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The Life and Times of W.C.Fields
Faber & Faber, London 1997; paperback 1998
W.W. Norton, New York, 1997, paperback 1999
Godfrey Daniel! Mother of pearl! Simon Louvish wants to set the record straight on the life of W. C. Fields. In Man on the Flying Trapeze (564 pages. Norton. $29.95), Fields's latest biographer starts out sounding frighteningly like one of those priggish busybodies whose role in any Fields film is to make life a living hell for the star. Fields did not grow up poor, Louvish tells us. He didn't squirrel away money under various aliases in banks all over America. His tombstone doesn't say I'D RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA. But before you can cry "Say it ain't so," Louvish takes things to a more sublime level. The man behind these lies and legends, he points out, was none other than Fields himself. Not content with the plain facts-middle-class upbringing; quick, if not overnight, success as a professional jugglerhe made himself up. His childhood became Dickensian, and the starving young juggler slept on snowbound park benches. He was his own greatest creation, and in Louvish, this complicated artist has finally found the biographer he deserves.
Following Fields from burlesque to vaudeville, from juggling to comedy and finally into radio and film, Louvish chronicles not only a life but a concise history of early-20th-century entertainment. But while this novelist and film scholar is erudite, he is never pedantic, and he knows when to shut up. "It is no part of this book," he wisely admits, "to explain why W. C. Fields, or any other great comic, is funny." This is a particularly wise tactic in Fields's case, because so much of what he did that makes people laugh ought not to be funny at all. When Fields, as Egbert Souse in "The Bank Dick," says, "My uncle, a balloon ascensionist ..." it's not funny, strictly speaking, but you laugh anyway, and then laugh a little harder because you don't know exactly what it is you're laughing at.
Deconstructing the myths that barnacle Fields's history, Louvish reveals a man much more mysterious than the famously bibulous clown. He was a great drinker, yes, but he was also a great gardener, a fact that he took pains to hide (although his gardening habits were quite in keeping with the Fields we love: he wrote notes to recalcitrant roses: "Bloom, damn you, bloom!").
In the end, though, the myths may crumble, but he remains our favorite knight-errant, shambling, incoherent, defeated yet unbowed as he tilts against everything proper and overstuffed. When Fields as Wilkins Micawber comes home in "David Copperfield" and announces to his wife, "I have thwarted the malevolent machinations of our scurrilous enemies-in short, I have arrived!" we laugh and cheer. Once again he has not just made us laugh; he has lifted our hearts in the same moment. As Fields himself would say, "It baffles science!"
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