Sincerely Yours

THE THURBER ALBUM (346 pp.)--James Thurber--Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

The main thing about James Thurber of Columbus, Ohio is that his parents were people, and that Thurber grasped this unsettling fact quite early in life. Take his father, a man who "could rarely get the top off anything . . . was forever trying to unlock something with the key to something else." How could Thurber, or any kid, ever forget that his dad, wearing a derby hat, tried to repair the lock to the rabbit hutch, and "succeeded only after getting inside the cage, where he was imprisoned for three hours with six Belgian hares and thirteen guinea pigs"? Or take his mother, who "once distressed a couple of stately guests in her father's home by descending the front stairs in her dressing gown, her hair tumbling and her eyes staring, to announce that she had escaped from the attic, where she was kept because of her ardent and hapless love for Mr. Briscoe, the postman."

Another boy might have fled from that kind of background into the impersonal logic of physics or mathematics. Not Thurber. As writer and as cartoonist, he became the top U.S. humorist of the day. He did it largely by making all the world a rabbit hutch and every man in it his father's brother. His first 17 books of prose and drawings, with their battles between the sexes, their bewildered males running a maze that leads inevitably into another, are the century's finest guidebooks to the schizophrenic ward of modern man's booby hatch. His new one. The Thurber Album, is a gently humorous grab bag of reminiscence, and a tribute to his family, his friends, and the all-but-normal life he knew in Columbus.

Lamp Oil Internally. Way back in the Thurber cousinhood there was Dr. Beall. a homeopath in a plug hat, who believed in "small doses of mild drugs, a heavy meal three times a day, a good cigar after each one, a little whisky to regulate the heart, a cheerful disposition to relax the system, a healthy skepticism to clear the mind of notions, and a sane moderation in exercise and bathing, either of which could kill a man if he didn't watch out." Doc Beall's most common prescription was lamp oil taken internally. He took it himself and lived almost 90 years. Mary, his sister, smoked chewing tobacco in a clay pipe, let a pet black snake have the run of her house, and outlived two husbands. When, in the hospital, her nurses took away her pipe and 'baccy, she begged a cigar from one of her visitors, broke it up and used it for chewing. She died one Sunday morning at 93.

Most of Thurber's forebears were long-lived and the men were men, not the modern shrew-ridden neurosis carriers of the Thurber cartoons. In his 70s, Great-Grandfather Fisher could lift 200 lbs. over his head. When he died at 77, his hair was black and he had "all his own teeth in his head, too--all except one. That'd been knocked out with a brick in a fight." Toward the end, he came to look at a newborn great-grandchild, "a puny boy weighing seven pounds." "Goddam it," he said, "the next generation of Fishers is goin' to be squirrels." His son, Thurber's grandfather, was hardly that. He showed his independence by having all his teeth capped with gold and, in his 60s, swallowing beach sand to "assist the integrity of the intestinal track."

Follies with Grace. Author Thurber's own start in life came at the hands of Midwife Margery Albright, who rates, and gets, one of the most endearing portraits in the Album. Aunt Margery "knew where sour grass grew, which you chew for dyspepsy, and mint, excellent for the naushy, and the slippery elm . . . for raw throat and other sore tishas." Contemptuous of doctors, she cured her husband of fever by forcing a broth of sheep droppings down his protesting gullet. For stubborn pregnancies she blew powdered tobacco "up one nostril of the expectant mother," and so brought on a fit of sneezing that would "dislodge the most reluctant baby."

The Thurber Album has some fine stuff about his city editor on the Columbus Dispatch. He disliked college men, contemptuously called Thurber "Phi Beta Kappa" (which he was), and could intone it "so that it sounded like a Girl Scout's merit badge." He came to like Thurber, but he never liked fancy writing, which he always greeted with "This story is in bloom!" Other good men well remembered are Cartoonist Billy Ireland (a man so kind he once complimented a friend's wife with "Edna, that's the prettiest washing out there I ever saw"), several profs at Thurber's Ohio State University, the self-appointed athletic coach of Columbus' asylum for the blind. Mainly the Album is a lesson in human affection, shrewd but not hard, done with a wonderful eye for idiosyncrasies carried with dignity, human follies borne with grace. That Author Thurber loves these people, their unmistakable Midwestern American grain, is clear on every page. Plain folk have never been more gracefully praised.

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