SOURCE: Frick, Daniel E. “The Prison House of Art: Aesthetics vs. Politics in Robert Coover's Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 2 (spring 1994): 217–23.

[In the following essay, Frick offers a critical reevaluation of Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, which he considers an underappreciated achievement that offers important insight into the depressing reality faced by contemporary American writers who seek to imbue works of aesthetic excellence with political relevance.]

Robert Coover's Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? does not appear on most short lists of the important works of contemporary fiction. In fact, it is not likely to be named as one of Coover's major efforts. But it should be. Instead, Gloomy Gus has been twice dismissed as an undistinguished performance. The short story version, published in 1975 in American Review, was seen as a writer's exercise, a way for Coover to work out the frustrations of the extremely difficult and tedious composition of the heftier The Public Burning, while the 1987 novella was most frequently understood as little more than a one-joke satire on Richard Nixon.¹ Viewed from a more sympathetic perspective, however, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus? stands as Coover's most moving contemplation of the central issue facing any politically concerned writer: that is, the tension—perhaps the unresolvable conflict—between the demands of artistic excellence and of ideological commitment. This multifaceted—but underappreciated—literary gem casts light on the ease with which artists trivialize themselves by retreating into the sanctuary of their art, and, even when they do not, the crushing odds against their efforts to use their work for the public good.

What gives Gloomy Gus its largely unacknowledged depth is that Coover plays his theme in three variations. The first is a parody of an exclusively aesthetic approach to art. As in The Public Burning, Richard Nixon provides Coover with the basis for a fictional character, known in the novella as Gloomy Gus (a law school nickname of the ex-President), a former star halfback turned actor. In this one-time Chicago Bear prospect, Coover lampoons the artist fixated on technique. A shy college student, successful at academics, school theatricals, and politics, Gloomy Gus is a failure at the two things that the adolescent American male is told matter most: football and girls. Like a humorless Benjamin Franklin grimly pursuing moral perfection, Gus tries by the sheer force of an inflexible will to teach himself to be a football player and a lover. Setting aside two 30-minute periods a day to practice how not to go offside and how to hold a girl's hand, he starts at the beginning because, as a man who must make himself, “nothing ever came naturally to him” (102). Acquiring a single skill led, however, to the need to learn several new ones, and as he could streamline but never eliminate his original drills, Gus soon gives over his entire life to mastering his crafts. His confidence that he could learn the “virtually infinite” responses “with which opposing teams and girls might confront him” (108) testifies to his unquestioning trust in a disciplined technique.

Gus wins renown on both his chosen fields of play, but his obsession with mastering their formal structures renders the outside world invisible to him. Astonishingly, Gloomy Gus achieves his stardom in the early years of the New Deal, and later works as an actor for a WPA project, yet shows no awareness of the effects of the Great Depression. What is more, any emotional qualities outside of his enclosed system—such as beauty or joy—are unassimilable: Gus “would probably have registered them as some kind of vexatious disorder, and added yet another calisthenic to his schedule” (94). As a consequence, he learns how to seduce without ever feeling lust, much less love. Locked into programmatic responses that exclude the personal as well as the political, Gus is a “coldhearted craftsman” (131).

Even more pathetic, Gus's method brings only a fleeting success. The novella's title—referring to the genre of news articles that seeks out that oxymoronic creature, the forgotten celebrity—forewarns us of Gus's ultimate failure. When the opposing team in the 1934 NFL championship substitutes one of his sex-practice partners for one of their linemen, Gus is beaten senseless by the police to stop an exhibition of his bedroom technique. Unable to process such brutal disapproval, the greatest football player and lover comes unhinged, like “a kind of unwired puppet, unable even to recall his toilet training or his native language” (143). Eventually, his Pavlovian stimulus-response system kills him. Leo, a labor organizer, had thought having an ex-football star join the demonstrations supporting the strike at Chicago's Republic Steel plant would be good for the workers' morale. Instead, Gus starts a riot when he perceives an airborne gas grenade as a football and intercepts it to make an open-field run. Celebrating his “touchdown,” arms raised in a “V” above his head, Gus is shot dead by the police, a martyr to the techniques that taught him how to climb the ladder of success.

