Alan Jacobs

It was nearly 30 years ago, I suppose, that Simon Callow began working on his biography of Orson Welles. It was originally conceived as a two-volume project, but after the first volume — whose story takes us to the completion of Citizen Kane — was published and work began on the second, Callow realized that he was not going to be able to narrate the next 45 years of Welles’s life in a single book. Instead, he made the fascinating, and I think wise, choice to devote the entire second volume to the five years following the completion of Kane, because during those five years Welles put an end to his relationship with the American studio system, and was left with only one option: to become what Callow calls a “one-man band.” This became the title of the third volume — and eventually there will be a fourth. (Callow tells the story of the biography’s composition here.)

The standard story of Welles is that he was a great genius destroyed by the unimaginative rigidity of the American movie studio system. But it’s impossible to read Callow’s narrative — which is consistently admiring of and sympathetic to Welles — and come to any other conclusion than this: Welles destroyed his own career. Again and again and again his bosses told him that he needed to do certain things in order to fulfill contracts he had freely signed — to do the task he was being paid to do rather than chase other opportunities that he at the moment found more congenial — to stop spending other people’s money as thought it were his own. He simply never heeded any of these warnings, responding only when absolutely necessary but always in self-defense and even in some cases self-celebration. To put it simply: Welles could never be trusted to do what he was contractually obliged to do.

I think Callow sums up this element of Welles’s character incisively at the end of the second volume, when he is describing Welles’s divorce from Rita Hayworth:

The pattern of flight is unmistakable, one repeated from his relationship with Dolores del Rio, who by contrast with Rita Hayworth was emotionally mature, socially brilliant and a fine artist in her own right. She was neither neurotic nor needy; she simply required commitment from him. And that he would not give. Any form of limitation, obligation, responsibility or enforced duty was intolerable to him, rendering him claustrophobic and destructive. He could only function as a free agent, untrammelled by partners, children, wives, administrators, accountants, producers, studios, political mentors. He must go his own way. His motto might have been Aleister Crowley's ‘Do what thou wilt shall be all the law’. In terms of his work as a director, that meant that he had, inevitably, to become an independent film-maker. Confinement, whether personal or professional, was unbearable to Orson Welles. His exploratory urges were central to his nature; he indulged them unceasingly for the rest of his life. Occasionally, something close to a masterpiece would result. But that was not the purpose of his journey through life. The doing was all.

This strikes me as inarguably true, and the keynote of Welles’s achievements and failures alike.

Nobody suffered more from Welles’s perversity of character than George Schaefer, the head of RKO studios, who brought Orson Welles to Hollywood — a decision that ultimately got Schafer fired. Callow’s summation of this initially exciting and eventually disastrous relationship also provides a brilliant capsule summary of Welles, to be set alongside the passage quoted above:

Welles, young and flushed with the sense of his own talents, paid lip service to these small qualifications, seeing RKO as an inexhaustible milch cOw. He rejoiced in Schaefer's enthusiasm for him, and thought that by a combination of charm, bluster and a sly implication of complicity he could get exactly what he wanted, often saying one thing and doing the opposite, in the belief that he would always come up with the goods and that they would always be worth whatever they cost. But he was at the mercy of the nature of his own talent, depending on adrenalin and inspiration to bring off his effects. He had enormous difficulty in engendering material: his real gift was for editing, interpreting, transforming. A screenplay only existed, for him, as a suggestion a of a starting point, which would then acquire its character, its tone, its form and to a large extent its meaning from what he did with it in the act of creation. He could never supply anything to order. But Schaefer, as a businessman an investor, so to speak, in Welles had to believe that he could. The aggrieved letter that Schaefer sent him in Rio was an acknowledgement that the two men were not, in fact, partners at all. The terrible phrase ‘lip service’ sums up the older man's sense of betrayal and disappointment. Had Welles been straight with Schaefer, had he listened to him, had he understood what a peerless and indomitable ally he had in him, had he grasped that there were limits to any enterprise funded by Hollywood, his history and that of Hollywood to say nothing of that of George Schaefer, might have been very different. Instead of being remembered merely as Citizen Kane's midwife (who then heroically saved it from an untimely death), Schaefer might have been remembered — as he had dreamed of being — as usher-in of an altogether extraordinary period in the history of cinema.

(See how fine a writer Callow is? The bastard.)

One of the things that I especially enjoy about Callow’s narrative is how his experience as an actor, as a lifelong participant in the making of plays and movies, informs his approach to Welles’s career. This happens in large ways and small, but I especially enjoy the small. For instance, when talking about Joseph Cotten’s performance as Eugene Morgan in The Magnificent Ambersons, he notes that Cotten was asked to play someone about ten years older than he was, which, Callow says, is far more difficult than playing someone several decades older.

