The Print Media's Commentary on Kane Fiasco

[Glenn Anders]

Tony: I take it, then, that you would call yourself, what was known when I was in school, a "New Critic." You stick with the work itself, are meticulous about details, stay with the text, etc.

Fine.

Let's start with a fundamental: I know that you don't mean that your favorite charlatan is named "Thonpson." That has to be a typo. But I notice that both you and Baesen insist on misspelling his name, "David Thompson." His name is "David Thomson."

A-HA!! Take that!

Unless you want to gain him sympathy; revive that old line, "Call me anything, but spell my name right"; or give him the excuse that you must be writing about some other "David," I would put "David Thomson" down on my little "sh*t list," if I were you!

Back to textual criticism:

Now as to the substance of your reposte . . . well, there isn't much of it. Once more you obsess on homosexuality. I don't understand where that comes from. I never brought it up. My remarks are about Welles' loss of his mother, his uncertainty about his father, his love/hate of "Dadda" Bernstein, his womanizing which prevented him from sustaining a modicum of tranquility with his wives. My whole point is that these biographical details and themes are at a deep level, and often tertiary to the main thrust of his films, including CITIZEN KANE (which unless a genius manages to meld THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND together, I'm afraid, Tony, will always be seen as his greatest picture).

Is homosexualtity really at the heart of the criticism that you have of Thomson's work? Surely, not of Conrad and Higham, too? You say not, but that seems to be your main objection behind the idea that Mankiewicz might have suggested, even challenged, Welles to infuse CITIZEN KANE with biographical detail. After all, to Welles, all of this would have just been other pieces of the puzzle, their creation known as Charles Foster Kane.

Isn't saying, "Thonpson [sic] may devote only six pages, explicitly, but implicitly his book continues the tradition, as do Conrad's, Higham's, etc." -- really one of those McCarthy witch hunt phrases? I'm sure you, Baesen, certainly Welles, would condemn this statement if they were written to criticize a person's political opinion. Why should I or anyone else accept it when used to attack a work of literary biography, worse yet the biographer himself?

You seem to be saying: "All right, Glenn, a-ha, a-ha, we know what you mean when you defend your pal, Davie Thomson. Isn't it true, Little Davie and his ilk use feminine adjectives to describe our leader, Orson Welles? If he walks like a duck, Glennie-baby, and quacks like -- "

See what I mean, Tony?

I hope so.

But in principle, to accept your ploy, for academic purposes, as a hypothetical, I agree that Art must be taken on a case by case basis, judged on its merits. My understanding of Music is that it is best when it is pure, non-programatic. Popular as Rimskij-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumble Bee" once was (may yet be?), it will not stand up against a Bach's "Brandenburg Concerto, #5. But if the composer does not name his piece programatically, how can we really tell?

That's why, as you yourself point out, Bach is not a good example, nor is Will Shakespeare in Literature, because we do not know enough about the motivations of the one, nor much at all about the specific emotional life of the other. Much of what is said about "Will" is silly speculation, and, except in the Sonnets, doesn't have any thing to do with the work.

Music, like most Art really, deals primarily with emotion. As you say, we don't know if Bach is gay or not, or if his Concerto #5 is for or about homosexuals. In fact, we can't tell if Rimskij-Korsakov is gay (at least, I can't, nor do I care), or if it is "The Flight of the [Gay] Bumble Bee" or "The Flight of the [Macho] Bumble Bee." We don't know if Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" concerns heterosexual armies or homosexual armies. If Fydor had not given a name to his overture, we would say that it is about turbulence, passion, triumph.

And after listening to a lot of Tchaikovsky's music, we could guess what his orientation was. Right? Right. And we would generally be wrong.

Music. Emotion.

Dance. Poetry in motion. The emotion of gesture. Despite popular opinion, it is very hard to look at dancers, and determine their sexuality. And what is a gay ballet?

Painting. Emotion in line and color. How do you tell a gay painting from a "normal" one?

Dealing with words becomes more difficult, but literary art at its purest is again about emotion.

I was struck by an earlier remark you made, Tony, which I did not respond to:

"I remember someone once saying 'The further removed an artist's work from their perrsonality [sic], the more pure the art.' Personally, I might not go that far, but I believe that the relations of the work to the artist are totally unimportant to the value of the work itself, and can never be proved in any case."

If you believe that, why say anything about a work? Once there was something of a prohibition here about discussing the political ramifications of Welles' work. Then, Callow, evidently on the wellesnet approved list, came along with Hello Americans, and everybody discovered that Welles spent his whole adult life passionately involved in political matters. The prohibition was relaxed to some extent.