The obsession with aesthetics cannot be simply laughed away, however. So, in a second thematic variation, Coover confronts the problem through the character of Meyer, a Jewish scrap-metal sculpture artist who also works for WPA projects and dreams of joining his friends with the Lincoln Brigade in Spain. Meyer views Gus as his double: “I'm afraid we had a lot in common, Gloomy Gus and I, more than I've sometimes wished to admit” (107). This unsettling identification causes the sculptor to brood on whether he will share Gus's fate. And, truth be told, Meyer's dedication to his work does isolate him from human contact. Feeling a catharsis in Gus's death that inspires him to work, the artist declines a series of invitations to join in fellowship with his friends. Not even the spiritual and physical communion of romantic love is allowed to him. When Golda wonders why he has no girlfriends, Meyer explains simply: “I like to be alone” (129). Gus could become a great lover and football player only at the cost of his humanity; Meyer, too, must make a similar sacrifice if he is to realize his creative dreams. Thinking of his sculptures, he wonders, “how much is really a gift to the world, how much a premeditated theft of its substance?” (69). Art steals from life, while leaving its practitioner less than fully human.

But, unlike Gus, Meyer displays an awareness of the dangers of artistic mastery. As a result, he does not give himself wholly to his work. For Meyer, being a success does not matter as much as does participation: “It's what I love about socialism, theater, life itself” (82). He enjoys the intellectual play of developing aesthetic theories: from the idea that in a class-ridden society the artist's function is to make the separate planes of class existence collide (126) to his realization that “what I want to do is make sculptures that reveal different things at the same time” (151). Ultimately, though, he refuses to renounce companionship for his art. He may be “eager to light the torch before [all his theorizing] gets away from [him], but … not quite eager enough” to send away his friends who, despite his previous refusals, have entered his unlocked apartment (152). Such a lack of consistency would have been unthinkable in Gus; however, in Meyer it seems not fickleness so much as flexibility. Carrying this healthy impulse over into his work, a floor-to-ceiling size mask of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, Meyer resolves to stop his mania with finding the precisely right look for the eyes, vowing to “maybe … have one of them wink, or cross them, or paint eyeballs on cardboard that can be moved from side to side and up and down behind the cavities” (145). Instead of insisting on an unachievable perfected state, this series of alternatives allows Gorky's face, as well as Meyer's mind, a diversity of expressive forms. Like his sculpted figures of athletes, jugglers, and dancers, Meyer aspires to remain in well-balanced motion—the quality he calls “the central thing about life” (91). By keeping the door unlocked to new ideas as well as the comforts of human society, he is willing to be less than an ideal artist in order to be a better human being.

Paradoxically, however, the artist's triumph over mere formalism does not assure the political effectiveness of his art. Although he escapes Gus's neuroses, Meyer still has the potential to divorce his work from politics. For one thing, we cannot be certain that he will act on his insight and complete his Gorky. Moreover, the mask is the only one of Meyer's sculptures that relates directly to his political concerns. When the news of the bombing of Guernica arrives in the United States, Meyer has been working for an entire year on a cat constructed of pennyworth nails. The triviality of his work is an open subject among his friends. Maxie, a Zionist on his way to Spain, stares at Meyer's Gorky and mutters: “I don't know why anyone would do such a thing” (49). In one of his few comments not directed toward the short story version of Gus, Jackson I. Cope selects as the most important line of the novella the artist's confession that “I think of myself as a lyrical socialist, which makes about as much sense, given the world we live in, as being an anal-retentive anarchist with a bomb in his hand” (13). To the critic's mind this passage shows Meyer as a figure little different from Gus in that they both are “artists who know all the moves, and only that” (Cope 66).

