Two Gentlemen on the Beach

by Köhlmeier, Michael; Martin, Ruth;

  “Wouldn’t it be fun to play God – to raze the wonderful city of Cologne to the ground, but leave the cathedral standing? The Germans would believe it was the hand of their God. But it would be us.”

  Hitler and his Germans didn’t know, or didn’t want to know: in the end, their cities would look like abstract paintings. The war was just accelerating the process. Someday everything would look like an abstract painting.

  “Mr Knott, it takes a good deal of courage to paint a faithful figurative picture! Abstraction is mere cowardice, it is the artist falling to his knees before transience, it is the recognition of the senselessness in the eternal flow of cause and effect. We must not fall in with the dispirited! Spirit is something only we possess. There is nobody else in the universe who can imagine the unimaginable. But enough said, Mr Knott, enough seen, enough heard! Let’s pack up! Let’s go!”

  Down in the office they looked at the picture together. By then, it was three o’clock in the morning.

  “What do you say, William?” the boss asked him. “What shall I call it? Think about it! Please!”

  But he didn’t know what to say.

  That was the end of November.

  On the evening of 12 December – it was a date Mr Knott would always remember – there was a scratch at the door. The black dog was there.

  William Knott knew what to do.

  When he had finally grasped what his task involved – “when a person says to you, look after me, make sure I don’t put a bullet in my head, then you hear his words, but you are not immediately clear about the consequences” – he got in touch with a “psychologist”. He had to qualify this: not a psychologist in the sense that he had a licence, but not some windbag who would talk a problem into your head and the money out of your pocket. He was a friend of a friend, a man who had patched up many a marriage, alleviated many people’s depression, steered many away from the bottle and many back to the Lord. He went to this man – “you Germans might call him a saint” – and told him a sob story about his father contemplating suicide. He asked the man what he should do when the situation became acute. He replied: “Go for a walk. Walk, walk and keep on walking. Walk until he’s exhausted.”

  It was an unusually cold December. That was an advantage. With his own money, William Knott bought a cheap but well-padded long coat, a style that thousands of people wore; a cheap, well-padded hat with long ear flaps; and a scarf and gloves. Not even Mrs Churchill would have recognised the prime minister in this disguise. And luckily she was in Chartwell, tending to Sarah and the greenhouse. William Knott had spent the night at the flat on Storey’s Gate, on the mattress outside the open door to Churchill’s bedroom.

  Churchill was mutely compliant. He sat on his bed and stared at the wall opposite. William Knott switched on the reading lamp. The curtains remained closed. He dressed his boss, saying everything he was doing out loud as he did it – just as the “psychologist” had recommended. It made the patient conscious of reality, and also had a comic effect. He pulled the hat down over Churchill’s forehead, wound the scarf around his neck so that only his nose and eyes were visible, helped him into the coat, tugged on the gloves and led him by the arm to the door and out into the street. To the right, there was nobody to be seen; to the left, there was nobody to be seen. The chauffeur was waiting in the car two streets away. He wasn’t Churchill’s chauffeur, or some other official driver, he was a friend of a friend, whom William Knott had booked in a hurry, spinning him some yarn or other. He pushed his swaddled boss into the back seat, jammed himself in beside him, and they set off. The sun was not yet up.

  They drove out of the city and on up the Thames, until they had left the last houses behind them. Then they pulled over and breakfasted at the roadside. William Knott had brought ham and cheese sandwiches, apples and a thermos of tea. The chauffeur turned and watched them – no, he didn’t want any, he’d eaten. Churchill had not yet said a single word. William Knott pulled the scarf down under his chin, and handed him a sandwich and a tin cup of steaming tea. He ate and drank in silence. He didn’t want to smoke. He shook his head. The secretary hadn’t brought any alcohol.

  They carried on heading west to the marshy banks of the Thames. William Knott loved this area; his grandfather had lived there, raising horses and repairing saddles. For a second he thought he would like to be a horse. It seemed a good idea to pretend he and his boss were horses, two wild, free horses. He told the chauffeur to wait for them at the same place in four hours’ time.

  They walked in silence. Churchill kept shaking his head, but he said nothing. The path ran between horse fences. Behind a row of poplars, they could see stables and half-timbered houses. Smoke was rising. A dozen stallions were standing in a trampled clearing, still as statues. Sunbeams, coming through the clouds, fell on their heads. There were a few grey horses, a palomino, some bays with black tails and manes and gracefully curved swan necks.