Several months ago, maybe last year, I floated a theory that THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS was really primarily about American women, as CITIZEN KANE had been about American men. That notion was greeted with cool indiffernce, to put it gently, or cold rejection to put as I took it. Why? Could Welles have been an early feminist, for all his difficulty with women individually, in the flesh? [Not speaking of going to bed with them necessarily, mind.] Perhaps, a study of Welles' attitudes toward what would now be called "women's liberation," reflected in his works, should also be rejected as "nonsense," "rubbish."

Why did Welles work so many Black people into his productions (as in his Harlem Macbeth) and stress Black Themes in his interpretations (as in OTHELO)? Why did he champion Black women like Eartha Kitt? Perhaps we should reject any mention of those matters because they might reflect the fibers of Welles' life.

The list is endless.

Now, unfortunately, Tony, back to your hobby horse of homosexuality, the example you pick is not a very good one. First, you say that homosexuality is just "a convenient example of how the private biography has no real bearing on the work, at least any bearing which can tell us anything of worth about the work . . . ." Then, you ask:

"Let's hypothesize Tennessee wasn't [gay]: would it change the value of his work? Could he not have an understanding of the feminine without being gay?"

Well, of course, he could and did have an understanding of the feminine, and his sexuality wouldn't change the value of his works, but the significance of the works would be different in the eyes of critics, possibly in his attaraction to his public. In fact, his works would probably have been very different.

Given his upbringing and the attitudes of the time, a hetrosexual Tennessee Williams might not have had the same sympathy and compassion for his sister Rose that the gay Tennessee did. She would have been his crazy Fanny. Rose probably would not have been central to, arguably, his two greatest plays: The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. A hetrosexual Tennessee might well have regarded his sister's schizophrenia, as Welles saw his schizoid brother Richard's condition, as a shame, an embarrassment, as a lurking fear in his psyche. There was probably some of that as it was, and Williams' ability to rise above that, for all his fear and compassion, suggests what kind of human being he was.

And a hetrosexual writer of Tennessee's ambition, power and skills, all things being equal (and they never are), would probably not have spent the years 1930 to 1944 writing twenty unsuccessful plays, trying to turn himself inside out to get something produced on Broadway.

The biographical themes and details of Orson Welles' life, marvelously sublimated in his rich works, should not dominate our appreciation of the works themselves, but their place as a level in the discussion of his films should not be ignored either.

Writers like David Thomson and Peter Conrad are simply redressing a balance neglected by others.

I rest my case.

May I go now, sir?

I have to prepare to meet the evil "Man Mountain" Baesen for the WWF Literary Division Title over in the next arena. He's the huge guy with the horned Balaclava Helmet, right?

BTW, I have a good friend here, Peter Delacorte, a writer of one of the great Hollywood Sci-Fi novels, Time on My Hands, and a consultant on the 1998 film, All I Wanna Do, who goes with his wife, Bonnie, to the Toronto Film Festival every year. You guys should get together.

Uhh! Not another Rabbit Punch!

Glenn

[Tony]

What is this nonsense: "As I said as I finally struck down "Antonio the Magnifico"? :angry:



I'll try to take it point by point:

1. I don't accept labels, though I am against psychologizing the ruminating about art.

2. Thompson is lucky he is mentioned at all by anybody, let alone has his name spelled right. He is the Oliver Stone of film critics: whatever he imagines, he believes to be the facts.

3. "Now as to the substance of your reposte . . . well, there isn't much of it" : Well, thank you for that.

4. "Once more you obsess on homosexuality..."

My response is the same as my last post; please read carefully:

"As for sexual proclivities, I'm not dwelling on them, but rather using sexuality as a convenient example of how the private biography has no real bearing on the work, at least any bearing which can tell us anything of worth about the work: whether or not Welles or Will were gay means nothing to the permanent value and social importance of the work: it's just not important to the interpretation and understanding and meditating about the work."

5. Sexuality is not my main charge at all; it is merely a good example; I could just as easily have chosen the "Welles's work is always autobiographical because it's about men who are powerful and their abuse of that power" cliche, but this again seems to me to be unsupported by any facts. Indeed, Welles is on record as being philosophically against that kind of person; it is a theme he was interested in, but there's no proof, and no way to prove, that this was because it's autobiographical in any way.

