A Clown at Midnight by Andrew Hudgins (review)

Andrew Hudgins’s latest book of poems, his eighth and the first to appear since the career retrospective American Rendering: New and Selected Poems, takes its title from a remark attributed to Lon Chaney, Sr.: “The essence of true horror is a clown at midnight.” As arresting a juxtaposition as this, by now, familiar image still presents, and as aptly as that image may evoke an enduring concern in Hudgins’s work for the tragi-comic, or at least grimly comic (or even what David Foster Wallace, in honor of the director who revived, for Blue Velvet, Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams”—“A candy-colored clown they call the sandman / tiptoes to my room every night”—tentatively termed “Lynchian”: “where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter”)—the book’s epigraph from Plato ends by showing the dangers of trying to explicate the matter:

. . . the chief thing which he (Aristodemus) remembered was Socrates compelling the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this they were constrained to assent, being drowsy, and not quite following the argument.

Given such dangers, perhaps what is most worth noting about the quotation from Chaney is its curious diction: “the essence of true horror is a clown at midnight”—why not, as one might expect (trying, like a good Platonist, to extricate the matter), “the embodiment of true horror”?

Lon Chaney, “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” was born in Colorado Springs—on April first, of course —in 1883 (the previous year Oscar Wilde, future author of “The Truth of Masks,” had visited town, performing at the Opera House where Chaney would one day serve as a “prop boy”). Since both of his parents were deaf—they met at the school his maternal grandfather had founded “for the Education of Mutes”—young Lon would devise for them elaborate pantomimes of daily events, developing over time the extraordinary skills of non-verbal communication that would establish him as the most versatile film actor of the Silent Era—and, presumably, the skepticism of the metaphysical implied by his statement. This skepticism appears to have been radical; another statement of his, perhaps the most famous (if not the most Wildean), was “Between pictures, there is no Lon Chaney.”

Lest horror lack its requisite comic relief, it should be mentioned that Peter Sellers, also referred to, with some regularity, as a “Man of a Thousand Faces,” gave voice, with some regularity (on The Muppet Show, for instance), to a similar view: “There is no me. I do not exist . . . there used to be a me but I had it surgically removed” (his given name, incidentally, was Richard Henry Sellers; his parents called him “Peter” after his older brother, who was dead at birth). While less helpless in the face of—or less helplessly the faces of—mutability than Chaney or Sellers, Hudgins recalls in the first chapter of his memoir The Joker—published concurrently with A Clown at Midnight—a childhood intuition of a comparable existential crisis: “Language was so fragile I could break it just by trying to grasp it, and since it was the only tool I had to make sense of the world, if I destroyed it I also destroyed my own identity.”

Likewise, as Hudgins has demonstrated throughout his poetic career, in composing language he composes his own—among others’—identities. From the start his work has featured both dramatic monologues—from, to name a few, a Baptist preacher’s daughter, Jonathan Edwards (in Saints and Strangers, 1985), Sidney Lanier (in After the Lost War, 1988), and John James Audubon (in The Never-Ending, 1991)—and autobiographical narratives (especially in The Glass Hammer, 1994). In a 2003 interview with Mark Jarman, Hudgins commented,

When I finished my first four books, I . . . decided that I wanted to move away from narrative...