  A motorbike with a sidecar approached them, a man and a woman, both bundled up in thick coats up to their noses, leather caps on their heads, sunglasses masking their eyes. The man eased off the throttle and asked in a wool-muffled voice if he could help them – were they looking for someone? William Knott laughed in a familiar manner, as if he knew the man and the woman, and said he was just taking a pre-Christmas walk with his father, who had grown up here and wanted to ease his homesickness a little – he had arrived from Chicago just a few days ago. As the two of them walked on, Churchill said: “Very good. I could be your father, couldn’t I?” He didn’t laugh at the tall tale. The “psychologist” had been very insistent that the easiest way to make a depressed person laugh was to tell a third party an audacious lie in his presence. Yes, he had been very insistent. “You have to play the scoundrel a little,” he’d said. “Steal a piece of cake when you’re with him, lie to a policeman, stick your tongue out at a child behind its mother’s back, pretend to be a limping Frenchman or a stutterer. Making the depressed person into your accomplice will gladden his heart. Don’t ask me why that should be so. It just is.”

  William Knott quickened his pace, gradually, so that his boss didn’t notice. This was another thing the “psychologist” had advised him to do. He was aiming for total exhaustion; just making him tired wouldn’t do. “If a person is forced to think about his bones and muscles, he doesn’t think about his soul.” In general, the “psychologist” thought the soul didn’t exist (which is why William Knott also placed him in inverted commas in his letter).

  At one point Churchill asked if he’d told the office where they were – England seemed to be surviving without them. He’d spoken to Paul Ackroyd, one of the secretaries of state from the Defence Ministry, replied William Knott. He’d told him the prime minister was taking a day’s holiday in the Bahamas. The prime minister had decided to go on the spur of the moment. There was no need to give a reason – everyone in the office thought the prime minister was in urgent need of at least one day’s holiday. The boss didn’t laugh at the Bahamas story, either.

  When they had been walking for two hours, Churchill said: “This was a good idea of yours. Thank you, William. I’m doing better now. Don’t you think?”

  On the night of 15 December, William Knott didn’t sleep on the floor outside Churchill’s door, but on the floor beside Churchill’s bed. If the boss wanted to get up, he would have to tread on him. That was the idea. But when he woke up, the boss wasn’t in his bed. Nor had he trodden on him. He had tiptoed out of the room. William Knot pulled on his boots and coat, ran up the stairs and climbed the metal ladder to the roof. The boss was standing at the parapet. Barefoot. Bareheaded. In his pyjamas. The air raids had eased off since mid-November. Maybe the Germans were preparing to try a new tactic, having failed to break the courage of the Londoners; or maybe they’d lost interest in Great Britain. When it became known that Hitler had made a pact with Stalin, Churchill had marched along the corridors, gesticulating and grinning. This was the first step towards Germany declaring war on Ru
ssia, he prophesied. Either Stalin really was the sly fox he believed him to be, and from now on he would work like the devil to prepare his country for war, or he was just as stupid as the rest of the world, and Russia would soon be overrun by the German Wehrmacht. Churchill took the reduction in German planes over England as a sign that an attack on Russia was imminent – he had announced it to his astonished ministers just a few days previously (before the dog had scratched at the door). The night was not as cold as the nights had been of late, and it was clear and quiet. No fire, no sirens, no cannons, no detonations. A dark city, yes, but a peaceful one.

  Without turning to his very private private secretary, he said: “It’s not your fault, William. Nobody will say it’s your fault. Don’t worry, I’m not going to jump. I’m still clear-headed enough to make a decision. I’ll step down. Dr Moran will give the press a suitable explanation. I just came up here to see what it would be like.”

  “What what would be like?” he asked.

  “What it would be like if a short, fat man like me were to hit the asphalt on Tothill Street a few days before Christmas. It would be difficult to construct an assassination out of it. Although anything can be constructed. Have I told you that my friend Charlie Chaplin and I are both keen collectors of suicide methods? We think of a method, and at the same time we think of how it would be to use it on ourselves. It can be cheering…”

  At that, Knott interrupted his boss and cried out: “Charlie Chaplin is in town! Didn’t you know? It was in the paper! He’s premiering his new film in three days. It’s the funniest film he’s ever made. A film about Hitler. People will die laughing!”

