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

has put so much of his public self into the character of Eldred. As we shall see, 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. They remain villains, but they also function as critics of bourgeois society and as scapegoats; after all, there is a little of Eldred in Jack—and, by extension, in everyone. In one sense, therefore, the Eldreds of the world have nearly the same perverse appeal for Welles as Milton’s Satan had for writers of the nineteenth century; they become symbols of the desire to reject one’s hated circumstances and gain control over destiny.
    On a less speculative level,
Bright Lucifer
is interesting for the way it embodies Welles’s major themes. The mixture of Midwestern pastoral, grotesque terror, and “family drama” vaguely suggests both
Citizen Kane
and
The Magnificent Ambersons
, and when the white man/red man conflict is added, we find ourselves at the veritable center of American literature. The spiritual tension of the play—the contest between a somewhat flawed humanist and a power-hungry maniac who models himself on the devil—will appear again and again in Welles’s later work, most obviously in stage productions of
Faust, Julius Caesar
, and
Danton’s Death
, and in films like
Kane
and
Touch of Evil
. On one side of this battle are liberal reason and good feeling; on the other are the demons of psychoanalysis and the supernatural. Whenever Welles depicts such a contest, he comes to the same potentially radical conclusions that are implicit in most gothic fiction: he shows that evil characters have both power and consistency, whereas liberals are either complacent, badly flawed, or swept up into the tyrant’s own madness. In his more obviously politicaldramas and films, he presents the conflict in terms of a social dilemma, his moral being somewhat pessimistic: evil always wins, the one consolation being that the tyrant’s hubris leads to his downfall.
    For all of its interest, however,
Bright Lucifer
is only child’s play. At one point in the text, in a line Welles has lightly crossed out, the frustrated actor Jack remarks of his career, “I wanted to scare people on a big scale. . . . Not lousy movies. No, I mean artistically—a huge practical joke.” Relatively soon afterward Orson Welles would be able to fulfill this ambition; fascinated with trickery and hoaxes, he inadvertently pulled the biggest Halloween prank of them all.
II
    Had Welles been able to get work in the English theater after his experience at the Gate, he might have remained an expatriate; luckily, he found his way back to America during one of the most interesting periods in the nation’s theatrical history. He soon landed a job with a road company headed by Katharine Cornell, met John Houseman, and began the association that led to the New York Federal Theatre and the Mercury group.
    Welles entered the New York theater just at the high point of what Gerald Rabkin has called “committed” drama—the period 1934–36, when Theatre Union and New Theatre League had produced Clifford Odets’s
Waiting for Lefty
and Irwin Shaw’s
Bury the Dead
. His major work, however, occurred in a period of relative quiet, when the New Deal had become the chief subsidizer of social plays and even the Communists had become moderate. By the middle of the decade the Popular Front had been established, creating an alliance