Dear Jack,
Probably the best date I ever had was when I took James Thurber to dinner and a movie.
It was 2013; I was 26, he would have been 119 had he not died 52 years earlier. I didn’t go out with his ghost, of course. I took a Thurber omnibus, in which was collected his short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, with me to a pub and re-read WM over a stout and an order of brussels sprouts. After that, I walked myself across the street to the movie theatre, bought a ticket, and settled down in the auditorium—book still in hand—to watch Ben Stiller’s big-screen adaptation of Thurber’s story. The audience was mostly middle-aged or older couples, some of whom saw me reading my book and remarked on what a good way that was to spend the time before the film started.
I admit I was a bit nervous on behalf James Thurber and Walter Mitty; Thurber famously disliked Samuel Goldwyn’s 1947 movie starring Danny Kaye (which has long been a favorite in my family). If you’re at all familiar with Thurber’s writing and cartoons you know that he does not shy away from the ridiculous—yet it’s an elevated ridiculousness, for all that. There’s a certain amount of absurdity in his original Walter Mitty, but it’s definitely on the tragi-comic side, whereas in the hands of song-and-dance-man Danny Kaye it’s decidedly more slapstick. (And who can forget Boris Karloff’s sepulchral intonations on the line “I know how to kill a man and leave no trace”? It’s via “an icicle inserted at the base of the skull,” in case you wondered.)
“It’s forty kilometers through hell, sir,” said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. “After all,” he said softly, “what isn’t?”
― James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Ben Stiller, in many ways, is a modern analogue to Danny Kaye—a comedian who for much of his career was known more for screwball pratfalls than for deep, insightful storytelling. But his first installment of Night at the Museum was pretty good. In his hands, I thought, Walter Mitty might turn out to be halfway decent … or it might be cringe-inducingly awful, further denigrating the hero of Thurber’s story.
Turns out I needn’t have worried. Even though the film itself bore little resemblance to the original plot (though it does center around an unassuming man named Walter Mitty, who escapes the mundanity of his life via vivid daydreams), it turned out to be charming, touching, funny, heartwarming, and surprisingly hopeful. I think everyone in the theatre clapped when the credits rolled, and there were more than a few damp eyes, including my own. It’s one of my favorite modern movies, and I can’t help but think that Thurber would also have appreciated it, even though his story served more as “inspiration” than as an actual framework for the film.
Your boy Scott Fitzgerald even gets an indirect shout-out.
Thurber and Fitzgerald knew each other, of course, as anybody who was anybody in the writing circles of Jazz Age New York City was likely to. (Gatsby, by the way, turns 100 this year; The New Yorker, for which Thurber wrote and drew cartoons from 1927 into the 1950s, is also turning 100.) In Ben Stiller’s film, Walter Mitty daydreams that his love interest, single mom Cheryl Melhoff, declares her undying devotion to him, and then Walter tells her, “I have that Benjamin Buttons thing.”
Cue a hilarious continuation of the dream sequence in which he, like Benjamin Button, grows back toward babyhood as he ages—only Walter, who “never saw the movie,” ends up being both an old man and a baby at the same time. If you haven’t seen the scene yet, go watch it, because I can’t do it justice with a description. (Better yet, go watch the whole film.)
I have also never seen the Benjamin Button movie (I presume Walter was referencing the 2008 version with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett); I watched the preview the other day and decided that was enough for me. Up until a month ago I would have sworn that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was by Charles Dickens, because doesn’t that just sound like something he would’ve written? I was surprised, therefore, to open a recently acquired collection of Fitzgerald stories and find BB there in the table of contents.
I finally read it last week. And it made me cry.
My collection of Fitzgerald’s stories, edited and prefaced by Matthew J. Bruccoli, includes this comment from Scott himself on Benjamin Button’s origins:
“The story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler’s ‘Note-books.’”
Fitzgerald may have been exploring here the “tension between romanticism and realism,” as Bruccoli says, that is inherent in fantastical fiction, but his story primarily reminded me of two things: Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and my grandfather, who is experiencing the long, slow fade-out of Alzheimer’s. The disease was first formally identified in 1901, twenty-one years before Fitzgerald chronicled Benjamin Button’s story. I doubt that he even had it in mind while writing, but now, a century later, the similarities between Benjamin’s cognitive decline and that of those who experience Alzheimer’s are hard to ignore (even though they’re not necessarily exact matches).
It’s more likely that Kafka’s tale could have influenced Fitzgerald’s, however. The Metamorphosis was published in 1915, six years before Benjamin Button, and also featured a fantastical depiction of a man who became an embarrassment—and then an outright threat—to his family through a bizarre physical transformation that was no fault of his own. Benjamin’s tale isn’t as bleak as Gregor’s, of course—but the parallels are there, for those who want to write dissertations.
Before I depress myself too much with these melancholy reflections, I should mention also Thurber’s essay The Secret Life of James Thurber, which is half a humorous meditation upon Salvador Dali’s autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, and half a fascinating glimpse into his own vivid imagination (something that apparently doctors chalked up to Charles Bonnet syndrome resulting from Thurber’s being shot in the eye with an arrow as a child. Make of that what you will).
“I came into the house one rainy dusk and asked where Frances was. ‘She is,’ said our cook, ‘up in the front room crying her heart out.’ The fact that a person could cry so hard that his heart would come out of his body, as perfectly shaped and glossy as a red velvet pincushion, was news to me. For some reason I had never heard the expression, so common in American families whose hopes and dreams run so often counter to attainment … My search for her heart took some fifteen minutes.”
― James Thurber, The Secret Life of James Thurber
Thurber’s short stories and novellas are genius, of course, but my favorites are those in which he relates the astonishing adventures of his eccentric upbringing in Ohio (The Night the Bed Fell), his etymological musings (What Do You Mean It Was Brillig?), and his varied exploits as a psychosemanticist (and general lover of words).
I should mention that in 1947 the Screen Guild Players (sponsored by Camel cigarettes) performed a radio adaptation of Goldwyn’s film version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo reprising their roles. It tracks pretty closely with the movie, though there are naturally a lot of changes for brevity’s sake and that of radio storytelling. And at the end of the broadcast, Kaye and Mayo let audiences across America know just how great Camels really are; why, each week they give thousands of free cigarettes to servicemen in military hospitals around the country.
Imagine if they tried to do that today.
It’s also worth noting that in the ’60s someone had the bright idea of making a television sitcom based on James Thurber’s life and experiences as a New Yorker writer and cartoonist. The initial version was actually called The Secret Life of James Thurber, but, when that pilot didn’t sell, it eventually was sold as My World and Welcome to It (also the title of another of Thurber’s books). Whether it’s worth watching is debatable, but I’ll let you be the judge of that. I presume it made Thurber roll in his grave.
How’s the view from where you are?
Yrs,
Meli
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