Regarp Book Blog

In 1904, the notorious Apache warrior Geronimo, now in his mid-seventies, was a federal prisoner of war on loan to the St. Louis World’s Fair, which belongs to our nation’s uncomfortable collective memory for its numerous ethnographic exhibits of so-called “primitive” humans which included, in addition to Native Americans, the Tlingit, indigenous to Alaska, and the Igorot, an aboriginal population from the Philippines who were billed as “headhunters,” as well as Congolese pygmies. Geronimo developed rapport with one of latter, an amiable nineteen year old Mbuti tribesman named Ota Benga, imaginatively advertised as a “cannibal,” who stood four foot eleven inches and whose smile showcased teeth ceremonially sharpened to fine points. The old medicine man presented him with an arrowhead as a gift; they were, of course, all in this kind of zoo together.

But only two years later that very metaphor materialized for Ota, whom after a brief stay at New York’s American Museum of Natural History found himself on display in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo, where he hung his hammock, wearing a loincloth and carrying a bow and arrow, or wandering the zoo grounds accompanied by an orangutan he had grown attached to—a captivating if unpaid attraction for amused onlookers. Just after the turn of century, fresh from the imperialist adventure that was the Spanish-American War, which had compelled Filipinos to trade one colonial power for another, “civilized” Americans delighted in the spectacle of gawking at “savages” in various contrived natural habitats—especially, it turned out, in of all places, New York City!

The hapless Ota’s surprising story, from his birth in central Africa through his unlikely travels across the United States, is the subject of Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo [1992], an entertaining if occasionally uneven account by dual authors Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume. It is also, actually, a dual biography, as Ota shares much space in the narrative with Samual Phillips Verner—the grandfather of one of the authors—an eccentric missionary who visited the Congo on a “specimen-gathering mission” for the Fair, and “collected” Ota Benga as one of those “specimens.” There are grander themes to parse, as well, that this set of authors may not have been up to. These run the gamut from the oppression that reigned in the Jim Crow south to the cruelty that characterized the Congo, and—especially—to this particular moment in time when an America now equipped with automobiles and electricity and even manned flight could yet shamelessly put human beings on display to at once juxtapose with and champion their alleged superiors shouldering their “white man’s burden.”

Bradford, an engineer who was inspired to write a biography of his colorful grandfather, recognized that Ota Benga was the hook that would attract readers, and set out to do the research. Blume was brought in to polish the manuscript. Neither were trained historians, which perhaps makes the finished product more readable, if less reliable; more on that later.

This storied grandfather, the aforementioned Samual Phillips Verner, was born in post-Civil War South Carolina to a former slaveholding family and grew up furnished with the deep-seated racism typical to his class and his time. Verner emerges here as an intense, academic prodigy who lingers upon troubling moral quandaries of right and wrong, while suffering from alternating episodes of mental illness—he once insisted he was the Hapsburg Emperor—and religious fervor. Throughout, he takes comfort in the Daniel Defoe novel Robinson Crusoe, as well as the real life adventures of Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone in distant, exotic Africa. The sum total of all this was to coalesce in Verner’s calling as a missionary to what was then commonly referred to as the “Dark Continent.” It is in Africa that he demonstrates his intelligence, his charm, his many capabilities, and his propensity for both earning enemies and cementing friendships. He also wrestles with the inherent prejudices he carries from the deep south that come to be challenged by the realities of the human experience. And, as in his boyhood, there are disturbing moral dilemmas to resolve. But what becomes increasingly clear as the pages are turned is that Verner is first and foremost a narcissist, and resolutions for any paradox of morality are always obtained by what suits Verner’s own circumstances most comfortably and most conveniently.

