The Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott

Source of book: I own the complete poetry of Sir Walter Scott

Did any of my readers also play the card game, Authors, as a child? My mother introduced us to it, and I remember playing it from time to time. I also might, in a pinch, be able to list the works and authors from the game. For Sir Walter Scott, there were three novels, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, and The Talisman. The fourth work - each author had four - was The Lady of the Lake. Since I have read the other three, this was the last one to complete the set.

So, that explains why I picked this poem out of all of Scott’s works. I certainly didn’t expect to fall down a rabbit hole of the weird history behind the poem and the even weirder subsequent influence that the poem has had. (I’ll address some of this in a footnote.)

First of all, despite the name, this poem has nothing whatsoever to do with the “Lady of the Lake” of Arthurian legend. That lady gave Arthur his sword, Excalibur, and raised Lancelot, and otherwise participated in the legends in various ways.

This poem instead is loosely based on the feud between King James V of Scotland and the Douglas clan. (James was the father of Mary, Queen of Scots; and grandfather of James VI and I - who would unite England and Scotland and commission the King James Bible.) The actual events of the poem are Scott’s invention, although he drew on incidents from various points in Scottish history and legend for the tale.

I already discussed Scott’s life in my previous post on his Scottish novel, The Heart of Midlothian. Scott is best known today for his novels, particularly the three listed above, which contributed to our modern pictures of Robin Hood, Queen Elizabeth I, and King Richard I, respectively.

However, before he attempted novels (which he initially did under a pseudonym), he was a successful poet. The Lady of the Lake was one of several long narrative poems, and was written in 1810, four years before his first foray into prose fiction.

The poem is divided into six cantos, which each tell of one day in time. The setting is the beautiful countryside on the borderlands between the highlands and the lowlands. The lake is Loch Katrine, which does indeed contain an island large enough to serve as a hideaway.

Loch Katrine. Photo by Richard Webb. Used pursuant to the Creative Commons License.

The plot runs roughly as follows (Spoilers follow):

The Highland Scots, led by Sir Roderick Dhu (exiled for committing a brazen murder in the King’s court) are at odds with the Lowland Scots, who are loyal to King James, who nominally rules Scotland. Douglas, who was formerly of the king’s court, has quarreled as a result of vicious rumors, and has fled to the highlands with his daughter Ellen and his minstrel, Allan Bane.

As the poem opens, a lowland hunter, calling himself James Fitz-James, becomes lost in the highlands while chasing an elusive stag. His horse dies of exhaustion by the shores of a lake. He blows his horn, but instead of his countrymen, he is found by a highland maiden, who rows across from and island. By the common courtesy of the time, he is given a bed for the night, and sent on his way, even though he is known to be on the other side of the conflict. The maid is, of course, Ellen, and Fitz-James is smitten.

Her hand, however, is sought by two others: the dangerous and rather bloodthirsty Roderick Dhu, and the young highland chief Malcolm Graeme. Ellen is under pressure to marry Roderick, as such a marriage would cement an alliance between Duncan and Roderick’s Clan Alpine.

After Fitz-James departs, Roderick and Graeme arrive, and quarrel over Ellen, and Graeme leaves. He is later captured by the forces of King James. Roderick decides to muster the highland forces, and rebel against King James. Douglas refuses, because he still retains some loyalty to the crown. Roderick goes ahead anyway, and prepares the burning cross to send abroad as the signal...

Wait, what was that? A burning cross? That sounds a bit familiar. (More on this in a footnote below.)

The signal is sent, and the forces are told to meet at a certain point. Douglas, Ellen, and Allan, seek refuge in a hideaway.

The next day at the gathering, Brian the Hermit (who is kind of a cross between a druid and a monk), predicts that whichever side draws the first blood will win the encounter.

Fitz-James, led by a guide, encounters Ellen, and asks for her hand, but she refuses. He gives her his ring, however, and tells her she can use it if she needs a favor from King James.

Later, Fitz-James and Roderick meet, and challenge each other to single combat. Roderick is seriously wounded, and is taken by Fitz-James to the castle.

Stirling Castle. Photo by Finlay McWalter. Used pursuant to the Creative Commons License.

Douglas in the meantime, has gone to the castle to seek to reconcile with the king, and also to try to save Roderick and Graeme. He is imprisoned himself, however. King James, though, gives the order to stop the warfare and seek a truce.