6. I'm primarily against the Thompsons, the Highams, etc. because theirs is a moral condemnation/critique of Welles's life, rooted in a pseudo- psycho/bio reading of his work, whereas I believe that the morality of his life is unimportant to his work and its value to society.

7. "Isn't saying, "Thompson [sic] may devote only six pages, explicitly, but implicitly his book continues the tradition, as do Conrad's, Higham's, etc." -- really one of those McCarthy witch hunt phrases?"

No. it's not: writings about Welles can be easliy divided into two camps, which exhibit their natural tendencies throughout their work, like a DNA structure: the moral gang, such as Callow, Higham, Thompson, etc. and the film gang who write about the work and not the man.

8. " My understanding of Music is that it is best when it is pure, non-programatic."

This is an old argument: is Beethoven's 5th second-rate because it is programmatic? What about so much of Stravinsky and Schoenberg? Le Sacre du Printemps? Gurre-lieder? C'mon, Glenn.

9. Why are Shakespeare and Bach not good examples? Don't you think that if we had a lot of biographical material about them, their work would have been relentlessly "psychologized" by now? Will's sex life would have been dragged out as explaining the true meaning of Jomeo and Juliet, and Bach's authoritarianism would have been used to explain his contrapuntal technique. And what complete and utter nonsense that would be.

10. "I was struck by an earlier remark you made, Tony, which I did not respond to:

"I remember someone once saying 'The further removed an artist's work from their perrsonality [sic], the more pure the art.' Personally, I might not go that far, but I believe that the relations of the work to the artist are totally unimportant to the value of the work itself, and can never be proved in any case."

"If you believe that, why say anything about a work? Once there was something of a prohibition here about discussing the political ramifications of Welles' work. Then, Callow, evidently on the wellesnet approved list, came along with Hello Americans, and everybody discovered that Welles spent his whole adult life passionately involved in political matters. The prohibition was relaxed to some extent."

Now this is interesting: Why indeed? Why say anything? Because plenty can be intelligently said about art; certainly biographical inormation (such as Welles's politics) can help inform about a work, but this is a far cry from reading all the work as nothing but an autobiography. It helps us to know Welles's history and thought in order to read the work, but this is a different proposition from reading it all as Freudian autobiography, and coming to subsequent moral judgements upon Welles, as though his id were open to public viewing. I hope you can see this distinction, because due to a poverty of expression, I can't put it more clearly.

11. "Several months ago, maybe last year, I floated a theory that THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS was really primarily about American women, as CITIZEN KANE had been about American men. That notion was greeted with cool indiffernce, to put it gently, or cold rejection to put as I took it."

Actually, I remember writing a post complimenting you on that thought, though it would seem to say more about Tarkington, as almost every word in the screenplay is from the book; it does say something about Welles's aesthetics that he exhibited sensitivity to Fanny, but this can be read from the work; when we resort to pseudo-bio in order to somehow support this, we enter the area of superficial psychologizing- you know, "dollar-book Freud". Actually, if you read Bessy's book ,there arre many strong examples of Welles's mysogeny after Ambersons: what are we to make of this? And what about the strong sexuality of his later work? Kodar has said Welles was extremely reticent about showing sexuality on the screen, and that she actually wrote and directed the sex scenes in TOSOTW. What are we to make of this? Is it a collaboration? I think we must finally interpret the work: it's all there.

12. " Given his upbringing and the attitudes of the time, a hetrosexual Tennessee Williams might not have had the same sympathy and compassion for his sister Rose that the gay Tennessee did. She would have been his crazy Fanny. Rose probably would not have been central to, arguably, his two greatest plays: The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. A hetrosexual Tennessee might well have regarded his sister's schizophrenia, as Welles saw his schizoid brother Richard's condition, as a shame, an embarrassment, as a lurking fear in his psyche. There was probably some of that as it was, and Williams' ability to rise above that, for all his fear and compassion, suggests what kind of human being he was."

I think this is an insult to the genius of Tennessee, though I know it's not popular to say so; let me give you a contemporary example: "Brokeback Mountain": no more sensitive movie could be made about a gay affair, in my opinion. But is Ang Lee, the director, gay? Does it matter? Is he bisexual? A closet gay? Straight? We don't know, and it doesn't matter to the value of the work, or our interpreting of it. Here's another example: Antonioni shows great sensitivity to female characters in his movies; is he straight? Gay? Bisexual? We don't know-and does it matter? And finally: Welles showed great interest in gay characters in several scripts, especially "Wind" and "Big Brass Ring"; Was he a closet gay? Bi-curious? Straight? Does it matter?

