SOURCE: "The Confidence Man," in National Review, Vol. XX, No. 16, April 23, 1968, pp. 399-400.

"The buyer tries to come back with a lower counter-offer. "You're crazy!' retorts Fields. "And you're drunk!' snaps the buyer. "Yes,' agrees Fields, "but I'll be sober tomorrow, and you'll be crazy for the rest of your life!'

—A detail from It's a Gift (1934), and in many ways an epitome of Fields, whose logic could be strangely difficult to fault. The reader who scents a fallacy will be wiser when he has tried to put a clear statement of what it is into, say, 200 words.

Fields coped in picture after picture with people—a whole population, except maybe an innocent girl or two—who would be crazy the rest of their lives and to lose them in syllogistic thickets was his most benign tactic. They had passed the Volstead Act, a deed as impenetrable to this day as the heart of Nero or the smiles of the Etruscans, and their business in life was to be prim and vigilant and very greedy, pending some mutation that should free the human species from maintaining its body temperature, thus opening to all the paradise of the toad.

They brought forth monstrous children whose affinity for molasses, than which blood is thinner, sent Fields' watch "like a stone in quicksand" to the bottom of a jar of molasses ("The minute hand won't be a bit of use") and flooded Fields' grocery store with molasses ("Closed on Account of Molasses" reads the sign on the door) without winning Fields even the approval of the mother responsible. ("First you try to drown him in molasses," commences one tirade. The name is Mrs. Dunk.)

They affirmed that there were to be no more cakes and ale. Their epicenter was, more or less, the Des Moines YWCA. By the mid-Thirties they had blighted the continent. To transcribe:

"That night, Fields has trouble sleeping, and the nagging of his wife, complaining about her years of suffering and hard work, doesn 't help. Just as Fields is at the point of falling asleep the phone rings.

"'Well, why don't you answer the phone?' demands the tyrant. 7 have no maid, you know; probably never will have!' Sleepily, Fields goes to the phone, but it is a wrong number: somebody calling for the maternity hospital. Mrs. Bissonette mulls this over for a minute, then: "Funny they should call you from the maternity hospital in the middle of the night. ' Fields mumbles an explanation. "No dear, it was someone trying to get the maternity hospital. ' By now Mrs. Bissonette 's sarcastic ire is fully aroused: "Oh, now you change it! Don't make it any worse by lying about it. ' "

Fields, in that blight, was the Obsolescent Man. That was his steady role and his latent pathos. He stood for an older anarchy, which was to such a present as tent shows were to movies. The tent show was his explicit metaphor, and the juggling act, which he sneaked into movie after movie, sometimes by sheer gall vis-à-vis the director, was the sign of his incomprehensible expertise, a lost freedom asserted.

That the passionate man gives way to the administrative was a truth known to Shakespeare, whose Octavius, minutes after Cleopatra's death-music ("Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have / Immortal longings in me"), affirms that Fearless Fosdick is his Ideal in asking only "How died she?" That the passionate man may yet survive and persist, forced into grotesque ritualism of a skill nobody wants (how to juggle balls, pick pockets, raise the ante) was a myth posterior to Shakespeare, affirmed in America, certified by Fields, who made of its affirmation a style of life.

He was a confidence man; his freedom was predatory; hence his redemption from the pathos of Jiggs. It was for no bucolic splendor that he yearned, no Fête Champêtre, corned beef and cabbage heaped upon the Spode, nor no lazy drift down-river with Nigger Jim beneath the Missouri stars, but for the Lord God's primal division of mankind into the Fleecers and the Fleeced, in a time before that tertium quid, the Respectable, had blurred these satisfying categories. For to be active according to one's nature is a great good, and to be active in the confidence that the primal categories of creation conform to one's appetite, that is a very great good indeed. What is man, that he should presume to give a sucker an even break? Fields was the Ayn Rand of Americana.

Hence "an episode in which Fields cunningly sells a 'talking dog ' to a sucker. After the deal is consummated, the new owner makes a remark at which Fields is quick to take necessary umbrage, and the dog huffily remarks that just for that, he "ll never speak again. "He probably means it, too, ' prophesies ventriloquist Fields as he leaves. "

Mankind exists, so Fields thought, to have a talking dog or the Brooklyn Bridge sold to it, or the SST, or a gold brick, or the system that incorporates Fort Knox. So, too, thought Mencken and Barnum; so too, it is difficult not to suppose, thought Poor Richard. As the cube is the flimsy module which multiplied and agglomerated yields the RCA building, a megalomaniac slab, so that transaction with the talking dog is the primary structure which reduplicated and reasserted on a satisfyingly ample scale becomes a W.C. Fields picture: The Old-Fashioned Way, or The Bank Dick.

