THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022 65
merely an incident in a longer sequence
that begins when the roof and walls of
a hospital building are whisked away
like a magician’s napkin; then a much
bigger house falls on Keaton, who, ac-
cepting it neutrally, grabs a tree trunk
and holds tight as it flies across town
and into the river. Nothing like it had
ever been seen in a theatre, or even imag-
ined in a book, so specific are its syn-
tax and realization to moving pictures.
How are we to share these glories in
2022? Fortunately, Cohen Films has pro-
duced mint-quality restorations of all the
great movies, and Peter Bogdanovich’s
last work, the 2018 documentary “The
Great Buster,” is a terrific anthology of
highlights. Even more fortunately, those
two new books, each excellent in its way,
are weirdly complementary in their com-
pleteness. James Curtis’s “Buster Keaton:
A Filmmaker’s Life” (Knopf ) is an im-
mense year-by-year, sometimes week-by-
week, account of Keaton as an artist and
a man. Every detail of his life and work
is here, starting with his birth, in 1895, as
Curtis painstakingly clarifies which of
two potential midwives attended to the
matter. (Mrs. Theresa Ullrich rather than
Mrs. Barbara Haen, for the record.) His
perpetually touring and performing par-
ents, Joe and Myra, had been on the road
when it happened, in the one-horse town
of Piqua, Kansas. Curtis takes us through
the progress of the brutal comedy act that
Joe Keaton raised his son to star in; things
were so hard at the turn of the century
that at one point Harry Houdini, with
whom the three Keatons shared a show,
had to pretend to be the kind of psychic
he despised in order to draw the rubes
into the theatre. We even hear about gags
that Buster Keaton helped invent for Ab-
bott and Costello in his later, seemingly
fallow, years.
Dana Stevens, in “Camera Man”
(Atria), takes an original and, in a way,
more distanced approach to Keaton. In
place of a standard social history of si-
lent comedy, much less a standard bi-
ography, Stevens offers a series of pas
de deux between Keaton and other per-
sonages of his time, who shared one or
another of his preoccupations or proj-
ects. It’s a new kind of history, making
more of overlapping horizontal “frames”
than of direct chronological history, and
Stevens does it extraordinarily well.
Some of these pairings, to be sure, are
more graceful than others. The comedi-
enne Mabel Normand appears for the
somewhat remote reason that Chaplin
refused, early in his career, to be directed
by her, a fact that’s taken as an index of
the misogyny that reigned in the world
of silent comedy. (The truth is that Chap-
lin, a once-in-a-century talent, routinely
bullied anyone who tried to tell him what
to do.) On the other hand, a chapter on
Robert Sherwood and Keaton is genuinely
illuminating. Sherwood, now forgotten
despite four Pulitzers and an Oscar, was
one of those writers whose lives reveal
more about their time than do the lives
of those writers gifted enough to exist
outside their time. The author of well-
made, well-meaning plays advancing pro-
gressive causes—he ended up as one of
F.D.R.’s chief speechwriters—he cham-
pioned Keaton, notably in the pages of
Life, with acute discernment, a reminder
that the categories of popular culture and
serious art were remarkably permeable in
the twenties. Just as Hart Crane was writ-
ing poetry about Chaplin when Chaplin
was still only very partly formed, Sherwood
recognized Keaton’s greatness almost be-
fore it seemed completely manifest. Writ-
ing about Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton in
the early twenties, he maintained that
their efforts “approximate art more closely
than anything else that the movies have
offered.” Sherwood even wrote a feature
for Keaton, which, like James Agee’s at-
tempt at writing a movie for Chaplin,
proved unmakeable. Sherwood’s script
got Keaton marooned high up in a sky-
scraper but couldn’t find a way of getting
him down. When Keaton and Sherwood
saw each other in later years, Sherwood
promised to get him down, but never did.K
eaton seems to have been one of
those comic geniuses who, when not
working, never felt entirely alive. He ful-
filled the Flaubertian idea of the artist
as someone whose whole existence is
poured into his art: the word “dull” crops
up often as people remember him. Cur-
tis is particularly good on the early years.
Joseph Frank Keaton spent his youth in
his parents’ knockabout vaudeville act;
by the time he was eight, it basically con-
sisted of his father, Joe, picking him up
and throwing him against the set wall.
Joe would announce, “It just breaks a fa-
ther’s heart to be rough,” and he’d hurl
Buster—already called this because ofhis stoicism—across the stage. “Once,
during a matinee performance,” Curtis
recounts, “he innocently slammed the
boy into scenery that had a brick wall
directly behind it.” That “innocently” is
doing a lot of work, but all this brutal-
ity certainly conveyed a basic tenet of
comedy: treating raw physical acts, like
a kick in the pants, in a cerebral way is
funny. “I wait five seconds—count up to
ten slow—grab the seat of my pants, hol-
ler bloody murder, and the audience is
rolling in the aisles,” Keaton later re-
called. “It was The Slow Thinker. Audi-
ences love The Slow Thinker.”
A quick mind impersonating the Slow
Thinker: that was key to his comic in-
vention. The slowness was a sign of a
cautious, calculating inner life. Detach-
ment in the face of disorder remained
his touchstone. Of course, stoicism is
one of the easier virtues to aspire to when
your father has actually put a handle on
your pants in order to ease the act of
throwing you across a vaudeville prosce-
nium, and it’s easy to see the brutality
as the wound that drew the bow of art.
But in this case the wound was the art;
Keaton minded less the rough play than
his increasingly drunken father’s refusal
to let him out of the act long enough to
go to school. He seems to have had ex-
actly one day of public education.
In New York, the Keatons found
themselves at war with city reformers
who were evidently more passionate
about keeping children off the vaude-
ville stage than about keeping them out
of the sweatshop; arrests and court ap-
pearances ensued. After that, the family
largely avoided New York, often retreat-
ing to the backwoods resort town of
Muskegon, Michigan, the nearest thing
young Buster ever had to a home. It was
only when Joe started drinking too hard
and got sloppy onstage that, in 1917, the
fastidious Buster left him and went out
on his own. It was the abuse of the art
form that seemed to offend him.
In those days, young comedians were
being swept off the stage and into the
movies more or less the same way that
garage bands were swept out of high-
school gyms and into recording studios
in the nineteen-sixties. Keaton fell in
with Joseph Schenck, then a novice movie
producer, who paired him with Roscoe
(Fatty) Arbuckle in the equivalent of the
John Belushi–Dan Aykroyd teaming, a