We Need to Talk About Camille

Dear Sarah,

I’m in the foothills of holiday territory as I write this, so forgive (or at least understand) this opening bout of sentimentality. However, there’s a formal point here, if not a critical one, so I take some comfort in the fact that this is periphrasis with a purpose.

As far as I can tell, our first contact with each other came in June 2017, when I received from you an email—“somewhat out of the blue,” as you wrote—about an essay I’d written on the concept of transmedial possibility. I of course knew your work on Faulkner’s brief foray at Universal, and I was rather surprised to receive such a kind and appreciative note from a senior scholar I’d never met. I’d just finished a stint as an adjunct at Yale, where I had been a graduate student, and was about to set off for a part-time position in the History and Literature program at Harvard (where I’d continue to earn a grad student’s wage). I mention the hopping around and the contingent work to emphasize the fact that your kind words came at a crucial time, when it would have been both smart and easy for me to move on to something else. It was important to me that you believed in my work, and important too that you were investigating the professional life of letters amid the new media of the early twentieth century. I find it difficult to write unless I’m writing for an audience; if I can write to someone, all the better. So began a correspondence that continues today and, I hope, into the future (if not always in public).

Almost exactly five years after that first email, in the summer of 2022, you wrote me with comments on the introduction to my book—which has just been released by Cambridge University Press as Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System.You explained in that email that our interests had converged to an almost comical degree. You too had been baffled by the critical neglect of Ralph Barton and Anita Loos’s weird and wonderful Camille; or, the Fate of a Coquette, their 1926 home movie adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils’s 1848 novel La Dame aux camélias (The Lady of the Camellias); you too planned to write about it in the introduction to your study of silent-era motion picture print culture. This overlap wasn’t a problem for you, you said, but was it for me? Of course it wasn’t, but your felt need to “come clean” gave credence to my belief that our disciplines have placed too much emphasis on “the archive.” If anything, the compulsion to lay claim to an archival “discovery,” always valuable during the now decades-long dominance of what Joseph North has described as the historicist-contextualist paradigm in literary studies, has intensified as stable and dignified jobs have dwindled amid the economic volatility of the twenty-first century.

So I appreciated your scholarly decency, but there was no chance that you would scoop me here, precisely because there was nothing to scoop. As I note in the introduction to Classical Hollywood, American Modernism, Camille has long hidden in plain sight, available first as a bonus feature in Warner Home Video’s second volume of The Chaplin Collection (2004) and subsequently, because it’s in the public domain, all over the internet. Indeed, what was interesting to me was the fact that the movie was so available but had occasioned so little comment by scholars of literary modernism and silent cinema alike. I think one reason for that is that because it was already found, one could not say eureka! Instead, one would have to determine what, if anything, was interesting about it. In other words, one would have to do criticism.

All my best,

Jordan

*

Dear Jordan,

Thanks so much for setting in motion this exchange about the wonderfully madcap Camille. And thanks too for your kind account of our initial email contact. Funny—I forget(!) or fail to think in terms of professional hierarchies, and so was touched to learn how my “out-of-the-blue” email hit. I was, simply, so thrilled to discover your work and what seemed to be our shared interests, especially as your work seemed to confirm my perhaps rather eccentric or unfashionable interests: the interactions of “film + literature” beyond canonical authors/modernists in (studio-era) Hollywood, beyond adaptation, beyond the screenplay, and beyond cinematic modernism. To have my interests confirmed, even in an email exchange, by a graduate student in some ways meant a lot more to me than confirmation by a more senior scholar.

As for our shared interest in Barton’s Camille, and its important place in our books, I wasn’t worried about scooping you. I was concerned you might think I’d ripped you off! And yes, you make such a good point about archival “discoveries,” Jordan. I gesture at something of this kind in the opening sentences of the Acknowledgments to my own new book, Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture: Literature in Motion, which was published just a couple of months after yours. In fact, I started writing those acknowledgments many, many years ago, for my book is, as I write in the Acknowledgments, “a gesture of, an act of gratitude for and recognition of archivists, archiving, archives. In some sense, it simply shares what has always been there, owing to the tireless work and care of archivists.”

