Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Continuing with Short Fiction Month, I read two stories by James Thurber the other night. I've always loved Thurber's off-kilter way of looking at the world, even though he's unaccountably fallen off my radar screen in recent years. So I got out my Library of America Thurber collection and chose two tales, pretty much at random.

First was "The Macbeth Murder Mystery", which is one of those stories that has even me, an aspiring storyteller, thinking: "How on Earth did this guy come up with this, anyway?" This is a very short story that is simply a conversation between two people, one of whom is a reader of nothing but murder mysteries like Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, and all those. Problem is, she ends up in a situation where the only reading material at hand is a copy of Macbeth. Which she reads as a murder mystery, approaching it as if it were a Christie novel. And proceeds to critique, in the same way. The sheer delight of invention here, in so small a package, is wonderful; especially when our mystery-loving heroine announces, "I don't think Macbeth did it" and goes on to outline why.

The second story was "You Could Look It Up". Having just seen Bull Durham last week, and recognizing "You could look it up" as that film's final line, I wondered if the Thurber story with that as its title could be about baseball. Sure enough, it is. This is the tale of an unnamed baseball team that is suffering a losing streak in the midst of a September pennant chase, and the very odd way in which they turn their luck around. I won't say more than that except to note that I always thought dwarf-tossing was primarily a 1990s phenomenon.

Thurber is required reading for anyone looking for dark, off-center humor. What I especially love about him is that he wrote in the middle of the twentieth century, when various norms of propriety forced writers to look for more literary ways of suggesting what they had in mind. Reading the writers from those eras always makes me wonder if we've lost more than we bargained for when we became a more permissive, "anything goes" type of culture.