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17 Hemingway and Chaplin Abraham Polonsky / 1953 From The Contemporary Reader 1.1 (March 1953): 23–31. In the lifetime of an artist after he has created a body of work, an instant arrives when the pressure to speak with his own voice, as if privately, becomes irresistible. All works of art whether they are called objective or subjective and no matter who pays for them, the artist, the patron, the publisher, or the state, express the artist’s point of view. This is one of the fascinating things about art as with the manufacture of munitions; even when you say I’m saying this because they make me or I’m manufacturing this because I have to, to eat, to survive, to get away with it, in the end there is something in you, some interest which is the same as the one you pretend to detest. So everything an artist does reflects his point of view or part of it and yet all these works are different from the one in which, with a passion for autobiography, he confesses to his irresponsibilities , his quirks, his fancies, his egotism, his irony about himself , and his commitment to historical destiny. The intimate work keeps repeating “in spite of my weakness” and “because of my strength” and between the confession and the boast, truth becomes personal and we no longer are bearing the abstract social opinions which everyone can share or condemn without ever living; we begin to hear those on which the artist has founded his life, changeable often, but nevertheless real. The artist’s need to speak out is always his whether he decides the occasion or a subpoena does it for him. Chaplin’s Limelight and Hemingway ’s Old Man and the Sea are psychological self-portraits and it is hard to tell when we are dealing with art and when with simple testimony. All cunning storytellers prefer to speak through invented characters even when the character is mostly their own. The artist feels more freedom that way. It is a way to get around the constant demand to be one thing at a particular moment, as if everything were being put to a vote 18 abraham polonsky: inter views and the decision were going to be final (as in Zeno’s old jokes). Fiction makes it unnecessary to eliminate real contradictions which the artist finds in life, in the heart of his conscience, and perhaps just in his ignorance . He can always claim it was Calvero or Santiago who said it, who felt it, who did it, and it is up to us to point out when it is Chaplin or Hemingway speaking directly for themselves as they have lived and wish to be remembered. I know also that the artist likes to be found out, the reader likes to find him out, and this is the way they influence each other in private. Limelight and The Old Man and the Sea are just about the same story, the tale of an old man once supreme in his field whom time has weakened and circumstance faced with a test of strength and philosophy. Both heroes affirm and do not alter their vision of life. Chaplin is involved with a girl and Hemingway is involved with a fish. Limelight deals fundamentally with the conflict between Chaplin and his American public. This public includes almost everyone who can hear and see: the mass audience which resists the transformation of the magical tramp into a realistic satirist and lyric poet; the avant-garde, nowadays the rear-guard, who are embarrassed by his simple ideas of human perfectibility; the special organizations of Catholics and veterans who picket his politics; and the governmental bureaucracy always one jump ahead of the grand jury but still with the power to keep a Chaplin in involuntary exile. The scene of the film is the London theatrical world early in the century and the hero of the tale is the aging clown, Calvero. Until he appears it is hard to tell whether this is going to be Chaplin in the world of fantasy or in the real world. His beginnings are always deceptive and the test is never the laughter but the nature of physical pain. Even in M. Verdoux where Chaplin experimented with the transition between two worlds, the old roué fell out of the window without worrying too much about gravitation and human engineering. In fantasy everything is a symbol even when it is...

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