grasp—but not without importance. It lifts the user from the embrace of
living things, setting him, half insulate, in a machine. To walk the
earth, to sail the sea, to ride a horse or plod behind one in a buggy—to
drink the heady brews of grain or vine—these are all ways of touching
life. But to box oneself into a thing of iron, and race through the
verdurous world as fast as ever one may, is to get almost out of life,
even without the common aid of accidents. It is to exile oneself from
the sensuous growing earth which is our ultimate food.
Now, to move is to overcome resistance. And to overcome resistance _too
well_ is to avoid life’s loveliness which dawns on men only when they
are forced to pause. The perfect, unconscious mechanism of an animal
knows neither thought nor beauty. The child begins to think and to
enjoy, only when life stops him. This drug of ours induces a child’s
heaven—or an animal’s. It makes things too easy: seeing the world,
seeing folks, seeing your girl, too easy. And man can stand the
adversity which bores him, far better than a lubricated ease. To see an
endless series of places is to value none of them. To see too many folks
is to see too little of oneself. For the value of things lies, in great
extent, in the amount of ourselves we must put forth to get them. Take
love-making, for example. Resistance and time are so necessary for its
right consummation that even the brutes know it. Make the tryst between
the boy and the girl too facile and too swift—eliminate the hazards of
invading little brothers in family drawing rooms—and the couple will
very soon prefer the delights of a hard-won brown bottle to the delights
of each other.
So the vicious circle rounds. And the drug whose use was to bring
increased power and joy turns its addict impotent and sad. This specific
concoction has done much to make of us a gloomy people. Or, perhaps, it
was the other way. Being a lugubrious lot, we have fallen victims to a
drug which turns us even worse: making us roll along on lines of motion
far less fancifully pleasant than the devious ones induced by alcohol.
Unfortunately the drug’s ill results have not yet made us sick of it. We
are merely demanding more of the same. Swifter mobility to kill time and
trouble; more elaborate and expensive emptinesses to fill empty
holidays. In the American town, the effect is sadly visible. The streets
are cluttered with the wheeled instruments in which the drug is used.
And the air is fouled with its miasmic fumes. And the poor folk who took
to it in order to be free, in order to know flight from trouble, find
themselves grooved into traffic lines, manacled by traffic laws,
crawling like slaves under the haughty signals of the cop.
Verily, the hour calls for some great solver of problems to save the
nation. I think at once of Mr. Henry Ford. He has been so successful in
solving our transportation problems. He has earned so much wealth in
that beneficent task. And he has shown himself so eager to go on serving
his people—if possible, in bigger, better ways! Has he no scheme for
curbing the evil uses of this Thing which causes our noble countrymen to
roll along the landside in a complacent stupor?
_1927_
TWO: PORTRAITS
I. MEN
II. AMERICAN TRAITS
III. IDEAS
_I. MEN_
1. RANDOLPH BOURNE
A girl friend of his mother snatched him away from the wise arms, to hug
and coddle him; let him slip and dropped him from the balcony where they
were standing. This is the origin of the sad mutilations with which
Randolph Bourne went through life. The tale has the true depth of a
legend. The affection of a young woman, clumsy with unskilled love; the
desire to share, to help, perhaps—and as aftermath, the lifetime of
agony and visible disgrace. This is the sort of irony that Randolph
relished, and bore with him through the world. Beholding him, one felt
that his deformity somehow was not the profane traditional one: it was
rather the stigmata of some miscarried loveliness.
He was very deformed. Not alone was he dwarfed and hunchbacked: his face
was twisted, he had a tortured ear, his color was sallow and his
breathing was audible and hard. He walked in a cape that hid him. He
took a chair for the first time in your presence, let fall the black
shroud about him, and revealed a form so mangled that you despaired ever
to find sufficient ease for the sort of conversation his immediately
brilliant mind demanded.
But the magic of Randolph Bourne was not separate from his poor body,
and at once you knew this. This is why, in writing of his splendid
spirit, it is meet to dwell upon his misery. Within half an hour, your
discomfort was gone—so miraculously gone that your mind was prone to
look about for it. But whenever, in the future, awareness did return of
the grotesque shape in which this spirit was imprisoned and was doomed
to walk, it was intellectual altogether: the mind needed to stir the
senses with the thought of it, while the senses moved in full ease
within his presence.
