James Thurber, Devotee and Scourge
Forgive him for inventing the football cliché, for he was still a fan.
by John Baskin
James Thurber was an odd duck, very much bred in Columbus, Ohio, but also not of it. This fact accounted for a wonderful tension in his work, whereby the temperament of a Midwestern foozle lay beside a fellow reading Henry James, someone equally at home in Paris or Parma but not really from either. He was also one of Ohio State’s biggest fans, except when he wasn’t.
Thurber once explained Ohio as “a region steeped in the traditions of Coxey’s Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft.” When he went off to Ohio State in 1913, the university’s primary function was still vocational training and most of its 4,000 students were solidly grain-fed Ohioans. It was the kind of place, Thurber observed, where it was dangerous to be found with a copy of Shelley in your pocket. A German teacher of Thurber’s time contended that “any stirring of the mind” on campus was considered high-brow and undemocratic. Still, there was a good English department and a small, lively band of students, and Thurber always acknowledged both.
Midwestern to the core, Thurber could never quite make up his mind about football. On one of his typing hands, he wrote that Ohio State was a college “for football players, Boost Ohioers, and stock-judging teams.” On the other, he wrote, “We give place to no man in our ardor for the game as it is played at Ohio State.” And he said football “has more beauty in it than any other competitive game in the world, when played by college athletes.”
So he vacillated, scheduling trips back from New York to coincide with Ohio State’s home games and illustrating the front cover of the official program for the Ohio State–University of Michigan homecoming game in 1936, but also fretting over the emerging big-time nature of the football program, which, he thought, was diametrically opposed to any equal fealty to the arts. (He was fond of quoting his old professor, Joseph Denney, who’d said of the university, “Millions for manure, but not one cent for literature.”)
Because of his national platform, he helped give rise to the notion that Ohio State was a “football factory.” By the 1940s, Thurber had established himself as a literary lion, first at The New Yorker, where he’d written “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” his most famous short story, and several books, including the autobiographical My Life and Hard Times, which catalogued the deeds—and misdeeds—of his Columbus relatives. It’s generally regarded as his masterpiece, a portrait of a particular Ohio world soon to be overrun by modernity: his grandfather, who wasn’t sure the Civil War had concluded, his Aunt Sarah who lived in nightly fear of a burglar blowing chloroform under her door, and a grandmother who thought electricity leaked out of the empty light sockets. Biographer Charles Homes characterized the events of the book as representing “What Ought to Have Happened, if only the world were a little more artistically organized.”
It was Thurber’s essay, “University Days,” in My Life and Hard Times that gave America an enduring picture of the dim bulb football lineman, personified by the Ohio State tackle Bolenciecwcz, whom Thurber described as “while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter.” When the economics professor asks Bolenciecwcz to name any means of transportation, the ensuing colloquy among Bolenciecwcz, his classmates, and Professor Bassum is classic Thurber:
“You may choose among steam, horse-drawn, or electrically propelled vehicles,” said the instructor. “I might suggest the one which we commonly take in making long journeys across land. ” There was a profound silence in which everybody stirred uneasily, including Bolenciecwcz and Mr. Bassum.
Mr. Bassum abruptly broke this silence in an amazing manner. “Choo-choo-choo,” he said, in a low voice, and turned instantly scarlet. He glanced appealingly around the room. All of us, of course, shared Mr. Bassum’s desire that Bolenciecwcz should stay abreast of the class in economics. For the Illinois game, one of the hardest and most important of the season, was only a week off.
“Toot, toot, too-tooooooot!” some student with a deep voice moaned, and we all looked encouragingly at Bolenciecwcz. Somebody else gave a fine imitation of a locomotive letting off steam. Mr. Bassum himself rounded off the little show. “Ding, dong, ding, dong,” he said, hopefully.
Bolenciecwcz was staring at the floor now, trying to think, his great brow furrowed, his huge hands rubbing together, his face red.
“How did you come to college this year, Mr. Bolenciecwcz?” asked the professor. “Chuffa chuffa, chuffa chuffa.”
“M’father sent me,” said the football player.
“What on?” asked Bassum.
