Quote time

[selenak]

It was back to work for me, meaning the fabulous Feuchtwanger archive at the USC. There is a thrill about going through original manuscripts, letters etc. which is unique to libraries, and always in my mind connects to A.S. Byatt's novel Possession. Now of course I never made that kind of monumental discovery, but in addition to a lot of useful background material for my thesis written over a decade ago, I found, and am still finding, fragments of the past that might not have literate merit yet still tell us something about the people they hail from, and haven't turned up in any biographies. Take, for example, a letter written by Charlie Chaplin to Lion Feuchtwanger shortly after finding, on the middle of the ocean between the US and Britain, that his greencard had been revoked. To stake that Chaplin was bitter about this is putting it mildly. In interviews and in his memoirs, he was restrained, of course, and in time he and the US made up, but in a private letter to a friend and shortly after the event, you get an acid blast like this:

It is so wonderful to be away from that creepy cancer of hate where one speaks in whispers, and to abide in a political temperature where everything is normal contrasted to that torrid, dried-up, prune-souled desert of a country you live in. Even at its best, with its vast arid stretches, its bleached sun-kissed hills, its bleak sun-lit Pacific Ocean, its bleak acres of oil derricks and its bleak thriving prosperity, it makes me shudder to think I spent 40 years of my life in it.

On a less bitter note and more amusing note, you also get confirmation that Chaplin, for all his leftist views, was still a child of the Empire. Here he is, again to Lion Feuchtwanger, about having met Jawarahal Pandit Nehru (a genuine socialist, btw), the first Prime Minister of India:

I spent a couple of days with Nehru at the time when he was helping to negotiate the Korean truce. The day I visited him Rhee had let the war prisoners escape, and Nehru was terribly worried and shocked abut it all. Cablegrams were coming and going all the time I was there. I found him quite interesting; we talked a great deal about Lord Mountbatten and what a splendid job he did handing back India to the Indians – the mert of which I do not quite understand from the English point of view! He seemed quite a nice man but a little pompous, but then that may be the Indian manner.

....

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Some more pictures of selenak's Los Angeles adventures, as I visited the Getty Center yesterday:



The Getty.







It probably won't surprise you that it always makes me think of Charles Foster Kane and Xanadu. Even though the Roman Villa that the late Getty actually built, the old Getty Museum, is downright modest by comparison. At any event, the Getty is build with Roman marble (why the museum couldn't use American marble - or at least South American marble, if North America doesn't have same, I don't know, but again, Xanadu syndrom), contains, of course, a great collection of art - my favourite item this time was a Magdalene by Artemisia Gentileschi, who seems to change expressions depending on which angle you approach her from - and an absolutely stunning view over Los Angeles:






(For the Germans among you: Er stand auf seines Daches Zinnen/ und blickte mit vergnügten Sinnen/ auf das beherrschte Samos hin:/ "Dies alles ist mir untertänig/ So sprach er zu Ägypten's König/ Gestehe, das ich glücklich bin." )

The view in the direction to the Pacific Coast, over the garden, isn't half bad, either, and anything but bleak (pace recently banished Chaplin):

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Marvellous Chaplin quote, exactly why archives and correspondence are endless fun. (I always knew Chaplin's real temperament was about as far from the saccharine morality of his movies as can be.) I love reading letters and diaries, and wonder whether editing Feuchtwanger's correspondence and mailbag might not be worth your while?

So who's "Er" in the beautiful German quote? And which Egyptian king did he speak to? Even I can see this is lovely (and wistful.)

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Re: saccharine morality - Dickensian, wrote Feuchtwanger in one letter, and that's it, imo, because Chaplin throughout his life remained such a Victorian (and because that life took so long, it's easy to forget he really was a child of the Victorian age). And then he never claimed that his movie persona was himself (in his film scenarios, and also in his memoirs, he always writes "the tramp", never "me"), as opposed to many a film star. And his own background - crazy starving mother, orphanage, rags to riches - is the Victorian tale per se. (When the memoirs came out, people thought he might be exaggarating, until journalists did some research, and if anything, he was making the childhood period more harmless than it was.) Which as opposed to Victorian tales did not leave him even tempered but with a chip on his shoulder and, like Scarlet O'Hara, determined never to go hungry again. And yes, absolutely, much with the temper. The man ruled his film productions like an absolute monarch.

Feuchtwanger's correspondance is already partly published - the entire correspondance with Arnold Zweig, and the letters to and from the Brothers Mann, Brecht, Kantorowicz and the other literati, for example.

"Er" is Polycrates in "Der Ring des Polycrates", based on the Greek myth of the same name, ballad by Friedrich Schiller. Which Schiller wrote in the magical ballad year he was exchanging poems with Goethe on a weekly basis, practically. I think the Egyptian king he was talking to was an equally mythical one called Rhadamantis, not an actual historical one.

Since you liked the Chaplin, here is Oona, daughter of Eugene O'Neill, being a bit catty about the Brits in the coronation year:

“We went to London for ten days and I personally returned feeling rather bored with the English. Nothing much goes on in any cultural way – the theater is dull and the plays are bad, and really they don’t seem to even publish any books that one wants to read. And this being the Coronation year the whole atmosphere is quite insane. Charlie thinks that Princess Margaret is pretty which annoys me no end, but I remind myself that his English blood has to assert itself occasionally. In any case, London is till a beautiful and romantic city.”

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Very fair point about Chaplin being a Victorian.

And princess Margaret was stunningly beautiful at the time of the Coronation:

[selenak.livejournal.com]

No kidding. Clearly Chaplin was motivated by aesthetics rather than patriotism!