Читать книгу The Anatomy of Harpo Marx - Wayne Koestenbaum - Страница 12

The Mad Mohel’s Goo-Goo Eyes of Monomaniacal Attunement

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935)

Any other thinks, and then at once thinks something else. I cannot think something else, I think one thing all my life. —FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, Demons

I

MONOMANIA: TRAGEDY IS CUTE Monotheistic, I stick to Harpo. My sentences bear a grudge against development: at one star, they statically stare. If Groucho, Chico, and Harpo are the Trinity, I ignore Father and Son, and put all my eggs in the Holy Ghost’s basket.

Harpo, a tenor’s valet, puts on his boss’s costume (Madama Butterfly’s Captain Pinkerton) and salutes. Harpo’s eyes bulge with pleasure at fitting into a category (“obedience”) while betraying it. Hand raised at military attention, he looks like John-John saluting JFK’s coffin. We call such an image “cute” because it makes tragedy diminutive and comestible. Cuteness is an exempt island populated by kids, pets, and neuters.

Indeed, I consider “cuteness” a philosophically resonant concept. Kitty Carlisle comforts Harpo, who clutches himself. I refuse to demean this image by calling it corny or camp. Instead, I’ll call it cute, or catastrophic: pathos hits the ecstatic spectator and folds consciousness, creating a complicated hinge.

Harpo should be embarrassed to wear pajamas in Kitty’s presence. His vulgar shirt, popping out, matches his eyes. Call them speaking eyes, eyes that bring the other into existence, eyes that do not merely receive but that actively host the other. Kitty Carlisle Hart died in 2007; I’d hoped to interview her, but missed my chance.

HARPO AND CHICO GREET EACH OTHER: STYLIZATION OF ENCOUNTER By stylizing their reunion and breaking it down into steps, Harpo and Chico prolong the threshold of mutual greeting.

The greeting begins with exaggeration. Harpo’s wide-open arms hail Chico and exaggerate encounter’s bliss. (No one tells him, “Down, dog. Don’t get so excited.”) We’ve seen them greet each other this way before. Their rapprochement obeys a fixed, inelastic structure.

Harpo whistles and points when he sees Chico. By pointing, Harpo draws significance like a demiurge from a subterranean cave.

After the hug, shame kicks in: Harpo pro-phylactically begins the shushing routine, finger over lips. Long ago, someone told Harpo to shut up. Afraid that Chico will say “shut up” again, Harpo shushes himself (self-mutilation, as if with a razor) in advance; and then, cheerful sprite, he forgets the self-silencing and restages the hug. Harpo’s rhythm: (1) hug, (2) shame-shushing, (3) hug, (4) shame-shushing. Playing fort-da (reunion, separation, reunion), the boys make a sandwich of their greeting: two hugs contain a shameful filling.

FORT-DA: THE DESIRE TO BE CONKED OUT I repeatedly bring up fort-da: the scene, Freud’s concoction, of absence followed by presence. I know too well its slap-slap back-and-forth, deprivation after gorging, disappointment after closeness.

Fort-da. Gone, there. Har-po. Harpo bops his boss’s head with a mallet, knocking him out, and then revives him with smelling salts. Groucho says, “You feel sorry for what you’ve done, right?” Harpo nods repentance. When the boss reawakens, Harpo automatically conks him on the head again. (Being conked out is bliss.) Henri Bergson suggests that comedy depends on mechanical behavior; I see a connection between Harpo’s rote antics and the mechanical decor of Marcel Duchamp’s art, his Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or his spiraling-wheel film (Anemic Cinema). Surrealists drained feeling from sexuality by emphasizing its technological shapes, just as Harpo drains horror from violence through unthinking actions. His urge to wreak havoc is a harmless reflex, like yawning. It doesn’t matter which direction the amoral action proceeds; Harpo, a sluice, opens and closes with machinic will, like Nietzsche’s chthonic “spirit of music.”

HARPO AS KISSING MACHINE To call Harpo’s eroticism “machine-like” makes it seem intellectually acceptable, unsentimental: I don’t want you to think that Harpo is corny when he kisses Kitty and then kisses an old gent. I’d rather you think him mechanical. Harpo’s adhesiveness respects no categories (including gent versus dame). His impulse, programmed to continue, must exhaust itself through repetition, a rampage that climaxes when he kisses the captain. No matter how many times Harpo releases tension, he still takes pleasure in repeating the infraction, the annunciatory nugget, be it a honk or a kiss.