I believe it doesn't- and the same goes for Tennessee, as much as that may shock you.

13. "The biographical themes and details of Orson Welles' life, marvelously sublimated in his rich works..."

This is mere speculation: how could this ever be proven? Neither Welles or Thompson ( or anyone else) is privy to the sublimations of Welles's mind, even though Dr. Thompson thinks he is.

14. "Writers like David Thomson and Peter Conrad are simply redressing a balance neglected by others."

I strongly disagree, of course: in my opinion, these writers are hacks, telling us little about Welle's work that hasn't been distorted through their relentless style and consquent moralizing, and nothing about his life that hasn't also been distorted by their agenda: totally useless books on Welles. I will say though that Thompson is a far better writer: I read him for the fun and the masochistic annoyance; however, Conrad I find scattershot and virtually unreadable: he's not only silly, but he's all over the place on every page.

I'm sure you won't feel I've pinned you down, but as in the infamous Monty Python soccer game with philosophers, I hope we're not really in competition.

:;): Antonio

[Roger Ryan]

I hesitantly step into the ring here...

Basically, all artistic creation comes from personal experience, the interpretation of someone else's experience or simply the imitation of another artistic creation. This is found in every painting, book or movie out there.

Welles' personal experiences most definitely informed his moviemaking and screenwriting, but the degree of conscious autobiography is what can be debated. My take on TOSOTW is that the kind of macho character Hemingway portrayed irked Welles back in the day when the author reportedly criticized Welles' voice-over as sounding like it was being read by a homosexual (to put it in the most polite terms possible!). Whether as a form of revenge or not, the idea that the macho guy might secretly have homosexual tendencies himself probably appealed to Welles as a good dramatic device for the character of Jake. This is not strictly autobiographical, but Welles' personal experience with Hemingway probably informed how he saw the lead character in TOSOTW. Apart from that, Welles' experience in the movie business would have definitely informed the approach he took with the other satirical jabs presented in that film. The Juliet Rich character could very well have been created as an unflattering portait of Pauline Kael, but the character was included because it worked in the context of the film. The whole Welles/Kael issue was a lot more recent at the time and closer to Welles himself, but the conflict between the two does not automatically mean that Jake = Welles exclusively since we've already seen how Hemingway was used for the Jake model.

All of life's experiences are drawn upon when the artist is creating something. What about simple imitation? Welles did that too in TOSOTW: the movie-within-the-movie was an imitation of the kind of "art film" one would expect from Antonioni.

If there was nothing of Welles' personal experience in his work, he would simply be an imitator at all times (which he certainly wasn't). His early work in films was informed by his experience in radio and on the stage and by what he liked and didn't like in the movies he saw before he started making them. Later, his lack of a proper budget directly informed how he would direct and edit a scene. These are professional examples, of course. Personally, his relationships with men and women would inform how his characters would interact; not necessarily how Welles would choose to behave himself, but perhaps how he would imagine he should or should not behave in a similar circumstance. It's plain obvious that Welles' relationship with his brother Richard informed his play "Bright Lucifer" and the screenplay for "The Big Brass Ring". It does not mean that the two works are strictly autobiographical; simply that Welles recognized from personal experience that having a mentally ill brother would make for a good dramatic device.

In the end, the varying influences are mixed so thoroughly that nothing remains pure autobiography which is what I believe Welles had been getting at all along.

[Glenn Anders]

Roger: You make a case I can entirely agree with, much more succinctly, and with greater ease, than any sparring of mine with Tony could do.

I think, I'll just hold your coat for a while.

Tony: Roger says it all.

I'm not easily shocked by much at my age. I can't afford the time and energy to reply to you, point by point. Most of what you say does not deal with my arguments.

What does disturb me a bit is that you will not give ground on the possibility of ANY biographical material or themes being validly found as an influence in the works of Orson Welles (or I take it, any other artist). This stance seems hidebound to me in the extreme. You say that you have no objection, but any mention of the possibility seems to set you off.

[Interestingly, when I try to agree with your proposition that Music is another example of an Art form which really defies biographical interpretations, you say:

"This is an old argument: is Beethoven's 5th second-rate because it is programmatic? What about so much of Stravinsky and Schoenberg? Le Sacre du Printemps? Gurre-lieder? C'mon, Glenn."

I was saying, without a title to hype the listeners about what a piece is "supposed" mean, no one can really tell. My attempt fell flat.

