Orson Welles, Vol I (15 page)

He carried with him in his pocket a copy of
Field and Fair
, by Pádriac Ó Conaire:
Travels with a Donkey
in Ireland
, and he seems to have accepted its invitation:

Come with me, O friend of my heart, and let us enjoy the sight of majestic mountain peaks and dark pine forests; let us stroll by musical streams, past cool brooks where dwell thousands
of birds; come along for Spring is at hand, and fresh blood is flowing through your veins and mine … come along with me, my friend, and we shall travel
till night overtakes us. We shall pass thro snug little villages with a light in every house, and a messy fire will be seen through the open door, and the bean-a-tighe busy preparing the meal, or minding her baby, or having a chat with her neighbour … up, friend of my heart, and come along with me till I have cured that dark disease that afflicts your mind … delay not, but come along.

Intoxicating
stuff: a perfect remedy for late-adolescent accidie, sense of self-disgust and self-weariness, oneself ever-present, unavoidable, impossible to ignore, Ó Conaire’s ‘dark disease that afflicts your mind’. And Ireland lived up to Ó Conaire: it did not disappoint. In fact, it inspired Orson to pages of prose every bit as high-flown, and in their own way, as contagiously charming as those of
his model. It was of course in the back of his mind that he might return not merely with a number of masterpieces on canvas (he had come laden with the accoutrements of the career he pretended to espouse) but also with a slim volume of travel writing. He kept a journal, and wrote letters to Hortense and Roger Hill and to Dadda. The latter have a more studied quality, as if for publication; indeed,
Dadda being Dadda, the moment they arrived they were typed up and passed around among interested parties. It is the most extended correspondence Welles undertook, and along with the private matter of the journal and the chatty tones of the letters to Roger and Hortense (‘the Skippers’, as he calls them) it gives a very agreeable picture of the sixteen-year-old Orson, footloose and fancy free. It
is still to some extent an official account; there are no intensely private revelations. Even on holiday, and to his most intimate circle, Orson presented a public face.

Our very landing was dramatic – the tender pulled up to the side of the ship full of luggage and relations – everyone aboard it seemed to me was Irish – men and women got on their knees, weeping with joy, there was much craning
of necks and pitiful waving and then little cries of recognition as first one passenger and then another picked out their ‘Paddy’ or ‘Michael.’ A fine tall man with flowing silver hair and a face like Wotan brandished his silver-headed cane fiercely over our heads crying in a voice like thunder – ‘Sure it’s God’s own country.’ I looked out over the rolling indigo sea into the misty mountains,
blue and gold at the
horizon – they were singing ‘The Wearin’ of the Green,’ and on the tender people separated for years were locking and locking in the intricacies of an Irish jig. ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter, home from the hills.’ I unarmored, as Wotan, leaping madly down the gang-plank sang out for the hundredth time – ‘Sure, and it’s God’s own country.’

He decided
impulsively to disembark at Galway, making up his own itinerary.

I must say I don’t regret it. If I had gone on to Cobb, I should have missed Connacht entirely – the West Coast of Ireland is unknown and unbelievable. In all Europe and the Western Hemisphere there is nothing to approach it – in this Americanised three-quarters of the globe, it is unique – the last frontier of romance.

The writer of this was not a topographical ignoramus: at the beginning of this letter to Dadda Bernstein he says ‘surprises I have had in my travels – countries like Japan and China have exceeded my expectations, but in sixteen short, very full years of living, nothing comparable with Galway – or the West Coast of Ireland – has loomed so unexpectedly – so breath-takingly on my horizon’. The sense of
awe and excitement never seems to have left him. He relates his adventures with comic awareness of his own situation; the country, its people and its customs seem glorious to him: Ó Conaire himself could not have celebrated them more. Despite fetching up in Galway at the height of the turfing season, he manages to acquire the regulation donkey; her name, after ‘a certain species of fairy’, is Sidheoghc
(pronounced – and thereafter spelt – Sheeog) and together he and she embark, in classic Robert Louis Stevenson fashion, on a month’s adventuring.

