668
PARTISAN
.REVIEW
resist making little speeches about his discovery, continually poking us
in the ribs for fear we might miss the point. In the end Verdoux turned
out to be personally as vulnerable as his logic, and that saved the
comedy, though one couldn't
be
sure how much of Chaplin had gone
down with Verdoux. Calvero, quite as much a man of the world as
Verdoux and sharing his slightly questionable elegance and half-baked
independence of mind, is a more agreeable philosopher, preaching not
murder but tolerance, vitality, and love. Yet his tone is not very different;
like Verdoux, he is over-impressed with his ideas and must be always
laboring the point. Now and then he strikes a real spark: "That's all
any of us are-amateurs. We don't live long enough to
be
anything
else." More often he can only make a good try: "Life is a desire, not
a meaning." Dying, Calvero can leave us only with this: "The heart
and the mind-what an enigma!"
Is
it this kind of thing the Tramp
might have been wanting to say during those years of his silence?
I suppose it is, and I suppose it might have been better if we had
never found out. But now that Chaplin has broken the silence, I
confess I do not find these platitudes of his quite so distressing or inap–
propriate as, perhaps, I ought to. To be a clown is not an
art
of detach–
ment. With whatever deliberation he may contrive his effects, in the
end the clown must submit
personally
to humiliation, receiving a custard
pie in his own face, falling on his own behind. Even though the fall is
not so painful as it looks, it is still a real fall. Every clown, no doubt,
dreams that because he has practiced the fall in advance
it
will not
truly touch him, his essential being will remain upright; this is the
source of that " tragedy" of a clown's life that we have heard so much
about. But if he is a true clown, then his essential being is precisely
what consents to the fall, and we who refuse to separate
him
from
his role are more right than 4e is.
In
Limelight,
as in
Monsieur Verdoux,
Chaplin has got caught in
this paradox. He has grown reluctant to submit directly to humiliation
and is anxious to be accepted as something "more" than a clown; this
is the "feeling of sad dignity" that he speaks of. It is true he also takes
great pride in being a clown, but pride itself he uses as a means to
deny his identity: we become aware of him suddenly as belonging to
a "tradition." Of course there
is
a "tradition" and Chaplin is
its
highest
embodiment, but when he presents himself in that role he has to that
extent violated it. He
is
never more dignified, never less a clown, than
in the scenes where he appears as a street singer, dressed handsomely
in motley, passing a hat for pennies, thoroughly at ease because he has
come back to his roots. "This
is
the only true theater," he says gesturing
at the street and the world; the statement is true as it
has
always
been,
