It always feels like an appropriate moment to talk about Buster Keaton, if only because talking about him leads naturally to watching his films and experiencing again the shades of awe and amazement they reliably awaken. The present occasion is the publication of James Curtis’s Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life, an encyclopedic biography that lays out his trajectory and vicissitudes in novelistic detail, and Dana Stevens’s Camera Man, a series of meditative essays that examine Keaton and his world from a multitude of vantage points.
These two quite different books complement each other nicely. Curtis keeps to a linear path, following Keaton as closely as the archives permit, from his beginnings as an infant vaudeville phenomenon to the long aftermath that followed his decade of triumph in the silent-film era. Stevens, by contrast, darts among adjacent or parallel lives (Mabel Normand, Bert Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald) and events (the Wall Street dynamite bombing of 1920, the rise of movie fan culture, the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous), relating Keaton and his work to what she calls “the invention of the twentieth century.” If Curtis provides the chronicle (immersing us deeply enough to induce claustrophobia in recounting the dark years when Keaton’s career imploded), Stevens provides the brilliantly illuminating commentary, reflecting with its unexpected leaps the imaginative agility of his greatest work.
The two books join an already immense literature. As the most quintessentially silent of silent filmmakers, Keaton seems to provoke from writers a verbal adjunct to an art that so beautifully dispenses with words. It’s as if they were impelled—however quixotically—to complete with language what is already complete in itself. It is not enough to look at his films; there remains always the need to recount them, to recapitulate their gags in slow motion, to plot their mechanisms, to puzzle out how they were made, and to define (no matter how impossible the attempt) their singular effect. Is it a matter of geometric abstraction, of heroic physical feats accomplished without bravado, of a sublime and unsentimental hilarity shot through, in James Agee’s words, with “a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia”? In the search for an appropriate analogy, Keaton has been likened to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Franz Kafka. At the end of his life, finally showered with artistic recognition, he confided to his wife his wariness of “that genius bullshit.”