“I git an ’lowance,” said the tackle, in a low, husky voice, obviously embarrassed.
“No, no,” said Bassum. “Name a means of transportation. What did you ride here on?”
“Train,” said Bolenciecwcz.
“Quite right,” said the professor.
Did he really create the vacant-minded Bolenciecwcz with his boyhood friend Chic Harley in mind? Hard to believe, but his college chum Elliott Nugent says he did. Thurber also wrote an epic poem about Harley that went, in part:
There’s a thousand other stories of the games of other years,
But one from out the thousand like a flash of light appears,
And there’s nothing half so thrilling from the first year to today,
Like the glory of the going when Chic Harley got away.
Easier, of course, for the world to remember Thurber’s portrait of poor, laboring Bolenciecwcz over his Harley-induced iambic pentameter, and therein the Thurber dichotomy in which he was at once university devotee and scourge. In 1940, he had added more parody to Ohio State football, this time in the play he’d written with his Elliott Nugent, The Male Animal. (Nugent, a man-about-campus and future actor-playwright of note, had taken the fledgling Thurber under his wing, made him get a haircut and a new suit, and got him into Phi Kappa Psi. The two men would remain lifelong friends.)
By the mid-century, The Male Animal was regarded as “a small classic of the American theatre.” It was in a Midwestern college town (read: Columbus) on the eve of The Big Game (Michigan, of course), and the play involved a professor; his winsome wife, Ellen; and a returning jock who in his own spangled university days had been Ellen’s boyfriend. The dominant theme is the romantic triangle and its resolution, with a backstory of whether or not Professor Turner—who plans a classroom reading of a letter by the executed anarchist Niccolo Vanzetti—will buckle under the pressures of censorship.
Another of Thurber’s several biographers, Burton Bernstein, said the play was “like a tipsy midget at a teamsters’ outing, its academic-freedom theme bravely, absurdly, asserting itself in an otherwise conventional Broadway romantic comedy.” Reviewers generally agreed it was “a palatable way for the theatregoer to take a dose of social conscience.” Thurber blanketed Ohio with tickets, admonishing visiting firemen from Columbus that the play’s setting could be any Midwestern campus town, but no one was having any of it. (Thurber and Nugent wouldn’t publicly admit the setting was Ohio State until years later, “to avoid libel and mayhem,” as Nugent put it.)
In 1942, the play moved from Broadway to Hollywood. The local references in the film rendered “Midwestern University” even more clearly as OSU, to wit: the Neil Avenue gate, the scarlet-and-gray school colors, and, of course, the team fight song—“We Don’t Give a Darn for the Whole State of Michigan.” Speculation was that the relatively innocent audiences of the 1940s were not yet accustomed to such immodesty as “damn,” even though Clark Gable had famously used it a couple of years before when he walked away from Vivien Leigh at the end of Gone with the Wind. Ohioans, though, had no such reservations. It was, first of all, Michigan they were talking about, and they’d been not giving a damn about Michigan since the 1920s.
According to local lore, it was sometime in the 1920s when an inebriated fan wandering through the old Deshler-Wallick Hotel lobby had yelled, “We don’t give a damn for the whole state of Michigan.” That was followed by a wonderful impromptu moment in which a musical combo in the lobby—and several dozen well-lubricated OSU fans—spontaneously set the phrase to the music of “The Old Gray Mare.” And thus a legend was born.
The Male Animal, with its serious underlying note of an unpalatable censorship, made Thurber seem terribly prescient in the 1950s when Joseph McCarthy burst onto the national scene, infecting the country with the specter of a communist under every bed. Thurber wasn’t happy with McCarthyism, of course, but he was also unhappy with Ohio State because the university in 1951, after a “faintly socialistic Columbia University professor” gave a talk on campus, instituted a gag rule for speakers.
Thurber’s position was that no communist could sway an Ohio State audience and not allowing them to speak forewent a splendid occasion “to heckle and confound such speakers.” A few months after the gag order, the university decided to award Thurber an honorary degree. Both the timing and the manner of it—the university hinted Thurber didn’t actually have to be present—was insulting, and he declined, rather graciously but pointedly.