On the final day, after the battle, Allan Bane and Ellen come to the castle with news of the battle and the truce. Ellen is there to seek the freedom of her father, but finds that he has already been pardoned, and that Fitz-James was really King James in disguise. She then asks for the pardon of Roderick - her loyalty to the highlanders outweighing her more personal desires. Alas, Roderick has died of his wounds. Ellen hesitates to ask for Graeme’s freedom, so King James brings him in, and jokingly orders him put into fetters, while putting a necklace over him and handing the clasp to Ellen. (A nice little Scottish engagement ceremony.)

The form of the poem is interesting. Scott uses primarily iambic tetrameter in rhymed couplets, but he deviates from that form on numerous occasions. There are various songs scattered throughout the poem, and each has meter suited to the topic, speaker, and form. He also uses metric changes in a few instances to change mood. For example, he switches to a formal iambic pentameter for the last stanza.

Scott’s writing is always delightfully descriptive, and this poem just seems to flow off the tongue with ease. (Most poetry sounds better out loud - and this poem sounds so melodious that way.) Here is a bit from Canto I:

XI.

The western waves of ebbing day

Rolled o'er the glen their level way;

Each purple peak, each flinty spire,

Was bathed in floods of living fire.

But not a setting beam could glow

Within the dark ravines below,

Where twined the path in shadow hid,

Round many a rocky pyramid,

Shooting abruptly from the dell

Its thunder-splintered pinnacle;

Round many an insulated mass,

The native bulwarks of the pass,

Huge as the tower which builders vain

Presumptuous piled on Shinar's plain.

The rocky summits, split and rent,

Formed turret, dome, or battlement.

Or seemed fantastically set

With cupola or minaret,

Wild crests as pagod ever decked,

Or mosque of Eastern architect.

Nor were these earth-born castles bare,

Nor lacked they many a banner fair;

For, from their shivered brows displayed,

Far o'er the unfathomable glade,

All twinkling with the dewdrop sheen,

The briar-rose fell in streamers green,

kind creeping shrubs of thousand dyes

Waved in the west-wind's summer sighs.

Likewise, during the hunt itself, Scott uses the language to convey the breathlessness of the pace, slowing down as the horse tires and eventually expires. Truly delightful command of the language and the form. I also like Fitz-James’ thoughts as he realizes he will have to spend the night far from home.

'Blithe were it then to wander here!

But now—beshrew yon nimble deer—

Like that same hermit's, thin and spare,

The copse must give my evening fare;

Some mossy bank my couch must be,

Some rustling oak my canopy.

Yet pass we that; the war and chase

Give little choice of resting-place;—

A summer night in greenwood spent

Were but to-morrow's merriment:

But hosts may in these wilds abound,

Such as are better missed than found...

Both of these are in the characteristic iambic tetrameter. A contrast comes in Ellen’s song to her guest, Fitz-James. The accents are reversed, substituting trochees for the iambs, making a “feminine” rhyme (unaccented syllables) at the end.

Soldier, rest! thy warfare o'er,

   Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking;

Dream of battled fields no more,

   Days of danger, nights of waking.

In our isle's enchanted hall,

   Hands unseen thy couch are strewing,

Fairy strains of music fall,

   Every sense in slumber dewing.

Soldier, rest! thy warfare o'er,

Dream of fighting fields no more;

Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,

Morn of toil, nor night of waking.

Later in the poem, Scott describes the wild character of Brian the Hermit. Note the mention of the banshee, the harbinger of death in both Scottish and Irish legend.

VII.

The desert gave him visions wild,

Such as might suit the spectre's child.

Where with black cliffs the torrents toil,

He watched the wheeling eddies boil,

Jill from their foam his dazzled eyes

Beheld the River Demon rise:

The mountain mist took form and limb

Of noontide hag or goblin grim;

The midnight wind came wild and dread,

Swelled with the voices of the dead;

Far on the future battle-heath

His eye beheld the ranks of death:

Thus the lone Seer, from mankind hurled,

Shaped forth a disembodied world.

One lingering sympathy of mind

Still bound him to the mortal kind;

The only parent he could claim

Of ancient Alpine's lineage came.

