A Chance Meeting, page 28
31. W. E. B. DU BOIS AND CHARLIE CHAPLIN
W. E. B. DU BOIS and his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, were waiting for the lights to go down. Du Bois loved the movies, and he had the old feeling of satisfaction as the clicking whir began. Now eighty-nine, Du Bois was a little hard of hearing, but Chaplin’s new movie wasn’t difficult to follow. Charlie Chaplin, the king of a small European country, had been deposed. He escaped to New York, but immediately ran into trouble with the U.S. government and was forced to testify before a committee closely resembling the House Un-American Activities Committee. Du Bois—who, after the Justice Department trumped up an indictment of his Peace Information Center, had narrowly avoided incarceration, in part with the help of a tract in his defense written by Langston Hughes—would have enjoyed this scene.
Chaplin’s unnuanced political rhetoric made the movie a little less watchable, but Du Bois was a fan of long standing, and he had patience. Perhaps he liked the young boy in the film who made the impassioned speech about the Justice Department’s unlawful withholding of the passports of its citizens. The Du Boises had been confined to the United States for eight years without passports. Du Bois had missed, among other things, the Paris Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists of 1956, at which James Baldwin noted that Du Bois’s was the absence that caused “the greatest stir.” Du Bois had always lived in an international community—he had known men and women from Germany and France, Haiti and Japan, India and what was soon to be an independent Kenya. Sitting in the movie theater that day, perhaps Du Bois envied the king’s ability to get on a plane and go.
The following year, in 1958, Du Bois celebrated his ninetieth birthday. Helen Keller sent him her warmest wishes, remembering vividly the visit he and William James had made to her at the Perkins Institute more than sixty-five years before. In February, the month of his birthday, Du Bois published his essay “A Vista of Ninety Fruitful Years” in the National Guardian. He began, with ready wit, “I would have been hailed with approval if I had died at 50. At 75 my death was practically requested,” but, as always, he turned the occasion to one of serious purpose. America, he said, was “afraid of the Truth, afraid of Peace.” There had been a day, he said, when the United States would go “to war only in what they believed a just cause after nothing else seemed possible.” But “today we are lying, stealing, and killing. We call all this by finer names: Advertising, Free Enterprise, and National Defense. But names in the end deceive no one.” “We fail,” he continued, “because we have not taught our children to read and write or to behave like human beings.” Du Bois, recognizing and adapting to all the new circumstances of a changed world, did not say so when he recorded the vista from his aged vantage point, but he had decided that there was no longer any place for him in America.
W. E. B. DU BOIS by Carl Van Vechten, 1946.
In the month after his birthday, the Supreme Court finally handed down a judgment of the unconstitutionality of passport denial, and the Du Boises left for England, where they stayed with Paul and Essie Robeson; Paul Robeson had also been trapped in the United States without a passport for the last eight years. The Robesons were among the many acquaintances the Chaplins and the Du Boises had shared over the years—a list that also included H. G. Wells, Professor and Mrs. Albert Einstein, Harry Bridges, and Max Eastman. From the Robesons’, via much of Europe, the Du Boises went, in 1959, to Moscow, where they had a long interview with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, and to Beijing, where a cordial meeting with Mao Tsetung was arranged. The Du Boises eventually moved to Ghana, though they continued to travel. In 1962, in Switzerland, Du Bois met Charlie Chaplin.
Chaplin, who had never become an American citizen, had left the United States for good ten years before. The reasons for his departure were complex. The government had begun keeping files on him at least as early as 1942, when, two years after finishing work on his anti-Nazi picture, The Great Dictator, he gave several speeches not only commending the Russians for their courage in fighting the Nazis in World War II but also naïvely praising the communist purges. There was, however, never enough political evidence to deny Chaplin the ability to come and go freely into and out of the United States. However, Chaplin’s regular involvement with young women of sixteen and seventeen and the fact that he frequently arranged for them to have abortions made it possible to accuse him of immorality—another reason for which one could be expelled from the country—though it is doubtful that this behavior would have been investigated if Chaplin had been publicly unsympathetic to socialism.