HARPO’S PERSISTENT SLEEPINESS Harpo hits the jackpot. We don’t know what the jackpot is—but we understand that he has the power to hit it. At this moment, his jackpot is narcolepsy, or an uncontrollable desire to drop dead. Gerard de Nerval’s Aurélia and André Breton’s Nadja—literary models for principled immersion in somnolence—lead me to claim Harpo’s drowsiness (or drowsiness in general) as omnipotence, the sleeper ruling an invisible domain.

In the stateroom, Harpo stows away, snoozing in the luggage drawer. He finds the drawer comfortable, not cramping, as Moses enjoyed his bulrushes, or Jesus his manger’s cribbed containment—enclosures that belong to D. W. Winnicott’s category, the holding environment. Notice Harpo’s full, drooping hands, his thick fingers, his happiness at being upheld by Chico and Allan Jones (who fills Zeppo’s straight-man shoes and will star the following year with Irene Dunne in Show Boat). I remember pretending to sleep, on a boat in choppy Monterey Bay, while my Norwegian friend fished with his father. After throwing up over the rail, I feigned coma to avoid manly bait-and-tackle.

THE FANTASY OF BEING PUT TO SLEEP BY A HANDSOME FRUITCAKE TENOR Groucho calls Harpo a “bag of Jell-O.” Allan, the handsome tenor, tucks the bag of Jell-O into bed—a covertly epiphanic moment. Imagine Allan—or any other singer too lovely to qualify for conventional manhood—putting you to bed, or hiding you in a drawer. He fulfills my Gordon MacRae fantasy; Nelson Eddy will serve in a pinch.

My student, an Allan Jones type, appearing in a college production of The Mikado, sang “A Wand'ring Minstrel I”: though I was the professor, I became the bag of Jell-O, tucked away in the drawer, because the soapily attractive student occupied a position (a category) of songful naïveté. I could greet the naïveté as if I were a foreigner saluting someone else’s native land. The student’s high voice made me the object-in-the-drawer, the tucked-away thing. John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and Grease also inspires my wish to be the ironed, folded object. Cute male songfulness sends me into a parallel category: sleep.

OVERORDERING EGGS In the hallway Groucho orders food from the steward. Formulaically, repeatedly, Chico, from the stateroom, adds his own request, “And two hard-boiled eggs”; piggybacking, Harpo honks his horn. In response to Harpo’s request, Groucho increases the order: “Make that three hard-boiled eggs.” Harpo expresses his greedy, automatic wish for food mechanically, via horn honks. Harpo, potentate, King Tut, laid out in state, honks from the dead: I want a hard-boiled egg. His needs don’t change. They can only be repeated, amplified. Does Harpo want an egg? Or does he simply want his sleeping presence to be noticed? Harpo’s infantile incomprehensibility sends forth an imperial demand. I don’t insist on his demand’s moral rectitude. I don’t celebrate its size. I celebrate its clear enunciation—and the paradoxical contrast between Harpo’s physical immobility (supposedly asleep) and his audible need (I want eggs). I praise not egotism but the unanswered.

Harpo overorders eggs. I come from a family of overorderers. My mother’s mother crammed her refrigerator with food “it would be a crime not to eat.” Harpo’s reiterated demand for eggs remembers his mother Minnie’s multiple production of brothers.

SEARCH FOR STASIS Harpo leans, still asleep, against the maid making the bed—not merely because he wants her body, but because he wants a surface, any surface. The maid—her white uniform nurse-like—tries to pry him off. She doesn’t consider him human. What’s this burden—leech or lech—on my back? Groucho interprets Harpo’s action—wrestling the maid— as groping. I interpret Harpo’s gesture as a search for stasis—a planet wanting to gird itself in the solar system’s loins. Like a corpse in Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry or Rope, Harpo’s deadness encumbers and enlivens the plot. How can we deal with his stinking weight?

TYPOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION If this image were a painting, we might call it a “deposition”— a mannerist depiction of Christ, or Harpo, brought down from the cross. I like to compare secular figures to Christ, who offers a metaphor for exemplariness itself. Leaning against a fat engineer, Harpo acts the part of Christ. Compositionally, as if in Caravaggio’s Deposition from the Cross, the diagonal object—Harpo—creates drama and swirl. Supported, he rides atop others; sleepy, he seems a dead body, the storm’s eye, the slash that cuts across the tumult and corrects it.

Harpo’s dumb presence reminds me of the donkey in Robert Bresson’s film Au hasard Balthazar: Harpo, too, will be kicked, abandoned to die on a hillside. I have typological tendencies. (Typological criticism seeks analogues in the Old Testament for events in the New.) I take Harpo as type for something else. In a dream last night I played Harpo on a TV show, my costume a hodgepodge of available scraps. I lingered, waiting to hear my Harpo impersonation’s ripple effect on dowager consciousness: a grande dame lived in this liminal TV studio, a Mission-style mansion overlooking not one river but two . . .

HYPNOTIZED BY MATERNAL DEATH: POINTING FINGER Emerging from the trunk, Harpo looks dazed, hypnotized by claustrophobic maternal presence, or paralyzed by maternal death. Bug eyes show him to be a boy just this instant being born and already looking dead. He pretends to consider his emergence from this trunk (Judy Garland’s “Born in a Trunk”?) a joyous nativity, but he looks like Dracula rising from a coffin in the ship’s belly. Acolyte, Harpo holds his pilgrim staff as Parsifal held the eventually salvific spear.

Harpo, like a pointing Christ, outstretches his finger. Chico, gabbing, has turned his back. Harpo gestures, with his finger, a second time, a gesture that Chico disregards, for he has the hubris of the speaking, the vocally agile, while Harpo has the sanctified innocence of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, or any role model whose naïveté combines intensity and ignorance.

HEAD-WIGGLE Harpo’s head-bobbing—“head-wiggle,” I’ll call it—is not my favorite of his mannerisms: he bobs his head to feign indifference. I’d prefer him to acknowledge external impingements: when his head wiggles, he lowers himself to drum-major status, an extra in the “Before the Parade Passes By” number from Hello, Dolly!—a canned rendering of holiday spirit and public ceremony. No one admires Harpo’s head-wiggle, though it provides immunity from pogrom.

DUMBFOUNDED BY NOURISHMENT’S PHANTOM PROSPECT: HARPO AS MUSELMANN, AS DIRT Suppertime for Harpo. The Italian chef hands him a plate. Dumbfounded, mouth agape, Harpo gazes blankly at the paralyzing offer. No one has handed him a plate before. Oliver Twist, too, wanted more. Finally, more arrives. Toward pleasure’s imminence Harpo maintains a deadened stance. Pleasure is an event he can’t quite think. In line, receiving sauce, shocked Harpo recalls the figure in Auschwitz (as described by Primo Levi and other survivors) known as the Muselmann, the captive who has given up the will to live. Liberation’s bounty hasn’t broken through to Harpo, a Bedlamite who responds to plenitude’s arrival with a frozen double-take; he stares at the plate, at the man serving him, and then back at the plate. He tries to establish consequentiality, cause-effect relations: he tries to understand how the donor has a relation to the donated object.

Harpo impersonates death-in-life: the face of the Muselmann, the vanquished. Harpo, emblem of the prankster, the giddy fool, who says “yes” to life, also embodies the “no.” Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, writes: “Precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings—really, more weights than human beings—nothing does us as much good as a fool’s cap.” Harpo dangles within our reach a liberating fool’s cap—the opportunity to be permanently foolish. And yet he reminds us, when his stare goes dead, of the direness of becoming weight (stone, dirt) rather than human being.

Paradoxically, the prospect of nourishment—of gratuitously offered food, heaped high on his plate—prompts Harpo’s free fall into Muselmann deadness.

RUBBING Obsessive thoroughness: Harpo wipes his plate clean with a heel of bread. He rubs the bread to death; he rubs past the point of no return. Once a motion starts, comic mechanicity takes over: the rubbing machine has its own logic. Wishful dreamers rub; Aladdin rubs the lamp to produce a genie. Continuous pressure, however, deadens pleasure. You need to alternate rubbing with not-rubbing. Harpo rubs and rubs until he kills the grain. So does the reiterating interpreter. Interpretation rubs without cessation. With persistent pressure, I rub Harpo to insist: he exists.

