms.” I might write a post or a book about that some day. I grew up in a community of small farms during years when people reclaimed land from harmful experiments with “modern methods” and had steadily increasing modest yields every year. I’ll only briefly mention, here, that though the Bible writers recognized people’s need to adapt to changing conditions and didn’t scold those who had little practical choice about being “huddled masses,” they ridiculed the building of “towers” and urged people to spread out, move away from cities, and cultivate each one’s own vine and fig tree. That much healthy interpersonal distance does not prevent their being a community.

I’ll just say that, though some of the things she believed were timeless truths and others were the falsehoods her century tested and disproved, here are the most overtly religious thoughts of a sincere Christian who was also a competent writer. If your Christian fellowship consists of writers whose books you read on your day of rest, Dorothy Day will probably be welcome.

 

Book Review: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Title: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

(Once again, lots of different editions are out there; if you buy this book in support of your favorite web site, and don't specify that you must have a particular edition, you'll get whichever is available at the best price.)

Author: E.L. Konigsburg

Date: 1967

Publisher: Atheneum / Dell

ISBN: 0-440-43180-8

Length: 162 pages

Illustrations: drawings by the author

Quote: “Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away...Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that’s why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

Claudia, age eleven, and Jamie, age nine, are bored in their comfortable suburban home. They hoard their pocket money and plan a clever “lesson in Claudia (and Jamie) appreciation” for their parents and brothers. They budget for food, laundry, and return train fare, and plan their own intensive course in art history to keep their minds active during their adventure.

Nevertheless, once they settle in at the museum, they’re still bored, and now they don’t even have school. Maybe that’s why they get involved in the question of who really made their favorite statue, and make friends with the donor, Mrs. Frankweiler.

More than that would probably spoil the suspense—this is a short, simple novel, accessible to middle school audiences. Let’s just say that it’s a very arty, upscale, urban, and funny story that readers from age ten up have been enjoying for fifty years. If you didn’t read it as a child, your inner child wants you to read it now.

(This web site thanks Dan Lewis for reminding us what a cool children's book this one was!)

You can probably find this book at a public library, in the Newbery winner collection, but you can also buy it to support this web site: $5 per book, $5 per package (three to five books of similar size can fit into the package), plus $1 per online payment, as discussed on the Payment Information Page. You can also order a Storybook Doll dressed like Claudia, Jamie, or both, for $10 per doll.

Book Review: Oscar of the Waldorf

Title: Oscar of the Waldorf

(This image is of the reprint edition; it may be a copy of a paper dust jacket that my book no longer has, but it's not the first edition, which is what I have for sale in real life.)

Author: Karl Schriftgiesser / Oscar Tschirky

Date: 1943

Publisher: Dutton

ISBN: none

Length: 238 pages

Illustrations: several black-and-white glossy plates

Quote: “Being a hotel man has been more than my job. It has been my profession...my life.”

Who was Karl Schriftgiesser? Why is this biography of Oscar Tschirky, copyright by Oscar Tschirky, written in the third person “by Karl Schriftgiesser”? Was Oscar of the Waldorf vain enough to invent a biographer in hopes of sounding more modest...or was he prudent enough to hire an assistant whose native language was English in order to produce a well-written book in English? It hardly matters now, because this is not the story of Oscar, personally. It's the story of his hotel.

Oscar and the Waldorf Hotel flourished in the “Gilded Age” between 1890 and 1930, a time when Marxism flourished as a reaction to the extravagance of the obscenely rich. Money did, of course, trickle down in its slow inefficient way. “Wealthy Willy” Waldorf Astor built his luxury hotel on the site of his father's home, in the hope that his own name would displace his father's name from history, with a mission of making himself famous by operating the most extravagant luxury hotel the world had ever seen. He succeeded, possibly because he hired a sturdy Swiss immigrant away from Delmonico's and basically put that immigrant, Oscar, in charge of stocking the hotel with the people William Waldorf Astor wanted for friends. Oscar and a full crew of cooks, waiters, cleaners, messengers, even live elevator operators, profited from Astor's dissipation of his inheritance. If they didn't become rich in the sense that Astor was rich, Oscar, at least, had no worries about retirement.

Oscar didn't chatter at the customers, he tells us. He was not the head chef, but the head waiter, or as they say in Europe the maitre d'hotel. Over the years, because he gave good service and wasn't chatty or gossipy, he did come to seem like a friend to some of the hotel's patrons. Sometimes he heard things. Once, he says, once in his lifetime, he was able to tell some of them something important enough to make him break his rule and speak before he was spoken to. Oscar had his small part in the design of the Panama Canal.

