Part 16
The creator of an American legend--I quote from the advertisements--is certainly a wise man. Don Marquis, who now writes his colyum alone, has always had a good second-rate talent for verse, and a good first-rate understanding of humanity. It is the second quality which makes him appreciate the memoirs of William Butler Yeats, and helps him create _The Old Soak_. “Here’s richness”! It was right for him to make an entire second act of that play an ode to hard liquor, with lyric interludes about the parrot, for he is on the side of humanity, against the devils and angels alike. Hard liquor, loafing, decency, are his gods, and he fights grimly, with a tendency to see the devil in modern art. He is against a great many American fetiches: efficiency and Y. M. C. A. morality and getting on; and he has a strong, persistent sentiment for common and simple things. All of these together would not make him a good colyumist without some expressive gift. He has enough to render his most endearing qualities fully. And beyond them he has at times a bitterness which drives him to write like Swift and a fantasy which creates archie and Captain Fitz-Urse, and these also are parts of his wisdom.
Christopher Morley, like Rolla (not, however, Rollo), has come too late into a world too old, and daily dreams himself back into the time when a gentle essayist was the noblest man of letters and William McFee a great novelist. His latest work is bound in Gissing Blue Leather, is admired by Heywood Broun, and has been compared to nearly everything except the Four Gospels. Little children should not be permitted to read his colyum in the New York _Evening Post_, for it is a sort of literary _boy-scoutisme_, and very wrong! (It has recently ceased to exist.)
The influence of the daily column is so great that by this time a goodly portion of the literary criticism--or book-reviewing--appears in that form. Keith Preston is partly colyumist, partly literary critic, estimable if not always just in both departments, and a writer of excellent verse. Of the literary colyumists Broun is the most interesting case. He has a peculiar mind, apt to find a trifling detail the clue to too many great things; he has a great sense for the pompous and the pretentious; he is actually a humorist when he lets go. But a strange thing has happened to him. While he was acquiring a reputation as arbiter of taste in New York by putting down his simple feelings about books and other things, he was slowly becoming aware of the existence of the intellect. It was borne in upon him, as I believe the phrase is, that a work of art is the product of an intellect working upon materials provided by a sensibility. The discovery unnerved him--I might almost say deflowered. For Broun has lost his native innocence; he is a little frightened by the hard young men who sudden let loose the jargon of æsthetics, of philosophy, of the intellect in general--and what is worse, he _thinks_ that they may not be bluffing. He has gone manfully to work, but the middle distance is dangerous. It is likely to produce more dicta like his notorious dismissal of rhythmic prose by a reference to verse rhythms in prose. His characteristic statement is, however, apropos of a flying catch by Aaron Ward, of which, Broun said that no book had ever so affected him with the sense that the humanly impossible had been accomplished. He seems to wonder, now, whether discovering the mind will ever console him if he loses the catch, whether being an amiable, intelligent, courageous, radical humorist, with sufficient taste to dislike the third-rate and a jocular respect for the first rate--whether all this isn’t enough. And all the while the young men of three nations are giving him to believe that the really new movement is going to be intellectual. In the moment of hesitation he does one thing which may save him--slowly renouncing literature, he digs into his humour and works it hard. He or it will be exhausted presently; when that happens he will be out of the woods--on either side.
But I doubt whether Broun ever was as simple as Bugs Baer. His is called roughneck humour--for all I care. The truth is that Baer is one of the few people writing for the newspapers who have a distinct style. K. C. B. has a form which becomes a formula--it is exasperating to read it--one continues as one continues to read the Bull Durham signs along a railroad track. Baer writes like the speech of Falstaff and his companions, with a rowdy exaggeration. His comparisons are far fetched, his conceptions utterly fantastic. His daily commentaries on sport are concise and entertaining, his best work occurs there,[23] but in _The Family Album_, a Sunday feature of the Hearst papers, he succeeds, despite the subject and the length, in communicating his peculiar quality. It is mingled with banalities like “he was hunting quail on toast up in Canada,” but you also get:
So he felt better and met a friend of his and they skipped the Eighteenth Amendment a couple of times and uncle came home and challenged pop to anything. Pop wanted to know what, and uncle said, “Anything at all. There ain’t one thing that you can do that I can’t do better than you.”
He kept up his anonymous boasting and pop said to mom, “Your escaped brother is loose again. That’s him. He takes one drink of that radio liquor and he starts broadcasting.”
Uncle said, “I’ll broadcast you for a row of weather-beaten canal boats. I’m mad and hungry. I’m as hot and hollow as a stovepipe.”
Mom said to pop, “Don’t turn Abimelech away hungry. What does the Good Book say about--”
Pop said, “Oh! That’s been vetoed by the President.”
