Something About Polk

I'm closing in on finishing James Thurber's "92 Stories," and have found a treasure-trove of delights.

One such is a bit called "Something About Polk," focusing on the then-current (and also now-current) general ignorance of the accomplishments of James K. Polk, the 11th President of the United States.

He was impressed that a previous reader of a book on Polk was indignant enough about the author's dismissive view of Polk to write in the margin three concrete facts about the former president, showing he wasn't as "almost unknown" as the author thought.

The facts, for the curious:

1. Governor of Tennessee

2. Twice Speaker of the House of Representatives

3. The Jackson leader in the fight against the U.S. Bank.

Thurber, of course, agreed with the author -- he himself knew little of Polk, and lamented that he'd neither been shot or impeached or anything to help the common man cement an idea of Polk in their heads, unlike other presidents.

I learned the word "roorback," or a last-minute political trick, coined from such a trick played by Polk's opponents meant to convince voters that Polk was a slave-trader who branded his slaves, as reported in a fictional book by Baron Von Roorback.

But even contemporary historians and writers dismissed Polk as forgettable, with Thurber pointing out that Carl Sandburg included an anecdote about Polk's wife in his "Abaraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years," but not about Polk himself.

He concludes the best would be to make up more memorable Polk stories and share them to the point they entered the zeitgeist, and concludes thus:

"These are all that I can think of myself, and i am afraid that none of them is going to hurl our hero into immortality, but at least they are a start in the right direction. Let somebody else try it. There's no great rush."

I suspect he would have been amused by this:

Not Your Typical Thurber

From James Thurber's "The Man on the Train":

I instantly felt as if I had stumbled into a wrong apartment in which someone was dressing. And yet I had merely glanced across the aisle of a train at a man I had never seen before, who looked back at me. I had an unreasonable feeling that there must be something I could do for him. It was almost as if he had spoken. And yet I met his gazed for only a moment or two and then we both turned away. It happened a long time ago -- four or five years -- and it is as meaningless to my life as an old forgotten telephone number; but there it is , as sharp as any memory I have of a friend. It comes up before me clear, irrelevant, and uncalled for, at unexpected hours. . .

There is something lugubrious about the expression of a man with a toothache. I think I could always pick out such a sufferer instantly: a man with a toothache looks, crazily enough, as if he were trying not to laugh. But this was not a look of physical pain. I felt, for some odd reason, as if the cause for it were on the tip of my mind; as if, by some little extra effort, I could divine the dark experience, whatever it was.

That is about a sixth or seventh of the entire short story. And we expect, as we go along, to the reveal that the man has suffered some insignificant foible for which Thurber is famed for framing as a catastrophe.

But this story, with its buildup and closing line, rivals the famed "saddest" story ever written, atrributed to Hemingway but first appearing in print when Hemingway was only seven years old.

I wonder at the story's origin. Is it typical Thurber fiction, but going in a different direction than we usually assign to Thurber, or is this a bit of reportage, something he experienced himself in reality and wrote down so as not to forget it. I don't know what the answer is.

You can listen to the whole story here. (Narration is, uh, not professional by any means.)

Ladies, A Word

Trying to fathom why men do what they do?

Maybe James Thurber can help with his short story "The Private Life of Mr. Bidwell," published in The New Yorker in 1933.

The beginning:

From where she was stitting, Mrs. Bidwell could not see her husband, but she had a curious feeling of tension: she knew he was up to something.

"What are you doing, George?" she demanded, her eyes still on her book.

"Mm?"

"What's the matter with you?"

"Pahhhhh-h-h-h," said Mr. Bidwell, in a long, pleasureable exhale. "I was holding my breath."

This seems to be Mr. Bidwell's greatest sin.

He does it at home. He does it at parties. He says it's deep breathing, good exercise. But men reading it know better. He was doing it just to see how long he could hold his breath.

Ask any man, they'll tell you. They might even be familiar with this scene from the film "The Right Stuff," and wish they had the power of a John Glenn or a Scott Carpenter:

I have to spoil the ending of the story for you. The Bidwells end up divorced, with Mr. Bidwell unprepentant after many pleas from his wife to change his ways.

The ending paragraph:

George Bidwell lives along now (his wife remarried). He never goes to parties any more, and his old circle of friends rarely sees him. The last time that any of them  did see him, he was walking along a country road with the halting, uncertain gait of a blind man: he was trying to see how many steps he could take without opening his eyes.

This little story is just one of the many reasons I love James Thurber.