We travelled a good per cent of Ireland together, Sheeog and I – from Galway to Donegal and the giants’ courseway, and nearly back, at night we camped at the roadside – Sheeog feeding on the mountain grass and I cooking over a turf fire, and when
the stars were out, Sheeog went to join the ‘sidhe’ – the fairies – and I curled myself up under the cart and fell asleep. There were nights, too, spent in the cottages, wakes, weddings, and match-makings … my week with the band of gypsies, my mountain-climbs, my night in a quagmire, and finally, the auctioning of Sheeog at the Clifden fair – should all make tolerably interesting after-dinner tales.

He found a welcome in the small, comfortable communities scattered around the countryside. He was a stranger, and therefore fascinating. He evidently had no fear, which people as well as dogs can spot in an instant. He also seemed to assume, which is more surprising, that people would treat him generously; so of course they did. What it was in his experience that led him to such an assumption
is not easy to know, although, despite the myriad complications of his emotional life, he had never known rejection, and rarely encountered malice. He had been greatly loved: by no means always wisely, but very well. And it seems that there was never a time in his life that Orson Welles joined a group of people, expecting them to dislike him.

As for the gypsies … well, why not? He was obviously
ready for anything. Like many people whose home life is for whatever reason unsatisfying, he was always able to become part of a different clan with ease: to identify with them, to join in, to be one of them. This too was a repeated pattern. At various times in his life, Welles would become immersed in black life, in Spanish life, in Arab life. Lacking a family of his own in the usual sense,
he had no identity to lose; he was thrilled to belong to a new one. Of course, he would then move on. So a week with the gypsies would be par for the course. Having sold the donkey, his next move was to the Aran Islands, a yet more intimate community than that of the West Coast, and one with which he identified even more easily and closely. Synge, it would appear, was the lure, initially. His love
affair with all things Irish had not entirely made him forget his first and one true love, the theatre. He found his way to it with unerring instinct. In Galway, Professor Liam O’Briain had, with a little government money, established the first Irish-speaking theatre, the Taibhearc. Their initial production had been
Diarmuid and Gráinne
, by the young actor and designer Micheál Mac Liammóir (who
had, uncredited, illustrated the copy of
Field and Fair
in Welles’s pocket), and they were eager to recruit young Irish-speaking actors. Hearing of this, Welles applied for a grant to learn the Irish language – on the Aran Islands, for preference – and then return to act at the Taibhearc. His application was turned down; they didn’t have that sort of money. So he made his way to the isles of Synge
on his own.

John Connelly who sells stout and plug tobacco built a slate roof on his house thirty years ago. Fifty years before, the English government performed the remarkable engineering feat of erecting a coast-guard station – (which has gone out of use, and which I use
as a studio) – and a light-house. There too, there is a priest who braves the waves when the Sundays are fine – to say
Mass, but despite these vague hints at civilisation, Inisheer remains as it has been for many centuries – the most primitive spot in Europe.

He describes the history of the isles – ‘these people who produced and flourished in Tut Antkahmen’s time – and kept alive the flame of Christian culture in the days of Genghis Khan’ – in excitable language: ‘it is almost beyond belief that two days’
journeying from the world’s greatest metropolis brings one to a land where an intelligent and aristocratic people live in archaic simplicity, surpassing anything in Homer!’ He calls the island ‘their paradise’. It is notable that Welles’s view of human history, and of life in general, is very severely polarised into the innocent and the corrupt. For him, very little exists between evil and good. The
West of Ireland was for him pre-lapsarian. Writing to Hortense Hill, he says that

here life has attained a simplicity and is lived with an artistry surpassing anything – I am sure in the South Seas … somewhere there may be a forgotten land where eyes are as clear and hearts as open, but nowhere is candour so remarkably combined with
intelligence
, an intelligence which results from nearly
five thousand years cultural background.
Being then fully cognisant of these several underlined wonders – you may gather that my wanderings have brought me to a kind of lost Eden rich in romance and of bounteous beauty … I shall find it very hard to leave my little cottage by the sea for the world of tram-cars and leather shoes I used to know.

He visits the Donahues, to see Mrs Donahue’s new-born.

I know and love every spot and every soul on these isles … I left Donahue’s after a time and spent an hour or so lying in the sand listening to the sounds of the night – afar off the crying of dogs and donkeys – the mournful note of a Gaelic ballad and nearer me the wailing of the gulls and the ‘wash-wash’ of the quiet sea. It was a clear night tonight – so clear that as I walked back to my
village I could make out the brighter stars in the wet strand at my feet.