By his own account, Verner’s time in the Congo consisted of remarkable exploits that saw him establish rapport with various native peoples, including pygmies, as well as form an unlikely kind of alliance with a dangerous, otherwise unapproachable tribal king, and a near-fatal episode when he impaled his leg on a poisoned stake set for an animal trap. Along the way, he distinguishes himself by his courage, quick-thinking, and ingenuity—like a character out of Defoe, perhaps. Did it all really happen? Bradford reports Verner’s saga as history, although it is based almost entirely on his grandfather’s own recollections. As such, the reader cannot help but question the reliability of a fellow who once believed himself to be the Hapsburg Emperor!

African pygmies, much like the Khoisan peoples, have an ancient indigenous lineage that are genetically divergent from all other human populations. They may or may not be descendants of paleolithic hunter-gatherers of the central African rainforest. In Ota Benga’s time, the Mbuti, nomadic hunters, ranged within the artificially drawn borders of the Congo Free State, a vast territory that was for a time the personal fiefdom of Belgium’s King Leopold II, a land infamous for the widespread atrocities committed by Leopold’s private army, the dreaded Force Publique, that enforced strict rubber collection quotas through extreme methods of murder and mutilation. A human hand had to be turned in for every bullet issued to prove these were not wasted, so baskets of hands—including children’s hands—became symbolic of Leopold’s “Free State,” a realm of horrors that inspired Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For those who have read Adam Hochschild’s magnificent work, King Leopold’s Ghost, there is nothing new here, but two of its protagonists, black missionary William Sheppard and Irish activist Roger Casement, who campaigned against Leopold’s reign of terror, turn up in this book, as well. Verner, it seems, was surprisingly unmoved by the carnage about him.

Verner contracted malaria. That illness, his leg injury, and the overall dissatisfaction of mission officials with his performance conspired to send him back to America, where he became famous for his reported feats and, based upon his background, won the assignment of procuring pygmies for The Louisiana Purchase Exposition (also known as the St. Louis World’s Fair). So, eight years later he returned on expedition, with the blessings of King Leopold himself, and in an accidental encounter with the Baschilele tribe stumbled upon Ota Benga at a slave market. Apparently Ota, away from his camp on a solo elephant hunt, as pygmies were wont to do, had returned to find piles of corpses, including his wife and children—victims of the Force Publique. He and other survivors were sold into slavery. Verner could not believe his good fortune: he purchased Ota for “a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth.” [p103] He later recruited other more willing volunteers, and set sail for home. The Thirteenth Amendment forbidding chattel slavery was ratified nearly four decades prior, but that proved not to be a barrier to Verner’s transport of Ota to the United States.

That is just the beginning of this fascinating story! There is much more to come, which makes this book, although flawed on some levels, well worth the read. Those who have studied the American Civil War and the antebellum south are familiar with the nuanced relationships that can develop between the enslaved and those who hold them as property. A bond developed between Verner and Ota that was even more complicated than that. Verner may have purchased Ota and dutifully turned him over to the World’s Fair, but he later freely returned him to Africa. Yet, after a time, Ota, widowed once more after losing a second wife to snakebite, found himself with little to hold him there and a taste for the excitement he had found in America. Thus, he made an enthusiastic return to the US with Verner. But things were not destined to go well for either of them.

Verner had visions of grandeur that did not translate into either the wealth or recognition he sought. He seemed to genuinely care about Ota’s welfare, but that fell to neglect as his own fortunes dwindled, and Ota wound up in that degrading display at the Bronx Zoo. He was not there very long. His rescue came from unlikely quarters: African American clergymen, chafing at their own second-class status, were rightly appalled at the humiliating spectacle of Ota at the zoo, which they likewise perceived as advancing Darwinism, an abomination for their Christian faith. Ota went first to an orphanage in the Bronx, and later to Lynchburg, Virginia, where a kindly patron arranged to have his sharpened teeth capped, fitted him out in suitable clothing, sent him to school, and found him work at a tobacco factory, where he was known as Otto Bingo. But Ota, who in his heyday with Verner had been a celebrity of sorts on travels that had once even taken him to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, found himself lonely and alienated. One day in 1916, he pried the caps off his teeth and shot himself. He was about thirty-three years old.

