The Last Flower by James Thurber

This is the second of what will be four or five posts on the Library of America James Thurber Writings and Drawings volume. I'm reading it in chunks, since I'm not the man that can go straight through a thousand-page book these days, and most of those chunks are excerpts from the various books Thurber published, because LoA didn't want to put out a multi-volume complete Thurber for whatever reason (I'm guessing budget or space on the list or a sense of his importance; mostly likely a combination of all three).

The first post was titled after The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times. This one is slightly sillier, since I'm going to write about two hundred-odd pages of Thurber under the name of a short fabulistic drawn book from the eve of WWII. The Last Flower is available as a separate book, if you want it that way.

See that first post for more details on Thurber and the LoA book, if you care.

The clump I got to this time is from the late Thirties: extensive selections from the two collections The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze and Let Your Mind Alone!, and then Last Flower itself.

Middle-Aged Man is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction - or, rather, has a bunch of stories about mostly married couples, some of which are explicitly framed as reminiscences of Thurber, and some of which have characters described in the third person and given other names. They're all in the same tone and style, all in that Thurber voice, and they work well together as a collection. (I have no idea how much else was in the original book, or how similar it was; compiler Garrison Keillor edited out some unknown amount of material from all of these books to fit it into a single LoA volume.) There are a few autobiographical pieces that are not about men and women, too, I should mention. Particularly the famous "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox," which many readers may have found in some anthology somewhere or other.

Let Your Mind Alone! is a somewhat more themed collection - the full title includes and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces. Let Your Mind Alone! itself is a series of ten linked essays about a bunch of then-well-known pop-psychology books; Thurber returns to the same four or five writers repeatedly over the course of the series. All the books seem to be in the "how to be happy" mode, aimed at a relatively affluent, urban, educated audience - I'm pretty sure this series of essays was in The New Yorker originally; it's exactly that sort of audience - and Thurber takes a very dim view of all of their recommendations and ideas. It's amusing, but not particularly relevant, ninety years later - we've had at least a dozen different pop-psych phases since then, and this one is quite musty and unfamiliar, although the general outlines don't change all that much.

Also from Let Your Mind Alone! comes eight miscellaneous pieces - pretty much along the same lines as the ones in Middle-Aged Man, and equally amusing. These tend to skew more towards autobiography, though it also included one of Thurber's best-known man/woman stories, "The Breaking Up of the Winships."

And then The Last Flower was published in November of 1939, and apparently made very quickly just before that time: it could be seen as a very early graphic novel, telling its story with one big image to each page with a caption underneath. (The alternative interpretation is that it's a picture-book format, like so many books for children, only this one is for an adult audience.) It starts in the aftermath of "World War XII," which led to the collapse of civilization. Most of humanity is full of anomie and despair, for the usual fabulist unspecified period of time, but one young woman and one young man nurture the last flower in the world, which leads to the rebirth of civilization...and, then, inevitably, to the next world war, which reduces the world to only one man, one woman, and one flower.

I see that Last Flower is generally considered guardedly optimistic, even with its cyclical destruction. But I instead see escalation in it: WW XII destroys civilization but leaves a large number of people alive to go on; WW XIII kills all but two people. Clearly, to my pessimistic mind, the next cycle will finish the job entirely.

Thurber is a somewhat limited writer: he had a distinctive style and set of concerns (Last Flower is mostly outside of those, though, I should say) which he turned into a stream of amusing and thoughtful pieces for about thirty years. For most of us, a thousand pages of Thurber would be too much all at once, but two hundred pages or so - like I did this time - is a fine dose, and I recommend it.