There follows what he calls “another quaint tribal quarrel” in which “pop laughed a whole octave above sarcastic” and “Mom said, ‘Stop that debate before I take the negative.’”
Everything of Bugs Baer is foreshortened; he is elliptical, omits the middle step. His language is syncopation. His points of reference are all in the common life; I don’t suppose that he has ever touched a book or a play in his column. For all that, he impresses me as a naturally subtle spirit. I may be wrong. He is certainly a joyful one.
_Burlesque, Circus, Clowns, and Acrobats_
BURLESQUE, CIRCUS, CLOWNS, AND ACROBATS
This is a footnote in the interest of justice more than anything else. The general scheme of this book is that it is to be an outline, for each of its major chapters is devoted to a subject about which a book ought to be written--but not by me. In such an outline there is no specified allotment of space, and I have written most on the lively arts in which I myself take the liveliest pleasure. Burlesque is not of these--and I confess to enjoying it most in the person of those artists who come out of it into revue, or vaudeville, or any other framework with which I am familiar and which I admire. I can understand an enthusiast feeling the same way about them as I feel about revue and vaudeville players who try to enter the legitimate stage--that they are corrupted by a desire to be refined. The great virtues of burlesque as I (insufficiently) know it are its complete lack of sentimentality in the treatment of emotion and its treatment of appearance. The harsh ugliness of the usual burlesque make-up is interesting--I have seen sinister, even macabre, figures upon its stage--and the dancing, which has no social refinement, occasionally develops angular positions and lines of exciting effect. I find the better part of burlesque elsewhere, notably in clowns. And instead of trying to be fair to a medium I do not know well, nor care too much about, I have put in a picture which I greatly admire and which probably is more to the point than anything I could write.
I shall try to find a picture for the circus, too. Because the circus is a mixed matter and some of it is superb. The _jeux icariens_ I have never seen except in France: they are really exquisite. They are usually performed by a whole family. The training is exceedingly arduous, must be begun in childhood, and the art is dying out. In this act the essential thing is the use of human bodies as maniable material. The small boy I saw rolled himself into a tight round ball and was caught on the upturned feet of his father, flat on his back, and tossed to another grownup in the same position, the little rolled-up body spinning like a ball through the air. The beauty of the movements, the accuracy and the finesse of the exploitation of energy, delighted. Trained elephants, however, haven’t exactly this quality; and trained seals, agreeable to watch because they are graceful and supple of body, lack something. I have seen a diabolo player who was beautiful to follow, and a juggler who placed two billiard cues end to end on his forehead, threw a ball and caught it at the top of the cues, then dislodged the ball and put it into play with three others. This extraordinary mixture of good and dull things, this lack of character, makes the circus easy to like and useless to think about. The special atmosphere of the circus, the sounds and sights, and smells, are, of course, another matter.
Two of its actual features justify speculation: acrobats and clowns. The American vaudeville player can say nothing worse of an audience than “they like the acrobats.” When they hang by their teeth I cannot respect them; the development of any part of the human body is interesting, no doubt, and I do not wish to insist that there _must_ be an æsthetic interest in every act. But I feel about them as the Chinese philosopher felt about horse-racing: that it is a well-established fact that one horse can beat another, and the proof is superfluous. But there are trapeze workers whose technique is a joy to see and who exploit all the possible turns, leaps, somersaults in air, so that one is pleased and dazzled. I do not wonder that painters in every age have found them a lovely subject. But a lady balanced on one leg of a trapeze bar, smoking a cigarette, fanning herself, _not holding on to anything_--means exactly nothing to me unless it is accomplished with some other quality than nerve. I am sure she will never fall and do not care to be present when she does.
Clowns are different. Even those poor nameless ones who dash in between major acts and with noise and toy balloons divert little children, have some quality. They partake of our tradition about masks, they can’t help having background. Everything exaggerated and ugly in burlesque is here put to the uses of laughter; even the dullest has some gaiety in make-up, in a mechanical contrivance, in gait or gesture. Marceline helping the attendants with Powers’ Elephants at the _Hippodrome_, so busy, so in the way, so unconscious of hindering, always created a little world around himself. Grock is incredible in the faultlessness of his method; as musical-eccentric he surpasses all other clowns, and his simple attitude before chairs and pianos and the other complications of life is a study in creativeness. I have written elsewhere of Fortunello and Cirillino, also great clowns; and they complete this sketchy footnote, since for the greatest clowns I have ever seen, nothing short of a separate title will suffice.[24]
_The True and Inimitable Kings of Laughter_
THE TRUE AND INIMITABLE KINGS OF LAUGHTER
Clowns are the most traditional of all entertainers and one of the most persistent of the traditions about them is that those who have just died were better than those one has laughed at a moment ago. A very obvious reason is that the clowns of the recent past are the clowns of our own childhood. It is my fortunate position never to have seen a clown when I was a child, and all those I have ever laughed at are alive and funny. One of them, the superb Grock, was a failure in New York; the remarkable Fortunello and Cirillino who arrived with the _Greenwich Village Follies_ of 1922 are acrobats of an exceptional delicacy and humour; there isn’t a touch of obvious refinement about them and they are exquisite. And the real thing in knockabout grotesquerie are the three who call themselves, justifiably, the true and inimitable kings of laughter, the brothers Fratellini at the Cirque Medrano in Paris.
