The Magic World of Orson Welles by James Naremore Read Free Book Online

you, but you’re getting past the age—
    ELDRED : You’ve tried to be just like a father to me, haven’t you? All those years tucking me into bed. I have my mother’s eyes, haven’t I? I used to wear bangs and we went on little walks together and you taught me the alphabet. Yes, and Christ knows you’ve taught me that litany!
All these years!
 . . . my adored old stepmother . . .
    BILL : Listen, Sonny, your mother and I—
    ELDRED : My mother? You mean
Martha, that
woman?
    BILL :
Eldred!
    ELDRED : She hates me! She hates me, Bill! It’s true! She’s jealous of our love for each other. So’s [Jack]!
    BILL : Eldred, my God!
    ELDRED : I tell you I’ve seen it in his eyes all day, jealousy and hatred and craziness—
    Naturally it is Eldred who is crazy, and one should hesitate before imputing a purely autobiographical motive to these lines. Even at eighteen, Welles had a highly developed sense of the Eldred-like roles his voice and body had destined him to play. He was too sophisticated a writer not to disguise his private life, and his emphasis on oedipal rivalry may be less a considered analysis than an attempt to be au courant. The passage does, however, prefigure a tendency in his later work, where he constructs fantasies loosely based on his own life, often projecting himself into the role of a possessed, pathologically troubled character whose behavior is the result of misplaced libidinal energy. The demonic, self-destructive urge for power in this character grows out of a Freudian conflict, and the fictional world Welles constructs belongs in a tradition somewhere between old-fashioned gothic melodrama and psychological “realism.”
    Despite the setting, the play is dominated by themes of savagery and devil worship, symbols of Eldred’s troubled consciousness, and the staging suggests Welles’s later experiments in the “Voodoo
Macbeth
.” A group of Indians—probably based on the Menominee of northern Wisconsin—are encamped near the island, engaged in a burial ceremony for a squaw; the sound of their drums keeps entering from offstage, providing eerie background for the contest between Jack’s sanity and Eldred’s affection for the “dark gods.” Ultimately the monster actor is no match for the real thing. While Bill is momentarily away, Eldred takes advantage of a conversation about practical jokes in order to convince Jack that a trick can be played on the Indians: Jack will dress up in his Hollywood costume (which happens to have been brought along on the fishing trip) and appear at the ceremony outside. Jack agrees to this adolescent scheme, but he is carried away by his own performance; he kidnaps the squaw from the frightened Indians and spends most of the night running through the forest carrying a dead body. Eldred has somehow anticipated all of this and is trying to engineer Jack’s madness. When the actor returns to the cabin, shaken and guilty, Eldred helps him conceal the facts from Bill and proposes that he put on the monster costume once more in order to give Bill a good laugh. Again—somewhat implausibly—Jack capitulates; and when Bill sees a horribly realistic “ghoul” standing in the cabin, he dies of a heartseizure. Eldred and Jack are left confronting each other in the lonely cabin, Eldred raving madly about the triumph of evil and offering to become Jack’s “manager” for any hauntings in the future. Jack seizes a revolver and shoots Eldred dead, but as he stands over the body, an apparition appears: a ghoul, looking exactly like Jack himself in the monster costume. Jack rushes out into the night, screaming Eldred’s name. The devil drums begin sounding outside, and Welles’s stage directions remark, “Something old and dark has got its way.”
    This contrived story provides some basis for psychological speculation about Welles, who