The megasucker, when Fields extends himself, is not someone inside the plot but the largest accessible entity outside it, Paramount or Universal, which has been conned into bankrolling a film subversive of its entire corporate message, and has paid Fields not only a high price for savaging mothers and kicking babies on camera, but a high price also for the screen-play, a two-page surrealism which he covertly expanded for his own use with careful prescription of every pause and grimace, all the time letting on that he was barely sober enough to lurch onto the set and rely on his vaudeville reflexes.

The contract typically called for the script to be credited to an Otis Criblecoblis or a Mahatma Kane Jeeves (those were the days of Pandro S. Berman, and Fields himself had been preposterously christened William Claude Dukenfield). The script in turn called for Fields to play himself, thinly disguised as Larson E. Whipsnade or Egbert Sousé. Into at least two motion pictures he inserted, like a Bacchic afterthought, a subplot concerning his conning of a motion picture company. Into one he even introduced a movie director named A. Pismo Clam, who is so perpetually drunk that his work has to be taken over by Fields.

These majestic swindles ran, at their best, like the juggling act he brought in extenso into The Old-Fashioned Way, along with a complete performance of The Drunkard. The numerous elements are related by the fact that they are all simultaneously somehow in the air. No useful work is being performed by the juggler; and yet a seeming miracle is occurring, which we may attribute to the hours of practice on which he squandered his youth. If he had been learning a respectable trade there would be nothing for us to see, and here we are, enthralled.

He attempted to work his juggling act into David Copperfield, where he played Micawber; it was a transparently relevant piece of business, he argued, which Dickens merely didn't happen to think of. MGM demurred. In The Bank Dick, however, his culminating film (1940), he does not visibly juggle yet juggles transcendently, keeping in breathtaking simultaneous motion, up and down and across and past each other, drunks and con men and a movie company, a bank and its president, a bank examiner, two robbers, a nonexistent colored midget with an assegai, a shapeless wife, a brat who heaves rocks, a mother-in-law who rocks and says "Hah!," a paisley shawl and a river of beer and a butler, three careening cars, the Black Pussy Cat Saloon, and the town of Lompoc (Calif.) which existed and exists, and which, like banks and brats and mothers-in-law and the other divertissements of respectability, he hated. I write this thirty miles from Lompoc.

Are they real? Yes, horribly real. Have they moral substance? They have none. The rewards for saving the bank's assets include "a hearty hand-shake" which consists of the president's fingers "barely touching Fields' outstretched palm for a moment—an effect that Fields heightens by going into a split-second freeze-frame," and "a copy of the bank's calendar, illustrated with an inspiring painting of 'Spring in Lompoc.' Is Fields their moral superior? Only in this, that bumbling through their affairs, and abetted by his alter ego the script writer, he can keep them in frenzied motion.

Is he rewarded? He is, and in the only coin creation affords, theirs. He attains to millions, to a butler, to a mansion, to an institutionalized affluence that urges on him of a morning "just one more Baba au Rhum," to the daily opportunity of deciding between a tropical helmet and a top hat, to go with the cutaway and spats. It is supernal Respectability, the apotheosis of Lompoc (a word Fields spoke as though grinding it beneath his heel).

Since the world pays in only one currency, it is easy to assume that he cheated and bamboozled to acquire what Respectability has by birthright. He did not. He bamboozled as an assertion of style, and of what he understood as tradition. Tradition has only common matter in which to assert itself. When the finally affluent Fields failed to make his top hat come to rest on his head because it had landed instead on the tip of his flourished cane, we are not to suppose that he exhibits nouveau-riche awkwardness. He is displaying an old vaudevillian's skill, in a bit of business he had performed so often it became his trademark. It attained the same result as might awkwardness, but do not be misled by that.

Do not be misled, similarly, by the nihilism in his premises, or the incoherence in his speeches. It was the ambience he detested that was nihilistic and incoherent, incapable of resolving any issue whatever except by summoning policemen. Black Humor, which he practiced as did Mark Twain, despairs because its capacity to make such distinctions has been forced into the area of style alone, the language, the system of rewards, the entire social idiom, the very basis of appeal to eternal law having been coopted by the adversary.

Hence Fields with his double tongue, persuading a dimwitted protégé, in the interest of ultimate good, to embezzle from the bank, simultaneously addressed his audience and posterity, tonguing and mumbling, never very clearly, an exhortation that welled from the depths of his soul:

"Don't be a fuddie-duddie, don't be a moon-calf, don't be a jabbernowl—you don't want to be any of those, do you?" It was nearly all that was left for him to say.