Always happy to answer a question about Thurber, one of my
favorite authors.
Jack "Pal" Smurch, the protagonist of
"The Greatest Man in the World," is an assistant mechanic who has recently achieved the
remarkable feat of flying a single-engine plane around the world. He is soon going to
be lifted to "the heights of fame"; the problem, however, is that he does not possess
"the intelligence, background, and character successfully to endure the mounting orgies
of glory" that will be offered to him.
When reporters try
to dig up the story of Smurch's life, they find that it is not fit to print. He is a
"little vulgarian" who leers rather than smiles. He is a "nuisance and a menace," who
once knifed the principal of his high school and once spent time in a reformatory for
stealing an altar-cloth from a church.
When Smurch is first
interviewed by the press after his landing, he does not display the modesty that was
expected of heroes; instead, he tells the reporters, "I put it over on Lindbergh," a
disparaging reference to Charles Lindbergh, who "only" managed to fly his little plan
across the Atlantic Ocean.
Thurber seems to be satirizing
the way people who performed great feats were typically portrayed in the media as moral
paragons, whether they were or not. Thurber wrote first published this story in 1931. I
doubt that someone could write such a story in our contemporary times, when people like
Paris Hilton can become celebrities on the basis of little else beside the
irresponsibility and immorality of their behavior.
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