Film I Me Mime Wayne Koestenbaum’s wide-ranging homage to a silent movie star Noah Isenberg

The Anatomy of Harpo Marx by Wayne Koestenbaum Berkeley: University of California Press. 336 pages. $30.

riginally I intended to write a The book devotes one chapter to each of sing, ‘Last dance, last chance.’ The fear that a his chapter on Room Service (1938). “A tie is “ book about Harpo’s relation to the thirteen major films in which Harpo detail doesn’t belong in this book inspires me a circumcision motto, a trace of foresaken O history and literature,” remarks starred alongside brothers Groucho and to insist that everything belongs. What’s the skin.” But isn’t a tie sometimes just a tie? Wayne Koestenbaum on the first page of his Chico (and, in the early pictures, Zeppo). point of ‘book’ if it can’t include scraps? Isn’t Koestenbaum seems to recognize the tunnel fittingly zany, aphoristic, and meandering The pages present a string of prose snapshots, inclusiveness the point of the big store, a ware- vision that can result from pursuing his obses- study of the great mime of Marx Brothers richly illustrated with several dozen screen house of points, some insufficiently pointed?” sions too doggedly, admitting at one point, fame. “A tiny chapter on Harpo and Hegel. A grabs—a term whose semantic ambiguities The author, in other words, grants himself “I’ve been reading too much Lacan.” tiny chapter on Harpo and Marx. A tiny chap- and erotic undertones would seem to invite carte blanche to include what he wishes. And In the main, his interpretations tend toward ter on Harpo and Stein. A tiny chapter on the kind of playful reading that Koestenbaum so the book can be, by turns, exhilarating abstraction or discursive detour. He draws his Harpo and Hitler.” That idea didn’t stick. employs elsewhere. Similarly, each section and maddening, illuminating and irksome. ideas, some more opaque than others, from Plan B, we are told, was a novella, The Pillow falls beneath evocative subheadings, ranging Among the many guises of Koestenbaum’s a catalogue of Western thinkers (especially Book of Harpo Marx: “The narrator, Harpo, from “Harpo Gives Himself Breasts” and Harpo are the “Jewish fool,” the silent mys- Barthes and Benjamin, while the epigraphs was a queer Jewish masseur who lived in Vari- used to open each chapter range from John ety Springs, New York, and whose grandpar- Cage and Nietzsche through Elfriede Jelinek ents had starred in vaudeville with Sophie and Julia Kristeva), applying them with a Tucker.” That approach, too, got tossed. For poet’s sensitivity to language and a comp-lit plan C, the one that yielded The Anatomy of professor’s penchant for theorizing the ordi- Harpo Marx, Koestenbaum attempts “a nary. Examining the famous mirror scene in blow-by-blow annotation of Harpo’s Duck Soup (1933), in which Harpo shad- onscreen actions. My aim? Assemblage. ows each of Groucho’s movements, gestures, Homage. Imitation. Transcription. Dilation.” and facial expressions (a scene that was This may sound like a tall order, and it is. hilariously updated by Harpo and Lucille Yet Koestenbaum, whose books include Ball on I Love Lucy), Koestenbaum insists, Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon “Harpo wants to erase his own presence— (1995) and The Queen’s Throat: Opera, but also to intensify it through doubling. Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire Harpo contains a fold, like a creased page. (1993), rises to the occasion. The act he per- Eager to find ambiguous indentations in forms—the book is, on so many levels, about matteness, I invaginate reality by making it performance—comes off as a potent and idio- not simple.” Was this perhaps originally syncratic mix of film analysis and autobiogra- meant for a tiny chapter on Harpo and Hei- phy, a series of interpretive gestures that rely degger? Riffing later on the formal limita- as much on his critical as on his confessional tions of audience, Koestenbaum remarks, reflexes, pairing well-wrought epigrammatic “I’m an egghead, writing for other eggheads. observations with recurrent dream transcrip- Anti-intellectualism is rampant in the United tions. “The foundation of my technique,” he States. The interpreter counts for naught.” notes about a third of the way through, “is Far lighter and more playful, replete with digressiveness, which means I’m a joker. interpretive jouissance, are the many dream According to Freud, jokes protect thoughts transcriptions—“evidence I can’t omit from from conscious criticism. He described the my pillow book,” as he puts it early on—that joke’s libidinous ease, its shortcuts, the plea- he incorporates. Under the subheading “Why sure it takes in weaving incommensurables Dreams Must Be Part of Serious Thinking,” together, in behaving like a combination of a in his chapter on Animal Crackers (1930), he lap-dancer (I’ll grope anyone who pays me) observes, “I dreamt that Barbra Streisand, and a flâneur (I’ll get excited by