CORRESPONDENCE
PROTEST
Sirs:
I hope Mr. Warshow's unjust review
of Parker Tyler's
Chaplin, Last of the
Clowns
in the October PR will not dis–
courage the reading of this brilliant
book. The reader of the review would
not suspect that the book has a thesis,
that it is a probing work which ex–
plores the relations of Chaplin and
Charlie in a delicate, imaginative way,
that
it
is rich in fine observations, and
contains some beautiful, stirring pages
of pure enthusiasm rare in writings on
film. I don't know of another book on
a film artist that comes up to it in
quality. The psychoanalytic details that
Mr. Warshow isolates in order to justi–
fy his dismissing the book are a very
small part of the whole and hardly
represent its broad insight and method.
In themselves, and especially when torn
out of context, these details indicate
nothing about the truth or falsity of
Tyler's interpretation of Chaplin and
might occur in Freud. It should be
said, however, that the crudity of state–
ment in the episode of the flag is not
Tyler's but the reviewer's-1 do not
find in the book the vulva and penis
on which Mr. Warshow is pleased to
insist.
Meyer Schapiro
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REPLY
Sirs:
I know, of course, that Mr. Tyler's
book has numerous admirers, and it is
interesting to learn what virtues Mr.
Schapiro has found in it. (However,
I am not sure I should consider "pure
enthusiasm" a virtue.)
The "crudity" of naming the penis
and the vulva is indeed mine. Mr.
Tyler expresses his idea perhaps more
delicately: "Are the stars and stripes
not also substantive for
a bed?
. . . . What would the
star
alone be,
what the straight-shooting
stripe?"
(The italics are Mr. Tyler's.)
Robert Warshow
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Being the presentation of a vital
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92 pages, 43 pages of illustrations, '15
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