The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

by James Thurber

  Half a mile out of Antibes on the shore road, I stopped the car and changed places with Olympy, letting the engine run. Leaning forward, he took a tense grip on a steering wheel much larger than he was used to and too far away from him. I could see that he was nervous. He put his foot on the clutch, tentatively, and said, ‘Embrayage?’ He had me there. My knowledge of French automotive terms is inadequate and volatile. I was forced to say I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember the word for clutch in any of the three languages, French, Italian and German, in which it was given in my Motorist’s Guide (which was back at the villa). Somehow ‘embrayage’ didn’t sound right for clutch (it is, though). I knew it wouldn’t do any good for an American writer to explain in French to a Russian boat specialist the purpose that particular pedal served; furthermore, I didn’t really know. I compromised by putting my left foot on the brake. ‘Frein,’ I said. ‘Ah,’ said Olympy, unhappily. This method of indicating what something might be by demonstrating what it wasn’t had a disturbing effect. I shifted my foot to the accelerator – or rather pointed my toe at it – and suddenly the word for that, even the French for gasoline, left me. I was growing a little nervous myself. ‘Benzina,’ I said, in Italian finally. ‘Ah?’ said Olympy. Whereas we had been one remove from reality to begin with, we were now two, or perhaps three removes. A polyglot approach to the fine precision of a gas engine is roundabout and dangerous. We both lost a little confidence in each other. I suppose we should have given up right then, but we didn’t.

  Olympy decided the extra pedal was the embrayage, shifted into low from neutral, and the next thing I knew we were making a series of short forward bounds like a rabbit leaping out of a wheat field to see where he is. This form of locomotion takes a lot out of a man and car. The engine complained in loud, rhythmic whines. And then Olympy somehow got his left foot on the starter and there was a familiar undertone of protest; this set his right foot to palpitating on the accelerator and the rabbit-jumps increased in scope. Abandoning my search for the word for starter, I grabbed his left knee and shouted ‘Ça commence! Just what was commencing Olympy naturally couldn’t figure – probably some habitual and ominous idiosyncrasy of the machinery. He gave me a quick, pale look. I shut off the ignition, and we discussed the starter situation, breathing a little heavily. He understood what it was finally, and presently we were lurching ahead again, Olympy holding her in low gear, like a wrestler in a clinch, afraid to risk shifting into second. He tried it at last and with a jamming jolt and a roar we went into reverse: the car writhed like a tortured leopard and the engine quit.

  I was puzzled and scared, and so was Olympy. Only a foolish pride in masculine fortitude kept us going. I showed him the little jog to the right you have to make to shift into second and he started the engine and we were off again, jolting and lurching. He made the shift, finally, with a noise like lightning striking a foundry – and veered swoopingly to the right. We barely missed a series of staunch granite blocks, set in concrete, that mark ditches and soft shoulders. We whisked past a pole. The leaves of a vine hanging on a wall slapped at me through the window. My voice left me. I was fascinated and paralyzed by the swift passes disaster was making at my head. At length I was able to grope blindly toward the ignition switch, but got my wrist on the klaxon button. When I jerked my arm away, Olympy began obediently sounding the horn. We were riding on the edge of a ditch. I managed somehow to shut off the ignition and we rolled to a stop. Olympy, unused to a left-hand drive, had forgotten there was a large portion of the car to his right, with me in it. I told him, ‘A gauche, à gauche, toujours à gauche!’ ‘Ah,’ said Olympy, but there was no comprehension in him. I could see he didn’t know we had been up against the vines of villa walls: intent on the dark problem of gear shifting, he had been oblivious of where the car and I had been. There was a glint in his eye now. He was determined to get the thing into high on his next attempt; we had come about half a mile in the lower gears.

