dreamer"⁹—a position which would be given its most memorable form in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1939). And there are unmistakable parallels between "The Seal in the Bedroom" and "The Unicorn in the Garden" (1939), a fable in which a man sees a unicorn eating roses. When he awakens his wife to tell her what he has seen, she replies "The Unicorn is a mythical beast," and goes back to sleep. The husband then sees the unicorn eat a lily, and his reporting of this event is met with an even nastier response on the part of the wife: "You are a booby, and I am going to have you put away in the booby-hatch." But the husband manages to turn the tables on her, so that the police and psychiatrist are convinced that she is crazy, and they take her away. Referring to this fable, the same commentator quoted above (Charles S. Holmes) aptly wrote:

Here, the battle of the sexes in presented as apart of the larger conflict between fantasy and reality; and—significantly—the fantasy-principle (male, loving, peaceable) triumphs over the reality-principle (female, cold, hostile).

This is an excellent way to put the matter, and one which is borne out by numerous stories, drawings and statements Thurber made.

The wife in "The Seal in the Bedroom" certainly embodies the reality-principle. And Thurber turns the tables on her by intruding the implausible seal into her world, and then showing up her realism as being a denial of reality. But this means that it is on the basis of the reality-principle that we know her to be wrong, assuming that we go along with the joke and accept, as Thurber implicitly asks us to, that the seal is really there.

There may be more to this than a gag.

In a 1939 essay, "Thinking Ourselves into Trouble," Thurber compares man—given to abstract reasoning—with the lower animals who rely on instinct and are far better adjusted and less bewildered for it. The comparison continues:

It may be the finer mysteries of life and death can be comprehended only through pure instinct; the cat, for example, appears to Know . . . Man, on the other hand, is surely further away from the Answer than any other animal this side of the lady bug. His mistaken selection of reasoning as an instrument of perception has put him into a fine quandary.¹⁰

In this philosophical context, reasoning is portrayed as an obstacle to knowing. And something of that same outlook may apply to the seal cartoon as well.

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Suppose we think of the seal’s presence in the bedroom, not only as an intrusion of fantasy into reality, but also or alternately as an expression of the view that reality is often implausible, inexplicable, inconsistent with routine expectations. If reality is defined in this way, then the trouble with the wife’s ‘realism’ is that it isn’t realistic enough!

In other words, if we look at the cartoon in cognitive terms, Thurber can be seen as discrediting an outlook which considers itself realistic, but which is cut off from those aspects of reality that defy logical explanation. And conversely, Thurber would be saying that a genuinely realistic outlook would allow for the possibility that a seal might turn up in a bedroom.

Marriage

The couple in the seal cartoon embody married life, and to borrow a concept evoked by Thurber in another of his captions, there is very little ‘magic’ left in their marriage.

One manifestation of that absence of magic is the conspicuous asexuality and unattractiveness of both husband and wife. Just try to imagine them making love. And the interaction between them—in this case, the wife’s mocking denial of the reality of her husband’s experience—is another sign that the relationship has lost whatever charm it may have had at the beginning.

Placing the seal in their bedroom was itself an act of playfulness and whimsy on the part of the cartoonist, and the seal can be seen as embodying precisely those qualities in a setting in which they would otherwise be sorely lacking. In this and perhaps other respects as well, the seal may represent what is missing in the marriage ranging from playfulness and whimsy, to pleasure, physical appeal and maybe even sexuality.

But the seal could just as well represent an alternative to sexuality and to adult life in general, in the sense that the Thurberesque amalgam of fantasy, humor and childlike drawing could stand as an opting in favor of the child in oneself, perhaps in compensation for inadequacies, frustrations and disappointments as an adult.

There is no point in dwelling unnecessarily on Thurber’s personal history in this connection, but there are three facts which should be

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mentioned: 1) Thurber’s marriage to his first wife, Althea, was an unhappy one which ended in divorce in 1935; 2) she reportedly had "no sense of fantasy";’² and 3) Thurber suffered from potency problems in their relationship and consequently felt unable to satisfy her sexually (ibid., pp. 166, 213).

