Because you cannot be a smart clown.

—Slava Polunin [1]





Charlie Chaplin was highly influential for Hart Crane, especially his silent film The Kid (1921), in which a tramp (Chaplin) adopts a child abandoned due to poverty. Crane wrote “Chaplinesque” in ekphrastic response to the film, which in the poet's own description is “a sympathetic attempt to put [into] words some of the Chaplin pantomime, so beautiful, and so full of eloquence, and so modern.” [2] I agree with Crane's assessment, but at the same time “Chaplinesque” has moments so awkward, so confusing, and so failed in terms of the broken images which traipse line-to line. I do not use any of these terms in a pejorative fashion, for such is the nature of clown poetics: a skilled sloppiness that values intuition over rationale or order.

The first two strophes frame the poem in the tender but impecunious existence of the tramp:

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step, and know

Recesses for it from the fury of the street

Or warm torn elbow coverts. (line 1-8)

The poem begins with the collective pronoun “we,” yet the “meek adjustments” which follow do well to distance us from any sense of royalty. As contemporary clown Alex Tatarsky emphasizes, there must be a “lowness inside [the clown], a being-of-the-earthness, a falling-to the groundness.” [3] We are immediately rooted, then, in a collective largeness which drives the poem, occurring with its linguistic comrades “our” and “us” eight times throughout the poem's 23 lines. I'm reminded of a favorite moment from a traditional clown act, when a group of clowns are told by the ringmaster they are not allowed to perform their opera. After much squabbling back and forth, the ringmaster has had enough and kicks one of the clowns in the butt: [As one the clowns react as though all were kicked.] [4]

And as the poem unfolds its suggestion of the communal, we likewise are reminded the clown's admirable abilities of sidestepped pirouettes—and even evading death—are (as yet) our own talents as well. The sonically slanty "make" and "meek"—an eyebrow down there, an eyebrow up there, a twitch in-between— mimick Chaplin's performance style. Similarly the word-playful fourth line not only mocks the violence of war but to my mind, its sonics make a face at it. Entertain me with some physical theater workshop right quick—try saying the line out loud: “Or warm torn elbow coverts.” Does one not have to distort their face toward quirks of the grotesque given the assonance of o’s, grimace the mouth around the consonance of r’s? And so the poem suddenly has a face, and it's not hard to imagine from there the tweak of a dirty derby hat in a broken mirror as the erratic meter stops and starts on its whims, and the rhyme scheme further tangles itself in the sound of its own voice. Crane, queer poet par excellence, also delivers a stealth campy beauty, a mixture of baggy pants-ed iambic-ish-ness with eloquently stumbling slant rhymes that “slither” into nearly every line ending's pocket trollop with Chapin's own bowlegged awkwardness, from the first strophe's “adjustments” / “ consolations” / “pockets” to the half-rhymes which link the remaining four strophes together, despite each being end-stopped (coverts//smirk; surprise//lies; on//seen). Silent film requires the visual element that pulls us through its narrative from one scene to the next; in Crane's pictorial translation, the loud sonics of the stanzas’ last and first lines yank us into the next room:

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,

Facing the dull squint with what innocence

And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

And through all sound of gaiety and quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness. (lines 9-23)

Let us examine the theatrical properties of these three rooms, which are hardly as clear as some of The Kid's visual contradictions, such as a carjacker holding a bundled orphan baby in one hand and a long-barreled revolved in the other, the baby staring into space after being abandoned next to an ashcan in a grimy alley, or later sipping milk from the nipple of a beer stein. Crane manages to abstract what on the surface should be concrete nouns, such as a pocket, a thumb, or an ash can. Instead their materiality is ruptured through both strange supporting diction and a syntax of a kind of broken simplicity reminiscent of title cards in silent cinema (one title card from The Kid reads “All's well... Job Number 13; another simply ‘Awkward Ass.’)” [5] A tramp's impecunious pocket becomes a place for the wind to “deposit”; an “empty ash can” is transformed in the light of the moon into “a grail of laughter.” Multisyllabic words like “inevitable,” “collapses,” and “pirouettes” feel especially like an abstract tap-dance. The dense syllables of a word like “obsequies” has an effect making even grey a kind of glitter, similar to the moonlit ash of which our maximalist grail overfloweth by the poem's end.

