James the Giant Killer

THE BEAST IN ME AND OTHER ANIMALS (340 pp.)--James Thurber--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

What should a visitor to George Bernard Shaw say, apart from "This is a mighty nice place you've got here"? Who, or what, ate Archeologist Wesley L. Mill-moss, the excavator of "Middle-Western Man"? What lad won the Frank D. Waterman Prize for "the best and most varied" autograph album of 1932? What is the relationship between "a male Wedlock" and "a female Volt with all her Ergs in one Gasket"? Why did Herbert F. Pritchard insist that he was the author of Cymbeline?

All these questions and a few thousand more are succinctly answered or kicked in the teeth in James Thurber's latest collection of stories and drawings, which cover the years 1928 to 1948. The Beast in Me also includes such matter as Humorist Thurber's grimly unhumorous "Soapland" (studies in contemporary soap opera); New Yorker Editor Harold Ross's loyal retort to a man who asked why the hell the magazine printed "a fifth-rate artist like Thurber" ("You mean third-rate," snapped Ross); and, best of all, "The Beast in the Dingle"--a superb parody of a Henry James short story that delicately deflates the most long-winded master of modern letters.

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