Biography/Buster Keaton: Tempest in A Flat Hat by Edward McPherson : Unlike his contemporary, Charlie Chaplin, images of Buster Keaton in shops selling reproduction movie posters are rare, writes Stephen Dixon.
Unlike Laurel and Hardy, there are no little figurines of him in the fancy goods departments of chain stores. What happens with Keaton is much more special: his timeless magic is discovered and marvelled at by each new generation. And often there's a book - like this new biography - to point youngsters in the direction of his films.
Keaton is regarded as one of the great visual artists of the 20th century. Of all the Hollywood comedy pioneers, he was the one who instinctively understood the medium's potential as something greater than a means of recording gags. He created a unique dynamic between himself and his surroundings, a kind of geometric equilibrium and wholeness that always located him in the eye of a comic hurricane. After his first day in a studio in 1917 he took a camera home and dismantled it, and he swiftly became a master of every technical aspect of film-making.
Towards the end of his life he was required to take a tumble for a TV commercial. "I don't want to tell you your job, young man," he said to the director, "but if you move the camera over here it will be a gag. If you leave it where it is, it's an old man falling down stairs."
Born in 1895, Joseph Keaton was in his parents' knockabout vaudeville act from the age of three, and got his nickname through his ability to perform busters - show slang for elaborate falls. It was in vaudeville he learned the value of his trademark impassivity; audiences howled at the sad-faced child being hurled about.
As he grew to manhood, that opacity became hauntingly beautiful. Behind the white mask the eyes burned with fervour; it was a face that suggested everything and betrayed little. And the body was that of a clown, stocky and stumpy-legged but superbly athletic and thrillingly acrobatic.
Keaton gave it everything: in one film he literally breaks his neck, in another he almost drowns as a restraining wire snaps and he's swept over the rapids. Those were among the few occasions when his meticulous planning was slightly out. In Steamboat Bill Junior (1928), the front of a two-storey house collapses on him and he is unhurt because he's standing where an open window hits the ground - there was a clearance of six inches around him, and if Keaton had been off his mark he would have been driven into the earth like a tent peg. There was no fakery - these were real stunts and real life-or-death risks.
At the height of his fame, Buster Keaton enjoyed total artistic freedom. He was also a member of Hollywood's royalty, living in a fabulous mansion and married to fellow star Natalie Talmadge. But while Charlie Chaplin hob-nobbed with intellectuals and the influential, Keaton's friends remained the gagmen and grips, the technicians and carpenters. Chaplin could pontificate for hours about his Little Tramp representing Everyman and the triumph of the human spirit. Keaton had only this to say about his own screen persona: "He is a working man. And he is honest." Loss of artistic control, alcohol and marital problems all played a part in Keaton's professional decline, but the truth is that his time had passed - when films started to talk there was no place for his epic visual poetry. He never asked for sympathy and for the rest of his career (he died in 1966) just got on uncomplainingly with whatever crumbs the studios threw out to him - demeaning slapstick shorts, bit parts, devising routines for comic labourers such as Abbot and Costello who weren't fit to lace his big boots.
In 1965, with that noble face elegantly eroded by age, drink and disillusion, Buster Keaton appeared in Samuel Beckett's Film, directed by Alan Schneider. Beckett was a Keaton fan and suggested him for the part, and though the comedian was unfamiliar with Beckett's work he gave it his best shot. For some observers, Film is an interesting curiosity, or a bizarre aberration. For me, it has a magnificent inevitability: two great exponents of comic - and cosmic - economy and precision fusing like colliding stars.
Edward McPherson is a young New York writer, and this is his first book. He frankly states that it is a fan's notes; he has discovered Buster and he can't wait to communicate his admiration and respect. There is nothing new in the book, which is a tolerably written account of his best years, but that hardly matters. It might send you in search of Buster and he's easy enough to find. There he is: pursued by 100 wives and 1,000 cops, leaping rooftops, falling and pirouetting, hurtling and tumbling, master of his body and the space it occupies, joyous in his solemnity, never defeated, always honest.
Stephen Dixon is an artist and writer
Buster Keaton: Tempest in A Flat Hat by Edward McPherson Faber and Faber, £20