These pieces of biographical information don’t ‘explain’ anything, and they are of course irrelevant to our own experience of the cartoon. Furthermore, I don’t enjoy discussing these details, which belong to the private life of an artist. But they do tell us something about resonances the seal cartoon may have had for Thurber with regard to his portrayal of married life.

Well, Who Made the Magic Go Out of Our
Marriage—You or Me?"

Copyright 1943 James Thurber. Copyright 1971 Helen Thurber and Rosemary A. Thurber. From Men, Women, and Dogs, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

A latent political dimension?

The reader is undoubtedly wondering what on earth anyone could possibly have to say about "The Seal in the Bedroom" in a political context. And in fact, one of the points worth making in this connection is that the cartoon is not political, and that that in itself deserves our attention, in view of what was going on at the time in American life and letters.

In the years immediately following the onset of the Depression, a strong Marxist current developed within intellectual circles in the

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United States, and Thurber saw himself as holding out against the encroachment of politics into art. At first, Thurber’s position took the form of depicting himself as temperamentally attuned to events and imaginings which belong specifically to the private life of the individual. For example, in his "Preface to a Life," which introduces My Life and Hard Times (1933), Thurber described himself as a middle-aged writer whose

ears are shut to the ominous rumblings of the dynasties of the world moving toward a cloudier chaos than ever before, but he hears with an acute perception the startling sounds that rabbits make twisting in the bushes along a country road at night. . . He can sleep while the commonwealth crumbles but a strange sound in the pantry at three in the morning will strike terror into his stomach. He is not afraid, or much aware, of the menaces of empire but he keeps looking behind him as he walks along darkening streets out of the fear that he is being softly followed by little men padding along in single file, about a foot and a half high, large-eyed, and whiskered.¹³

But before long, Thurber had a head-on collision with the Marxists, soon after The New Masses launched another of its periodic attacks on The New Yorker.

In the summer or fall of 1934, Thurber had a heated argument with Mike Gold, editor of The New Masses and tough initiator of the ‘proletarian’ movement in American literature. Thurber could not have been unaware of the violent public controversy which had followed Gold’s attack on Thornton Wilder in The New Republic in the fall of 1930. According to Edmund Wilson, "the Gold-Wilder row marked definitely the eruption of the Marxist issues out of the literary circles of the radicals into the field of general criticism" (Bernstein, p. 222). Thurber had read Gold’s attack on Wilder, and now he had his own confrontation with the militant Marxist at a party given by New Republic editor, Malcom Cowley, who reported: "Gold said that all the petit-bourgeois writers like Thurber were nothing but college punks who couldn’t get it up any more. Well, this really hit home with Jim." In a fifteen-page typewritten letter Thurber later sent to Cowley in the aftermath of his run-in with Gold, Thurber wrote:

what Gold emphasized was that if I understood Marxism I would do better and truer and more important stories and, yes, even pictures. For it seems, I deal, in my stories and pictures, only with this strange amorphous indescribable group known as the bourgeoisie. . . .¹⁵

In this letter in which he poured his heart out to Cowley, Thurber decried

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what he saw as the Marxists’

desire to subject the individual to the political body, to the economic structure, to put the artist in a uniform so like the uniform of the subway conductor that nobody would be able to tell the difference. It is this desire to regiment and discipline art—the art of writing and the art of living—that some of us are afraid of, that some of us seem to see a greater menace in than the critics do. Who has stood up and opposed it, with the sharp, flat, challenging words it deserves? My God almighty, Max Eastman, in a flabby, soporific ten thousand words explaining that Art, really you know, has nothing whatever to do with purpose or with politics or with function or with utility! We don’t need someone to say that that is true—we know it is true—we need someone to say, listen, you sons of bitches, hands off—keep your noses in your economic and political dishes or we’ll knock them off!¹⁶

Now one approach to looking for the relevance of Thurber’s art to the social life of the period, has been to see Thurber’s beaten-down men as "an implied criticism of industrial, competitive, acquisitive society," and as embodying the bewilderment brought into the lives of Americans by the Depression (Berstein, p. 203).

There is another and I think more valid approach, and that is to situate the seal cartoon in relation to the Thurber-Gold argument, even though the cartoon was drawn in December 1931, and the fight with Gold was not to occur until nearly three years later.

