Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Daydream believer

The creation of the legendary New Yorker writer James Thurber has long been used as shorthand for a person with fantastical tendencies. But there's a bit of Walter Mitty in all of us, argues Andrew Buncombe - and the spin doctors of Downing Street ought to know that better than anyone

Thursday 07 August 2003 00:00 BST
Comments

The storm is rapidly turning into a hurricane, but somehow the old Navy hydroplane has to get through. "Switch on No 8 auxiliary," cries Commander Walter Mitty, as he takes the controls. His men grin at one another as they are knocked one way and another by the storm. "The Old Man'll get us through," they whisper. "The Old Man ain't afraid of hell."

Except, of course, Walter Mitty is not a naval commander fearless of hell but rather a meek-mannered man who, in reality, is driving his wife into town for an appointment at her hairdresser. "Not so fast! You're driving too fast," she chastises her husband, as he quickly wakes from his daydream to find himself at the wheel of his mundane family car. "What are you driving so fast for?"

In these opening scenes of what has become one of American literature's most famous short stories, the humorist and writer James Thurber affectionately and precisely captures the quintessential daydreamer, the person whose imagination carries him or her away from the humdrum to the fantastic, away from the hectoring voice in their ear to something more spectacular and heroic.

That story, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, was first published in 1939 in The New Yorker magazine, but this week, proof of the timelessness of Thurber's daydreaming character was provided from the most unlikely of places, and in circumstances that even Thurber's imagination might not have dreamt up. In a conversation with The Independent's deputy political editor, Paul Waugh, a "senior Whitehall source" - later revealed by other newspapers to be the Prime Minister's official spokesman, Tom Kelly - described Dr David Kelly, the weapons expert who was found dead several weeks ago having apparently committed suicide, as "a Walter Mitty character". The implications of the "off-the- record" briefing were obvious - that this man was a fantasist who pretended that he knew more than he really did.

There was an outcry from the friends and family of Dr Kelly, and Tom Kelly issued a hastily prepared and rather strangulated statement in which he apologised for any offence caused, and tried to claim that his comments had been taken out of context. "What I was trying to do... was to outline questions facing all the parties that the Hutton inquiry would have to address. It was in that context that the phrase 'Walter Mitty' was used, but it was meant as one of several questions facing all parties, not as a definitive statement of my view, or that of the Government."

It is not clear whether Tom Kelly has ever read any Thurber, but it would be hard for him to argue that he was not aware of the inference of what he had said. Since Thurber's story appeared in The New Yorker, and was then subsequently made into a 1947 movie starring Danny Kaye, the name of the henpecked Walter Mitty has entered the lexicon as a shorthand for a daydreamer, for someone who exaggerates their importance or position. In short, a fantasist.

"I don't think it would have happened without the involvement of Hollywood," says Professor E Donald Hirsch, senior editor of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, which says of Thurber's character: "A person who dreams of living a romantic life may be called a Walter Mitty."

"That is what got it over the lump. The New Yorker was not that well read. I think it was the movie. That is the way that a lot of these things happen."

Thurber never liked the film. Born in 1894 in Columbus, Ohio, Thurber had a somewhat dysfunctional childhood. His father was a mild, timid man who only ever had menial jobs, while his mother was a domineering force in the family home, and a keen practical joker. Once, she surprised guests by explaining that she was kept in the attic because of her love for the postman. On another occasion, she pretended to be a cripple and attended a faith-healer's revival, jumping suddenly up and proclaiming herself cured.

While Thurber considered his mother "a born comedienne", it was in his father that many believe he found his inspiration for the daydreaming Mitty. "There is no more classic a description of a henpecked man than that," says Thomas Fensch, author of two books on the writer, including The Man who was Walter Mitty: The Life and Work of James Thurber. "He has captured perfectly the inept American male dominated by a female. There has been no better story about the American male than The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."

The whole point of Thurber's story, as it appeared in The New Yorker and then in the collection My World and Welcome to It, is that Mitty fantasises wildly about becoming someone else, but never actually changes. In the space of around just 2,500 words, he dreams of being a deadly marksman charged with a killing ("With any known make of gun I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at 300ft with my left hand"); a soldier in wartime; a world-famous surgeon saving a patient's life; and a condemned man calmly facing the firing squad, smoking a final cigarette and shaking away the offer of a blindfold.

Yet, despite all of his daydreaming, Mitty remains Mitty. When his wife returns from the hairdresser she nags him about whether he has bought the dog food and overshoes that she had told him to get. The Danny Kaye movie - along with a remake by Steven Spielberg starring Jim Carrey, due to be released next year - changes the original plot and has some of Mitty's daydreams actually come true.

This is not a minor matter, and it is why Thurber, who died in 1961, so disliked the film to which he was hired as a script adviser. His vision of the story saw Mitty as the everyday person in the street, someone who fantasises and dreams but for whom the unchanging humdrum is the reality. His daydreams - and Downing Street would do well to note this distinction - are nothing more than that: his behaviour in the real world, and the way he interacts with other people, does not change as a result of them.

For Harrison Kinney, author of a respected Thurber biography, and editor of the recently published The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber, that is the precise attraction of the Mitty character, and an important factor in the way the phrase has been adopted - especially by anyone who has actually read the story for themselves.

"Most people, men and women I think, felt he was writing about them," he says. "We all have daydreams. That is what it is about. He summed it up in a short piece for all of us."

Kinney detects a dark side to the story of Walter Mitty, a certain misogyny perhaps, and a reflection that Thurber's first marriage was far from happy. "Of course, there is a dark side. No man can be lonelier than when unhappily married, and you get the impression he was," he said. "Thurber was something of a misogynist... the wife is always in charge and bossing the man around. But we all feel we are being pushed around by circumstances we can't control, by our boss or whatever."

Among the many people surprised that Mr Kelly chose to liken the highly respected weapons inspector to Thurber's most famous character, in what has been interpreted as a clear attempt to smear his name, is the writer's daughter Rosemary, who now controls her late father's estate.

Speaking from her home in Michigan, she says: "I have not seen the phrase used as anything other than positive. It is a belief in two worlds - there's the real world, and then there's the dream life. Walter is the well-mannered henpecked husband, but his dreams are out of this world."

She is unsure whether her father would have been surprised by the way Walter Mitty had entered the lexicon. On reflection, she doubts that he would have been. "I think we all know that when you hit the nail on the head - and people understand because they are living it - then it carries on and there is life to it."

She is adamant, however, that in her father's most famous creation there is something positive, something wholesome and healthy: an understanding that sometimes we all dream about how things might be, how things could turn out, who we might be, and what sort of lives we might lead if only we could escape the chains that hold us back. It is something to which we can all relate, whether we sit in a office on a rainy February afternoon dreaming of opening a beach bar in Jamaica; or drive down the traffic-clogged M25 imagining ourselves at the wheel of a 1964 Mustang in the Indy 500.

Walter Mitty is a hero for every one of us who has played the lottery; or has picked up the shampoo bottle in the shower, dreamt it into a microphone, and then belted out our lungs for the benefit of a stadium packed with adoring fans. He stands for those of us who have run out on to a muddy, sloping football pitch on a damp Sunday morning, knowing inside that we were really on the hallowed turf of Wembley.

So, it's perfectly possible that, from time to time, the Nobel-prize nominee Dr Kelly was a Walter Mitty character; but then, so, hopefully, is his namesake who tried to undermine the scientist's reputation with such a cheap shot. Unless, that is, he is content to spend his time smearing the name of a dead man on behalf of the Government.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in