The Anatomy of Harpo Marx. Wayne Koestenbaum

accretive motion.

      When the phone rings, Chico answers it, and Harpo makes musical mischief by ink-stamping any available surface: each time the stamp concussively strikes, it produces a different pitch. Sometimes he hits the bell’s bull’s-eye, inadvertently calling a hotel maid: “Did you ring, sir?” she says, saluting, and then, with each accidental ring, another girl appears. Seeing the first maid arrests Harpo: he has discovered a magic switch but doesn’t understand the cause-effect relation between bell and Being. And thus Harpo is entitled to live in the entranced gap between cause and effect, off samsara’s wheel.

      WAVING GOOD-BYE TO SOMEONE WHO CAN NO LONGER SEE YOU Harpo doesn’t mind being rejected. He waves good-bye to the girls, already out of sight. A Harpo trademark: waving to someone who can no longer see you. He acts chummy with the void. His wave dignifies the useless communication, the for-nothing. Demonstrating a pointless, antiutilitarian beauty, he puts effort and artistry into a motion unseen by companions. Thus Harpo, an autoerotic autocrat, denies that affectionate actions need recipients.

      KINESIS PRECEDES THINKING Move, then think. Act, then contemplate. Obey the body’s innate intelligence, its wish to move. Writing is kinetic. These sentences obey my movement-based desire to concentrate on a vanished subject.

      Chico and Harpo take turns spinning around a crook—played by Cyril Ring, who also appeared in Bette Davis’s Mr. Skeffington and Barbara Stanwyck’s The Lady Eve and Judy Garland’s Babes in Arms. (Hollywood intertextuality is important: kabbalah-like, it confirms cinematic kismet.) Men aren’t supposed to dance together, but Harpo’s kinetic momentum prevents the comrade from understanding the act’s compromising nature.

      Let me be clear. I’m not saying that Arthur Marx—the real Harpo—was queer. I’m not saying anything about the sexuality of the real Arthur Marx. How could I? (Oh, I could say a few things: he was happily married to actress Susan Fleming. They wed in 1936, when Harpo was forty-six years old. His closest friend was the theater critic and Algonquin Round Table wit Alexander Woollcott, who happened to be queer, and who happened to be, as Groucho put it, “in love with Harpo in a nice way”—a relationship about which there has been a certain amount of intriguing though ungrounded speculation.) Nor am I saying anything about what Harpo, the character, wants. “Harpo,” onscreen, is a fiction. And fictions don’t have desires. They have actions. Harpo’s actions I choose to take queerly. Don’t accuse me of outing anybody! I’ve never outed anyone in my life. I’m simply watching Harpo dance with a man.

      TURN A SHAME WORD (BUM) INTO A REPEATABLE MUSICAL OBJECT Cyril—bully, snob, Gentile—calls Harpo a bum. “Come, Penelope, let’s get away from this . . . bum.” Tramp. Rear end. The word bum, though it stuns and shames, provides ammunition. Here is a word that Harpo can handle—a juicy, containable morpheme, an almost onomatopoeic syllable, whose low, corporeal sound reinforces its sense. Again he mouths the word: “bum.” It may mean nothing to him, but it offers a pretext for testing out repetition, for moving his lips, for enunciating. Bum—insult—turns into kernel of song. Harpo mouths the word to Chico, who provides sound. And as bum repeats—“bum, bum, bum”—it accretes into a rhythm, an abstract pattern. Chico sings and Harpo mimes “bum-bum-bum” while exiting, Harpo holding a phantom flute and audibly whistling. (Words may be out of bounds, but nonverbal noises are kosher.)

      I’VE ACCOMPLISHED ANOTHER TRANSFORMATION Pleasure, for Harpo, lies in transformation for transformation’s sake. Why not be thrifty, and make use of every inanimate scrap? (Gertrude Stein’s credo: Use everything.) Harpo takes part in the grand tradition of art (from Marcel Duchamp to John Cage to Dieter Roth, and beyond) that recycles—or transubstantiates—debris.