In the end, I longed for more information about Ota and less about Verner. This volume, while enhanced by both wonderful photographs and a thick appendix of press clippings from the day, is conspicuously absent of endnotes—which would be useful for the reader anxious to separate fact from fiction in Verner’s likely embellishments. Still, despite its limitations, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it.

My Review of: King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terrorism and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild

Ota Benga is referenced, with much relevance, in Angela Saini’s fine work, reviewed here:  Superior: The Return of Race Science

In 399 BCE, Socrates was condemned to death, a tragic punctuation mark to the celebrated fifth century that had Athens and Sparta and the multitude of other poleis witness first the repulse of the mighty Persian Empire, the flourish that was the Age of Pericles, and then the carnage of the Peloponnesian War that for nearly three decades battered Greek civilization and culminated in Athenian defeat. In that same era, hardly anyone had heard of Rome, humiliated just shortly thereafter when sacked by Gauls in 390 BCE. A mere century and a half later, the Greeks were themselves subjects of a Rome that had become master of the Mediterranean. But in victory or defeat, sovereign or not, the pulse never failed to beat in the poleis—or beyond it. The life of Socrates, likely embellished, was told most famously by Plato, who founded his Academy in Athens in 387 BCE. Plato’s pupil Aristotle later established his own school, the Lyceum, and served as tutor to Alexander the Great, who in his vast conquest spread Hellenism across the east. By the time that Egypt, the last parcel of territory once claimed by Alexander, fell to Roman rule in 31 BCE, Greek thought prevailed more than a thousand miles from Attica and the Peloponnesus, and it was to dominate Roman intellectual life for centuries to come. As Roman poet Horace once observed: “Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought the arts to rustic Latium.”

That story is subject to a superlative treatment in The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome:150 BC-400 AD [2023], a fascinating and engaging work that is the latest to spring from the extremely talented pen of acclaimed classicist Charles Freeman. In a departure from the thick tomes and deep dives into intellectual history that have made his reputation, such as The Closing of the Western Mind¹ [2003], and its sequel of sorts, The Reopening of the Western Mind² [2020], this delightful survey sacrifices none of the scholarship Freeman is known for while expanding his appeal to both an academic and a popular audience. Even better, the volume is structured such that it can just as suitably be approached as a random perusal of out of sequence episodes as a cover-to-cover read.

Books of history often have a slow build, but not this one. The reader is instantly hooked by the “Prologue,” which features an adaptation of The Banquet, a hilarious satirical work by Lucian of Samosata, a second-century CE Hellenized Syrian who wrote in Greek, that has representatives of virtually every school of philosophy attending a wedding feast that degenerates from debate and dispute to debauchery—and even a full scale brawl! Attendees include Stoics, Platonists, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Cynics, and various hangers-on. The point, of courses, for the purpose of Freeman’s work, is both the considerable diversity that was manifested in Greek thought, as well as how prevalent that proved to be in the immensity of an empire that stretched from Mauretania to Armenia.

To animate this compelling cultural history, Freeman has chosen a select group of representative figures. Those grounded in the classics will recognize most if perhaps not all of them, which only serves as underscore to the sheer numbers of Greeks who took leading roles in Roman life over the many hundreds of years that spanned the time when Greece succumbed to Roman conquest in the second century BCE to the fall of Rome in the west in the fifth century CE. There are philosophers, of course, such as Epictetus and Plotinus, but there is also the historian Polybius, the biographer Plutarch, the geographer Strabo, the traveler Pausanias, the astronomer Ptolemy, the surgeon Galen, and a dozen others. Chapters for each are comprised of biographical sketches with an exploration of their significance, as well as the imprint their legacies left upon later Western Civilization. Included too are a number of interludes that explore wider themes to better place these individuals in context to their times.