  The road curved downhill as it passed Eden Roc and it was here that an elderly English couple, unaware of the fact that hell was loose on the highway, were walking. Olympy was in second again, leaning forward like a racing bicycle rider. I shouted at him to look out, he said ‘0ui’ – and we grazed the old man and his wife. I glanced back in horror: they were staring at us, mouths and eyes wide, unable to move or make a sound. Olympy raced on to a new peril: a descending hairpin curve, which he negotiated in some far-fetched manner, with me hanging on to the emergency brake. The road straightened out, I let go the brake, and Olympy slammed into high with the desperate gesture of a man trying to clap his hat over a poised butterfly. We began to whiz: Olympy hadn’t counted on a fast pickup. He whirled around a car in front of us with a foot to spare. ‘Lentement!’ I shouted, and then ‘Gauche!’ as I began to get again the whimper of poles and walls in my ears. ‘Ça va mieux, maintenant,’ said Olympy, quietly. A wild thought ran through my head that maybe this was the way they used to drive in Russia in the old days.

  Ahead of us now was one of the most treacherous curves on the Cap. The road narrowed and bent, like a croquet wicket, around a high stone wall that shut off your view of what was coming. What was coming was usually on the wrong side of the road, so it wouldn’t do to shout ‘Gauche!’ now. We made the turn all right. There was a car coming, but it was well over on its own side. Olympy apparently didn’t think so. He whirled the wheel to the right, didn’t take up the play fast enough in whirling it back, and there was a tremendous banging crash, like a bronze monument falling. I had a glimpse of Olympy’s right hand waving around like the hand of a man hunting for something under a table. I didn’t know what his feet were doing. We were still moving, heavily, with a ripping noise and a loud roar. ‘Poussez le phare!’ I shouted, which means ‘push the headlight!’ ‘Ah-h-h-h,’ said Olympy. I shut off the ignition and pulled on the hand brake, but we had already stopped. We got out and looked at the pole we had sideswiped and at the car. The right front fender was crumpled and torn and the right back one banged up, but nothing else had been hurt. Olympy’s face was so stricken when he looked at me that I felt I had to cheer him up. ‘Il fait beau,’ I announced, which is to say that the weather is fine. It was all I could think of.

  I started for a garage that Olympy knew about. At the first street we came to he said ‘Gauche’ and I turned left. ‘Ah, non,’ said Olympy. ‘Gauche,’ and he pointed the other way. ‘You mean droit?’ I asked, just that way. ‘Ah!’ said Olympy. ‘C’est bien ça!’ It was as if he had thought of something he hadn’t been able to remember for days. That explained a great deal.

  I left Olympy and the car at the garage; he said he would walk back. One of the garage men drove me into Juan-les-Pins and I walked home from there – and into a look of wild dismay in Maria’s eyes. I hadn’t thought about that: she had seen us drive away together and here I was, alone. ‘Où est votre mari?’ I asked her, hurriedly. It was something of a failure as a reassuring beginning. I had taken the question out of her own mouth, so I answered it. ‘He has gone for a walk,’ I told her. Then I tried to say that her husband was bon, but I pronounced it beau, so that what I actually said was that her husband was handsome. She must have figured that he was not only dead but laid out. There was a mauvais quart d’heure for both of us before the drooping figure of Olympy finally appeared. He explained sadly to Maria that the mechanism of the Ford is strange and curious compared to the mechanism of the Morgan. I agreed with him. Of course, he protested, he would pay for the repairs to the car, but Maria and I both put down that suggestion. Maria’s idea of my work was that I was paid by the City of New York and enjoyed a tremendous allowance. Olympy got forty francs a day at the boat factory.

  That night, at dinner, Maria told us that her mari was pacing up and down in their little bedroom at the rear of the house. He was in a state. I didn’t want an attack of chagrin to come on him as it had on the cordonnier and perhaps reach his brain. When Maria was ready to go we gave her a handful of cigarettes for Olym
py and a glass of Bénédictine. The next day, at dawn, I hear the familiar tintamarre and hurlement and brouhaha of Olympy’s wonderful contraption getting under way once more. He was off to the boat factory and his forty francs a day, his dollar and thirty cents. It would have cost him two weeks’ salary to pay for the fenders, but he would have managed it somehow. When I went down to breakfast, Maria came in from the kitchen with a large volume, well fingered and full of loose pages, which she handed to me. It was called Le Musée d’Art and subtitled Galerie des Chefs-d’œuvre et Précis de l’Histoire de l’Art au XIXe Siècle, en France et à l’Étranger (1000 gravures, 58 planches hors texte). A present to Monsieur from Olympy Sementzoff, with his compliments. The incident of the automobile was thus properly rounded off with an exchange of presents: cigarettes, Bénédictine, and Le Musée d’Art. It seemed to me the way such things should always end, but perhaps Olympy and I were ahead of our day & or behind it.