Harpo bounces up and down on his seat as he plays the harp. Butt up, butt down. He devotes himself to repeated actions—to impress on others that he is a hard worker—but also to give himself the pleasure of repeated thwacking and rubbing. I feel Jewish when I praise hard work. I hope that my labor—gilding Harpo—isn’t pointless drudgery, like the scholarship of George Eliot’s Casaubon, compiler of the impossible key to all mythologies.

Of my great-grandfather, Isaac Wolf Orgel, dead long before my birth, I know almost nothing, except that he translated (a fact I repeat) the first five books of the Torah into Yiddish—a study book published on Eldridge Street, New York City’s Lower East Side, in 1916, when Harpo was twenty-eight years old. Through repeated, incremental acts of attentiveness, Harpo rubbed and polished his persona, a solidity he submitted to additive shinings.

Do spectators believe that fools have complex inner lives, or do dramatic heroes and heroines hold the monopoly on emotional depth? Pamina, in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, profoundly suffers, but Papageno, like Harpo, merely pipes. Am I a piper or a sufferer? I dreamt I was a yogi, hiking barefoot through marshy and Germanic-sublime terrain reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich paintings: companions disappeared, but clouds compensated.

HUMILIATION: DIVIDING HARPO INTO EDIBLE BITS Seeking permission-to-exist, Harpo spins the piano stool—a self-spanking machine—and lifts his butt: the stool meets it. He swerves eyes to see kids loving his vaudevillian butt-trick. The crowd humiliates the clown, who retaliates by dragging spectators into his ass. Soon, he changes to a soigné mode, spits on his fingers, and rubs them together, ready to roll dice; he looks rakish, like a bombshell’s husband— Lana Turner’s Artie Shaw, or Marilyn Monroe’s Joe DiMaggio. The kids around him form a C, an inlet, an Amalfi Coast, a half-moon enclosure.

The keyboard lid falls on Harpo’s hand. While he sucks his sore fingers, I note the well-developed forearm muscle, an edible lump. (Cannibalistic fantasy: I imagine a link between humans and poultry.) The kids, laughing, neuter him with mockery, yet humiliation resexualizes him as the abject. Because humiliation baptizes Harpo anew, he invites shameful situations, which bring secret rewards, like the shivering glow of glass flowers in Harvard’s Museum of Natural History, flowers I’ve never visited, tourist-treasures that symbolize useless artistry. A former flame who praised them called me “Moose,” a nickname I pretended to consider a compliment.

Harpo’s hand, a washrag, wipes the keys. The kids laugh at his loose hand, suspended from a limp wrist. I can turn my wounded state into comic material, into framed “business.” A comic “bit” is a repeatable morsel of laughable self-presentation. I divide Harpo back into the bits that he produced in order to exist.

MENTALLY INCOMPETENT WOMAN IN THE CORNER OF HARPO’S INSTRUMENT Is she mentally challenged, or simply toothless, old, and indigent? She looks uncultivated. Not a Carnegie Hall gal. An idiot worships an idiot: two versions of pastoral. She lacks teeth; he lacks words. You’d only notice her if you stopped the film to isolate this image and to look beyond Harpo’s transcendentally upward gaze and lumpen proletariat arm. (Or else consider his arm a cultivated musician’s, like the arm of Arnold Schoenberg, who played tennis in Hollywood with Harpo.) Harpo, gazing upward, might be studying the moon, or searching for his muse. The toothless woman in the corner undercuts his lofty aims. I need an idiot in the corner of my own canvas, to convey that I’m a simpleton, not a man of ideas.

SUDDEN, FETISHISTIC APPEARANCE OF ANNA MOFFO BEHIND HARP STRINGS A moment later, when Harpo starts to play, the simpleton hermaphrodite disappears. Now, through harp strings, we see a dreamboat ingénue who reminds me of my favorite soprano, the late Anna Moffo—dimples, pale eagerness, dark hair, the coloration of Nastasya in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. That concatenation (midnight hair, blanched skin, raving eyes) warns us that nearby, in the ballroom, in the next paragraph, we will see doomed affections and a susceptibility to a fevered, socially irresponsible rampage of mental impressions. When we pay monomaniacal attention to one star, we open the door to adjacent fetishes. Focusing on Harpo, I’m ambushed by the soprano doppelgänger, dimpled and affettuoso, behind the harp-string scrim.

