Thanks to the New York Review Children's Collection for reprinting Thurber's The Wonderful O (1957), a delightful, feverish and slightly drunken word-chant masquerading as a children's book. Pirate Black comes to the Island of Ooroo, burning with a hatred of the letter O, after his mother's death-by-porthole. With his attorney Hyde, they ban the letter through mayhem and court (curt) test cases.
"Why not get rid of all the flowers?" demanded Black one day. "After all, there is an O in flowers."
"I thought of that," said Hyde, "but we must spare collective nouns, like food, and goods, and crops, and tools, and I should think, the lesser schools. I have taken the carpenter's gouge and boards. It still leaves him much too much, but that's the way it goes, with and without O's. He has his saw and ax and hatchet, his hammer and his chisel, his brace and bit, and plane and level, also nails and tacks and brads and screws and staples. But all he can build is bric-a-brac and knickknack, gewgaw, kickshaw, and gimcrack. No coop or goathouse, no stoop or boathouse."
It ends happily. Hyde is killed during his attempted escape, crushed by a collapsing O in a loophole of the law.
A recorded version is listed on Amazon, but I can't risk evaporation of the spell.
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:-)
ReplyDeleteWow, I didn't know he wrote any other kids' books besides The 13 Clocks (which I love).
ReplyDeleteI also was surprised, and found only accidentally at local library. Would have sworn that I knew the entire Thurber oeuvre.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, found only because wrongly-shelved as if by blind authorial ghost. (Ok: gormless libs minion.) Take that, you serendipity-free Kindle.
Thanks so much for your lovely thoughtful comment on my thing at Qarrtsiluni, not least because it brought me here, where I am finding wondrous things...
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