Thurber, James. Credos and Curios. Foreword by Helen Thurber. Harper, 1962.
James Thurber’s Credos and Curios, a posthumous collection of essays, notes, and sketches, is not a polished work. But it does not need to be. Thurber is like Mark Twain in that even when his prose is not polished, his meaning and humor come across. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty notwithstanding, Thurber is not so much a fiction writer as a raconteur. He is like the stranger you hope to meet in the bar who regales you with wonderful stories of his life, or people he has met, and fills them with drunken but surprisingly wise ideas. “Life at the moment,” he tells another man at a bar, “is a tale told in an idiom, full of unsoundness and fury, signifying nonism.” He tells us in another story that the psychologists and ophthalmologists are only concerned with “their own end of the optic nerve” and often tell jokes at each other’s expense. Talking about a night he spent with F. Scott Fitzgerald leads him classify kinds of alcoholics. I don’t think Thurber was an alcoholic, but he spent time with them and got the best out of them. Four, not five stars, only because it needs a bit more editorial apparatus to remind us who some of the characters were and how Thurber knew them. ( )