My observation is, however, that in using words and images, expecially when one man like Welles, attempts to control the whole show, the biographical themes are harder to ignore.]

I understand from my old college friend, Professor Emeritus William Hildebrand of English at Kent State University, and his wife Dr. Ann Hildebrand, a childrens literature specialist, that gossip has become more important than substance in our Universities (and everywhere else). But your experience seems to have elicited pathological reactions on the other side. The ad hominem vitriol against Thomson, Higham, and Conrad strikes me as extreme.

Tony, I hope we are having fun here.

Both you and Roger are people whose views I respect.

We can kid around, but I would wonder what animus appears so deep that you would insist on misspelling a colleague's name to express your disagreement with his views.

I don't really think David Thomson deserves that. I know David Thomson, slightly, in passing. Neither you nor I are David Thomson.

Let's leave this discussion (from my standpoint) at that.

Glenn

[Harvey Chartrand]

David Thomson rules, man! He has a lovely poetic style, and is also very funny. Thomson and Peter Conrad wrote the best books on Welles, even better than Welles' authorized biography by Barbara Leaming, which should have been called "A Ribbon of Fibs."

[Tony]

Gee, Harvey: it's hard to tell if this is a compliment or insult!

[mteal]

David Thomson rules, man! He has a lovely poetic style, and is also very funny. Thomson and Peter Conrad wrote the best books on Welles, even better than Welles' authorized biography by Barbara Leaming, which should have been called "A Ribbon of Fibs."

I agree about the Conrad, one of my favorite Welles books. It has it's erratic, even wacky moments, but plenty of fascinating ideas and insights as well. I feel like I gained alot from reading it. On the other hand, I feel like I gained absolutely nothing from reading Thomson's ROSEBUD, except the opinion that it's author is a witless microbe who despises Welles (and Kubrick too, judging from his worthless comments on TCM's EDGE OF OUTSIDE).

[Tony]

I have a different opinion, Mteal: here are some quotes from an article by Conrad of 2005; note the moral (indeed almost religious) condemnation of Welles throughout, as well as the relentless reducing of all of his work to autobiography; I consider Conrad only a friendlier version of Thomson:



"After the war, emerging from the Vienna sewers in Carol Reed's The Third Man, he came to personify the moral irresponsibility of the times. Harry Lime is a superficially charming devil, given power by his wit, guile and emotional nullity. Welles played the role without makeup, as if confessionally.

He was ruined by megalomania and self-indulgence...

In 1946, he made The Stranger, playing a Nazi living incognito in Connecticut. He unfairly discredited the film, perhaps to conceal the candour of its self-analysis.

The chaotic Mr Arkadin, known in some of its contradictory versions as Confidential Report, was his confidential report on his own lethal myth, an exercise in self-demolition.

"What we aim for is perfection." Did Welles the film-maker aim for perfection? Then why did he leave so much of his work in such a painfully imperfect state?

In his script for Touch of Evil, Welles wrote a dismissive epilogue to this apotheosis of man. The comment, which concludes the film, also served as an obituary for himself.

Was he King Lear, deposed and deprived of power by craven conspirators, or was he Falstaff, who settles for self-indulgence and relies, like an overgrown infant, on always being forgiven? Of course he was both.

Welles often sentenced himself to damnation. It was his way of beseeching us to intercede and vote for his salvation.

Welles believed that his body conferred a divine right on him.

In the trailer for Citizen Kane, he calls for a light, like God when creating the world. He then has a microphone lowered into its beam so that he can talk about the film while remaining (again like the deity) unseen.

Harry Lime, in the speech Welles wrote for himself to deliver high above the Prater in The Third Man, tries to convince his naive friend that the black dots scurrying below are expendable for a price. Nowadays, he says: "Nobody thinks in terms of human beings." Welles both was and was not Harry."



I hope I'll be forgiven for double-posting here, but these two following brief excerpts of an article by Jonathan Rosenbaum from 1996 seem very appropriate here as well, with the added note that Conrad, I believe, belongs in the first group of authors:

Rosenbaum:

"The bad news about the recent Welles biographies by Callow and Thomson is that they pretend to an authoritativeness about the man's inner nature and motivations that I doubt will be accepted by anyone who knew Welles intimately- or even by most of those like myself or Brady who encountered him briefly and casually. Conscious or not, the agenda of both Callow and Thomson is to set certain ideological worries about Welles to rest rather than clarify what these worries represent, and exercising moral censure, puritannical or otherwise, is one of the most convenient methods available for carrying out this exercise. Another is the recourse of both biographers to a kind of spurious and, in Thomson's case, irresponsible word-spinning about Welles's inner life normally associated with fiction."

