INTRODUCTION
Thurber was on much surer, though vaguer, grounds, with The Last Flower, a salute to the imagination for once not tainted with misogyny, for the enemy here is war, the most masculine of occupations. Drawn in 1939 during the shock of the joint Nazi/Soviet invasion of Poland, The Last Flower is an apolitical protest against a world ruled by hard-nosed men of affairs, whose “realism” always seems to lead to death and disaster for humanity. The Edenic innocence of the Man, the Woman, and the Flower don’t provide much policy guidance for overcoming the men with guns, but no one, least of all an artist, should be expected to have all the answers.1
Thurber quickly abandoned his brief career as a political controversialist, which in fact offers few opportunities for “significant” humor. He was giving freer rein to his interest in fantasy in a series of brief pieces he did for the New Yorker called “Fables for Our Time”, each featuring an Aesopian moral at its conclusion. The pieces were later collected in a book, published in 1940, along with items from another series, “Famous Poems Illustrated,” wonderful caricatures designed to accompany the hopelessly square nineteenth century poems that American school kids were then expected to memorize.
Thurber’s Fables are deliberately modeled on Aesop’s Fables. Some of them are rather lazy, “wise-guy” updates of familiar stories, as in the case of “Little Red Riding Hood,” where Red disposes of the Wolf with her trusty automatic. Others are “animals acting human” stories, like “The Bear Who Could Take it or Leave it Alone,” about a bear who is confident that he only chooses to drink. The final twist occurs when, after choosing not to drink, he proves to be just as obnoxious when sober as when drunk—a drinker’s moral if ever there was one.
Thurber naturally indulged his taste for fantasy in these tales, I have rarely cared for fantasy, in part because, if anything can happen, then it really doesn’t matter what does happen. Furthermore, fantasy has a tendency to get “dark” in a hurry. Freed from the burdens of reality, writers often take the opportunity to “settle” things that in real life usually go unavenged. To my mind, fantasy and sadism often go hand in hand, and you can find both in Thurber. Perhaps the most striking is “The Owl Who Was God,” a very mordant tale. Thurber plays with the idea of bird calls becoming speech in a remarkably arch manner as the owl is quizzed by a skeptical secretary bird.
The owl’s gnomic responses, plus his great, staring eyes, which “prove” that he can see in the day as well as the dark, cause a variety of impressionable animals to worship him. Naturally, he leads his hysterical followers out into the middle of the road, where most of them, including the owl, are slaughtered by a speeding truck.
Fortunately, Fables for Our Time is not all blood and guts. It includes one of Thurber’s most famous stories, “The Unicorn in the Garden,” about a rare Thurber man who outwits his shrewish wife, allowing him, it would seem, to spend the rest of his life in a garden with a unicorn, feeding it lilies, a vaguely phallic and presumably paradisiacal fate.
“I was one of the lucky ones,” said E.B. White of James Thurber. “I knew him before fame got him, before blindness got him.” In the early forties, both fame and blindness got to Thurber. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” his most famous short story, appeared in the New Yorker in 1939, the same year that The Male Animal triumphed on Broadway. Both works would be made into feature films, The Male Animal in 1942 and “Mitty” in 1947.
Thurber’s first successes as a writer, in college and after returning home from his service in Paris with the State Department in World War I, had been for the stage, but he seems to have had an incurable lack of confidence in his ability to write anything with a sustained plot. In the late thirties he convinced his great friend and mentor, Elliot Nugent, now enjoying a substantial Hollywood career, to join with him to write a play about a subject immensely “fraught” for Thurber, the conflict between the man of action and the man of words, a subject about which they surely had words as literary gents struggling to survive in the gridiron hothouse known as Ohio State.
- The Last Flower is probably “denounceable” as advocating appeasement or isolation. However, Thurber was a strong anti-Nazi, and I’ve seen no evidence that he followed the “left” position that advocated against U.S. involvement (until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, that is). Like many Americans who loved France, he was horrified by the Nazi conquest of that country. ↩︎
