“Objection,” said the Supreme Prosecutor. “We are dealing here with a purely internal matter, caused by the consumer’s having consumed all the clocks.”
“Objection sustained,” droned the Supreme Magistrate.
The Man in the Street now took the stand. “Why don’t we use sundials?” he demanded.
“I challenge the existence of the witness,” said the Supreme Prosecutor. “He says he is the Man in the Street, but he is, in fact, the Man in the Supreme Council Room. Furthermore, sundials work only when the sun is shining, and nobody cares what time it is when the sun is shining.”
The Man in the Street left the witness chair, and nobody noticed his going, since the Supreme Prosecutor had established the fact that he had not been there. There was a long silence in the Supreme Council Room, a silence so deep one could have heard a pin drop, if a pin had been dropped, but nobody dropped a pin. What everybody in the council room heard, in the long, deep silence, was the slow tick-tock of a clock, a wall clock, the clock on the wall behind the Supreme Magistrate’s bench. The officials and the witnesses and the spectators had grown so used to not hearing clocks it wasn’t until the clock struck the hour that they realized there was a wall clock on the wall.
The Supreme Magistrate was the first to speak. “Unless I am mightily mistaken, and I usually am, we have here the solution to all our problems,” he said, “namely, a clock. Unless there is an objection and I sustain the objection, which I do not think I shall, we will place this clock in the clock tower of the town, where it can be seen by one and all. Then we shall once again know what time it is. The situation will be cleared up, and the case dismissed.”
“One minute,” said the Supreme Prosecutor, and everybody waited a minute until he spoke again. “What is to prevent the ogre from eating the clock in the clock tower?”
“If you are asking me,” said the Supreme Magistrate, “I do not know, but I do not have to confess my ignorance, since affirmations of this sort do not fall within my jurisdiction.”
A bailiff stepped to the bench and handed the Supreme Magistrate a folded note. The Magistrate glanced at it, took off his glasses, and addressed all those present. “The ogre is dead,” he announced.
“Objection,” said the Supreme Prosecutor.
“Objection overruled,” said the Magistrate, “if you are objecting to the fact of the ogre’s death.”
“I accept the ogre’s death as a fact,” said the Prosecutor, “but we are moving too fast, and I should like to call a specialist to the stand.” And he called a specialist to the stand.
“I am a collector,” said the specialist. “The clock on the wall is the only clock there is. This makes it not, in fact, a clock but a collector’s item, or museum piece. As such, it must be placed in the town museum. One does not spend the coins in a museum. The wineglasses in a museum do not hold wine. The suits of armor in a museum do not contain knights. The clocks in a museum do not tell time. This clock, the last clock there is, must therefore be allowed to run down, and then placed in the museum with proper ceremonies, addresses, and the like.”
“I move that this be done,” the Prosecutor said.
“I should like to continue to know, as much as everybody else, what time it is,” pronounced the Supreme Magistrate. “Under the circumstances, however, there is but one thing I can do in conformity with the rule which establishes the inalienable fact that the last clock is a collector’s item, or museum piece. I therefore decree that the last clock, the clock here on the wall, be allowed to run down, and then placed in the town museum, with proper ceremonies, addresses, and the like.”
The next day, at nine minutes of twelve o’clock noon, the last clock ran down and stopped. It was then placed in the town museum as a collector’s item, or museum piece, with proper ceremonies, addresses, and the like. Among those who spoke were the Lord Mayor, the Secretary of Status Quo, and the Supreme Magistrate. They all chose the same subjects, without verbs or predicates, and the subjects were these: glorious past, unlimited opportunity, challenging futures, dedication, inspired leadership, enlightened followership, rededication, moral fiber, spiritual values, outer space, inner man, higher ideals, lower taxes, unflagging enthusiasm, unswerving devotion, coordinated efforts, dedicated rededication, and rededicated dedication.
After that, nobody in town ever knew what time is was. Factories and schools remained closed, church bells no longer rang because the bell ringers no longer knew when to ring them, and dates and engagements were no longer made because nobody knew when to keep them. Trains no longer ran, so nobody left town and no strangers arrived in town to tell the people what time it was. Eventually, the sands of a nearby desert moved slowly and inexorably toward the timeless town, and in the end it was buried.
Eras, epochs, and eons passed before a party of explorers from another planet began digging in the sands above the buried town. They were descendants of people from Earth who had reached Venus a thousand years before and intermarried with Venusians. Among them were a young man and a young woman, and it was their fortune to be the first to come upon the ancient library of the old inspirationalist. Among some papers still preserved upon his desk were the last things he had written—bits of poetry from the grand Old Masters and the minor poets. One of these fragments read, “How goes the night, boy? The moomoon is down. I have not heard the clock.” And the very last words his wavery pen had put on paper:
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us,
Mummum in the sands of time.
“What is mummum?” the young woman asked.