  The premiere of The Great Dictator was to take place in four cinemas at once: the Prince of Wales, the Gaumont Haymarket, the Marble Arch and the London Pavilion. William Knott drove from one cinema to the next. Owen Peters at the Haymarket finally knew – or at least, he was the only one prepared to tell in return for money – where Chaplin was: at the Haydon Studios in Hammersmith, where he had rented a cutting room for five days. They said he was even sleeping there.

  44

  When I was still a schoolteacher, because I couldn’t live off clowning alone, I wrote sketches for two people, and performed them with a female colleague. I was Pierrot, she was Auguste, with a red nose and oversized checked dungarees. Things were going well. Our weekends were booked up. We were well-matched. I wrote the less funny part of the white-painted know-it-all for myself, and for her I wrote the part of the cunning, intentionally clumsy, sometimes cruel anarchist. She got married, and then things stopped going well. She had a baby, and then things stopped going altogether. For a while I performed solo. But it didn’t suit me. In the late eighties, I saw the Australian puppeteer Neville Tranter and his play Underdog at a theatre festival in Stuttgart, and I was smitten. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to try partnering a puppet. I had found my calling. And it was so obvious. A man from the other side of the world made me think about my own story.

  My mother died when I was five – I only have vague memories of her. My father never got over his loss. He didn’t marry again. To console himself and to give me some sense of a family, in the evenings before bed he would act out “The Parents’ Conversation about Their Son”. That was his impersonal way of putting it. He would hug a pillow, that was my mother, and speak first as himself and then as her. Without changing his voice. There was nothing parodic about it. Sometimes the conversations were funny, sometimes serious; and if they were funny, they weren’t meant to be. He would tell my mother what had happened that day, and she would comment on it. He’d ask her advice, and she would give it. Sometimes they disagreed; sometimes they argued, and then he would take offence and stop talking and leave the talking to her until they made up again. He acted it so believably that during the scene it didn’t once occur to me that all this wasn’t real. When he took offence, he was offended, and I would beg him to make up with Mum, or I wouldn’t be able to sleep. My father was a great comedian, a great involuntary comedian.

  I built and tried out various puppets, all modelled on Neville Tranter’s: life-sized with a mouth you could open and close. I made an Auguste, a Harlequin, a Kasper, the egg-headed white clown, and a Buster Keaton. I improvised conversations with them. I couldn’t strike the right tone.

  Then my father died, and in his papers I found his extensive correspondence with William Knott. I read about Churchill’s friendship with Charlie Chaplin. I read that the two of them had formed an alliance against their common enemy, depression. I read how a desperate William Knott had taken Great Britain’s supreme commander, incognito, by taxi to the Haydon Studios in Hammersmith, to meet the friend who could help him. I read that they found Chaplin in a heap of cut celluloid, from which the top half of his slender body was protruding – a man who was no less in need of his friend’s help than his friend was of his. This was a circumstance neither of them had foreseen: the black dog visiting them both at the same time.

  Afraid of the Hearst press, which had more influence on the West Coast than it did on the Eastern seaboard, Chaplin had decided to hold the world premiere of The Great Dictator in New York, at the Capitol and Astor theatres. The papers owned by William Randolph Hearst didn’t give much thought to the film’s aesthetic aspect – they saw it as a disgusting piece of warmongering, commissioned by the Churchill-Roosevelt clique. The East Coast newspapers, by contrast, barely touched on the film’s all-too-obvious political dimension, though they were not convinced of its artistic merit. The New York Times said that this was perhaps the most significant film ever produced, but the critic was referring to its political impact and the audacity of the enterprise. Otherwise he thought the dialogue feeble – “and no wonder, for Chaplin’s first pure talking picture” – the music calamitous, and the “persistent lapses in style” made the film seem muddled. Another reviewer spoke of the picture as a grandiose flop. A third said charitably that it wasn’t all that bad, but it could have been better. The final monologue, when the Jewish barber, who has been mistaken for the dictator, makes a radio broadcast calling for peace, tolerance, freedom and hope, was too kitschy for everyone. There was talk of embarrassment, of a monumentally tasteless ending, of the betrayal of an artistic ethos. One critic wrote that the speech had ruined not just the film, but Chaplin’s whole career. Klaus Mann blustered that “It has no style, no continuity, no convincing power. […] It is a ludicrous farce, adorned with turgid editorials. Mr Chaplin’s concluding harangue is almost unbearably trite.”

