TEXT 6: DESTRUCTIVE FORCES IN LIFE

by James Thurber

Before you read:

1) Find out essential facts about the author.

2) Have you ever read inspirational or self-improvement mind and personality psychological books? What impression did you have of them? Have you found them useful?

 

The mental efficiency psychological books go into elaborate detail about how to attain Masterful Adjustment, but it seems to me the problems they set up, and knock down, are in the main unimaginative and trivial: the little fusses at the breakfast table, the routine troubles at the office, the familiar anxieties over money and health – the welter of workaday annoyances which all of us meet with and usually conquer without extravagant wear and tear.

I could cite a dozen major handicaps to masterful Adjustment, which the thought technicians never touch upon, a dozen situations not so easy of analysis and solution as most of theirs. I will, however, content myself with one.

Let us consider the case of a man of my acquaintance, Harry Conner, who had accomplished Discipline of Mind, overcome the Will to Fail, mastered the Technique of Living – had, in a word, practically attained Masterful Adjustment. He was called on the phone one afternoon about five o'clock by a man named Bert Scursey. Harry Conner did not answer the phone, however; his wife answered it. As Scursey told me the story later, he had no intention when he dialled the Conners' apartment at the Hotel Graydon of doing more than talk with Harry. But, for some strange reason when Louise Conner answered, Bert Scursey found himself pretending to be, and imitating the voice of, a coloured woman. This Scursey is by way of being an excellent mimic, and a coloured woman is one of the best things he does.

'Hello,' said Mrs. Conner.

In a plaintive voice, Scursey said, 'Is dis heah Miz Commah? '

Yes, this is Mrs. Conner,' said Louise. 'Who is speaking?'

'Dis heah's Edith Rummum,' said Scursey. ‘ Ah used wuck for yo frens was nex doah yo place a Sou Norwuck. '

Naturally, Mrs. Conner did not follow this, and demanded rather sharply to know who was calling and what she wanted. Scursey, his voice soft with feigned tears, finally got it over to his friend's wife that he was one Edith Rummum, a coloured maid who had once worked for some friends of the Conners' in South Norwalk, where they had lived some years before. 'What is it you want, Edith?' asked Mrs. Conner, who was completely taken in by the impostor (she could not catch the name of the South Norwalk friends, but let that go). Scursey – or Edith, rather – explained in a pitiable, hesitant way that she was without work or money and that she didn't know what she was going to do; Rummum, she said, was in the gaolhouse because of a cutting scrape on a roller-coaster. Now, Louise Conner happened to be a most kind-hearted person, as Scursey well knew, so she said that she could perhaps find some laundry work for Edith to do.

‘ Yessum,’ said Edith. 'Ah laundas. '

At this point, Harry Conner's voice, raised in the room behind his wife, came clearly to Scursey, saying, 'Now, for God's sake, Louise, don't go giving our clothes out to somebody you never saw or heard of in your life.'

This interjection of Conner's was in firm keeping with a theory of logical behaviour which he had got out of the Mind and Personality books; There was no Will to Weakness here, no Desire to Have His Shirts Ruined, no False Sympathy for the Coloured Woman Who Has Not Organized Her Life.

But Mrs. Conner who often did not listen to Mr. Conner in spite of his superior mental discipline, prevailed.

‘Where are you now, Edith?' she asked.

This disconcerted Scursey for a moment but he finally said, 'Ah's jes rounda corna, Miz Commah. '

'Well, you come over to the Hotel Graydon,' said Mrs. Conner. 'We're in Apartment 7-A on the seventh floor.'

'Yessm,' said Edith. Mrs. Conner hung up and so did Scursey. He was now, he realized, in something of a predicament. Since he did not possess a streamlined mind, as Dr. Mursell has called it, and had definitely a Will to Confuse, he did not perceive that his little joke had gone far enough. He wanted to go on with it, which is a characteristic of wool-gatherers, pranksters, wags, wish fulfillers, and escapists generally. He enjoyed fantasy as much as reality, probably even more, which is a sure symptom of Regression, Digression and Analogical Redintegration. What he finally did, therefore, was to call back the Conners and get Mrs. Conner on the phone again.

'Jeez, Miz. Commah,' he said, with a hint of panic in his voice, 'Ah cain' fine yo apottoman! '

'Where are you, Edith?' she asked.

'Lawd, Ah doan know,' said Edith. 'Ah's on some floah in de Hotel Graydon. '

'Well, listen, Edith, you took the elevator, didn't you?'

'Das whut Ah took,' said Edith, uncertainly.

'Well, you go back to the elevator and tell the boy you want off at the seventh floor. I'll meet you at the elevator.'