Late had he heard, in prophet's dream,

The fatal Ben-Shie's boding scream;

Sounds, too, had come in midnight blast

Of charging steeds, careering fast

Along Benharrow's shingly side,

Where mortal horseman ne'er might ride;

The thunderbolt had split the pine,--

All augured ill to Alpine's line.

He girt his loins, and came to show

The signals of impending woe,

And now stood prompt to bless or ban,

As bade the Chieftain of his clan.

I was not able to confirm if the “coronach,” a traditional Scottish improvised lament, followed any particular metric pattern. Scott uses an interesting combination of anapests and feminine endings.

He is gone on the mountain,

   He is lost to the forest,

Like a summer-dried fountain,

   When our need was the sorest.

The font, reappearing,

   From the rain-drops shall borrow,

But to us comes no cheering,

   To Duncan no morrow!

The hand of the reaper

   Takes the ears that are hoary,

But the voice of the weeper

   Wails manhood in glory.

The autumn winds rushing

   Waft the leaves that are searest,

But our flower was in flushing,

   When blighting was nearest.

Fleet foot on the correi,

   Sage counsel in cumber,

Red hand in the foray,

   How sound is thy slumber!

Like the dew on the mountain,

   Like the foam on the river,

Like the bubble on the fountain,

   Thou art gone, and forever!

This lament takes place at the funeral of a clan chief. The mourners must leave the vigil and take arms after the messenger with the burning cross arrives. After all,

Within Loch Katrine's gorge we'll fight,

All in our maids' and matrons' sight,

Each for his hearth and household fire,

Father for child, and son for sire Lover

for maid beloved!--

As a final example of the creative use of meter, Scott uses the anapest rhythm again in the uncouth song of the drunken soldiers. Here is one of the stanzas:

Our vicar still preaches that Peter and Poule

Laid a swinging long curse on the bonny brown bowl,

That there 's wrath and despair in the jolly black-jack,

And the seven deadly sins in a flagon of sack;

Yet whoop, Barnaby! off with thy liquor,

Drink upsees out, and a fig for the vicar!

These soldiers are not the lowland nobles and knights, who are bound together by the feudal system and therefore loyal based on the system of landholding. Nor are they the highland clansmen, who are organized by what Scott calls patriarchy. He is actually rather accurate here, as the system was somewhat similar to other ancient political organizations. The head of the clan would be the eldest in direct descent from the founder of the clan, and he would rule his lesser relatives, servants, slaves, captives, and assorted persons bound to the clan by tradition. The two clashing systems meant that loyalties were often divided on the borderlands (which was a cause of this particular dispute), and one often had to choose between political ties and family ties.

This poem was a joy to read. The local color was fun, as it usually is in Scott’s works. The language had an addictive cadence, and Scott makes the past come alive. I also found it fun to recognize a few obscure words that influence our language today, although we hardly notice it. One of these was “lave,” meaning to wash. We see this in our polite term for the bathroom, the lavatory. The second was “ruth,” used in the sense of a feeling of pity. We don’t use this one, but we do its opposite, “ruthless.” I also like the obsolete but versatile word “caitiff,” meaning in different contexts, a coward, a captive, and a miserable person.  

A final word I wish to mention is one that I first encountered, of all places, in a Nancy Drew book. A “pibroch” is an art form largely associated with the great highland bagpipe (although it was probably originally played on harps). In this context, it is the characteristic tune unique to each clan. I recall a scene in Scott’s novel A Legend of Montrose in which the pipers from the assembled clans engage in a battle to see who can blast louder than the others. Duelling bagpipes, anyone?

Since Clan Alpine is a fictitious clan, there is no actual pibroch to be found for this poem. Instead, here is the pibroch for clan Campbell, since my friend and colleague Clayton has Campbell ancestry. 

Note on the Flaming Cross:

I was a bit startled to see a flaming cross in this poem, and had to look up its meaning. I ended up down a pretty crazy rabbit hole, to say the least. Here goes.

Scott describes a highland tradition that may well date back to the druids. When the clans would assemble for war, the lead clan would hold a ceremony. A cross of branches was assembled, and each of the four points sharpened. These points were set on fire, and then quenched in the blood of a goat sacrificed for the occasion. A messenger would then circulate the cross to each loyal clan. The clan must then assemble on pain of their blood being shed and their houses burnt - just like the cross and the goat.

So far, so good. A bit dramatic and pagan sounding, perhaps, but nothing more.

