Sorrowful Jones (1949).

I never knew he was British.  Not for the longest time, anyway.  This is something I found out about (or else my memory was jogged) just recently.  To tell you the truth, it still comes as a surprise to learn he wasn't born and raised here; and why shouldn't it?  Bob Hope is one of those names that sounds like it's got an Apple Pie baked into it somewhere.  The guy's voice even sounds like a cross between a Midwesterner with just the faintest hint of a New York Yankee drawl.  He had the kind of face you'd expect to greet you wearing a straw boater hat, grey spats, white shirt sleeves, and a red and white striped vest as he welcomed you to the Coney Island Pier.  It is just possible the guy could have held just such a job during his desperate and hungry years.  The man I'm talking about used to be referred to as America's Entertainer.  That's the title he was given by one of his official biographies, anyway.  I'm not sure who remembers him anymore, now.  In fact, his reputation seems to have reached a very interesting pinnacle.  I'm no longer certain what anyone thinks about Bob Hope anymore.  It's as if time and tide have rendered a once flesh and blood human being into a blank slate.  If Bob were here to read this, he'd probably make a joke about it.  That was his stock and trade, so far as he ever had a job aside from occasional bouts of employment from either the Army or the Oscars.  Whenever they needed someone to play the clown for the cameras, or lift the troops' spirits (usually with the help of the latest cover model) Bob was there.

It got to the point where both establishments where thinking of installing special revolving door entrances just for him.  The password for both joints was the same.  "Hello, I think you know me.  I'm Bing Crosby's golf caddy".  That's a jest, of course, yet it gives you an idea of the type of humor he was known for in his time.  Needless to say, Hope was a lot better at it than me.  Still the question remains.  Does anyone know him anymore?  Am I talking about someone who even existed?  Did I make that whole name up?  Here's what author John Steinbeck wrote about him in a newspaper dispatch that was compiled later on into a non-fiction collection titled Once There was a War.  "When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. This man drives himself and is driven. It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective. He works month after month at a pace that would kill most people. Moving about the country in camps, airfields, billets, supply depots, and hospitals, you hear one thing consistently. Bob Hope is coming, or Bob Hope has been here.

"In some way he has caught the soldiers’ imagination. He gets laughter wherever he goes from men who need laughter. He has created a character for himself—that of the man who tries too hard and fails, and who boasts and is caught at it. His wit is caustic, but is never aimed at people, but at conditions and at ideas, and where he goes men roar with laughter and repeat his cracks for days afterward (78)".  The writer also offers this interesting bit of trivia about the entertainer.  "The Secretary of War is on an inspection tour, but it is Bob Hope who is expected and remembered (ibid)".  Fast forward to today, and all most of us can do is ask one simple question.  Mr. Steinbeck, who on Earth are you even talking about?  Come to think of it, who are you anyway?  What have you done that so important?  Anyway, why waste space on an old court jester?  That seems to be the opinion most folks would have about a name like Bob Hope, even if a lot of us can't find the right words to express it.  The basic meaning behind such questions is the same, "Why should I care"?  It brings to mind something Mark Twain said a long time ago.  He claimed that "Fame is a vapor".  To which most will ask, "Who's Mark Twain"?

As to the question of whether Bob Hope is a real person, the answer, in the strictest sense, is no.  There never was a real Bob Hope.  All that happened was that once upon a time, a Welsh stone mason named Henry Hope met a girl named Avis Townes.  He was a working stiff, and she was something of a theater brat, with what was, at the time, a steady career as a concert singer.  Perhaps to Henry's own surprise, Avis accepted his proposal, and they got married in the year 1890.  It was pretty good so far as married households went.  It was almost like that Chuck Berry song, the one that goes "C'est la vie, say the old folks.  It goes to show you never can tell".  The one hitch in this fairy tale was Henry's penchant for gambling his funds away on the race track.  Henry made his growing family into self-imposed exiles in the city of Cheltenham, which was all they could afford.  While there, in 1903, the couple welcomed their fifth child to whatever this is.  They named him Leslie Townes Hope.  It's not the most promising way to start a life.  That's the kind of name that will get you beat up, if you're not careful.  It almost goes without saying that as he began to come of age, young Leslie soon learned how to become a practiced brawler.  Before that, however, there was a change in the family's household fortunes.

