How I admire W. C. Fields! -- What a great oldtimer he was. None like him. I'll write something about him soon, my personal ideas. "Ain't you got no Red Eye?" "Ain't you an old Follies girl?" "I snookered that one." "Those Grampion hills." "Mocha-java." "The enterprise I am about to embark upon is fraught with eminent peril, and not fit for a young lady of your tender years." "Don't you want to wear diaphanous gowns? And get enough to eat?" With his straw hat, his short steps, his belly, his wonderful face hid beneath a bulbous puff of beaten flesh, his twisted mouth, his knowledge of American life, of women, of children, of fellow-barflies, and of death ("the fellow in the bright night-gown.") His utter lovelessness in the world. Bumping into everything blindly. Making everybody laugh. The line he himself wrote, addressed to him" "You're as funny as a cry for help." How he blows foam off a beer, an Old Mad Murphy of time; how he is alone among foolish people who don't see his soul.
Shakespeare never was sadder.
A hounded old reprobate, a clown, a drunkard of eternity, and "Man."
(Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954, ed. Douglas Brinkley, Viking 2004, p. 236, entry of 14-16 October 1949.)
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