II

BUG EYES OF ECSTASY As Harpo plays, suddenly he goes bug-eyed. (Is this effect chosen or unconscious?) Eyes grow italicized—a night-driving car’s high beams. Don’t ask why his eyes pop out. Instead, ask why it gives me pleasure to notice them popping out. I’ll keep my eyes fixed and bug-like, to shield against trance’s termination. When his eyes go buggy, I have more chance of being seen by him. I, as Harpo, have more chance of seeing, recording, getting credit for being visionary and demon-possessed. Eye-shine signifies the fetish, at least according to Freud, who plays with the word Glanz—shine—when writing about a nose. Uncanniness concentrates in shiny places.

TRACE OF MATRILINEAGE’S STOLIDITY IN HARPO’S FACE Harpo’s face reveals matrilineage: in his cheeks I detect the doughy contentment of a face I’ve only seen in photos—my father’s mother, Ilse Gutfeld, good field, from Berlin. I was told that her father owned a “candy manufactory.” Strange word: manufactory. Lost vocations, vanished taxonomies of labor: Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929, the year after my father’s birth, mentions obsolete, small professions (Apollo Linen Renting Agency, Feitel’s Grain Dealer, Adler’s Wet-Wash Service). In Harpo’s face I find the wet-washer’s willingness to be inanimate. My father’s face went dead when I watched him watching my mother; his face froze when I complained.

IS THERE LAUGHTER IN THE UNCONSCIOUS? My method: remove comedy from images, and see what remains. What do Harpo’s scenes look like if we confront the material coldheartedly? Is there laughter in the unconscious?

My hypothesis: it is possible, whether man or woman, to feel light-hearted about the state of being castrated. By castrated, I mean: deprived of viability. Deprived of one’s joy, one’s toy. It is possible to be lighthearted about the little death that castration represents, and to treat disenfranchisement as comedy. (If I continue to use the word castration, I might get in trouble.)

Chico throws Harpo’s comb-harmonica out the porthole, which Harpo opens, ready to jump. Happy man, halfway out the birth-hole, experiences autonativity: giddily Harpo emerges from the ship’s orifice to refind his puny, beggared instrument.

THE NUMBER THREE IS UNCANNY Harpo lands in the cabin of three sleeping men—Jews, explorers, rabbis, with Pharaoh Hatshepsut beards. As in a fairy tale, where triads reign, Harpo confronts three brothers asleep in one grave-bed: these strangers might be communists, satisfied with homogeneity, individuality erased. Wrong room? He has actually landed in the right room, the room that will explain fraternity. In close-up, Harpo, shocked, greets an apparition already present in his unconscious: three brothers, devoured by sleep and sameness.

The cutting game rebegins. Harpo lifts one man’s beard: a puzzling butterfly flies out, prompting Harpo to snap scissors midair. He’ll settle for any object—he remains loyal to the scissors, not to their prey. Harpo wants to scissor the Angel of Death, the soul, the special effect, the fourth brother, embodied in a butterfly, whose flight reminds us that Harpo himself is flighty, not tethered.

NODS When Chico speaks, Harpo nods, movements minimized, hands at his side: I agree with my brother. Strict rules hold me in place. I won’t budge. I enjoy bondage’s compos mentis. Cuteness saves Harpo from execution. Lacking judgment, I am your corroboration machine. Nods will accrue interest. Instants of emptied-out agreeability, of echo, will consolidate into ingot. I achieve transcendence sequentially, through a lifetime of nodding. When the emcee invites Harpo to speak, he shakes his head no; delaying, he drinks glass after glass of water, which dribbles down his chin and dissolves his fake beard— an image that Roland Barthes uses to describe identity’s unclassifiability. To avoid speaking, Harpo accepts the bearable humiliation of wetting himself.

HARPO AS MAD MOHEL The sticky beard travels among men. Now Harpo has it. But he passes it to a dignitary by hugging and kissing him. If you raze a man’s authority—with scissors or scapegoating—you steal his beard. The beard is the hot potato that no one wants. Take my false beard, my Jewish stain. Take my wife. Fact: borscht-belt headliner Henny Youngman married into my maternal grandmother’s family. Kinship binds me to funny Jewry. So many circumcision plots! Snip, snip: I write you, young Jewish boy, into your historic identity. Harpo is a mohel gone mad.