The Cirque Medrano is a one-ring circus in a permanent building near the Place Pigalle; ten times a week it fills the vast saucer of its seating capacity at an absurdly low price--the most expensive seats, I believe, are six francs--and presents something a little above the average European circus bill. There are more riding and a few more stunts than at others, and there are less trained animals. And ten times weekly the entire audience shouts with gratification as Francesco Fratellini steps gracefully over the ring, hesitates, retreats, and finally sits down in a ringside seat and begins a conversation with the lady sitting beside him.
The thing which distinguishes the Fratellini and makes them great is a sort of internal logic in everything they do. When the spangled figure with the white-washed face sits down by the ring and chats a moment it is merely disconcerting; at once the logic appears--he is waiting for the show to begin. An attendant approaches and tells him to stop stalling, that the people are waiting to be amused. He replies in an odd English that he has paid his “mawney” and why doesn’t the show begin. Promptly another attendant repeats the message of the first in English; Francesco replies in Italian. By the time the process has been gone through in five languages the clown has changed his tack entirely; you realize that since he doesn’t understand what all these uniformed attendants are saying to him, he thinks that _they_ are the show and he is trying to conceal his own irritation at being made the object of their addresses and at the same time he is pretending to be amused at their antics. The last time he speaks in what seems to be gibberish (it is credibly reported to be rather fair Turkish) and the attendants fall back. From the opposite entrance to the ring arrives a figure of unparalleled grotesqueness--garments vast and loose in unexpected places, monstrous shoes, squares like windowpanes over his eyes, a glowing and preposterous nose. His gait is of the utmost dignity, he senses the situation and advances to Francesco’s seat; and as a pure matter of business he delivers a terrific slap, bows nobly, and departs. Francesco enters the ring. At the same time a third figure appears--a bald-headed man in carefully arranged clothes, a monocle, and a high hat, a stick. The three Fratellini are on the scene.[25]
It is impossible to say what happens there, for the Fratellini have an inexhaustible repertoire. The materials are always of the simplest, and the effects, too; they have hardly any “props,” the costumes, the smiles, the movements, the gestures, are almost exactly alike from day to day. Much of their material is old, for they are the sons and grandsons of clowns as far back as their family memory can carry; I have seen them once appear armed for a fight with inflated bladders, looking precisely like contemporary pictures in Maurice Sand’s book about the _commedia dell’arte_, and on another occasion have seen them so carried away with the frenzy of their activity that they actually improvised and proved their descent from this ancient form. They do burlesque sketches--a barber shop, a bull fight, a human elephant, a magician, or a billiard game; the moment they stop the entire audience roars for “la musique,” the most famous of their acts, remarkable because it has a minimum of physical violence.
_La Musique_ is all a matter of construction and is a wonderful example of the use of material. For at bottom it consists of the efforts of two men to play a serenade and the continual intrusion of a third. Francesco and Paolo arrive, each carrying a guitar or a mandoline, and place two chairs close together exactly in the centre of the ring. They step on the chairs and prepare to sit on the backs, but even this simple process is difficult for them, as neither is willing to sit down before the other, nor to remain seated while the other is still erect, and they must be continually rising and apologizing until one flings the other down and keeps him there until he himself is seated. Ready then, they blow out the electric lights and strike the first notes; but the spotlight deserts them; they are left in the dark and puzzled; they regard one another with dismay and suspicion. Suddenly they see it across the ring and, descending with great gravity, carry their chairs across. Again they start, and again the spotlight goes; their irritation mounts, but their dignity remains and they follow it. It flits back to where they had come from. There is a consultation and the two chairs are returned to their original place in the centre of the ring. Then the two musicians take off their coats, prowl around the ring stalking the light, and fall upon it; then slowly and with much labour they lift the light by its edges and carefully carry it back to their chairs. And as they begin to play the grotesque marches in behind them, unconscious of them, intent only upon his vast horn and the enormous musical score he carries. Unseeing and unseen, he prepares himself, and at about the tenth bar the great bray of his horn shatters the melody of the strings. The two musicians are dismayed, but as they cannot see the source of the disturbance, they try again; again the horn intrudes. This time there is expostulation and argument with the grotesque, but, as he reasonably points out, music was desired and he is doing his share. There is only one issue for such a scene, and it takes place, in a riot.
