Thurber Tonight: "How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work" from "Let Your Mind Alone!"

B. J. ("Two-Gun") Winfall, of New York City

[Yes, you can click on the drawing to enlarge it.]

"The bartender took his time slamming glasses and a bottle down on the bar. B.J. filled a glass, tossed it off, turned heavily, and faced the roomful of men. 'I'm Two-Gun Winfall from New York City!' he shouted. 'Anybody want anything?'"

-- from tonight's installment of Let Your Mind Alone!,
"How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work"

by Ken

When I first read the Let Your Mind Alone! pieces they were already two or three decades old (though more time has of course elapsed since then), and already came from a world that was in many respects different. That didn't bother me. In fact, it probably enhanced the experience: seeing how that world was different and yet in so many important ways hardly different at all from ours. That still seems to me the case, at this significantly larger remove in time.

I find now, just as I did back then, that Thurber's inquiry into this outpouring of books in what we might now call the "mental self-help" genre had aged hardly at all. Oh, each wave of these things has its own "age" and some of its own jargon, but the character and crappiness of the advice changes remarkably little. For all that the infamous Dorothea Brande and David Seabury (whose, er, "masterpiece," The Art of Selfishness, was published in 1937, the year after How to Worry Successfully) are creatures of their time, they (or their close kin) are just as much creatures of ours. Could the local TV talk shows survive without them?

Even the seemingly "topical" references sometimes defy their age. Al Capone, for example, whose spirit overhangs Thurber's tale of B. J. "Two-Gun" Winfall's invasion of Chicago. When I first read these pieces, everyone I knew had grown up with Capone thanks to The Untouchables. (That would be the TV series, of course, with Robert Stack as he indefatigable and incorruptible Eliot Ness.) Yet Capone, it seems to me, has never lost his iconic status, through Geraldo and the vault on up to Boardwalk Empire.


FOR THE FULL STORY OF "TWO-GUN" WINFALL'S
BRASH BRUSH WITH MORTALITY, CLICK HERE

Our previous coverage of the Let Your Mind Alone! series:

1. "Pythagoras and the Ladder"
2. "Destructive Forces in Life"
3. "The Case for the Daydreamer"
4, "A Dozen Disciplines"
6. "Anodynes for Anxieties"

Tomorrow night: No. 7, "The Conscious vs. the Unconscious" -- introducing Dr. Louis E. Bisch's magnum opus, Be Glad You're Neurotic

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

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