It was Randolph’s eyes and hands that brought about the wonder. The
hands were exquisite, gentle, quiet. They seemed made for such clear
profundities as the playing of Bach: they bespoke his style—the caress
of his ruthless understanding. And they flowered from his body with the
inevitable irony of all his being. The eyes were penetrant, studious.
There was a reticence in them, after the adventure, not before it. You
knew from them that Randolph Bourne was wise, and that he had withdrawn
some subtle spirit of himself forever from gross contacts: that he had
learned to see and to experience without the ill-focused turmoil of too
close contacts. So surely consonant were his hands and eyes with what he
said, that the body became a sort of Christian _Lest Ye Forget_—a sign
to thrust you back into the humiliating coil of life, from the high
freedom of his discourse.
All of him had this counterpoint. His spirituality was shrewd; his
warmth was ironical and measured; his gaiety was leashed; above all, his
direct caustic wit was barbed with a general indulgence. The body had
forced on him this complex economy of emotion. And there ensued from it
a splendor of free energy for every challenge of liberty, for every
accolade of the creative life. This little man, indeed, so celled in a
crushed body that even breath was hard, became a rounded athlete of the
spirit, as none, perhaps, of us who have survived him. The loss of
Randolph Bourne is a shadow that lengthens....
_1925_
2. CHARLES CHAPLIN
a.
Chaplin’s eyes are a blue so darkly shadowed that they are almost
purple. They are sad eyes; from them pity and bitterness look out upon
the world. They are veiled: while the man moves forward with
irresistible charm, his eyes hold back in a solitude fiercely
forbidding. No one who sees the eyes of Chaplin can feel like laughing.
They are the one part of the man which does not show in his pictures.
For fifteen years these eyes have looked out on Hollywood. Much nonsense
has been written about this suburb of Los Angeles, which is itself a
suburb of the country. America reviles it as an indecent stranger
somehow lodged in its midst, or romanticizes it into a scene from the
“Arabian Nights.” But, of course, Hollywood is no worse a place than any
provincial city of our land; nor better. Hollywood’s producers are
typical money men; its directors are typical professional men; its
actresses and actors are typical girls and boys. Its army of mechanics,
craftsmen, engineers, are the usual American sort: grime them up a bit,
lower their wages, and they would fit in to your town garage.
Hollywood’s swarm of aspirants buzzing about the lots are typical
floating seed of the American jungle: the wastrel seed that finds no
soil to root in, whether it rots near home or blows away. Only in one
respect is Hollywood unusual: its girls are really as fair as all girls
would like to be.
Hollywood is the perfect mirror of banal American success. Ordinary
souls dream extraordinary dreams—in the way of ordinary souls. And in
Hollywood the dreams come true. Here is uncounted money, here is
glamour, here is the exact mechanical production of that ideal to which
success means a show. And Chaplin, with those frightening eyes of his,
which almost no one ever sees, looks out upon this world, his home since
he was twenty-four. There is another world which he looks in upon: the
grey, grinding London of his childhood. He loves the London slums; for
these slums were his and they are in his heart. But on his mother’s side
the blood of Chaplin is half gypsy. Through her, whom he brought from
England to live near him on the Coast, yet another world lives in him: a
world of meadows and irresponsible laughter.
In the city of success he carries with him the taste of the London
slums. But even there he was not at home: even for that sad past which
formed his body and his mind he has a grim, ironical refusal—since
there, too, the gypsy in him was a stranger.
This counterpoint of sympathy and denial is our first clew to the man.
