{"id":96833,"date":"2016-04-11T19:04:35","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T23:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=96833"},"modified":"2016-04-11T19:58:10","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T23:58:10","slug":"the-rest-is-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/11\/the-rest-is-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rest Is Silence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chaplin\u2019s trip abroad.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From the cover of My Trip Abroad<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the fall of 1921, journalists were clamoring to know if Charlie Chaplin intended to play Hamlet. They asked him in Chicago at the Blackstone Hotel. They cornered him at the Ritz.\u00a0His response each time was coy and evasive: \u201cWhy, I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of all the unlikely questions they tended to ask him at this point in his career\u2014\u201cAre you a Bolshevik?\u201d \u201cWhat do you do with your old mustaches?\u201d\u2014the Hamlet question seems most out of place. Why would an actor known for his comedy and silence take on a famously verbose and tragic role? Hamlet, with his hemming and hawing, didn\u2019t seem a natural fit for an actor in Chaplin\u2019s position. But then, no actor had ever been in Chaplin\u2019s position before.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 1921, Chaplin was the most famous man in the world, famous in a way that hadn\u2019t been possible since the birth of cinema a mere twenty-odd years earlier. He\u2019d just put out The Kid<\/em>, his most ambitious film, and the first feature-length\u00a0film comedy. There had been other attempts, mainly accidents: Harold Lloyd\u2019s A Sailor-Made Man<\/em>, which ran over its three intended reels into a fourth, and Chaplin\u2019s earlier Tillie\u2019s Punctured Romance<\/em>\u00a0had the length but lacked the architecture. The Kid<\/em> was different. It merged tragedy and comedy into a third, fluid form. Chaplin wanted to wring out of audiences every single emotion at once without losing any narrative cohesion. The result was a high emotional realism not yet seen in the short history of the cinema.<\/p>\n

This was, before 1921, unheard of\u2014inadvisable, even. People thought Chaplin too ambitious, especially for his medium. \u201cIt won\u2019t work,\u201d his friend Gouverneur Morris told him. \u201cThe form must be pure, either slapstick or drama; you cannot mix them, otherwise one element of your story will fail.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Chaplin understood something of the complicated response he produced in his audience, a response belonging neither to pure joy nor pure sadness. In 1914, an actress had approached him with tears in her eyes after watching him film a two-reel comedy. \u201cI know it\u2019s supposed to be funny,\u201d she said, \u201cbut you just make me weep.\u201d<\/p>\n

Needless to say, The Kid<\/em> was a massive success. The cost of that success was Chaplin\u2019s health and part of his sanity. The film premiered in January 1921; by that fall, he was facing influenza and depression, and he was homesick, maybe for the first time since coming to America, for his native England.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was in one of those \u2018what\u2019s the use\u2019 moods,\u201d he wrote in My Trip Abroad<\/a><\/em>, his memoir of his return to Europe in 1922. \u201cI wanted something and didn\u2019t know what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n

My Trip Abroad<\/em> is a catalog of this uncertainty\u2014a story of being caught immobilized between the past and a bright but overwhelming future. It\u2019s not hard to imagine how the gloomy Dane might have been on his mind\u2014in his state, it wouldn\u2019t have seemed such a violent character change.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor seven years,\u201d he begins,<\/p>\n

\n

I have been basking in California\u2019s perpetual sunlight \u2026 working and thinking along a single channel and I wanted to get away. Away from Hollywood, the cinema colony, away from scenarios, away from contracts, cutting rooms, crowds, bathing beauties, custard pies, big shoes, and little moustaches \u2026 I wanted an emotional holiday.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u201cAs I look when I am serious,\u201d a photo from\u00a0My Trip Abroad<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cAn emotional holiday\u201d: Chaplin repeats this phrase throughout My Trip Abroad<\/em>. A strange and fascinating document, at once a travelogue, a diary, and a personal essay, the book presents an oddly relatable, deflated version of the actor at the brightest moment of his career, plunging us into his deepest fears and pettiest worries, all while remaining curiously superficial. Chaplin describes everything\u2014his moods, his actions, his sicknesses, flights of rapture, and depressions\u2014in short, sharp sentences, often in the present tense. Throughout his travels, he\u2019s greeted, mobbed, loved wherever he goes. All of it reinforces the fact that he can never return to the anonymity that preceded his fame. In 1922, all he wanted was to \u201cget away from Chaplin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, he describes being accosted by his fans\u2014at one point he\u2019s the subject of a brutal onrush in which pieces of his outfit are torn from his body. Everywhere he goes, he\u2019s found out. In clubs, bathrooms, even steam rooms\u2014he\u2019s \u201ca discovered man, even in my nakedness.\u201d Fame, for Chaplin, came with a full litany of ways in which the reality of his person had disappointed his adoring fans. Why wasn\u2019t he more muscular? Or why wasn\u2019t he shorter, with larger feet, funnier? In essence, his admirers wanted to see someone more like his character the Tramp, who is, throughout Chaplin\u2019s sad attempt at a vacation, painfully present. Everywhere he goes, \u201cthere are grave doubts,\u201d he writes, \u201cas to whether I am Charlie Chaplin or not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those doubts dogged Chaplin himself, afflicting him with a truly Hamlet-like indecision. After all, in 1921 he was betwixt, in every sense. He was on the verge of finishing up his contract with First National and going on to form his own production company, United Artists. He had just gone through a harrowing divorce with his first wife, Mildred Harris. He\u2019d made his first full-length film. He\u2019d envisioned his trip to Europe as a period of rest, but it ended up bringing his existential crisis to a head. Throughout the trip, he couldn\u2019t decide whether to rest or work, socialize or hide, travel or stay put\u2014he was even torn, in the pages of My Trip Abroad<\/em>, between the American word\u00a0vacationing<\/em>\u00a0and the British\u00a0holidaying<\/em>. Not that either seems especially accurate.<\/p>\n

