Wolfe’s ‘Fat Magician’: Marx Brother?

Was Gene Wolfe’s short story “The Fat Magician”: inspired by the Marx Brothers’s A Night at the Opera?

For no particular reason, I was watching the (Jewish) Marx Brothers’s 1935_91ya A Night at the Opera. They were some of the most famous & beloved American celebrities in the world when Gene Wolfe (b. 1931_95ya) was growing up, and A Night is one of their most famous & successful films; so, anything in it could be considered quite well known to Wolfe’s generation & previous generation.

One scene at the 1h mark started to seem oddly familiar: A plainclothes policeman, who is noticeably fat, is looking for the other 2 brothers in the 1^st (Groucho) brother’s apartment, which has several rooms as well as a fire escape. The brothers rush from room to room evading the policeman, taking beds with them, as he becomes more and more confused, and the beds disappear; while the visible brother appears to do nothing, but assists their escapades and confuses the policeman further.

At one point, the policeman mistakes a bed held up by a brother hiding behind it for the door to the room, and at the end, he rushes into the other room through the escape—only to see the brothers dressed up with what looks like a long (rabbinical?) beard and a tea cozy or something of that ilk (which looks strikingly like a yarmulke), concluding he’s stumbled into the wrong rooms entirely, and gives up and leaves to search elsewhere.

Something about it seemed familiar… not like a movie, but something written… Gene Wolfean, not any other writer, somehow… but what Wolfe novel involved Jewish comedians or room-swapping…?

After some searching, I realized that it reminded me of the Wolfe short story “The Fat Magician” (2000_26ya; collected in Starwater Strains, 2005_21ya).

“The Fat Magician” has puzzled us; no-one has given a remotely satisfying explanation of the multiple loose ends, or explained its clearly political subtext, or answered the questions the story poses to the reader, and this is perhaps why it has been relatively little discussed & panned by readers. (Gene Wolfe’s introduction is, as usual, unhelpful.) But if you watch the Marx Brothers scene, I think suddenly it all snaps into place, including questions like the censored names.

The basic mechanic is the same: repeated room swapping and sleight of hand to hide people from the authorities. There is a fat man involved, and the police are, of course, the enemy, persecuting the Marx brothers. Ernst is mentioned as having a waxed moustache & beard; and while Groucho may not have had a beard, he certainly had a moustache. A ‘stage magician’ was a common thing in Jewish vaudeville (eg. Houdini), even if the Marx brothers were never magicians per se (as far as I can tell from a quick Wikipedia skim), they do do a lot of sleight-of-hand-like things. The chair is described as suspiciously large and like a bed, like the beds in the scene, although when the Nazis look under it they find nothing.

The Wolfe Wiki notes: “The old people from fat Ernst’s generation feared him while the young ones like him.” This is true in A Night at the Opera, where a long sequence is devoted to showing how the Marx brothers enchant the young children of the cruise ship and ally with the romantically-young protagonists, while the cruel old people who represent The Man are opposed to them and are preyed on by them.

The Wolfe Wiki asks “What is the last name of fat Ernst S—?”

By an interesting coincidence, the Marx brothers’ mother was named ‘Miene “Minnie” Schoenberg’; although their connection was sometimes deceptively obscured, as WP notes that “Minnie also acted as the brothers’ manager, using the name Minnie Palmer so that agents did not realize that she was also their mother.” Schoenberg is not necessarily a Jewish surname (looking through Schoenberg (surname) & “Schönberg” (disambiguation page) notes that it means ‘beautiful mountain’ and would be an appropriate resort hotel name), it is certainly strongly associated with Jews.

This hints that Ernst Schoenberg was eventually dragged off and killed as a ‘Jew’ by the frustrated Nazi goons in lieu of the Jews he was hiding from them. The concealment of the surname under the em-dash anonymization convention helps delay the twist—any reader who sees ‘Schoenberg’ on the first page is going to expect the ending, in addition to possibly spoiling the gimmick prematurely. (At least, in an era far more familiar with the Marx Brothers than ours.)

