The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

by James Thurber

  Once Vereker invited me to a house which a lady had turned over to him when she went to Paris for a divorce. (She expected to marry Vereker afterward but he would not marry her, nor would he move out of her house until she took legal action. ‘American women,’ Vereker would say, ‘are like American colleges: they have dull, half-dead faculties.’) When I arrived at the house, Vereker chose to pretend that he did not remember me. It was rather difficult to carry the situation off, for he was in one of his black moods. It was then that he should have written, but never did; instead he would gabble brilliantly about other authors. ‘Goethe,’ he would say, ‘was a wax figure stuffed with hay. When you say that Proust was sick, you have said everything. Shakespeare was a dolt. If there had been no Voltaire, it would not have been necessary to create one.’ Etc. I had been invited for the week-end and I intended to stay; none of us ever left Vereker alone when we came upon him in one of his moods. He frequently threatened suicide and six or seven times attempted it but, in every case, there was someone on hand to prevent him. Once, I remember, he got me out of bed late at night at my apartment. ‘I’m going through with it this time,’ he said, and darted into the bathroom. He was fumbling around for some poison in the medicine chest, which fortunately contained none when I ran in and pleaded with him. ‘You have so many things yet to do,’ I said to him. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and so many people yet to insult.’ He talked brilliantly all night long, and drank up a bottle of cognac that I had got to send to my father.

  I had gone to the bathroom for a shower, the time he invited me to his lady’s house, when he stalked into the room. ‘Get out of that tub, you common housebreaker,’ he said, ‘or I shall summon the police!’ I laughed, of course, and went on bathing. I was rubbing myself with a towel when the police arrived – he had sent for them! Vereker would have made an excellent actor; he convinced the police that he had never seen me before in his life. I was arrested, taken away, and locked up for the night. A few days later I got a note from Vereker. ‘I shall never ask you to my house again,’ he wrote, ‘after the way I acted last Saturday.’ His repentances, while whimsical, were always as complete as the erratic charades which called them forth. He was unpredictable and, at times, difficult, but he was always stimulating. Sometimes he keyed you up to a point beyond which, you felt, you could not go.

  Vereker had a close escape from death once which I shall never forget. A famous American industrialist had invited a number of American writers and some visiting Engish men of letters out to his Long Island place. We were to make the trip in a huge bus that had been chartered for the purpose. Vereker came along and insisted, when we reached Long Island, on driving the bus. It was an icy night and he would put on the brakes at a curve, causing the heavy vehicle to skid ponderously. Several times we surged perilously near to a ditch and once the bus snapped off a big tree like a match. I remember that H. G. Bennett was along, and Arnold Wells, the three Sitwells, and four or five Waughs. One of them finally shut off the ignition and another struck Vereker over the head with a crank. His friends were furious. When the car stopped, we carried him outside and put him down on the hard, cold ground. Marvin Deane, the critic, held Vereker’s head, which was bleeding profusely, in his lap, looked up at the busload of writers, and said: ‘You might have killed him! And he is a greater genius than any of you!’ It was superb. Then the amazing Vereker opened his eyes. ‘That goes for me, too,’ he said, and closed them again.

  We hurried him to a hospital, where, in two days, he was on his feet again; he left the hospital without a word to anybody, and we all chipped in to pay the bill. Vereker had some money at the time which his mother had given him but, as he said, he needed it. ‘I am glad he is up and out,’ I said to the nurse who had taken care of him. ‘So am I,’ she said. Vereker affected everybody the same way.

  Some time after this we all decided to make up a fund and send Vereker to Europe to write. His entire output, I had discovered, consisted of only twenty or thirty pages, most of them bearing the round stain of liquor glasses; one page was the beginning of a play done more or less in the style of Gertrude Stein. It seemed to me as brilliant as anything of its kind.