Similarly, he is very good on the ways in which casting decisions and decisions of interpretation are intertwined with one another. The Magnificent Ambersons again provides an excellent illustration: in Booth Tarkington’s novel, George Minafer is an elegant, epicene youth, a beautiful young man. But Tim Holt, the actor who portrays George for Welles, is stocky, blunt, straightforward – he gives the appearance not of an aristocrat but rather of a middle-class brat. Conversely, Cotten is a bit too elegant to portray the go-getting entrepreneurial energy of Eugene Morgan. The opposition between those two characters, so explicit and unavoidable in Tarkington’s novel, takes on a very different form in Welles’s movie, and indeed somewhat confusingly so.

Callow thinks Welles is an astonishing genius of a director, even if his indiscipline and need to be forever stimulated prevented him from doing the best work he was capable of. (At one point Callow quotes Welles saying that he wasn’t nearly as interested in finished products as in the process of working.) About Welles as an actor Callow is less enthusiastic but equally incisive. For Callow, Welles is a powerful but also a limited actor — a judgment with which Welles himself agreed: he was terribly insecure about his acting, never about his directing. (When performing in a movie or TV show he wasn’t directing, he was known to walk onto the set, take a look around, and then say to the director, “You’re going to put the camera there?”) I think one of the best illustrations of Welles’s strengths and weaknesses as an actor comes when Callow describes Welles as Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil:

Welles as Quinlan is an unforgettable portrait of corruption, physical and moral, but it is not a living one. If there is an actor whom he resembles it is [Marlene] Dietrich‘s old sparring partner in The Blue Angel, Emil Jannings, a performer likewise given to creating extraordinary shapes that he filled, not with lived life, but with a wealth of detail and a selection of off-the-peg emotions.

I could go on and on. These are fascinating books, and I think that when the story is completed, Callow will have written one of the finest biographies of our time, and an unrivaled portrait of one of the most distinctive figures in 20th century art and culture.

I’m beyond excited that this July Sara Hendren, Claire Holley, and I will be leading a workshop at Laity Lodge on The Work (and Joy) of Repair. I’m gonna learn so much. 

Moving to Texas eight years ago forced me to think often about water — and the future of American places that simply don’t have enough of it to sustain their populations. (I have an essay on this topic coming out in Raritan, but not for a few months.) Stories like this one are, to me, harrowing, and they always push me towards a counterfactual thought experiment: What would America look like if the growth of our population and the movement of our people had been governed by rational expectations of water supply? 

From an interview with Todd Hido at Lens Culture:

LC: Your series Homes at Night is one of my favorites. We never see human silhouettes or the homes’ inhabitants. Why is it important to you that the houses appear on their own?

TH: Because of the very simple fact that if it is an empty shell, the viewer can place their own memories within it or create a narrative that would otherwise be blocked by the reality of what is actually inside.

In my recent post on neighborliness, I quoted from a sermon by Helmut Thielicke, and I want to return to one passage from that sermon: 

Anybody who loves must always be prepared to have his plans interrupted. We must be ready to be surprised by tasks which God sets for us today. God is always compelling us to improvise. For God's tasks always have about them something surprising and unexpected, and this imprisoned, wounded, distressed brother, in whom the Saviour meets us, is always turning up on our path just at the time when we are about to do something else, just when we are occupied with altogether different duties. God is always a God of surprises, not only in the way in which he helps us — for God's help too always comes from unexpected directions — but also in the manner in which he confronts me with tasks to perform and sends people across my path. 

It strikes me that it is just this kind of surprise that the Effective altruism (EA) movement is determined to avoid. It’s a movement that puts givers in complete control: they rationally calculate how much to give and to whom, and are on principle unmoved by other considerations. 

My hero Paul Farmer used to say that as generous as WLs (White Liberals) can be, they tend to believe that the world can be repaired at no cost to themselves. If that’s true, then the difference between the WLs and the EAs is that the latter think the world can be repaired at no cost to themselves in anything other than money.

For an alternative model, I would suggest that everyone read this long and deeply moving story about an active, overflowing love that does not count costs — that gives all it has without calculation — that is wholly human-hearted. 

P.S.

The epicenter of the EA movement seems to be in the Bay Area, and I wonder if that could be significant. If you are a very wealthy person who has to step over or around homeless people and drug addicts every day -- or who at least has to hear regularly about your city’s crisis of homelessness and drug addiction -- wouldn’t it be nice to have a Theory that explains why you don’t need to do anything about the problem? Maybe that's too cynical, but I do wonder.

My friend Ken Myers — of Mars Hill Audio fame — has made a page with links to his several fascinating posts on the music of Passiontide. 