The Marx brothers connection doesn’t directly reveal any big twist for the room trick or change the moral of the story, but what it does suggest is that we need to think in a more slapstick, vaudevillian approach about what a stage magician might be doing beyond gimmicked locks. (Stage magicians do use gimmicked locks, of course, but that’s a low and inelegant trick.)

The narrator starts by telling us he will not tell us the whole truth, to keep the daughter’s confidence. So when he tells us the trick is moving room to room, that can’t be it. This is, at best, a half-truth, with the real trick held back against future totalitarian regimes. (We’ve discussed how Wolfe in other late fiction has a rather reactionary Boomer turn in imagining the USA succumbing to a Fox News cartoon caricature of socialism.)

The dialogue eventually tells us that the chair is in the parlor and the parlor appears to be a kind of central hall which is directly connected to several rooms, and Ernst orders the Nazis to close doors when they are done.

What would be the most slapstick vaudevillian thing for Groucho Marx to do, sitting on his big chair in the middle of a hallway, chomping on his cigar, while thugs searched room to room for his brothers?

Why, it would be for the brothers to scurry not room to room, but room to chair to room.

The chair is the key because it is the temporary hiding spot, the waystation!

The Nazis go to search one room, they scurry out from the neighboring room to under the chair, wait for the Nazis to go into the next one they just vacated & close the door, and scurry into the just-cleared room. (There is plenty of room, as the brothers can squeeze themselves in: indeed, previously in the movie, for the most famous scene in the boat room, the other brothers have stowed away in Groucho’s luggage to get on the boat.) The Nazis come out, maybe demand to see under the chair or drill it, but there’s nothing there. They go to the next room, and so on, until they have ‘cleared’ all rooms with no results but Ernst laughing at them and offering cutting commentary.

Nothing supernatural, nothing weird about Ernest actually being fat because “he’s absorbed 3 men into his body” or anything like that, only ordinary sleight-of-hand opposed to totalitarianism.

Any future Nazi who thought they had discovered the trick of the locked doors might lock the between-room doors themselves with their own locks; but this would fail, because the fugitives are not using the between-room doors at all! The Nazi would need to lock the regular doors, and obviously Ernst would have the keys to them all, so that wouldn’t work without special measures.

Thus, the narrator has kept his promise to keep the real secret hidden and effective, but if you know what Wolfe is alluding to, you can figure out the full trick (as well as details like Ernst’s surname).

As for the deeper meaning: Wolfe is constantly playing with the ideas of ‘levels’ and ‘imitation of higher/lower things’—as the meme goes, “and yet a trace of the true self exists in the false self”.

So Ernest is a magician, not because he has magical powers, but because he used stage magic to become a salvific figure who achieved the miracle of saving Jews from the Nazis, although he ultimately dies on their behalf. (The irony is that ‘real’ magic is not real, but ‘stage magic’ is real magic.) And further, the Nazis do not have magical powers from demons to fight Ernest, but they are driven by demonic influences on the hearts & minds of men to do satanic things, like the Holocaust. Since Judgment Day has not come, Satan & evil remain undefeated, and men like the Nazis may come again; so our narrator leaves this coded account for ‘those with eyes to see and ears to hear’ about how to use ‘magic’ to covertly resist, and achieve miracles.

So, I suggest that “The Fat Magician” is a bit of a transposition/rewrite, in classic Wolfe fashion (similar to how “Suzanne Delage” turns out to be Bram Stoker’s Dracula), of genre fiction that Wolfe was familiar with and expected his audience to be familiar with, but has now become highly obscure, for commentary/allusive purposes.

This is also interesting if you argue, as some people do, that Wolfe’s The Land Across & The Sorcerer’s House is in some way drawing on the same ideas: that beneath the heavy supernatural texture, there is a lot of more mundane sleight-of-hand trickery used by humans in imitation of the supernatural, where we must be alert to any possibility of swapping or replacement as our attention is misled—but there is still a core of supernatural evil we must look for, even if it may wind up being much smaller & simpler than we expect.