(urth) "The Fat Magician": inspired by the Marx Brothers' _A Night at the Opera_?

[Gwern Branwen]

For no particular reason, I was watching the Jewish Marx Brothers's
1935 _A Night at the Opera_
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Night_at_the_Opera_(film)). They were
some of the most famous Americans in the world when Gene Wolfe (b.
1931) 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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7Bsl1Q4Iog A plainclothes policeman,
who is noticeably fat, is looking for the other 2 brothers in the 1st
(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; at one point he 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 (which look strikingly like a yarmulke), concluding
he's stumbled into the wrong rooms entirely, and leaves.

After some searching, I realized that it reminded me of the _Starwater
Strains_ short story "The Fat Magician":
https://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Stories.TheFatMagician

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 not magicians, 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 the Marx brothers enchant the young children of the
cruise ship and ally with the young adult protagonists, while old
people are opposed to them and are preyed on by them.

The Wolfe Wiki asks "What is the last name of fat Ernst S****?" The
Marx brothers' mother was named Miene "Minnie" Schoenberg; while it is
not necessarily a Jewish surname (looking through
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoenberg_(surname) &
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6nberg note 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.

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, vaudevillean
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 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 for future
totalitarian regimes. 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 vaudevillean 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 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).

So, I suggest that "The Fat Magician" is a bit of a
transposition/rewrite, in classic Wolfe fashion, 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.

-- 
gwern
https://gwern.net