On the Importance of Trivia

In her review of Charlie Chaplin's The Kid in 5001 Nights at the Movies, Pauline Kael, one of the 20th century's most important film critics, noted that "a little girl named Lita Grey (known as Lolita), later to be Chaplin's wife, appears in a dream sequence set in Heaven."

This final trivia note in her review surprised me in a way and got me thinking about the whole notion of "trivia," which we literally take to mean things of little importance. Kael does not strike me as one to include "unimportant" bits of information in her review, so her inclusion of this strange bit of information made me rethink the potential importance of what we normally call trivia.

 At first, this particular piece of trivia strikes one as slightly salacious, especially given that Kael bothers to note that the girl was known as "Lolita" (a word that, long after Chaplin's film, became associated with underage sirens), and that the "little girl" appears in a dream sequence in Heaven. Chaplin married Grey when she was just 16, just a few years after The Kid was released, and she was one of several much-younger women that he was involved with during his life. Kael's bit of trivia, then, prods us to do additional research (to see if she was actually one of his underage wives) and also seems to emerge as a kind of dig at the long-dead Chaplin, suggesting that he saw young girls as idealized dream figures, after all.

That's all well and good, but how does it help us understand the film? Why does trivia ever matter?  My students are always interested in a similar bit of salacious trivia involving Edgar Allan Poe -- the fact that he married his 13-year-old cousin. So, yes, part of it seems to revolve just around gossip-mongering and the desire for dirt. Yet trivia also humanizes our subjects, reminds us of the intersections between art and life and helps us to get to know filmmakers and authors better by examining their flaws and various obsessions. The Kid, though made in 1921, idealizes and even sentimentalizes children through the gauze of Victorian lace curtains, and Chaplin's ability to understand children affected both his work and his personal life. The Kid is a great movie, my favorite Chaplin film, mostly because of the performance of Jackie Coogan, but we can also see the danger of sentimentalizing childhood. For Chaplin, this led to a messy personal life and even potential legal troubles; in his film, his sentimentality, as Kael notes, was "often awkward, and even mawkish." The perfection of The Kid allows us to see the purity of Chaplin's vision, what he was really going for when he wasn't stumbling on these flaws.

On a more basic and intuitive level, trivia complicates our subject in ways that aren't always clear. Trivia is often strange and surprising; it makes us reexamine our assumptions. Chaplin cast his future young wife as a dream girl. So what? There may not be any clear answer, but it gives us something to think about. That's the simple beauty of trivia. 

"It's not really about me": Writing and the problem of persona

When a writer works in the realms of poetry or fiction, or anything that isn't strictly nonfiction, he must deal with the problem of people thinking that the origin of the poem or story must be autobiographical. Frequently it is, of course, but writers also need to feel free to create art without worrying about how the art will be perceived as a reflection of the self. This is particularly a problem with significant others, I think, because they look at the writing as potentially providing clues about people (writers) who are often taciturn and frustratingly difficult to understand. If you're Stephen King's wife, you read a novel like Carrie, which King reportedly threw in the garbage can, and tell him, "I think this is publishable," instead of, "I can't believe you wrote a novel about a weird high-school girl getting her period and killing everybody at the prom." But not everybody can be Stephen King's wife (herself a poet and apparently also a solid proofreader).  Sometimes a significant other can be less-than-ideal as a "first reader" because they're reading the story or poem for clues about the reader instead of reading it on its own terms.You can't really blame them.

A related issue, unfortunately brought up by the events at Virginia Tech a few years ago, is what writing can tell us about the potentially violent tendencies of a person. This is a wholly misguided and dangerous effort. While the Virginia Tech shooter's creative writings might have been disturbing, what might happen if we looked at the books of a writer like King and decided that he was a danger to society? (Another interesting yet sad footnote: King has refused to allow reprints of one of his disturbing novels, published under his Bachman pseudonym, because he was afraid it was inspiring high-school shooters. This is an unfortunate way of looking at things, and if Salinger had thought the same way, we wouldn't have reprints of Catcher in the Rye. But it's obviously King's right, and it certainly reveals his caring and compassionate side.)

Writers tend to hide behind the idea of "persona," telling friends and especially significant others, "This isn't really about me. It's a persona. It's fictionalized."  This is true, of course, in that all creative writing involves a reimagination of the truth.  But it's also true that writing can tell you something about the writer -- not about his evil thoughts or his past devious deeds, but about what he's thinking about and obsessed with.

Either way, it's important for the writer and the reader to not get too hung up on what's based on real life and what works can tell us about an author. Creative writing instructors, myself included, are always trying to convince students that it doesn't really matter if something happened -- it has to be believable and valuable on its own terms as writing. This also works in the converse; we shouldn't look to discern the "real truth" behind a work of fiction or a poem if it works on its own. We might be curious and that might tell us something about whether the story is good (our imaginary conception of Poe as a deranged drug addict says more about the compelling nature of his stories than about anything he did in real life), but we should push that aside as much as possible, and allow the poem or story to speak for itself.