“I don’t know,” the young man said, “but something tells me we shall find a lot of it.” They went on digging, and, in the end, came upon the last clock in the town museum, so clogged with sand they could not tell what it had once been used for, and so they marked it “Antique mechanism. Function uncertain. Possibly known to ancients as mummum.” And they took it back to Venus, in a cargo rocket ship, with other mysterious relics of the Time of Man on Earth.
January 12, 1959*
Bill, old fellow:
Take this one up tenderly, for it’s my heart. I worry a little bit, foolishly perhaps, because of my fear that some of your dedicated editors may not so much read this as process it. I have processed it myself, screened it, and rewritten it five times from start to finish. I don’t have to tell you, a musician, that the repetitions, a word that is anathema to The New Yorker boys and girls, are not only intentional, but have been worked out with exceeding care. I won’t bother your staff by pointing out the indirect influences of Browning’s triple rhyme scheme (though I use no actual rhymes), and what Leonard Bernstein might call the architecture of the andante cantabile. The boys and girls will understand this, but someone is sure to point out the use of “so clogged” and “and so” in one sentence. Tell them the hell with it. Some keen mind may even suggest variance for “took the stand” and “took the witness chair.” Tell them to forget it. If anybody says this is uncharacteristic and familiar, I shall kill him.
The immediate inspiration occurred to me when I was dozing during the fourth quarter of the last Giants-Browns football game, when the announcer said, “With only 35 seconds left to go, all the Giants have to do is eat up the clock.” For further implementation on such phenomena the kids might read The Dynamics of Insight by Alexander Reid Martin, or, better yet, not read it. There is nothing in this piece I am unaware of and, for Jesus sake, don’t let any of the keen minds point out that there is illogic in the statements of some of the specialists. I don’t have to tell you that this is a moving study, moving and a little frightening, too, of what modern mummum has done, and is doing, to muxx up the condition of man. Incidentally, The New Yorker review of “The Human Condition” should easily win the Pulitzer Prize for dullness.
Affectionately,
J. T.
About the Author
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S most popular American humorist, JAMES THURBER
(1894–1961) authored nearly two dozen collections of drawings, essays, stories, fables, and biographical works—much of which he published as a founding voice of The New Yorker magazine. Along with a shelf of classic children’s books, a gem-like autobiography, My Life and Hard Times, and two Broadway productions, Thurber created spontaneous, unstudied drawings that profoundly changed the character of cartooning and expanded the very possibilities of an illustrated line.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
About the Editor
MICHAEL J. ROSEN has published five volumes of James Thurber’s uncollected or unpublished work, including the 2019 monograph, A Mile and a Half of Lines: The Art of James Thurber (Ohio State University Press), that coincides with the first major exhibition of Thurber’s artwork at the Columbus Museum of Art. From 1982 to 2001, he served as literary director of The Thurber House, a center for readers and writers in the restored boyhood home of James Thurber in Columbus, Ohio. During that time, Rosen helped to create The Thurber Prize for American Humor and a biennial anthology of contemporary humor. Like Thurber, he is a native son of Columbus, Ohio, a writer of children’s books, an illustrator, humorist, and a consummate dog person.
Praise for Thurber and His Fables
“Herein lie great words and lines of wit and wisdom as might be read by a father to a son, or, for that matter, a mother to a father while a daughter stands with arms folded and a knowing look. How grateful I am that my dad read me Thurber, otherwise I’d know nothing of these fables and have no suitable way to bide my time until our current nightmares tumble from a careless window.”
—Elvis Costello
“Every sport has its Ultimate, its Greatest of All Time: Babe Ruth, Ali, Nicklaus, Pelé, Federer, The Don. The sport of creating laugh-out-loud cartoons, fables, and funny essays has Thurber. He is, and probably always will be, The One.”
—Stephen Fry
“Thurber celebrates the losers, the awkward, the unpopular . . . and yet he’s never a smug observer.”
—Tracey Ullman
“James Thurber taught me how to read. His pictures were so weirdly intriguing that I had to know more, so into the words I went, and things just got funnier. It’s one of the longest and most important relationships in my reading life.”
—Michael McKean
“Thurber’s genius was to make of our despair a humorous fable.”
—John Updike, 1956
“It was Whitman who wanted to turn and live with the animals; it is Thurber who has succeeded in the only possible terms, by enlisting them in the endless battle for human sanity.”
—Manchester Guardian (London), 1957
“Take Aesop, or La Fontaine, add a dash of lunacy, garnish with the drawing of a man whose perfect vision is undistracted by good sight and you still won’t have a Thurber fable . . . You won’t have it because a Thurber fable is unique in the most unicorn sense of the word. A Thurber fable shares that special world of humor that we identify as Thurbeia, a wispy, wacky realm somewhere between heaven and mirth, inhabited by fierce, long-haired women, by apprehensive men whom life has passed by (and in the wrong direction at that), and by the hound dog of Idealism staring confounded at the bug of Reality.”
