My Autobiography

To Oona

by David Robinson

C
HAPTER
One begins in forthright Victorian biographical style: ‘I was born on 16 April 1889, at eight O’clock at night, in East Lane, Walworth.’ When
My Autobiography
appeared in 1964, this was itself a revelation. The hundreds (quite literally) of books that had been devoted to Chaplin had vaguely placed his birth here, there and everywhere (even Fontainebleau), and no birth certificate exists to settle the question. But here for the first time we had Chaplin’s word for it, and into the bargain his credentials as a true South Londoner, since only a local would name East Street (its official name) as ‘East Lane’ – the style ‘lane’ being popularly applied to any metropolitan thoroughfare that boasts a market. And thereafter the revelations, particularly about the privations of his early life and the precocious discovery of his gifts as a performer, were prodigal. At seventy-five years old, Charles Chaplin finally told his own story, at length.

On its first appearance the book attracted enormous and worldwide attention (it has been translated into upwards of twenty-five languages) – as well as scepticism on various counts. It must, some said, have been written in collaboration with a ‘ghost’, because that is how Hollywood biographies are made. All the evidence, though, is that the book was a solo authorial effort. His family remembered how Chaplin would kiss his wife Oona goodbye and retire to his library for three concentrated sessions every day, just like going to the office. Chaplin himself complained to Ian Fleming that his secretary was forever trying to improve his English: ‘He said he was not surprised, as he had taught himself the language and suspected that his secretary knew it far better than he did but, even so, he liked his own version and hoped that some of what he had actually
written would survive the process of editing.’ Leonard Russell, anticipating serial publication of the book in the
Sunday Times
, was rebuked by the original publisher, Max Reinhardt of The Bodley Head, when he enquired discreetly if the author had a collaborator: ‘Mr Reinhardt looked shocked, offended even. Surely we couldn’t think that Chaplin, a man who wrote his own scripts, directed his own films, composed his own music, would seek outside help with his own memoirs: every word would be written by Chaplin – he would swear an affidavit on that.’

Reinhardt was right. Chaplin had a lifelong compulsion to do everything himself, even down to wanting to play every role in each of his films (his ideal was to find actors and actresses who would faithfully imitate and reproduce his own interpretation of their parts). In writing for films, he had developed his own routine. He would begin by dictating to a secretary or scribbling a draft, usually in pencil, in his own rapid script and often doubtful orthography. This would be neatly typed, with discreet corrections of the spelling, after which Chaplin would revise and correct and scribble and return it for a re-type. The process was repeated until he was satisfied. This seems to have been the method with
My Autobiography
. The style, in any case, is too distinctive and too consistent with earlier memoirs (
My Wonderful Visit
in 1922 and
A Comedian Sees the World
in 1933) to be anything but his own work. There are the appealing idiosyncracies of the self-educated writer. Chaplin had little formal schooling, and painstakingly and late acquired the skills of reading and writing. In the process he was fascinated by words and the desire to discover new ones. He described how he kept a dictionary beside him, and endeavoured to learn one new word every day. Thus at any point throughout his life he would be preoccupied with his most recent verbal finds: at the time of
My Autobiography
they included ‘ineffable’, ‘levitous’, ‘aposiopesis’, ‘esurient’, while he joyfully writes, ‘I was not frantically ebullient about his prognostications.’ Yet alongside this self-conscious verbalizing, he has a natural expressive gift that constantly results in striking, even poetic, phrases. A vibrant, expressionist recollection of the sights and scents of late Victorian Lambeth concludes, ‘From such trivia I believe my soul was born.’ The new Waterloo Bridge, ‘although beautiful… meant little to me now, only that its road led over to my boyhood’. Kennington
Park ‘still bloomed green with sadness’. Returning to the scenes of boyhood, ‘I had a feeling of uneasiness that perhaps those gentle streets of poverty still had the power to trap me in the quicksands of their hopelessness’.

A few critics of the time were sceptical of the childhood hardships Chaplin recounted, and sought to dismiss them as Dickensian fiction. Even recently one or two American revisionist biographers have resumed the attack on his veracity; but hard documentary evidence consistently confirms Chaplin’s account. The book was a prodigious feat of memory. He had no help from researchers. When he wrote, the studio archives, kept in his home in Vevey, constituted a vast, virtually inaccessible mass. From the early theatrical years, there was little besides one small scrap book. No doubt many memories were retrieved in conversation with his half-brother Sidney, who seems to have visited Switzerland a number of times during the six years that Chaplin was preparing his memoirs. The accuracy of his memory was to be amply attested twenty years after he wrote. In the 1980s a mass of documentary evidence re-emerged, from researches in the London civic archives and from two large trunks of early memorabilia that Chaplin’s brother Sidney had kept in store for many years, and which were rediscovered and given by Sidney’s widow to Oona Chaplin. Apart from providing odd dates and details that had eluded Chaplin, the new documentation contradicted nothing in his account.

Sometimes his few mistakes actually serve to vindicate Chaplin’s memory. Thus he remembers the ogre who meted out school punishments as ‘Captain Hindrum’; an old vaudeville friend of his mothers, fallen on evil times, as ‘Dashing Eva Lestocq’; and the kindly stage manager at the Prince of Wales Theatre, where Chaplin was a boy actor, as ‘Mr Postant’. Their names turn out in fact to have been Hindom, Dashing Eva Lester and William Postance. Chaplin, it appears, was indeed remembering, from sixty or seventy years before, names he had heard but perhaps never seen written down, rather than reclaiming them from
post facto
research.