  Chaplin gave no interviews after the New York premiere. Later, he told Josef Melzer he had felt as though his veins were running with iced water. As though the whole world was laughing him to death. As though he had committed a crime. At first he wanted to cancel the London premiere, but Syd made it clear to him that the financial penalties for that would blow their budget. Then he telegraphed London to rent a studio there, and travelled to England earlier than planned – with the neat, velvet-lined box that Raphael Brooks had given him in his suitcase. In five days, he wanted to completely recut the film. If he worked day and night, he told himself, it could be done. One day before the screening, he realised it couldn’t be done. He had cut the copy to pieces. If they had to show the American cut, he didn’t want to go out in front of the London audience. He never wanted to go out in front of an audience again.

  Before Churchill and William Knott entered the cutting room, Chaplin had just listened to the barber’s speech, for the hundredth time.

  Hannah, can you hear me? Wherever you are, look up, Hannah. The clouds are lifting. The sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness into the light. We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed and brutality. Look up, Hannah. The soul of man has been given wings, and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow – into the light of hope […]. Look up, Hannah. Look up.

  Churchill came up behind him, laid a hand on his shoulder and said: “It’s me
, Winston.” And he said again: “It’s me, Winston.”

  Chaplin turned round, stood up, and told William Knott he wanted to be alone with his friend. He asked him to wait. To take a seat in his armchair. He took Churchill’s hand and led him into the darkroom. The door clicked shut behind them.

  And he – he waited, writes William Knott.

  I was aware of my father’s friendship with William Knott, though not of what the latter’s work for Churchill had entailed. Nor had my father ever spoken to me about the extent of their correspondence. And now, as I read the letters – Knott’s widow was good enough to send me my father’s replies as well – I knew at once that I had to have a very, very long conversation with my father. Yes: now, after his death. Just as he had had a very, very long conversation with my mother after her death. I built a puppet, gave it his features, his hair, his throat, his hands. The only prop on the stage would be a large table, at which my father and I would sit. It would look like I had put my arm around him. In this way I could control the puppet. I wrote the dialogue, asked my former colleague to assist me as co-director and coach. She read the text. Was I sure about this, she asked me. Yes, I said. Why? She said she’d thought the text was going to be a classic clown entrée, only longer. I said: isn’t it? My father and I talked about depression; I was the white clown and he was the Auguste. We didn’t tell a single joke, we didn’t twist a single sentence into a piece of word-play, we didn’t say a single risqué word. We left long pauses, heart-rendingly long pauses. But the audience laughed. They laughed so hard that the premiere was twenty minutes longer than the dress rehearsal. The white clown and the Auguste talked about various methods of committing suicide, and various methods of avoiding suicide. And they talked about the method of the clown. The white clown told the old Indian creation myth about a god who invents the world out of boredom, by lying on his belly and turning in a circle, scratching a spiral of images and signs into the stone, starting with the division of light and darkness, water and land, and going on to the creation of animals and men out of slime, on to first love, first hatred, the first murder, the first act of forgiveness, the first memory, the first piece of music, the first recognition of a connection. Everything that happens. The story says the world will end when he gets to his belly, and can’t go on drawing. The Auguste told the story of the friendship between the great statesman and the great actor; how the two men fought the black dog together, and fought Hitler together, one with laughter, the other with war. The white clown threw in the story about Theodor W. Adorno and his missing essay “Framework for a Theory of the Comic”, and said that in his hour of bitterest despond in American exile, the philosopher lay on his belly and wrote a letter to himself. The Auguste spoke of God, in whom he believed, and said that God sometimes allowed himself to be deceived, by white clown puppeteers for example, and that He wasn’t angry with them, even if they didn’t believe in Him. The white clown called the Auguste a stupid Auguste, and the Auguste fell silent for a long time and stared out into the blackness. “Please, talk to me,” the white clown said to the Auguste. “Talk to me, or I won’t be able to sleep tonight!” Then the Auguste kissed him and told him the story about how the greatest of all comedians had taught him how to hold his cane in the wrong hand, and how he, the most skilful of the unskilled, tutored a short, fat, rather older man with a loud snuffle, wearing a black suit with a heavy watch chain attached to his waistcoat, teaching him how to be unskilled, as snow fell outside the windows and the boys and girls headed off with their toboggans to the hill outside our town – a town that was big enough for Professor Lindemann’s planes, but remained intact throughout the war. There is only one way to measure comedy: laughter. The white clown, whose hand allowed the Auguste to move, heard it in the auditorium. He couldn’t see anything: the spotlights were pointing at him.