What obtains instead is a kind of homesickness\u2014if we felt for an instant that Chaplin has any idea what home looks like for him. He\u2019s reticent about calling England home, despite his Proustian nostalgia for the places of his youth\u2014specifically the foods of his youth. The book begins with him answering an invitation to dine with a friend:<\/p>\n

\n

There were many other invitations, but this one carried an assurance that there would be a steak-and-kidney pie. A weakness of mine. I was on hand and ahead of time. The pie was a symphony. So was the evening \u2026 It awoke within me a chord of something reminiscent. I couldn\u2019t tell what.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My Trip Abroad<\/em> is full of \u201cI couldn\u2019t tell what\u201d moments. Even crying is a thing that seems to happen to<\/em> Chaplin\u2014passively, unexpectedly. \u201cMy cheek is damp,\u201d he writes. \u201cI turn away and blot out the sadness. I am not going to look back again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who is<\/em> Chaplin, in 1922? He doesn\u2019t know. He can only see that self through the eyes of adoring others, whose love of him terrifies and excites him. Everyone who meets him tells him he must be so happy to be so loved: to \u201chave friends,\u201d as they put it, \u201call over the world.\u201d But he doesn\u2019t. \u201cChaplin\u201d has friends all over the world. Chaplin is relatively alone.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

It\u2019s perfectly understandable, in this light, that he wanted so badly to get away from himself while he could. In another fifteen years, it would be the public that wanted to get away from Chaplin, to the point of asking him, eventually, to leave the country. For now, he was content to figure out what that country meant to him. Was it his home, or his stage?<\/p>\n

The character, too, had dealt with this question. Chaplin\u2019s films are a paean to uncertainty, instability, loss, and change. The Tramp was the character, out of all the silent comedians, who most fully embraced these things. Keaton\u2019s houses may fall around him, but Chaplin, in his mournful cynicism, had the good sense never to build a house in the first place. He knew he could never live in one.<\/p>\n

So, yes\u2014Hamlet seems about right. Hamlet, the man who can\u2019t decide who to be, whether a man of action, a god of vengeance, or a simpering, whining boor\u2014someone who doesn\u2019t know who he is and makes everyone else suffer for it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel small\u2014like a cheat,\u201d Chaplin writes. \u201cThis worship does not belong to me. God, if I could only do something for all of them! But there are too many\u2014too many.\u201d<\/p>\n

And there were too many. Too many people loved him. They wrote to him in such volume that he had to engage six secretaries just to answer them back. They wrote to say they were his long-lost mother; they asked him to use their sons in his films; they enclosed pawn tickets; they asked him what he was doing during the war. One man sent him his own Croix de Guerre, spurring on Chaplin\u2019s own guilt at not having served. When he visits an English veteran\u2019s hospital to sign autographs, a patient named Bill jokes that he will return the favor:<\/p>\n

\n

There is an uproar of laughter and Bill laughs just as loud as the rest. Bill has no arms.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 But he bests them. He will sign at that. And he does. With his teeth. Such is their spirit. What is to become of them?<\/p>\n

The signs of the recent war were everywhere, and they were harrowing for him. Each time he comes upon a young man who served, he seems stabbed by a strange pang, a desire to help these men who \u201cfor a fantasy and trick of fame go to their graves like beds.\u201d They complicate the notion of home, fighting for a place they can no longer truly live in.<\/p>\n

The notion of home would come to mean even more to him later on, when he was forced to leave his adopted country because of his politics. He moved to Switzerland in 1957, to live out the rest of his days in a mansion that\u2019s now host to a museum honoring his life and work. Like the Tramp, he was for most of his life a man without a country, and deeply, painfully aware of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cA man cannot go back,\u201d he concludes in My Trip Abroad<\/em>. \u201cHe thinks he can, but other things have happened to his life. He had new ideas, new friends, new attachments. He doesn\u2019t belong to his past except that the past has, perhaps, made marks on him.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for Hamlet, Chaplin never played him. A few years before that fateful trip abroad, though, when a reporter for the\u00a0New York Times<\/em> asked him\u2014\u201cWould you like to play Hamlet?<\/a>\u201d\u2014he gave a less guarded answer than you might expect. \u201cI am too tragic by nature to play Hamlet,\u201d he said. \u201cOnly a great comedian can play the Dane.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n