Henry had a brother named Frank, and at the time of Leslie's birth, his uncle was holding down a steady job in Cleveland.  A bit of reading between the lines makes you sort of realize that in terms of family dynamics, Frank was always the reliable, dependable sibling who knew how to be a diligent worker, and hold on to a job.  Henry, meanwhile, seems to have been as close to a polar opposite black sheep as you can get without ever having the label handed to him.  Still, you've got to give Leslie's father some credit, he seemed determined to do right by his growing family.  So when the opportunity came to get some much needed income by moving to the United States to work alongside Frank, Henry made one of those decisions that seem pragmatic at first glance, and then later on reveal themselves to be a fateful turning point for the future of at least one of his children.  Henry Hope landed in the States sometime in 1904, just a year after Leslie's birth.  Despite his often lazy and irresponsible ways, Henry surprised perhaps even himself with a newfound ability to put his nose to the grindstone same as his brother, and slowly and surely began to stockpile enough money to send for the rest of the family to join him.

The reason for this newfound responsibility is obvious enough once you realize that with Frank breathing down his neck keeping an eagle eye on his brother, Henry was less prone to falling into his usual habits such as gambling, drinking, or girl chasing.  It was a lesson in humility for Leslie's father.  It might also have been proof to Henry just how much of a myth there was in the idea that hard work ennobles the soul.  All it did was make him feel thirsty and stifled in all sorts of ways.  He might even have felt a great deal of sympathy with another saying of Mark Twain's.  "It's always the early bird that gets the worm (I once knew a fella who tried it; got up at sunrise; the horse bit him).  Henry might have felt bitten, yet he also got the reward of being reunited with his family into the bargain.  The Hope clan even got the extra added bonus of soon being able to move into their own house.  The punchline that was lying in wait for Henry and Avis Hope came in the form of their own son, Leslie, and the way they raised him from a pup.  It was a textbook case of be careful what you wish for.  However, when you're dealing with people as headstrong as Mr. and Mrs. Hope, does it really make any true difference?

Whatever the case, while Henry Hope seems to have straightened up after his move to America, it couldn't erase his past as something of a vagabond rogue,  Avis, meanwhile, was still a theater brat at heart; one of life's great frustrated actresses.  This could be seen in the fact that not long after moving into their own American home, Ava made Henry buy her a piano that she could play around with and belt out some of the old music hall tunes she was most likely born and raised on.  It's a hell of a household situation for a child to be born into.  It's so out of the norm of the average American home that there's almost a case to be made for describing the Hope family as one of those odd chances where you get an entire clan made up of misfits of various stripes; each with their own ways of expressing some deep seated sense of malcontent.  For Henry, is was a long held desire to be the big shot man about town.  For Avis, it was her name (or any member of the Hope family) "up there" in bright lights on the stage.  This made for a very bohemian styled home life that had nowhere else to go except for rubbing off on the Hope children.  The good news in all this for Leslie Townes Hope is that his folks and siblings all seemed to belong to the rare positively charged version of the misfit tribe.

His parents doted on him, for one thing.  Nor was there any false notes in their love.  It also something they spread to all of their kids.  I was unable to find anything that would label them as bad parents.  Yes, they were oddballs, yet there's never anything really abusive about them that I could find, especially when the whole bunch got to the States.  Instead, it was all just a case of Mom and Dad channeling the youth that neither of them ever got a chance to misspend into more productive outlets for their kids.  In Leslie's case, this involved sooner or later getting bit by the same showbiz bug that infected his mother so long ago.  In most homes this kind of thing would single Les out as the runt of the litter.  In the Hope manse, however, he just made his folks proud.  With that type of encouragement under his hat, Leslie Townes soon found himself taking his chances in between dropping out of school forever and holding down a series of odd jobs by trying his hand at getting his start in the world of Vaudeville.  To give an idea of what this long vanished institution was like, imagine a bawdier version of The Muppet Show, except that unless someone like Edgar Bergen was onstage, there wasn't a puppet anywhere in sight.

It was a pretty ramshackle operation all around, and yet Vaudeville's circuit was the birthing ground for some of the biggest names in comedy during the Golden Age of Cinema.  The more you know the filmography of this era, the more impressive the list of names to come from Vaudeville sounds.  It included the likes of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, George Burns and his wife, Gracie Allen, and their lifelong friend, Jack Benny.  Sooner or later, after a lot of dedicated hard work, Leslie Townes Hope was able to add his name to that impressive roster as well.  He had to find a better stage name for himself first, though.  It's the kind of thing that's probably not so much of a big deal now.  However, Henry and Avis's most talented son figured no one was ever going to put up with, much less remember a name like Leslie.  So after a bit of digging around for ideas, he settled on the moniker of Bob Hope.  The rest is pretty much history.  Finding the right name seems to have done a lot for Leslie Hope's confidence.  He began to get more laughs for his audience as he continued to workshop his material.  With greater laughs came greater notices, and his star continued its upwards trajectory from there.

