Charlie Chaplin & the Little Tramp - Essay Example

Susan Beegel has recently offered the intriguing speculation that the character f Manuel Garcia was based partially on the nineteenth-century matador Manuel Garcia "El Espartero." (Beegel 12-23) Hemingway's article in the Toronto Star Weekly (October 17, 1923) continues to suggest, however, that the character in question was inspired largely by Manuel Garcia Lopez, called "Maera," and his chaotic bullfight at Pamplona in July 1923. Hemingway was a relatively inexperienced spectator when he wrote the article for the Toronto Star Weekly.

In fact, he had never seen a bullfight until earlier that spring, and the title f the article, "World Series f Bullfighting a Mad, Whirling Carnival," (White 99-108) characterizes his rather unsubtle response to what he saw. By contrast, in the so-called "miniature" that he wrote about the fictionalized "death" f Maera-shortly after seeing the fight-Hemingway's tone is, despite the subject matter, coldly, if not grotesquely, ironic. Although he had completed a draft f the miniature by late July, he apparently revised it in response to Ezra Pound's comments, because he wrote Pound that he had "redone the death f Maera altogether different.. The new death is good.

" (Baker 91) Although Hemingway is not, . Indeed, the potential comedy f Maera's cinematic "death" was not lost on Scott Fitzgerald, who parodied the miniature in a letter to Hemingway in the fall f 1926, a year after the miniature appeared as "Chapter XIV" f In Our Time: "The King f Bulgaria began to whirl round and round.. Soon he was whirling faster and faster. Then he was dead." By the time Fitzgerald wrote him, however, Hemingway had long since moved from comparing Maera's death (in the miniature) to a sped-up film, to comparing Manuel Garcia's bullfight (in "The Undefeated") to a pratfall ballet which echoed not just Maera's bullfight at Pamplona in 1923 but the antics f Chaplin's comic tramp, "little Charlie.

" Comic bullfights featuring clowns dressed like Chaplin's little tramp were very popular in Spain and France in the Twenties and Thirties. (Campbell 42) And perhaps Hemingway was influenced solely by having seen a bullfight involving "Charlie Chaplins," as he calls them in "The Undefeated." But there is a good possibility that he was inspired to employ the tramp as an analogue in "The Undefeated" by a conversation he had with Fitzgerald's close friend Edmund Wilson, who had written what he called "a great super-ballet f New York for the Swedish Ballet--a pantomime explained by movie captions and with a section f movie film in the middle, for which Ornstein is composing the music and in which we hope to get Chaplin to act.

" (Wilson 117) Hemingway had first met Wilson in New York, in January 1924 (see Selected Letters, 103, Notes) and apparently learned about the projected ballet at this time. On October 18, 1924, a month before he completed "The Undefeated" (see Selected Letters, 133), originally entitled "The Bullfighters,"