Jackie Gleason & Two Kinds of Anger

Anger and How We See the World

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that we have an attitude to the whole world—is it our friend or an enemy? In his definitive lecture, "Aesthetic Realism and Anger," Mr. Siegel writes:

The desire to be angry comes from the fact that we feel, very early, that what is going on in this world is not what suits us. And the thing that we can do then is to say that the world is a bad place for us, or we can try to find out why it doesn't suit us. This is not an easy job. To understand is difficult. And yet it is the only thing that will save us from carrying on an anger day after day.

Growing up in Florida, outwardly I did not seem like an angry person. I tried to be cheerful and there were things I honestly liked, such as going to my neighbor's house to see the new litter of puppies their dog had. But inside I often had that feeling Mr. Siegel describes—that the world was a bad place.

I felt this very much in my family. The Coopermans had many things people want—a nice home, vacations every summer. But the way we cared for each other and then could be distant made me angry. Going out to a restaurant or to a friend's house, we looked like an affectionate family, but I knew that wasn't the whole story. At home, my mother and father sometimes seemed bitter and resentful. But I never tried, as Mr. Siegel says, to "understand" what my parents felt. Instead I had contempt—felt their lives were messy, the world was bad and I better keep to myself.

My angers as a boy were personal and vain. Once I went with my mother and father to get my first suit. In the store I hated every suit I saw—they were the wrong color or they didn't fit right, and there was nothing I liked. But my parents said I needed a suit for a bar mitzvah I was going to, and they bought me one. I threw a fit. Sitting in the back seat of the car I sulked the entire way home. Finally my father stopped the car and my mother turned around and screamed at me "What do you want from us!"

The telling thing is what happened the next week. I put on the suit and I loved it. I couldn't figure out why I had hated it so much just a few days earlier. One large reason, I learned, is this: I wanted to be displeased and angry. Aesthetic Realism has seen that this contempt drive is in everyone—the hope that nothing will please you. The self can prefer to be disgusted and angry because then you feel superior to everything; but this undermines our lives because it is against our deepest purpose, to like the world.

Jackie Gleason grew up so differently from me. Early he met things that were hard to bear. He was born in Brooklyn in 1916. In The Great One, biographer William A. Henry describes young Jackie as "plucky and adventurous," yet he lived in grim circumstances—his parents were poor. Jackie Gleason grew up in a way people today are being forced to endure. His own later description of his family's apartment sounds a little like that spare set of The Honeymooners:

The surroundings were dismal, just a round table and an icebox and a bureau that everything went into. The light bulbs were never very bright and the rooms were always bare.

When he was three Jackie's sickly older brother, Clemence, died. His parents began to drink and they grew apart. One day, just before Christmas when Jackie was almost ten, his father left work and never came home. He was never seen or heard from again. This affected Jackie Gleason tremendously. I think it solidified the feeling he had early that it was a tough world and he better be tough himself—that a certain kind of aggressive street smarts would take care of him rather than thought about the world. Jackie became rebellious at school and dropped out. By eleven he was hustling pool in his neighborhood.

The place where life seemed best to Jackie Gleason was at the vaudeville house. Henry writes:

The little boy was certain that nowhere was there such happiness as he had seen in the Halsey Theatre. He begged to be taken back again and again..At home he imitated the funny dances he saw and the funny way the actors fell without hurting themselves.

The world at the Halsey did suit Jackie Gleason—it had surprise and order, slapstick and structure. In his teens Jackie was invited to emcee the Halsey's amateur nights because of his "spontaneity, his ability to be funny off the cuff." Henry tells how one night Gleason decided to "skid deliberately into some seltzer that had been spilled on the stage and take an extravagant windmilling pratfall."

I think Jackie Gleason felt throwing his whole self into funny ways of using his body had the world seem likable—he was free. That's what you feel in that lovely phrase of his that later became so famous—"And away we go!"—the self on the brink of going out of itself.

When Jackie Gleason was 19 his mother died. Now essentially alone, he moved to Manhattan to pursue a career in show business.

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