It turns out that a bit later in history, James VI of Scotland ascended the throne of England, uniting the kingdoms. His son, Charles I, wasn’t quite so popular, and was eventually executed. (I discussed the Commonwealth and Restoration periods in a recent post.)

The Scots were not too happy about either the commonwealth or the eventual Glorious Revolution, which ended the rule of the Stuarts. They wanted both to restore the Scottish Stuarts to the English throne, and also establish the Scottish form of Christianity over that of the Anglican form. Essentially a combined political and religious war broke out. This conflict was known as the Jacobite Rising, and was the setting of Scott’s first novel, Waverley It continued in fits and starts until the 1740s, when King George II destroyed the clan system, banned the wearing of tartans, and banished many of those Scots involved in the uprising to the various colonies.

Those that came to North America settled largely in the Southern colonies of the Carolinas and Georgia.

When The Lady of the Lake came out, it had a tremendous influence in Scotland, sparking what is known as the Highland Revival. Eventually, the laws repressing the symbols of the highland clans were repealed, and Scottish pride flourished. (Believe it or not, there is still a Scottish separatist movement.)

The influence of the poem was not limited to the British Isles. In the wake of the Civil War, the most furious of the vanquished South rallied around the idea of descent from the original founders of the United States - including the Scots who settled the South. The Ku Klux Klan adopted the “clan” name, a few of the terms, and used the burning cross as both a rallying device and as a threat. (The original use of the cross, as I described it above, had no racial implications. It was a summons and a threat against allies, not enemies.)

To a degree, this odd Scottish connection remains within the Neo-Confederate movement. While the Neo-Nazis use the term “aryan” to describe the ideal “white” ancestry (a Germanic idea), the most common term found on Neo-Confederate sites is “anglo-celtic,” a term encompassing the various groups associated with England before the Norman (French) invasion.

I suppose this was natural, in a way. The tale in The Lady of the Lake is a classic narrative. It’s fun to be the noble underdog, fighting for family and hearth, against the oppressor. It’s always more fun to believe that one is on the side of “true” religion against the false - and both sides believed it in this conflict. Thus, I suppose it is natural to want to identify with Highlanders, and adopt their imagery for one’s own cause. We like to identify ourselves with the noble heroes of legend, whether our cause is truly just, or whether we are intimidating and murdering former slaves.

It wasn’t just those bitter about the Southern defeat that took inspiration from this poem, though. Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave and abolitionist leader, originally bore the name of Bailey. Like many slaves, it was the family name of his owner. After his escape, he rejected that name, and chose his name from Scott’s poem. Thus, both sides adopted this tale as their own narrative.

Note on Music:

Composers, too, found inspiration in The Lady of the Lake.

The official Presidential anthem, “Hail to the Chief” had lyrics which were adapted from the song to Roderick Dhu in the poem.

Rossini’s opera, La Donna del Lago is based on the poem - although there are a few changes to the plot to accommodate the expectations of the genre. 

The most famous, however, is Schubert’s Ave Maria, which was originally the third of three songs sung by Ellen Douglas in a cycle of seven songs from the poem. Schubert liked the tune enough to use it for a setting of the Roman Catholic Latin prayer.

Here is part of the original from The Lady of the Lake:

Ave. Maria! maiden mild!

   Listen to a maiden's prayer!

Thou canst hear though from the wild,

   Thou canst save amid despair.

Safe may we sleep beneath thy care,

   Though banished, outcast, and reviled--

Maiden! hear a maiden's prayer;

   Mother, hear a suppliant child!

Here is Schubert’s later adaptation. Bonus points for the violin solo.

A Curtain of Green by Eudora Welty

Source of book: I own this.

Interesting fact: Eudora Welty lived in the same house in Jackson, Mississippi. from the time her family moved there around when she finished high school until her death at age 92. (She did move out for part of her college education, but returned.) That’s pretty rare these days. 

A Curtain of Green is Welty’s first collection of short stories, published in 1940. I noticed immediately that her writing resembled that of Flannery O’Connor, another Southern short story writer. I looked it up, and Welty predated O’Connor by nearly a decade. (Inquiring minds want to know this sort of thing.) I also noted some resemblance to the small town tales of Sarah Orne Jewett, who wrote in the late 1880s. All three had an eye for personal relationships, the countryside, and the beauty, truth, and occasionally terror of the small town life. (Jewett wrote about New England, thus potentially influencing Robert Frost.)