In retrospect, the greatest achievement Hope ever managed to give himself was realizing that he'd found a place outside of his family where he could say he belonged.  Left to his own devices out on the streets, Leslie Townes would have still been a survivor.  He also would have been stuck as the odd man out.  His natural roguish ways and mannerism would have left with the kind of bad reputation that, if he wasn't careful, might have landed him in all kinds of hot water.  Up on the stage, as Bob Hope, however, his smart mouth was appreciated for the clever wit that emerged from it, often before he even had a chance to think about what he was going to say.  All he had to do was look on a scene of human foibles, and the puns and jabs would start to crowd into his mind waiting for a chance to become the punchline.  It was Hope's ability to channel all that reckless energy into a stage practice that soon became one of the earliest examples of what we now know as stand-up insult comedy.  The best part about it all was that Hope found himself embraced for being a wit.  It was like discovering there was this second home away from home that was out there just waiting for him to arrive.  After cutting his teeth on the Vaudeville stage, that home began to expand for Bob Hope in a lot interesting ways.

Like every single comic on that list above, Hollywood came scouting for talent on the circuit, and Hope got scooped up to Tinseltown, just like Burns, Allen, Benny, and the rest.  This was a somewhat regular occurrence for a brief span of time in Hollywood's early history.  Film moguls like Carl Laemmle and Louis B. Mayer had just begun to set up shop in the Valley of L.A.  Studios like Metro Pictures and Universal began with first buying up land, then building soundstages and home offices, then gathering together all the camera and editing equipment that you could either get your hands on, or else build up from scratch.  Then they would assemble a team of artists, technicians, and writers to operate behind the cameras.  All the Studios needed to complete the picture where stars to perform in front of the lens.  It wasn't a question of being starved for talent, either.  It was more like a bunch of independent entrepreneurs (yes, there was a time when you could have said this about the Big Studios with an absolutely straight face) were able to open a series of privately own megamart stores, and then had to go out and hunt for products to put in the shelf aisles.  The major difference is that storytelling was Hollywood's stock and trade back then.  It meant you needed faces to help make believe come alive.

So, if you were an enterprising studio head like Samuel Goldwyn or Walt Disney, you sent scouts out to look for talent wherever you could find it.  A lot of times, the kind of talent you were looking for could be found on the Vaudeville stage, and one day Bob Hope found himself as Tinseltown's latest discovery.  In many ways, it's fair to say he never looked back.  While his name has faded into a near obscurity by this point, at the time, he was able to enjoy the kind reputation that stars like Bill Murray, Steve Martin, or Eddie Murphy are still able to enjoy today.  This marks the first time one of Bob Hope's movies has ever been reviewed here on The Scriblerus Club.  It comes from somewhere in the middle of Hope's career, after a heyday of covering himself with glory as an entertainer for the troops during World War II.  It's a nice little piece in which he stars alongside a bright young comedian named Lucille Ball.  It's also a film that manages to surprise you with how familiar it's story is if you're an 80s kid.  Made in 1949, and based off the work of Damon Runyon, this is the tale of Sorrowful Jones.

Magic For Beginners (2014).

One of the long-term goals here at the Scriblerus Club is to see if it's possible to dig up a lot of long forgotten names, and see if they can't have their day in the spotlight.  It's an amusing bit of trivia to keep in mind when it comes to talking about today's artist.  In many ways, she almost functions as a kind of ironic inversion, or maybe even a subversion of one of the aims of this site.  I get the impression that Kelly Link is some kind of household name.  By that I mean that it's easy to get the sense that her reputation as an author has made her something of a well known enough figure in the book world so that she has a fairly decent and devoted fan base to keep her name in the spotlight.  It's not one of the major cultures within fandom.  She's probably never going to reach the heights of a J.R.R. Tolkien or Alan Moore.  Still, she seems to have carved out enough of a niche to be able to say that she's done okay for herself.  The irony about an author like Link comes from the way she almost subverts the goals of a blog like this, perhaps without ever meaning or trying to.  When it comes to the work of a writer like Kelly Link, it is possible to offer all sorts of conjectures about the possible meaning of any one of her stories.  The punchline is that while I'm able to do my job as a critic in terms of a proper examination of narratives, I'm not sure I can tell you much about Link as a human being.  That's because all the relevant biographical information on her life is hard to come by.

