Hughes and Thurber

I have not seen anyone compare and contrast these two short stories--so seemingly different are they in perspective and style. But as I read them in the last few days, I see them as both reflecting a reaction to what one might call the absence of God in mid-20th century American fiction. God, or an attenuated version of the Puritan divinity who inhabits every windy corridor of Hawthorne, and whose firm determinism echoes through the galleys of Melville, gradually left the intellectual and cultural scene in America after the Civil War. Though He was ceremonially mentioned in Presidential addreses or was present in the capstone courses on ethics or moral living at genteel colleges and universities, He was considered irrelevant as we discovered the brave new world of the 20th century. Science and technology, the brutal realities of war, the despair of the Great Depression--all of these conspired to sap this Puritan divinity of the awesome power which He wielded from the Mathers to Lincoln.

Yet, even after a fever has left our system, we are affected by both its memory and its virulence. Alternatively, even after a pleasant experience has ended, we still bask in the warmth of its recollection. So it is with God. Though we ushered Him politely out the back door, and though He left without a big struggle, the effects of God, much like the odor of a now-departed person who has long-lived in a space, still permeate the place. Thus, I will argue that the link joining these stories that at first have apparently nothing to do with each other, is a (perhaps even unconscious) reaction to the absence of God.

Hughes' "Thank You Ma'am" (1931)

"Thank You, Ma'am," by Langston Hughes (1902-67), is the more explicitly theological of the two short stories, and the interaction between the young teen Roger and Mrs. Washington foregrounds the issue of the unexpected goodness of a person (Mrs. Washington) and the resultant resolution of the recipient of the favor (Roger) to clean up his life and live differently as a result of the encounter.

In "Thank You, Ma'am," Roger is a 14 or 15 year-old boy who only meets Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones because he tried, unsuccessfully, to steal her purse. She overpowers him, takes him to her home and, rather than "turning him in" or humiliating him in some way, actually feeds him, talks to him and gives him the money he was trying to steal in order to get a pair of blue suede shoes. In the space of the brief encounter we not only see the woman's "tough love," but we also get a glimpse of Roger's desire to change his life, so that he would "not want to be mistrusted.."

The story takes its life from the Christian doctrine of grace. Grace is a gift of God, God's unmerited favor, God's giving of the gift of good new life to people when they are in the midst of bad old life. The offer is given freely, but the twist, so to speak, is both the expectation of God and desire of grace's recipient to reform life so as to live faithfully in response to the grace. For Christian theology, grace, as it were "happens" and we need to reform our life as a result.

This is the doctrine that pokes its head very obviously into the center of Hughes' story. Bad boy, but really only bad because of the penury of his circumstances, does bad deed but, unexpectedly, this bad deed turns out to be the instrument for him to have a chance not only to get what he originally wanted but to get even more. He cleans up, gets a free meal, and understands an important lesson in life--that he is a person of value and that he need not live his life in the way he thought he had to. It is a tale of hope, pure and simple.

And it closes in such a biblical fashion, too. The boy is preparing a sort of mini "Thank you" speech at the end, when she ushers him to the door of her apartment. But "he couldn't do so." He barely managed to say "Thank you" before she slammed the door. This is reminiscent of the Prodigal Son's attempt to choreograph his return speech to the Father (Luke 15), but the Father cuts him off before he has finished even his first thought. There is no real way to say "thank you" for an act of grace other than to show the gratitude in a reformed life.

Thurber's "Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1939)

James Thurber (1894-1961) and Langston Hughes were contemporaries; they worked not more than six miles from each other, Thurber at the mid-town office of the New Yorker and Hughes on 127th Street in Harlem. I wonder if they were friends, if they inhabited similar worlds, and how they thought of each other's work.

