Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  here life has attained a simplicity and is lived with an artistry surpassing anything – I am sure in the South Seas … somewhere there may be a forgotten land where eyes are as clear and hearts as open, but nowhere is candour so remarkably combined with intelligence, an intelligence which results from nearly five thousand years cultural background. Being then fully cognisant of these several underlined wonders – you may gather that my wanderings have brought me to a kind of lost Eden rich in romance and of bounteous beauty … I shall find it very hard to leave my little cottage by the sea for the world of tram-cars and leather shoes I used to know.

  He visits the Donahues, to see Mrs Donahue’s new-born.

  I know and love every spot and every soul on these isles … I left Donahue’s after a time and spent an hour or so lying in the sand listening to the sounds of the night – afar off the crying of dogs and donkeys – the mournful note of a Gaelic ballad and nearer me the wailing of the gulls and the ‘wash-wash’ of the quiet sea. It was a clear night tonight – so clear that as I walked back to my village I could make out the brighter stars in the wet strand at my feet.

  And then there was the other side of the coin; Dionysos’s part in the Homeric paradise. To Maurice Bernstein he wrote, in the accents of his hosts:

  a shindy is a great thing, and scarcely an evening goes by but what one of us doesn’t rout the old fiddlers out and stage one. You would hardly recognise your Pookles – or ‘Paddy’ as everyone here calls him, jigging away into the wee small hours! Irish dancing is not delicate, but it is a hearty, joyful, genuine expression of the dance impulse. It is a great sight to see the kitchen of, let us say, Maggie Flaherty, (dealer in the mountain dew) – sichh! – cleared of impediments and full of fine Erin men in indigo and homespun and beautiful (I use the word unhesitatingly) and smiling colleens in nice red skirts and sienna jackets, all whirling about in the intricacies of ‘the stalk of barley,’ and stamping their leathern slippers on the flaggings as the orchestra lays on into the night. It was fine tonight, and when the dancing was over, there were ballads sung, and stories told, as is usual – and a long walk across the moonlit strand brings me here.

  He submitted joyfully to a view of Ireland and the Irish – especially the islanders – that merged in his mind with what he had read. He had clearly not read Liam O’Flaherty, then a very angry young Irishman indeed.

  The Irish peasant … is in process of transformation, and goodness only knows where he may get to and what he may become … those literary hirelings that still dishonour our country by trying to persuade us that the peasant is a babbling child of God, who is innocent of all ambition, ignorant of guile, midway between heaven and earth, enveloped in a cloud of mystical adoration of the priests and of Caitlin ni Houlihan, the raparee with a pike in his thatch, the croppy boy confessing his sins on the way to the scaffold to suffer a patriotic martyrdom, a violent primitive who runs wild, naked and raving mad, once the gentle hand of the priest is raised from his back, a cold sexless ascetic whose loins never cry out for the pleasure of love, a quantity as fixed and unchangeable as the infallibility of the pope.

  O’Flaherty’s fierce and furious Tourist’s Guide to Ireland of 1930 tells the other side. But for Orson, romantic American child of his time, he had discovered Shangri-La. He had frankly given up most pretence of sketching. The oils had tumbled out of his rucksack on the first day, and most of them had been sent on to Dublin to await his arrival. With the rest he had managed to execute ‘precisely ten terrible landscapes … the almost unearthly quality of the countryside and the mountains in the West and North completely stumped me. I cannot tell you of the bitterness associated with those ten futile efforts – I actually wept aloud at the realisation of my own incapacity.’ Four went to pay for lodgings, the remaining six destroyed. ‘Ireland is really a watercolour country,’ he says, going on quite accurately to identify his talent as being exclusively for still-life composition, design and portraiture. But there he is stumped, too: ‘I shall carry away with me perhaps half a dozen portraits – most of them will be good likenesses, but as portrayals of that indefinable Erin spirit they will be dismal failures … there is a twinkle that dances in an Erin eye – an intelligent candour – and something more … to paint that is to paint God.’ As for the writing: ‘I am really drinking too deeply of Ireland to write well about it … I have lingered in these parts so long I have almost ceased to be a traveller.’ Drily he adds: ‘neither of us could write an amusing article on Kenosha from the tourist’s standpoint.’

  Inevitably his letters to Dadda end with the eternal refrain: send money! Rather jarringly, at the end of his last letter written from the Isles, he alludes to his incarcerated brother: ‘ the point is an old one, and one which you are much accustomed to hearing, the same blood that flows in Richard’s veins flows also in mine … I am desperately in need of money!!!!!! Unless financial aid awaits me in Dublin, I shall never be able to leave that city alive, but will die a swift and painful death by starvation.’ How much was left of the $500 he started out with is unclear, but he made no bee-line for Dublin, deciding instead to mess about in a boat on the River Shannon, travelling with Michael Conroy, whom he had met in Galway. Conroy was Pádraic Ó Conaire’s brother, and they seem to have had a delightful time of it. He makes regular appearances throughout the journal as Mr O’Connor, a more sober counterpart to Orson’s madcap self.

  Welles is often moved by what he sees. ‘The glory of the Shannon scheme and the wonder of it are suddenly overshadowed by the great beauty of ordinary nature. I think of the much quoted and mis-quoted phrase of Joyce Kilmer – and whisper it to myself as we glide on into the dusk: “Only God can make a tree.”’ The adolescent emotionalism of this passage is duplicated throughout the journal, and is as much to do with literary tone as with real feeling – shortly afterwards he ‘notes with alarm a subtle hint of autumn in the air’. At Limerick he disembarked, heading for Dublin on a newly acquired bicycle named Ulysses, spelt throughout as Ulysees, especially in reference to their Oddysey. Penelope gets a mention too, but classical allusions are abandoned as he realises ‘what a really long way it is to Tipperary’. Boarding another barge to travel up the Shannon again – ‘in as adventurous and I fear as mad a manner as has characterised the whole of my movements in Ireland’ – the account begins more and more, no doubt unconsciously, to have a Jerome K. Jerome feel about it. There are disasters with the bicycle – and the comic refrain ‘I really must get my brakes fixed’ – odd semi-encounters with young Irish women (who seem rather to fancy Mr O’Connor), dark suspicions of madness in entire village populations. ‘I feel a part of all this joyous world about me!’ he exclaims.

  In the margins and sometimes across the page he sketches the barge, the countryside and especially the faces of his fellow travellers. These are vivid, brilliant in some cases. His sketch of the head bargee – ‘he looks and acts like General Lee’s elder brother’ – is a fine creation in the manner of Jack B. Yeats. His prose becomes livelier, too, whenever another human being enters it. His immersion in plays and playing had given him that: a keen sense of character – an external view, but sharp, well observed.

  They finally arrive in Athlone, the end of his peregrinations. The next stop is Dublin, which he enters by bus – the bus drawn in the journal, bowling merrily along into the sun. Over it he has scrawled: ‘a great deal happened here of which I have not written’ and below it: ‘I am riding into Dublin thinking glad thoughts about Ireland.’ They did not last long. Having surrendered to the warmth and generosity of country people, he experienced the shock of the Big City. The journal suddenly loses its hello-clouds, hello-sky blitheness. ‘I am grateful that the electricity was off when I came back to my room that first evening in Dublin two days ago. If there had been light I would have sat down to this desk then and poured out the anguish that was in my soul – and it was anguish – the despairing ready-for-the-river anguish one experiences when unknown and alone in a big city and apparently
forgotten at home.’ No one knew where the American Express office was; when he finally found it there was nothing there for him. ‘“Nothing,” I shrieked – so loudly that traffic stopped on College Green to see what was the matter, “Nothing for W-E-L-L-E-S????!!!” The agent eyed me with Christ-like tenderness. “There was a post-card,” said that gentleman, “for Wallace – but it was claimed!!”’

  Even allowing for the shock of arriving in a city after a bucolic couple of months, Dublin in 1931 could well have been very daunting. Not by comparative standards a very big city, it had, and has, a swagger and a splendour all its own. The layout is that of a great city, some of its buildings rival those of Berlin or London, but its juxtaposition of shoddiness and splendour is more abrupt than in most great cities, its beauty intermittent, its dignity easily compromised. When Welles first crossed the Liffey (the ‘dirty water’ after which the city is named) the marks of the uprising of only fifteen years before were clearly visible on the great monuments of O’Connell Street, heroic scars added to noble features. Layers of history would have immediately been apparent, an essentially English Georgian city somehow subverted by its context, intimate and rural, a capriccio of curious juxtapositions, both a village and a metropolis. Small though it actually is, its character is so powerful as to be intimidating, for all its wit and vigour and good manners. Neither Kenosha nor Chicago – and certainly not Galway and Limerick – not even Tokyo or Shanghai – could have prepared Orson Welles for this maelstrom of sophisticated mullarkey.

  At least he spoke the language; and – better still – there were theatres to haunt. The troubles were far enough in the past, the Free State for the moment securely enough established, to lead an uninformed visitor to believe that Dublin was still one of the capital cities of the United Kingdom. A prime date on the number one circuit for visiting theatre companies hotfoot from London, it offered sensational fare. Bitter Sweet straight from the West End; Will Rogers topping the variety bill upon which those sterling performers Kafka, Stanley and Mae (artists in paranoia?) were also featured. The musicians of the world played in its concert halls: Paderewski, no longer Prime Minister of Poland, was still dazzling audiences with his prodigious pianism; Conchita Supervia was in recital; and the Shakespearean rear was brought up by Sir Frank Benson and his cricket-playing thespians. The now world-famous Abbey Theatre, still presided over by Yeats and Lady Gregory, was the home of both the most vital group of national playwrights in the world and the most distinguished group of players, even eclipsing the Moscow Art Theatre in fame. It also boasted a brilliantly lively and audacious art theatre, the Gate.

  The Abbey Players were in the midst of a world tour, currently playing (Orson may have been vexed to discover) in America, shortly to open in Chicago. So, forgoing the charms of Bitter Sweet, Polish pianists and Spanish sopranos, Orson took himself on his second evening in town down O’Connell Street to the old Rotunda, the converted eighteenth-century concert hall in which the Gate Theatre had taken up residence, to see a play distinctly not of the Abbey School: The Melians: A Tragedy of Imperialism, by Edward, Earl of Longford, in which Ireland was Melos to England’s Athens, a characteristically intelligent and powerful piece, not perhaps in the last resort theatrically persuasive: certainly not in the view of the young American visitor. ‘New and native and to blame for a stupid production’, Orson told his journal. The leading part was played by the theatre’s star actor, designer and co-director, Micheál Mac Liammóir, author of the Galway Taibhearc’s Diarmuid and Gráinne. But Welles’s attention was taken more excitedly by a young man playing a small role: Cathal Ó Ceallaigh, whom he had met on his travels in the North. In some excitement he went backstage to see him; they met and spent some time together wandering around Dublin. Eventually, Ó Ceallaigh invited – was persuaded to invite? – Welles to meet him at the theatre, and there he bumped into Hilton Edwards, director of The Melians and of the Gate itself. Before their chat had got very far, Welles boldly put himself forward for a job. Edwards ‘was gracious and candid. He would be delighted, he said, but the budget would not permit of another member. He could find me a small part in Jew Süss just going into rehearsal but I would have to work on amateur’s wages – which are just a gesture. If I cared to stick it and if we got along together bigger parts might come and he might even persuade the committee to pay me an extra guinea if I accepted.’4 On this basis, he started work at the Gate Theatre. The exuberance of his letters is absent from his private journal, which speaks of ‘the loneliness, boredom, terror and hopes that the VERY BIG city of Dublin has caused me’ and of his shame that ‘the amount of things accomplished or pleasure gained in the last (nearly) three weeks is so little that an account of my squanderings of time and money would only prove depressing reading in the years to come. In a nutshell,’ he rather mournfully continues, ‘I have landed a job in the Gate Theatre and I plan to work there and go to Trinity until Christmas at least.’

  Welles had been sent to Ireland, like a foreign legionnaire, to forget; in his case, the theatre. Now here he was, about to take a job in one, albeit a rather inglorious one. Then his luck changed. Charlie Margood, actor, press agent and assistant scene painter suddenly left the company and ‘I am hired’ – the words PROFESSIONAL BASIS, ringed round, are placed above ‘hired’ – ‘in his place to fill the various departments in which he functioned’. He was, as his letters reveal, employed as a factotum, with the possibility of small roles, privileged to be involved in the work of the theatre and graciously awarded an honorarium which would barely cover his expenses. The prospect filled him with bliss. ‘Step back John Barrymore, Gordon Craig and John Clayton,’ he crowed, ‘your day has passed, a new glory glows in the East. I am a professional!!!’ The last word is underlined six times. On the following page he has drawn a cartoon of a soigné figure with a cane leaving the stage door, as flowers cascade around him. It is obviously meant as a far-fetched joke; in the event it was not so very different to what actually happened.

  His arrival at the Gate Theatre was a supreme example of his being in the right place at the right time. By chance, the directors of the theatre were in a serious spot. They had announced a play – Jew Süss – without having an actor for the crucial second leading part, Duke Karl Alexander; Orson was one of a stream of aspirants being allowed to try for the role. ‘Tomorrow is casting. I have been promised Karl Alexander, the second largest role (and thereon hangs a tale!)’ He understates.

  What followed has been the subject of as many variants and baroque elaborations as a Nativity Scene or an Annunciation; two of the participants were fabulists of Olympic standard and the third was loth to spoil a good story. Here is Orson’s contemporary account, in a letter to Roger Hill: ‘There are two big parts in Jew Süss. One is the George Arliss title role and the other is the half Emil Jannings, half Douglas Fairbanks contrast to the Jew, Karl Alexander, the Duke. I read the play, decided I had no chance as Süss and though I scarcely dreamed of getting it learned Karl Alexander. My first audition was a bitter failure. I read them a scene and being terribly nervous to please and anxious to impress I did a J. Worthington Ham with all the tricks and resonance I could conjure up.’ Mac Liammóir, in his autobiography All for Hecuba, elaborates memorably:

  Hilton walked into the scene dock one day and said: ‘Somebody strange has arrived from America; come and see what you think of it.’

  ‘What,’ I asked, ‘is it?’

  ‘Tall, young, fat: says he’s been with the Guild Theatre in New York. Don’t believe a word of it, but he’s interesting. I want him to give me an audition …’

  The scene of Orson’s audition as Mac Liammóir describes it is a masterpiece of comedy, which needs to be read in its entirety. But it is shot through, too, with a sense of the mystery both of acting and the human personality that is entirely characteristic of its author, and powerfully perceptive of its subject, whom he never ceased to regard as a phenomenon of nature compounded equally of the monstrous and the sublime.


  ‘Is this all the light you can give me?’ he said in a voice like a regretful oboe. We hadn’t given him any at all yet, so that was settled, and he began. It was an astonishing performance, wrong from beginning to end but with all the qualities of fine acting tearing their way through a chaos of inexperience. His diction was practically perfect, his personality, in spite of his fantastic circus antics, was real and varied; his sense of passion, of evil, of drunkenness, of tyranny, of a sort of demoniac authority was arresting; a preposterous energy pulsated through everything he did. One wanted to bellow with laughter, yet the laughter died on one’s lips. One wanted to say, ‘Now, now, really, you know,’ but something stopped the words from coming. And that was because he was real to himself, because it was something more to him than a show, more than the mere inflated exhibitionism one might have suspected from his previous talk, something much more.

  Hilton Edwards (who, according to Mac Liammóir, had throughout that audition, been ‘shaking with silent guffaws and throwing out his hands with broad Italianate gestures as if to encourage our new friend to further frenzies’) brought Orson down to the stalls. ‘Terrible, wasn’t it?’5 said Orson. ‘Yes, bloody awful,’ Hilton answered. ‘But you can play the part … that is, if you make me a promise. Don’t obey me blindly, but listen to me. More important still, listen to yourself. I can help show you how to play this part, but you must see and hear what’s good about yourself and what’s lousy.’ ‘But I know that already.’ ‘Then act on it.’ Hilton’s little speech presumably was made after the second audition; Orson wrote a rather different version of it to Maurice Bernstein:

  ‘You’re already at the point a matinee idol arrives at when it’s got on in years and people are writing plays around his little tricks and capers. But that won’t do here. We have nobody to write nonsense for you to show off in. You have a gorgeous stage voice and a stage presence in a million, and you’re the finest overactor I’ve seen in aeons, but you couldn’t come in and say “Milford, the carriage awaits” as well as Art, our electrician … you couldn’t say “how do you do?” behind the footlights like a human being. You handle your voice like a singer, and there isn’t a note of sincerity in it.’