SANCHO PANZA I won’t abandon objects whose tenderness consists in their tendency to disappear. I remain loyal to Harpo, as Harpo remains loyal to Chico, as Sancho Panza sticks to Don Quixote. Sancho Panza says, “If I were a clever man, I would have left my master days ago. But this is my fate and this is my misfortune; I can’t help it; I have to follow him.” Sancho Panza can only think one thing; he can’t think something else. Loyal, he succumbs to monomania, to foolhardy single-mindedness.

GIRLIE TRICKS: SNACK BREAK AS CAESURA Breakfast hijinks: Harpo turns a pancake into a powder puff, a sugar jar into a makeup compact. He’ll use drag to horrify his brothers. (Face powder resembles shaving cream, or whiteface.) Seeking lip rouge, he dips pinkie in ketchup and observes his reflection in a saucer’s mirror. Transforming a cruet into a perfume bottle, he dabs behind his ears. He blows up his glove, a balloon-udder, and, impersonating the maternal fount, pumps milk into brotherly coffee. He feeds others, but mostly himself. As, in poetry, one inserts a pause, or a caesura, in the middle of a line, so Harpo inserts a snack break in the middle of a scene: while moving beds between rooms to gaslight a policeman, Harpo fixes himself a quick pancake sandwich.

THREE VERSUS FOUR: HARPO’S WANDERING EYE Harpo, Allan, Chico, and Groucho crowd onto a park bench. Harpo looks maximally melancholy. Four won’t fit on the bench. Abstract question: what is the difference between three and four, and how does this difference influence my emotions?

Harpo’s eyes, digressive, stare off to the side, toward melancholy itself. I like to reproduce images that show Harpo thinking, standing separate from adults whose conversation leaves him out. Note his meditative, calm remoteness from the gang. Note his staff: only Harpo carries a prop. His eyes, looking away, posit elsewhere as a superior though inaccessible location. Inattentiveness, not a pathology or a flaw, signals separation—chosen?—from socialized screenmates. Drifting toward uncommunicativeness, he stares into the sliver, the hallucinated dimension, parallel to the conventional universe.

When a person gives up words, what replaces them? Imaginary comforts: Harpo must tether himself to a community of vibrations, aromas, and textures. Unpleasant isolation he must refigure as salutary abstraction or ethereal dispensation, like a field of forget-me-nots. He asserts the hallucinated as his cohort; he stares at nothingness and wills it into being. Keeping busy with phantasms, he angelically guards Chico. Hence the pastoral rod. Harpo’s Parsifal staff will ensure resurrection.

DIVERGENCE FOR DIVERGENCE’S SAKE Harpo turns around to see an offscreen apparition. We don’t know what distracts him. All we see is his divergence, the bittersweet pleasure of divided consciousness. With kidnapped gaze, Harpo pledges allegiance to the something else: “I don’t want this. I want that.” I value monomania—always thinking the same thing—but I respect Harpo’s entropic, diversionary tendency to drift toward the invisible.

THE MELANCHOLY OF BEING CAUGHT IN THE HALLUCINATED SLIVER By sliver I mean: that transitional dimension between communicative reality (social intercourse with brothers) and solipsism, the privacy of being Nothing, No One. Harpo sometimes dwells happily in the integumentary border zone, where he is held by the nearby presence of brother or brothers (it hardly matters whether it is one brother or two; one is as hardy a “holding environment” as two), but where he is also not-held, aloof, at play, distracted, vanishing, drifting. In these transitional moments, Harpo experiences melancholy eddying. He occupies a topsoil of intermediateness: standing behind the gang, he is included and excluded. No one will talk to him. No one will give him a task. Unseen father, unrewarded mastermind, unfondled omniscience, he has a god’s or puppeteer’s responsibilities, without the worship. Note Harpo’s melancholy separation from the familial conspiracy’s inner circle. Note his blankly attentive stare toward dyspeptic Groucho. We can fully appreciate Harpo’s melancholy only if we isolate him from the group, and only if we freeze the unfolding film in a still. Harpo’s hypnotized stare contains panic; mere barometer, he attends more carefully to the outside event (Groucho’s threatened departure) than to his own mood.