When he left the country, Chaplin was staggering under the attacks on his last movie, Monsieur Verdoux, which had proved much too cold for his audience. Hart Crane would have been glad to know that the abandoned kitten he had imagined for Chaplin turned up to be fed by the sympathetic heroine in the movie; Chaplin had kept Crane’s poem in mind over the years. The poet would have had to revise his opinion, though, if he had learned the fate of another cat in Monsieur Verdoux who had the misfortune to scratch Chaplin while rehearsing a scene. The rest of the cast was horrified when they ran the scene again some days later and found that the cat was now a prop—Chaplin had ordered it killed and stuffed. Marlon Brando, one of the two stars in the last movie Chaplin directed, said of Chaplin that in addition to being “perhaps the greatest genius that the medium has ever produced . . . he made everybody else look Lilliputian,” he was “fearsomely cruel,” probably “the most sadistic man I’d ever met.”
The week before Chaplin left the country, he stopped in New York and sat for Richard Avedon. For one of the pictures, Chaplin held his index fingers up on either side of his head to suggest a devil’s horns and stretched his mouth into a huge grin. His face had something of joy in it and something of cruelty, but it was a little hard to be sure which was the deeper feeling. As the Tramp, his face always seemed impossibly transparent, but in life and in photographs he was guarded.
That day in 1957, as they left the auditorium, W. E. B. Du Bois might have said to Shirley Graham Du Bois that he missed the old silent Chaplin films. Chaplin used to describe working with “the great beauty of silence.” He had made the silent City Lights in 1930 after all the other studios had switched to sound, and he used sound for the ridiculous speeches of the Great Dictator in such a way as to keep the film largely a pantomime. Central to Chaplin’s genius was his ability to convey what he understood from looking at a person’s face and not being able to talk to him. As he grew older and crueler,
Charlie Chaplin by Richard Avedon, 1953.
Chaplin’s face may have begun to lose the heart that Crane had discerned there; maybe the Tramp would have become impossible for Chaplin anyway.
Conversation was a barrier for Chaplin; it made him feel insecure. This fear was at its worst when he returned to Europe and met well-known intellectuals. In his autobiography, Chaplin told a story of having dinner at George Bernard Shaw’s house. Shaw led him to the library, where Chaplin noticed the shelf of Shaw’s books. “Ah,” he said, “all your works!,” but not having read them he could think of nothing further to say. He regretted the lost chance to talk with Shaw; they rejoined the others in the dining room. Chaplin had a similar experience of meeting Gandhi. He knew, he later wrote, of Gandhi’s work for “The Freedom of India,” which Chaplin supported, and had some sense that Gandhi was against mechanization. He sat next to Gandhi on a sofa in a squalid room on London’s East India Dock Road and attempted, with minimal success, to fashion from these two bits of knowledge an intelligent and respectful question.
Talking to avoid exposure was part of what undermined Chaplin’s later films and his project of writing his autobiography—work he undertook after the failure of A King in New York. Truman Capote, then Chaplin’s neighbor in Switzerland, was very disappointed by the manuscript: “I started to read and it broke my heart. I wanted Chaplin to have a great autobiography.” But instead, “it was the book of a poor little English boy who will never be part of the royal family. So I went to work on it. In pencil. And I took it down to him.” They started to talk about it, and “Charlie threw me out. ‘Get the fuck out of here,’ he said.” Du Bois was not alone in missing the silent assurance of the Tramp.
