'It's Like the Fountains of Rome'

“Did you ever hear Emmy really laugh? It’s like the fountains of Rome. There are only two or three people who can produce it, and I’m not one of them. No, that’s not right. I have produced it, but unintentionally. She was laughing at me. It’s also like the cups on the pantry shelf.”

Live long enough and you’ll encounter every style of laughter, from full-body Rabelaisian to silent quiver. Laughter is the most pleasurable of physical sensations, excluding the obvious. Mockery in the form of raucous laughter is our most appropriate response to public stupidity, pomposity, humorlessness and any abuse of power. Bullies hate to be laughed at more than getting punched in the nose. A long time ago I copied out a line from Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes (1968): “[H]e was being deprived of some of his laughless laughs.”

 

Enviably, some people have no shame when laughing: let the snot fly! Bless ’em. Boswell recounts his great friend’s laughter: “Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his manner. It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: ‘He laughs like a rhinoceros.’” Others seem embarrassed to laugh, and do so only when socially sanctioned by their betters. How human it is that grief and laughter both elicit tears.

 

In the passage quoted above, William Maxwell is describing the laughter of Emily, his wife, in a letter to Eudora Welty written on this date, November 3, in 1955. Maxwell seems to have been both a connoisseur of  laughter and an enthusiastic practitioner. On August 10, 1969, he describes his reaction to reading Welty’s forthcoming novel, Losing Battles (1970):

 

“But my God how funny it is. I laughed continually—Emmy said she had never heard me laugh so much over a book. Not helpless laughter, not tears of laughter, but the quiet appreciative kind, as I hugged my jokes to myself.”

 

The Urtext on the subject is Max Beerbohm’s “Laughter” (And Even Now, 1920). He devotes ample space to Dr. Johnson, who “grew violent only in laughter.” He was no jokester, no life-of-the-party clown, but Beerbohm notes of him: “Echoes of that huge laughter come ringing down the ages.” Johnson was no jolly good fellow, yet his laughter was a force of nature. In his Samuel Johnson (1977), W. Jackson Bate writes:

 

“Johnson, time and again, walks up to almost every anxiety and fear the human heart can feel. As he puts his hands directly upon it and looks at it closely, the lion’s skin falls off, and we often find beneath it only a donkey, maybe only a frame of wood. This is why we so often find ourselves laughing as we read what he has to say. We laugh partly through sheer relief. His honesty to human experience cuts through the ‘cant,’ the loose talk and pretense, with which all of us get seduced into needlessly complicating life for both ourselves and other people. We laugh also at the unpredictability and novelty of Johnson’s way of putting things.”

 

[You can find Maxwell’s letters in What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell (2011).]