Misadventures in the Land of Fables #74

James Thurber’s ‘Further Fables For Our Times’

James Thurber’s second volume of modern fables offers more of the same whimsical, witty, and remarkably wide-ranging short narratives. Entertaining, but for those who like their fables to strike a more serious tone the collection is disappointing.

Nothing sticks, nothing much.

I was amused to see a version of Aesop’s ‘The Fox and the Crow’ in which the crow offers to share the cheese with the trickster, as it does in my re-working. (More Fables.) Here it serves as an inducement for the fox to stay and listen to the crow’s self-praise. The moral: “No one else can praise thee quite so well as thou”

Thurber adopts an archaic style for his epimythiums (the moral at the end). This is amusing; at the same time betrays a lack of confidence in the form. In the modern age, you can’t pretend to wisdom without adopting a tone either of world-weariness or of trivialising parody. If you make them laugh, you avoid being laughed at.

The fables closest to my taste were ‘The Lion and the Lizard’, whose tragic conclusion achieves a sort of melancholy grace, the glutton eats himself to death while the creature he had once terrorised starves, and the tale of ‘The Peacelike Mongoose’ ostracised, indeed, exiled for his rejection of violence.

“I am trying to use reason and intelligence,” said the strange new mongoose.
“Reason is six-sevenths of treason,” said one of his neighbours.
“Intelligence is what the enemy uses,” said another.

Thurber’s trenchant response to the McCarthyite ‘Red Scare’ in the 1950s America. And you might say the miscommunication at the heart of ‘The Weaver and the Worm’ speaks as much to the current age of ‘bullshit’ and ‘bad faith’ as it does to the paranoia and persecution of the Fifties.

“We live, man and worm, in a time when almost everything can mean almost anything, for this is the age of gobbledy-gook, doubletalk, and gudda.”