So why dogs? The answer is simple: for Thurber, the dog chimed with, represented, the American man in his natural state—a state that, as Thurber saw it, was largely scared out of him by the American woman. When Thurber was writing about dogs, he was writing about men. The virtues that seemed inherent in dogs—peacefulness, courage, and stoical indifference to circumstance—were ones that he felt had been lost by their owners. The American man had the permanent jumps, and the American dog did not. The dog was man set free from family obligations, Monastic Man. Dogs “would in all probability have averted the Depression, for they can go through lots tougher things than we and still think it’s boom time. They demand very little of their heyday; a kind word is more to them than fame, a soup bone than gold; they are perfectly contented with a warm fire and a good book to chew (preferably an autographed first edition lent by a friend); wine and song they can completely forgo; and they can almost completely forgo women.” For Thurber, the dog is not man’s best friend so much as man’s sole dodgy ally in his struggle with man’s strangest necessity, woman.

It’s a language, and a way of talking, that seems a little alien to us now. But it’s central to what Thurber is up to, and why he’s up to it. The war between men and women is his subject, and the Thurber dog is, so to speak, the third body in a three-body problem that fills his work. There’s the Thurber wife and the Thurber husband, and between them is the Thurber dog. The Thurber wife is certain, sighing, exasperated, and idiosyncratically knowing; it’s the wife who knows that the only good diners on the highways are the ones “not at an angle to the road.” The Thurber husband is daydreaming, frightened, and neurotic. The Thurber dog is between them: steadfast, melancholic, in every sense dogged, but complete in himself. When I write about food, I write about hunger, M. F. K. Fisher said. When I write about dogs, I write about dignity, Thurber could have said, because dogs still have it and men do not.

We know now that the Thurber wife became the Thurber wife because of her confinement; her exasperation at the Thurber husband rises from her frustration at being only a wife. She became the Thurber wife because she could not become, as she can now, the Thurber boss; her bossiness is an expression of her being precluded from being an actual leader. The Thurber triangle is altered now. But that doesn’t reduce the intensity with which it was realized, or make less moving its third angle, that of dog and man. What gets to Thurber is not so much the dog’s eagerness, or the loyalty, or the bravery, or any other would-be virtue so much as the dog’s inherent and ordinary dignity.

Within the world of the Thurber dog there are many different specimens and varieties. Thurber dogs worth thinking about include the Boston bull terrier Feely, whom Emma Inch, the part- time cleaning lady, carries with her in her arms wherever she goes, and the poodle who threw up in Thurber’s car on her way to a dog show. Then there are the memorable dogs who filled up the cellar at 921 South Champion Avenue, only to emerge one night in “a snarling, barking, yelping swirl of yellow and white, black and tan, gray and brindle as the dogs tumbled into the kitchen, skidded on the linoleum, sent the food flying from the plate, and backed Aunt Mary into a corner.” But the Alpha and the Omega, the two poles of Thurber’s dog lore, are dogs from his Columbus boyhood: Muggs the Airedale, portrayed in “The Dog That Bit People,” and Rex the bull terrier, memorialized in one of the New Yorker pieces collected in “The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs,” “Snapshot of a Dog.” (Rex is actually what we now call a pit bull.) Muggs is the stubborn, stolid, unpleasant side of the nature that man and dog share, though with man now it must be kept under wraps. He bites. Rex is the noble, stoical side of that same nature. He fetches. (He fights, too, but the fighting is somehow more ritual than rage.)

Muggs, though irredeemably bad-tempered, is still an essentially benevolent presence, since it is his essence to do what he likes: “He was sorry immediately, Mother said. He was always sorry, she said, after he bit someone, but we could not understand how she figured this out. He didn’t act sorry.” This perfect sequence of observations marks the Thurber sound: plain to the point of bareness, they’re funny because they make no effort to bridge the man/dog gap, and because they leave no simpler way with which to say what must be said. (A lesser writer might have written, “You never sensed in his behavior any regret,” instead of “He didn’t act sorry.”) Resolutely unsentimentalized, Muggs makes a pass at everyone, even his mother—Muggs has the poise of the unpersuadable. He may be difficult, but he isn’t absurd. Rex is the other side, as dumb as a post, but as resolute as one, too: “There was a nobility about him. He was big and muscular and beautifully made. He never lost his dignity even when trying to accomplish the extravagant tasks my brother and myself used to set for him.” His readiness to do anything he’s asked is what makes Rex matter: