Orson Welles, Vol I (24 page)

Stylistically, it’s fevered, stagey, exclamatory – naive, larded with quotations and echoes. But it has real and disturbing power, fuelled by the personal feeling that runs through it. There are theatrical effects, particularly sound effects, of some imagination. But the feel is immature, both confessional
and sensational. He continued working on the play for some years. The bulk of it was written when he was seventeen; but he was still talking about mounting it as late as 1939. ‘
Bright Lucifer
is a likely sounding piece about a Hollywood horror actor, a sort of Boris Karloff, who eventually gets to the point of believing he is an honest-to-god menace,’
¹¹
said
The New Yorker
. ‘This delusion seizes
him on an Indian reservation, and the Indians get him. Welles still thinks it might make a fine play.’ Significantly he makes no mention of the central character.

No doubt it was something he had to get out of his system. James Naremore in a brilliant analysis observes that ‘a great deal of Welles’s work can be explained in terms of the conflicting demands of his humanism, personified in this
case by Jack, and his romantic rebelliousness, represented by Eldred. It is as if characters like Eldred give him the opportunity to express an anger that the more rational side of his personality then corrects and criticizes. But clearly his imagination and passion were fired by the notion of the tragic outlaw; usually he makes such characters the victims of some kind of determinism, and in so
doing he gives a certain humanity to their rebellion.’
¹²
The anger is unmistakable: rage at dependency, containment. It is harder to see the weak and hysterical Jack as an embodiment of humanism. The real issue in the play is between Eldred and Bill, his guardian, and it is over the question of absolute love. Bill has to die because Eldred loves him too much, which renders him weak. Love kills.
Orson was very well capable of expressing himself lovingly, and clearly had an overwhelming need for affection and affirmation (‘the sunshine of your enthusiasm’). But love was also a complicated thing, a source of guilt, disappointment and fearful vulnerability. Often he would seem to need to kill the love that he had provoked. He had, after all, killed his father.

Mrs Leaming, it should
be noted, has an entirely different
conception of the play. The tone, she maintains, is comic, and the self-portrait is ironic, portraying Welles as others portray him, only with preposterous exaggeration – but who then had ever portrayed him as diabolic, or haunted? It takes, I would suggest, a very particular sense of humour to find the wantonly destructive action of the play or its violent
language amusing. It is, rather,
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Demon
, once read, hard to forget. It is a disturbing glimpse into a very old and dark side of Welles’s mind.

After the disappointment of
Marching Song
’s failure to interest New York producers, Welles was restless again. Again Skipper came to the rescue. ‘I needed a new project to absorb this boy’s bubbling energy; to satisfy
that constant creative urge.’
¹³
The boy really was now at a loose end, neither working nor studying. He had scarcely wasted his time; Dublin and the work he did on
Marching Song
, particularly, were highly educative, if not strictly speaking educational. He told Peter Bogdanovich that he had a scholarship for Harvard, but even if that were so, the academic year was well under way by now; he would
certainly need something to fill his time until the following fall. The charm of writing plays without prospect of production may have begun to pall, and nature-watching had its limits, too.

Maurice Bernstein, feeling baulked at every level, had an extraordinary suggestion: that Welles should take to the Chatauqua circuit, just like his mother, offering a similar programme of music and poetry,
interspersed with explanatory comments. No doubt he would have handled the poetry and, especially, the commentary with relish; but quite apart from the question of his musicianship (last heard of three years before at the school concert) the
hommage
to his dead mother is most uncomfortable – everything to do with Bernstein, and nothing to do with Welles. Skipper’s notion was infinitely more attractive:
‘Write a Shakespeare book. Tell other teachers some of the tricks we used at Todd to make the Elizabethan popular in the classroom as well as the stage.’
¹⁴
They would call it
Everybody’s Shakespeare
. As before, Hill would kick things off, writing an introduction and editing the texts: Welles’s chief task was to illustrate the characters and the settings, and through stage directions provide an
impression of how the plays might appear in performance to a spectator.

For Skipper it was a way of killing two birds with one stone: occupying Welles, and using the Todd Press, professionally dormant since the last printing of Skipper’s once brilliantly successful basketball primer. For Welles too, the venture had two purposes:
he would be doing something productive which might have a fair
chance of making him rich and famous (and put an end to dependency), and it would give him an excuse to get out of Chicago. He’d had enough of home – with its comforts but also its demands. Even more than most seventeen-year-olds, he was a man but not quite an adult. He had lived and worked in the real world, earning his way, being judged and assessed and, on the whole, not found wanting. His play
had been read by important New York producers, and though it wasn’t optioned, it wasn’t altogether dismissed either. He had achieved a great deal already. And yet he had no real independence. Sitting around unemployed and unregarded except by his immediate family circle was intolerable. So he set out – not merely away from the North West, but out of America, and indeed out of the Western World.
He booked a second-class passage on the American Export Line freighter for Morocco, the
Exermont
.

Maurice Bernstein forked out the price of the passage. As always, he was willing to underwrite any activity that seemed to push Welles away from the idea of acting. Curiously, whenever Welles appeared to be cultivating his abilities as an artist (surely an even less secure and generally less remunerative
calling than the theatre), ‘Doctor’ approved, perhaps subconsciously aware that it had been Richard Welles’s ambition for the boy. It is also remarkable that he gave his blessing to what was, in 1933, a wildly exotic adventure, fraught with unknown peril. To most Americans, Africa was an unimaginably distant world, much more so than the Far East, which had had, for at least a half a century,
close commercial connections with the United States. The fearlessness with which Welles contemplated the voyage is equally remarkable. The large cities of Morocco – Tangiers, Casablanca, Fez – were accustomed to European visitors (Tangiers in particular was included in many guide-books on Spain, as if it were an island off the mainland) but the interior had been inaccessible to all but the
most intrepid for centuries. Welles, whatever else he was or was not, was intrepid. The simple act of embarking on such a journey is almost as extraordinary as anything that may or may not have happened to him there, the subject of some of his most inventive yarns.

It is useless to pretend that we really know what did happen. In all heroic myths, voyages occupy a special place, and this one
of Welles’s is no different: the secret journey of the hero, his hidden half-year, both initiation and self-discovery. In the absence of any publicly reported activity (he appeared in no plays in Rabat, nor was there a
New York Times
correspondent in Fez), and with few
letters to go on, we can only examine the tantalising fragments of his adventure there that he would from time to time bring out.
In this case, his fabulating gifts had fairly free rein, uninhibited by the existence of witnesses. Some of the stories are delightful in themselves; often they tell us something about his state of mind. What is certain is that he got a glimpse of yet another world, and that the seventeen-year-old who ventured on such a journey on his own was no ordinary lad.

It all started with his customary
boyish exuberance. The letter that he wrote to Skipper on board the
Exermont
is full of holiday high spirits – a tone familiar from all his letters to him. Like most good correspondents, Welles reserved particular personas for particular people; for Skipper he always wrote cheerily, punningly and lovingly; generally he apologised for being behind with the work, whatever it was; and as often as
not he asked for money. He always wished Skipper were there. ‘Of the work in progress on
Everybody’s Shakespeare
: You’ll find grotesqueries in my stage directions, repetitions and misfirings. You’ll have to do a clean-up job. I’ll be relieved when I can get this off in the mails. The mere presence of Shakespeare’s script worries me. What right have I …? What a nerve I have …? I wish to high heaven
you were here to reassure me. Mainly I just wish you were here. You’d love it! Everyone from the captain down is a real character.’ He had with him paper, pen and ink (the illustrations were to be marginal line drawings), a Complete Works, and, he told a journalist in 1938, ‘a trunkful of Elizabethan dramas’. The
Exermont
brought him to Tangiers. At least, that is what he generally said. From
there, according to several of his interviews, he travelled to the Atlas mountains to meet up with his Paris chum, the Kaïd Brahim, son of the fabled Lord of the High Atlas, Thami el-Glaoui. Once there, he was treated to lavish and exotic Arab hospitality. Next he went to Casablanca, and thence to Spain. It is worth considering this baldly recited itinerary in some detail, because if true, it must
have been a simply astonishing experience; and it is not necessarily not true. Certainly the
Exermont
docked at Tangiers, and it is entirely likely that Welles decided to stay there.

