I have been with Charlie from midday to midnight. He has just left me.
First we went to his studio, and Dick came along with us to see “The
Kid” which I had never seen. He had it put on for me in his studio
theatre, and now I realize the whole world of possibilities in films.
Just as a “movie” can be stupid, boring, badly done, and irritating,
as any bad bit of work must be, so too it can be very fine and very
beautiful. Charlie has produced an exquisite story. It might so easily
have been “soppy” and full of false sentiments--but it is not. It is
simple, human and full of pathos.
Dick reacted to it in the most stirring way. When the moment came that
the Kid was to be taken from Charlie and put in an orphan asylum, Dick
clung round my neck and cried and sobbed. He said “I can’t bear it, I
can’t look till the end.” He got so hysterical that Charlie was quite
alarmed and had to reassure him by saying that it wasn’t true. “It’s
only a play Dick! It will all come right in the end!” Charlie too was
quite affected by Dick’s emotion.
Whenever we came to the pathos parts, Charlie tiptoed to the harmonium
and played an accompaniment and when the lights went on Dick and I were
shamefacedly mopping our eyes!
When we went up to his house and lunched, it was half past three!
The house which is not his, but is rented, is Moorish and fantastic
in design, the tortuous unsimplicity of which disturbs Charlie. But
he loves the quiet of it and the isolation on a hill top with the
panorama of the town extending for miles below to the sea. At night, as
he says, it is just a fairy twinkling world when the town lights up.
Later we went for a walk round the hilltop, and the air was hot and
full of evening insect sounds. Dick scrambled wildly up the sloping
banks, while Charlie and I more sedately walked round and round by the
winding climbing path. He was trying to tell me what he thought was
the ultimate aim of all our effort. He maintained that no artist would
do great work until all petty ambition was obliterated.
“There must be no dreams of posterity, of immortality, no desire for
admiration, for after all what are these worth ... at best 1,000 years
hence people might walk round your immortal stone and say--it certainly
is beautiful; yes, it is wonderful--(and Charlie acted the part)--Who
did you say did it? Clare Sheridan 950 years ago”--“and then,” said
Charlie, “in 5 minutes they will be saying ‘Where is that motor, I told
him to be back in 35 minutes’”--There is nothing, he said, so beautiful
that will make people forget their eggs and bacon for breakfast--as for
admiration of the world--it’s not worth anything--there is in the end
but oneself to please:--“You make something because it means something
to you. You work, because you have a superabundance of vital energy,
you find that not only you can make children but you can express
yourself in other ways--in the end it is you--all you--your work, your
thought, your conception of the beautiful, yours the happiness--yours
the satisfaction; be brave enough to face the veil, and lift it, and
see and know the void it hides, and stand before that void and know
that within yourself is your world--”
I said rather feebly that I wanted my children someday to be proud
of me--he made a repudiating gesture. “You should want them to love
you--to love you in a perfectly primitive animal way. To love you
because you are you--to love you whatever you are--to love you if you
are wrong.”
I said that if he left me nothing to work for, no aim, no end, only my
own satisfaction, I thought one might feel suicidal.
He was horrified at this. We stopped in our walk. Charlie looked at me:
“How could anyone like you with so much vitality talk of suicide? Oh
the glory of life, the glory of the world (he threw his arms wide to
the horizon) it’s all so beautiful, and it’s all mine ...” and then we
had to laugh at ourselves for becoming so desperately serious.
I had not meant to stay so long but he asked Dick if he would like to
stay for tea, and Dick said yes, and that he’d like to stay the night
as well. Dick likes Charlie. He says to him: “Charlie, you’re the
funniest man there is ...” and in the car going home after tea, Dick
said that as I had talked to Charlie all the afternoon it was only fair
that he should have him all to himself until we arrived home. Finally
Charlie and I went and dined together, and danced at the Ambassador
Hotel. Everyone knew him, and seemed glad to see him back. The whole
world is Charlie’s friend, no wonder Charlie loves the world!
Then, such a strange thing happened, there in that gay room full of
jazz music we got to talking of our childhoods. Goodness knows how it
came about, but I told him mine, and then he told me his. He told it
with his wonderful simplicity, told it with detachment as if he were
telling of some one else, not of him. It was a terrible bit of realism,
and I though I rather love realism, I felt almost a desire to stop him
from going on. It was more than one could bear to visualise.
It was a curious place in which to tell such things, but we were
oblivious of everyone in the room. And now, stranger to me than ever
is the psychology of this man, once a little child of sorrows, who has
taught a whole world to laugh.