The gag rule eventually went away (as, thankfully, did McCarthy), but it left a dent in both the university and Thurber, further provoking his contradictory feelings about Columbus and Ohio State. As usual, though, his Buckeye DNA held sway, bringing him back home in 1959 to receive the Distinguished Service Award of the Press Club of Ohio. In 1960 he made the dedicatory speech for a new OSU Arts and Sciences Building named after his old professor Joseph Denney. Thus his affections swung back and forth, for he was at heart an artist with an artist’s concomitant aesthetic liberality, and he was also bedrock Columbus, bound by the same conservative fetters as his mid-century Ohioans. The truth was, he never really got far from home. Once, traveling through Carcassonne in the south of France, he was delighted when he spotted an automobile with a Cleveland license plate.” You just can’t outrun Ohioans,” he said proudly.
What Ohio State fans should remember about Thurber was that, first and foremost, he was an Ohioan and, in his own way, one of them. His early life was suffused with sports, particularly baseball, because Columbus in those days was a baseball town and Thurber, as a 12-year-old kid, saved his nickels to go to Neil Park and watch the Columbus Senators. Ohio State, having lost to Michigan 86–0 when Thurber was eight years old, was still a work-in-progress. That would be changed, in part, by the ministrations of a young man named Chic Harley—Thurber’s classmate at East High who’d played baseball on a team captained by Thurber’s brother.
Thurber was a couple of years ahead of Harley; he looked on while Chic helped establish Ohio State’s national presence. He would later write the quintessential description of Harley on the football field, for the New York newspaper PM, and it went like this: “If you never saw him run with a football, we can’t describe it to you. It wasn’t like Red Grange or Tom Harmon or anybody else. It was kind of a cross between music and cannon fire, and it brought your heart up under your ears.”
It isn’t difficult to see why Columbus—and Ohio State—figured so prominently in Thurber’s writing. One, he was born into a family so inventively moonstruck they begged to be herded onto the printed page where they could be consumed at leisure. (Personal favorites: Aunt Mary, who survived until the age of 93 on what seemed to be copious amounts of chewing tobacco, and Thurber’s mother, Mamie, an inveterate showoff who once appeared on the stairs in her dressing gown, her hair awry, and announced to guests she was being kept in the attic against her will because of her hapless love for Mr. Briscoe the postman.) Two, at Ohio State, he was known for cramming four years into five and still getting away without a degree. He managed to noodle through most of his course work but biology (where his faltering eyesight kept him off the microscope) and military drill, which he hated unreservedly and complaining that the uniform made him look like a streetcar conductor. (“You’re the main trouble with this university,” the ROTC commandant told him. “Either you’re a foot ahead or a foot behind the company.”)
Thurber lived at home and ferried himself back and forth on the streetcar, a somewhat spectral figure floating about the campus, awkward and dreamy. His was the frequent picture of the artistically-inclined loner who combats isolation with a rich imaginative life (the salon of the mind holds many a lively event where the bashful introvert is the life of the party).
In the 1920s, Thurber landed a reporting job at the Columbus Dispatch, where he stymied the old hands with his approach to the news. “He was a scribbler, a writer,” sniffed one of them, with the superiority in which the profession held the suspiciously literate among themselves. Thurber, who was addressed as “Author” by his city editor, bemoaned what he said was the paper’s perfect lead for every story: “John Holtsapple, 63, prominent Columbus galosh manufacturer, died of complications last night at his home, 396 N. Persimmon Blvd.” The city editor, a man named Kuehner, who’d trained on the police beat, hated departures from journalistic rigor, especially flowery introductions, and whenever he spied one, he shouted, “This story is in bloom!”
Thurber’s experiences with the city desk lent him a recurring anxiety dream in which the editor races over to his desk carrying a shoe and barks out, “We’ve got just ten minutes to get this shoe in the paper!” His basic job was covering city hall, but his fertile imagination overrode the beat’s minimal qualifications. It sometimes caused him to ignore important numbers, such as his story on the municipal debt, in which he overstated it by $6 million. That incident was followed by a bulletin board directive at the Dispatch forbidding Thurber to write any story that dealt with sums above five figures.