Rome’s was a martial society not known for organic cultural achievements, at least not until much later in the course of its history. Greek art and epic, already deeply influential on the Etruscans that Rome supplanted in their geography, came to fill that vacuum. The syncretism that gradually integrated Greek mythology into equivalent Roman gods and goddesses, with appropriate name changes, similarly saw Greek culture increasingly borrowed and incorporated over time, even as this latter process met with a sometimes fierce resistance by conservative Roman elites. Philosophy proved especially unwelcome at first, as perhaps best highlighted in a report by Plutarch of an Athenian delegation to Rome in 155 BCE that saw a certain Carneades, a philosopher associated with antidogmatic skepticism, argue convincingly to an audience in favor of one proposition the first day, only to return the next and masterfully rebut his own position—to the horror of Cato the Elder! But such attitudes were not to prevail; Greek philosophy was to dominate Roman intellectual life, even as Christianity gained traction—and some of Freeman’s Greeks are in fact Christian—until repressed by the Church in the last decades prior to the fall of Rome. This was especially facilitated by the Pax Romana that characterized the first two centuries of empire, a period of relative peace and stability that allowed ideas, including spirited philosophical debate, to spread freely across long distances. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161 to 180 CE) was himself a Stoic philosopher!

Freeman’s book demonstrates the vitality of Greek thought in Roman life not merely through the various schools of philosophy, but even more importantly in the realms of science, medicine, and scholarship. Long ago, in my own studies of ancient Greece, I read both Polybius (c.200–c.118 BCE) and Plutarch (46-119 CE) while carelessly overlooking the implications in that these were Greeks who resided in Rome. Plutarch himself even became a Roman citizen. It is a telling reminder that Greeks remained a critical influence upon Western Civilization—long after their city-states ceased to be anything other than place names on Roman maps.

I once ran across a claim of Christian triumphalism in the literature that argued that the rise of Christianity was enabled by a paganism that had so run its course that it had doomed itself to obsolescence, leaving a gaping spiritual hole that begged for a new, more fulfilling religious experience for the masses. It’s a nice fairy tale for the faithful, but lacks support in the scholarship. Even as the “catastrophic” notion of the demise of polytheism (associated with Gibbon) has given way to the more realistic “long and slow” view by historians, it is often surprising to discover how vibrant paganism remained, well into late antiquity. And the best evidence for that is the flourishing of Greek philosophy, and the paganism associated with it, in the Roman world—both which finally fell victim to the totalitarianism of the early Christian Church that at first discouraged and later prohibited anything that strayed from established doctrine. With that in mind, The Children of Athena serves as a kind of prequel to Freeman’s magnificent The Closing of the Western Mind, which chronicled the course of events that came to crush independent inquiry for a millennium to follow in the Western world.

There is possibly no more chilling metaphor for this than in one of the final chapters of The Children of Athena that is given to Hypatia (c.350-415 CE), a Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt in the twilight of the empire. Hypatia, the rare female of her times who was a philosophical and scientific thinker, fell afoul of a local bishop and was murdered by a Christian mob that stripped her naked and scraped her to death with shards of roof tiles. And so the Western mind indeed did close.

For the record, I have come to know Charles Freeman over the years, and we correspond via email from time to time. I read portions of drafts of The Children of Athena as it was coming together, and offered my ideas, for whatever those might be worth, to help polish the narrative. As such, I was honored to see my name appear in the book’s “Acknowledgements.” But I am not a paid reviewer, and I would never praise a title that did not warrant it, regardless of my connection to the author. I genuinely enjoyed it, and would highly recommend it.

