Reading Peter Baker’s piece in today’s New York Times about the two older Bush brothers, I came across these 1988 statements by the youngest brother, Marvin:
“Jeb is the serious one. We have always thought that he would have a public career.” And the older brother? “George? George is the family clown.”
Also of interest: Baker’s description of George’s “liquid, languid youth.” That word “liquid” is perfect: it chimes with George “enjoying the four B’s—beer, bourbon and B & B liqueur.”
But we were talking about clowns—or at least Marvin Bush was. Few of us want clowns taking over the juggling pins of government.* Still, clowns fascinate us. They operate with a license that allows them to throw off all kinds of societal restraints. They laugh and they cry; they speak truth to power. They expose “sense” as nonsense. As Henry Miller once wrote: “I should have been a clown; it would have afforded me the widest range of expression.”
I’ve collected a number of stories, essays, and poems over the years that feature clowns (often in unsettling ways), and I’ve taught these works in a variety of contexts. But I’ve never taught a class that focuses exclusively on the figure of the clown, in all his bemused, bedraggled, motley glory. Next year I’m planning to do so. (The class’s inevitable title: “Taking the Clown Seriously.”) So I’ll be using this space from time to time to think out loud about clowns and the roles they play: in poetry and fiction, on stage and screen, and in the wider culture.
In Michael Chabon’s “The God of Dark Laughter,” a murdered clown is discovered in the western Pennsylvania woods. In the cave in which the clown had been living, Detective Jack Ganz (the dimmest of bulbs) and Edward D. Satterlee (the county’s district attorney and our narrator) discover a number of books:
a collected Blake, and a couple of odd texts, elderly and tattered: one in German called “Über das Finstere Lachen,” by a man named Friedrich von Junzt, which appeared to be religious or philosophical in nature, and one a small volume bound in black leather and printed in no alphabet known to me, the letters sinuous and furred with wild diacritical marks.
“Pretty heavy reading for a clown,” Ganz said.
“It’s not all rubber chickens and hosing each other down with seltzer bottles, Jack.”
“Oh, no?”
“No, sir. Clowns have unsuspected depths.”
“I’m starting to get that impression, sir.”
credit: Vin Innocente/Instagram
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* Perhaps the citizens of Reykjavík feel otherwise; they elected comedian Jón Gnarr as their mayor in 2010. Upon being elected, Gnarr said that he wouldn’t join a governing coalition with anyone who hadn’t watched “The Wire.” Why aren’t Reykjavík and Baltimore sister cities?