The Heavy Bear

Chapter 1

BUSTER KEATON first entered my life in October 1964, when I was nine months old – nine months out after the nine months in. He arrived by train in the town of White Rock, BC, a few miles inland from the fishing town of Ladner, where I lay, all my senses on fire, my capacity for memory unknown. That autumn, Keaton was sixty-nine years removed from his mother’s womb and a half-century removed from the vaudeville stage. After several decades of neglect, he was finally enjoying a small resurgence of fame. An international superstar in the 1920s, who directed and starred in a series of silent comedic feature films that made him both famous and wealthy, he was derailed by the advent of sound and its accompanying studio system in the 1930s and became a lost, forgotten, often-intoxicated figure throughout the 1940s and early ’50s. The new medium of television saved him, gave him hope and work and kept him in the corner of the public eye until the public could be reminded of the genius of his early manhood.

After his fall from the heights of fame, Keaton took any job offered, no matter how trivial or cheap, and at one time proudly boasted that he worked more than Doris Day. But the work was mostly dreck over which he had no artistic control or input. Keaton fans – and there are thousands all over the globe – who like to debunk the idea that their hero’s life was tragic simply do not understand what it means for an artist to lose the opportunity to employ his gifts. The same world of commerce that deprived readers of whatever greatness Herman Melville might have achieved after Moby d**k if he’d been encouraged is the same world that deprived filmgoers of the brilliance Keaton and Orson Welles might have achieved had their genius been celebrated and financed instead of quashed. But, as the poet Adrienne Rich writes, “no one tells the truth about truth.” We all prefer legend and myth and illusion. We all prefer the movies. And why not? After all, we see what we know – which is what we remember – in silent, visual terms. If we recall a scream, it’s the open mouth and the terror in the eyes, not the anonymous shrill cry, that comes to us. That Russian woman’s horror at the runaway baby carriage in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is all the more haunting because we can’t hear it.

Back at home, I couldn’t return to sleep, nor could I stop thinking about the little man on the telephone wire. Obviously, I couldn’t go back nearly fifty years and see the real Buster Keaton on the railroad tracks at White Rock, at least not directly. But I could certainly see the screen image of the aged comedian there any time I wanted, because it appears in The Railrodder, a 1965 production of the National Film Board of Canada, and the reason why Keaton was in British Columbia at all. The film is memorable for two reasons: it is silent and therefore affords The Great Stone Face, as he was known due to his stoic onscreen expression, a final opportunity to resurrect the gags and gestures of his youth; and it captures the country I can no longer access with any of my senses, the country that is not a physical space but a vision and a time. How do we remember a feeling? How do we remember what the past felt like?

After making a press of dark roast, I slipped in the DVD and watched The Railrodder. Then I watched Buster Keaton Rides Again, the documentary shot simultaneously with the filming of The Railrodder, which is even more haunting in its depiction of a dying legend and a vanishing nation. And I stepped straight out of linear time – just like Keaton as the projectionist in his classic 1924 film Sherlock Jr., who leaves his own body and enters the story he is showing on the screen – and arrived in the past where the light animates the dead and every shadow is a snarl of tape on the cutting-room floor.