•
In 1962, when W. E. B. Du Bois met Charlie Chaplin in Switzerland, it might have happened like this: Charlie Chaplin woke up feeling a little sweaty and anxious and tried to remember what it was that he had to do that day. Nothing very complicated—Oona was taking the children somewhere in the morning, probably shopping, and in the afternoon W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife were coming to visit. Du Bois had been pleasant on the phone yesterday when he had called, and of course it was the right thing to have them—Paul Robeson had written that they were coming—but Chaplin found himself reluctant. He did not like to talk of America and exile. He got up and washed meticulously, dressed carefully, and was served breakfast. In the late morning, Oona and the children came back, and they lunched, and he followed her into her room to watch her change. Switzerland, he thought, had been good to her skin, and he stroked his own face reflectively. They had been married for nineteen years. He was now seventy-three; she was thirty-seven—that year she gave birth to the last of their eight children. Her father, Eugene O’Neill, one year Chaplin’s senior, had died nine years ago. The Chaplins rarely spoke of O’Neill, though perhaps she was thinking, that day as she changed, that Robeson had had his first fame in her father’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings. Chaplin stood and kissed the back of her neck, fondled her breast through her kimono, and walked out of the room.
Du Bois and his wife, Shirley, came promptly at three, as had been arranged. He looked, Chaplin thought, remarkably well for a man of ninety-four. In 1962, W. E. B. Du Bois and his second wife had been married for eleven years; she was sixty-six. Shirley Graham Du Bois had a doctorate in history and was an extremely well spoken woman who had written biographies of both Paul Robeson and Frederick Douglass, among others. Since they had left America, she had often been called on to travel and speak in Du Bois’s place or to be part of conferences that he could not attend. Du Bois was always interested in brilliant women. It had been one of his disappointments, never especially well hidden, that his first wife, Nina Du Bois, was not meant to give speeches.
These, however, would not have been the sorts of things talked about in Vevey, on a beautiful fall day, upon leaving the spacious house with its staff of twelve to walk through the gardens. Du Bois, with his astounding memory, might have remembered that Henry James had set Daisy Miller in Vevey; he often thought of the James brothers in these retrospective years. They walked slowly, the two exiled kings, but Du Bois was quite at ease, using his cane sparingly and occasionally pointing to a flower or a tree to ask its name. Chaplin learned to compensate for Du Bois’s limited hearing by speaking slightly louder; this jangled Chaplin’s nerves, but he found himself admiring the man.
When they returned to the house for tea, conversation, as Chaplin had anticipated, turned to politics. Both men were cautiously heartened by the recent changes in the American political scene. Du Bois was interested in the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr., though he said that he had never expected to live to see a militant Baptist preacher. Du Bois had written of the relationship between King’s philosophy and the achievements of Gandhi in the Indian journal Gandhi Marg, and King had been glad to receive a letter from the Du Boises supporting the Montgomery bus boycott. Du Bois was interested, too, in the Kennedy administration and the shift away from the policies of Eisenhower. For his part, Chaplin found that he was newly popular in the United States: newspapermen, who for a decade had been bitingly critical, had decided that they liked Monsieur Verdoux quite well after all and, though Chaplin did not feel his work particularly belonged to any country, had happily gone back to the adoptive position that the Tramp films were one of the glories of American art.
The maid came in to refill their teacups. Chaplin was growing a little impatient. Du Bois felt that he had pronounced enough opinions for the day. Oona O’Neill Chaplin and Shirley Graham Du Bois talked of Switzerland, of travel, of Paul and Essie Robeson. Chaplin, as sometimes happened, grew suddenly tender and stood to do a funny little imitation of the way Essie walked. They laughed. Encouraged, his shoulders shrank in, and his head wobbled, and for the briefest moment Du Bois saw the Tramp. Then Chaplin was standing, still narrow but shoulders back, very dignified, and carefully using a cane that wasn’t there. Du Bois, laughing, recognized himself.
32. LANGSTON HUGHES AND CARL VAN VECHTEN AND RICHARD AVEDON
LANGSTON Hughes left the doctor’s office. He nodded at the receptionist, shrugged into his overcoat, and walked out onto 137th Street. The day was cold and clear. He strolled past some of his favorite town houses, and down toward 127th. It was February of 1963; he had been back for fifteen years; he was still glad to be in Harlem. He had been sick in so many places—the unexplained illness that had laid him low in Mexico when he was so angry at his father, a similar physical devastation when he had broken with his patron, the unnamed struggle with gonorrhea in northern California. (To his friends he had said “sciatica” and “arthritis.”) It was nice, now, to go to a doctor in Harlem who didn’t flinch on touching brown skin, who didn’t make him go in by some other door so that the white patients wouldn’t worry about whether any of his blood would mingle with any of theirs, who just said, “How are you feeling, Mr. Hughes?” and was pleased to see him.
