Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson

Author:Shirley Jackson [Jackson, Shirley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-03T21:00:00+00:00

Clowns

“What’s so special about clowns?” I’d been wondering to myself. “What makes them so funny?” (Let me say here that I intend someday to ask a clown—for instance, Emmett Kelly, that mighty creature—about people. “What’s so special about people?” I shall ask him.) Wandering around asking idiotic questions is not usually the best way to learn anything, I’d have thought, but with clowns it seems to be not how you introduce the subject but, once introduced, how you dismiss it.

“The one in the circus,” said my son with whom I began it. “The one who sweeps up the spotlight.”

“Grock,” said our friend who is a musician. “The greatest clown who ever lived, and the most unfortunate fellow.” He began to laugh reminiscently. “Let me show you,” he said; he stood up and gestured widely. “Grock used to come onto the stage, walking like this. In his bag he found first a clarinet, which he played, singing the low notes the clarinet would not sing. Then, he finds a violin, and he wishes to play that, but it is a small violin, a toy. And Grock is wearing those great gloves of the clown, so he plays the violin anyway. Like this. The small violin, and the large gloves. And he tosses the bow into the air, but cannot catch it.” The musician stopped for breath. Then, while he was tossing an imaginary violin bow into the air and pointedly not catching it, the writer interrupted.

“Remember the Marx Brothers? And the dancing scene in front of the mirror? Or Groucho’s walk? Or Harpo swinging on the opera house scenery? Or—”

“Grock, then,” the musician said, his voice rising. “He will play the piano, although it displeases him, and it plays badly, so he dismembers it. So he thinks he will play the accordion, and for a while it plays beautifully, but then he cannot make it squeeze back together again, and it grows longer and longer, until poor Grock is wound around and around. The most unfortunate fellow.”

“Remember Emmett Kelly slouching along chewing on that loaf of bread?” demanded our neighbor who owns the coal business. “He walks—I can’t describe it—like this, look.”

“There was a little circus used to come around summers,” my grocer told me. “Had a clown, funniest man I ever saw. He threw tomatoes. Didn’t do anything else—just threw tomatoes.” He made an easy throwing gesture. “Just threw tomatoes,” he said.

“Watch me,” my son said. He ran around in little circles, shouting, “I’m sweeping up the light, look! I’m sweeping up the light!”

“Grock?” said the lady whose business is cosmetics. “Yes, I remember Grock; he was a great man. He was the only clown I ever saw who wore almost no makeup. His face was natural, if you know what I mean, but like a clown’s without paint.”

It was like that right along. First the familiar, faraway look in the eyes, then the reminiscent smile. Then the urgent need to imitate, rather than describe—to be, for one minute, the clown himself.

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