MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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world but socially he was destined to feel homeless. He remained an
English subject, but after the fluidity of identity he achieved in
America, England became impossible for him. After his first tour of
the States with the Karno company, his homeland made him moody
and depressed: "I loved England, but it was impossible for me to live
there; because of my background I had a disquieting feeling of sink–
ing back into a depressing commonplaceness." Not long afterward,
when he began to make fllms in America, he made a two-reel comedy
full of touches of pathos called
The Immigrant,
which, 57 years later in
My Life in Pictures,
he could still describe as the closest to him of any
he had ever made.
This fllm, as Isabel Quigley says,
was simply highlighting the 'outcast' aspect of Charlie's nature.
The tramp is an eternal outsider to ordinary society, the im–
migrant an outsider compared with the native, and Chaplin
himself was not merely an immigrant in America-how pre–
cariously poised there, later events were to show- but an im–
migrant in the entire society to which, with success, he had sud–
denly climbed. For a climber, however much welcomed, never
belongs ...
The events of the 40's and 50's, along with his own contentious
character, conspired to rekindle Chaplin's feelings of rejection. He
concluded his career with several bittersweet fllms, one of which,
Monsieur Verdoux,
was a masterpiece. That Chaplin never really
foun"d a home, that he continued to hold family and fortune together
by his wits, was painful for his life but vital for his art. By the time of
Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight,
and
A King in New York,
when he is losing
his public and losing his country, with the tramp completely behind
him, he turns rejection into a new marginality and a different kind of
strength.