BALL GAMES While the orchestra tunes, Harpo sneaks up and slips the score to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” inside the parts for Il Trovatore. No reason to be embarrassed about noticing anatomically resonant details: the Marx Brothers teach us why boys play ball games with each other. Think of Little League (the horror of being forced to cooperate). Think of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, partnerships, partner-snips. Snip, snip, the circumcision game. Mohel, c’est moi.

WRIST-BEND: ADAPTABILITY AS VIRTUOSITY Harpo plays trombone with a violin bow. He brings the wrong stick to the wrong instrument. He faces a stick problem, a commensurability quandary. Impossible tasks mesmerize Harpo’s fake-obedient eyes. He knows the incompatibility of bow and trombone. He knows that he doesn’t belong in this genre, or in a tux. I identify with the perpendicular angle his hand and forearm assume. Hinged wrist and hand, as if in sign alphabet, compose an L. Harpo contorts his body to fit into someone else’s lunatic system. The clown’s body— a puppet’s—proudly finds L-shaped perpendicularities of self-morphing obedience. And I admire Harpo’s pliability, his survival-of-the-fittest adaptability, adrenaline-jolted as a competing gymnast. (Turn your clown-body, through athletic virtuosity, into a symbol of the survival techniques a tribe needs. Pretend to take pleasure in accommodationism.)

STATIC STATES ARE UNCOMFORTABLE: ACCELERATE, ESCALATE, INTENSIFY Some of us pick fights, race cars, or dance. Some of us write. Some of us have as much sex as possible. Some of us stand apart from testosterone; melancholy, we observe its pliés.

Using violin bow as sword, Harpo spars with the conductor’s baton. Cockfight: eager-faced Harpo wants to home in on an agon. Like sex, or any escalation: Harpo turns a static state into a process of increasing excitation—not because he has specific agendas (to play trombone, to destroy the opera house) but because he wants to accelerate. I overstate the case by saying “he wants.” Who knows what Harpo wants? We only see evidence of his momentum.

The trombone’s greased slide plays loudly and irrelevantly, contra Verdi. Harpo intensifies for intensification’s sake. With chewing gum, he affixes sheet music to a fellow instrumentalist’s head. Harpo often chews gum, a pastime of repetition, of intensification. You don’t chew gum because you want gum. Who desires gum as a thing-in-itself? Gum is a pretext for persistent jaw-motion.

When instrumentalists suddenly play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” Harpo smiles (surprised by his own trick, an unannounced switch between labor and leisure) and tosses a ball, with violin as baseball bat. Only after Chico has expressed approval (he compliments Harpo’s aim) can we retroactively surmise that Chico’s gladness was Harpo’s goal. Why bother pleasing Chico again and again? Like gum, to be chewed perpetually, the game of keeping someone’s approval in place is a lever—a sewing-machine pedal—that Harpo keeps pressing without experiencing release. If you crave perpetual intensification, you will not want to shut down the excitation process, even if your jaw hurts.

BRAGGING ABOUT HARPO I brought my baby brother to school as my third-grade “show and tell” exhibit, and now I want to show off Harpo’s greatness, to watch your face as you notice his adorability and aptness. Always question the investments of the pointing finger. Harpo is my subject, but my subject is also attestation, demonstration, the wish to point out Harpo, to make you experience adulation. We were a family of show-offs. My older brother showed off the idiosyncrasies of great cellists; under his tutelage I listened to records of Zara Nelsova, Pierre Fournier, Janos Starker, and Gregor Piatigorsky. My big brother also showed off TWA; he bragged about its superiority to Pan Am. Harpo is my TWA.

FATTY’S MAGIC PANTS The thuggish tenor whips Harpo’s butt. Harpo clasps it, mouth open in a pained O. (Harpo mimics pain but never seems to feel it: Bugs Bunny’s cartoon agony.) Harpo’s antics highlight the butt, always on the verge of getting spanked. I recall Fatty Arbuckle, a buttock-oriented fool, star of Fatty’s Magic Pants, an 8mm film I once owned. Minta Durfee, an actress less famous than Mabel Normand, co-starred. (Minta Durfee thus becomes someone to rescue, to idealize.) I liked Fatty’s pancake pallor, and the tendency of his pants to fall down. Over Christmas vacation, in 1967, I watched Fatty’s Magic Pants thirty times. I counted. I wanted to show off my interest in Fatty’s fate. I wanted to prove the sacredness of Fatty’s Magic Pants. I could best prove its magnificence by watching it thirty times and by announcing to everyone that I had watched it thirty times—a feat I’m still announcing.