As you mention, Camille, or the Fate of a Coquette is New Yorker illustrator Ralph Barton’s 1926 adaptation (of sorts) of La dame aux camélias. Barton compiled his four-reel feature, which he screened at one of his famous soirées, by splicing together bits of the home movies he’d made over the years of his friends and acquaintances, many of whom were the most celebrated littérateurs and motion-picture personalities of the day. Anita Loos, whose Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady had just been published with Barton’s illustrations, wrote Camille’s scenario and starred in the title role. Ruined by a “degenerate arch roué” (played by Loos’s husband John Emerson) and condemned to life as a “bird in a gilded cage for MEN” (as the intertitle says), Camille becomes pregnant, is visited by the Virgin Mary, and subsequently kills herself.

I actually cannot recall how exactly I “discovered” Barton’s film, but it must have been by or around early 2017; I certainly hadn’t seen any reference to it before then. I do own the Chaplin DVD that includes Camille so I can only assume that’s where I stumbled upon it. I remember being absolutely astonished on seeing the dramatis personae for the first time (Fig. 1):

Paul Robeson

Sinclair Lewis

Anita Loos

Theodore Dreiser

Sherwood Anderson

George Jean Nathan

Alfred A. Knopf

H. L. Mencken

Charlie Chaplin

Ethel Barrymore

John Emerson

Rex Ingram

Dorothy Gish

Clarence Darrow

Paul Claudel

Somerset Maugham

Sultan of Morocco

Richard Semler Barthelmess

& etc.

I couldn’t believe it. Why had I never heard of this film? Why had I never seen or heard any mention of it? It really should be of great interest to anyone interested in early twentieth-century cultural history; it also happens to be one of the earliest extant examples of amateur film. But it’s also just a riot: the pure pleasure of Sinclair Lewis’s crazy “expressive” performance as the “elements that control the Destiny of Man” (Fig. 2)! Charlie Chaplin’s restaging of his famous “Bread Roll Dance” from his 1925 film Gold Rush!

More narrowly and usefully for the purposes of Literature in Motion, Barton’s film encapsulated in thirty-plus minutes some of the ways motion pictures facilitated new experiences and formations of literary culture: the increasing entanglement of authorship with motion-picture stardom, including the cross-industrial collaborations that saw authors contributing to motion pictures both on and behind the screen and in very hands-on ways.

My first formal-ish piece of scholarship about Camille was a conference paper I delivered at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in 2017. Oddly (to me), no one in the audience showed any interest in this extraordinary film. So it’s especially wonderful now to have this opportunity to attempt to elicit some interest in it via this private-cum-public forum.

Tell me of your own first encounter with Camille, Jordan, and how you deploy it in your own book.

All best, and looking forward to learning more,

Sarah

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Hi, Sarah,

According to emails I sent to myself—my Gmail inbox has long served as a makeshift journal—I stumbled upon Camille in late 2012, a short time after I completed my grad-school comprehensive exam. I read Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes for my list on “film-industry fiction” (an idea about which I had only the vaguest notion at the time . . . something my examiners surely can confirm), and was struck by the intuition that Blondes presented a picture of literary culture that, in its ironic, self-undermining way, troubled Pascale Casanova’s vision of the world literary field. I had taken Joe Cleary’s first iteration of the seminar that served as the basis for Modernism, Empire, World Literature (2021), and was therefore attuned to the ways that the economic and geopolitical transformations of the long twentieth century diffused the authority of the European cultural capitals. For Casanova, Paris is at the center of that abstract, Bourdieusian construction, consecrating the works written throughout the world; whereas for Lorelei Lee, the heroine of Loos’s comedies, Paris is “devine” because “the French are devine [sic],” presumably because their customs agents wear gold braids and can be shut up for five francs.[1] Though Lorelei is the archetypal dumb blonde, Loos uses her as a prophetic dummy, ventriloquizing an account of world culture profoundly reordered by Hollywood. At the end of Blondes, as Lorelei marries the man who will end up being the producer of movies she will co-author and in which she’ll star, she celebrates, too, a marriage of highbrow and low on terms set by the movie capital: “all of the Society people in New York and Philadelphia came to my wedding and they were all so sweet to me, because practically every one of them has written a senario [sic]” (121). I thought Loos, through Lorelei, opened a path for thinking about Hollywood’s role in that reorganization.

