'Idiot Hopefulness or Fathomless Exasperation'

When my oldest son was about seven and already a movie enthusiast, we drove up to the Crandall Library in Glens Falls, N.Y. to watch Laurel and Hardy movies. I’d seen a notice in the paper. A film collector brought his own projector and a box of 16mm reels and set up in one of the meeting rooms. About a dozen people showed up, most very old or very young. For four hours we watched “County Hospital,” “Big Business,” “Double Whoopee,” “Our Wife,” “The Music Box,” “Way Out West” and other films with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. I’m certain I have never sustained laughter for that long. Of course, laughter has a social component, and I was merely joining my son and the rest of the all-male audience. This is one of my most cherished memories. Josh and I still love Laurel and Hardy. 

It seems fitting that Arthur Stanley Jefferson was born on Bloomsday, fourteen years before that joyous event first took place on June 16, 1904. He entered the world in his grandparents’ house in Ulverston, Lancashire. Describing an early photo of the pair, Hugh Kenner refers to their “stares of idiot hopefulness or fathomless exasperation that constituted their public critique of the universe.” Kenner was reviewing The Films of Laurel and Hardy by William K. Everson in the November 14, 1967, issue of The National Review. Kenner, the scholar of Modernism, adept of Joyce, Pound and Beckett, continues with the photograph:

 

“Bathed in the nearly horizontal light of early morning, the boys look fresh: the day is all before them. Creation has sprung forth anew, pianos once more unwrecked, cars undemolished, hats unbattered, suits unrumpled. Ollie lounges against a Ford that looks spry as a grasshopper, his bulk so poised as to seem weightless, feet nonchalantly crossed. Stan’s hands are clasped in ecstasy. They bend toward each other in communion. Soundless laughter convulses them; their closed eyes savor some invisible bit of business . . .”

 

Kenner carefully evaluates the films, acknowledging that some were dross but others “classic,” flawless” and even “perfect.” “Big Business” (1929) he calls their masterpiece. In it, the boys are door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen. Kenner closes his review:

 

“Their comedy, more than any other in cinema, theologized, so to speak, the common experience that if you hammer nails you are apt to strike your thumb. The theology, being false, is comic only in being belied: each film upheld it dogmatically; it was all their films that belied it.”

 

In a November 7, 1967, letter to Kenner, Guy Davenport praises the review and writes:

 

“A joy; your essay on Stan and Ollie. Arthur Stanley Jefferson. And Oliver Norvell Hardy, of Milledgeville, Ga. (where Flannery O’Connor wrote her novels), descendent of Nelson’s Hardy. One would love to sic a genealogist onto the matter, and come up with a kinship between Tom and Stan Jefferson.”

 

[The quoted letter can be found in Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (ed. Edward M. Burns, Counterpoint, 2018).]