The drawing room of his house is packed with bibelots, pictures,
bric-a-brac, sent him by the admiring splendor of the world. Here are
tributes from Chinese mandarins and from the royalty of Europe. And
here, too, on the wall, hang a few colored lithographs of Whitechapel
and Wapping. Chaplin loves to take these from the wall. They depict
streets that are like some cold inferno, in which the people stir slowly
like souls stripped of all save the capacity to suffer. Watch his eyes
as he looks at this picture of his childhood world. They are at once too
soft and too hard. The emotions of understanding and of refusal are
separate in them. In this room I once sat with Chaplin while the Comte
de Chasseloup exhibited to us what are perhaps the most terrible
photographs in the world: close-ups in progressive detail of tortures
and executions which he had collected in China. We looked on the
deliberate process of men being carved alive—as a butcher quarters a
calf. We saw faces black with the horror of their pain, and then white
with the relief of death. And in Chaplin there was the same counterpoint
of feeling. His eyes took in the tremendous pity of these portrayals of
man’s way with man. Suddenly his eyes hardened; he jumped up, and his
mouth was cruel. “There’s humanity for you! By God, they deserve it.
Give it to them! That’s man. Cut ’em up. Torture ’em! The bastards!”...
The pity he had felt was intolerable to him. He summoned hardness to
wipe it out: to save himself from this danger of being overwhelmed.
Chaplin does not wish to give himself to any emotion, to any situation,
to any life. Life draws him too terribly for that. Whatever he feels
must immediately arouse its opposite; so that Chaplin may remain
untouched—immaculate and impervious in himself.
With this same reserve he moves through Hollywood. He is no recluse. His
secret apartness is far subtler than that. He frequents the Coconut
Grove at the Ambassador, where the slightly decayed youth of the Coast
ferments in dance. He sits for hours in the smoke of his friend Henry
Bergman’s restaurant on the crowded boulevard. He goes to parties—to
those of his friend Marion Davies at her Beach House, to those of
William Randolph Hearst at his ranch. And wherever he goes he is the
life of the crowd. He acts, he mimics, he plays, he insists on amusing
and on being seen. But always there is the same immediate wavering away
from the life about him and from the effect he produces. He does not
give himself nor does he really take. Above all, he does not
aggressively refuse any advance or emotion. He is noncommittal.
_Intactness_—this is the principle that best explains the balance of
opposites in feeling, conduct, thought, which he sets up. He is like an
atom that must journey alone through the world. The atom moves an
intricate course, swerving here and there, myriadly attracted, myriadly
repelled, seeming to give, seeming to respond—always remaining free and
alone. A direct refusal of the world about him would mean a definite
relation with it. This is not Chaplin’s game. If the world draws him, he
responds—passive. His course has been swerved, but he is uncommitted. He
resolves every force with its opposite. Emotionally this means that he
frustrates in himself every impulse of utter giving or of utter taking.
He remains unpossessed and ultimately unpossessing. But this deep
frustration is the key to his profound success. Do not pity him for it.
He is no pitiable creature.
With sure instinct Chaplin has guided his personal life through channels
where he would be always alone. He loves the world he lives in, and
despises it. He does not want to change it: no man is farther from the
fervor of the prophet, and yet few men have done so much to show it up
as ridiculous and worthless. He does not want another world. He uses
this one, just as it is, in order to ensure his aloneness. But, were he
really alone, he would meet in the silence of himself some acceptance
which would prove his unity with the world. So he courts the world, and
dwells in it, in order to frustrate such a possible self-encounter.
There was a time when Chaplin seemed to me a kind of fallen angel: an
angel cursed by God with all human feelings and with the inability to
fulfill them: cursed with the gift of evoking laughter and love and with
no power to take laughter and love to himself. But this was a
sentimental error. The inordinate tenderness of the man, his gentility
and grace, are checked by his native rejection of the self-bestowal to
which such qualities must lead. Hardness and ruthless egoism are as
primal in him as the generous emotions. He refuses to be lost in any
synthesis of love. He must remain the atom of himself. And in his
perfect poise _between_ the forces of the world—the poise of
opposites—this is what he remains. And this is what he wants.
