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BOOKS:
ORSON WELLES: THE STORIES OF HIS LIFE
by PETER CONRAD
Faber and Faber; 384 pp.
reviewed by
Matthew Plouffe
A Film Comment Online Exclusive
Honestly, the world doesn't need another biography of Orson Welles. The handful that exist seem to be perfectly adequate accounts of the man's life, documenting the unprecedented successes and countless failures. David Thomson's spellbinding Rosebud - perhaps among the most adept - offers keen insights as it sifts through the endless accounts of Welles the Liar, Welles the Big Baby, and Welles the King in an ultimately successful attempt at covering all of the man's artistic endeavors.
A complicating factor for any writer, well documented in Welles's 70 years, is that he was a deceptive man. One thing that is certain: Welles the Liar delighted in telling his story to those enamored with his legend-that is, just about everyone. It could be said that he saw press, friends even, as another audience with the power to take his show on the road. The question is, when did the show begin, and when did it end? At 23, he looked out at a host of microphones the day following his panic-inciting War of the Worlds radio broadcast and remarked, "I had no idea." (Thomson reminds us that the wunderkind winked, flashing an OK sign to his Mercury Theater cohorts as he walked away from the fluttering notepads.) Not long after utilizing radio to call into question the public's servile relationship with a talking wooden box, the liar was headed to Hollywood to revolutionize another medium, an act that would both lead to his legend and his end in that town.
Peter Conrad opens his preface to Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life with the lines, "There are already half a dozen biographies of Orson Welles; this is not another one. Rather than telling the story of his life, I have set out to investigate the stories he told about that life." These are welcome words to any Welles lover. Conrad states that Welles was "a metamorphic, even a metaphysical man"; the facts can delineate a mere silhouette of the mercurial genius.
A conglomeration of stories, facts, and accounts of the Welles persona, Conrad's account indulges his apparent affinity for engaging in intellectual acrobatics. The results, if you can keep up with him, are no less than enchanting. From the opening pages, his connect-the-dots method reveals an extensive knowledge of the minutiae so often lost in Welles biographies, and the winding paths down which they lead. He specializes in selling ostensible conjecture with a quote from the horse's mouth, playing Wellesian games with his audience and using a refined literary magic far from mere sleight of hand. Segueing from discussion of the god Mercury to his earthly doppelgnger, Conrad writes, "Renaissance humanists dignified Mercury, deflecting attention from his skill at barter and his gift of gab to praise him as a metaphysician, the guardian of lore that came to be called hermetic, sacred to the figure Bacon called Trismegistus. Welles combined these two faces. Adroit, evasive, he excelled at talking his way out of trouble. But he also fancied himself a mystagogue, mediating-like the loftier Mercury of the humanists-between earth and heaven. 'The camera', Welles said, 'is much more than a recording apparatus. It is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.'" Conrad masters his reader by leading him out into a space that seems far removed from the subject at hand, and opening doors where one thinks there are none to be found. That is not to say he doesn't engage in his fair share of guesswork. He's constantly crossing the boundaries of biographer and, despite the aforementioned disclaimer, it can be off-putting, inciting distrust. His book requires a reader's submissiveness, a willingness to be lead along by a wandering tether; doing so yields great rewards. Simply, The Stories of His Life pieces together the Welles that is too often dismissed despite the frequency with which he is called "genius." It endeavors to understand some of the complex intellectual machinery that made the man function and profoundly burdened him in a world unprepared for such an improbable artistic mind.
The autobiographical readings of the films, which have become a cornerstone of Welles studies, are also investigated with a fresh, interdisciplinary approach. Conrad's simultaneous extrapolation and elucidation of the relationship between the artist and his work often reaches far beyond the filmmaker and his films, into a universal, fractured artistic conscious. On Citizen Kane, he writes, "With its erratic array of different genres, the film learned the lesson of simultaneity from the layout of Kane's newspapers. On those pages, divergent stories jostle in the same space, rather than being sorted into a temporal sequence as traditional narrative ordained. Incoherence - in the muddle of Freudian consciousness or the convergence of separate, relative events in Einstein's physics, or in the cubistic clutter of the caf tables of Picasso and Braque-was a modernist virtue. For Welles, it was also a psychological convenience. There were so many Welleses, and in Citizen Kane he set them loose to fight it out."
Conrad's is a bold undertaking. Biographers rarely limit themselves to the facts but use a factual foundation to inspire acceptance from their readers and propose their own legitimacy. In virtually discarding that tried-and-true groundwork, the author engages in an uphill battle from page one (not to mention that his subject may be one of the most fiercely complex artists of the 20th century). Were it not for Conrad's equally complex and beguiling intellect, it's safe to say he might quickly have found himself losing that war. But his insights challenge the common conceptions of Welles, offering vital new perspectives on the man and his life. Even the learned Welles scholar will delight in Conrad's markedly Wellesian courage to go anywhere, to say anything in the hopes that it might lead out of the tired ruts into which classical analysis and biography often fall.
Suffice it to say that the final chapter of The Stories of His Life is inspired by a peculiarity that amounts to a lone footnote in Thomson's biography - that Welles, despite his obsessive love of Shakespeare, never directed or played in The Tempest. It begins with a sinuous account of the Welles Conrad loves, the demystified man with a persona no less worthy of myth, with a life that so often seemed an amalgam of those Shakespearean characters he played. He writes, "In his early life, Welles skirted the role of Hamlet. At the end of it, he also avoided playing Prospero. He said he loved The Tempest more that any other Shakespearean play-as well he might, since it could have been the last installment of his autobiography: it is about the autocracy of illusion, though its magnus voluntarily lays down the staff with which he raises spirits. But Welles never directed the play or acted in it. The omission was so odd that he sometimes hardly believed it, and filled the gap with imaginary productions ˇ he claimed that he had directed The Tempest in London. During the Seventies he remembers planning a version of the play with designs by the surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchev; it was actually King Lear ˇ Gielgud once tactlessly offered him the role of the bestial Caliban. Welles refused, preferring to think of Prospero as his ideal self-image. In 1974 he denied that he was a renaissance man, but said that Prospero certainly was one, and commended him for rejecting the arrogant atheism of the Renaissance by drowning his book of spells and renouncing his black art." The Stories of His Life may be the first book that truly wrestles with the idea that celluloid was but one enigmatic color in the inestimably cryptic work of art that was Orson Welles, the brilliant liar, the master storyteller. - MATTHEW PLOUFFE
© 2004 by MATTHEW PLOUFFE