He was not inspired by the prosaic dramas of city hall, his interests gravitating naturally to the collection of oddballs wandering in and out of the mayor’s office. (They included a man who could receive a local radio station on the rims of his spectacles and a woman who predicted earthquakes by a twinge in her left side.) Thurber’s working day was a brief office appearance after which he took off, “a sheaf of folded copy paper in my pocket and a look of enterprise in my eye,” heading for Marzetti’s, a restaurant whose main population seemed to be newspapermen who sat around drinking coffee and doodling on the tablecloth.
In 1922, he covered the dedication of Ohio Stadium, and he wrote his college chum Nugent about the event. “Too bad you can’t be here to whiff the football air and to see the stadium dedicated,” he said. “It is nearly completed now, a wonderful structure, set down in the pastoral back eighty of the OSU like a modernized Greek temple or a Roman coliseum born of mirage. Michigan plays here October 21, dedication day…”
There he was again, a fan. He remained one, too. Even as an adult he could still recite Columbus line-ups and batting averages, and at The New Yorker, when the magazine’s vaunted proofreaders spelled Chic Harley’s first name as “Chick,” he threw a fit. “It was an error no Ohio State man could ever live down,” said biographer Bernstein. When Thurber died in 1962, E. B. White, one of his closest friends, wrote, “There were at least two, probably six Thurbers. His thoughts have always been a tangle of baseball scores, Civil War tactical problems, Henry James, personal maladjustments, terrier puppies, literary rip tides, ancient myths, and modern apprehensions. Through this jungle stalk the unpredictable ghosts of his relatives in Columbus, Ohio.”
And his Columbus always featured Ohio State at its center. Because he hadn’t concluded his university stay with a proper graduation, it was as though he’d hang around in perpetuity, awaiting resolution to some vague and unfinished hometown business. Even with his typical ambivalence, there’s little doubt he’d have been pleased when in 2016, as Ohio State played Nebraska, the Buckeyes unveiled replica uniforms from the famous undefeated 1916 Chic Harley team. They featured red jerseys with gray vertical stripes and the look was called “music and cannon fire,” after Thurber’s famous description of Harley running.
The fans may have only dimly recognized Thurber’s name, but they surely knew Harley’s. It’s unlikely many would have recognized the commonality of the two men, though. They were classmates at Ohio State when Chic almost single-footedly ushered in its first golden age. They were present at the creation, you might say. Thurber’s depiction of Harley running is still the single quote everyone uses when Harley’s name comes up. From a relatively young age, they both suffered physical debilities; Harley began a descent into dementia, Thurber into blindness.
Thurber, of course, was no athlete—he once said his most notable accomplishment was “hitting empty ginger ale bottles with small rocks at a distance of thirty paces.” He was the afflicted American male, slight of build, awkward, so unathletic that he passed gym only by enlisting another student to masquerade as him and swim across the pool in his place. Harley, of course, owned the gym. Yet even such disparity bound them together, for Thurber envied Harley’s easy grace and converted the idea of it into his writing. Even today, Thurber’s mid-twentieth century essays are the epitome of grace. They appear to be effortlessly tossed off when they’re nothing of the kind—deceptively simple declarative sentences that in their quiet rhythms blend both humor and, to use Thurber’s own phrase, “the damp hand of melancholy.”
Thurber’s athleticism was an inner one, given voice in a story like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” where Mitty’s alter ego—as with Thurber’s own—became the athlete. No one understood better than Thurber that life was an obstacle course. Like his boyhood hero on the football field, Thurber slipped past many of the obstacles with Harley’s own dexterity. Only the expression differed. Then one day, there they were, both Ohio State immortals. Chic Harley and James Thurber: two peas in an Ohio pod.
John Baskin is the author of New Burlington: The Life and Death of an American Village and The Cincinnati Game (with Lonnie Wheeler), and has written for The New York Times, The Nation, The Yale Review, and other publications. This essay comes from Lords of Smashmouth: The Unlikely Rise of An American Phenomenon, his recently released book.