"Another major distinction that can be made to these lists is that the first seven works [Higham's 2 books, Carringer's 2 books, Kael, Thomson and, in a diluted form, Callow] all describe Welles as a deeply flawed, morally reprehensible human being and the last ten [ Bazin, Brady, Cobos, Cowie, Leaming, McBride, Naremore, Riambeau, Welles/Bogdanovich, and Berthome/Thomas] don't. Significantly, only one of the authors in the first list, Carringer, had any personal contact with Welles- unlike most of those in the second list, including Bazin, Brady, Cobos, Leaming, and McBride, and possibly others as well."

[*Tony note: to the second list I would add the books by Peter Noble and Maurice Bessy, both written by authors who knew Welles very well. Bessy's is interesting in that he discusses certain negative traits of Welles the man, but this does not negatively affect his assessment of the worth of the art: it is not used to make moral judements. As for the little BFI book on Kane by Laura Mulvey, Rosenbaum makes this comment: "Laura Mulvey's interesting ideological and psychological reading of Kane...manages to absent itself from both of the positions outlined above."]

[mteal]

That's a potent case, Tony, but I think Conrad's criticisms of Welles are usually a peripheral part of a complex strategy to try and place Welles's work in as expansive a context as possible, in order to try and figure out exactly what Welles was all about as an artist and what he was trying to say. Higham's RISE AND FALL OF AN AMERICAN GENIUS is a rather nasty book too, but it also useful in that it contains some impressive research. This seems in contrast to Thomson, whose book seems like little more then a systematic and carefully callibrated attempt to belittle not only Welles's character, but his artistic legacy as well. Thomson lets his irritating (and mostly negative) opinions of Welles's work fly throughout his book. Conrad keeps those kinds of opinions to a minimum and concentrates more on using his wide-ranging knowledge of history and culture to illuminate and cross-reference the many themes and metaphors in Welles's enormous body of work. As one of Conrad's defense attorneys, I offer a cross section of snippets from the PETER PAN chapter that are a good example of why I enjoyed his book even though I don't completely understand some of it:

"Kane, (Welles) said in 1958, 'tries to become the king of his universe, a little like Quinlan in his border town'. And their common presumption damages the whole tradition of liberal civilization. The spoiled infant, as Freud said, is treated for awhile as "His Majesty, the Child".

"It was difficult for Welles to grow up, because he knew that he would never again enjoy the unanimous adoration which adults lavished on him during his first prodigious decade. Then the terms of his RKO contract spoiled him all over again. This is why he was so touched by Antoine de St. Exupery's THE LITTLE PRINCE.

"St Exupery's prince visits a king whose monarchy is absolute because the asteroid he squats on is so tiny that his ermine robe covers it's entire area. On his diminutive private star, the little prince can enjoy as many sunsets as he wishes in a day, simply by adjusting his angle of vision. Welles shared the prince's universality, and the stories he liked were about characters whose stamping ground was the entire earth: Phileas Fogg...Ahab...Harry Lime, who recovers from his death in Vienna and resurfaces all over the map in a radio series.

"The smaller your planet, the more ubiquitous you can be. On Earth, St. Exupery's prince discovers the relativity of an absolutism like his own, as Welles did when he was ejected into adult reality...On his asteroid, the prince cultivates a single, vain, capricious flower; on Earth he strays into a rose garden where all five thousand blooms are exactly alike. His flower's egomania at least preserved the sense of difference. Here below, the mass crushes the notion of individuality; this was how Welles came to interpret his professional setbacks, and in THE TRIAL he presets the crowd's extermination of ideosyncracy as the grim, inevitable edict of modern society. "

It's that kind of impressive and thought-provoking cross-referencing that Conrad's book has alot of. That kind of thing is nowhere to be found in a book like Thomson's. Instead Thomson does things like using an interview with some guy who was briefly in Welles's employ to imply that Welles, in his later years, probably had no friends, no family, and no sex life. What scholarship.

[Glenn Anders]

I generally agree with you position, mteal. I should only suggest that the disagreements here come from our various understandings of the material and preferences for point of view.

In the name of scholarship, might you specify to what interview "with some guy who was briefly in Welles's employ" you refer?

Glenn

[mteal]

I don't own a copy of Thomson's book, and I can't recall offhand what the guy's name was. Kensington, or something like that. I'll check next time I'm at the library.

