Thus he set off for Chartwell and stayed there for almost three months – being treated like a member of the family, making friends with the dogs, the ducks and the swans, picking vegetables and frequently cooking for the whole party. He conducted long conversations with Mrs Churchill in particular who, if he might blow his own trumpet, placed the greatest trust in him. And he drank some of the whisky left by Sir Winston – not a pretentious single malt, just Johnnie Walker Red Label. They worked for up to ten hours a day. Knott, Mrs Soames, and that nice young man Martin Gilbert divided up the bundles between them, around twenty large crates altogether. Churchill hadn’t been a great believer in filing, and each of them was faced with a great variety of important and unimportant, personal and political, published and “secret” letters. In one of his crates, Knott writes, there were two letters that made his heart beat faster. Both were addressed to Mr Charles Chaplin.
I have quoted the first in full.
The second letter is “queer and troubling and ghastly” – to such a degree that William Knott decided to keep this document from his former master’s relatives. I think he meant Randolph above all; he feared that the dandy, who had always hated him and tried to humiliate him at every opportunity, had now become “a dangerous, unpredictable Robin Goodfellow” who would get up to some mischief with it, whatever that might mean.
This is William Knott’s description of what he found: a sheet of strong, white paper, six feet long and just as wide, made from two pieces stuck together. It was found tightly rolled inside a cardboard tube, open at the top and bottom, and is covered in words written in dark brown ink. The writing runs in a spiral, starting at the outside and working inwards. We may imagine that Churchill lay face-down on the paper and turned as he wrote. The writing becomes wobbly and erratic due to the uncomfortable writing position, which must have become more and more uncomfortable the closer the spiral of words came to the writer’s body. At the centre is a circular stain, around twelve inches in diameter. William Knott believes it is a sweat patch. Churchill was inclined to perspire. William Knott believes he was naked as he wrote. Evidently Churchill had recalled Chaplin’s method of battling the black dog – the method of the clown.
Before Churchill embarked on his spiral, he wrote a kind of preamble in the top left-hand corner of the sheet:
Dear Friend!
Charlie,
I cling to my childish beliefs: there is nothing that cannot be touched, and what cannot be touched does not exist. You can touch the skin of the dying man, you can feel it growing colder.
In the spiral, Churchill gives a succinct description of the evening with the Hanfstaengls in the Hotel Continental.
At one point that evening, he writes, he left the séparée to wash his face and get some fresh air. In the lavatories, he encountered a man. At first he only saw him from behind. The man was about to have a shave; he had pulled his suit jacket down off his shoulders, to his forearms, and was bending over the wash basin. His cheeks, mouth, chin and throat were covered in a thick layer of shaving foam. Churchill nodded at the man’s reflection in the mirror, and the greeting was returned. And just then, the man cut himself with the razor, between his ear and his temple. The cut was obviously deep; the shaving foam on his cheek turned red in seconds. What happened next, Churchill writes, was something he had previously lacked the courage to put into words. The man started to curse, in a foreign language “splintered with consonants”, brandishing his razor at his mirror image as he did so – and Churchill let himself be infected by it, just as he had with Mrs Everest when he was a little boy, and joined in the cursing. And because there was nobody in the room but the two of them, and neither understood the other’s language, meaning they could be neither astonished nor offended by each other’s curses, they soon gave up on real words and lapsed into a gibberish that all men on earth understood, as if they had been born before Babylon, and soon they also stopped looking in the mirror and into the reflection of each other’s eyes, or their own. They turned round, and each of them, wild-eyed, cursed straight at the world – until they had had enough, and Churchill turned and hurried out.
With that, Churchill’s spiral reached his belly; the rest, William Knott wrote to my father, is smudged and illegible.
