Consider the plot of the first, still best, Huston-directed film, The Maltese Falcon, in which the motivation is contributed by a valuable bijou in the shape of a falcon, a treasure for which the principal participants betray each other and murder and die—only to discover the falcon not to be the jeweled and genuine item but a solid lead fake, a cheat. This happens to be the theme, the dénouement, of most of Huston’s films, of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in which the prospector’s hoard of killed-over gold is blown away by the wind, of The Asphalt Jungle, The Red Badge of Courage, Beat the Devil, and, of course, of Moby-Dick, that deadend statement on man’s defeat.
Indeed, Huston seems seldom to have been attracted to material that did not accept human destiny as an unhappy joke, a confidence ploy with no pea under any pod; even the scripts he wrote as a young man—by example, High Sierra and Juarez—confirm his predilection. Like much art, his art, and he can be an artist when he chooses, is in great degree the compensatory result of a flaw in the man: that emotional lacuna that causes him to see life as a cheat (because the cheater is cheated, too) is the irritant that births the pearl; and his payment has been to be, in human terms, himself something of a Maltese falcon.
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Shortly before Chaplin departed from America in 1952, a leave-taking of deplorable permanence, he asked Avedon to make his passport portrait, a chore Chaplin proceeded, in the midst of the sitting, to satirize, and the product of his clowning, a horned Pan-sprite mocking the spoilsport universe of governmental borders (in territory and thought), is surely the sort of picture the lovable tramp would have pasted inside his passport: a nice eyebugger for boresome officials. It does amuse to remember the fadeout road of Chaplin’s silent days, the empty dusty vista down which, at the end of every adventure, the little bum recedingly sashayed, knapsack aboard: remember, and realize now where the road was awinding: of all places, to Switzerland! and that sorry knapsack, why, it was full of greenbacks! bullion to buy a marbled king-of-the-mountain abode above a lake blue as bluebirds, a Happy Ending bower where the revamped tramp, surrounded by the dotings of a beautiful waif-bride and seven beautiful waif-children, moseys about sniffing his beloved flowers.
Which is as it should be (the person responsible for City Lights, The Gold Rush, Modern Times, creations final and perfect as a lion, as water, is perfectly final, deserves—on this earth here and now—bliss), and is almost, but isn’t: because, in recent years, Chaplin has permitted petulance to absorb him—he believes himself, perhaps rightly, to have been maltreated by America, its press, State Department, and so paces his villa garrulously fuming: which is his privilege, still it is regrettable, for it is wasteful: his last film, A King in New York, an irritable poking at things U.S.A., was entirely waste-motion—was, unless it served to drain the gall out of his craw.
Chaplin has had access to genius, and another advantage rarer than that: the benefit of being sole proprietor of his own shop—financier, producer, director, writer, star. One father to a baby is nature’s requirement; the necessity of collaborative seeding is the oddity-making curse of film-art, that blasted heath upon which few giants, and as few middling grown men, stride: those who do, all honor to them.
A GATHERING OF SWANS
From the journal of a Mr. Patrick Conway, aged seventeen, during the course of a visit to Bruges in the year 1800: “Sat on the stone wall and observed a gathering of swans, an aloof armada, coast around the curves of the canal and merge with the twilight, their feathers floating away over the water like the trailing hems of snowy ball-gowns. I was reminded of beautiful women; I thought of Mlle. de V., and experienced a cold exquisite spasm, a chill, as though I had heard a poem spoken, fine music rendered. A beautiful woman, beautifully elegant, impresses us as art does, changes the weather of our spirit; and that, is that a frivolous matter? I think not.”
The intercontinental covey of swans drifting across our pages boasts a pair of cygnets, fledglings of the prettiest promise who may one day lead the flock. However, as is generally conceded, a beautiful girl of twelve or twenty, while she may merit attention, does not deserve admiration. Reserve that laurel for decades hence when, if she has kept buoyant the weight of her gifts, been faithful to the vows a swan must, she will have earned an audience all-kneeling; for her achievement represents discipline, has required the patience of a hippopotamus, the objectivity of a physician combined with the involvement of an artist, one whose sole creation is her perishable self.
