The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
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United StatesThe Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1939) is a short story by James Thurber. The most famous of Thurber's stories,[1], it first appeared in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939; and was first collected in his book My World and Welcome to It (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942).[2] It has since been reprinted in James Thurber: Writings and Drawings (The Library of America, 1996, ISBN 1-883011-22-1), and is one of the most frequently anthologized short stories in American literature.[3] The story is considered one of Thurber's "acknowledged masterpieces".[4]It was made into a 1947 movie of the same name, with Danny Kaye in the title role, though the movie is very different from the original story.
The name Walter Mitty and the derivative word "Mittyesque" have entered the English language, denoting an ineffectual person who spends more time in heroic daydreams than paying attention to the real world.[5]
Contents
[edit] Plot summary
The short story deals with a vague and mild-mannered man who drives into Waterbury, Connecticut with his wife for the regular weekly shopping and his wife's visit to the beauty parlor. During this time he has five heroic daydream episodes. The first is as a pilot of a U.S. Navy flying boat in a storm, then he is a magnificent surgeon performing a one-of-a-kind surgery, then as a cool assassin testifying in a courtroom, and then as a Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot volunteering for a daring, secret suicide mission to bomb an ammunition dump. As the story ends, Mitty imagines himself fearlessly facing a firing squad, "inscrutable to the last."
Each of the fantasies is inspired by some detail of Mitty's mundane surroundings:
[edit] Themes
The story depicts a man whose extremely mundane life is constantly interrupted by the character's escapist fantasies. Whereas the fantasy Mitty is not scared of anything, the real one protests feebly, if at all, at demands that he behave cautiously. Similarly, the admiration bestowed on Mitty in the fantasies contrasts with much less pleasant interactions with real people. Aside from being ordered around by his wife (who seems to genuinely worry about him, and wants to take his temperature to see whether he is sick), Mitty is yelled at by a policeman and a parking lot attendant, and laughed at by a woman who hears him say the words "Puppy biscuit".
Yet none of the fantasies end with Mitty winning through in each dangerous situation; the first four fantasies are interrupted, and the fifth ends with Mitty facing the firing squad.
[edit] Sources
It has been suggested[citation needed] that Thurber got the idea for Walter Mitty from a book by a leading British crime-fiction writer, Anthony Berkeley Cox. Cox, writing as Francis Isles ten years earlier, in a book called Malice Aforethought (Chapter 2), has a character named Dr. Bickleigh who escapes from intolerable reality into fantasies markedly similar in character to those of Mitty.
However, Mitty is very much a Thurber protagonist, so much so that he has been called "the archetype for dreamy, hapless, Thurber Man".[3] Like many of his male characters, such as the husband in "The Unicorn in the Garden" and the physically unimposing men Thurber often paired with larger women in his cartoons, Mitty is dominated and put upon by his wife. Like the man who saw the unicorn, he escapes via fantasies. A similar dynamic is found in the Thurber story "The Curb in the Sky", in which a man starts recounting his own dreams as anecdotes as an attempt to stop his wife from constantly correcting him on the details.
In his 2001 book The Man Who Was Walter Mitty: The Life and Work of James Thurber (ISBN 0-930-75113-2), author Thomas Fensch suggests that the character was largely based on Thurber himself. This is consistent with Thurber's self-described imaginative interpretations of shapes seen with his "two-fifths vision" in his essay "The Admiral on the Wheel".
[edit] Wordplay
Thurber's love of wordplay can be seen in his coining of several nonsense terms in the story, including the pseudo-medical jargon "obstreosis of the ductal tract", "streptothricosis" and "Coreopsis has set in"; and the recurring onomatopoeia of "ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa".
[edit] 1947 film
The story was made into a 1947 movie starring Danny Kaye as a young daydreaming editor for a book publishing firm. The film was adapted for the screen by Ken Englund, Everett Freeman, and Philip Rapp, and directed by Norman Z. McLeod. It was filmed in Technicolor, a rarity at the time.
Thurber was repeatedly consulted about the film's script, but his suggestions were largely ignored by producer Samuel Goldwyn, who had the writers alter the original story to showcase Kaye's talents.[6] In a letter to Life Magazine, Thurber expressed his considerable dissatisfaction with the script, even as Goldwyn insisted in another letter that Thurber approved of it. [7]
[edit] Future film
At one time, producer-directors Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg, with Kevin Anderson as Mitty, were to remake the film, but it fell through. A different production is underway at 20th Century Fox, starring Mike Myers as Mitty.
[edit] Stage adaptations
"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" was adapted to the stage by Thurber as part of the 1960 Broadway Theater revue A Thurber Carnival. The sketch, which closed the show except for "Word Dance Part II", was nearly identical to the short story, except that at the end he cleverly avoids being shot.[8] The original cast for the sketch was as follows:[9]
The story was again adapted for the stage in 1964, this time by Joe Manchester. This musical version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty depicts Mitty at age forty, tempted by "would-be chanteuse" Willa De Wisp to leave his wife Agnes and really live "the Secret Life". It features seventeen songs, with lyrics by Earl Shuman and music by Leon Carr. [10] The musical opened off-Broadway at the Players Theatre on October 26, 1964 and ran for 96 performances.[11]Time Magazine referred to the musical's plot as having been "boldly extrapolated" from the short story, and called the result "a thoroughly pleasant musical evening". [12]Columbia Records issued an original cast recording on LP, also dated 1964.