If he did, he would have stepped into a scene from the Arabian nights. Benn’s Blue Guide in the 1929 edition (which Welles may well have consulted before setting out) describes the street scene. ‘Moors in flowing
robes and red fezes or in white-hooded burnouses, Jews in dark dresses, and negroes of every shade, throng the streets, off which open the dark little shops of merchants.
Though West here meets East, though motorcabs hoot at biblical strings of laden camels, the atmosphere is oriental, and to wander through the narrow twisting streets and lanes, often vaulted, and to visit the animated morning
markets is to leave Europe behind.’ To say nothing of Highland Park, Illinois. Its proximity to the Spanish mainland made Tangiers an accessible introduction to the Muslim world for European visitors, and of these there were plenty, admirably catered for in a number of hotels and cafés; the powerful French influence since 1919 had ensured a modicum of what were held to be civilised amenities. Nor
would Welles have been the only American in Tangiers, either. In the last few years, there had been quantities of young American artists of one persuasion or another in Morocco, travelling about and meeting up. Perhaps Welles had got a whiff of this, and that was his reason for choosing to go to Morocco in particular. Paul Bowles had been there a year before in 1931; his first view of the city was
a revelation.

If I said that Tangiers struck me as a dream city, I should mean it in the strict sense. Its topography was rich in prototypal dream scenes: covered streets like corridors with doors opening into rooms on each side, hidden terraces high above the sea, streets consisting only of steps, dark impasses, small squares built on sloping terrain so that they looked like ballet sets designed
in false perspective, with alleys leading off in several directions; as well as the classical dream equipment of tunnels, ramparts, ruins, dungeons and cliffs. The climate was both violent and langorous.
¹⁵

Another traveller, Edward Hutton, at nearly the same time – also describing what he saw as dream-like, ‘as though suddenly you had half-remembered something that for a lifetime you had forgotten’
– wandered through the streets till he came upon a gate:

A noble-looking old man in soutane and turban, with bare feet and legs and beautiful expressive hands recited to a listening circle of people the acts of the prophet. Every now and then he would pause and play a little desert air, the formless tune of a nomad people, on his tiny Arab guitar … it was Homer that I saw in the midst of that
attentive throng, Homer reciting ‘The Wrath of Achilles’ to the people of Chios, in days that we cannot forget. Not far away I found the snake charmer piping to his swaying servants …
¹⁶

Such sights must have spoken deeply to the aspect of Welles
that had fallen in love with the Aran Islands and their vanished civilisation. For Welles, who was there to illustrate the plays of Shakespeare, it
may have occurred to him that this culture had more in common with the Elizabethan world than the Elizabethan world does with our own: a structured world, one in which simple tools performed the daily tasks, where the community existed as a living whole, and where religion audibly and visibly penetrated every moment of the waking day. He’d seen China, Japan, rural Ireland, he’d spent time on an
American Indian reservation. Here was yet another manifestation of human culture, entirely different again. If travel really does broaden the mind, few people of his age can have had greater breadth; few people of any age.

So far, so credible. The story now modulates into the Thousand and One Nights mode. Welles-Scheherazade told Barbara Leaming (and no one else) that travelling around Tangiers
and its outskirts in buses, having presumably seen and tired of the Souk, the Casbah and the seemingly unending beach (the second longest in the world), he bumped into an elderly Dutch miniature water-colourist, a curator at the Rijksmuseum. They palled up and travelled together for some weeks. This is a familiar pattern: Mr O’Connor in Ireland and Larry the Archer had been previous travelling
companions. The elderly Dutchman, it transpired, was expected at the court of Thami el-Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakesh, so they headed in that direction. In doing so (assuming they did) they would have been taking a route that had only recently been opened up and was treacherous to negotiate. The Hachette Guide to Morocco of 1924 firmly pronounced, under the heading
TOURING AND EXCURSIONS AMONG THE
NATIVES
that ‘the time for distant trips in the mountains and in the Sahara has not yet come: it is necessary to wait till the political situation has improved in those parts, and the still rebellious tribes have made their submission’. By 1930, the same guide was cautiously looking forward to ‘the possibility’ of travel to the mountains. A year earlier, a dogged young Englishman (Richard Hughes,
later author of
A High Wind in Jamaica
) had with great difficulty reached the same destination by donkey. But it is just possible; let us assume that our odd couple, an enormous plump American, laden with Elizabethan dramas, pen, paper and ink, and an elderly Dutch curator with his artist’s materials, arrived together in Marrakesh.