"The Secret World of Walter Mitty" is equally short as "Thank You, Ma'am" (probably no more than 1500 words) but probes the issue of daydreaming. Alternatively said, it looks at the way that a seemingly dull Connecticut man, Walter Mitty, is able to abstract himself from the humdrum existence of his life with his overbearing wife during their weekly shopping/errand visits to Waterbury CT by imagining himself in certain heroic roles. The story begins with a daydream, where Mitty is a war hero piloting a hydroplane in inclement conditions. Where other men falter, he urges action. But then, as happens four times in the brief story, Mitty is brought back to reality, this time by his wife, who testily reminds him that he is driving 15 mph faster than normal. Various events that happen while he is waiting for his wife at the beauty parlor trigger other heroic memories, whether it is Mitty as a pathbreaking surgeon, or a skillful marksman on trial for a crime. The last daydream is the briefest, while he is waiting outside for his wife in a rain shower. He imagines himself in front of a firing squad--and then the story ends.

While Hughes' story deals transparently with the issue of grace, Thurber deals allusively with an equally strong Puritan doctrine, but he does so in a negative way. The Puritans believed deeply in purposeful and focused living. One's life was to be lived for the glory of God, and one's activity in life would be morally charged so as to realize the Kingdom of God or to hasten its coming. Ethical responsibility flowed from having received divine grace; it meant the submission of all things, from one's intentions to one's actions, to the scrutiny and approval of God.

But Walter Mitty's life runs counter the the Puritan vision of the Christian life. He is "trapped" in the enervating realities of middle-class existence, and to "escape" this existence he enters into a dreamy world which actually takes up far more literary space in the story than the "real" world. In other words, the "dream" becomes his "reality." He seems to have no purpose; he just does his weekly run to Waterbury to take his wife to the beauty parlor and get a few articles that he needs to fend off winter storms (boots) or feed the dog (biscuits). His interactions with people are all perfunctory and, essentially, meaningless, as he is either criticized or laughed at or corrected. He simply is a hapless man. But he lives.

Conclusion

Each of the stories reflects a portion of a picture of life or, to put it differently, an angle on existence. Hughes still believes in grace and its ability to lead to a resolution to live a good life and to improve one's life. Thurber simply describes a life without purpose, where the dream world takes up a larger space than the lived world. Walter Mitty seems not to live in despair, however, and this presents a sort of challenge to the old Puritan theology: a person who seemingly has enough resources to live his life, but lives it without needing God, and who lives it not by diligent application of skills to improving our conditions here but simply by escaping to other worlds in which he imagines himself a "big man." Whereas Hughes is closer to the Puritan world by assuming at the end that the boy has a "choice" to improve his life (like making a "choice" for Christ), Thurber just assumes, through the character of Mitty, that life is a given, and that escape is the way to move through its dullness and minor oppressions.

Is either "right?" I think the answer is "Yes"--both are. Purposiveness has its purposes, but escape is quite alluring. There is a time in life for both. An irony, of course, is that Thurber's celebration of escape only comes through his diligent effort to craft a story. So it is all purposive, even if the end is escape...

[By the way, each author coins new terms in these brief stories. I love Hughes' reference to the boy as "willow-wild." Thurber's medical neologisms, derived mostly from either Greek words or from a botanical name--coreopsis--are also interesting. It brings up the point of how a true author invents the langauges as s/he goes along. As the story unfolds, one discovers that the received words are not enough to hold the thoughts that teem. Language, encased in dictionaries, is only a provisional vessel to hold the overflowing richness of creative effort. It must be expanded to fill the heart of the author. Why not, then, use tons of languages to embellish English? Fill your mind with the best prose and poetry in many languages, and then you can draw upon these, and modify them, to meet the exigency of the moment. It really is true that no one has quite felt the world exactly how you feel it now. Thus, you need new words to express that thought--but the words also need to be connected enough to a received reality so that the words make sense in the world....boy, this could be a separate essay...]

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Langston Hughes-"Thank You Ma'am" James Thurber-"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"

Langston Hughes-"Thank You Ma'am"
James Thurber-"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"