Even more than that, Welty is one in a long line of authors that wrote short stories that might be called “local sketches,” as my wife put it. It wasn’t just women, although many were. Mark Twain, Guy de Maupassant, and in his own way, Edgar Allan Poe wrote in this vein. In addition to her short stories, Welty also wrote longer works, winning the Pulitzer for The Optimist’s Daughter.

There are some rather dark stories, but also some that are humorous (“Why I Live at the P.O.” for example) and others that give a kind portrait of decent people. Welty’s South isn’t really the South of the rich yet decayed plantation - it’s the impoverished South, complete with unemployment, racial tensions, and making do. The darkest tale, “Flowers for Marjorie” is almost a reverse portrait of an O Henry relationship, where the couple turns against each other during hardship rather than coming together.

Another theme that runs through the stories is that of the outsider. I was surprised at the number of characters which suffer from some sort of mental or physical disability. In “Lily Daw,” a mentally slow woman is alternately encouraged to enter an asylum and to marry the man that desires her. Welty does an excellent job of portraying the callous way we tend to treat those we view as “retarded.” She had a keen ear for the sort of dialogue by which we dehumanize the disabled.

I also loved the portrayal of the African American jazz musician “Powerhouse,” in the story that bears his name. Again, she is able to bring out the nuances of conversation, the realities of show business and of segregation, and uses minor incidents to show personality. 

I can't help but imagine Louie and his larger-than-life stage presence as a model for Powerhouse.

 

There are many examples of creative word pictures and descriptions. One that I particularly liked was in “The Key.”

He looked home-made, as though his wife had self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband when she sat alone at night.  

Not only does this evoke a particularly idea of the man’s appearance, but it also hints at the relationship as it emerges later in the story.

One more note on this. Welty would be an excellent example for aspiring writers of which details are important, and which are not. I think she does an exceptional job of making every small item described important to either plot or character. Nothing is wasted.

It’s interesting when an author writes about his or her own writing process - or how they came to write. Thus, it is intriguing to read “A Memory,” in which (assuming the story is true and not fictional) Welty describes how she first began to see people as the characters she would later write. Welty does not glorify this awakening. Rather, she is harsh - almost brutal - on her younger self for her complete lack of compassion.

I was at an age when I formed a judgment upon every person and every event which came under my eye, although I was easily frightened. When a person, or a happening, seemed to me not in keeping with my opinion, or even my hope or expectation, I was terrified by a vision of abandonment and wildness which tore my heart with a kind of sorrow. My father and mother, who believed that I saw nothing in the world which was not strictly coaxed into place like a vine on our garden trellis to be presented to my eyes, would have been badly concerned if they had guessed how frequently the weak and inferior and strangely turned examples of what was to come showed themselves to me.

Later in this story, she describes being at a local beach, and seeing this group of strangers:

Sprawled close to where I was lying, at any rate, appeared a group of loud, squirming, ill-assorted people who seemed thrown together only by the most confused accident, and who seemed driven by foolish intent to insult each other, all of which they enjoyed with a hilarity which astonished my heart. There were a man, two women, two young boys. They were brown and roughened, but not foreigners; when I was a child such people were called “common.” They wore old and faded bathing suits which did not hide either the energy or the fatigue of their bodies, but showed it exactly.

Throughout the story, these people revolt Welty, and yet her revulsion disturbs her greatly. This does appear to be the germ of her particular genius. Many of her characters are unsympathetic, and yet, she has learned empathy in those years since her childhood. She still notices the quirks, the physical and emotional unattractiveness, the unkindnesses they often show each other. Yet, she views with love more than disgust. I think particularly of the last story in the book, the one that is probably the best known, “A Worn Path,” which misses no line and crease, and yet is a compelling portrait of self-sacrifice.

This sense of compassion is also apparent in Welty’s photography. She worked as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, and her photographs of Southern rural poverty during the Great Depression dovetail nicely with her writings. Both give a sympathetic while highly realistic and perceptive view of her native Mississippi and its inhabitants. 

Alarms and Diversions by James Thurber

Source of book: I own this.