This is, in fact, one of those works that is difficult to fault, despite my glaring critical eye. Freeman’s depth in the field is on display and impressive, as is his ability to articulate a wide range of sometimes arcane concepts in a comprehensible fashion. I suppose if I were to find a flaw, it would be for the lack of much needed back matter. Readers may bemoan the absence of a “cast of characters” to catalog the names of the major and minor individuals that occur in the text, a key to philosophical schools and unfamiliar terminology, as well as maps of ancient cities and towns. Still, that is a minor quibble that should best be taken up with the publisher rather than the author, and hardly diminishes the overall achievement of this book, which does include copious notes and a fine concluding chapter that for my part found me motivated to go back to my own shelves and read more about the men and women that people The Children of Athena.

¹ A link to my review of: Review of: The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman

² A link to my review of: The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment, by Charles Freeman

Decades before J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI connived for a pretext to deport a wealthy British ex-pat suspected of communist connections who also happened to be an influential, world-famous artist—that person was John Lennon and that attempt ultimately failed—a much younger Hoover and his then-cronies mounted a similar but far more effective crusade against an individual who in his time was even more consequential. That man was British-born Charlie Chaplin, Hollywood’s first truly global phenomenon, who while not deported was yet driven into permanent exile.

Author and film historian Scott Eyman sets out to tell that story and more in Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided [2023], an informative and entertaining if uneven portrait of a celebrated figure as devoted to his art as he was indifferent to the enemies he spawned along the way. Seizing upon Chaplin’s clash with the authorities over his politics as the focal point of the narrative, the author seeks to distinguish this work from numerous previous chroniclers of its prominent subject, with mixed results.

Chaplin, both a genius and a giant in the days when cinema was in its infancy, left an indelible mark upon the nascent motion picture industry. In the process, he attracted both critical acclaim and legions of adoring fans, as well as, with equal fervor, the scorn of moralists and the disfavor of those who viewed his brand of social consciousness as a threat to the American way of life. Like the later John Lennon, he was an outsize talent who eschewed convention, dared to take unpopular positions, flaunted a somewhat sybaritic lifestyle, accumulated enormous wealth, and was a legend in his own time—the very ingredients that stoked in alternate audiences parallel passions of adulation and abhorrence.

Anticommunism runs deep in the United States, from the “Red Scare” of the 1920’s to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)—a creature of the Depression era that was reborn with a fury in the postwar period—and the related excesses of McCarthyism, a nearly continuous stream of panic and paranoia that characterized American culture for decades that ostensibly aimed to identify enemies foreign and domestic but instead extra-constitutionally branded certain political thought as a crime. In the process, thousands of Americans and foreign nationals suffered persecution, ostracism and even imprisonment. A weaker dynamic by Lennon’s time, it nevertheless remained a force to be reckoned with for those so victimized. Something of anachronism, anticommunism yet still echoes into today’s politics. One of the faults in Eyman’s treatment is his failure to place Chaplin’s harassment for his alleged political sympathies into this wider context for the reader unfamiliar with its deeper historical roots.

Neither Chaplin nor Lennon were members of the Communist Party, but that was almost beside the point for authorities who deemed each as unwelcome, if only for their respective advocacies for a greater social and economic equality, which was seen as sympathetic to communist ideology. And there was a whiff of perceived disloyalty in their demeanors. Lennon was ardently anti-war. Chaplin, who styled himself a “peace monger,” was regarded as especially suspect because he never sought US citizenship; instead he railed against nationalism as a root cause of war, and imagined himself as a kind of citizen of the world. Alas, Chaplin had the bad fortune to find himself targeted in tumultuous times characterized by a populace both less sophisticated and more docile than in Lennon’s day. And he paid for it. Of course, as Eyman’s book underscores, objections to Chaplin’s way of life proved far more damning to him than his actual politics.

Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in London in 1889 into abject poverty much like a character out of Dickens. Orphaned by circumstances if not literally, in his childhood he endured the dehumanizing struggle of the workhouse and for a time lived alone on the streets. His older brother Sydney was to rescue him and helped foster his budding stage presence in sketch comedy that eventually took him across the pond, first to vaudeville and later to Los Angeles, where he made his silent film debut. A master of the art of physical comedy, it was there that he invented the trademark character that would define his career and later cement his celebrity—the “Little Tramp,” a good-natured, childlike, sometime vagrant costumed in baggy pants, oversize shoes, and a tiny mustache—that would evolve into an endearing screen icon endowed with a blend of humor and pathos. The Tramp would later serve as the central protagonist for the very first dramatic comedies.

Chaplin was a wildly popular overnight sensation, which by 1915 made him, at only twenty-six years old, one of the highest paid individuals in the world. Just four years later, he joined forces with other leading lights to form United Artists, a revolutionary film distribution company that permitted him to fund and maintain complete creative control over his own productions. UA served as the critical vehicle that enabled Chaplin to write, produce, direct, star in, and even compose the music for a series of films that would make him a legend, including The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), and Modern Times (1936), all featuring the Tramp character. Favoring the subtle artistry of silent films over the “talkies” that came to dominate motion pictures, Chaplin stubbornly continued to produce silent (or mostly silent) movies long after that format had been largely abandoned by others. Eventually he moved to talkies with The Great Dictator (1940), a political satire that starred Chaplin in a dual role as a Tramp-like character and a farcical persona based upon Hitler. Later, he abandoned the Tramp in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and comedy altogether in the semi-autobiographical Limelight (1952).

In his personal life, Chaplin was a bundle of contradictions. An extremely wealthy but socially conscious man, he was capable of great generosity towards those he favored, but like many who grew up in extreme poverty he could be stingy, as well. It was that childhood abandoned to the streets, according to Eyman and other biographers, that informed every aspect of the mature Charlie Chaplin, in his screen persona as well as his private life. A dominating perfectionist on the set who could be maddening for cast and crew alike with his demands for multiple re-takes of the same scene day after day, and productions that could go on for months or even a year, off camera he was moved by the inequalities of unbridled capitalism, and the plight of the disadvantaged. He advocated for greater economic equity and against the rise of fascism both on screen and off, which made him seem suspect to the powers-that-be, which was further exacerbated by clashes with puritanical movie censors that regarded him as openly flirting with immoral themes. That he was friendly with known communists and campaigned to open a second front to benefit the USSR in the wartime alliance against Hitler only heightened those suspicions and led to accusations that Chaplin himself was a communist or “fellow traveler.”  He once received a subpoena to appear before HUAC, but he was never actually called to testify.

Physically tiny but handsome and charming, Chaplin was something of a womanizer who was frequently unfaithful and had a string of liaisons, sometimes with leading ladies, as well as a total of four marriages. He favored young women: his first two wives were each only sixteen years old when he married them, his fourth wife was eighteen and he was fifty-four when they wed. Other than his infidelities, he seems to have been kind and considerate to his various partners, and he often remained friends and sometimes a financial benefactor to former lovers. His third marriage to actress Paulette Goddard ended in divorce, but she then starred in his next film, and they got along amicably for years to come. The notable exception to that rule was his affair circa 1941-42 with the unstable and vindictive Joan Berry, which led to a career-damaging paternity suit for Chaplin. But he was a devoted and faithful husband to his final wife, Oona O’Neill, with whom he fathered eight children; they stayed together for thirty-four years until his death in Switzerland in 1977 at the age of eighty-eight. Still, the romantic scandals that dogged him—especially the poisonous courtroom drama that played out publicly in his disputes with Joan Berry—tarnished his reputation and bred a whole coterie of enemies in and out of Hollywood willing to work against him when the FBI set its sights on him as an undesirable alien.

