272
PARTISAN REVIEW
him in her
1944
essay, "The Jew as Pariah.") This was asserted as
fact by his scrupulous biographer Theodore Huff in
1951,
only to be
denied by Chaplin himself in his autobiography thirteen years later.
His most recent biographer, John McCabe, throws up his hands in
despair at Chaplin's many contradictory remarks on the subject. To
Huff Chaplin was "an extremely complex personality ... enigmatic
about his birth, family background, childhood, and early youth." To
a degree, this remained true even after the wealth of Dickensian
detail which the actor finally put on record in his memoirs at the age
of seventy-five.
But there are many sources of marginality besides religion, in–
cluding gender, early psychic wounds, class, and social origins.
Whether or not Chaplin was a Jew, his book certainly showed that
he was a creature of the seamy underside of city life . Today it is hard
to separate the tramp character from Chaplin's own unforgettable
account of how drink, destitution, insanity, death, and the work–
house plagued his luckless parents during his early years, as this
vaudeville family clung to the tattered remnants of its former gentil–
ity. The tramp, after all, is a decayed gentleman holding on to the
appearance of respectability long after the substance, if he ever had
it, has vanished . In other terms, he is a character who-like the
music ha1' comedians among whom Chaplin grew up -literally
creates
him~df
before other people, in a world that's always a stage .
Such a fluidity of identity is characteristic of city life, where the
ascribed roles and family roots of rural society slide over towards
anonymity, and people can sometimes become whatever they ap–
pear to be.
This play of appearances, rich with social nuance, is one of the
keys to Chaplin's art and to his amazing modernity and timelessness,
which some critics no longer recognize behind his "old-fashioned"
technique . It's no accident that writers from Melville to Ralph
Ellison have settled on the con man and trickster as an archetypal
modern figure; Chaplin's tramp survives through many of the same
qualities of resourcefulness and self-adaptation. No one has ever ac–
cused Chaplin of being a modernist, in the sense of belonging to a
vanguard committed to aesthetic experimentation. Though film is
nothing if not a modern medium, Chaplin's own artistic credo is
rooted in vaudeville and pantomime, the clown tradition, and even
Victorian melodrama. "To me," he once said, "theatricalism means
dramatic embellishment ... the abrupt closing of a book; the lighting
of a cigarette; the effects offstage, a pistol shot, a cry, a fall , a crash;