Although I probably would have developed a love for snark one way or another, I blame the fact that I read a good bit of Mark Twain and James Thurber during my high school years. (Twain’s The Innocents Abroad did much to make me cynical of guided tours and saintly relics. And the line, “Is...is he dead?” still makes me laugh.) Thurber’s style still fascinates me as well. His wordplay and puns, the fraught male-female relations, his intolerance for annoying dinner guests, and his delightfully primitive drawings - all these characteristics make for delightful reading, particularly when combined with his dry, understated wit.

Those who have not read any Thurber might start with his best known work, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” or perhaps Fables for Our Times. (Moral: Don’t count your boobies before they are hatched.)

Thurber was born in Ohio in 1894. His father was probably his model for the timid protagonist with the far stronger wife. His mother was quite the live wire. Thurber called her a natural comedian, and her strongest form of humor was the practical joke. (More about her later.) As a child, he lost an eye after his brother accidentally shot him with an arrow. His eyesight in the remaining eye was injured as well, and he eventually became practically blind.

I noted in one of my posts on P. G. Wodehouse that it was interesting that it was Wodehouse and Thurber who wrote the character of the hen-pecked man more convincingly than any other authors - despite the fact that they were both happily married. Thurber did experience an unhappy first marriage, but he hardly seemed to have been a pushover. His second wife Helen was much better suited to life with an author, and indeed she helped him greatly as his sight failed. Friends described them as a devoted couple.

Thurber wrote primarily for The New Yorker, during its heyday under founder Harold Ross. (Thurber would write about his relationship with Ross, who was quite a character, in The Years with Ross.) His various fiction and non-fiction works were then collected and published as books. He also wrote a few stand-alone works, such as his surreal fairy tale, The Thirteen Clocks.

Of the Thurber collections I had previously read, I would have voted for Lanterns and Lances as my favorite, based on the pleasing variety of topics, the nightmarish tales of his insomnia, when words would haunt his thoughts, and on the delightful tales of how annoying other people’s children - and their doting parents - are, “The Darlings at the Top of the Stairs” and “Moments with Mandy.” Oh, and also essays on ill-used language, such as the prescient “The Spreading ‘You Know’” and “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend me Your Earmuffs.” However, I think that Alarms and Diversions might now be my favorite. By a little. At least because it has more drawings.

While language does not take up as much space in this particular collection, Thurber’s wit still shines in essays such as “The Psychosemanticist Will See You Now, Mr. Thurber,” which includes delightfully descriptive terms such as “carcinomenclature” (meaninglessly obtuse descriptions), and memorable phrases like, “the psychic trauma caused by linguistic meaninglessness.” In our increasingly jargonistic times, Thurber’s perspective could have been written in our own time, rather than the 1940s and 50s.

Also surprising is how well Thurber understood trends that we think of as modern. For example, he wrote wonderful sendups of parenting trends (“...the tendency of our time to oversimplify problems, especially where little girls are concerned...” is a great line in an essay on poor parenting techniques), belief in mythical creatures (an essay on the Loch Ness Monster compares it memorably to the Beast of Revelation), the Christmas card culture, and panic about the supposed “feminization” of everything - particularly literature.

Another incident in Thurber’s life gave rise to another modern conundrum. Thurber spent several months during World War One as a code clerk for the State Department. For whatever reason, he was never given much of a screening, being asked only if his grandparents were born in the United States.

Waking up at night now and looking back on it, I sometimes wonder how I would have come out of one of those three-men inquisitions the State Department was once caught conducting. Having as great a guilt sense as any congressman, and a greater tendency to confession, it might have taken me hours to dredge up out of my mind and memory all the self-indictments that must have been there. I believed then, and still do, that generals of the Southern Confederacy were, in the main, superior to generals of the Northern armies; I suspected there were flaws in the American political system; I doubted the virgin birth of United States senators; I thought that German cameras and English bicycles were better than ours; and I denied the existence of actual proof that God was exclusively a citizen of the United States.

It wouldn’t be a Thurber book without some funny stuff about the “battle of the sexes,” of course. I liked the banter between Thurber and his wife after he made a questionable impulse purchase.

My wife sighed. “Men shouldn’t be allowed to shop alone,” she said. “It’s - it’s dangerous.” No, it isn’t,” I protested. “Well, chaotic, then,” she said. I settled for that.

His self-deprecating humor at the expense of males is balanced by his hilarious portrait of his aunt Wilma, who couldn’t do math to save her life, yet insisted on arguing with the local merchant about the amount of change.

