Let Me Tell You (20 page)

“What's so special about clowns?” I'd been wondering to myself. “What makes them so funny?” (Let me say here that I intend someday to ask a clown—for instance, Emmett Kelly, that mighty creature—about people. “What's so special about people?” I shall ask him.) Wandering around asking idiotic questions is not usually the best way to learn anything, I'd have thought, but with clowns it seems to be not how you introduce the subject but, once introduced, how you dismiss it.

“The one in the circus,” said my son with whom I began it. “The one who sweeps up the spotlight.”

“Grock,” said our friend who is a musician. “The greatest clown who ever lived, and the
most
unfortunate fellow.” He began to laugh reminiscently. “Let me show you,” he said; he stood up and gestured widely. “Grock used to come onto the stage, walking like
this.
In his bag he found first a clarinet, which he played, singing the low notes the clarinet would
not sing.
Then, he finds a violin, and he wishes to play
that,
but it is a small violin, a toy. And Grock is wearing those great gloves of the clown, so he plays the violin anyway. Like
this.
The small violin, and the large gloves. And he tosses the bow into the air, but cannot catch it.” The musician stopped for breath. Then, while he was tossing an imaginary violin bow into the air and pointedly not catching it, the writer interrupted.

“Remember the Marx Brothers? And the dancing scene in front of the mirror? Or Groucho's walk? Or Harpo swinging on the opera house scenery? Or—”

“Grock, then,” the musician said, his voice rising. “He
will
play the piano, although it displeases him, and it plays badly, so he dismembers it. So he thinks he will play the accordion, and for a while it plays beautifully, but then he cannot make it squeeze back together again, and it grows longer and longer, until poor Grock is wound around and around. The most
unfortunate
fellow.”

“Remember Emmett Kelly slouching along chewing on that loaf of bread?” demanded our neighbor who owns the coal business. “He walks—I can't describe it—like
this,
look.”

“There was a little circus used to come around summers,” my grocer told me. “Had a clown, funniest man I ever saw. He threw tomatoes. Didn't do anything else—just threw tomatoes.” He made an easy throwing gesture. “Just threw tomatoes,” he said.

“Watch
me,
” my son said. He ran around in little circles, shouting, “I'm sweeping up the light, look! I'm sweeping up the light!”

“Grock?” said the lady whose business is cosmetics. “Yes, I remember Grock; he was a great man. He was the only clown I ever saw who wore almost no makeup. His face was natural, if you know what I mean, but like a clown's without paint.”

It was like that right along. First the familiar, faraway look in the eyes, then the reminiscent smile. Then the urgent need to imitate, rather than describe—to be, for one minute, the clown himself. In the conversation of all the people I listened to, there was also an intensely
personal
remembrance of some clown whose gestures and actions were indelibly marked on their minds. The musician remembered Grock, the unfortunate, with his toy violin and his unwinding accordion, and yet kept insisting while he spoke: “He was a truly great musician, that Grock, a superlative musician. All the musicians used to attend Grock every night, and he made them cry.” The lady who made cosmetics had no wistful smile for Grock's music, but recalled perfectly that he wore almost no makeup. That a writer should remember a mimic dance before a mirror is hardly surprising; that a grocer should remember a clown who threw tomatoes is an interesting sidelight on what must be one great repressed longing of grocers toward their customers. And—this, I believe, was the saddest of all—the child remembers how uproariously helpless Emmett Kelly was, sweeping up the spotlight into an enormous circle, so that he had constantly to start over.

Hearing all this, our friend who teaches sociology remarked, “Did you know that the Pueblo Indians have a special ‘ceremonial clown' who joins in the dances and songs of the religious ceremonies, simply making fun of them? And while the ceremony is going on, the ceremonial clown wanders around among the performers, making faces behind their backs, or throwing things at the audience, or mimicking the dancers.”

And, even in the sociologist, the nostalgic smile.

I think—although there are many people I should hesitate to ask about it—that almost everyone remembers, with that same longing, a moment when a conclusion of superlative importance emerged from the actions of the pathetic little man who was so funny. Is it because the clown seems so overwhelmed by the infinite pathos of life, so outlawed by complexity and confusion, that what overpowers us with laughter is the expression of our own futility or the sight of our own precious little concerns reduced to a proportionate stature? The businessman laughs over Emmett Kelly gnawing on the loaf of bread; the Indians, with a sound eye for the practical, encourage a mockery of their sacred performances, as though to remind the audience and the participants that they are only human and, consequently, silly.

Most of my friends were furiously indignant when I suggested that there could be women clowns. The idea was preposterous: The clown was a man and might, if he chose, dress as a woman, but only briefly, and to make a point. Perhaps the clown should be a man because, although he is allowed to retain a vast human dignity, he must be deprived of all human rights so that he is a valiant small figure at the very broadest part of universal experience, with an emotional aspect so unselfconscious that it can become personal to every member of his audience. His emotion
must
be impersonal—and impersonality is not a feminine characteristic.