So Camille struck me first as a document with similar interests:the transatlantic cast all revolved around the writer and illustrator of Blondes, and Loos was among the most successful scenario writers in the industry. Like you, I was amazed by the cast. And I was also struck, as you were, by the fact that I could find no sustained writing on the film, which seemed symptomatic of a meta-critical issue I’d noticed in modernist studies.[2] I suspected that our field had overlooked this fascinating object because it didn’t fit the rubric by which it had understood the interactions between film and literature.

Although we could compare it to a movie like Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), Camille lacks the self-conscious sophistication of that city symphony; as with Blondes, Camille’s tongue is fully in its cheek. Nor did it have the modernist pedigree of the POOL group’s Borderline (1930), Kenneth MacPherson, H.D., and Bryher’s justly famous avant-garde film of an interracial love affair starring Paul Robeson—even though Robeson, as Dumas, is also given pride of place in Camille. Indeed, where Borderline presents Robeson’s hands as aesthetic objects unto themselves, allowed only to gleam and, once, ball into a hurling fist, Camille not only puts those hands to aesthetic work but also allows them to work themselves, that is, to produce art. Here, Robeson plays the humanist artist-genius he was and could not be in a Hollywood production.

“Was and could not be in a Hollywood production”: that observation was epiphanic for me. Barton and Loos’s Camille and Loos’s Blondes each took the Hollywood studio system’s protocols—its preferred editing style, its prioritization of stars, its reliance on pre-existing literature, its anxious avoidance of anything that might instigate unwelcome interest from censors and antitrust investigators—as a baseline. When Barton and Loos present Chaplin, in the role of Salome, pantomiming at a cocktail shaker that’s standing in for the head of Jokanaan, they concentrate into a single image—smart, silly, and in stunningly bad taste—many of the ways an American modernism took shape within, alongside, and against the Hollywood current (Fig. 3). In 2012, Camille catalyzed the insight that gave rise to my dissertation, but it would take a decade for me to discover the right, or right enough, language to express it.

Sarah, I just saw that Barton’s Vanity Fair illustration “When the Five O’Clock Whistle Blows in Hollywood” will appear on the cover of your book (Fig. 4)! I think it’s an inspired choice, but rather than offer my own take—and in line with the recent Visualities series on book covers (parts I and II)—I’m wondering if you’d like to explain why you think this is the right image to introduce your argument, and what, if at all, this image has to do with Camille.

To borrow the words of Robeson’s Dumas in Camille, thanks in advance for “burn[ing] the midnight oil to guide us a little, with [your] mighty pen”!

Jordan

*

Wow, this is all fascinating, Jordan, especially your reading of Loos’s work as suggestive (and more) of Hollywood’s profound reordering of world culture. Before I turn to “When the Five O’Clock Whistle Blows in Hollywood”—thanks for bringing it up!—I thought maybe I should elaborate a little on what I wrote, too cursorily, about it in my last email: how “motion pictures facilitated new experiences and formations of literary culture.”

Most obviously, Camille is an adaptation (albeit a pretty wild one). Motion pictures’ narrative turn during the transitional era (c. 1907–1917) generated, as we well know, a greater demand for story material, and hence the turn to source literature, and to page-to-screen adaptation, which opened up a world of opportunities (and risks) for authors and publishers. But I’m less interested in adaptation—the production end of the business—than in the ways literary culture came to participate in practices of film exhibition and consumption. In terms of Camille’s not fitting into—exceeding—the scholarly rubrics vis-à-vis film and literature, Jordan, I couldn’t agree more. And indeed my book is a result of the frustrations I experienced, and what I saw as the limitations and in some ways fetishes of this (sub)field, while undertaking my work on Faulkner and Hollywood. The predominance of adaptation in the scholarship about film and literature has obfuscated, to some extent at least, the many other ways literary and motion-picture cultures have interacted over the past hundred years and more, including in terms of the increasing enmeshment of authorship with motion-picture stardom.