What he wants, Chaplin has infinite resources for getting. The shrewd
technique of his art is but a phase of the same art in his life. This is
the man who, when he was first approached with an invitation to enter
pictures—untried and unknown—jacked up the initial offer of seventy-five
dollars a week to twelve times that figure. “I saw they were anxious,”
he explained to me. “When I said to them, ‘I think I’ll study
philosophy; I don’t care for acting,’ I saw them go white. That’s how I
knew what I was worth.” And this is the man who, three years later, when
Mary Pickford, Fairbanks, Griffith, Hart and himself were in danger of
being shamefully exploited by the business end of the game, gathered
them all together into “United Artists” and preserved a fair portion of
the treasure to the men and women who were doing the work. Chaplin is
endowed with consummate powers for connecting with the world. “I’d make
a great banker,” he once told me. He is intelligent, so intelligent that
he intuitively grasps the abstruse currents of modern thought, esthetic,
political, even philosophic. He is sensitive, so exquisitely that the
gamut of human joy and pain plays endless responses within him. And he
is passionate and earthy, a lover of good food and of women and of racy
words. All these gifts naturally conspire to make him one with the
world. Yet there is in him this dominant need to be one only with
himself, to submit to no marriage, to let himself be lost in no union,
to which his mind and sense impel him. What, in this diathesis, can he
do? He can keep on moving. He can make his life a constant journey
through the inconstancy of impressions which, if he dwelt with them,
would bind him. He can make of his life an _escape_.
b.
The life, then, of this first master of the motion picture, is motion.
His art is the treasured essence of his life. The theme of the Chaplin
picture is Chaplin himself, in relation (opposition) to the world. He
journeys through it, immeasurably roused, solicited, moved—yet aloof,
yet intactly alone. The form of the Chaplin film is his own body, set
off by the world: his body made into a mask behind which the man, all
intact, goes slyly and painfully on his impervious journey. And the plot
of the Chaplin film is merely some sequence of episodes in this constant
opposition of himself journeying through life and never fused within it.
Of course, it is not as easy as it sounds. Precisely because his work is
the incarnation of his life mood, of his life journey, its birth is a
delicate issue. In the beginning there is the atomic Chaplin, cast in
some role that will motivate his passage through the required number of
reels. But that passage—as pawnbroker’s assistant, circus fool, convict
pilgrim, fireman, seeker of gold, tramp, janitor, country bumpkin,
etc.—that passage must be blocked out with events. Each foot of the film
is an event, an encounter between Chaplin and the world. Since the art
is to be the essence of his life, it, too, like his life, must be
completely _fleshed_; and must breathe! From each encounter, either with
another person or with some inanimate object like a brickbat, there must
rise visible and palpable the personality of the entire journey. So each
event of the film must be a work of art in itself. And there must be
sequence, breathing, flowing, mounting. Each event must rise into the
next until the mass of events becomes a plastic music where each episode
is a note. The whole tale is a motion of events to represent the journey
of the man—his escape, intact, through the myriad mass of life.
The mood of the tale, being intimately Chaplin’s own, is carried within
him. What he must wait for is the precise scale of episodes that will
form the mood. Even when the events have come to him (the particular
stunts of the film), they must be weighed and measured. Where do they
fit in? Do they fit in at all?
This period of gestation is painful and long. Chaplin lies abed an
entire morning. He broods, measuring the tentative “body” of his tale by
the inner sense of what he wants. This sense is infallible, but it is
inarticulate save as the completed picture will be its articulation.
Chaplin does not know, he has no words for saying, the exact timbre and
gamut of physical actions that will express this particular body of his
life journey. The picture will be his knowing.... Meantime, several
miles away, his studio awaits him. It is a charming lot, several acres
in size. Here lives Kono, the remarkable Japanese factotum who manages
Chaplin’s personal journey through life, who serves as a kind of
intelligent oil against the inevitable frictions of the inevitable
encounters with stranger and friend. Here wait his general staff: Alf
Reeves (who has been with him since music-hall days), Harry Crocker,
Carl Robinson, Henry Bergman, Henry Clive, Roland Totheroh—possibly the
director Harry d’Arrast, who once worked with him in Crocker’s present
place and who remains his chum. All these men are distinguishably sweet,
sensitized, intelligent, aloof in the crass Hollywood world. (That world
is full of workers who carry on after they have left him, bearing the
stamp he gave them—Menjou is a celebrated instance.)
The staff all feel the tension of their chief. The strain, indeed, is so
great that there are men in the “industry” who could not stand it. At
last, possibly around noon, Chaplin arrives. The instant has come when
he is ready. He has dropped into his clothes, stepped into the limousine
which waits all morning at the door, with the engine throbbing. He is
hatless, tieless, and his vest is open. But the clothes are the most
dapper product of the London tailor. He wears them, at work, like a
gypsy. Even in this detail there is the meeting of the Chaplin
opposites. Gypsy and exquisitely groomed young gentleman delete each
other: leaving, as ever, merely Chaplin.