[Glenn Anders]

Very good, mteal.

You will appreciate that when one gets into that situation, as I have at times, the point loses all meaning. The man I think you refer to is Robert Kensinger, and you will find him on page 416 of Rosebud.

Kensinger is quoted a number of times directly, and he does present a sad picture of Welles, the private man. Within his remarks about Welles, he expresses the reaction of a young admirer who is shocked in the difference between the man on the screen, or even the man on TV, and the rather depressed, solitary elderly man watching television shows in a darkened room of his leased house in LA. It appears to have been a shock.

To the contrary side, passing on to pp 406-407, Thomson discusses Welles' anarchic joy in editing of films, when the same man was full of energy practicing his craft, even if in the film discussed, F FOR FAKE, he is wrestling with charges made against him for fraud in his career. Thomas finishes his section on the film with several examples of praise, ambivalent praise, but praise, nevertheless. "F FOR FAKE is a blissful, idyllic comedy -- made by a man too often engulfed in his own humorlessness, so that every hearty laugh left you more depressed" (p. 409). The effect of Oja Kodar on the film and Welles has often been noted. Here Thomson does it memorably: "Kodar relaxed Welles, took the edge off his misogyny and made his gazing eyes innocent, sexual and unashamed. We see bits and pieces of her naked in the Picasso period, and, again, the mood is that of paradise. We feel happy for him" (p. 409). There is a poignance when he finishes off this section describing Welles' meditation on Chartres: "Welles's voice speaks of time moving on, at last, erasing the moment of great art. It is the voice that saw urban blight and the fading of magnificence in AMBERSONS. And it is a voice that makes gentle, wistful mockery of itself, and himself."

Had I the time and energy, I could find in Rosebud many other passages which illustrate the "kind of impressive and thought-provoking cross-referencing that Conrad's book has alot of." I think what puts people off about Thomson's book, something I've tried to illustrate in various ways in the past, is that Thomson came upon Welles at such a vulnerable period that, like young Robert Kensinger, he was appalled that the protean genius who enchanted him in CITIZEN KANE was unable to overcome the human, political and economic handicaps which hampered his later life and career. Thomson takes it as almost a personal betrayal.

And that, I believe, is because Thomson recognizes that he and Welles are quite alike. Hence, his plan for Rosebud is uncomfortably intimate.

Many here reject Thomson's work for that reason, and for others, but for a few who understand where his criticism comes from, Rosebud continues to have value. About ten years older than Thomson, I had to rationalize myself the difference between the technical perfection of Welles' CITIZEN KANE and some of his later work, the contrast between Welles at 27 and at 50.

Knowing how and why he failed, how he was brought down, does not entirely excuse his own responsibility at many turns. Both Conrad and Thomson show us the various sides of Welles and his productions, with love or at least pity, not the cool snideness I, at least, find in Callow.

It is, I suppose, a matter of perception.

Glenn

[Tony]

The more I read about the likes of Thompson, pseudo-biography and the relentless jamming of an artist's work into pseudo-psychology, the sicker I feel: take this sentence you've quoted, Alex:

"F FOR FAKE is a blissful, idyllic comedy -- made by a man too often engulfed in his own humorlessness, so that every hearty laugh left you more depressed."

Welles was "humourless"? His hearty laugh made me feel "depressed"?

I'm afaid this sentence tells us much more about Thomson than it does Welles; in fact, that enormous ego of Thomson's seems to only allow him to write autobiography diguised as biography: he actually believes that his personal feelings and ideas about Welles have such weight in his own mind that they therefore must be fact.

"F FOR FAKE is a blissful, idyllic comedy -- made by a man too often engulfed in his own humorlessness, so that every hearty laugh left you more depressed."

This is not only "damning with faint praise"; it is the work of an assassin: a failed assassin, I believe, and perhaps an unconscious assassin, but an assassin nonetheless, of both Welles's work and his character. Thompson acts as judge, jury and attempted-executioner, utilizing moral outrage as his method.

With a friend like Thomson, Welles needs no enemies.

Let's start on page 3:

"He had always been the most important person in his own drama".

Well, aren't we all? Why is this leveled as some kind of failing, or lacking?

"His 'failure' was a sustaining tragedy, his song."

This sentence implies that Welles used the failures of his life as something to strengthen him, but in a way that it became his theme. Did Welles use the theme of his failures (whatever they were) as his "song"? If he did, I didn't notice. But Thomson is levelling a criticism here, which he believes to be damning.