When I set out to write this article, one of the first things I did was head over to Wikipedia (say sorry) for a brief rundown of her personal biography.  From there, I could go searching through other online resources to gain a greater picture of such things as what books she liked to read growing up?  What were her favorite stories, in other words?  What kind of shaping influence did these works of fiction have on the development of her own artistic Imagination?  How did all this effect the way in which she told her own stories?  Where did the ideas for her penchant for playing with narrative conventions come or stem from?  Why did she decide to let this be one of the defining features of her stories?  What sort of general outline of her life would help us to gain an understanding of her growth as an artist?  These are all the sort of questions and background details that any critic worthy of the name should want to have at his disposal when it comes to getting as clear a picture as they can on whichever artist or artwork that comes in for a viewing under the microscope.  So of course, she gives me nothing to work with.  I've been unable to glean much information about either Link's life, the books she liked, or how it all went together to shape the writer she's become.  I'm left having to critique from a blank slate.

That's sort of the last thing I was expecting to happen here.  I can also appreciate how this sort of plays havoc with the goals I've set up for this site to be able to enjoy a good laugh at my expense.  It also means that a lot of the focus for this article will have to remain on the artistry, almost at the total exclusion of the author.  I can't help wondering if Ms. Link might have preferred things this way.  Whatever the case, it means that best place left for me to start with in practice is with a description of what kind of generic author she is.  It helps to bear in mind that this marks the first time I've read any of Link's work, yet the good news about that is I was able to make an after-the-fact smart choice about it.  I stumbled upon just the right sort of introductory text that was of such a quality as to serve as the perfect gateway introduction to the kind of stories Kelly Link likes to tell.  The type of story where the contents of the narrative go a long way toward giving the reader as full a picture as possible of what sort of writer and tale they've got on their hands.  With this in mind, the first solid thing I can tell you about Link is that her writings belong to a very specific coterie, or group of writings and authors.

The one bit of biographical trivia I was able to dig up was that she was born in 1969.  That's an important date, because it signals her as belonging to either somewhere in the middle or in the immediate aftermath of what was then a New Wave within all the major genres of Popular fiction.  This was back during a time when a lot creative talents in the fields of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror were busy hammering out all the defining traits by which we know them today.  It was thanks to the efforts of writers like Harlan Ellison or Shirley Jackson that we begin to see the formation of the current tropes that still define the popular genres as we have them (for the moment, anyway).  The thing to keep in mind is that a lot of what now seems commonplace to us was (during the time period in which Link was born, and writers like Ellison and Ursula Le Guinn busy crafting a lot of it) brand new and astonishing in an era before the likes of Star Trek: TNG or Alex Proyas' Dark City.  This was the period of creative fermentation when the basic contours of the Popular Fiction began to take their final shape.

It was a moment of collective realization and creative potential for the Fantastic genres, and the artists who became aware of this possibility all began to stretch the legs of their artistic capabilities.  It's how we got films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, or novels like I Am Legend, or Our Lady of Darkness.  Even a book like Salem's Lot has a good claim as both a groundbreaker and a trendsetter.  When Stephen King published his novel of a supernatural evil encroaching on a small New England town (no spoilers here!), it may not have been original in the strictest sense of the term, and even the author would be the first to admit that.  There had been various attempts at revitalizing, or breathing new life into one particular and long familiar type of monster in the Horror genre.  Richard Matheson can be spoken of as having beaten King to the punch twice already by the time the Lot hit the retail shelves.  The first time was the aforementioned Legend text.  The other came in the form of a somewhat obscure, yet still remembered ABC TV Movie of the Week.  It was called The Night Stalker, and was broadcast way back in January of 1972.  It featured the Old Man from A Christmas Story as he went up against an otherworldly creature of the night on the streets of Las Vegas (again, no spoilers!).  The point however, is that while these efforts may count as the true trendsetters, it was King's work that caught the pop culture imagination in a big way.  It was books like his that helped the genres all move forward.

