by Simon Callow
Act Two takes place early the next night: there are shouts, yells, and a low excited murmur off. Jack is drinking; Bill comes in with a lantern. They can’t find the body. ‘Eldred’s loving this,’ says Bill. Jack asks what school he’s going to. None, says Bill. ‘He doesn’t believe in them. I don’t know what he wants to do. Hasn’t made his mind up yet … he’s young.’ There’s nothing young about Eldred, says Jack. ‘He’s as old as Egypt.’ There isn’t a generation or a world for busy little bitch boys!’ There is a curious, sexually charged atmosphere between Jack and Eldred throughout the play. Jack seems on the brink of a revelation (Bill: Eldred’s my boy. Jack: Your boy! I’ve half a mind to tell you –) when Eldred returns. Bill walks out. Eldred and Jack discuss what’s happened: Jack as The Ghoul has terrified the mourners; the body of the dead squaw they are mourning has disappeared. ‘My God,’ says Jack in one of many seeming anticipations of The War of the Worlds furore, ‘the whole country’s up in arms.’ Jack describes how The Ghoul took him over. ‘Delicious,’ says Eldred. ‘The Brands were always mad.’ After a moment, Jack laughs wildly. Eldred joins him and the sound of his laugh stops Jack. Eldred stops laughing. There are several of these laughing duels in the course of the action. Eldred prescribes ‘a grain of reality’ to cure Jack’s raving. He offers him another drink. Jack: ‘You’re a persuasive little bitch.’ Eldred smiles. Bill comes back, tries to josh Jack, who storms off. Bill and Eldred discuss spirits. Eldred says:
There’s evil on this earth! In holy days, men fought it – there were charms and chants and bells and books and candles, and good men fought for good. But now they don’t believe! Vampires fatten, were-wolves range and witches go unburnt – they aren’t believed! Thicker and quicker flows the force and tide of evil. Strong with a million years’ momentum, since the great flaming fall when all the hosts of Lucifer showered down out of the sky like comets … they are – everywhere! … there – there, behind you! Or there –
There at the door The Ghoul appears. Bill rushes out. Jack, without mask, returns. Eldred asks if Bill’s laughing. ‘No,’ says Jack. ‘He’s dead.’ Curtain.
Act Three starts with Jack raving, wanting to know what he looks like, unable to find a mirror. (Much play is made throughout of the lack of a mirror; an allusion to Dracula, presumably.) ‘If there was a mirror and I looked in it … what would I see?’
ELDRED
Nothing … [you’re] a ghost … I’m the host – The master of ceremonies. I call the dances … the heavens are bright, I see – my star. I must follow it. Last night there was no power on earth but me. Nothing anywhere, I stowed the cosmos in a casserole of my five senses. I made a Morse Code of eternity and got a mess of blots and blurs. That was my world … Tonight I’m sane. I see! Now that Bill’s dead. He left a hole to see through in the night. And Jack Flynn left a reflection … I see my face in it, but something more – behind – bright as my star and big as my shadow – leaning over me and whispering a reason.
Jack realises (not perhaps the quickest, our Jack) that Eldred has manipulated all these events – that he killed Bill. Eldred: (Very quietly) ‘Perhaps. (Almost to himself) I had to. I loved him so. (Almost musingly) Bill was destroyed with love. (Very sincerely) I loved – him so much – he had to die.’ Jack understands. He has become, finally, a new man. He goes to get a pistol. Eldred hands him a box of shells. The drums, the drums. Jack returns with his loaded gun. Eldred: ‘I show you all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And I say unto you, all this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will give it. And I’ll throw in some immortality … if thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.’ ‘ASMOEDELIUS!’ screams Jack. Eldred: ‘It was God’s apple! His bastard – whining! The wriggling Christ! Snivelling and screaming on the cross! Let’s make him pay!’ – Jack shoots him: ‘You’re losing Eldred Satan Brand.’ Eldred’s dying speech predicts eternal restlessness for Jack. ‘ The whole world will be your haunted house … devils don’t [die] – I won’t. The evil that we do lives after us … my demon will never die.’ Jack shoots and shoots and shoots. He stands motionless. Across the lake, sound of the jazz band but the notes come over the distance strangely, weirdly, piping like a gnomes’ accompaniment to some tiny cabal. The door opens slowly: it’s The Ghoul. Jack runs after it, shouting hysterically Eldred! Eldred! The drums, the drums. Something old and dark has got its way.
Eldred, the bitch boy, is one of the most breathtakingly unpleasant characters in the whole of twentieth-century dramatic literature. What makes it doubly disturbing is that it is so self-evidently a detailed self-portrait; the intensity of the feeling, the loathing for Dr Bernstein and his wife are absolutely real. Of course, it may be said that it simply betrays a lack of invention and a lack of imagination: he reached for events, people from his own life and squeezed them into the plot of his melodrama. But whether accidentally or consciously, he has summoned a degree of emotion that is quite shocking. It seems to be self-loathing that Welles is expressing in his delineation of Eldred: he is the guilty one, the inhuman, the not as others – tainted, or just monstrous? The autobiographical elements of the play sing out: in the details, but also in a more general sense of evil, of nightmares, of self-loathing. Until the final twist, Eldred is a Nietzschean figure, rejecting love as weakness, asserting his independence of morality and religion. He exists to destroy. His instinctive grasp of Jack’s weakness enables him to use him as his puppet – to do his evil for him. This could be mere fantasy of adolescent omnipotence; or some deeper more personal feeling of Welles’s that a fundamental weakness and dependency in himself needed to be overcome. He had, after all, from an early age, been dependent on people other than his parents. The most shocking thing in the play is Eldred’s hatred of his guardian; one can only hope that he never showed it to Maurice Bernstein.
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 Tang
iers, 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