And then there was the other side of the coin; Dionysos’s part in the Homeric paradise. To Maurice Bernstein he wrote, in the accents of his hosts:

a shindy is a great thing, and scarcely an evening goes by but what one of us doesn’t rout the old fiddlers out and stage one. You would hardly recognise your Pookles
– or ‘Paddy’ as everyone here calls him, jigging away into the wee small hours! Irish dancing is not delicate, but it is a hearty, joyful, genuine expression of the dance impulse. It is a great sight to see the kitchen of, let us say, Maggie Flaherty, (dealer in the mountain dew) – sichh! – cleared of impediments and full of fine Erin men in indigo and homespun and beautiful (I use the word unhesitatingly)
and smiling colleens in nice red skirts and sienna jackets, all whirling about in the intricacies of ‘the stalk of barley,’ and stamping their leathern slippers on the flaggings as the orchestra lays on into the night. It was fine tonight, and when the dancing was over, there were ballads sung, and stories told, as is usual – and a long walk across the moonlit strand brings me here.

He submitted
joyfully to a view of Ireland and the Irish – especially the islanders – that merged in his mind with what he had read. He had clearly
not
read Liam O’Flaherty, then a very angry young Irishman indeed.

The Irish peasant … is in process of transformation, and goodness only knows where he may get to and what he may become … those literary hirelings that still dishonour our country by trying
to persuade us that the peasant is a babbling child of God, who is innocent of all ambition, ignorant of guile, midway between heaven and earth, enveloped in a cloud of mystical adoration of the priests and of Caitlin ni Houlihan, the raparee with a pike in his thatch, the croppy boy confessing his sins on the way to the scaffold to suffer a patriotic martyrdom, a violent primitive who runs wild,
naked and raving mad, once the gentle hand of the priest is raised from his back, a cold sexless ascetic whose loins never cry out for the pleasure of love, a quantity as fixed and unchangeable as the infallibility of the pope.

O’Flaherty’s fierce and furious
Tourist’s Guide to Ireland
of 1930 tells the other side. But for Orson, romantic American child of his time, he had discovered Shangri-La.
He had frankly given up most pretence of sketching. The oils had tumbled out of his rucksack on the first day, and most of them had been sent on to Dublin to await his arrival. With the rest he had managed to execute ‘precisely ten terrible landscapes … the almost unearthly quality of the countryside
and the mountains in the West and North completely stumped me. I cannot tell you of the bitterness
associated with those ten futile efforts – I actually wept aloud at the realisation of my own incapacity.’ Four went to pay for lodgings, the remaining six destroyed. ‘Ireland is really a watercolour country,’ he says, going on quite accurately to identify his talent as being exclusively for still-life composition, design and portraiture. But there he is stumped, too: ‘I shall carry away with
me perhaps half a dozen portraits – most of them will be good likenesses, but as portrayals of that indefinable Erin spirit they will be dismal failures … there is a twinkle that dances in an Erin eye – an
intelligent candour
– and something more … to paint
that
is to paint
God
.’ As for the writing: ‘I am really drinking too deeply of Ireland to write well about it … I have lingered in these parts
so long I have almost ceased to be a traveller.’ Drily he adds: ‘neither of us could write an amusing article on Kenosha from the tourist’s standpoint.’

Inevitably his letters to Dadda end with the eternal refrain: send money! Rather jarringly, at the end of his last letter written from the Isles, he alludes to his incarcerated brother: ‘ the point is an old one, and one which you are much
accustomed to hearing, the same blood that flows in Richard’s veins flows also in mine … I am desperately in need of money!!!!!! Unless financial aid awaits me in Dublin, I shall never be able to leave that city alive, but will die a swift and painful death by starvation.’ How much was left of the $500 he started out with is unclear, but he made no bee-line for Dublin, deciding instead to mess about
in a boat on the River Shannon, travelling with Michael Conroy, whom he had met in Galway. Conroy was Pádraic Ó Conaire’s brother, and they seem to have had a delightful time of it. He makes regular appearances throughout the journal as Mr O’Connor, a more sober counterpart to Orson’s madcap self.