The British Library is a nifty, nifty thing. I spent most of the day there yesterday, and let me tell you, getting your hands on, for example, a letter written by Charles Dickens to David Roberts (a painter of the era) is something else again. (I just wish I were better at decyphering handwriting.)
This is of course the new building, not the old one where William Morris encountered the young George Bernard Shaw who was studying Karl Marx and the score of
Tristan und Isolde simultanously. But romanticism of old buildings aside, this is better for research, what with every reading room having ample place for laptops, etc. And pencils. I'll always connect pencils with researching in English-speaking countries; they handed them to me in Los Angeles as well.
Monday, by contrast, I enriched various bookstores.
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rozk had told me the second volume of Simon Callow's Orson Welles biography had just come out, and as the first one was already my favourite take on O.W., I immedately went and bought it. I'm reading it now. The great thing about Callow isn't just that, being an actor himself, he can bring the threatrical productions (and films, and radio) to life in a way none of the others can but that he manages to strike a balance between what he wittily calls in the foreword "Orsonolatry" and bashing, both reactions Welles evoked quite a lot. What's more, he takes Welles seriously in a way both many of the worshippers and the bashers don't. Which is to say: instead of getting lots of pages listing Welles' various affairs and the (other) famous people he met, you get, in this second volume which covers the era post
Kane till immediately post
MacBeth, which was when Orson left the US more or less for good as a place of residence and went to Europe, a tight focus on what was our hero's main obsession during those years - politics. He wasn't alone in that, of course, this was after all the WWII and immediate post war era, but what's amazing - and what I, having read several biographies of the man, had never seen laid out like this before - is that he did far more than the usual entertaining-the-troops stuff. One of his ongoing subjects in his radio commentaries, articles and speeches was racial equalit; he worked with the NAACP in the case of Isaac Woodard, a black soldier who after being discharged had gotten viciously beaten by (white) police and lost his eyesight because of it. Callow also quotes some of the letters Welles got as the result of a broadcast in which he had said there was no reason why a black man and a white woman should not marry, and it's chilling to read them because they are basically disappointed fan mail and the racism is so completely taken for granted:
"My dear Mr. Welles, you are not advocating inter-racial marriage between the Whites and Negroes, are you, Mr. Welles? Your commentary last Sunday, July 7th, would lead one to believe that you are. It is very difficult for me, who have believed in you so much, to believe that a man possessing the intelligence that I have credited you with possessing (...) would lend his time and talents to championing such an unworthy cause. No, Mr. Welles, I am not prejudiced against the Negroes, but the Negro, as a race, is mentally incapable of taking a place alongside the white man. He is not competent to make intelligent decisions for himself. (...) Your young daughters are growing up, Mr. Welles - your own lovely little daughters - Christopher and Rebecca - and it will not be many years before they too shall be attractive young women, like myself. How will you feel then, if Negro men whistle at them? Undress their slim bodies, join their eyes? Try to pick them up in cars? Would you consent to your lovely daughters being touched by Negroes? God knows, surely, you couldn't!" (Bearing this in mind, Welles' later choice to switch the gender of the couple in
Touch of Evil in regards to the book the film is based on, where they are a white cop and his Mexican bride, to a Mexican cop and his white bride, is even more pointed.)
And then there's Welles in 1945, writing in an article:
"We are the world's greatest production plant and the largest creditor nation. Without sensible economic agreements between England and Europe, Mr. Luce's prediction of the American century will come true, and God help us all. We'll make Germany's bid for world supremacy look like amateur night. And the inevitable retribution will be on a comparable scale." As in in the first volume, Callow isn't sparing in his depiction of the Wellesian temper tantrums or ruthless reliance on his charm to get out of tricky situations, but as opposed to, say, fictional depictions of Welles as the one dimensional one in the film
The Cradle Will Rock, he also manages to get across to the reader what was so remarkable about the man to begin with, both in terms of art and in terms of fearlessness and engagement. By comparison, the Welles emerging from the biography of Barbara Leaming (who firmly belongs in the camp of Orsonolators) is far more boring, not just because Leaming never utters a word of criticism but because we get a lot about his failed marriage to Rita Hayworth and nearly nothing about politics.
All in all: can't wait till the third volume, especially since the "European" movies are by and large my favourite Welles oeuvres, but given the time between
The Road to Xanadu and
Hello Americans, I probably will have to. A long time.
***
Monday evening, I met
kangeiko, which was wonderful, and saw
Sunday in the Park with George, one of the Sondheims I had previously never seen on stage before. 'Twas a great production, with a stunning design, which really managed to take you into Seurat's painting, and the actors/singers were all fabulous too. With the exception of
Forum, this is probably the "lightest" Sondheim I ever saw, and with my love of morbidity, I'll continue to prefer
Assassins and
Sweeney Todd, but it was truly beautiful.
Today: The Globe, meeting
kathyh, the Tate and perhaps another meeting....
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