As it was, while he championed social justice, Chaplin himself was remarkably apolitical. As the very archetype of the rags-to-riches story, he cited the inherent incongruity of accusing a man who made his fortune via American capitalism of being a communist. But already castigated for his alleged moral turpitude by the doyens of “respectable” society, as the Cold War dawned and the Soviet Union turned from former ally into existential threat, he was widely denounced by detractors and calls grew for him to be deported. Chaplin’s greatest weakness turned out to be his own naivety. When he left for London for the world premiere of Limelight, his re-entry permit was revoked. The grounds for this action were quite tenuous; had he contested it, it is likely he would have been readmitted. But he was so embittered by this affront that he remained in exile from the United States for the rest of his life, returning only once very briefly in 1972 to accept an honorary Academy Award for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century.”

The problem with Charlie Chaplin vs. America is that despite what may have been his original intentions, it is not completely clear what kind of book Scott Eyman ultimately sent to press after he rested his pen. The subtitle presumes it to be a chronicle of Chaplin’s dual with the established order to avoid banishment, but that theme hardly dominates the plot. On the other hand, there is a wealth of material that hints at what could have been. Much print is devoted to Charlie’s childhood struggles on the streets of London, as well his grand success with the production of The Kid, but there is little connective tissue of points in between, leaving the formative Chaplin mostly conspicuous in its absence. So it cannot be termed an authoritative biography. Likewise, there are sometimes lengthy excursions to focus on a particular movie or a specific film technique, while others are glossed over or ignored. So it cannot be a critical study of Chaplin’s filmmaking. It is as if Eyman bit off far more than he wanted to chew and ended up uncertain what should be spit out, with some chunks of the account too fat and others too lean.

The result is a narrative that is sometimes choppy, with a tendency at times to clumsily slip in and out of chronology, and a penchant in places to fall into extended digressions—including an awkward multipage interview excerpt with a Chaplin associate that might better have been relegated to the back matter of notes or appendix. Still, warts and all, the book never grows dull. The reader may be left unsatisfied, but ever remains engaged. And, to his credit, Eyman succeeds superbly in capturing Chaplin’s personality, by far the most significant challenge for any biographer. That is in itself a notable achievement, especially with a subject as nuanced as this one.

J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, some twenty years after Chaplin’s re-entry permit was denied. John Lennon was ordered out of the country in 1973, but a New York judge reversed the deportation order in 1975. Earlier that same year, HUAC was formally terminated. After some quiet years, Lennon was making a musical comeback when he was murdered by a deranged fan in 1980. He was only forty years old. By then Chaplin had been dead for three years, at a ripe old age, but his creative juices had never really flowed the same way in exile. He made two additional films abroad, but neither lived up to his earlier triumphs.

Charlie Chaplin could be the most famous movie star in history whose films most Americans alive today have never seen, largely because even in my 1960s boyhood, when Chaplin still walked the earth, and when most broadcasts outside of prime time were devoted to old movies, silent films were already long passé, and most of his greatest films were silents.  With that in mind, along with reading Eyman’s book I screened several Chaplin films: The Kid, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator. I am neither film critic nor film historian, but I consider myself something of a film geek, and I confess that I was blown away by Chaplin’s brilliance in both The Kid and City Lights. While I can understand and appreciate its message and its impact upon release, I found The Great Dictator dated, overly long, and less entertaining. But I would judge Modern Times as not only magnificent, but so extraordinarily timely with its themes of technological oppression, automation, corporate capitalism, threats to individuality, and loss of privacy that it belongs as much to 2023 as it did to 1936. If there is a fault to be found in any of these efforts, it is that Chaplin’s absolute creative control denied him the editorial input that was warranted on occasion. There are slapstick bits, for instance, that while hilarious yet go on interminably. Someone needed to yell “Cut!” Even a genius, as Chaplin indubitably was, needs an editor.

So too, in my opinion, does Scott Eyman. A talented and prolific writer who has authored numerous biographies of stars who once peopled the “Golden Age” of Hollywood, Eyman’s prior accolades could very well be the reason that someone with a sharp red pen did not have the authority to carve out the potentially great book that lay within that sheaf of pages that went to print.

[Note: This ARC edition came to me through an early reviewers’ program.]