by Kelly Pickerill
[[To watch Charlie Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life, see the “teaser” blog for Sunnyside here.]]
Glen David Gold’s masterful novel Sunnyside opens with a curious event: simultaneous sightings in 1916 of Charlie Chaplin in six different cities, accompanied by his rumored arrival at various train stations throughout the United States, and his being paged in over eight hundred hotel lobbies across the country.
One of the sightings, off the northern coast of California by a Mr. Leland Wheeler, sets in motion events that will forever change his life. Leland works in a lighthouse under the domineering thumb of his mother, but he fantasizes about becoming a motion picture star. Though he doesn’t until later learn he came from show business (both he and his mother were abandoned by his father, the leader of a traveling wild west show, before he was born), Leland is determined to return, despite the fact that his mother (and the war) stand in his way.
Though they meet in the novel only once (without Leland’s realizing whom he’s speaking to), Gold places Charlie Chaplin and the fictional Leland Wheeler at Sunnyside‘s focal points. As delightful as it is to get a glimpse inside Chaplin’s head, one of the most enjoyable things about reading Sunnyside is getting to know Leland Wheeler. Leland could be seen as Chaplin’s emotional doppelganger–both characters are resentful yet reverent of their mothers, they both experience the fiercest pride one moment and in the next the most crippling self-doubt. Yet while Chaplin holds his audience, those closest to him, and, it could be argued, himself at arm’s length, Leland is more willing to unearth and discover those parts of himself that are the most damaged.
“[Chaplin] wanted the world to love him forever so he could tell them, forever, what idiots they were for doing so.”
Chaplin, in his films, is continually looking for that scenario that will showcase the Little Tramp’s vulnerability, will really make him lovable and and show him to be completely innocent. But Chaplin’s own innocence and “lovability” begin to fade as he becomes jaded by the cult of celebrity surrounding him. At a war fundraiser, Chaplin tries to connect sincerely with his fans, but “now that he was trying to be both himself and a servant of the world, he was failing. He persevered, believing that the simple act of faith, the spirit of talking with the audience, would lead to a kind of communion.” All the audience wants is to see him do his funny walk.
Leland, on the other hand, begins the novel naïve, stubborn, and prideful, but through its unfolding–most specifically, through his experiences in the war and his relationship during it with a very special dog–he learns to let go of his false self-worth in exchange for true honor. Of course, along the way, he experiences moments of crippling self-doubt: “‘Acting’ as a calling led him to realize that all was vanity. He would serially let down everyone who had ever known him.” During the war Leland learns to forgive his mother for her heavy-handedness, his father for his self-importance, and himself for his self-deception.
Sunnyside is set during the heyday of the silent film stars, but it’s not about early American film. In the early 20th century, the motion-picture changes America profoundly; celebrities become important and emulable not by virtue of royal birth or social status, but by their ability to convey their emotions in their movements and expressions. During the war, Americans flock to the movie theatre in droves; even during the flu pandemic of October 1918, the managing director of the Strand Cinema remarks in the newspaper, “We think it a most wonderful appreciation of [the Chaplin film] Shoulder Arms that people would veritably take their lives in their hands to see it.” But the letter appears next to his obituary, for, immediately after posting it, he himself drops dead of the flu.
Sunnyside is set during World War I, but it’s not about the war. In Gold’s novel, “the war to end all wars” becomes another character. Dogged yet determined, by the end of 1918 the war seems to be going through the motions it once felt with ferocity. The war lives in the novel through the characters’ thoughts and actions; it is therefore by turns atavistic, demoralizing, and self-aggrandizing, or ennobling, humanizing, and humbling. As seen through the characters’ eyes, at any moment the war is simultaneously barbaric and beautiful: “What was the lesson here, and were there still lessons at this late date? He wanted the war to be over; he wondered what ‘over’ meant, and when the next war would begin…There was a thin line, for instance, between tenacity and stupidity. A mutiny was a stroke of genius or it wasn’t. How sad to make the effort.”
Sunnyside is a study of the parts that make up a whole. Celebrity, authority, creativity, something as comically entertaining as petty thievery and as sobering as what constitutes honor, nothing is beyond the deft pen of Gold. What makes up the magic of the novel is the way Gold layers these multitudinal hues to create a finished canvas that is complex and sprawling yet gripping and completely accessible. You really shouldn’t miss it.
