(6) JAMES THURBER –

THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY (1942)

 

“Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.”

 

James Thurber – “American cartoonist, writer, humorist, journalist and playwright”, as well as prolific contributor to The New York magazine.

Speaking of Thurber as cartoonist, as much as I love Thurber’s cartoons, I have to admit he wasn’t the best artist – as he himself admitted about his “lumpy” art style, joking to parents who submitted the art of children as better that indeed it was but they just hadn’t been through as much.

However, it was the dry absurdist humor of Thurber’s cartoons that shone through the art, as it did through his writing. “Many of Thurber’s fictions…deal with the fundamental conflict between men and women, and the romantic vs. practical mindset represented by each, respectively. His works are also colored by his liberal individualist views, in a time when creeping nationalism was threatening personal freedom in many parts of the world — some not entirely remote — and are also characterized by a deep sympathy for animals, particularly dogs.” Some of my favorite works by Thurber are the portraits he wrote for his family dogs.

If there’s one work by Thurber that stands above the rest, it’s his short story of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, which “recounts a day in the life of a man who daydreams about heroic adventures as he goes about his mundane existence”. It has been adapted as – or loosely inspired – two films, one in 1947 starring Danny Kaye, and the other in 2013 starring Ben Stiller. I haven’t seen either, but I’d lean towards the first given Kaye’s comedic performance in The Court Jester.