The preparation of these riots is a work of real delicacy, for the Fratellini know that two things are equally true: violence is funny and violence ceases to be funny. Like Chaplin, they infuse into their violence the sense of reason--they are violent only when no other means will suffice. In the photographer scene they call into action the “august” a stock character of the European circus, played at the Medrano with exceptional skill by M Lucien Godart. The august is a man of great dignity whose office it is to parley with clowns, be the butt of their jokes, and in M Godart’s version, set off their grotesque appearance by an excellent figure and the most correct of evening clothes. (He is in addition a rather good tumbler, and it is part of the Medrano tradition for the audience to hiss him until he grows seemingly furious and turns twenty difficult somersaults around the ring.) The Fratellini, armed with a huge black box and a cloth, ask him to sit for his photograph. Francesco takes it upon himself to explain the apparatus, Paolo standing close by with the three fence posts which represent the tripod, and Alberto, the grotesque waiting near by. Suddenly the tripod falls on Alberto’s feet and he howls with pain; Paolo picks the posts up again, and again they fall, and again he howls. It is unbelievable that this should be funny, yet it is funny beyond any capacity to describe it for one reason which the spectator senses long before he sees it. That is that the tripod is not intentionally thrown on the feet of the grotesque. The fault is Francesco’s, for he is explaining the machine and making serious errors, and every time he makes a mistake Paolo gets excited and forgets that he has the tripod in his hand, and simply lets it drop. One senses his acute regret, and at the next moment one realizes that his scientific zeal, his respect for his profession of photographer, simply does not permit him to let a misstatement pass; his gesture as he turns to set the matter right is so eager, so agonized, that one doesn’t see what has happened to the tripod until it has fallen. And to point the moral of the matter, when the grotesque Alberto after the fifth time picks the tripod up and attempts to slay Paolo, Paolo is again turning toward the others and the blow goes wide.
What the Fratellini are doing here is, to be sure, what every great actor does--they are presenting their effects indirectly. The difficulty for them is that in the end they must give their effects with the maximum of directness--they have to strike a man in the face and make the sound tell. In the scene of the photograph the august is “he who gets slapped” (the phrase is a common one) and the scene is carefully built up through his reluctance and stupidity in posing. At first it is only an exaggeration of the customary difficulties between a photographer and a little child; but as the august becomes more and more suspicious of the intentions of the photographer, the clowns become more and more insistent that he, and nobody but he, shall have his picture taken. Gradually an atmosphere of hostility is built up; the august tries to escape from the ring and is hauled back; then dragged, then forced to sit; the opposing wills grow more and more violent; the audience senses the good will of the clowns, the obstinacy of the august; not a push or shove is given without reason and meaning. And when they see that there is nothing else for it, the three hurl themselves upon the clown in a frenzy of destructiveness and he is rent limb from limb. (In actual fact only his exquisite evening clothes were rent, but the effect is the same.)
In these scenes and almost all their others, the Fratellini escape the reproach of being nothing but violent, while they hold every good element which violence in action can give them. To them are comparable the best (and only the best) of Eddie Cantor’s scenes--when he applied for the job of policeman and when he was examined for the army--where there is a play of motive and a hidden logic. In their world everything must be sensible, and the most sensible thing in the world is to hit out. Behind them is a dual tradition--centuries of laughter and centuries of refining the instruments by which simple laughter can be produced. For it is opposed to their sense of fitness (as it is to ours) that the clown should create an effect of subtlety.[26] The kind of laughter they produce _must_ involve the whole body, but not the mind. They have to be active all the time, so that you are dazzled and cannot think; and they must shake the solid ground under your feet, so that you may shake with laughter. What the critical observer discovers as method must reach the actual average spectator only as effect. All of this the Fratellini have accomplished--“these three brothers who constitute one artist” are the complete and perfect exemplars of their art. Seeing them sometimes twice a week, and nearly two dozen times, I find their qualities inexhaustible. Even in the descriptions of acts noted above it can be seen that they have a definite sense of pace; their changes from fast to slow in the middle of an act, their variations from violence to trickery, their complete mastery of climax, their fertility of invention, are all elements of superiority. But they are only elements in a composition based on something fundamentally right--the knowledge that we have almost forgotten how to laugh in the actual world, and that to make us laugh again they must create a world of their own.
_The Great God Bogus_
THE GREAT GOD BOGUS
If there were an Academy I should nail upon its doors the following beliefs:
That Al Jolson is more interesting to the intelligent mind than John Barrymore and Fanny Brice than Ethel;