29
But that is not the end of the story. At the age of eighty, Ernst Hanfstaengl wrote his memoirs (Zwischen Weißem und Braunen Haus. Memoiren eines politischen Außenseiters, Munich, 1970). His book also mentions the evening in the Hotel Continental in April 1932. He says how awkward the situation had been for him. He had tried several times to reach Hitler, as he writes:
I went to the hotel phone booths and called first the Brown House and then Hitler’s private apartment. Both times I was told the same thing: nobody could say where Hitler was to be found. A second later, I thought I was hallucinating: on the staircase before me I saw Hitler, still unshaven and wearing his threadbare trench-coat. I rushed towards him and hissed: ‘For God’s sake, Herr Hitler, what are you doing here? Churchill or his son could show up at any moment.’ Hitler replied that unshaven, and in this attire, he couldn’t and wouldn’t [meet them].
Hanfstaengl goes on to say that he advised Hitler to borrow a fresh shirt from the hotel, have a shave and come to the private dining room. The Churchills were nice people, they would forgive his lateness, and it could still be a pleasant evening. He was sure he didn’t need to remind Hitler how important this meeting was. But Hitler declined. And Hanfstaengl was left with no option but to convey this message – though admittedly without mentioning that he had seen Herr Hitler.
Of course, William Knott was familiar with Ernst Hanfstaengl’s book. My father had read it too. Both found it repellent, pretentious, megalomaniacal and sycophantic at once. And both were fascinated by the thought that the man in the lavatories might have been Adolf Hitler. If it was him, then Churchill didn’t recognise him. If he had recognised him, he would have been sure to mention it in his “clown letter” to Chaplin. In his memoir The Second World War he merely says – and his memory corroborates Hanfstaengl’s – that he and his family waited in vain. He summarises: “Thus Hitler lost his only chance of meeting me. Later on, when he was all-powerful, I was to receive several invitations from him. But by that time a lot had happened, and I excused myself.”
But that still isn’t the end of the story.
Elsewhere I have already mentioned Erica Southern and her Interview With the Tramp. I know the book is frowned upon, and not just by Chaplin scholars; and God knows there are reasons enough for that. It turns the artist into the subject of gossip and tittle-tattle – which probably wouldn’t have bothered Chaplin – but in so doing, it has him say things that are shockingly stupid and so clumsily phrased that a gullible reader might ask himself how this man could possibly have become what he became. The facts soon came to light: first, that Erica Southern was a pseudonym, and the author was one Lilian Bosshart; and second, that this woman had invented three quarters of Chaplin’s “answers”. Bosshart – and Chaplin would certainly have liked this – was a waitress at the Grand Hotel du Lac in Vevey, and occasionally looked after the table where the maestro dined with his family and guests. She had pricked up her ears and cobbled her “interview” together from what she had overheard.
Even with all these caveats, the book does give us a few interesting pieces of information. Winston Churchill is mentioned at one point. Chaplin recalls the English statesman telling him how he met a friend of Hitler’s in the early thirties, who claimed the Führer had confided in her that he had wanted to commit suicide at the age of six. Chaplin replied to his friend – and I quote: “Winston, I’m afraid we can’t choose the members of our club.”
When I read that, the pencil slipped from my hand. William Knott gives the same quote in his letter to my father! Though here, it’s Churchill who says it – word for word! Churchill told Chaplin that when he got back to the private dining room, he found Frau Hanfstaengl there alone. The children, sh
e told him, had gone into town, and her husband had offered to drive Clementine, Mary and Professor Lindemann to the Hotel Regina – he would come back afterwards. Frau Hanfstaengl, Churchill said, was quite drunk. She reeled off the story about saving Hitler’s life “by twisting the pistol from his hand with a jiu-jitsu grip and burying it in a barrel of flour” for a second time. And then she told him how that evening, she had rocked the weeping man in her arms and stroked his hair. As the gendarmes were hammering on the door, he said in a tremulous voice that he had wanted to take his own life at the age of six: day after day, his father had subjected him to savage beatings, and never missed an opportunity to ridicule him and show him up in front of other people. Churchill’s comment to William Knott: “I’m afraid we can’t choose the members of our club.”
I don’t know how this sentence reached Chaplin; but Erica Southern / Lilian Bosshart’s Interview proves that it did reach him. Maybe Churchill showed his friend the “clown letter” at one of their meetings after the war. But there was only one person to whom it could have been addressed: Charlie Chaplin. Only he could have known what kind of club it was.
