``Dorothy Parker said of Thurber's animals that ``it is best to say but
little ... one goes all weak with sentiment.''  Dorothy Parker is
not the only person to have said something foolish about Thurber,
especially about his dogs, but she is perhaps the most interesting
person to have done so.  The source of her foolishness is, I think,
like the sources of the stupidities of lesser commentators, to be
found in a peculiarly American terror of being childish or sentimental.
But the terror of sentimentality is no less an oppressive and
truncating force than any other form of hatred or terror, and results
in much stupidity.

I find myself moved to write about two or three idiotic things that
get said about Thurber largely because I keep having the feeling that
the world is going to hell in a hand basket, and together with that,
a feeling that we need a hero, a champion of the imagination, and at the
moment Thurber's books are being reprinted at a satisfying rate,
which makes him as good a candidate for champion as I know of.  That
other tall, thin, forbearing hero, Clint Eastwood, has descended, as
American heroes tend to do, into self-parody, which may or may not
be intended.  Thurber's literary condition is more or less identical
with the tradition that gives us certain cowbey heroes as well as Dirty
Harry, namely, the popular adventure story.  That is the genre America
misunderstood so badly when it elected Ronald Reagan president.
(The trouble with Reagan is not, as they used to say in California
when he was running for governor, that he is a cowboy.  The trouble
with Ronald Reagan is that he isn't a cowboy, is not capable of a
sustained and intelligent affirmation of the sort we associate with
cowboys and other American heroes.)

But Thurber was capable of making a life and an art out of the
American heroic tradition, and, astonishingly, of revising that
tradition, long before Leslie Fiedler wrote Love and Death in the
American Novel, to include women and dogs in it.  In fact, I must
digress from my main subject, which is Thurber's dogs, to say that
Thurber is one of my feminist heroes.  His men, unlike Travis McGee,
do not get depressed when they discover that women are not necessarily
eternally twenty-two years old, suntanned and sinewy and obedient.
As Dorothy Parker pointed out, Thurber's men actually love his
difficult, bitchy women, none of whom look like making it to the
cover of Cosmopolitan.  A great deal of his art is a celebration, in
fact, of the contrary, difficult, stubborn, powerful possibilities of
the female in Western tradition.  His women, at their best, are
virtually never in danger of succumbing to the Cinderella Complex,
as recent popular psychology has it, and are not about to let their
men settle comfortably into the Peter Pan Syndrome.  And what he
finds wrong with women and men as twentieth-century America presented
them to him is so much like what Simone de Beauvoir found wrong
with women and men as twentieth-century America and Europe presented
them to her that I could almost suspect the two of them of
conspiracy.

Thurber's ``misogyny,'' like Beauvoir's assault on the myth of the
gentle and obedient woman, a myth that has killed so many powerful
women, has its sources in a vision of human possibility more powerful
than the pseudomythologies they both inherited.  It took Thurber a
while to parlay that knowledge into art, but the point is that he did
manage it, as near as one can make out, actually managed grown-up
human thought.  The famous first-wife-on-the-bookcase cartoon is the
product of a mind that knew as much as Tocqueville, Beauvoir, and
Virginia Woolf ever did about the lethal forces hidden behind the
sweet fairy tale of the tidy suburban marriage.

I will stay with this digression for a while.  When I call Thurber a
``feminist,'' I mean that his work comforts, stays, and succors me
at moments when new versions of the ideally sweet, supportive, and
harmless woman come my way unexpectedly and treaten my peace of
mind.  Observations such as the following are what I have in mind.

   Women writers cooperate with and are grateful to the books of
   their predecessors.  The masculine tradition of relationships
   among texts is that anxiously suspicious and competitive one
   so ably and anxiously described by Harold Bloom; women, by
   contrast, support and nourish each other's writings.  The male
   tradition of triumphant and antisocial excellence is alien
   to the feminine literary intelligence.

...Fortunately Thruber himself is to hand, with his wonderfully
combative, aggressive, competitive women.  I just
reach onto my bookshelf and open Thurber's Dogs at random.  I find
the piece ``Canines in the Cellar,'' a tale about one of Thurber's
role models, his mother.  The occasion is an impending visit from
Aunt Mary, whom our heroine, Mame Thurber, dislikes and does not
nourish.  Aunt Mary in her turn hates the Thurber family's beloved
dogs.

   ...my mother had spend the afternoon gathering up all the dogs of
   the neighborhood, in advance of Aunt Mary's appearance, and
   putting them in the cellar.  I had been allowed to go with her on
   her wonderful forays, and I thought that we were going to keep all
   the sixteen dogs we rounded up...

   The big moment finally arrived.  My mother, full of smiles and
   insincerity, told Aunt Mary that it would relieve her of a tedious
   chore - and heaven knows, she added, there were a thousand steps
   to take in that old house - if the old lady would be good enough
   to set down a plate of dog food in the kitchen at the head of the
   cellar stairs and call Judge and Sampson to their supper ... when
   the door opened and the could see the light of freedom and smell the
   odor of food, they gave tongue like a pack of hunting hounds.  Aunt
   Mary got the door halfway open and the bodies of the largest dogs
   pushed it the rest of the way.  There was a snarling, barking,
   yelping swirl of yellow and white, black and tan, gray and brindle
   as the dogs tumbled into the kitchen...

   When the last one had departed and the upset house had been put back
   in order, my father said to his wife, ``Well, Mame, I hope you're
   satisfied.''  She was.

Now, that's my heroine!  I identify with her, I emulate her, I want to
live up to Mamie Thurber.  And where would I be without her?  Roughly
where American women so often are - gloomily deciding yet once again
that if women writers are nice, I must not be a woman, or a writer,
or something.  In a state of confusion, in short.

Mame's summoning of the dogs in the battle against senselessness
and oppression is a typical maneuver in Thurber, and one that ought
to be taken seriously...

Vicki Hearne ``Beware of the Dog!'' _Animal Happiness_ p.106