"He was not like others. They could not be like him. He was determined on that barrier. Why are there so few of you, he taunted audiences, and so many of me?"

Wow. A lot of assumptions here, in four short sentences. "They could not be like him". I guess Thomson is saying Welles was an elitist. But his example: "Why are there so few of you, he taunted audiences, and so many of me?" comes from an incident when Welles showed up for a talk and there were about 10 people in the audience; good-naturedly he remarked that he was a director, writer, actor, producer, manager, etc. and then he said the above comment. Thomson takes this joke out of context and uses it to 'illustrate' Welles's supposed bad character; furthermore, with the words "he taunted audiences" Thomson claims this was a regular insult, when there's no record Welles ever said it more than once.

Page 3, cont'd:

"He has known great friendships; he had left several people living in his rich shadow, whether they recognized the gloom or not."

Gloom? I'm sure Welles, like any of us, had people who didn't like him, as well as others who loved him, and many who were neutral. I'm sure that Oja Kodar loved him and would not agree that being close to him was "gloomy"; in fact, she has told how he always made her laugh, and that no matter how great a dissapointment he endured (particularily in the later days) he never wallowed in self-pity. It seems quite possible that she, and others like her who actually knew Welles (unlike Thomson) would not recognize Thompson's invention.

Page 3, cont'd:

"Friendships never quite convinced, or satisfied him." Really? where's the proof of this? Testimony? Something that has impressed me in recent years is the number of letters by Welles to friends that have surfaced for auction, letters that show a person taking time to create very special messages, often including little sketches which show great fondness for the person along with great humour. But it seems Thomson has an "inside road" into Welles's psyche, not only his ego and superego, but his id as well.

Or might he be writing about someone else?


Well, that's page 3, and not all of it, and it's the first page of the book: we can clearly see Thomson's method: attempted assassination by moral condemnation, embedded in a sneaky style: very smooth, and quick on the eye: before you know it, you've digested the poison, and you've enjoyed the taste. We can see less talented examples of this in Kael, Carringer, Higham, Conrad (as I've noted above) and others; Thomson is just the best (or the worst?) example of this delightful style.

I'm thinking of starting a thread devoted to this analysis of "Rosebud", of doing a page a day: after all, there are only 424 more pages of this...special material.

:;):

[Glenn Anders]

Tony: The psychology is quite good, but you may have a point that there is too much of it.

Welles was an only child of enormous potential. He was encouraged, nurtured, and though he lost both his parents before he was sixteen, he was thrown in with a pair of early new agers, Guardian Dr. Bernstein and Mentor Skipper Hill, who continued to let him have his artistic way. The talent bloomed and with a little luck, he reached great heights at a young age. When the boulder of all that talent and accomplishment began to roll back down the hill, he was able to slow it enough to produce other intriguing works, but only at enormous personal costs.

That is why, on page 425 of Rosebud (the last page), after driving down the coast from San Francisco on the day of Welles' death, looking out over the magnificent site Welles laid out as his Xanadu for himself and Rita Hayworth, Thomson has his lover say to him (or perhaps himself say to himself and Welles):

"But it never happened? [italics].

"That's right. They never lived in the place. I thought of a panoramic view from there -- the trees and the ocean. That might work. And it would remind us that the world is very large and the greatest films so small.

"So film perhaps had made a wasteful life? [italics].

"One has to do something."

Rosebud's sublimations seem to make you so apopectic, Tony, mixing Thomson with Thompson, and with Alex (whoever he is), possibly we should just agree that there is a lot of psychology in the book, and though I find much of it valid, there may be too much.

I happen to be an only child, and I think that helps me understand both Welles and Thomson from the psychological standpoint.

Yesterday, by coincidence, I received an Email from an old friend back East. Neither of us have been very well, and my friend and some others had gotten the notion by a reference to the late Miles Archer from THE MALTESE FALCON on my phone recorder greeting that I was dead. He was almost as disturbed to learn that another friend had confirmed I was alive as he would have been had I been dead!

He rounded on me:

"But why should you care about [name withheld] --or me-- who love only to watch and enjoy movies?"

I rather believe that is Thomson's message, and I know there is a good deal of truth in it -- if you were never Orson Welles.

Glenn [I think]

[Tony]

Glenn/Alex/Bob:

"apopectic"?

Actually, I don't think there's too much psychology in the book; it's that I don't think there's any.

I will say it's a really good autobiography, though.




PS: can't wait for Rosenbaum!