Leah Libresco Sargeant:

The search for the perfect rule or set of safety settings does remind me of Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex. As she told me during our conversation, the modern culture around sex is marked by a broken promise. Many of her interviewees had a sense that, if you find the right rules, sex can only be good, and you and a stranger will never have to know each other or reveal yourselves to each other in order to feel good about what you do with each other. The rules (“two enthusiastically consenting adults”) will keep you safe.

But there’s no end run around character formation, and no checklist of consent items that lets us get around the fact that we are interacting with another human being, not a preference menu. 

Christine’s book sounds absolutely brilliant, and I very much look forward to reading it. Leah’s conversation with Christine — I know both of them, thus the first names — is fascinating also. Such vital voices! 

Re: my earlier post on an Ezra Klein column, I want to add that the universality of Christianity takes a very peculiar form, because it is a universality that also emphasizes neighborliness, a particular care for those who are nearby. Thus Matthew Loftus:

We cannot love “the whole world” except in abstraction, nor work for the mutual benefit of everyone in the same way that we can take care of our children or our sick neighbor. We must not fail in our duties to those close to us, even if our love ultimately does not stop there. Only by honoring the relationships that we have with others based on our common humanity and our common interchanges of trade and culture can we honor the God who created those people and places. Our local affections will have universal implications for how we use technology, farm the land, and execute trade. And in the global realm as well as the communal, love and sanity require limits.

I have forbidden the use of the EMR [Electronic Medical Records] in my mental health clinic at the hospital, at least for now. As I scribble my notes on paper, I look to the parent, sibling, child, or friend who has accompanied the patient to the clinic. When I ask how well the medications are working, sometimes the patient will say they are fine while their companion smiles and tells me the truth. Rarely do patients come alone; some friends or family members pay a day’s wages for an hour-long bus ride to the hospital to accompany their suffering loved one. I like to think that no one in our hospital suffers alone because the cultural ethos here forbids it. 

Please do read the whole thing. But this is key: “Our local affections will have universal implications.” And, conversely, our universal commitments will necessarily have local instantiations. 

I think Charles Dickens understood this paradox very well, as we see in the greatest of his novels, Bleak House. There we note Mrs. Jellyby practicing her “telescopic philanthropy” — meditating always on the suffering of the people of Borrioboola-Gha while utterly neglecting her own children — and the “business-like and systematic” charity of Mrs. Pardiggle. As Esther Summerson says, “Ada and I … thought that Mrs. Pardiggle would have got on infinitely better if she had not had such a mechanical way of taking possession of people.” When pressed by Mrs. Pardiggle to join in her “rounds,” Esther has a profound response (even if Mrs. P can’t grasp the import of it): 

At first I tried to excuse myself for the present on the general ground of having occupations to attend to which I must not neglect. But as this was an ineffectual protest, I then said, more particularly, that I was not sure of my qualifications. That I was inexperienced in the art of adapting my mind to minds very differently situated, and addressing them from suitable points of view. That I had not that delicate knowledge of the heart which must be essential to such a work. That I had much to learn, myself, before I could teach others, and that I could not confide in my good intentions alone. For these reasons I thought it best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself. 

Words to live by, say I. And let me conclude with words still wiser, from Helmut Thielicke’s great sermon on the Parable of the Good Samaritan: 

You will never learn who Jesus Christ is by reflecting upon whether there is such a thing as sonship or virgin birth or miracle. Who Jesus Christ is you learn from your imprisoned, hungry, distressed brothers. For it is in them that he meets us. He is always in the depths. And we shall draw near to these brethren only if we open our eyes to see the misery around us. And we can open our eyes only when we love. But we cannot go and do and love, if we stop and ask first, "Who is my neighbor?" The devil has been waiting for us to ask this question; and he will always whisper into our ears only the most convenient answers. We human beings always fall for the easiest answers. No, we can love only if we have the mind of Jesus and turn the lawyer's question around. Then we shall ask not "Who is my neighbor?" but "To whom am I a neighbor? Who is laid at my door? Who is expecting help from me and who looks upon me as his neighbor?" This reversal of the question is precisely the point of the parable.

Anybody who loves must always be prepared to have his plans interrupted. We must be ready to be surprised by tasks which God sets for us today. God is always compelling us to improvise. For God's tasks always have about them something surprising and unexpected, and this imprisoned, wounded, distressed brother, in whom the Saviour meets us, is always turning up on our path just at the time when we are about to do something else, just when we are occupied with altogether different duties. God is always a God of surprises, not only in the way in which he helps us — for God's help too always comes from unexpected directions — but also in the manner in which he confronts me with tasks to perform and sends people across my path. 

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P.S. I meant to schedule this to post tomorrow – sorry for all the stuff in one day. If I don’t post anything for the next day or two, just read this post several times. It’ll do you good. 

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