  We got together about fifteen hundred dollars and I was delegated to approach Vereker, as tactfully as possible. We knew that it was folly for him to go on the way he was, dissipating his talent; for weeks he had been in one of his blackest moods: he would call on people, drink up their rye, wrench light-brackets off the walls, hurl scintillating gibes at his friends and at the accepted literary masters of all time, through whose superficiality Vereker saw more clearly, I think, than anybody else I have ever known. He would end up by bursting into tears. ‘Here, but for the gracelessness of God,’ he would shout, ‘stands the greatest writer in the history of the world!’ We felt that, despite Vereker’s drunken exaggeration, there was more than a grain of truth in what he said: certainly nobody else we ever met had, so utterly, the fire of genius that blazed in Vereker, if outward manifestations meant anything.

  He would never try for a Guggenheim fellowship. ‘Guggenheim follow-sheep!’ he would snarl. ‘Fall in line, all you little men! Don’t talk to me about Good-in-time fellowships!’ He would go on that way, sparklingly, for an hour, his tirade finally culminating in one of those remarkable fits of temper in which he could rip up any apartment at all, no matter whose, in less than fifteen minutes.

  Vereker, much to my surprise and gratification, took the fifteen hundred dollars without making a scene. I had suspected that he might denounce us all, that he might go into one of his brilliant philippics against Money, that he might even threaten again to take his life, for it had been several months since he had attempted suicide. But no; he snarled a bit, it is true, but he accepted the money. ‘I’m cheap at twice the price,’ he said.

  It was the most money Vereker had ever had in his life and of course we should have known better than to let him have it all at once. The night of the day I gave it to him he cut a wide swath in the cheaper West Side night clubs and in Harlem, spent three hundred dollars, insulted several women, and figured in fist fights with a policeman, two taxi-drivers, and two husbands, all of whom won. We instantly decided to arrange his passage on a ship that was sailing for Cherbourg three nights later. Somehow or other we kept him out of trouble until the night of the sailing, when we gave a going-away party for him at Marvin Deane’s house. Everybody was there: Gene Tunney, Sir Hubert Wilkins, Count von Luckner, Edward Bernays, and the literary and artistic crowd generally. Vereker got frightfully drunk. He denounced everybody at the party and also Hugh Walpole, Joseph Conrad, Crane, Henry James, Hardy and Meredith. He dwelt on the subject of Jude the Obscure. ‘Jude the Obscure,’ he would shout, ‘Jude the Obscene, June the Obscude, Obs the June Moon.’ He combined with his penetrating critical evaluations and his rare creative powers a certain unique fantasy not unlike that of Lewis Carroll. I once told him so. ‘Not unlike your goddam grandmother!’ he screamed. He was sensitive; he hated to be praised to his face; and then of course he held the works of Carroll in a certain disesteem.

  Thus the party went on. Everybody was speechless, spell-bound, listening to Elliot Vereker. You could not miss his force. He was always the one person in a room. When it got to be eleven o’clock, I felt that we had better round up Vereker and start for the docks, for the boat sailed at midnight. He was nowhere to be found. We were alarmed. We searched every room, looked under beds, and into closets, but he was gone. Some of us ran downstairs and out into the street, asking cab-drivers and passers-by if they had seen him, a gaunt, tall, wild man with his hair in his eyes. Nobody had. It was almost eleven-thirty when somebody thought to look on the roof, to which there was access by a ladder through a trapdoor. Vereker was there. He lay sprawled on his face, the back of his head crushed in by a blow from some heavy instrument, probably a bottle. He was quite dead. ‘The world’s loss,’ murmured Deane, as he looked down at the pitiful dust so lately the most burning genius we had ever been privileged to k
now, ‘is Hell’s gain.’

  I think we all felt that way.

  The Kerb in the Sky

  When Charlie Deshler announced that he was going to marry Dorothy, someone said he would lose his mind posthaste. ‘No,’ said a wit who knew them both, ‘post hoc.’ Dorothy had begun, when she was quite young, to finish sentences for people. Sometimes she finished them wrongly, which annoyed the person who was speaking, and sometimes she finished them correctly, which annoyed the speaker even more.

  ‘When William Howard Taft was – ‘ some guest in Dorothy’s family’s home would begin.

