The Anatomy of Harpo Marx. Wayne Koestenbaum
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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