Celebrity gossip is of course the main attraction of his memoir. Most of it is bland, amusing, newspaper-style gossip. John “Bet-a-million” Gates, an early patron, wagered a hundred dollars that one raindrop would reach the bottom of a window ahead of another one (he won). Lillian Russell couldn't make up her mind whether she wanted cantaloupe or ice cream for dessert; Oscar gave her half a cantaloupe with ice cream in the center and named this dessert “cantaloupe a la Lillian Russell.” Horace Fletcher, an eccentric medical researcher who believed in eating very plain food very slowly, frustrated Oscar by ordering bread and water for lunch. When a Barnum & Bailey employee turned eighty, still on the job, the company paid Oscar to make a banquet for 400 mostly famous people into a literal circus, with trapezes overhead. Early in his career Oscar had published a book of recipes he'd collected from New York's best chefs, with the result that people thought he was a chef himself; he continued collecting recipes and encouraging chefs to invent new ones, and his “war cake” recipe appears on page 173, but most of the recipes he collected were for enormous amounts of food—and one of his favorite finds, he says, came from a prison chef and could have been officially named “Clam Chowder a la Sing Sing.”

By the 1940s, when friends urged Oscar to write this book, it appears that he had become a somewhat nostalgic and querulous old man, always missing and reminiscing about an era that had passed. In the early twentieth century conservation laws forced him to stop offering endangered wild animals as main courses. Then the World Wars forced him to curb the extravagance and comply with “shortages” and “austerities.” Prohibition forced him to ruin, in his own mind, his terrapin soup by making it alcohol-free. The Depression took all the fun out of being extravagant, and eventually his beloved hotel closed down. It reopened on schedule, but it just...wasn't...the same.

Not that he was bitter. Having invested his whole life in the hotel had its benefits. At seventy-five, Oscar could probably have retired in any place and style he might have fancied...and he chose to move into the “new” Waldorf-Astoria hotel, where he was allowed to work part-time as a greeter for as long as he wanted. (His wife, whom he doesn't embarrass by mentioning more than three times in the book, moved in with him.) That the children and grandchildren of the “old” Waldorf's early patrons kept coming back, among other things to see the institution Oscar had become, gives his memoir a happy ending.

Oscar Tschirky had no problem with extravagance, snobbery, or inflated prices, and it probably wouldn't bother him at all to know that his memoir has become a collectible book. If you don't demand the first edition, of which I can't guarantee I'll find more than one, a copy of Oscar of the Waldorf will cost $30 per book plus $5 per package (four books of this size can fit into a package) plus $1 per online payment.  

Book Review: All Around the Town

[I also reviewed this little book on Blogjob...well, guess what? It didn't sell on Blogjob. I still have it, and I'm entitled to post it on two sites, especially since people don't seem to be buying anything from the other site. True word-nerds can compare what I wrote about one physical copy of one book on two different days: https://blogjob.com/priscillaking/2015/09/02/book-review-all-around-the-town/ .]

Title: All Around the Town

Author: Phyllis McGinley

Date: 1948

Publisher: Lippincott

ISBN: none

Length: pages not numbered, but basically this is a 28-verse song

Illustrations: paintings, some with color, by Helen Stone

Quote: “East Side, West Side, Everywhere you look, City sights Are witty sights And bursting for a book. So here’s a little list of them Arranged from A to Z[:] The gay things, the stray things That city children see.”

Do you know the tune? “The Sidewalks of New York” was one of the most popular tunes ever copyrighted from Tin Pan Alley. What McGinley did in this book was to compose twenty-eight new verses—an introduction, one for each of the first 25 letters of the alphabet, and two for Z—to sing to that familiar waltz tune. If you sing it, it's guaranteed to put the baby to sleep...unless it puts you to sleep first.

Read through as a poem, All Around the Town is a real period piece. “A is for the Aeroplane”—not yet an airplane. “B’s the Bus, the Bouncing Bus”—have you ever seen such a bus? “D’s the Dairy Driver. He makes a daily round.” He did, back in the day when it was also natural and appropriate to call the ice-cream vendor “the gay Good-Humor man,” and “H is for the Horses that haul their city loads,” and “O’s the Organ-grinder” who performed for pocket change in early spring.

Nevertheless, individual verses may still describe some aspects of the world children see even today. If I’d had the whole book as a child I might have felt that “B’s the Bus” came from long ago and far away. I didn’t. When we went into cities, buses still bounced as they bore the shoppers storeward. I tested again when I was in a city two weeks ago. The bus I rode to Wal-Mart didn’t look anything like the bus Phyllis McGinley rode, nor like the ones I rode as a child, but it bounced in the same old familiar way…

What I have is not the very first edition, but close enough that if it were in better condition it would still be an old and valuable book. Amazon shows an enormous price range for this book, depending on how much wear copies show. If you buy it here you'll get a well used copy for $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment; adding other books to the package makes this a better deal than you'd get from Amazon; otherwise, since it's not a Fair Trade Book (Phyllis McGinley hasn't needed a dollar for many years) you might as well go directly to Amazon. If you want a "new" copy...serious collectors' prices. If you are a local lurker and buy it from me in real life, you'll get a cleaned and dried, but mildew-stained, copy that I wouldn't send out through the mail; you'll have the opportunity to handle the book and make sure it doesn't trigger allergies, and you'll pay less than $10. 