  ‘President!’ Dorothy would pipe up. The speaker may have meant to say ‘President’ or he may have meant to say ‘young’, or ‘Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States’. In any case, he would shortly put on his hat and go home. Like most parents, Dorothy’s parents did not seem to be conscious that her mannerism was a nuisance. Very likely they thought that it was cute, or even bright. It is even probable that when Dorothy’s mother first said ‘Come, Dorothy, eat your – ’ and Dorothy said ‘Spinach, dear,’ the former telephoned Dorothy’s father at the office and told him about it, and he told everybody he met that day about it – and the next day and the day after.

  When Dorothy grew up she became quite pretty and so even more of a menace. Gentlemen became attracted to her and then attached to her. Emotionally she stirred them, but mentally she soon began to wear them down. Even in her late teens she began correcting their English. ‘Not “was”, Arthur,’ she would say, ‘ “were”. “Were prepared.” See?’ Most of her admirers tolerated this habit because of their interest in her lovely person, but as time went on and her interest in them remained more instructive than sentimental, they slowly drifted away to less captious, if dumber, girls.

  Charlie Deshler, however, was an impetuous man, of the sweep-them-off-their-feet persuasion, and he became engaged to Dorothy so quickly and married her in so short a time that, being deaf to the warnings of friends, whose concern he regarded as mere jealousy, he really didn’t know anything about Dorothy except that she was pretty and bright-eyed and (to him) desirable.

  Dorothy as a wife came, of course, into her great flowering: she took to correcting Charlie’s stories. He had travelled widely and experienced greatly and was a truly excellent raconteur. Dorothy was, during their courtship, genuinely interested in him and in his stories, and since she had never shared any of the adventures he told about, she could not know when he made mistakes in time or in place or in identities. Beyond suggesting a change here and there in the number of a verb, she more or less let him alone. Charlie spoke rather good English, anyway – he knew when to say ‘were’ and when to say ‘was’ after ‘if’ – and this was another reason he didn’t find Dorothy out.

  I didn’t call on them for quite a while after they were married, because I liked Charlie and I knew I would feel low if I saw him coming out of the anaesthetic of her charms and beginning to feel the first pains of reality. When I did finally call, conditions were, of course, all that I had feared. Charlie began to tell, at dinner, about a motor trip the two had made to this town and that – I never found out for sure what towns, because Dorothy denied almost everything that Charlie said. ‘The next day,’ he would say, ‘we got an early start and drove two hundred miles to Fairview – ’ ‘Well,’ Dorothy would say, ‘I wouldn’t call it early. It wasn’t as early as the first day we set out, when we got up about seven. And we only drove a hundred and eighty miles, because I remember looking at that mileage thing when we started.’

  ‘Anyway, when we got to Fairview – ’ Charlie would go on. But Dorothy would stop him. ‘Was it Fairview that day, darling?’ she would ask. Dorothy often interrupted Charlie by asking him if he were right, instead of telling him that he was wrong, but it amounted to the same thing, for if he would reply: ‘Yes, I’m sure it was Fairview,’ she would say: ‘But it wasn’t, darling,’ and then go on with the story herself. (She called everybody that she differed from ‘darling’.)

  Once or twice, when I called on them or they called on me, Dorothy would let Charlie get almost to the climax of some interesting account of a happening and then, like a tackler from behind, throw him just as he was about to cross the goal-line. There is nothing in life more shocking to the nerves and to the mind than this. Some husbands will sit back amiably – almost it seems, proudly – when their wives interrupt, and let them go on with the story, but these are beaten husbands. Charlie did not become beaten. But his wife’s tackles knocked the wind out of him, and he began to realize that he would have to do something. What he did was rather ingenious. At the end of the second year of their marriage, when you visited the Deshlers, Charlie would begin some outlandish story about a dream he had had, knowing that Dorothy could not correct him on his own dreams. They became the only life he had that was his own.

  ‘I thought I was running an airplane,’ he would say, ‘made out of telephone wires and pieces of old leather. I was trying to make it fly to the moon, taking off from my bedroom. About half-way up to the moon, however, a man who looked like Santa Claus, only he was dressed in the uniform of a customs officer, waved at me to stop – he was in a plane made of telephone wires, too. So I pulled over to a cloud. “Here,” he said to me, “You can’t go to the moon, if you are the man who invented these wedding cookies.” Then he showed me a cookie made in the shape of a man and woman being married – little images of a man and a woman and a minister, made of dough and fastened firmly to a round, crisp cookie base.’ So he would go on.