As we have seen, there is some truth in this insight; but the comment Cope chooses as central to Meyer's character appears on the fifth page of printed text: far too early for a defining moment. To accept this reading makes the narrator a static figure, even though he is in motion—walking home from the hospital after Gus's death—during the bulk of the storytelling. And, most importantly, at the end of his trek, Meyer is confronted with a challenge that illustrates to him that art is inseparable from politics. Indeed, his aesthetic theorizing only begins to mature at the moment he confronts a swastika painted on his apartment's entrance door. Although he has consistently denied his Jewish heritage, hesitated to join his comrades fighting in Spain, Meyer fights back his urge to run away, paint over, or remove the sign. Instead he leaves the outlines of the hateful symbol intact but turns it into a work of art. Rather than pretend it was never there, he alters the swastika for his own purposes, leaving it on his door “transfigured maybe, but not dismissed” (127). A small triumph to be sure; all the same, I do not think we should be too quick to discount this accomplishment. Vowing “no more abdications,” Meyer realizes that “I'm not going to Spain” (125). Though an important struggle is going on there, he literally need not look any further than his front door to find evil to fight. Declaring the “dead time is over. I'm frightened, but I'm alive again” (125), he seems determined not to fall into the paralysis of his former ways.

Sadly, even as Meyer makes his first ideologically committed stand, we already know the helplessness of his art to halt the Holocaust to come. Leo's pessimistic warning—“nudge the establishment … and you can still get killed” (11)—forebodingly predicts the fate of those negotiating the tricky currents outside of society's mainstream. Moreover, Coover underscores this blunt warning by placing Meyer's hero-worship of Gorky midway between the writer's death in 1936, which came during a time when some argue that he was tiring of his role as an apologist for Stalin's authoritarianism, and the beginning of a 1938 show trial in which several of the dictator's political enemies were conveniently dispatched on the bogus charge of assassinating this beloved spokesman for the revolution (see Troyet 188–97). Put simply, the time-frame of the novella implicitly reminds us that politically concerned artists cannot always control the uses to which their works and names are used. Hence, Meyer avoids the trap of solipsistic formalism that destroyed Gus only to face another, more treacherous, snare: being “the little pig who lives in the straw house” in an America that is “the land of the wolves” (127). Saving his soul from the self-destructive dead-end of mere technique exposes himself to hostile cultural forces much more powerful than any work of art.

What adds to the poignancy of the novella's conclusion is that much of its irony is self-directed. For in dramatizing the uncertainty of Meyer's position, Coover is also commenting on his own, a twist that adds the third variation to his theme. Taking a comment from a 1986 profile—“When I write about the world, I'm writing about my own writing” (Smith 45)—as an invitation to read Gloomy Gus autobiographically, we can see that both Meyer and his creator see the dangers of over-valuing aesthetics. In 1973, when The Public Burning and Gus were his most current projects, Coover sought to dispel an interviewer's notion that “a fascination with structure” is the governing impulse of his fiction by responding that “No, finally, mere design is not that appealing” (Coover, Interview with F. Gado 145). In addition, he also went on to recognize the self-isolation that lies at the heart of the creative process, commenting that while “the fiction maker's function is to furnish better fictions with which we can re-form our notions of things. … [nevertheless,] to accomplish his ends, the writer, by the nature of his profession, must himself withdraw entirely” from human society (Coover, Interview with F. Gado 149–50).

In this light, Meyer's late 1930s America, an environment in which the Left exists as a demoralized political force, should be seen as an analogue to the world in which Coover wrote Gloomy Gus: the early 1970s, when the New Left's agenda of participatory democracy had shattered against the hard edges of Nixon's Silent Majority, and the 1980s, during the reign of Reagan's vision of “morning in America.” In this hostile climate, former radical activists gave up on direct political action and sought the refuge of academia. And while colleges and universities provided the safe haven of tenure, they also isolated the Left from the lives of most people. In an insightful essay on Fredric Jameson, Cornel West critiques the work of America's leading Marxist cultural critic during this period as brilliant but “too theoretical … too far removed from the heat of political battles” (140). In the 1970s and 1980s, the writings of the “Academic Left” became as irrelevant to daily life as Meyer's sculptures are to his world.²

