My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin (most read book in the world TXT) 📕

for me a little too shrill. Perhaps the shrillness was in Hart Crane himself. Yet he had a gentle sweetness.

We discussed the purpose of poetry. I said it was a love letter to the world. ‘A very small world,’ said Hart ruefully. He spoke of my work as being in the tradition of the Greek comedies. I told him that I had tried to read an English translation of Aristophanes but could never finish it.

Hart eventually was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, but it was too late. After years of poverty and neglect he had turned to drink and dissipation, and when returning to the States from Mexico in a passenger boat he jumped into the sea.

A few years before he committed suicide he sent me a book of his short poems called White Buildings, published by Boni and Liveright. On the fly-leaf he wrote: ‘To Charles Chaplin in memory of The Kid from Hart Crane. 20 January, ‘28’. One poem was titled Chaplinesque.

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step, and know

Recesses for it from the fury of the street,

A warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

That slowly chafes its puckered index towards us,

Facing the dull squint with what innocence

And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on?

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

And through all sound of gaiety and quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Dudley Field Malone gave an interesting party in the Village and invited Jan Boissevain, the Dutch industrialist, Max Eastman and others. One man, an interesting fellow introduced as ‘George’ (I never did know his real name), seemed highly nervous and excited. Later somebody said that he had been a great favourite with the King of Bulgaria, who had paid for his education at Sofia University. But George overthrew his royal patronage and became a Red, emigrated to the States and joined the I.W.W. and eventually was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. He had served two years of it and had won an appeal for a new trial and was now out on bail.

He was playing charades, and as I watched him Dudley Field Malone whispered: ‘He hasn’t a chance of winning his appeal.’

George, with a tablecloth wrapped around him, was imitating Sarah Bernhardt. We laughed, but underneath many were thinking, as I was thinking, that he must go back to the penitentiary for eighteen more years.

It was a strange hectic evening and as I was leaving George called after me: ‘What’s the hurry, Charlie? Why going home so early?’ I drew him aside. It was difficult to know what to say. ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I whispered. He waved his hand as if to sweep the thought aside, then gripped my hand and said emotionally: ‘Don’t worry about me, Charlie. I’ll be all right.’

*

I wanted to stay longer in New York, but I had work to do in California. First, I intended to hurry through my contract with First National, for I was anxious to get started with United Artists.

Returning to California was a let-down after the freedom, lightness and the intensely interesting time I had had in New York. The problem of completing four two-reel comedies for First National loomed up as an insuperable task. For several days I sat around the studio exercising the habit of thinking. Like playing the violin or the piano, thinking needs everyday practice and I had got out of the habit of it.

I had feasted too much on the kaleidoscopic life of New York and I could not get unwound. So with my English friend, Dr Cecil Reynolds, I decided to go to Catalina to do a little fishing.

If you were a fisherman, Catalina was a paradise. Avalon, its sleepy old village, had two small hotels. The fishing was good all the year round. If the tuna were running, there was not a boat to be hired. In the early morning, someone would shout: ‘They’re here!’ Tuna, weighing from thirty to three hundred pounds apiece, would be thrashing and splashing about as far as the eye could see. The sleepy hotel was a sudden hum of excitement; there was hardly time for dressing, and, if you were one of the lucky ones who had ordered a boat in advance, you stumbled into it, still buttoning up your pants.

On one of these occasions the Doctor and I caught eight tuna before lunch, each weighing over thirty pounds. But as suddenly as they appeared they would disappear, and we would go back to normal fishing again. Sometimes we fished for tuna with a kite which was attached to the line and held the bait, a flying fish, flapping on the surface of the water. This type of fishing was exciting, for you could see the tuna strike, making a whirl of foam around the bait, then run with it for a couple of hundred feet or more.

Swordfish caught around Catalina are from one hundred up to six hundred odd pounds. This type of fishing is more delicate. The line is free and the swordfish gently takes the bait, a small albacore or a flying fish, and swims off with it for about a hundred yards. Then he stops and you stop the boat and wait a full minute to give him time to swallow the bait, reeling in slowly until the line is taut. Then you sock him hard with two or three jerks and the fun commences. He makes a run of a hundred yards or more, the reel screaming, then stops; quickly. you reel in the slack