How would a partisan of proletarian realism have perceived the seal cartoon in the early 1930’s? On the basis of the principles Mike Gold outlined in his New Masses manifesto, "Proletarian Realism," I would assume that in Gold’s view, the cartoon was typical of the decay of bourgeois culture, in the sense that it reduces art to the status of a mere plaything. Instead of dealing with "the real conflicts of men and women who work for a living," Thurber’s cartoon is an escapist piece of mental acrobatics, an empty mystification suited to the tastes of The New Yorker’s fashionable subscribers. From the proletarian point of view, who cares whether or not some petit bourgeois heard or didn’t hear a seal bark, and who needs to devote a moment’s attention to this frivolity, when in the real world, millions of people are starving, and it is the artist’s solemn duty to support their struggle for a decent life?

Now switching over to Thurber’s point of view in this perspective, the seal cartoon—like his other works—may have stood as part of an affirmation: 1) of the personal culture Thurber did not want to see swept away by "the new regime of thought" (as he called it), which respected only ideological issues; 2) of the artist’s right to preserve and cultivate that personal culture; 3) of playfulness and humor, in opposition

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to the grim seriousness of Marxist esthetics; and 4) that "realism"— whether proletarian or any other type—is inadequate, both in art and in life, because implausible events have a way of showing up the pretentiousness of any cognitive or ideological system which claims to have all the answers.

I don’t want to put undue stress on the political significance of an apolitical cartoon. But given the social conditions and intellectual climate of the period, it would be an oversight not to consider the ways in which this cartoon—the most talked about drawing of 1932—clashed with a political outlook Thurber experienced as threatening.

Aarhus Universitet

Notes

     ¹James Thurber. The Years with Ross. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1959, p. 56.
   ²_____."The Beast in Me and Other Animals." London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973. v.1, p. 419.
   ³The cartoon appeared in the issue of February 8, 1961, p. 232. Punch had already (in June 1958) honored Thurber by inviting him to carve his initials into the mahogany table at 10 Bouverie Street. This is a sacrosanct ritual, and only one other American humorist had previously been honored in this way: Mark Twain.
   ⁴"James Thurber in Conversation with Alistair Cooke." The Atlantic. 198, 2 (August 1956), p. 37.
   ⁵The Years with Ross, p. 53.
   ⁶"That Thurber Woman." unsigned. Newsweek. November 22, 1943, p. 84.
   ⁷Charles S. Holmes. "James Thurber and the Art of Fantasy." The Yale Review (Autumn 1964), p. 18.
   ^8"A Dozen Disciplines," in Let Your Mind Alone! Hamish Hamilton, 1937, p. 41.
   ⁹"The Case for the Daydreamer." Ibid., pp. 35-36.
   ¹⁰Forum and Century. 101 (June 1939), p. 310.
   ¹¹In another context, E. B. White wrote: "To understand, even vaguely, Thurber’s art, it is necessary to grasp the two major themes which underlay all his drawings. The first theme is what I call the ‘melancholy of sex’; the other I can best describe as the ‘implausibility of animals.’ These two basic ideas motivate, subconsciously, his entire creative life. Just how some of the animals shown in these pages ‘come in’ is not clear even to me—except in so far as any animal must be regarded as sexually relevant because of our human tendency to overestimate what can be learned from watching it." Is Sex Necessary, "A Note on the drawings in this book," (Garden City, New York: Blue Ribbon Books 1944), pp. 195-196; orig. pub. by Harper Brothers in 1929.
   ¹²Burtoi, Berstein. A Thurber Biography. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975, p. 166.
   ¹³Cited by Berstein, p. 225.
   ¹⁴Bernstein, p. 228. One of the results of this letter was Cowley’s proposal that Thurber write a review for The New Republic of an anthology entitled Proletarian Literature in the United States, edited by Granville Hicks, among others. Thurber took Cowley up on his invitation and the predictably critical review, called "Voices of Revolution," appeared in The New Republic on March 25, 1936.

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    ¹⁵Robert E. Morsberger. James Thurber. New Haven: College and University Press, 1964, pp. 18-19, 53-54.
   ¹⁶Rpt in Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom. New York: International Publishers, 1972, pp. 197-202.

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