Chaplin and the Sandblaster: Edmund Wilson’s Avant-Garde Noise Abatement

“I have written a great super-ballet of New York,” announced Edmund Wilson in a letter of January 1924, referring to a project tentatively to be produced by the Ballets Suédois—and a project that was conceived, to a surprising degree, in terms of sonic spectacle. Wilson’s breathless description becomes nearly deafening at its climax, revealing that his ballet would be:

a pantomime explained by movie captions and with a section of movie film in the middle, for which [Leo] Ornstein is composing the music and in which we hope to get Chaplin to act. It is positively the most titanic thing of the kind ever projected and will make the productions of Milhaud and Cocteau sound like folk-song recitals. It is written for Chaplin, a Negro comedian, and seventeen other characters, full orchestra, movie machine, typewriters, radio, phonograph, riveter, electromagnet, alarm clocks, telephone bells, and jazz band. They may send me out to the coast in a few days to try to persuade Chaplin to take part in it. If it comes off—though it will probably start in America—they will later take it to Paris.¹

Anyone who has even so much as dabbled in the 1920s may feel a bit lightheaded upon reading this: Rarely does a text, much less a single epistolary paragraph, catalog so many of the familiar cultural preoccupations of an era so casually, so comprehensively. The aestheticized machine; urban experience as an object of artistic fascination; avant-garde border-crossing into popular culture and across artistic media; the transformation of sound through new technologies of production and reproduction; the mania for cinema and most especially for Chaplin; the vexed relationship between white sophisticates and African American culture; the struggle to define an American cultural identity against Europe and within modernity—scholarly bookshelves have buckled under less.

Cronkhite’s Clocks, as the ballet came to be called, has been overlooked in studies of the modernist arts, and the reasons are not difficult to find. Most obvious is the simple fact that the project never reached fruition. Of its potential layers—music, choreography, sets, costumes, film—all that seems to survive is the scenario conceived and scripted by Wilson in 1923–24, which he published a few years later in a volume of writings with a rather crestfallen title: Discordant Encounters.² But the project’s obscurity surely owes much as well to the identity, and the reputation, of its author. Wilson is known to posterity as a critic and journalist, not an artist, and certainly not a likely mastermind of raucous dance scenarios. Wilson’s role as critic in the American reception of literary modernism was significant; he contributed early appreciations of Eliot, Joyce, and Proust to Vanity Fair and the New Republic, and his book Axel’s Castle (1931) traced the field from the Symbolists through Dada. Yet he ultimately pursued his career with little deference either to modernist strictures or to avant-garde partisanship. Further, his interests are often assumed to have been narrow. If, as one cultural historian has claimed, Wilson was “lamentably ignorant of music, painting, ballet, architecture, and sculpture,” then he would seem to have had little authority to create a multimedia project such as Cronkhite’s Clocks.³ But this ballet scenario is a souvenir of a stint during the 1920s when Wilson did aspire to participate actively in the world of music and dance, and it originated most directly from a freelance job he took on in 1923 as press agent for the upcoming American tour of the Ballets Suédois.⁴ In the course of promoting this Swedish troupe—which had lately made its name in Paris as the up-to-date alternative to the Ballets Russes—Wilson saw a creative opportunity, and a “great super-ballet” was born.

In order to offer a thorough account of Cronkhite’s Clocks in the pages that follow, it will be necessary not only to describe this unfamiliar project in detail, but also both to narrate the story of its creation (and demise) and to probe the...