If I had wondered whether any man might be a clown, a second glance at my clown-loving friends—one trying to show how funny it was that a man in enormous gloves should try to play a toy violin, another futilely trying to reproduce an irresistibly funny walk, a third explaining, in a voice shrill with giggling, the mechanics of a droll face or a funny turn of the head—would have convinced me that the gift of real humor is a rare thing, to be administered judiciously and guarded carefully against imitation. “Some people
have
to take life seriously,” our neighbor with the coal business told me earnestly. “If they didn't, then there wouldn't need to be clowns at all.”

What belongs to a clown, then? What, aside from the fact that he is born a clown and can never be anything else, are the essential things he must have to set up in business? A man can't just start out, apparently, with a funny face and a conviction that he is the local lowest common denominator and expect to make people laugh and cry; there are certain unchangeable factors on which any informed audience insists.

First of all, your clown must
look
like a clown. He must wear a distinctive dress. It may be the traditional clown costume, or some variation of it, or even, like Charlie Chaplin, a completely individual dress of his own. But it must be two things—constant and functional. Charlie Chaplin's shoes are a familiar example of the costume that looks always, and still is, an essential part of the act; they are distinctive, peculiarly adapted to him from the traditional clown costume, and they are the irresistible factor in his walk—without the shoes, there could not possibly be the Chaplin walk. Similarly, Grock's lack of makeup was an identifying characteristic, since it was unusual for that type of clown at that time to be without a heavy coat of whitewash, but Grock's singularly expressive face was, without makeup, one of his most eloquent assets.

Another thing that seems to be very important for all clowns, not even excepting the Indian ceremonial clown, is that he must be acting extemporaneously, or at least
seem
to be acting extemporaneously. No one will follow a clown who shows plainly that he has spent laborious hours perfecting some slight knack, or indicates by attaching any importance to it that the tiny trick of the hand is a product of endless practice. The clown, reacting universally to overwhelming provocation, must react immediately, impulsively, inevitably, as any of us might; he must not have a carefully prepared plan of action, since any one of us can have that.

Moreover, let him keep quiet, please. He may fall, climb, roll, dance, grimace, smash furniture, or do any number of idiotic and completely satisfying things, but he must, above all, do them without chattering at us. Perhaps this is our deep-seated mistrust of the spoken word coming out again; if the clown talks, he is vulnerable, like the rest of us, to reasoning, to argument, to correction, to the endless verbal tidal wave that has engulfed us. Also, if the clown is properly personal enough to his audience, his actions and his gestures are meaningful, more than any words can be. The breathlessness in a movie audience when it seems that perhaps Harpo Marx is going to speak at last is as much fear as it is expectation; it is the terror lest the clown weaken for the one moment that would lose him his invulnerability. Charlie Chaplin, speaking, has become a comedian, which is another thing altogether from a clown.

Everyone, by the way, who mentioned Grock to me added one important fact, which stayed with them past all meaning in the word “clown” itself; it was so important that it set Grock as the spirit of invulnerability on a very pinnacle of greatness. “He never came to America,” they said dreamily. “He was asked to come many times, but he never came. He said he had enough money, and he didn't want any more.”

There
was a clown, that Grock, with an unbelievable depth of human sympathy; the man who had enough money, and didn't want any more.

I wonder, then, what a clown might say about people. “They wear a distinctive dress,” he might say, “usually copied from other people. They seem to be futilely resisting a complexity of life far too great for them, they never
seem
to have any rational motive for their behavior. And they're so pathetic they make you cry, but above all”—and here, if he were a true clown, there would be an exaggerated gesture of despair—“they're unbelievably, irresistibly funny.”

The subject of children's reading, like taxes and hay fever and the fate of the New York Mets, is a matter upon which anyone, informed or not, feels the right to hold a positive opinion. I do not imagine that anyone really intends to come right out and propose that children
not
be taught to read, television and comic books being what they are, but how children read, and what, and when, are subjects of interest to all of us.

Many grade-school children can hardly read at all, or hate it if they can; many more can read words but not for sense. Reading for its own sake, for pure enjoyment, seems to be set aside as a waste of time in favor of reading as a vehicle for acquiring information, and for children today this knowledge is apparently supposed to extend from moral precepts (puppies who disobey their mothers get caught by the dog catcher) for the very young, to popular science and anthropology for the more sophisticated.

