Whenever we came to the pathos parts, Charlie tiptoed to the harmonium and played an accompaniment and when the lights went on Dick and I were shamefacedly mopping our eyes!
When we went up to his house and lunched, it was half past three! The house which is not his, but is rented, is Moorish and fantastic in design, the tortuous unsimplicity of which disturbs Charlie. But he loves the quiet of it and the isolation on a hill top with the panorama of the town extending for miles below to the sea. At night, as he says, it is just a fairy twinkling world when the town lights up. Later we went for a walk round the hilltop, and the air was hot and full of evening insect sounds. Dick scrambled wildly up the sloping banks, while Charlie and I more sedately walked round and round by the winding climbing path. He was trying to tell me what he thought was the ultimate aim of all our effort. He maintained that no artist would do great work until all petty ambition was obliterated.
“There must be no dreams of posterity, of immortality, no desire for admiration, for after all what are these worth ... at best 1,000 years hence people might walk round your immortal stone and say—it certainly is beautiful; yes, it is wonderful—(and Charlie acted the part)—Who did you say did it? Clare Sheridan 950 years ago”—“and then,” said Charlie, “in 5 minutes they will be saying ‘Where is that motor, I told him to be back in 35 minutes’”—There is nothing, he said, so beautiful that will make people forget their eggs and bacon for breakfast—as for admiration of the world—it’s not worth anything—there is in the end but oneself to please:—“You make something because it means something to you. You work, because you have a superabundance of vital energy, you find that not only you can make children but you can express yourself in other ways—in the end it is you—all you—your work, your thought, your conception of the beautiful, yours the happiness—yours the satisfaction; be brave enough to face the veil, and lift it, and see and know the void it hides, and stand before that void and know that within yourself is your world—”
I said rather feebly that I wanted my children someday to be proud of me—he made a repudiating gesture. “You should want them to love you—to love you in a perfectly primitive animal way. To love you because you are you—to love you whatever you are—to love you if you are wrong.”
I said that if he left me nothing to work for, no aim, no end, only my own satisfaction, I thought one might feel suicidal.
He was horrified at this. We stopped in our walk. Charlie looked at me: “How could anyone like you with so much vitality talk of suicide? Oh the glory of life, the glory of the world (he threw his arms wide to the horizon) it’s all so beautiful, and it’s all mine ...” and then we had to laugh at ourselves for becoming so desperately serious.
I had not meant to stay so long but he asked Dick if he would like to stay for tea, and Dick said yes, and that he’d like to stay the night as well. Dick likes Charlie. He says to him: “Charlie, you’re the funniest man there is ...” and in the car going home after tea, Dick said that as I had talked to Charlie all the afternoon it was only fair that he should have him all to himself until we arrived home. Finally Charlie and I went and dined together, and danced at the Ambassador Hotel. Everyone knew him, and seemed glad to see him back. The whole world is Charlie’s friend, no wonder Charlie loves the world!
Then, such a strange thing happened, there in that gay room full of jazz music we got to talking of our childhoods. Goodness knows how it came about, but I told him mine, and then he told me his. He told it with his wonderful simplicity, told it with detachment as if he were telling of some one else, not of him. It was a terrible bit of realism, and I though I rather love realism, I felt almost a desire to stop him from going on. It was more than one could bear to visualise.
It was a curious place in which to tell such things, but we were oblivious of everyone in the room. And now, stranger to me than ever is the psychology of this man, once a little child of sorrows, who has taught a whole world to laugh.
Thursday, November 3, 1921. Los Angeles.