anything I whose Jewfro in A Star Is Born looks like encounter on my urban stroll).” Harpo’s wig, dictated her memoirs while rid- As the arresting image of a lap-dancing “Harpo as Kissing Machine” to “Harpo’s tic, a “Germanic naturist,” a prophet of ing in a limo.” Or, in his chapter on Monkey flâneur may indicate, Koestenbaum’s Butt Cleavage,” and “Detachable Phallus: disaster, a phallus, or a delicious sucker: “I Business (1931), he opens with the following approach to Harpo makes for highly ani- Why I Poach from Psychoanalysis.” consider Harpo my lollipop, and I am forever lines: “Dream: Harpo starred in a Yiddish mated reading. The many digressions, From the outset, Koestenbaum recognizes licking him.” film, a talkie. He spoke! His voice was soft and whether unconscious criticism or criticism the radical nature of his enterprise, “to steal One exemplary reading, of the great beard- gravelly. Also dreamt I steamed an artichoke. of the unconscious, are every bit as essential a man from his native silence,” as he puts it, switching scene in A Night at the Opera Moral: I choke on art. Have you met Arthur as the larger story of his subject. The ambi- “and transplant him into words.” He’s much (1935), appears under the heading “Harpo as Choke, a quiet klutz his friends call Arty?” ent chaos, not to mention the perpetual less interested in the real man, Arthur (né Mad Mohel.” Readers seeking a linear account, a faith- anarchy and prankster sensibility, that often Adolph) Marx, born in New York City in ful chronicle, of the life and career of Harpo The sticky beard travels among men. Now comes with Harpo’s presence in film—the 1888, whose autobiography, Harpo Speaks! Harpo has it. But he passes it to a dignitary by Marx will likely be exasperated. Those willing wonderful “switch tricks” (e.g., lifting his (1961), he cites only fleetingly, than in his hugging and kissing him. If you raze a man’s to allow Koestenbaum to indulge in frequent leg for a handshake) and role reversals— screen persona and the seductive possibilities authority—with scissors or scapegoating— personal asides, promiscuous readings, and grants Koestenbaum the proper milieu in of interpretation or, perhaps, projection. you steal his beard. The beard is the hot potato his own anarchic transgressions vis-à-vis which to execute his own frolicsome readings. Commenting on a scene from The Cocoanuts that no one wants. Take my false beard, my conventional scholarship and film criticism As he observes in his chapter on A Night in (1929) in which Harpo and Chico dance Jewish stain. Take my wife. Fact: borscht-belt may well be dazzled. I myself fall somewhere Casablanca (1946), intimating another affin- together, he avers, “Harpo’s actions I choose headliner Henny Youngman married into my in between. While I appreciate the irreverent ity with the mischievous mime, “I specialize in to take queerly. Don’t accuse me of outing maternal grandmother’s family. Kinship binds wit, the theoretical acumen, and the intermit- pointing out perversities that others won’t anybody! I’ve never outed anyone in my life. me to funny Jewry. So many circumcision tent lyricism of Koestenbaum’s prose, some of plots! Snip, snip: I write you, young Jewish acknowledge.” Just as Harpo relishes misbe- I’m simply watching Harpo dance with a the self-consciously naughty dream excursus boy, into your historic identity. Harpo is a having and defying authority figures, slyly man.” Koestenbaum retains a lavish measure and other extended moments of autoanaly- mohel gone mad. putting them into compromising positions, of self-reflexivity throughout, zeroing in on sis—when the primary focus tilts toward the so, too, Koestenbaum derives great pleasure the chosen flash points from Harpo’s screen Given the heavy reliance on psychoanaly- author more than his subject—made me want in amplifying Harpo’s unspoken art. He inter- life—and on his anatomical features—and sis, and on Borscht Belt humor, the deep focus to re-create one of Harpo’s signature expres- nalizes his subject to such a degree that it’s then cutting away to other matters percolat- on circumcision should perhaps come as little sions, “throwing a Gookie” (“crossed eyes, possible to read The Anatomy of Harpo Marx ing in his wildly associative, equally erudite surprise. But that doesn’t mean that it’s bloated cheeks, protruding tongue”). as a fiendish satire of conventional scholar- mind. For instance, in his chapter on The Big immune from overdetermination: “Much Noah Isenberg directs the Screen Studies program Co ll e cti o n /N Y PL re The at ose R ship, lifting a leg instead of shaking hands with Store (1941), Koestenbaum writes, “Sudden about the Marx Brothers can be gleaned from at Eugene Lang College—The New School for Liberal y

standard methods and academic norms. auditory hallucination: I hear Donna Summer their off-kilter ties,” Koestenbaum writes in Arts and is the book-review editor at Film Quarterly. Bill

48 bookforum • summer 2012