MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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last," he tells us, as if the poor woman had died while giving birth - to
him. Years later he landed his first part as an actor and, still barely
literate , needed his older brother to read it to him and help him
memorize it. Once, out of work, he went on the stage as "Sam Cohen,
the Jewish comedian," but found himself unable to master either the
jokes, the physical appearance, or the requisite accent; he fell in–
stead into an anti-Semitic caricature. His memoirs pass over this
problem of identification only to underline his trauma as a per–
former:
That ghastly experience taught me to see myself in a truer light.
1 realized 1 was not a vaudeville comedian, 1 had not that in–
timate, come-hither faculty with an audience; and 1 consoled
myself with being a character comedian.
Chaplin's failure to play the Jew, to achieve rapport with the au–
dience , turns him into a virtuoso impersonator of other characters .
But his failure to achieve this intimacy was also a failure with
language . Later in the book- a book he was very proud of writing–
the autodidact takes note of the insecurity at the root of his passion
for reading: "I wanted to know, not for the love of knowledge but as
a defense against the world's contempt for the ignorant."
The same social insecurity that turned Chaplin into a reader
became the unacknowledged basis of his comic gift. The Jewish
comedian must have been the last role he was unable to play, for he
turned himself into a performer who could mimic anyone and any–
thing. "He could probably pantomime Bryce's
The American Common–
wealth ,"
said James Agee, ".. . and make it paralyzingly funny into
the bargain." Confused about his own identity, he became everyone
and no one, and achieved a complicity with audiences that had eluded
him as an individual. The long-standing myths about his back–
ground and even his birthplace, the enigma of his religion - which
he often fed with misinformation - all belong to the domain of what
he suppressed as he reformed himself with every part, every gesture.
By 1940, with the world in flames, he was even able to play the
part of the Jewish barber, though not as well as he imitated the ab–
surd dictator, who happened to resemble the famous comic actor–
they were actually born within a week of each other. With this dual
role Chaplin expressed his own ambivalent identity. By telling us
that torturer and victim were really the same person - that "we have
all of us," as Wordsworth said, "one human heart"-Chaplin avoided