Hughes might have admitted to the physician that he had gotten heavier in these last years; he was not very tall and had always been a slight man but now he weighed 180 pounds. Maybe he mentioned that his back sometimes got sore. The mattress was a little thin in his two rooms on the third floor of the brownstone he had finally been able to afford to buy with Emerson and Toy Harper. They had been living there for all those fifteen years. The Harpers (he was a musician; she was a dressmaker) rented out the other rooms and “Aunt Toy” took care of Hughes. Sometimes, in the early afternoons especially, when he was just waking up, Hughes had some pain in his shoulders. He needed something for his smoker’s cough, and he felt, a little more often these days, that he was getting older, but basically he had been able to answer the doctor truthfully that he was fine.
He thought he might buy some flowers for Aunt Toy on his way home, but then he thought that he wouldn’t have money to pay the typist until the next publisher’s check came in. He was beginning to get cold. He decided to go home and go down to the sub-basement and sort some of the papers that Carlo was always on him about. He was hoping that box of letters from Du Bois and the ones from Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps were all along the wall where he was pretty sure he had left them. At the apartment, he answered three of the forty letters that had come for him that day and left the others on the table, with the galleys of the collection he had edited of short stories by African writers. He would have to deal with all of this later in the evening. The next day, he and Carl were going to Richard Avedon’s studio to have their photograph taken together, and he knew Carl would ask about the letters.
Hughes didn’t always like going through old letters—he wasn’t a nostalgist or a historian—but he did it as a favor to Carl. When Van Vechten had first started organizing his collections to go to Yale and to Fisk and to the New York Public Library, Hughes had been living in Monterey in a one-room guest cottage built for him by the arts patron Noël Sullivan. (Hughes could always work better in someone else’s house.) Van Vechten sent Hughes insistent reminders about how to box and sort and sign and label and catalog everything. Sometimes Van Vechten got a little snippy if he didn’t hear back right away, but then of course in some sense no one had been more patient with Hughes and his occasional disappearances. If people ask me where you are, Van Vechten used to say, I just tell them you’re probably in China. This was often true enough—Hughes’s letters came from Moscow and Cuba, Haiti and Sweden, Spain during its civil war, and London and Paris.
Hughes had turned sixty-one a little more than two weeks earlier; he thought he was starting to understand Van Vechten’s chiding impatience. Perhaps he laughed out loud when he turned up a Van Vechten letter from 1957 that closed:
With the warmest possible greetings and cordial feelings (I wish to GOD you would stop signing yourself “sincerely”. One is sincere with the butcher. It is taken for granted one is sincere with one’s friends. Certainly I get letters from no one else in the world with such a conventional signing off.)
Carlo
Though they both lived in New York they still wrote to each other—the phone was a nuisance, and the other man was often out or sleeping—and Hughes had replied immediately that perhaps it was the three “very URGENT and long overdue book deadlines” that had limited his vocabulary. That had been six years ago, and Hughes remembered that he had been feeling a little weary in general. He had been through a hard few years. In 1953, he had managed not to denounce communism and had not been forced to name any names but had otherwise not made a strong show of resistance in front of Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn. It had exhausted his spirit, and he had been widely criticized for giving in too easily. A month after Hughes’s testimony, W. E. B. Du Bois had written quietly that “much time and thought of misguided intellectuals has been devoted to helping deprive American Negroes of natural leadership or to scaring them into silence.” That year, when Hughes wrote his introductory book for children, Famous American Negroes, he left out both Du Bois and Paul Robeson; he thought they were too radical for the time. The painful caution with which he felt he had to move and the guilt of not protesting more forcefully wore on Hughes; sometimes he turned to Walt Whitman for comfort and inspiration. Still, Hughes showed no irritation with Van Vechten’s demands; he rallied for his old friend and teased,
