Thurber Tonight: The first of two tales of marital, er, bliss -- "The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery"

From "The War Between Men and Women"
(yes, you can click on it to enlarge it!)

"Is it against the law for a man to be down on all fours beside a road, barking in a perfectly civil manner?" demanded the lady.

"No, ma'am," said the cop. He made no move to get on his motorcycle, however, and go on about his business. There was just the quiet chugging of the cycle engine and the auto engine, for a time.

-- from "The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery"

by Ken

Like the Thurber story "The Greatest Man in the World" (which we watched Keith Olbermann read Sunday night, Monday night, and last night), tonight's "Topaz Cufflinks Mystery" and tomorrow night's "The Curb in the Sky" appeared for the first time in book form in the 1935 collection The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze.

All three stories were subsequently included as well in the 1945 "sampler" anthology The Thurber Carnival, which also reprised the 17 drawings that made up the series "The War Between Men and Women," which had only just appeared in book form in Men, Women and Dogs, a 1943 collection of drawings. That title "The War Between Men and Women" became indelibly associated with Thurber, in ways that seem to me to lead mostly to gross misunderstanding. There's no doubt, though, that in Thurber's work as well as his life relationships between men and women are, well, complicated -- very much as they are in real life.

Of this impending pairing of stories I've made, "The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery" and "The Curb in the Sky," I wrote last night:

These are not, um, comfortable relationships we're going to be peeking at, and yet even so, there are distinctions to observe. Our stories fall on opposite sides of an invisible line that marks, well, the line -- the line that once you've stepped over, you've overstepped.

The overstepping comes tomorrow night. Meanwhile --

TO READ "THE TOPAZ CUFFLINKS MYSTERY," CLICK HERE


TOMORROW IN THURBER TONIGHT: The second of our two tales of marital, er, bilss -- "The Curb in the Sky"


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, and JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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