Moreover, the area of accomplishment must extend much beyond the external. Of first importance is voice, its timbre, how and what it pronounces; if stupid, a swan must seek to conceal it, not necessarily from men (a dash of dumbness seldom diminishes masculine respect, though it rarely, regardless of myth, enhances it); rather from clever women, those witch-eyed brilliants who are simultaneously the swan’s mortal enemy and most convinced adorer.
Of course the perfect Giselle, she of calmest purity, is herself a clever woman. The cleverest are easily told; and not by any discourse on politics or Proust, any smartly placed banderillas of wit; not, indeed, by the presence of any positive factor, but the absence of one: self-appreciation. The very nature of her attainment presupposes a certain personal absorption; nonetheless, if one can remark on her face or in her attitude an awareness of the impression she makes, it is as though, attending a banquet, one had the misfortune to glimpse the kitchen.
To pedal a realistic chord—and it must be sounded, if only out of justice to their cousins of coarser plumage—authentic swans are almost never women that nature and the world has deprived. God gave them good bones; some lesser personage, a father, a husband, blessed them with that best of beauty emollients, a splendid bank account. Being a great beauty, and remaining one, is, at the altitude flown here, expensive: a fairly accurate estimate on the annual upkeep could be made—but really, why spark a revolution? And if expenditure were all, a sizable population of sparrows would swiftly be swans.
It may be that the enduring swan glides upon waters of liquefied lucre; but that cannot account for the creature herself—her talent, like all talent, is composed of unpurchasable substances. For a swan is invariably the result of adherence to some aesthetic system of thought, a code transposed into a self-portrait; what we see is the imaginary portrait precisely projected.
This is why certain women, while not truly beautiful but triumphs over plainness, can occasionally provide the swan-illusion: their inner vision of themselves is so fixed, decorated with such clever outer artifice, that we surrender to their claim, even stand convinced of its genuineness: and it is genuine; in a way the manqué swan (our portfolio contains two excellent examples) is more beguiling than the natural (of which, among present company, the classic specimens are Mme. Agnelli, the European swan numero uno, and America’s superb unsurpassable Mrs. William S. Paley): after all, a creation wrought by human nature is of subtler human interest, of finer fascination, than one nature alone has evolved.
A final word: the advent of a swan into a room starts stirring in some persons a decided sense of discomfort. If one is to believe these swan “allergics,” their hostility does not derive from envy, but, so they suggest, from a shadow of “coldness” and “unreality” the swan casts. Yet isn’t it true that an impression of coldness, usually false, accompanies perfection? And might it not be that what the critics actually feel is fear? In the presence of the very beautiful, as in the presence of the immensely intelligent, terror contributes to our over-all reaction, and it is as much fright as appreciation which causes the stabbed-by-an-icicle chill that for a moment murders us when a swan swims into view.
PABLO PICASSO
In 1981 our world, granted it is still orbiting, will celebrate Picasso’s centenary. Of course, because he has that kind of luck, the great man will be on hand; and available, as usual, to all mediums of publicity: very likely on this occasion television will display him in the buff, as befits a god-creature quite beyond the laws of human decorum. Born in Malaga, a country of figs and stone and guitars, Picasso was a child-prodigy who stayed one: that is, remained a prodigy and something of a child, a man inhabited by a boy’s fooling-around impatience, hatred of system, fresh-eyed curiosity: “Pablo,” to quote his oldest friend, Jaime Sabartes, “is preeminently a sum of curiosities. He has more curiosity than a thousand million women.”
When Picasso was thirteen his father, an acrimonious Andalusian art-teacher who ground out greeting-card still lifes for the Barcelona bourgeoisie, gave over to his son his palette and brushes and never painted again; which was, in its way, Picasso’s first conquest—he went on to strew the century with painters overshadowed by him or altogether put
