The non-secret life of James Thurber on view
Not everybody can write like James Thurber, but anybody can go to his house, play his piano, listen to his Victrola and use his bathroom.
It’s the bathroom at the end of the second-floor hall. It’s an ordinary enough bathroom, or would be, if James Thurber hadn’t been there first. A bathroom being a bathroom, however, the docent at the front door told a visitor to go ahead and use it.
“That’s what it’s there for,” she said.
That’s how it is at Thurber House, a monument to the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain. It’s a handsome, two-story Victorian at 77 Jefferson Ave., in the middle of Columbus. (Columbus is in the middle of Ohio, and Ohio is in the middle of everything else.)
The house is open every afternoon. You just walk in. There’s no guide. You don’t have to pay anything. Surrounded by such trappings of humility, a visitor could scarcely imagine all the great stuff that happened within its brick walls.
There was the night the bed fell and the night the ghost got in. Thurber wrote about them in the pages of the New Yorker magazine nearly a century ago. That no bed ever fell and no ghost ever got in didn’t matter. In Thurber’s tales, the quiet house on Jefferson Avenue where the family lived from 1913 to 1917 (it was built on the grounds of the state lunatic asylum) was generally a booby hatch of chaos and confusion, with three generations of Thurbers dashing about in pajamas and panic, throwing shoes at imaginary intruders and worrying whether electricity was leaking out of wall sockets.
Everything now is just as it must have been back then, if you squint. Thurber, half blind, was himself a squinter whose poor vision did not prevent him from drawing an amiable amalgam of dogs, seals, rabbits and battling spouses.
Upstairs is the hallway where Rex the terrier slept, on the rare occasions he wasn’t up to something. It was Rex who, in “Snapshot of a Dog,” got himself the greatest send-off ever accorded man’s best friend. Rex, Thur- ber wrote, “never lost his dignity even when trying to accomplish the extravagant tasks my brothers and myself used to set for him.” Rex never ran after cars, because he “didn’t seem to see the idea in pursuing something you couldn’t catch, or something you couldn’t do anything with, even if you did catch it.”
Outside, in a small park, is the garden that Thurber’s famous unicorn never visited. But his fable about the unicorn appears, in its entirety, on a brass plaque. You can stand in the park, next to a sculpture of the unicorn, and read every word. (“So they took her away, cursing and screaming, and shut her up in an institution. The husband lived happily ever after.”) Most words on brass plaques don’t deserve to be, but every once in a while, some do.
In most museums you cannot touch anything. Guards stand around, making sure. In the Thurber House, it’s different.
“Go ahead and touch things,” said the docent. “Touch everything. Make yourself at home.”
About the only thing in the house you’re not supposed to touch is an Underwood No. 5 typewriter in Thurber’s bedroom. It’s the one he used at the New Yorker, and it is said to be the one on which he composed “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Without Thurber’s fingers on it, it’s just a typewriter. But a mere mortal keeps his distance just the same. There’s a difference between using Thurber’s toilet and using his typewriter.
In the dining room is a TV, a later addition to the premises. It plays a short documentary about Thurber, who, it turns out, wasn’t hap- py being Thurber. He wanted to be somebody serious, like Henry James. Probably Henry James, if he had any sense, would have wanted to be Thurber. The video, in which Thurber complains that his blindness must have been punishment for writing about human foibles, is the only sad thing about Thurber House. Fortunately, it’s only 10 minutes long.
After you see it, you walk into the dining room, which has been turned into a store that peddles knickknacks.
Thurber dog sculptures! Thurber T-shirts! Thurber pencils! Thurber coffee mugs!
The visitor smiles and pungles up. The place has to make a buck, something Thurber or the New Yorker rarely did. A Thurber pencil, with a picture of one of his cartoon dogs on it, costs 50 cents.
It turns out a Thurber souvenir pencil works just the same as an ordinary pencil, at least until you try to write the way Thurber did with it.