Cultural Amnesia (33 page)

William Claude Dukenfield (1879–1946) was known to the world as W. C.
Fields. He began as a carnival juggler. As the magicians Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett discovered in a later era, the accompanying patter was more in demand than the act, although Fields,
until the end of his career, was still able to do some of the most difficult conjuring tricks in the book. But there were other conjurers who could do them too. Nobody could equal him for his
patter. He was a success in silent movies from his debut in
Pool Sharks
(1915) until sound movies arrived, but when they did, he was one of the few
silent stars who actually gained from the change. It was because he could both write his own material and speak it inimitably: a winning combination.
The Bank
Dick
(1940) is the movie that his admirers know line by line. In real life he was a self-destructive drinker, but he would have been the first to discourage any large theories about
his essentially subversive talent having suffered in the context of Hollywood conformity. He had a drinks trolley at the side of his tennis court.

Is Mr. Michael Finn in residence?

—W. C. FIELDS,
The Bank Dick

W
OODY ALLEN
AND
Steve Martin have a common ancestor, and his name is W. C. Fields. A greater prodigy of comedy even than Chaplin, Fields could create dialogue for himself that was as funny as his
physical presence. (Chaplin’s abiding limitation was that he couldn’t: the real reason that he wanted to stay silent forever.) In
The Bank Dick
,
the question about “Mr. Michael Finn” is Fields’s way of advising the barman in the Black Pussycat Saloon that a Mickey Finn should be slipped to the visiting bank inspector,
Pinkerton Snoopington. The pesky Snoopington having been duly rendered incapable, Fields helps him through the foyer of Lompoc’s leading and only hotel, The New Old Lompoc House. (Once
having established the name of this hostelry, Fields abbreviates it to “the New Old”—a typically bizarre stroke of verbal economy.) From the right of frame, Fields ushers the
barely mobile Snoopington across the foyer and up the stairs on the left, which lead to the room where Snoopington will be safely stashed. The camera doesn’t move. Nothing happens. Then
Fields, alone, rushes across the frame from left to right. After a pause, he once again slowly propels Snoopington across the frame from right to left, heading for the stairs. We in the audience
deduce that Snoopington must have fallen out of the window of his room once Fields had got him up there. Without having seen it happen, the audience is convulsed at the phantom spectacle of the
paralytic Snoopington plunging into the street.

The scene is all action with almost no dialogue, but Fields could write wordless physical comedy the way
he wrote words: with unequalled compactness and suggestiveness. The direction is already there in the script, and there is every reason to think of Fields as one of the great directors of comic
films, even if he seldom took a formal credit. He certainly knew more than the producers: one of them wanted to cut the moment in
The Bank Dick
when Fields
shows his minion Og Ogilvy the warning signal he will use if Snoopington threatens to queer the pitch. If that preparatory moment had been cut, Fields’s later use of the signal would have
lost half of its effect. (A sure sign of a director who should not be fooling with comedy is when he
gets the urge to cut the preparation so as to increase the pace.) Fields
knew everything there was to know about comic construction: an important point to remember. Even his appreciators tend to think that because his life was an inspired chaos his work was too. In
fact he was disciplined to the roots. The same effort he had put into his vaudeville juggling routines—he would practise until his hands bled, hence the kid gloves—he put into his
inventions for the cinema. The most portable of those inventions was his way with the single subversive line. Every Fields fan can recite at least half a dozen of them, and make a fair show of
imitating the master’s drawling delivery, which could make even an abstract fragment of surrealist delirium as funny as a crutch. (“Rivers of beer flowing over your
grandmother’s paisley shawl.”) It is easy to think that the lines came to him in a dream, but the awkward truth is that they were poetically crafted. When the top hat that fell off
Fields’s head ended up standing on the edge of its brim on the point of his shoe, it didn’t happen by magic, and neither did a line like “What do you mean, speak up? If I could
speak up, I wouldn’t
need
a telephone.” Just think of all the ways that idea could be written down differently, and not be funny. Magicians do
not use magic. “Thou know’st we work by wit and not by witchcraft,” says Iago, “and wit depends on dilatory time.” Iago’s business was duplicity, but one of
his weapons was straight sense.