  Any psychiatrist will tell you that at the end of the way Charlie was going lies madness in the form of monomania. You can’t live in a fantastic dream world, night in and night out and then day in and day out, and remain sane. The substance began to die slowly out of Charlie’s life, and he began to live entirely in shadow. And since monomania of this sort is likely to lead in the end to the reiteration of one particular story, Charlie’s invention began to grow thin and he eventually took to telling, over and over again, the first dream he had ever described – the story of his curious flight toward the moon in an airplane made of telephone wires. It was extremely painful. It saddened us all.

  After a month or two, Charlie finally had to be sent to an asylum. I was out of town when they took him away, but Joe Fultz, who went with him, wrote me about it. ‘He seemed to like it up here right away,’ Joe wrote. ‘He’s calmer and his eyes look better.’ (Charlie had developed a wild, hunted look.) ‘Of course,’ concluded Joe, ‘he’s finally got away from that woman.’

  It was a couple of weeks later that I drove up to the asylum to see Charlie. He was lying on a cot on a big screened-in porch, looking wan and thin. Dorothy was sitting on a chair beside his bed, bright-eyed and eager. I was somehow surprised to see her there, having figured that Charlie had, at least, won sanctuary from his wife. He looked quite mad. He began at once to tell me the story of his trip to the moon. He got to the part where the man who looked like Santa Claus waved at him to stop. ‘He was in a plane made of telephone wires, too,’ said Charlie. ‘So I pulled over to a kerb – ’

  ‘No. You pulled over to a cloud,’ said Dorothy. ‘There aren’t any kerbs in the sky. There couldn’t be. You pulled over to a cloud.’

  Charlie sighed and turned slightly in his bed and looked at me. Dorothy looked at me, too, with her pretty smile.

  ‘He always gets that story wrong,’ she said.

  The Remarkable Case of Mr Bruhl

  Samuel O. Bruhl was just an ordinary-looking citizen, like you and me, except for a curious, shoe-shaped scar on his left cheek, which he got when he fell against a wagon-tongue in his youth. He had a good job as treasurer for a syrup-and-fondant concern, a large, devout wife, two tractable daughters, and a nice home in Brooklyn. He worked from nine to five, took in a show occasionally, played a bad, complacent game of golf, and was usually in bed by eleven o’clock. The Bruhls had a dog named Bert, a small circle of friends, and an old sedan. They had ma
de a comfortable, if unexciting, adjustment to life.

  There was no reason in the world why Samuel Bruhl shouldn’t have lived along quietly until he died of some commonplace malady. He was a man designed by Nature for an uneventful life, an inexpensive but respectable funeral, and a modest stone marker. All this you would have predicted had you observed his colourless comings and goings, in mild manner, the small stature of his dreams. He was, in brief, the sort of average citizen that observers of Judd Gray thought Judd Gray was. And precisely as that mild little family man was abruptly hurled into an incongruous tragedy, so was Samuel Bruhl suddenly picked out of the hundreds of men just like him and marked for an extravagant and unpredictable end. Oddly enough it was the shoe-shaped scar on his left cheek which brought to his heels a Nemesis he had never dreamed of. A blemish on his heart, a tic in his soul would have been different; one would have blamed Bruhl for whatever anguish an emotional or spiritual flaw laid him open to, but it is ironical indeed when the Furies ride down a man who has been guilty of nothing worse than an accident in his childhood.

  Samuel O. Bruhl looked very much like George (‘Shoescar’) Clinigan. Clinigan had that same singular shoe-shaped scar on his left cheek. There was also a general resemblance in height, weight, and complexion. A careful study would have revealed very soon that Clinigan’s eyes were shifty and Bruhl’s eyes were clear, and that the syrup-and-fondant company’s treasurer had a more pleasant mouth and a higher forehead than the gangster and racketeer, but at a glance the similarity was remarkable.