That shaping of the container of life’s detritus—the ash can—into laughter as an ultimate ideal—a grail—registers that largely mysterious human reaction on Henri Bergson’s treatise on the subject and that laughter must always be related in terms of the social, that “our laughter is always the laughter of a group,” pointing us back to Crane’s collective “we,” both audience and actors. [6] We laugh as a reaction to an overload of incongruous information—“what surprise!” [7] In other words, what surprise! This overload is adjacent to what clown semiotician Paul Bouissac describes in terms of gags: we as spectators to the poem “have no other choice than to anticipate the most expectable conclusion of the premise the clown throws at [us], which he will disprove in a split second, thus assaulting [our] cognitive balance with pure information. [8]

If this seems like a lot to juggle, it’s nothing compared to the poem’s central imagistic knot of its third stanza. In lines 9-14 we certainly are assaulted with information, a sidestepping of an image, quite difficult to picture this in the mind's eye, not unlike a death alluded to in the "final smirk" itself. If Marshall McLuhan considered cartoons “cool media” because they didn't give enough information and required “filling in” on the part of the audience, we have an ice-cold stanza here. Rather than concoct some haphazard answer to the mystery on display here, I'd rather fail "fine collapse"-style and trip over my negative capabilities. More than anything else, this half-image of a possible creator's thumb coming from out of nowhere to snub us out of the picture puts me in mind of the 1953 Daffy Duck cartoon, “Duck Amuck,” in which Daffy's animator torments him through the fourth wall, often swooping into frame with their giant pencil eraser.

Though here we are told the thumb chafes but not what it chafes against—perhaps the page itself due to one connotation of "index," but wait—weren't we talking about a thumb? And if it is us “facing the dull squint” (whose lesser known definition is a clownish “cross-eyed,” by the way) has this thumb somehow grown eyes—and if “puckered”… lips as well??—or do we somehow face ourselves in this aha! turned huh?? moment?

Let’s take a cutaway scene which takes us to the origin of Chaplin’s tramp character back in 1914. Working for the film series Keystone Kops—notably a silent film series featuring comedians playing incompetent policemen—Chaplin was asked last-minute to put on comedic makeup, but couldn't settle on his wardrobe for the upcoming shoot: “[o]n the way to the wardrobe, I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane, and a derby hat. I wanted everything a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large... [T]he moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was.” [9] The mysterious anti-imagism of the poem's central strophe thus “slithers” into the pocket of Jack Halberstam's “low theory,” knowledge derived from oddball modalities “[transmitted] through detours, twists, and turns... and confusion... that seeks not to explain but to involve.” [10] Each of Crane and Chaplin’s choices envelop and involve us in the performance of character and language.

The tramp is down-and-out of industry and its labor-intensive roles, a character that transgressively eschews such systems as restorative or even necessary. Chaplin's tramp character in The Kid practices a poignant hustle for his modest livelihood: his adopted child—cousin to the “kitten in the wilderness”—throws rocks through windows, and immediately after the tramp just happens to stroll on by with a makeshift pane-fixing kit, a sheet of glass strapped to his back. Crane embraced this symbolism personally: “[T]he pantomime of Charlie represents fairly well the futile gesture of the poet in U.S.A. today” (Crane, qtd. in Fisher 134). The tramp clown has an automatic nemesis, which is that of systems of labor, whether they are looking for work or eschew it, they remain in the “down-n-out" trench as part of their role. Harold Bloom’s claim that Crane had “no political interests whatsoever” [11] rings crackpot at the step of this poem. Isn't a poet's tenderness, however conniving, something that shatters common viewpoints and offers a new pane to angle one's vision through? As haphazard fixers of language, at our sloppy best we transform the waste of the world into laughter, recast wars against the innocent into a natural protective sleeve of “warm torn elbow coverts,” and remind our neighbors that a pirouette, however small, is by definition a kind of revolution.






Notes

---

[1] Slava Polunin, “Slava Polunin,” in Clowns: In Conversation with Modern Masters, ed. Ezra LeBank and David Bridel (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 52.

[2] Clive Fisher, “November 1919—March 1923,” in Hart Crane: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2002), 134.

[3] Rachel James, "The Politics of Rot: Alex Tatarsky," BOMB Magazine, April 28, 2021.

[4] Tristan Rémy, "Dèdè," in Clown Scenes, trans. Bernard Sahlins (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 105-111.

[5] Charlie Chaplin, The Kid, 1921.

[6] Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (København and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999), 11.

[7] Robert R. Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).

[8] Paul Bouissac, “The Semiotics of Gags,” in The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning: Rituals of Transgression and the Theory of Laughter (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 75-105.

[9] Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964) 144-147, qtd. in “Tramps: Sad and Sassy” in Clowns by John H. Towsen (New York: Hawthorne Books, Inc., 1976), 294.

[10] Jack Halberstam, “Introduction: Low Theory,” in The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2011), 15.

[11] Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” in The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Mark Simon (New York and London: Liverright, 2000), xiii.