The prison house of art: aesthetics vs. politics in Robert Coover's 'Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?'

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1994 by Daniel E. Frick

Robert Coover's Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? does not appear on most short lists of the important works of contemporary fiction. In fact, it is not likely to be named as one of Coover's major efforts. But it should be. Instead, Gloomy Gus has been twice dismissed as an undistinguished performance. The short story version, published in 1975 in American Review, was seen as writer's exercise, a way for Coover to work out the frustrations of the extremely difficult and tedious composition of the heftier The Public Burning, while the 1987 novella was most frequently understood as little more than a one-joke satire on Richard Nixon.[1] Viewed from a more sympathetic perspective, however, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus? stands as Coover's most moving contemplation of the central issue facing any politically concerned writer: that is, the tension - perhaps the unresolvable conflict - between the demands of artistic excellence and of ideological commitment. This multifaceted - but underapprecited - literary gem casts light on the ease with which artists trivialize themselves by retreating into the sanctuary of their art, and, even when they do not, the crushing odds against their efforts to use their work for the public good.

What gives Gloomy Gus its largely unacknowledged depth is that Coover plays his theme in three variations. The first is a parody of an exclusively aesthetic approach to art. As in The Public Burning, Richard Nixon provides Coover with the basis for a fictional character, known in the novella as Gloomy Gus (a law school nickname of the ex-President), a former star halfback turned actor. In this one-time Chicago Bear prospect, Coover lampoons the artists fixated on technique. A shy college student, successful at academics, school theatricals, and politics, Gloomy Gus is a failure at the two things that the adolescent American male is told matter most: football and girls. Like a humorless Benjamin Franklin grimly pursuing moral perfection, Gus tries by the sheer force of an inflexible will to teach himself to be a football player and a lover. Setting aside two 30-minute periods a day to practice how not to go offside and how to hold a girl's hand, he starts at the beginning because, as a man who must make himself, "nothing ever came naturally to him" (102). Acquiring a single skill led, however, to the need to learn several new ones, and as he could streamline but never eliminate his original drills, Gus soon gives over his entire entire life to mastering his crafts. His confidence that he could learn the "virtually infinite" responses "with which opposing teams and girls might confront him" (108) testifies to his unquestioning trust in a disciplined technique.

Gus wins renown on both his chosen fields of play, but his obsession with mastering their formal structures renders the outside world invisible to him. Astonishingly, Gloomy Gus achieves his stardom in the early years of the New Deal, and later works as an actor for a WPA project, yet shows no awareness of the effects of the Great Depression. What is more, any emotional qualities outside of his enclosed system - such as beauty or joy - are unassimilable: Gus "would probably have registered them as some kind of vexatious disorder, and added yet another calisthenic to his schedule" (94). As a consequence, he learns how to seduce without ever feeling lust, much less love. Locked into programmatic responses that exclude the personal as well as the political, Gus is a "coldhearted craftsman" (131).

Even more pathetic, Gus's method brings only a fleeting success. The novella's title - referring to the genre of news articles that seeks out that oxymoronic creature, the forgotten celebrity - forewarns us of Gus's ultimate failure. When the opposing team in the 1934 NFL championship substitutes one of his sex-practice partners for one of their linemen, Gus is beaten senseless by the police to stop an exhibition of his bedroom technique. Unable to process such brutal disapproval, the greatest football player and lover comes unhinged, like "a kind of unwired puppet, unable even to recall his toilet training or his native language" (143). Eventually his Pavlovian stimulus-response system kills him. Leo, a labor organizer, had thought having an ex-football star join the demonstrations supporting the strike at Chicago's Republic Steel plant would be good for the workers' morale. Instead, Gus starts a riot when he perceives an airborne gas grenade as a football and intercepts it to make an open-field run. Celebrating his "touchdown," arms raised in a "V" above his head, Gus is shot dead by the police, a martyr to the techiques that taught him how to climb the ladder of success.

The obsession with aesthetics cannot be simply laughed away, however. So, in a second thematic variation, Coover confronts the problem through the character of Meyer, a Jewish scrap-metal sculpture artist who also works for WPA projects and dreams of joining his friends with the Lincoln Brigade in Spain. Meyer views Gus as his double: "I'm afraid we had a lot in common, Gloomy Gus and I, more than I've sometimes wished to admit" (107). This unsettling identification causes the sculptor to brood on whether he will share Gus's fate. And, truth be told, Meyer's dedication to his work does isolate him from human contact. Feeling a catharsis in Gus's death that inspires him to work, the artist declines a series of invitations to join in fellowship with his friends. Not even the spiritual and physical communion of romantic love is allowed to him. When Golda wonders why he has no girlfriends, Meyer explains simply: "I like to be alone" (129). Gus could become a great lover and football player only at the cost of his humanity; Meyer, too, must make a similar sacrifice if he is to realize his creative dreams. Thinking of his sculptures, he wonders, "how much is really a gift to the world, how much a premeditated theft of its substance?" (69). Art steals from life, while leaving its practitioner less than fully human.