After this, I watched The Great Dictator again, and at least two scenes appeared to me in a different light: one was the scene where the Jewish barber soaps and shaves a customer’s face to Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No.5; and the other was the encounter between the two dictators Adenoid Hynkel / Adolf Hitler and Benzino Napaloni / Benito Mussolini, which ends in a screaming match. They begin by looking at each other, but soon turn away, and finally each of them, wild-eyed, flings curses out into the world.
Incidentally, in Churchill’s position I too would have been adamant that Sarah recited Schiller’s “Bürgschaft” that evening. The ballad’s last couplet is just too fitting:
Grant my request and let it be
Your band of two, henceforth be three!
30
The method of the clown. The attributes “queer and troubling and ghastly” used by William Knott to describe the “clown letter” are misleading. In truth the spiral of writing on the roll is evidence of a cool pragmatism. Churchill and Chaplin were pragmatists – more precisely, they were pragmatists capable of excitement. Those who claim that such an expression is an oxymoron are pragmatists incapable of excitement. The method of the clown is neither queer nor troubling, and nor is it ghastly – at least, not if it works, which means if it helps to drive away or at least reduce depression. And as they say: if it works, do it. Churchill got the method from Chaplin; Chaplin had it from Buster Keaton; and he had it from Harold Lloyd (as we know from a remark in Sylvia Davis’s essay Laughter without laughter. What’s funny to Buster Keaton? Los Angeles 1976, published privately to mark the tenth anniversary of BK’s death; though the information is termed a “rumour” in: Marion Meade: Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase, a Biography. New York 1995). Lloyd is supposed to have seen a workman repainting the face of the clock on a dizzyingly high church tower. The man got into difficulties, and because no one could hear his cries, he wrote “Help!” between the hands with his brush. He was clinging to the hand as he wrote, which turned under his weight so that the letters formed a semi-circle. From below, his limbs looked like the hands of the clock. Harold Lloyd, who suffered from terrible panic attacks, was greatly cheered by the spectacle. From it, he developed the “method of the clown” – the term was his – and passed it on to friends who were fellow sufferers. The experience also fed into the most famous scene in his film Safety Last! in which he dangles from the hand of a clock high up on a building. Lloyd told his colleague Buster Keaton that a few experiments in which he lay on a sheet of paper, writing a letter to himself in a spiral, had cured him of his affliction; he also believed that the journeyman painter up on the clock tower had really been an angel. He was sure that was so, replied the staunch atheist Keaton, and he asked Lloyd to describe the “method” to him in detail.
The first written reference to the “method of the clown” appears in Theodor W. Adorno’s essay “A Framework for a Theory of the Comic”. It makes no reference to Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd or Chaplin, as we might expect, though it does mention the comedian W.C. Fields. As early as 1933, Adorno had marshalled some thoughts on the subject for a lecture he was due to give to a Social Democrat association at Cologne University. The Nazis banned the society, and the lecture never took place. Soon afterwards, Adorno emigrated to England and expanded his thoughts on the phenomenon of the comic in his little study in Oxford, as a side-line, so to speak, and without letting anyone in on his thoughts. He did eventually give a lecture on his preliminary conclusions, aboard the ship that took him and his wife from London to New York in February 1938. In this lecture, he used the expression “method of the clown” for the first time. He was describing a “potential approach to the fear of the world’s shamelessness.” However, he didn’t explain where he had got the term, meaning that the people present – all of them German emigrants – must have thought he’d invented it; that it had suggested itself, so to speak. Among the listeners was Reinhard Mangold, a nineteen-year-old “student” of Adorno’s. As a schoolboy, he had fled Frankfurt with his parents, and had attended Adorno’s “lectures” in Oxford; now he was travelling on to America. (I use inverted commas here because Adorno was admitted to Merton College as an “advanced student”. He had been a lecturer in Germany, but hadn’t received an official teaching permit in Oxford; he gave lectures all the same.) Reinhard Mangold would give himself a new name in the New World, and would be remembered as one of the most innovative and courageous film producers in the history of Hollywood. In 1965, not guessing that Adorno had lost the papers for his lecture, he told the story of his encounter with the philosopher and his ideas on comedy on a German television documentary about his life. He said he had been greatly inspired by these ideas, and recognised that their origins lay in the classic slapstick films, especially in the films of Charlie Chaplin. He proudly held his lecture notes up to the camera. Adorno happened to watch the documentary, and made contact with his former student via the production company. His student sent him his notes by return of post. The philosopher used them to reconstruct his old thoughts, and filled them out with new thoughts – though, remarkably, there were still no reflections on the art of Charlie Chaplin (about whom he had already written two essays, published in the collection Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica). From this, he built his “Framework for a Theory of the Comic”, at the centre of which is the method of the clown. He never managed to finish the essay, which means we still aren’t told how the term reached Adorno – if indeed he ever intended to enlighten us on the matter. I should like to give a brief summary here of what Adorno says on the method of the clown.
