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The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy.
Faber & Faber, London 2001; paperback 2002
St Martins Press, New York, 2002
Art forms are languages. The pleasure in Elizabethan drama, or Cubist painting, or bluegrass music lies on the far side of a slope of learning which has to be climbed to appreciate the view. Sometimes the ascent can be dismal; sometimes (as with the classic silent film comedies) there are powerful lures to carry us over stumbling-blocks like primitive technology or old-fashioned manners.
And sometimes we tramp up the path and find that we simply don't like what we see. There are plenty of folk who don't "get" Laurel and Hardy - for whom the spectacle of two men doing very stupid things very slowly is odd and frankly unappealing. And it's amazing how effectively Simon Louvish's new book generates that sense of alienation and wasted time through the course of its marathon trudge. Actually, I'm a Laurel and Hardy fan.
Slapstick, mawkish sentimentality and simplistic morality are this critic's poison, and I've always felt more sympathy for the pathetic plight of Stan Laurel than for Charlie Chaplin's smart-arsed Tramp. Louvish himself, without question, is absorbed by the pair, and he certainly traces the tale of last century's greatest double act with dogged thoroughness.
The story takes in Stanley's apprenticeship, from minor roles in his father's productions at Glasgow music halls, faltering early solo ambitions ("Young Stanley Jefferson - He of the Funny Ways"), transatlantic expeditions in the company (and shadow) of Chaplin, and strivings on the US vaudeville circuit. Norvell "Babe" Hardy was simultaneously developing a film career, first in Florida and then at Hal Roach's Culver City studio, where Laurel eventually caught up with him.
Success wasn't easily won (both men were rising 40 by the time their teamwork found acclaim.) But the formula which they painstakingly evolved was both unorthodox and magical. For the respect demanded by the hopeful, tie-twiddling delicacy of the Hardy persona required the gags of the slapstick genre to be slowed down so much that Ollie's foil - Stan - had to operate at a virtual standstill: a living miracle of stupidity. And yet not only did the pair have the grace to carry off this slow-motion comic ballet, but the well-anticipated comedy payoffs which trundled relentlessly into view around them acquired a ritualistic quality which carried deeper echoes than the frenetic "business" of Laurel and Hardy's contemporaries.
With the Englishman the driving creative force, the pair's silent and sound movies of the Twenties and Thirties made them huge global stars even while they endured a sad decline, reduced to trotting out other people's assembly -line tripe in low-budget vehicles.
There's much to be said about Laurel and Hardy, and most of it is said somewhere in this book. And plenty more besides. Like an over-anxious waiter twittering and fussing over the dishes on the table, Simon Louvish is unable to resist the explanatory comment, the passing homily, the knowing aside. And really, it's hard to make out his purpose, or even to be sure that the author is free of that uncertainty. Countless previous biographies have focused on every possible area of interest to do with Laurel and Hardy; and, as if determined not to duplicate that focus, Louvish has come up with a book which fails to cohere into any sort of meaningful shape at all.
Here you will find some smashing photographs, excerpts from scripts and newspaper reports; summaries of well-known facts and tangential digressions; apocryphal anecdotes, with confirmation that they are unconfirmed; cultural analysis; details of Louvish's own inconclusive research; endless rote on obscure silent film plots and production information; exhaustive and tiresome conjecture about scarce evidence on subjects which the author really fails to animate as interesting human beings. The revelation that Oliver Hardy is "the original mystery wrapped in an enigma" is a poor reward for the reader whose patience and tenacity have held up as far as page 241.
So, if you want to know what it was like to be Laurel or Hardy, or to be near them, or what a day in their life might have been like, you must search elsewhere. And if you are tempted by the thought that there may yet be some magic in the subject, take a peek at page 246, where you will find a large close-up picture of a middle-aged man in a bowler hat, crying like a child. If that makes you feel both amused and sympathetic, then you know all you need to know. And no slope to climb, at all.
Also see:
Jeanine Basinger’s review in The New York Times Sunday Book Review,
8 December 2002, at:
www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/books/review/08BASINGT.htmlAlso review at:
Dallas News
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