The Anatomy of Harpo Marx. Wayne Koestenbaum
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screen, he looks directly at us. (Added treat: we see Groucho’s thinning hair.) Harpo shows us his doghouse: come in! This sudden invitation—revealed stigmata—doesn’t embarrass us; instead, we note his mocking mastery of home-sweet-home values.
Groucho miaows. In surreal puncture, a dog pokes its head out from Harpo’s painted chest. Kafka predicted Harpo’s literalist compliance. In the penal colony, Harpo is the drilled-on, human page—or else a stripper who offers his body as the customer’s sketchpad.
Groucho wants to one-up Harpo: “Bet you don’t have a picture of my grandfather.” With an excited nod, Harpo thrusts off his overcoat and lifts up his shirt, as if ready to receive injection. Groucho reluctantly confronts Harpo’s exhibitionism—imminent “mooning.” Perhaps the final tattoo—Grandpa’s image— was inscribed on Harpo’s buttocks. Genealogy goes back to the butt. He tries to flash it, though Groucho aborts the unveiling.
HARPO’S EXITING SALUTE, ITS MELANCHOLY PROWESS Harpo’s palm of farewell, as he hastily exits, may be a clown tradition, but it also alludes to the Führer’s salute, to Sicilian gestures, to kiss-offs, papal blessings, mysterious Christ-like manifestations, and to sign language. (The gesture, half good-bye, half fuck-you, combines vendetta-provoking rage and cheerful farewell.) Speechlessness is humiliating, a denigration that Harpo’s good cheer unwrites. I’m haunted by his upraised hand, its generosity, its willingness to communicate—even if it expresses nothing personal or specific. Harpo’s exit anticipates Chaplin’s late film Limelight, a clown’s melancholy departure. Obsolescence is exile: Harpo, ashamed of untimeliness, hides his face.
Immediately, Zeppo enters, half his hat missing. Harpo, exiting, scissored it. Deletion is his signature. He despoils not because he has found a use for fragments but because it suits him to deprive people of their endowments. Zeppo angrily throws down his fragmented hat, as if he were Gregor Samsa’s father, a patriarch disgusted by the buggy son, cowering and loafing in his fecal bed. Zeppo, assimilated, disowns Harpo’s ethnic freakishness.
LOAFING AS LABORING A few moments later, Harpo metamorphoses into dedicated chauffeur. Groucho enters the carriage, secretly composed of two separate vehicles; Harpo drives away on the sidecar, a motorbike—as if unaware that he left Groucho behind. By ignoring the job’s purpose, Harpo enacts Michel de Certeau’s concept of la perruque (the wig)—a worker’s revolutionary technique of goofing off, stealing company time for private creative forays that have nothing to do with paid labor.
Like a Solomonic surgeon splitting conjoined twins, Harpo divides hats, cars—to differentiate himself from the fraternal horde, to proclaim unlikeness. Arduous, to assemble a self so that a brother can recognize me, consider me legible: “That’s Pinky, the lazy one.”
STARING AT A ZONE HALF-AUDIENCE, HALF-NOTHINGNESS Harpo looks at Groucho and then at the camera. He should be paying full attention to Groucho: but Harpo needs to balance his bossy brother’s words with what can be gleaned only by staring blankly at a zone half-audience and half-nothingness. Harpo peers straight ahead, toward a hidden explanation. Attentiveness displaces its purported object: Harpo methodically looks elsewhere, a ghostly nonlocation.
THE MOM-MOUTH When the lemonade vendor reappears, Harpo points excitedly: his wide-open mouth resembles my mother’s in a 1959 photo. She knelt on the floor. Infant, I lay, stomach downward, on the bed, and smiled enthusiastically, with implausible, thrilled width. She imitated my smile: I call it the “Mom-mouth.” Stretched-open lips compress eyes into excited slits, mirroring but misrepresenting.
Again, Harpo produces the too-wide smile, comic Greek mask, Mom-mouth, a mother’s face replicating an infant’s, a face of repetition and ruse and mimicry, a face not at one with underlying emotion—the mouth, open as if to bite an apple; the eyes, distorted, condensed by the mouth’s excessive distension. Keeping the mouth open in simulated joy might lead to jaw cramp. (Oral sex ache?)
KRISTALLNACHT PREVIEW I must avoid the word then. The “then” of sequence. This happened, then that happened. The word then implies that history is a stepladder rather than a chronology-defying inundation. I’m not arguing for predestination, simply for inklings, foreshadowings that appear when we view earlier artifacts in hindsight.
Harpo puts Kennedy’s straw boater in the flame vitrine. Kennedy tips over the cart, and Harpo stands like a victim on Kristallnacht beside his wrecked shop. Harpo apprehends catastrophe, imploding around him; step-by-step causality gives way to maddening simultaneity. He might be silenced by the din of the too much—too many events, too many brothers.
JEW POLLUTES HOLY WATER Pants rolled above knees, Harpo climbs onto Kennedy’s lemonade vat, jumps in, and stomps, as if bike-riding or grape-crushing. Please observe the sequence. (1) Seeking recognition, Harpo looks at us with wide-open Mom-mask of fixed, unmodulated enthusiasm. He wants us—vaudeville audience, eyewitnesses, jury—to see his prank. Recognize my wickedness, cuteness, violence, spinning-in-place. Recognize my mania so that it can cease. (2) He beams at Kennedy’s misery. Harpo’s face remains Mom-frozen in parodic, heightened excitement.
II
“SHUSHING” AS FRATERNAL GLUE: DISOBEDIENT LITERALISM Harpo zealously absorbs the command, “Be quiet,” initiated by others, and then sends it back. You told me to shut up. Rebound: now I’ll tell you to shut up. “Shut up,” a familial structure, nestles him: he belongs to a cozy Cosa Nostra of “shushing.”
As Harpo and Chico approach stalwart Margaret Dumont’s house, Harpo ostentatiously shushes the void. He imitates Chico, originator of the “Shush!” patrol. Noisily Harpo plucks his check, snaps his finger, and falls back into fake compliance.
“Ring the bell,” says Chico. Harpo, smiling literalist, removes a bell-and-clapper from his pocket and athletically rings it: I’ve followed your commandment to the letter and thereby disobeyed its aim. Chico scolds him, and unsmiling Harpo reorients by touching his hat. When commanded “Push the button,” Harpo flirtatiously pushes a low button on Chico’s jacket—as if playing around with their shared omphalos.
Can all four brothers be appreciated at the same time? Is every brother equally loved? The youngest child at Passover asks the question. Why can’t everyone ask? Cain wins; Abel loses. Don’t demean this issue by calling it sibling rivalry. Call it, instead, international relations.
THE LAG Harpo lags behind. He remains loyal to the gesture of a moment earlier. Tenacious, slow, he pledges allegiance to the passé.
Shushing, Chico puts his fingers