Perhaps Camille’s greatest point of interest for me is the appearance of authors (Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, et al.) and authorship via scenes of writing (Dumas at work). Robeson as Dumas in Camille is suggestive of a broader screen interest in authors (a real author, a real author played by an actor, a generic author figure) as well as authorship and literary objects (real or fictional books, magazines, manuscript pages) I see emerging from the late 1910s. I’ll say a little more about the first: real authors on screen. Starting around 1909, and through the teens and into the early twenties, moving-picture footage of famous authors such as Mark Twain, Jack London, James Whitcomb Riley, Rex Beach, and Elinor Glyn was used to preface the adaptations of these authors’ work. I’m not sure that the number of such author cameos I located constitutes a silent-film “phenomenon,” but certainly I found enough of them to warrant some attention. These author cameos tell us something not only of authors’ direct involvement in motion pictures but also about the extent to which motion pictures became increasingly responsible for generating, maintaining, and/or expanding literary celebrity.

And thanks for asking about my book’s cover image, Barton’s wonderful September 1921 Vanity Fair cartoon. I think I must have come across it just after I came across Camille back in 2016. I decided then and there it would form the cover of my book since it captures so elegantly much of it—well, some of it. There is the Camille-Barton connection, most obviously. But it also depicts a group of writers, directors, and actors on Hollywood Boulevard out front of the Hollywood Hotel, which plays a small role in my book’s first chapter. In the early 1920s, several authors who’d moved west to work in Hollywood lived here: Beach, Glyn, Rupert Hughes, Somerset Maugham, and Gertrude Atherton, among others. In her 1932 autobiography, Atherton described the hotel as “the headquarters of all that was most interesting in Hollywood. . . . Not only did many of the screen folk live in that truly abominable hotel . . . but at this particular time nearly all the authors had been herded into it.”[3] And here in Barton’s cartoon are two of the authors who play a significant role in my book: Hughes and Glyn.

Before I sign off, I want to ask you to elaborate on your Camille-prompted epiphany: that Robeson was able to portray the kind of person he was in Camille and that he could not be that person in a Hollywood production.

All very best,

Sarah

*

Hi, Sarah,

Robeson’s position in Camille is too important to discuss so briefly, so thanks for the prompt. As I mentioned, Barton and Loos seemed to take a great deal of puckish pleasure in their violation of Hollywood screen decorum. However, the “casting” of Robeson as Dumas suggests more serious intellectual, artistic, and ethical commitments.

Though it’s a cliché, there’s no better description of Robeson than as a renaissance man. Here’s a partial list of his accomplishments: he was valedictorian of his class at Rutgers University, where he was an All-American football player; he attended Columbia University Law School and played professional football concurrently; he was a committed leftist activist; he was a lauded bass baritone singer; he acted on the stage in London and New York City, and on film in two roles in the race filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul (1925).[4] But because of what we might call the economy of race in mainstream US cinema—where Black people were and would continue to be confined to minor roles and demeaning types—it would have been unthinkable at Paramount or Warner Brothers to present Robeson in one of the author cameos you bring to light. (Consider that although Hammerstein conceived the role of the stevedore Joe in Show Boat with Robeson in mind, and although the play and movie present the character as a man of dignity, Joe is nonetheless made to speak and sing in dialect.)

In presenting Robeson as Dumas, Barton and Loos at once emphasize the Frenchman’s mixed race and honor Robeson’s artistry. With the same slyness we see in the superficially buffoonish Blondes, Barton and Loos acknowledge a history of Black artistry that American popular culture was all too ready to ignore. Robeson’s powerful hands give shape to Dumas’s prose (Fig. 5); as important as the actor’s luminous smile are the images of the man thinking; and all of the action that follows—the depiction of a galaxy of cultural stars so replete as to make MGM green—are figured as the visions of a man whom Hollywood would never allow Robeson to play.

I wish I had put it this well in the book (though surely it could be put better still). Yet another instance where live exchange has made me a better thinker; yet another entry in my ever-mounting account of intellectual debts!

Thanks for this, Sarah, and for everything else.

Jordan

Notes