There's perhaps more than a certain amount of unfairness involved there when an artist like Matheson gets lost in the shadows cast by King's later achievement.  At the same time, the irony of how things shaped out is that it provides a good look into what is able to grab the audience's attention enough to the point where their collective, shared enthusiasm is enough to turn both an artwork and its author into icons of pop culture.  It's what happened to King, and while Matheson has thankfully never been fully neglected, there is a sense that his own efforts have come to be regarded as stories that walked so that efforts of writers like King could run.  It may not be fair in the strictest sense, yet it's what the audience has decreed.  The point of all this passing trivia is to give a sense of the literary melting pot into which Kelly was born, and which she later went on to participate in.  It makes sense to label this moment of creativity and artistic growth as the formation of a kind of movement, and it's one I've talked about before.  In my opinion, Kelly Link belongs to a group of authors known as the New Wave Fabulists.

The closest anyone has ever come to a good definition of the writers who comprise this informal literary collective, and the type of stories they have to tell comes from the the mind of American Gothic writer Peter Straub.  While he can't give us a complete an idea of New Wave Fabulism, he does make a crucial first tentative step when he explains, "It would be easy but misleading to account for this in evolutionary terms. That is, it is not really accurate to say that over the past two decades the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror have been, unnoticed by the wider literary culture, transforming themselves generation by generation and through the work of each generation’s most adventurous practitioners into something all but unrecognizable, hence barely classifiable at all except as literature. Even evolution doesn’t work that way. The above process did take place, and it was completely overlooked by the wider literary culture but it did not happen smoothly, and the kind of post-transformation fictions represented here owe more than half of their DNA and much of their underlying musculature to their original genre sources. Contemporary, more faithful versions of those sources are to be found all over the place, especially in movie theaters and the genre shelves at Barnes & Noble. 

"Gene Wolfe, who is necessary to this volume, was producing fiction of immense, Nabokovian rigor and complexity thirty years ago, alongside plenty of colleagues who were satisfied to work within the genre’s familiar templates. Now, writers like Nalo Hopkinson, John Kessell, and Patrick O’Leary, for all of whom Gene Wolfe is likely to be what Gary K. Wolf calls a “touchstone,” are still publishing shorter fiction in magazines like Asimov’s and Fantasy and Science Fiction, and so is Kelly Link. (Jonathan Carroll, Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth Hand, John Crowley, and China Miéville seldom write short fiction, and we are are fortunate to have stories from them.) Strictly on grounds of artistic achievement, these writers should all along have been welcome in thoughtful literary outlets (web)".  An explanation that gets us closer to a definition of New Wave Fabulism is to claim that all it amounts to is what happens when any author comes up with the bright idea of fusing the techniques of any of the popular genres with the styles, vocabulary, settings, and vernacular of so-called Realist fiction.  This means that a proper label for this kind of story is to claim that it is one of technique, more than it is anything else.  It's a genre story told in a style or fashion of contemporary "Literate" fiction.

In other words, all New Wave Fabulism really seems to be is any effort at a story of Horror, Science Fiction, or Fantasy that attempts to wed the generic tropes and templates associated with all three of the narrative kinds listed above with the level of novelistic sophistication that you might find in the pages of a periodicals such as The New Yorker.  In other words, it's taking the basic setup or imaginative scenario that you might find in the works of someone like John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, John Updike, or Edith Wharton, and give it all a fantastical twist.  To give an example of how this applied technique could shape the contours of a Fabulist narrative, Stephen King once wrote a short story called "Graduation Afternoon".  Everything about the piece until the last page or two puts the reader in mind of one of the author's more slice-of-life, Stand By Me type or oriented narratives.  Those stories where it seems like King has set aside things going bump in the night for a moment to focus on the type of story that could happen in a more realistic setting.  Then the denouement arrives, and the nature of everything we've just read up to that point gets reshaped as the fantastical nature of the story and its characters begins to become apparent as we reach the finish line.

This is an illustration of the New Wave technique in its shorter forms.  An even better example of what this type of story amounts to is the idea of an ordinary suburban protagonist going out to play in his or her backyard, and discovering that somehow their house is located somewhere near the foot of Homer's Mount Olympus.  That's perhaps the closest I can ever get to a definition of New Wave Fabulism.  It's the type of story with a vested interest in trying to bring the realm of the old gods and archetypes down to mingle and mix in with our modern settings and situations.  Another term that might apply to this type of fiction is what's known as Urban Fantasy of various varieties.  At least it grants a further step closer to the type of stories that authors like Kelly Link tell for a living.  In fact, the idea of fantastic happenings in the suburbs is a very good description of the plot of her story, "Magic for Beginners".