![]() ![]() Thurber dogs worth thinking about include the Boston bull terrier Feely, whom Emma Inch, the part- time cleaning lady, carries with her in her arms wherever she goes, and the poodle who threw up in Thurber’s car on her way to a dog show. Within the world of the Thurber dog there are many different specimens and varieties. What gets to Thurber is not so much the dog’s eagerness, or the loyalty, or the bravery, or any other would-be virtue so much as the dog’s inherent and ordinary dignity. ![]() But that doesn’t reduce the intensity with which it was realized, or make less moving its third angle, that of dog and man. ![]() She became the Thurber wife because she could not become, as she can now, the Thurber boss her bossiness is an expression of her being precluded from being an actual leader. We know now that the Thurber wife became the Thurber wife because of her confinement her exasperation at the Thurber husband rises from her frustration at being only a wife. When I write about dogs, I write about dignity, Thurber could have said, because dogs still have it and men do not. When I write about food, I write about hunger, M. The Thurber dog is between them: steadfast, melancholic, in every sense dogged, but complete in himself. The Thurber wife is certain, sighing, exasperated, and idiosyncratically knowing it’s the wife who knows that the only good diners on the highways are the ones “not at an angle to the road.” The Thurber husband is daydreaming, frightened, and neurotic. There’s the Thurber wife and the Thurber husband, and between them is the Thurber dog. The war between men and women is his subject, and the Thurber dog is, so to speak, the third body in a three-body problem that fills his work. But it’s central to what Thurber is up to, and why he’s up to it. It’s a language, and a way of talking, that seems a little alien to us now. They demand very little of their heyday a kind word is more to them than fame, a soup bone than gold they are perfectly contented with a warm fire and a good book to chew (preferably an autographed first edition lent by a friend) wine and song they can completely forgo and they can almost completely forgo women.” For Thurber, the dog is not man’s best friend so much as man’s sole dodgy ally in his struggle with man’s strangest necessity, woman. Dogs “would in all probability have averted the Depression, for they can go through lots tougher things than we and still think it’s boom time. The dog was man set free from family obligations, Monastic Man. The American man had the permanent jumps, and the American dog did not. The virtues that seemed inherent in dogs-peacefulness, courage, and stoical indifference to circumstance-were ones that he felt had been lost by their owners. When Thurber was writing about dogs, he was writing about men. So why dogs? The answer is simple: for Thurber, the dog chimed with, represented, the American man in his natural state-a state that, as Thurber saw it, was largely scared out of him by the American woman. ![]()
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