One of the best essays in the collection is entitled “My Own Ten Rules for a Happy Marriage.” Inspired (he says) by the couple in a nearby apartment who destroyed the tasteful arrangement of their home by appropriating the knick-knacks as projectiles, he decided to make his own list.

I have avoided the timeworn admonitions, such as “Praise her new hat,” “Share his hobbies,” “Be as sweetheart as well as a wife,” and “Don’t keep a blond in the guest room,” not only because they are threadbare from repetition, but also because they don’t seem to have accomplished their purpose.

Thurbers rules are at turns silly, satiric, and pointed. Examples, in that order:

Rule Two: A man should make an honest effort to get the names of his wife’s friends right. This is not easy. The average wife who was graduated from college during the past thirty years keeps in close touch with at least seven old classmates. These ladies, know as “the girls,” are named, respectively: Mary, Marian, Melissa, Majorie, Maribel, Madeleine, and Miriam; and all of they are called Myrtle by the careless husband we are talking about. Furthermore, he gets their nicknames wrong. This, to be sure, is understandable, since their nicknames are, respectively: Molly, Muffy, Missy, Midge, Mabby, Maddy, and Mims...”

Rule Three: A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home...

Rule Four: The wife who keeps saying, “Isn’t that just like a man?” and the husband who keeps saying, “Oh well, you know how women are,” are likely to grow farther and farther apart through the years. These famous generalizations have the effect of reducing an individual to the anonymous status of a mere unit in a mass...

This last one, in particular, is one that I have observed to cause immense damage in relationships - and kudos to Thurber for finding a way to make it amusing by the end.

Another fun one was his idea that a wife might need to draw a detailed map of the house, showing the location of all objects the husband might need. (My wife probably has thought this at some point.) Of course, the problem is that he would lose the map.

And, in the way that only Thurber can find a way to mix relationships with grammar, there is this great paragraph near the end of the “rules.”

Two persons living in holy matrimony, I should have said long before this, must avoid slipping into blasphemy, despond, apathy, and the subjunctive mood. A husband is always set on edge by his mate’s “Far be it from me” or “Be that as it may.” This can lead to other ominous openings: “Would God that” and “Had I only the good sense to,” and the couple is then in the gloomy sub-cellar of the pluperfect subjunctive, a place where no marriage can thrive. The safest place for a happily wedded pair is the indicative mood, and of its tenses the present is the most secure. The future is a domain of threats and worries, and the past is a wasteland of sorrows and regrets.

I want to mention two more essays that I loved. Both are biographies. The first is a portrait of a woman known to everyone as “Aunt Margery,” from “Daguerreotype of a Lady.” Aunt Margery is a midwife and herbalist, with a delightfully quirky personality. She was obviously a big influence on the very young Thurber.

The second is entitled “Lavender with a Difference,” and is Thurber’s touching (and hilarious) obituary for his mother. As I noted above, she was quite a practical joker. In fact, by the end of the first couple of pages, I realized that I had found a female version of my father-in-law, who pulled some pretty outrageous and delightful pranks in his younger years. (He drywalled over the door to a dorm-mate’s room while he was home for the holidays, for example.)

Mrs. Thurber borrowed all the dogs in the neighborhood to pull a prank on her uptight aunt, pretended (in a brilliant disguise - including young James as a prop) to attempt to purchase the house next door, harassed the local merchants with requests for a single shoe or glove, and so on. The best, however, was when she snuck into a meeting hosted by a “faith healer,” borrowed a wheelchair sitting outside, and pretended to regain her ability to walk. Unfortunately, the owner of the chair was not amused...

Finally, I do want to share some of the illustrations. Thurber’s art was, shall we say, a bit simplistic. Like Mo Willems of the “Pigeon” series of children’s books (I love his stuff!), his art has an unexpected impact. He is able to convey mood and emotion in a minimum of detail.

Here are a few of my favorites from Alarms and Diversions. I apologize for the poor quality. I had to take pictures from a book that didn't want to stay open. These are really hard to find online - particularly the ones that fit my quirky sense of humor.

The typical Thurber male. 

I suspect that this is the fear that keeps my wife from being a camper. And she has a point...

Poetry geeks will appreciate this one. 

Clearly Mr. Thurber shared with me a knowledge of Homer and an annoyance at "morning people."