Notice this progression: (1) Watch the film about a fat man whose pants fall down. (2) Watch it thirty times. (3) Brag about having watched it thirty times.

I neutralize Fatty’s shame, but I also frame it: I enclose it in the container of accomplishment, of indefatigable viewing.

AMORAL INTENSIFICATION A male dancer rips the cloak off a gypsy lass, and Harpo (amorally intensifying) tears off her skirt to reveal knickers. Flashback: in sixth grade I stood below a short-skirted classmate climbing a ladder, and I took a snapshot of her underwear. Earlier, we’d fought on the playground, and the teacher, breaking up our brawl, had criticized my unmanly battle-ploys: biting, kicking. Harpo, in his autobiography, explains why he quit school in the second grade: class bullies picked on him. He didn’t want to tell the teacher, and so he escaped out the classroom window and never returned.

Harpo runs up and almost touches—not wishing to be singed—the dancer’s bare midriff. He’ll grab any unguarded sweet. Midriff might not arouse him. He might merely want to tickle it, to test its genuineness, to rid himself of a hovering contagion.

Harpo routinely intensifies: he tears the skirt off one gypsy, and then another and another. Having found a good trick, why not repeat it, exhaust it? Thus, amorally intensifying rhythms of arousal—more, more, more—become metaphysical questions. Why do I want more? Why do I love the process of wanting more more than I want the “more” itself?

III

THE PLEASURE OF SEEING A MAN NOT KNOWN FOR SEXINESS EXHIBIT A SUDDEN SEXY STIGMATA: THEORETICAL DIGRESSION ON SCISSORS, THEIR PARADOXICAL DOUBLENESS I enjoy masculinity doubling itself, especially when it’s not very masculine to begin with. Example: Harpo has lost his socks. We see his sexy calves. He inserts himself between two half-unclad dancer bodies—male and female—and, framed by their limbs, as if by a scissor’s twin blades, he whistles and waves to the audience. Newly born, he emerges between the woman’s legs and approaches the male dancer’s naked chest. Harpo plunges into a triangle formed by two other bodies and desexualizes them. He lightens their appearance of athletic effort by indicating, playfully, “I’m here”—a silent insistence, directed at us.

Scissors consist of two blades attached at midpoint. Scissors pose as One but signify Two. Scissors cause Solomonic separation (I cut thee in twain). Harpo epitomizes the One, but his weapon is a Twofer.

HARPO’S CUTENESS AS INCOHERENT ADDENDUM: THE SWINGING STAR’S DEMAND Is it strange to call a glimpse of Harpo’s muscles an “incoherent addendum”? They flash by. They don’t contribute to the story. No one mentions them. But I imagine a mother noticing her child’s well-fed healthiness, his immunity to rheumatic fever or meningitis: I imagine a Jewish mother’s consciousness of the child as food, like edible Hansel and Gretel. Muscular calves (visible when Harpo climbs a rope) can’t be faked, can’t accommodate the wishes of others, can’t impersonate or pander. I see Harpo’s calves from his mother’s point of view.

Harpo, like a monkey, swings in space, just as the tenor begins singing: the scene juxtaposes Verdi’s cultured melody with Harpo’s animal freedom, his lawless suspension. Harpo believes that the rope will hold him. Distortion: how big is this universe, this spacious field, in which Harpo madly swings? What is a swinger?

Harpo performs, with his body, the musical leaps that the tenor performs onstage: a silent fool’s physical eruptions parrot operatic paroxysms. Harpo catapults toward us, as if into our arms. Thus, he makes a demand. The star, assaulting the audience, without warning, insists on being received. As compensation, the star—an ambience—provides a holding environment, a container, around the beset, impinged-upon beholder.

HARPO ON THE LAM: HIS BODY ALWAYS TELLS THE TRUTH Unfashionable, to claim that a body “tells the truth.” And yet Harpo’s body authentically defies society and family, the mad demands of the other, of conversation.