Private Lives of the Marx Brothers The Marx Brothers. By
Kyle Crichton. (Heinemann. 1 2s. W.) THE Marx Brothers, those violent but amiable eccentrics who started the cult for craziness, who added such cruel refinements to slapstick and emerged as the genii of the non sequitur, led, it seems, private lives as disorderly as their professional ones. Mr. Crichton's book is a record of their exuberance, an exuberance which over- came great poverty and a long succession of disappointments and which turned their humble home in a Manhattan tenement into bedlam. As is so often the case in Jewish chronicles, Mother Marx, authoritative, matriarchal and obviously superhumanly long- suffering, was the motivating force behind the scenes, and it was she who insisted on her sons going on the stage—a career they were loth to pursue and in which, for many years, they failed to succeed.
It was she who dominated the home, who ruled that much-loved little hell-on-earth filled with rowdy relatives, hungry friends and sons whose spirits were so vulgar and whose health so rude that it is exhausting even to read of them. Judging by this book one might suppose that it was by brute strength rather than ability that the brothers beat their way to the top, brooking no discipline, holding nothing sacred, not even their scripts, and in a sense bullying the public into accepting a completely new form of enter- tainment. Their relentless determination not to conform to any known pattern, even when their clowning lost them jobs time and again, was rewarded in tthe end by fame and wealth, neither of which sedatives tamed them in the least.
Mr. Crichton's style of writing is confidential and anecdotal. It is injected with a liberal dose of hero-worship which is often irritating. Charm is an elusive thing to capture in print, and though doubtless the brothers' charm veiled their social solecisms or; to put it baldly, their appalling bad manners, one wonders whether their horseplays were the enchanting enfantillages they are made out to be. To throw one's hostess's silver platter of fresh salmon into the sea because one does not like salmon is surely a joke for which charm can barely atone. Still, the Marx Brothers are a law unto themselves, and one cannot deny that in their passage through life they have marked all who met them, both in reality and on the screen, with the stamp of their unique person- alities. In triumph and disaster they have stayed true to themselves. and all the warmth, vitality and humour of their days burst through the covers of Mr. Crichton's book like a spinning catherine-wheel.
VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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