Text retyped by David A. Gerstein
In his essay, Thomas Burke remarks how often he could tell Chaplin was reliving the past as he made his films: "When I saw The Kid and its implied attitude to orphanages," he observes, "I knew where that bit came from. And the incident in Shoulder Arms, when all but himself receive a parcel, and the instructions on table manners in The Kid, how to eat with the back of a knife -- I knew where that came from." Surely all this has basic truth, and although Burke does not go into the romantic incidents of sex in Chaplin's films, the same sort of parallel would hold with regard to the actual love odyssey of the comedian, on one hand, and the romances he invented for the screen, on the other. Here, however, the matter is, inevitably, more speculative, metaphorical. Just as Chaplin received so rich a pleasure in going back to the very dining room in which he had eaten in the London orphanage, thus recapturing (as he said) a "skin" he had once "shed," still with his "odor about it," so he must have drawn on his experiences for innumerable other little effects, and so achieved something of the revivification of lost times that Proust did. But Chaplin -- insofar as the objectivity of his screen art goes -- can by no means be compared with Proust as perfecter of self through art.
As we run the parallel lines of life and art in Chaplin's life, we have to bear in mind that he was not perpetually in a state of tranquillity, not in a quiescent condition of "total recall," but that life kept pace with his art; that, in the manner of the romantic, art and life were somehow ever confused; and far from conquering "reality" (as Proust conquered his environment and his intimate physical being, bending all their pain and narrowness to the liberating paean of his art), Chaplin remained one who perpetually escaped into art to achieve the perfection of gesture he saw in Japanese tragedy. The Little Tramp was definitely an underdog, and Chaplin could triumph over the Tramp's environment only symbolically, insofar as gradually, in the over-all view, his professional success enabled him entirely to control his own productions. He could do as he pleased on and off screen -- at least theoretically. There must be a material distinction, however, between Chaplin's artistic success and his professional success; the former's result did not always coincide with the triumph of the latter. This inequality in Chaplin's life is shown in a myriad of ways.
Text retyped by David A. Gerstein