Gloomy Gus shows that Robert Coover knows these depressing facts as well as anyone, even as he refuses to accept their inevitability. After all, his treatment of the conflict between aesthetics and politics attempts to subvert the cultural notion that art and ideology have no proper relationship. In fact, it is in Coover's insistence on the political nature of art that Lawrence Norfolk sees the writer “buck[ing] against his own alienating myth, that of ‘the postmodern novelist as disinterested nail-parer’” (730). In this way, Gloomy Gus illustrates Coover's aspiration to be a kind of cultural terrorist, “I like to be controversial in that way. It's proof I'm alive” (Smith 45). At the same time, however, he wryly acknowledges his own pretensions. As he told Christopher Bigsby in 1979, “I'm afraid the kinds of fictions that professional story-tellers have been engaged in … have had very little impact on the world” (88). The end result of this lack of cultural power is that most contemporary writers require a patron in order to function. Through Meyer, a revolutionary who subsists only by the grace of government relief projects, Coover mocks himself and his fellow radical artists who fund their work by virtue of academic positions and foundation money. The recipient of numerous private as well as governmental grants and fellowships, Coover is in the second decade of his association with Brown University, even though he once described such a position as a “trap”: “It's too easy. … The rewards come too easily” (Bass 291). (Ironically, the dust jacket of the Simon and Schuster edition of Gus advertises Coover's 1987 Rea Prize for the Short Story, boasting that its author had won “the largest literary prize of its kind in the United States.”) Like his fictional counterpart, Coover is implicated in a system that he despises. But what can artists do when there is no mass audience for their work? Meyer labors in obscurity to all but his fellow craftsmen, while Coover is a much-praised postmodern writer whose most recent novels—Gloomy Gus among them—march swiftly in and out of the pages of Books in Print. Both figures are products of cultures that subsidize artists and their works so that they may be ignored with a clear conscience. Thus, Meyer's predicament allows us to see that Coover is also an inmate in the prison house of art: finding himself compelled to attempt to use his writing for political ends even though he cannot imagine an act of artistry that, with any certainty, will make a difference.

Notes

1. In Robert Coover's Fictions, Jackson I. Cope asserts that the revised version of Gloomy Gus “is [Coover's] contemplation on aesthetics,” a work that mocks the artist who keeps art separate from politics (60). But despite this insight, Cope is primarily interested in the short story's relationship to The Public Burning. Because I wish to place the spotlight on Gloomy Gus in its own right, I base my analysis on the 1987 edition, which retains the major elements of the short story while adding significant new details.

2. I borrow the phrase “Academic Left” from John Patrick Diggins's provocative book The Rise and Fall of the American Left (277–383).

I would like to thank Joseph C. Voelker, Sanford Pinsker, and Joel W. Martin for their perceptive comments on earlier versions of this essay.

Works Cited

Bass, Thomas Alden. “An Encounter with Robert Coover.” Antioch Review 40 (1982): 287–302.

Coover, Robert. “Interview with Robert Coover.” With Christopher Bigsby. The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition: Interviews with English and American Novelists. Eds. Heide Ziegler and Christopher Bigsby. London: Junction Books, 1982. 81–92.

———. Interview. “Robert Coover.” With Frank Gado. First Person: Conversations On Writers and Writing. Schenectady, NY: Union Coll. P, 1973. 142–159.

———. The Public Burning. New York: Viking, 1977.

———. “Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?” American Review 22 (1975): 34–110.

———. Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? 1975. New York: Linden/Simon, 1987.

Cope, Jackson I. Robert Coover's Fictions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.

Diggins, John Patrick. The Rise and Fall of the American Left. New York: Norton, 1992.

Norfolk, Lawrence. “All-American Void.” Rev. of Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, by Robert Coover. TLS 1 July 1987: 730.

Smith, Amanda. “Robert Coover.” Publishers' Weekly 26 Dec. 1986: 44–45.

Troyet, Henri. Gorky. Trans. Lowell Blair. New York: Crown, 1989.

West, Cornel. “Ethics and Action in Fredric Jameson's Marxist Hermeneutics.” Postmodernism and Politics. Ed. Jonathan Arac. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 123–44.