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PARTISAN REVIEW
is something alien to our classic discussions of modernism, which in–
variably emphasize its bleaker and more problematic side, as in Irving
Howe's insistence that "nihilism lies at the center of all that we mean
by modernist literature." Comedy is much less alien to modern art it–
self, from the savage humor of Dada and surrealism to the linguistic
dandyism of the early Wallace Stevens to the slightly Chaplinesque
Jewish hero of Joyce's
Ulysses,
to the grim existential humor of
Beckett, Ionesco and the Theater of the Absurd, to the playful wit of
Picasso, Satie, and Cocteau, to the gay effusiveness of Pop Art and
the New York poets of the fifties and sixties. Many of the modernists
were enthusiastic consumers of popular culture, which they pre–
ferred to the cant of the official culture of their day. They were
drawn to the unpretentious vitality of the music hall and the cinema
over the commercial slickness or suffocating seriousness of the theater
and the novel. The modernists loved art that looked naive and spon–
taneous, however much subtlety had gone into it, art which seemed
at one with its audience in a way that usually eluded them. The
silent comedy of Keaton and Chaplin was extravagantly admired by
the surrealists and early modernists for the way it effortlessly evaded
the constraints of the official realism while remaining close to or–
dinary life.
Like Shakespeare's plays and Dickens's novels, Chaplin's films
transcend our artificial distinctions between high culture and popular
culture. He was at once a consummate artist and probably the most
beloved and widely known performer who ever lived. As an obses–
sive perfectionist he was almost unbearable to work for; he usually
shot hundreds of feet of film for every foot he eventually used. Yet he
also prided himself on the universality of his visual language. His
films are as accessible to children as to greybeards; they meant as
much in the African bush, where his face was readily recognized, as
in cosmopolitan New York, where a theater in the 1920s showed his
work for ten years running. He was devoted to pantomime as the es–
sence of all acting, and he bitterly resented the coming of sound for
impaling the cinema on language barriers and talking heads .
Several of the most traumatic moments of his early years, as
described in his memoirs, are associated with sound and language.
His mother's career as a performer - and the family's fortunes–
disintegrated when her voice began to fail her on the stage . His own
career began prematurely, at the age of five, when he was led out to
replace her before ajeering audience in the middle of a performance.
"That night was my first appearance on the stage and my mother's
