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

between Marxists and antifascist writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Archibald MacLeish. (Welles’s first important American role was as a doomed capitalist, a sort of ur-Kane, in MacLeish’s political drama
Panic
.) Throughout this time Welles was in sympathy with the left, and like most intellectuals he regarded Roosevelt as a hero; he remained an outspoken, active supporter of Soviet-American friendship, an antagonist of racism and fascism, until late in the forties. His political consciousness was shaped by the Popular Front. At various times he called himself a Socialist, remaining strongly antifascist yet somehow within the “pragmatic” ethos of New Deal reformers. In fact the remarkable sense of inner tension and contradiction that can be seen in a film like
Kane
is in some ways a reflection of the subtle complexities and contradictions in Welles’s own political situation.
    Welles also had come to prominence during a period of collective consciousness, when the major theatrical achievements were the result of groupactivity. Even the clearly non-Marxist dramatists like Sherwood Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, and Robert Sherwood had formed a loose alliance in the Playwrights’ Company, and New York was bustling with small theater collectives. (It was toward the end of this period that Welles and Houseman dissolved their partnership; according to Houseman, their egos had begun to conflict—a foreshadowing of the loss of collective spirit in the arts generally.) Of all the groups in those days, easily the largest was the Federal Theatre Project, which brought employment to actors and drama to people on a scale that has never been duplicated; in New York alone there were four major Federal Theatre companies, so Welles and Houseman accounted for only a small part of the total. Quite naturally, the project was attacked by conservatives, particularly by the Hearst press, which called it “an adjunct of the New York Leftist literary junta.” Although only about 10 percent of the productions had an overt political content, the very existence of such a theater was troubling to Republicans. At first Hallie Flanagan, the executive in charge, resisted censorship of the plays, but political pressure from the right mounted steadily. This no doubt contributed to the trouble Welles and Houseman encountered when they tried to stage Marc Blitzstein’s “labor opera,”
The Cradle Will Rock
, their only venture into truly proletarian theater, which was summarily closed by government agents and forced into a stunning improvised performance down the street in the aisles of the Venice Theatre. Welles immediately resigned his job with the New Deal, and Houseman was fired.
    But if they had departed the government officially, Welles and Houseman retained their New Deal approach to theater. They formed a repertory company with an investment of $10,500, lifting the name “Mercury” from a copy of
Mercury
magazine lying in a corner of an empty fireplace at Welles’s home. The company eventually had thirty-four members and took over the old Comedy Theatre on Forty-first and Broadway, announcing four productions for its first year of operation. With the blessing of Brooks Atkinson, the Mercury’s foundation was headlined in the Sunday drama section of the
New York Times
, where Welles and Houseman alluded to their previous Federal Theatre projects as a way of explaining what the new undertaking would be like. (Welles had already declared himself an enemy of government-controlled theater, but his opinions about this matter tended to vacillate; a short while later he appeared in Washington to testify on behalf of the Coffee-Pepper Bill, hoping to establish a Federal Bureau of Fine Arts.)
    Although the Mercury was to be dominated by Welles’s personality and by publicity about him, it presented itself as a group project trying to entertain and inform a mass public. The