“I won’t get serious until someone takes me that way,” said Fudd, or so his biographer says in The Foetal Man, though Fudd denies it in More Elmer. More Elmer is more memoir than autobiography, with its poolside tone of a Hollywood “as told to.” The millionaire with a mansion and a yacht, the expeditions with Leghorn and Cheney—no mention is ever made of the fat, red-nosed early years. Tubby with a Gun, the unauthorized hatchet job, claims, “The gouty boozehound was hunting for a 4F.” And it is undeniable Fudd slimmed down after shilling for the war effort in “Any Bonds Today?” Many speculate that a deal was made. With so many servicemen overseas, Fudd portrayed himself disingenuously as a idealistic outdoorsman, a vegetarian who hunted only for sport, and he settled too easily in the role of a confirmed bachelor, comfortable yet unfulfilled in his high-rise, ultramodern, pushbutton home of the future. Some critics see Fudd paying the price for this zaftig languishment with his masculinity. The author of Sadistic Buddha: Fudd Problematized observes that Fudd
[O]ccupies the role of the modern American family man, yet remains the elemental singleton […] his fondness for glamour gowns and wigs alongside his frequent costume of diaper and bonnet suggest his fetishization of the nuclear family; a man concurrent with middle-American post-war values, yet forever estranged by his queer, neotenic solitude.”
It’s not hard to imagine Fudd’s nervous titter in response. When he finally hung up his double-barrel and bunnystalker cap, he was dismissive of his lack of family and the mystery of his place in society. In Wascal, his posthumous tell-all (which remarkably does not contain a single “r”) he writes with sour, unconvincing bravado, “All of them. I could have bagged all the bunnies, but I didn’t want them—they wanted me.” What was it that Fudd really wanted? His oeuvre makes it plain: companionship. And his desultory compensation made that yearning especially plangent. Nightly, seated by himself, Fudd was attended by a robot-butler who invariably lifted a silver dome from a platter of roast rabbit every supper and duck each Sunday dinner.
Corwin Ericson is the author of Swell, a novel, and the collection Checked Out OK. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Galaxy Brain, Jubilat, Harpers, and Diagram.
Image: “Immovable Feast” by Kaleb
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