—Evening Citizen, Ottawa, Canada, 1953
“These fables deliciously revise some of the well-known classic fables. They are illustrated by Mr. Thurber’s incomparable—and I mean incomparable—drawings. For no one fills a few crude looking lines with more laughing gas than he does.”
—Chicago Tribune, 1940
“These tiny stories, in which a wide variety of animals show us how human we really are, are completely uproarious.”
—Saturday Review of Literature, 1940
“But Thurber, the fabulist, easily engages the invaluable services of Thurber, the scratch-pad artist. These ectoplasmic figures, seemingly executed in a telephone booth between wrong numbers, enhance his Fables more dynamically than the work of any other artist could, had he had a selection from Cimabue to Margaret Bourke-White. The little figures of animals and people depict every human mood save nobility and serenity. This is no lack, since there doesn’t happen to be any serenity or nobility in the Fables.”
—Saturday Review, 1956
“Thurber is an original. Critics who call him merely the Swift of our time underrate him, because he is something special, something all himself, as important a phenomenon of our time as the World’s Fair or the World War. I wouldn’t miss one of his books for anything. But I’m warning you, the laughs in this one are mostly desperate.”
—Memphis Tennessee Appeal, 1940
“In Germany this Aesop in reverse would be burned at the stake as subversive, mad, immoral, decadent, and defeatist. He is also delightful.”
—The Nation, 1940
“[Thurber] writes so simply and so pointedly that readers find it hard to believe that there isn’t some esoteric meaning hidden under every word, and that his own illustrations—simple, often only one line drawings—are just what they look like and not a kind of ink curtain hiding all sorts of subtleties. You may not like him (though his devotees can’t understand your having such a blind spot) but anyone who says he can’t understand him is in a fog of his own making.”
—Chicago Sunday Tribune, 1956
“[Thurber’s fables] are spare, luminous, concentrated, they are Thurber’s late quartets. His conflict has moved to a higher plane, it’s no longer only man versus gadgets, or man versus woman. It’s satire versus humanism; Thurber doesn’t hate the human race, like Swift; he cares for it, and hopes, he has had a vision of paradise . . . But finally this is the distilled wisdom of the blind prophet.”
—Observer, London, 1957
“So long as Mr. Thurber continues to people our darkness with these little doodles of his, we Americans are not much in danger of losing the uses of laughter.”
—Buffalo, NY News, 1956
“Here Thurber energetically continues his huge self-assigned task of trying to kid mankind into taking itself seriously. And if he fails, it is only because mankind isn’t listening.”
—Texas News, Lufkin, 1957
“I always read my Thurber—to laugh and learn.”
—Jon Scieszka
“I was introduced to Thurber in high school, and that’s when I became a writer.”
—Roy Blount, Jr.
Also by James Thurber
A Mile and a Half of Lines: The Art of James Thurber
The Thurber Letters
The Dog Department: James Thurber on Hounds, Scotties, and Talking Poodles
People Have More Fun Than Anybody: A Centennial Celebration of Drawings and Writings by James Thurber
Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself
Selected Letters of James Thurber
Thurber & Company
A Thurber Carnival (a musical revue)
Credos and Curios
Lanterns and Lances
The Years with Ross
Alarms and Diversions
The Wonderful O
Further Fables for Our Time
Thurber’s Dogs
Thurber Country
The Thurber Album: A Collection of Pieces About People
The 13 Clocks
The Beast in Me and Other Animals
The White Deer
The Thurber Carnival
The Great Quillow
Men, Women and Dogs
Many Moons
My World—And Welcome to It
The Male Animal (with Elliot Nugent)
Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated
The Last Flower
Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces
The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze
My Life and Hard Times
The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments
The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities
Is Sex Ne
cessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do (with E. B. White)
Copyright
COLLECTED FABLES. Copyright © 2019 by Rosemary A. Thurber. Introduction Copyright © 2019 by Michael J. Rosen. Foreword Copyright © 2019 by Keith Olbermann. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover designed by Milan Bozic
Cover illustration by James Thurber
All Illustrations by James Thurber, except as noted:
“The Flaw in the Plan,” © 2019 Laurie Rosenwald
“A Farewell to Mandibles,” © 2019 Seymour Chwast
“Many Pigeons,” © 2019 Victoria Chess
“The Ordeal of No. 137,968,” and “The Pigeon Who Wouldn’t Go Home,” © 2019 Victoria Roberts
“The Possum Who Wasn’t Playing Dead,” © 2019 Mark Ulriksen
“The Starling and the Crow,” © 2019 Eric Hanson
“The Generalissimo of All the Field Mice in the World,” © 2019 Edel Rodriguez
“The Bright Emperor,” © 2019 R.O. Blechman
“The Princess and the Tin Box,” © 2019 Blair Thornley
“The Last Clock,” © 2019 Calef Brown
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition JUNE 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-290918-3
Version 05242019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-290917-6
Collected Fables Page 14