As the mother of four children who have somehow learned to read, I think back with no nostalgia at all to the seemingly endless parade of “good” current children's books that came into our house, were absorbed, passed on to the next child, read, torn, scribbled on, and that finally found their way, carton by carton, to the children's room of our local library. I remember the adventures of numerous bluebirds, airplanes, toy engines, clowns, rabbits, and walking-talking dolls, all of whom got into trouble by not obeying, or not conforming, or not going to bed on time. I read and listened to touching tributes to doctors and school-bus drivers and little boys and girls who live in far-off lands, and jolly old Dan the grocery store man. I could tell you how to build a treehouse, I could give you the latest word on how we might live in a pioneer village, or how far away the sun is, or the chemical composition of table salt. The major part of our children's reading was devoted, for more years than I care to remember, to an antiseptic and wholly misleading interpretation of the world we live in; I was heartily glad to see each carton of books leave the house.

Not all the books went, of course, but the only ones that stayed were the ones people wanted. These turned out to be almost exactly what might have been predicted: The real books remained, the ones that packed a sense of excitement and enchantment, that were
read
rather than skimmed, the books that led young minds into worlds of imagination and delight. These are still around, and they are still being read.

I recently was asked to write a children's beginning-reading book. All right, I thought; for years I have been deploring the quality of the kids' books we are forced to buy, hating the practical, everyday moral stories; now I could write my own. I thought to write a little fairy tale, simple and short, the kind of story I would have liked to have my own children sound out as beginning readers. I was given a word list, made out by “a group of educators,” and asked to confine myself to this list, which included perhaps five hundred words of a basic vocabulary that was felt to be desirable for beginners. “Getting” and “spending” were on the list, but not “wishing”; “cost” and “buy” and “nickel” and “dime” were all on the list, but not “magic”; “post office” and “supermarket” were on the list, but not “Fairyland.” I felt that the children for whom I was supposed to write were being robbed, persuaded to accept nickels and dimes instead of magic wishes. This is a very small quarrel; there are many groups of educators who feel that Fairyland is an unhealthy environment for growing minds, but in a choice between television (“television” was on the list) and Fairyland, I know where I would rather have my own children growing up.

In all the morass of children's books, Dr. Seuss stands out as a particularly welcome friend. He could not have worked from my basic word list (“snacks”? “bellies”? “slunk”?), but then, Dr. Seuss makes his own rules, and has managed somehow to cover every step of reading growth from beginning to almost-sophisticated with a rich deposit of nonsense.

Not all the nonsense is his own, of course. On the back of
Hop on Pop,
an “educator” is quoted as saying: “The rhythmic pattern of words and ideas will provide excellent ‘sound-ear' basic training for the use of phonics,” and another “educator” chimes in, saying: “With
Hop on Pop,
children not only get a chance to enjoy fine literature, but also have an opportunity to learn a number of phonic elements, painlessly and joyfully.” Fine literature (“We like to hop on top of Pop.” “STOP. You must not hop on Pop.”) it may or may not be, but no reader, slowly mesmerized by rhythmic patterns, can avoid being caught by its charming silliness, which is, after all, far more of a recommendation for reading a book than any number of phonic elements.

I am mortally afraid of offending Dr. Seuss. If I did, a Grinch might steal my Christmas, or a Thnadner might turn up in my morning coffee, or I might find myself being pursued by a Sneetch or a Vroom or a Collapsible Frink. I've lost count of how many books Dr. Seuss has written, but I do know that his books are some of the rare bright spots in children's literature today. It is an honest pleasure to turn from a story about a dear little black-and-white kittycat who wants to make friends with a buttercup to
The Cat in the Hat,
with his effrontery and his casual joy in making a mess.

Dr. Seuss's A B C,
the author's newest book, is the very beginning of beginner's reading (“BIG C, little c. What begins with C? Camel on the ceiling—C…c…C”), although I do not find “begins,” “camel,” or “ceiling” on my basic word list for beginners. And—after long ago dismissing “zebra” as the logical end of the alphabet—Dr. Seuss has found a substitute, “Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz,” which makes Z far more persuasive than “zebra” ever did.
Dr. Seuss's A B C,
along with
Hop on Pop,
will give young readers a head start on reading for the sheer joy of it, which is no small accomplishment.

If there are faults to be found with Dr. Seuss—remember that Collapsible Frink—they are certainly very small ones. There is a certain appearance of haste that creeps into the later books; I am sure that Dr. Seuss writes, as he says he does, for fun and not for accumulated output, but perhaps he is too anxious to get the books finished and into the children's hands. The animals are beginning to look alike, for one thing, with less crazy invention; it is a sad comment on the state of things today when a Jo Redd-Zoff looks a lot like a south-going Zax, and both of them strongly resemble a High Gargel-orum. Also, I do quarrel with such lines as those in which Sneetches had “bellies with stars” and others had “none upon thars.”

Nevertheless, why a mind that finds one alphabet inadequate for its needs should be expected to confine itself to standard grammar and spelling is a question I could not try to answer.

Perhaps this quibbling is only because it is a temptation to wish that anyone who has given us such a wealth of zoological misfits and thoroughly satisfying nonsense should go on forever without a slip. Dr. Seuss's slips are small and rare, and as for going on forever, I think he probably will.