Book Review: The Thurber Carnival

Title: The Thurber Carnival

Author: James Thurber

Date: 1957

Publisher: Random House (Modern Library)

ISBN: none

Length: 369 pages

Illustrations: drawings by James Thurber

Quote: “Thurber’s life baffles and irritates the biographer because of its lack of design. One has the disturbing feeling that the man contrived to be some place without actually having gone there. His drawings, for example, sometimes seem to have reached completion by some other route than the common one of intent.”

That’s what Thurber, age 62, wrote about himself by way of an introduction to a collection of reprints of short early pieces, including drawings.

About his drawings the most obvious thing to be said was always something like what Thurber said, also in the preface to this book: “[H]e saw, not two of everything, but one and a half. Thus, a four-wheeled wagon would not have eight wheels for him, but six. How he succeeded in preventing these two extra wheels from getting into his work, I have no way of knowing.” Thurber was not “legally blind” but always had very poor eyesight. He sketched the outlines of things as he knew them to be more than as they looked to him. That the facial expressions of the people and animals in his drawings sometimes looked hilariously appropriate, to other people, may well have been the only way Thurber learned anything about facial expressions. Often they look inappropriate—in the way that it’s not always altogether clear to which species the animals are meant to belong—and that’s part of their comic effect. For someone who actually saw so little of the world around him, who knew he’d sketched something well because other people told him so, Thurber is remembered for a remarkable number of insightful-looking drawings.

He is, of course, remembered mostly for insightful and funny short stories. Everyone of my generation, at least, remembers “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “The Night the Bed Fell,” and possibly “Doc Marlowe.” Those three stories are in The Thurber Carnival with about fifty others, but although Thurber claimed to be looking forward to retirement when this book was published, some of his best work remained ahead of him. Any serious collector of American Humorous Literature will want Alarms and Diversions, Lanterns and Lances, Many Moons, The Thirteen Clocks, and The Wonderful O, none of which is in this collection, and all of Let Your MindAlone, only about a third of which is in this collection.

If there is something about Thurber that a reasonable person with a reasonable sense of humor might not like, it’s his “colored” characters. Thurber drew Black faces about as badly as he drew White ones, and noticed Black people primarily as people who spoke a different dialect of English that intrigued his word-loving ear. He didn’t hate, dislike, or despise Black people. He was, however, most likely to notice them as uneducated low-paid employees, his own or someone else’s. His intention when he wrote about somebody like Della, whose use of a word that sounded like “reeves” bemused him so that he hardly even seemed to care that she meant “wreaths,” was not to create or build stereotypes—Della’s “reeves” obviously bemused Thurber because he’d never heard anyone else say that word that way—but if he ever thought of Della as anything more than an employee who talked in a funny way, he didn’t write about it. 

Well, he was about the age of my grandfather, and he wrote for his own generation; what made Thurber special was that readers from the next two generations (in my family) or three (in the U.S. demographic scheme, generally) enjoyed so much of what he wrote, too. He generally skimmed lightly around news and political issues, although there are plenty of oblique references to those in his writing, and focussed on the funnier aspects of words and of people. This means that, if you’re willing to place a few observations about other races and nationalities, and a lot of Thurber’s observations about women, in their historical context, young people will probably laugh at Thurber’s jokes, too.

About Thurber’s remarks about women…I think the thing that redeems those is that, in real life, Thurber was a husband, father, grandfather. He lived in and wrote about a period when people seem to have been trying very hard to believe things about men and women that made it almost impossible for men and women to live happily together. Some people chose to avoid marriage for this reason; many married and were unhappy; a blessed few, like at least one pair of my own personal grandparents, had enough economic independence and/or enough social support in their churches to observe that the drivel they were hearing about “femininity” had nothing to do with their own actual observations of feminine persons in real life or in the Bible. (In fact the drivel was of French Socialist origin, but little seems to have been said or written about that.)

So Thurber observed things that inspired his short stories about couples who hated each other and were trying to get each other declared insane, his drawings of the beleaguered little man feeling that his house and wife were one big devouring monster lying in wait for him, or the man whose first wife was either lurking with obvious evil intentions or dead and stuffed on the shelf above him and his present wife. He was aware of a Problem. He didn’t preach that the solution to this Problem  involved individual family love; he was not a preacher. He did, occasionally and when he could do it to humorous effect, write about listening to the cook (if only to write about the funny way she talked), and listening to little girls (even if their own mothers leaped in to stifle the little girls’ creative whimsy), and the mysterious way Saralinda, even when she wasn’t appreciated or treated as well as she deserved, turned November into June. Thurber was not even a proto-feminist but I always got the feeling, reading his work, that he was less burdensome to feminists than most men of his age.

So it’s indisputable that Thurber is easier to read now than Will Rogers or E.B. White, and I’d guess that others will agree with me that he’s less annoying to read now than Richard Armour or Max Shulman. Read his work and tell me what you think, why not?

The Thurber Carnival is available as a Fair Trade Book. Prices vary from day to day, depending on the quality of copies available, but I can probably afford to send you a copy for the usual $5 per copy + $5 per package + $1 per online payment. You could fit a few books by living authors into the package for $5, so please feel free to scroll down and look for a Fair Trade Book to add.