Everyone knows that censorship closed off the future for Mae West. Less well-known is that it did the same for Fields. It
wasn’t alcohol or old age that ensured his decline, but a sudden, fatal limitation on what he was allowed to say. (Nevertheless alcohol helped: one of his best throwaway lines in
My Little Chickadee
was written from the heart. “During a trip through Afghanistan we lost our corkscrew and were compelled to live on food and
water.”)
The Bank Dick
is a great movie, but it might have been greater still if the censors hadn’t read the script first; and there would
almost certainly have been more Fields movies to equal it. When a poet is denied one word, it casts a pall for him on all the others; and Fields was a poet—a poet of innuendo. In private
life, nobody cared if he said “Filthy stuff, water: fish fuck in it.” But in the movies he was not allowed to go on getting away with advising little girls against playing
“squat-tag in the asparagus patch.” Nor could he any longer say to his Little Chickadee, “I have a number of pear-shaped
ideas I would like to discuss with
you.” Restricted by the new regulatory codes, the Hollywood film-makers did not necessarily abandon their intelligence. Some of the screwball comedies, made when studio censorship was in
full force, remain among the most intelligent films ever. The terse eloquence of films like
My Man Godfrey
and
His Girl
Friday
has been matched since the lapse of censorship but not exceeded. There was, however, a certain range of verbal playfulness that went disastrously into abeyance. It became impossible
to be suggestive about sex. One could be amusingly evasive about the broad fact of it, but never suggestive about its detail. For Fields, especially in his later years, being suggestive about sex
was at the heart of speech, because the discrepancy between his raddled body and his intact lusts was the secret of his screen personality. All his best dialogue came from a mental underworld of
sensual indulgence. Hence we have to live with the cruel paradox that sound movies silenced him. What we see of him on screen is just the beginning of what he might have done: a daunting thought
if you are one of those people who find his every audible moment even funnier than the way he looked when struggling with a wilful hat, or walking upstairs on the wrong side of a banister. Though
he exaggerated his early deprivations when he told tales of his upbringing, Fields was certainly the man out of place: one of those people who are born exiles even if they never leave home. For
some reason such misfits seem to favour the notion of verbal economy, as if turning ordinary language into the kind of compressed code that unfolds into a wealth of meaning when you have the
key.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) is a cautionary tale, but the tale is about us more than
about him. Tormented by a glamorous marriage that went wrong, drinking himself to destruction while doing second-rate work to pay the bills, lost in a Hollywood system guaranteed to frustrate
what was left of his ability, he became the focal point of numberless journalistic stories about the waste of a literary talent. He himself gave the starting signal for that approach with the
self-flagellating articles later collected by his friend Edmund Wilson in
The Crack-Up
. Faultless in its transparent style and full of true things about
the perils of the creative life, it is certainly a book to read and remember, but not until we have read and remembered (indeed memorized)
The Great
Gatsby
and
Tender Is the Night
. Otherwise we might get the absurd idea that one of the most important modern writers spent his career preparing
himself for a suitably edifying disintegration. The inevitable effect of a biographer’s hindsight is to belittle the subject’s foresight. As his two great novels prove, Fitzgerald
was well aware that the culture of glamour was a drawback of democracy, a levelling mechanism calculated to give us comfort by turning gifted lives into manageable legends. If he had written
nothing else at
all after
The Great Gatsby
, we would still be faced with one of the prophetic books of the twentieth century.
Fitzgerald guessed where celebrity, if pursued for itself, was bound to end up: as a dead body in the swimming pool.

A good style simply doesn’t
form
unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it
is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journalese.

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD IN A
LETTER TO HIS DAUGHTER, QUOTED BY EDMUND WILSON IN
The Crack-Up
, P. 296

M
ORE THAN FORTY
years
after I first read them, these two sentences from the ailing writer to his teenage daughter still arouse that thrill of delighted approbation that once took the form of the word
“yes!,” uttered while one stood up suddenly before walking around the room. Nowadays I stay in my chair, but in the metaphysical sense I am no less moved. Fitzgerald wrote this letter
in 1940. Propelled by his alcoholism, he was far gone in his decline by then: so far gone that he could actually believe his stints in Hollywood were getting him out of trouble instead of further
in. (We should hasten to note that it wasn’t the place’s fault: other writers could work the double trick of staying true to their gifts while still doing what the studios wanted, but
Fitzgerald was cursed, or blessed, with an incurable lack of savvy about conserving his energies.) He was not so far gone, however, that he didn’t feel the need to impress his daughter by
presenting himself as a wise man. In the long run, of course, there was a cosmic joke: he
was
a wise man. Great failure had made him so. It takes a great
artist to have a great failure, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was so great an artist that he could turn even his fatal personal inadequacies into material for poetry. The magazine articles collected in
The Crack-Up
were worth the crack-up: the moment when his mind came closest to disintegrating was the moment when his prose style came closest to a perfect
coherence. That was quite a thing for it to do so markedly, because it
had always been coherent. Fitzgerald, seemingly from his apprentice years, had wielded a style of
inclusive fluency, his because it was nobody else’s: the ideal natural, neutral style, so finely judged in its musicality it convinces its readers that their own melodic sense is being
answered from phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph. Can we really believe that he arrived at his style only after reading many other great stylists, absorbing and
synthesizing their various influences, and somehow contriving to eliminate the residues, even of the latest one? The belief comes hard.