He joins his crowd in the little bungalow on the lot, where lunch is
served and where he has his dressing rooms. Tentative moments of the
film are brought up, altered, discarded, readjusted. Chaplin paces, his
face hard, his mouth half open, his eyes far off in himself.
Infinitesimal details are studied, rehearsed, discussed; gags, postures,
meanings, properties, business. Walking up and down, the little man
holds in his head the film’s inexorable rhythm, the inner logic of its
growth. As the ideas fly back and forth, in words and mimicry, Chaplin
brings them to the measure in himself: rejects or accepts.
There may be months of this. Nothing seems to be going. The corps of
workers champ and chafe. Chaplin moves with his preoccupation through
his habitual life: parties, dinners, wanderings about town, swift
flights with friends, long hours alone. At last certain scenes, having
withstood the critical pause, seem certain. Carpenters and plasterers
get busy. Sets rise on the lot. Chaplin wanders about among the hammers,
alone or with his group: judging, silent, suddenly exasperated, lost in
a new angle of vision—giving sharp orders that destroy the work of
weeks. A shot that cost a long journey to location (and $50,000) will be
ruthlessly scrapped. Later a scene will be repeated a literal hundred
times; and, if the fifty-ninth time was right, each detail of it will be
so clear in Chaplin’s eye that he will reproduce it for the camera.
Finally, a thousand feet of photography will be collapsed into a yard so
pregnant with the essence of the event that it will move, intact like
the man himself, through all the world.
This perfect consciousness of Chaplin as craftsman would, of course, be
less conspicuous in any other place. (In Paris, for instance, where men
work with words and with pigment as Chaplin does with human masses, his
métier is understood as merely the highest form of a common practice.)
But Hollywood is a usual American town—not a capital of artists. And the
studios of Hollywood confine their precision and consciousness to
problems of mechanics and finance. They are monuments of esthetic
vagueness, intellectual nullity, artistic hit-or-miss. The usual story,
to begin with, is an externalized contraption put together by the
combined shrewdness of half a dozen wholesalers parading as writers,
scenarists, directors and producers. The actors have no accurate
technique. The directors have no conscious control. In such a
combination the chance artist is helpless and lost. When a scene is
“pretty good,” it is shot. And the result is the kind of flat
approximation that feeds the dreams of the millions. But by the time
Chaplin gets ready to rehearse a scene its precise place in the
architectonic of his tale has been measured, even as the theme itself
has been measured in his life. And as he rehearses, he knows what
happens. I mean that he knows the interplay of muscle, mass, space, and
their focal value as the camera lens will catch it. He is no expert in
photography. In his especial choreography he is supreme.
All organic life has a commanding, individual rhythm: the beat of a
heart, the slant of a mind, the indecipherable stir of cells must go
with that rhythm. Such an organic rhythm besets the consciousness of
Chaplin, incarnating his subjective mood into a story. At the beginning,
he knows the rhythm only. He has to grope for the episodes to flesh it.
But when he finds his episodes he knows what he wants. And at the moment
of shooting a scene he knows how to recall what he wants. And he can do
this because, from the twist of a leg to the flicker of an eye, he knows
how everything is done.
c.
All this, however, has not explained what it is that Chaplin is doing.
His work may be the incarnation of his personal escape from those
trammels of life to which his sensitivity and capacity for love expose
him; his way of escape may be shrewd with all the shrewdness of his
cockney-gypsy genius; and the esthetic expression of that journey of his
soul may be done with consummate craft. Yet the inward value of the
entire adventure is not yet clear.
We can best approach the significance of Chaplin’s art by considering
another constant presence (besides himself) in his meditations on the
story, in his conferences with Crocker and d’Arrast, in his rehearsals,
in his final prunings, acceptances and rejections. That other presence
he always alludes to by a simple name. He calls it “they.” “They” is the
public. “They” collaborates unceasingly with Chaplin. “They” has the
final veto over even Chaplin himself.