The great god Pan; a biography of the tramp played by Charles Chaplin (1952)

Chapter Nine The Fabulous Year .LJuring 1914 Chaplin performed in thirtyfive films. Twenty-two or twenty-three he directed himself. Such huge output was never to be reached again. It was as though, in the first burst of enthusiasm for the new medium, he was determined to explore all the possibilities of the strange character he had invented, to see him in all lights and to follow him through all conceivable adventures. As we look back on those thirty-five films we see them haunted with the shapes of Monsieur Verdoux, the Great Dictator and the gold-miner of the Alaskan adventure, and we can even discern the ghostly features of the Kid. After the Keystone comedies, the rest is decoration. The world as Charlie sees it in the Keystone comedies has one central point of reference— the ashcan, which is always near by, straight in front or just round the corner. Charlie half adores ashcans. He will sleep in them, hide in them, jump in them, and he knows his way all round them. Later he will take to sleeping in dog-kennels and even in dosshouses, but this is clearly only a temporary measure— the ashcan waits him at the end of the road. As he wanders from one ashcan to another with an immortal patience, he intends to extract as much amusement as possible from life, and he will even occasionally interrupt his wanderings to take a 98