An ugly scene with Minnie at dinner. A harmless discussion of Hegelian aesthetics over macchiatos and a nicely ripened Burrini. Then, abruptly, I confronted her with my thoughts regarding the letters from Duck. She denied everything and in a rage threw her cheese at me. I left to go for a walk and when I returned she was gone. O Weib!
Although Mouse’s career received a substantial boost in 1938 when The Brave Little Tailor was nominated for an Oscar, it is also from this date that we find Mouse privately doubting his own talent and calling into question his hitherto stable relationship with his creator.• An indication of the spiritual and emotional upheaval Mouse was undergoing at this time appears in the entry for September 25, 1939. He has just read King Lear and is deeply moved:
How wise was the Bard! Indeed, we are to the gods as flies to small boys. And what am I? Ink. Ink and a paltry trick of light! Transitory, insubstantial, a cartoon! O Disney! Can you know even an iota of the misery for which you alone are responsible? But of course not. Do you have to wear these absurd red shorts?
Mouse’s spirits were bolstered in 1940 with the release of Fantasia. It was received cautiously but favourably by most critics, and, in an increasingly rare display of magnanimity, Mouse praised the boldness of Stokowski’s decision to conduct the score despite the censure of his colleagues. America’s entry into the war led to a creative hiatus, but, strangely, Mouse at this time seemed happier and more content than he had for years. Thomas Mann visited him in California, and Mouse proposed a collaboration. Mann declined, however, as he was having his kitchen done.
The postwar period saw a resumption of work for Mouse, but while his films continued to do well at the box office, critics seemed to be looking elsewhere. While his technically audacious Mickey and the Seal, released in 1948, garnered positive reviews in isolated circles, the general consensus was that it stood as a sad testimony to a failure of vision. Mouse himself doubted the quality of his last works, expressing his deep reservations about them. In an entry for April 18, 1950, he writes:
I seem unable to grasp the core of things. Essences escape me. But more importantly, why does that man across the street hose down his sidewalk so often?
His last film, The Simple Things, critically ignored at the time but now considered a tour de force of romantic realism, was released in 1953. Mouse died shortly thereafter, financially secure but embittered over his artistic decline and an inability to fold fitted sheets. His last days were darkened by a Supreme Court ruling rejecting his request that a cease-and-desist order be slapped on the Mouseketeers, whose existence he reviled as “a grotesque excrescence that defames the very nature of mouseness.”
The Diaries of Mickey Mouse provides a startling perspective on the inner life and development of a gifted but deeply conflicted artist and documents strikingly the creative trajectory of one of the pivotal figures of the modern cultural landscape. The last entry speaks most movingly in this regard:
The same terrible dream again last night. Annette Funicello and several tall men in lederhosen playing the habanera from Carmen on ukuleles. I awake with the name “Britney” in my head. I’ve got to lay off the bourbon.
Such honesty is admirable in any small, white-gloved rodent, but coming from an artist of Mouse’s stature it humbles us all.
