form; in prose parody he is a duffer. His own prose has the one
essential quality for wit--it is not diffuse.[22] His actual character
is that of a civilized man who cannot be imposed upon by the bunk,
and as he is fairly independent he recognizes fake--in the world of
politics, business, and society--wherever it occurs. This is what
prevents him from being a good radical (type: Heywood Broun; other
things in his nature keep him from the insolence of martyrdom), and
what makes his work sympathetic to mature and disillusioned minds.
His exceptional good sense--he seems to have no sensibility--makes
stupidity an irritation to him; he follows half of the biblical precept
and does not suffer fools gladly. The habit of pontificating has grown
on him, and from expressing himself with justifiable arrogance on minor
matters he has proceeded to speak with assurance on manners, art, and
letters. It would be more accurate to say that he speaks without the
humility becoming to one who for many months boosted W. B. Maxwell in
opposition to Joseph Conrad. He hasn’t, essentially, any idea of his
great influence; for if he knew that a vast number of semi-intelligent
people were guided by him he would not so rapidly praise and damn (or
praise with faint damns, if I may quote another colyum). He is the
most exasperating of colyumists; and his triviality when confronted by
things he does not understand--I am thinking of his comment on _The
Waste Land_--is appalling. Yet this same quality is what makes him
precious; he is a gadfly to an exceptionally sluggish beast--the New
York intellectual. He has, inevitably, become the patron saint of the
smart. At any rate, he has done something to destroy the tradition
that what is witty is unsound. It is only when he is serious that he
becomes a little ridiculous.
I quarrel as much with Baird Leonard’s judgement on art and letters,
but I am not irritated because Miss Leonard (who writes for a paper
devoted to horse-racing and the theatre) is almost always willing to
indicate the path by which she arrives at her discriminations. She
hasn’t F. P. A.’s weak fear of the common, and her own mind is as far
removed as his from the commonplace, it has movements of grace and
lightness, and her humour is smooth and wholly urban. Too often for
me she fills her column with Bridge Table Talk, a sardonic report of
fake intellectualism done with vigour and ferocity, but hampered by
the framework which is not adaptable. I do not, at this moment, recall
a line she has written; I recall the tone of her whole work--it is
unaffected, not self-conscious, brightly aware of everything, keen and
curious and always on the alert. If the stage were what it seems from
out in front, Miss Leonard would be well placed on a theatrical paper.
She is writing for people wise enough to know the place of wit. Adams,
I fear, is beginning to write for people witty enough (and no more) to
despise wisdom.
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.
[Illustration:
CIRQUE MEDRANO. By Henri Toulouse-Lautrec
]
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]
[Illustration:
NATIONAL WINTER
GARDEN BURLESQUE.
By E. E. Cummings
(_Courtesy of_ The Dial)
]
_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.
[Illustration: FRANCESCO]
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.
[Illustration: PAOLO]
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]
[Illustration: ALBERTO]
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.
[Illustration: THE FRATELLINI. By Fernand Leger]
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.)