      At the hotel’s registration desk, Harpo sniffs the telephone, scrutinizes it, tries to interpret it, to cozy up to it, as if it were human. Then he chews the phone and looks toward the camera; his eyes, alight with pleasure, signify it tastes good or else I’ve accomplished another transformation; I’ve metamorphosed phone into food. The ink jar, like a precious thurible, glistens; pinkie in air, he drinks. Harpo’s face, a scientist’s, evaluates. With a receptivity to the strangeness of the ordinary as radical as Thoreau’s or Wittgenstein’s, Harpo treats existence as a sequence of experiments, none fatal. He puts down the ink jar, smiles, and nods. Job well done, another foodstuff pilfered, another item of garbage transformed into treasure.

      When Chico enters, Harpo’s face remains immobile—arrested by panic—but his alert eyes try to figure out whether the universe is sanely functioning. Hyperawareness of atmospheric dangers is an opportunist’s, a paranoid’s, or a traumatized soul’s—a shtetl mentality, transmuted to Paramount.

      THE SWITCH TRICK One of Harpo’s trademarks is the “switch trick”—instead of giving his hand to someone who wants to shake it, Harpo offers a leg. The detective unconsciously grasps the leg and then angrily thrusts it away when he realizes the ruse. This trick always satisfies Harpo. It gives him a chance to rest his leg. It eroticizes the handshake’s masculine formality. It amplifies the offering. It confuses the enemy. It stuns—stops—time. It stymies the equivalence, the fake parity, of hand and hand. It interrupts grammar.

      Everyone accepts Harpo’s thigh, because the switch trick happens quickly and unexpectedly, and because it lacks apparent logic. Why protect yourself against a nonsense assault? The switch trick blends aggression and intimacy, and proposes substitution as an aesthetic category. Notice the pleasure that hits when one thing replaces another. You expect a fist. You receive, instead, a flower.

      THROWING A GOOKIE The detective (played by Basil Ruysdael, a basso who sang in Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète with Enrico Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera) recognizes Harpo’s face, and flashes a “wanted criminal” photo. Reciprocating, Harpo throws him a Gookie. In his autobiography, Harpo Speaks, he calls this trademark expression “throwing a Gookie”: crossed eyes, bloated cheeks, protruding tongue. The gesture originated in cruelty. Mr. Gehrke, in Harpo’s childhood, was an ordinary man who rolled cigars in a store window. Imitating Mr. Gehrke’s expression of rapt, foolish absorption in a task, Harpo stood in front of the window and yelled, “Gookie!”—the Yorkville pronunciation of “Gehrke.” Onstage, the Gookie was a crowd-pleaser. With this trick, he could stimulate a restless vaudeville audience. Onscreen, the Gookie safeguards Harpo’s identity by making him monstrous. Gookie rhymes with two other treats: cookie and nookie. Harpo flashes a Gookie to freeze the villain, as the Medusa’s head turned the viewer to stone. The Gookie, snake-haired, recapitulates the excited stiffness of the penis it wants to embody, or to avoid, or to cut off. (So said Freud—controversially, charismatically.) The Gookie has an affinity with castration, but I can’t make the connection foolproof.

      HARPO ACTS EASILY OFFENDED Harpo playfully fingers Chico’s knish-like face. Chico slaps away the exploring hand— leave me alone! Offended, Harpo gives duck-mouth, pushes Chico, and wheels fists into the fight position. (Twice, at the moment a slug is expected, Harpo surprises by kicking Chico’s rear.) Not genuinely angry, Harpo enjoys stepping onto the assembly line of taking offense, a comprehensible sequence: he protrudes lips, kicks Chico, greases comedy’s wheels, advances to the next bit of business, and defends his own chivalric honor. His formulaic set piece—being offended— offers the comfort of imitable units, a Parcheesi pleasure, like Alhambra mosaics or Donald Judd shelves.

      BABY-ROMANCING THE LAW: THE NOD Basil the basso-detective intervenes again, breaking up the fight. Now Harpo baby-romances the law by leaning; collapsing, Harpo pushes the horn into the law’s gut, and thereby honks. Harpo has forced the law to operate the farting noisemaker. The honker glues the guys together: they slow-dance. Harpo satisfies a wish to cuddle by turning punishment into cozy roundelay.

      The basso-detective says, “I’m going to keep watching”—and Harpo, looking him directly in the eye, nods. Whether or not Harpo agrees, he nods. Reflex actions, mimicking compliance, protect him from