'Yessm,' said Edith, with even more uncertainty.

At this point, Conner's loud voice, speaking to his wife, was again heard by Scursey. 'Where in the hell is shecalling from?' demanded Conner, who had developed Logical Reasoning. 'She must have wandered into somebody else's apartment if she is calling you from this building, for God's sake!' Whereupon, having no desire to explain where Edith was calling from, Scursey hung up.

After an instant of thought, or rather Disintegrated Phantasmagoria, Scursey rang the Conners again. He wanted to prevent Louise from going out to the elevator and checking up with the operator. This time, as Scursey had hoped, Harry Conner answered, having told his wife that he would handle this situation.

'Hello!' shouted Conner, irritably. 'Who is this?'

Scursey now abandoned the role of Edith and assumed a sharp, fussy, masculine tone.

'Mr. Conner,' he said, crisply, 'this is the office. I am afraid we shall have to ask you to remove this coloured person from the building. She is blundering into other people's apartments, using their phones. We cannot have that sort of thing, you know, at the Graydon.'

The man's words and his tone infuriated Conner ‘There are a lot of ‘sort of things’ I'd like to see you not have at the Graydon!' he shouted.

'Well, please come down to the lobby and do something about this situation,' said the man, nastily.

'You're damned right, I'll come down!' howled Conner.

He banged down the receiver.

Bert Scursey sat in a chair and gloated over the involved state of affairs which he had created. He decided to go over to the Graydon, which was just up the street from his own apartment, and see what was happening. It promised to have all the confusion which his disorderly mind so deplorably enjoyed. And it did have. He found Conner in a tremendous rage in the lobby, accusing an astonished assistant manager of having insulted him. Several persons in the lobby watched the curious scene.

'But, Mr. Conner,' said the assistant manager, a Mr. Bent, 'I have no idea what you are talking about.'

'If you listen, you'll find out!' bawled Harry Conner. 'In the first place, this coloured woman's coming to the hotel was no idea of mine. I've never seen her in my life and I don't want to see her! I want to go to my grave without seeing her!' He had forgotten what the Mind and Personality books had taught him: never raise your voice in anger, always stick to the point. Naturally, Mr. Bent could only believe that his guest had gone out of his mind. He decided to humour him. 'Where is this – ah – coloured woman, Mr. Conner?' he asked, warily. He was somewhat pale and was fiddling with a bit of paper. A dabbler in psychology books himself, he wondered if Conner had not fallen out of love with his wife without realizing it. (This theory, I believe, Mr. Bent has clung to ever since, although the Conners are one of the happiest couples in the country.)

'I don't know where she is!' cried Conner. 'She's up on some other floor phoning my wife! You seemed to know all about it! I had nothing to do with it! I opposed it from the start! But I want no insults from you no matter who opposed it!'

'Certainly not, certainly not,' said Mr. Bent, backing slightly away. He began to wonder what he was going to do with this maniac.

At this juncture Scursey, who had been enjoying the scene at a safe distance, approached Conner and took him by the arm 'What's the matter, old boy?' he asked.

'H'lo, Bert,' said Conner, sullenly.

And then, his eyes narrowing, he began to examine the look on Scursey's face. Scursey is not good at dead-panning; he is only good on the phone. There was a guilty grin on his face.

'You…' said Conner, bitterly, remembering Scursey's pranks of mimicry, and he turned on his heel, walked to the elevator, and, when Scursey tried to get in too, shoved him back into the lobby. That was the end of the friendship between the Conners and Bert Scursey. It was more than that. It was the end of Harry Conner's stay at the Graydon. It was, in fact, the end of his stay in New York City. He and Louise live in Oregon now, where Conner accepted a less important position than he had held in New York because the episode of Edith had turned him against Scursey, Mr. Bent, the Graydon, and the whole metropolitan area.

Is there anything to be done about Bert Scurseys? Hardly anyone goes through life without encountering them and having their life – and their mind – accordingly modified. Can we so streamline our minds that the antics of Scurseys roll off them like water off a duck’s back? I don’t think so. I believe the authors of the inspirational books don’t think so, either, but are afraid to attack the subject. A person might build up a streamlined mind, a mind awakened to new life, a new discipline, only to have the whole works shot to pieces by so minor and unpredictable a thing as, say, a wrong number. The undisciplined mind runs far less chance of having its purpose thwarted, its plans distorted, its whole scheme and system wrenched out of line. An undisciplined mind, in short, is far better adapted to the confused world in which we live today than a streamlined mind. This, I’m afraid, is no place for streamlined minds.