The comic – he explains – is “an un/kind offering to schadenfreude”. And schadenfreude is a form of cruelty. To laugh means to laugh at somebody, and as such it is a form of punishment, visited by a crowd upon an individual who has unconsciously transgressed their norms, to make him aware of his transgression. Here, Adorno is following the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s thoughts, as laid out in his work on laughter, Le rire. Essai sur la signification du comique, in the year 1900. One of Bergson’s theories may be summarised as: in order for the individual and the community to survive, the individual must keep to the generally observed mores. Serious transgressions will land him in court; minor ones are sanctioned in other ways – for example, being laughed at. If a man – unintentionally – slips on a banana skin, we punish him with our schadenfreude, because slipping on a banana skin can be dangerous: next time he should pay more attention! Adorno’s new thought is that comedy is a conscious, intentional offering to schadenfreude. He explains this with reference to the work of W.C. Fields.
Fields’s comedy is based on breaking taboos. When he says – his most famous bon mot – that anyone who hates small dogs and children can’t be all bad, we laugh because it is extremely reprehensible to hate small dogs and children, and we affirm our loathing of such people if �
� following Aristotle’s theory of catharsis – for the short duration of our laughter we pretend to be just that kind of swine who does hate them. And we laugh in the awareness that W.C. Fields thinks just as we do, and that his joke is intended to affirm the rightness of his opinion and our own. So Fields breaks a taboo, and thereby illustrates the necessity of the taboo – namely, that we mustn’t hate small dogs and children. But that isn’t what W.C. Fields’s comedy is about. His intention isn’t to tell a joke. He actually does hate small dogs and children. And when he says that Felix Hoffmann is a better Messiah than Jesus, because the latter turned water into wine, but the former turned poppies into heroin, which makes people far happier, that is not intended as a joke, either. W.C. Fields didn’t tell jokes. He never described himself as a comedian; he was a juggler, he said – which everyone took to be a joke. He seduces us into being just as wicked as he is. And even if we pretend not to notice, if we pretend that this fat man with his bad manners and his drug and alcohol problem is a plain old “good” taboo-breaker, who isn’t actually breaking any taboos – we know, we know very well that he isn’t funny, he’s evil. So why do we laugh? Bergson, Adorno and many others before them who wrestled with the problem of comedy unanimously agree that comedy lies in the height from which you fall. If the pope passes wind, it’s funnier than if Mr Smith lets one go. When Chaplin dines on his shoe, as if it were a delicacy from an upmarket Paris restaurant, it makes us laugh because it’s a shoe and nothing more, and a filthy one at that. And it makes us laugh when W.C. Fields confides in us – puny, ridiculous little philistines that we are – that he does something as wicked as hating small dogs and children. Or setting up concentration camps. We ourselves would never dare to do that! Adorno thinks that Fields succeeds in exposing a bourgeois hatred of everything pure and beautiful, a hatred buried deep within us, which leads to an inferiority that we feel at all times. We split ourselves in two, we see ourselves both dwarfish and monstrous – and find both of these funny. We find ourselves funny. And there you go: for a little while, the world can’t hurt us.
Two Gentlemen on the Beach Page 13