  The Breaking Up of the Winships

  The trouble that broke up the Gordon Winships seemed to me, at first, as minor a problem as frost on a window-pane. Another day, a touch of sun, and it would be gone. I was inclined to laugh it off, and, indeed, as a friend of both Gordon and Marcia, I spent a great deal of time with each of them, separately, trying to get them to laugh it off, too – with him at his club, where he sat drinking Scotch and smoking too much, and with her in their apartment, that seemed so large and lonely without Gordon and his restless moving around and his quick laughter. But it was no good; they were both adamant. Their separation has lasted now more than six months. I doubt very much that they will ever go back together again.

  It all started one night at Leonardo’s, after dinner, over their Bénédictine. It started innocently enough, amiably even, with laughter from both of them, laughter that froze finally as the clock ran on and their words came out sharp and flat and stinging. They had been to see Camille. Gordon hadn’t liked it very much. Marcia had been crazy about it because she is crazy about Greta Garbo. She belongs to that considerable army of Garbo admirers whose enchantment borders almost on fanaticism and sometimes even touches the edges of frenzy. I think that, before everything happened, Gordon admired Garbo, too, but the depth of his wife’s conviction that here was the greatest figure ever seen in our generation on sea or land, on screen or stage, exasperated him that night. Gordon hates (or used to) exaggeration, and he respects (or once did) detachment. It was his feeling that detachment is a necessary thread in the fabric of a woman’s charm. He didn’t like to see his wife get herself ‘into a sweat’ over anything and, that night at Leonardo’s, he unfortunately used that expression and made that accusation.

  Marcia responded, as I get it, by saying, a little loudly (they had gone on to Scotch and soda), that a man who had no abandon of feeling and no passion for anything was not altogether a man, and that his so-called love of detachment simply covered up a lack of critical appreciation and understanding of the arts in general. Her sentences were becoming long and wavy, and her words formal. Gordon suddenly began to pooh-pooh her; he kept saying ‘Pooh!’ (an annoying mannerism of his, I have always thought). He wouldn’t answer her arguments or even listen to them. That, of course, infuriated her. ‘Oh, pooh to you, too!’ she finally more or less shouted. He snapped at her, ‘Quiet, for God’s sake! You’re yelling like a prize fight manager!’ Enraged at that, she had recourse to her eyes as weapons and looked steadily at him for a while with the expression of one who is viewing a small and horrible animal, such as a horned toad. They then sat in moody and brooding silence for a long time, without moving a muscle, at the end of which, getting a hold on herself, Marcia asked him, quietly enough, just exactly what actor on the screen or on the stage, living or dead, he considered greater than Garbo. Gordon thought a moment and then said, as quietly as she had put the question, ‘Donald Duck’. I don’t believe that he meant it at the time, or even thought that he meant it. However that may have been, she looked at him scornfully and said that that speech just about perfectly represented the shallowness of his intellect and the small range of his imagination. Gordon asked her not to make a spectacle of herself – she had raised her voice slightly – and went on to say that her failure to see the genius of Donald Duck proved conclusively to him that she was a woman without humour. That, he said, he had always suspected; now, he said, he knew it. She had a great desire to hit him, but instead she sat back and looked at him with her special Mona Lisa smile, a smile rather more of contempt than, as in the original, of mystery. Gordon hated that smile, so he said that Donald Duck happened to be exactly ten times as great as Garbo would ever be and that anybody with a brain in his head would admit it instantly. Thus the Winships went on and on, their resentment swelling, their sense of values blurring, until it ended up with her taking a taxi home alone (leaving her vanity bag and one glove behind her in the restaurant) and with him making the rounds of the late places and rolling up to his club around dawn. There, as he got out, he asked his taxi-driver which he liked better, Greta Garbo or Donald Duck, and the driver said he liked Greta Garbo best. Gordon said to him, bitterly, ‘Pooh to you, too, my good friend!’ and went to bed.

