Tragedy is about the distress and self-destruction of egomaniacs who place themselves at the centre of the universe. Comedy, wiser and more democratically compassionate, deals with humbler figures, whose humdrum miseries remind us of our shared human vulnerability. But as Simon Louvish says, the muddling routines of a comic character like Chaplin's tramp also rehearse a "cosmic battle". The subjective self grapples with a world of obtuse objects when Charlie slips on a malevolent rug in One A.M., and man collides with machine when he is fed into a hungry industrial gullet in Modern Times. Survival and extinction butt heads in The Gold Rush, where the snowbound, starving prospector dines on a boiled boot, picking out the nails as daintily as if they were the bones of a Dover sole.
The tramp's mishaps are metaphysical. The cabin in which he shelters in The Gold Rush is dislodged by an avalanche and hovers on the edge of an abyss, as Charlie, with desperate elegance, struggles to stay upright. In The Circus, he walks a tightrope like an existential hero, simultaneously fighting off a horde of escaped monkeys. Far below is our prostrate, beleaguered earth, which Chaplin once wonderfully described as "the underworld of the gods".
Because he performed these antics silently, Chaplin has always needed eloquent interpreters who, like Louvish, are anxious to explain the political or philosophical import of his pratfalls, dust-ups and manic rampages. As Louvish notes, writers early on volunteered "to fill the gaps between the public imagination and the enigma on the screen". In 1920, the dadaist poet Ivan Goll wrote a tribute called The Chapliniade, in which the impertinent tramp challenges the prim bourgeoisie and announces "the communism of the soul". Goll associated Chaplin with The Iliad, emphasising the epic violence of his films and turning the tramp into a warrior as infuriated as Achilles.
As his subtitle indicates, Louvish chooses instead to tell Chaplin's story as a reprise of The Odyssey, a digressive global journey that takes him, like the wandering Odysseus, from the drab slums of Lambeth to hyper-kinetic New York and nubile Hollywood, finally leaving him at rest in a private estate beside Lake Geneva, with Eugene O'Neill's daughter Oona as his devoted Penelope.
Though Chaplin was peripatetic enough, sailing back from Europe to California by way of Asia in 1932, the character he created proved to be even more intrepid. A true Everyman, the tramp turned up everywhere. He delighted what a colonist in 1925 called the "savages" and "black mammies" of Accra and his familiar natty silhouette invaded Indonesian shadow-puppet plays. In China, he became "the comic king of the Celestials", while in Bolshevik Russia he was honoured as a tireless Stakhanovite toiler in a "factory of laughter". The city fathers in Bologna fraudulently claimed him as a native son, pretending that his ancestors were the Caplinettis, poor immigrants to America. Everyone wanted a part of him. On a European tour, Chaplin was virtually carved up or dismembered by his fans; a woman used scissors to cut a souvenir from the seat of his pants, while another admirer tugged at his tie and almost strangled him in the process.
If the world succumbed to an epidemic known as Chaplinitis, the man himself was agitated by an ailment of his own, which should probably be called Chaplinoia. Odysseus dallied with nymphs like Calypso during his long journey home; Chaplin possessed a reckless fondness for underage nymphets and was eventually denounced as a moral menace by the US government.
Louvish ignores the fuss over his secret foibles. He doesn't speculate about the "abnormal, unnatural, perverted and degenerate sexual desires" of which Chaplin was accused by his second wife (she seems to have been referring to oral sex). He also makes light of Marlon Brando's claim that Chaplin was "fearsomely cruel" and "the most sadistic man I'd ever met" (which probably meant that Chaplin, directing A Countess From Hong Kong, insisted that Brando should memorise his lines rather than mumbling impromptu approximations). This is a biography of the mask, not of the man behind it. The cover design for Louvish's book rounds up Charlie's appurtenances - the bowler hat; the almost elastically nimble cane; the inky smudge of his moustache, mimicked by Hitler - but erases Chaplin's face.
Although the props served as synonyms for Charlie, Louvish reveals that Chaplin happened upon them accidentally, gave little thought to the way they cohered and in later life shuddered as he recalled "that dreadful suit of clothes". He was, he said, "filled with disgust at the character that circumstances forced me to create". Perhaps his bad faith galled him; he became rich by playing this indigent character and the memory of the little vagabond mocked the elderly, knighted grandee. Picasso once invited Chaplin to dinner. On the appointed day, he arrived in his chauffeur-driven car to deliver a card announcing that he couldn't come. A practical joke or a symptom of the celebrity's pampered insulation from reality?
Louvish suspects that the mask concealed another mask, closer to the truth of his private character. Although the persona of the tramp prevailed, the young Chaplin had an alternative character in his repertory: a spiv or swell who was up for aggro rather than sweetly accepting his lot, less lovable than the man in the baggy pants and dented bowler. Chaplin's double role in The Great Dictator acted out this dispute between his two selves. The tramp is the eternally optimistic Jewish barber, who believes that the invention of the aeroplane guarantees goodwill between men; the narcissistic spiv becomes the preening, posturing Hynkel, a caricature of Hitler. But the film's plot requires the barber to impersonate the crazed dictator: ego and id can't easily be kept apart.
Chaplin's role as the serenely guiltless serial killer in Monsieur Verdoux was even more troubling for those who first warmed to him as a downtrodden, gallantly resilient victim. In 1923, cubist painter Fernand Léger described the tramp as "a kind of living object", an emblem of life in the dehumanised modern city. Verdoux, who views the murder of his wives and his own execution with the same chilly equanimity, takes that description literally; he is, as Louvish says, a "machine-human", the kind of automaton that lethally threatens Charlie in Modern Times. After this alarming self-revelation, Limelight was a final act of expiation. Here, Chaplin plays the dying clown Calvero, who removes his make-up as the camera tracks in for a brutally truthful close-up of his abject face.
The fellow-feeling between Louvish and Chaplin is so intimate that the biographer, when discussing Limelight, writes a confessional monologue for his subject. He imagines Chaplin saying: "I was content to present the mask, but now I will strip it off and be revealed in the fallibility of my humiliation".
Yet this is not a book that revels in exposing personal flaws and it ends hagiographically, citing the theology of Sufi mystics to suggest that watching Chaplin is tantamount to "contemplation of the divine". I stumbled over this at first, but when I remembered City Lights, I found myself almost believing Louvish's blissed-out coda. Critic James Agee declared that the indescribable look on Chaplin's face at the end of the film - when the tramp stares helplessly at the flower girl who owes her sight to him but does not return his adoration - was "the greatest piece of acting in movies". Having flicked through my mental files, I could produce no evidence to refute the claim. Comedy can be more heartbreaking than tragedy and Chaplin is the man of sorrows whose sufferings, like Calvero's Calvary, have the power to heal a hard-hearted, mirthless world.
Charlie Chaplin: A life
Born: 16 April 1889 in London. Both parents were music hall entertainers. His mother was admitted to a mental asylum when he was four years old.
Career: 1914 Making a Living 1915 The Tramp 1919 Co-founded United Artists 1921 The Kid 1925 The Gold Rush 1931 City Lights 1936 Modern Times 1940 The Great Dictator 1952 Limelight 1967 A Countess From Hong Kong 1972 Honorary Oscar for lifetime services to film.
Died: 25 December 1977 in Switzerland. His body was briefly stolen by grave robbers and is now buried under concrete.
