What do Zeppo Marx and Valentin Tomberg have in common...?

Meditations on the "mystical way" of love

A few posts back, I mentioned in passing that I was reading the biography of Zeppo Marx. [1] Well, I did read it. For those of you for whom the name Zeppo Marx rings perhaps only faint bells in the back of your mind, if it rings any bells at all, he was the youngest of the legendary comedy team of siblings, the Marx Brothers (of whom there were five in all: in addition to Zeppo, there were Chico, Harpo, Groucho, and Gummo). In 1918, to keep Zeppo off the streets and away from his criminal pals in Chicago, and to fill the gap left onstage when Gummo joined the army (never to return to the act), their mother and manager, Minnie, drafted Zeppo into the family business when he was just 17. He remained with the act through the remainder of their Vaudeville years, their transition to Broadway, and on to Hollywood and the first five of the team’s thirteen films. In the movies, he was never given the opportunity to play anything but the straight man, occasionally the love interest, and sometimes even less. The truth is – and here we get a glimpse of the man’s psychological character – he resented both his inclusion in the act and his exclusion, except rarely, from sharing his own comedic talent onstage and onscreen (a talent which, it seems, he possessed in abundance). But this post isn’t about the Marx Brothers, even if I begin it by referring to the concluding sentences of Zeppo’s biography. Of the great comedians, the Marx Brothers have always been my favorites, which accounts for my reading the book in the first place. But there’s little that might be considered funny in it. Zeppo, it seems, was a particularly hard and unsympathetic man (unlike his brothers), and the biography ends on a sour note; in fact, it might be the saddest summation of a person’s life that I’ve read. He was a gambler, a womanizer, a heavy drinker, was regarded as crooked, had organized crime connections (so much so that his brothers considered disowning him), was a lousy husband, hardly a father at all to his adopted sons, and by the end had few real friends left. He also had become the wealthiest among his brothers (and yet he was deviously bumming money from an elderly Groucho in the 1970s, who mistakenly believed he was broke). The biography ends on this note: “[Benefiting others] never seemed especially important to Zeppo… [He] answered to no one. The only venture Zeppo ever pursued that he didn’t control was gambling – and he was arrogant enough to believe that he did… Zeppo made no demonstrable personal sacrifices… Zeppo lived for Zeppo.” The rest of the biography bears out those dismal words. In case you’re curious about what this post really is about, though, it’s about love, and to get us on that track I turn to words by the Russian-Estonian Catholic mystic, Valentin Tomberg (1900 – 1973) – a contrast to Zeppo Marx in nearly every way, except that they were almost exact contemporaries.