By Stuart Mitchner
Carl Sandburg was less of a poet than Charlie Chaplin.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Every time you understand a thing you multiply yourself.
—Charlie Chaplin
Scott Fitzgerald went out of his way to praise Charlie Chaplin in an August 1921 interview, having returned to his hometown St. Paul in triumph “with the crest of fame” on his head and his Princeton novel This Side of Paradise in its 11th printing. According to Andrew Turnbull’s 1962 biography, he “carried a great excitement within him,” enthusing to an older writer “how wonderful it is to be young and beautiful and a success.”
That same year, Chaplin returned to a triumphant reception in his own hometown of London. According to a newspaper interview, as he walked through Kennington, a neighborhood he’d grown up in, “I was recognized and people began to follow me, but at a little distance, very quietly. I found myself at the head of a procession, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.” The people were “charming, and so refined,” but there was “a look of sadness” in their eyes suggestive of “what they had been through in the four years of the war, and how they’d had the courage to endure it.”
“Gold Rush” and “Gatsby”
In A Woman of Paris (1923), Chaplin surprised his public by forsaking slapstick and the Tramp to deliver one of the most innovative, sophisticated pictures of the Silent Era. A year later he began working on The Gold Rush, a film that blended slapstick and America’s current “money madness” with the emotional pulse of the human comedy. Released nationwide on August 16, 1925 after a lavish, late June Hollywood premiere, it received universal acclaim and in 2025 celebrates its 100th year as one of the greatest films ever made.
When The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925, however, the reviews and sales were disappointing. In December 1940, after Fitzgerald died at 44, the New York Times obituary referred to a career “that began and ended” with the 1920s, its “promise never fulfilled.” The “best of his books” was Gatsby, published “at a time when gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession.” In it Fitzgerald displayed his “ability to catch the flavor of a night, a snatch of old song, in a phrase.” As its centenary is celebrated, Gatsby is considered not only one of the century’s greatest books but a rival to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for the ultimate acclamation: “The Great American Novel.”
Fitzgerald’s Enthusiasm
Fitzgerald’s thoughts on Chaplin are expressed at length by Manley Halliday, a fictional character in Budd Shulberg’s novel The Disenchanted (1950). One advantage of an in-the-moment record of the hard-drinking weekend in 1939 that Fitzgerald and Shulberg spent working on a screenplay is the way the conversation captures Fitzgerald’s uninhibited enthusiasm for The Gold Rush: “If movies didn’t die so fast it’d be considered a permanent classic like Hamlet or Cyrano. Funny as hell on the surface and full of inner meanings … just when the whole country was rushing for gold.” Halliday then goes on to mention a “little one-reeler” in which “Charlie’s a drunk being dragged along, grabs a bush as he struggles, finds a daisy in his hand. Daisy changes mood entirely. Becomes a poet, a dreamer, an aesthete.”
Daisy and Georgia
Struck by the stress on a name that just happens to be at the heart of Fitzgerald’s novel, where the power of Gatsby’s love for a girl named Daisy inspires him to create a realm of riches to lay at her feet, I noticed similarities between Gatsby’s dream of Daisy and the Tramp’s adoration of a dancehall girl named Georgia. In the 1942 revival of The Gold Rush narrated by Chaplin, he introduces her with a wistful warmth, leaving no doubt that she’s the soul of his story, the Tramp’s muse, the light of his life.
New Year’s Eve
The Gold Rush achieves its most poetic moment in the Tramp’s dream of the New Year’s Eve dinner he prepares for Georgia and the other dancehall girls. On one level “the Little Fellow,” as he’s affectionately referred to in Chaplin’s narration, is lighting candles, spreading a newspaper for a tablecloth, putting presents and favors at each girl’s place and keeping an eye on the roast in the oven. In fact, the girls never come, he’s alone and forgotten, while the revelers in the dance hall are singing “Auld Lang Syne” and Georgia, the girl of his dreams, is being romanced by Big Jack, the Gold Rush equivalent of Daisy’s obnoxious husband Tom Buchanan.
In his dream dinner, the Tramp becomes the smiling all-powerful master of the scene, the girls wearing the favors he made for them, toasting him, adoring him, calling for a speech. Instead, he performs the “Oceana Roll,” a candlelit poem composed with two forks and two rolls that everyone should see at least once before they die.
In a 1925 interview, Chaplin describes movies as the “keyhole into the way the other half of the world lives” — the “wastes and savings, graces and disgraces, hearts one does not know. If people see one good film in ten bad, they are coming near to possession of the world. Every time you understand a thing you multiply yourself.” As an example of “something new,” Chaplin cites the moment in The Gold Rush “where I tear a pillow to pieces and the feathers dance white in the black screen. Impossible on the stage!…. There I extended myself to the full. I think that bit has a sort of intensity. I tried to get something desperate and terrible into that and to express it in a new form, a sort of visual music.”
I’d forgotten the torn pillow until I saw the restored Gold Rush. Why would the Tramp tear a pillow to bits? Why all those feathers dancing in the dark? See it again and you know he’s giddy with delight because Georgia just told him that she and the girls will be coming to the dinner and he’s already celebrating, the scattered falling feathers becoming the confetti for his own New Year’s Eve dream.
Fitzgerald’s Visual Music
The closest Gatsby comes to realizing his dream of Daisy is when he gives her a tour of his fabulous home. One moment in the novel comparable to Chaplin’s explosion of feathers occurs when Gatsby takes out a pile of his shirts, “throwing them one by one” before Daisy, “shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray.” While she looks on, “the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue.” At that moment the tension of Gatsby’s exalted excitement and Daisy’s sheer wonder come to a climax as she bends “her head into the shirts and begins to cry: ‘They’re such beautiful shirts … it makes me sad because I’ve never seen such, such beautiful shirts before.”
What’s touching about Gatsby’s unmitigated joy at finally showing Daisy his domain is how his giddy love contrasts to the charismatic figure created by Fitzgerald’s prose poetry: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”
In Fitzgerald’s unfinished Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon (1941) he sets out to transform his film producer hero Monroe Stahr into another character with “something gorgeous about him.” Reading the New Directions paperback of The Crack Up, a collection of Fitzgerald’s writings edited by his friend and Princeton classmate Edmund Wilson, I’m convinced that if Chaplin had read that book, Fitzgerald’s swan song, he’d have sympathized with the author’s plight and recognized a view of life like his own in the vignettes and fragments and nuggets of insight, wit, and style scattered throughout the alphabet-lettered notebooks.
The Eyes Have It
The way the Tramp’s eyes follow the magical dance of the “Oceana Roll” in The Gold Rush dream reminds me of one of The Great Gatsby’s signature images, the giant billboard spectacles of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg overlooking the valley of ashes, an image inspired by Francis Cugat’s Celestial Eyes, the painting that makes the Gatsby first-edition cover so striking and that captures Jay Gatsby’s vision of Daisy Fay, his love and his doom, “whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs … sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth.” This is Daisy as Gatsby imagines her — the “colossal vitality of his illusion” that “had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way.”
Now I’m thinking of Chaplin’s Tramp, who tears a pillow to pieces and “the feathers dance white” against “the black screen,” expressing “something desperate and terrible … a new form, a sort of visual music.”
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Note: Except for the quote from Andrew Turnbull’s biography, the ones by Chaplin are from Charlie Chapin Interviews (Univ. of Mississippi Press 2005), edited by Kevin Hayes, which I found at the Princeton Pubic Library. The quotes from The Disenchanted are thanks to Richard Brody’s 2011 New Yorker piece on The Gold Rush and the June 21, 2020 shadowplay blog by David Cairns.