  The next day, as is usual with married couples, they were both contrite, but behind their contrition lay sleeping the ugly words each had used and the cold glances and the bitter gestures. She phoned him, because she was worried. She didn’t want to be, but she was. When he hadn’t come home, she was convinced he had gone to his club, but visions of him lying in a gutter or under a table, somehow horribly mangled, haunted her, and so at eight o’clock she called him up. Her heart lightened when he said, ‘Hullo,’ gruffly: he was alive, thank God! His heart may have lightened a little, too, but not very much, because he felt terrible. He felt terrible and he felt that it was her fault that he felt terrible. She said that she was sorry and that they had both been very silly, and he growled something about he was glad she realized she’d been silly, anyway. That attitude put a slight edge on the rest of her words. She asked him shortly if he was coming home. He said sure he was coming home; it was his home, wasn’t it? She told him to go back to bed and not be such an old bear, and hung up.

  The next incident occurred at the Clarkes’ party a few days later. The Winships had arrived in fairly good spirits to find themselves in a buzzing group of cocktail-drinkers that more or less revolved around the tall and languid figure of the guest of honour, an eminent lady novelist. Gordon late in the evening won her attention and drew her apart for one drink together and, feeling a little high and happy at that time, as is the way with husbands, mentioned lightly enough (he wanted to get it out of his subconscious), the argument that he and his wife had had about the relative merits of Garbo and Duck. The tall lady, lowering her cigarette-holder, said, in the spirit of his own gaiety, that he could count her in on his side. Unfortunately, Marcia Winship, standing some ten feet away, talking to a man with a beard, caught not the spirit but only a few of the words of the conversation, and jumped to the conclusion that her husband was deliberately reopening the old wound, for the purpose of humiliating her in public. I think that in another moment Gordon might have brought her over, and put his arm around her, and admitted his ‘defeat’ – he was feeling pretty fine. But when he caught her eye, she gazed through him, freezingly, and his heart went down. And then his anger rose.

  Their fight, naturally enough, blazed out again in the taxi they took to go home from the party. Marcia wildly attacked the woman novelist (Marcia had had quite a few cocktails), defended Garbo, excoriated Gordon, and laid into Donald Duck. Gordon tried for a while to explain exactly what had happened, and then he met her resentment with a resentment that mounted even higher, the resentment of the misunderstood husband. In the midst of it all she slapped him. He looked at her for a second under lowered eyelids and then said, coldly, if a bit fuzzily, ‘This is the end, but I want you to go to your grave knowing that Donald Duck is twenty times the artist Garbo will ever be, the longest day you, or she, ever live,
if you do – and I can’t understand, with so little to live for, why you should!’ Then he asked the driver to stop the car, and he got out, in wavering dignity. ‘Caricature! Cartoon!’ she screamed after him. ‘You and Donald Duck both, you –’ The driver drove on.

  The last time I saw Gordon – he moved his things to the club the next day, forgetting the trousers to his evening clothes and his razor – he had convinced himself that the point at issue between him and Marcia was one of extreme importance involving both his honour and his integrity. He said that now it could never be wiped out and forgotten. He said that he sincerely believed Donald Duck was as great a creation as any animal in all the works of Lewis Carroll, probably even greater, perhaps much greater. He was drinking and there was a wild light in his eye. I reminded him of his old love of detachment, and he said to the hell with detachment. I laughed at him, but he wouldn’t laugh. ‘If,’ he said, grimly, ‘Marcia persists in her silly belief that that Swede is great and that Donald Duck is merely a caricature, I cannot conscientiously live with her again. I believe that he is great, that the man who created him is a genius, probably our only genius. I believe, further, that Greta Garbo is just another actress. As God is my judge, I believe that! What does she expect me to do, go whining back to her and pretend that I think Garbo is wonderful and that Donald Duck is simply a cartoon? Never!’ He gulped down some Scotch straight. ‘Never!’ I could not ridicule him out of his obsession. I left him and went over to see Marcia.