Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (30 page)

He retreated into a nearby pub for a pitcher of warm Guinness. Spying a donkey cart, “the commonest sight in Ireland,” he felt inspired, and jumping up, offered to purchase the cart from its owner. He was told in no uncertain terms that “everything in the donkey and donkey-cart line had been bought up for use in the haying and gathering of new turf to follow for the next two months.” Undeterred, Orson asked for directions to a local shop, McDonogh and Sons, which crafted new donkey carts for sale. By a happy coincidence, Mr. McDonogh, the shop owner, was a relative of Pádraic Ó Conaire, the Galway-born Gaelic-language writer who had died a few years earlier—and whose travel memoir Orson had absorbed during the crossing. McDonogh, in turn, introduced Orson to the writer’s brother, a clay-pipe-smoking man named Isaac Conroy.

When Orson said he wished to buy a donkey cart and roam the west of Ireland, painting the countryside in all its splendor, “an adventure-loving, romance-loving, very Irish light” came into the eyes of McDonogh and Conroy, and the two men conveyed him by Chrysler to Galway Racecourse, where he was able to haggle his way into purchasing an excellent donkey, “a three year old Spanish lady with original ideas, and a beauty of face and figure”; and a suitable used cart, “a magnificent creation of blue and orange.”

Soon another Ó Conaire relative materialized—Michael, a cousin of Isaac—and the four men became fast friends. “I lived in their houses, danced with their daughters, and swam with their sons,” Orson wrote home.

He christened his new donkey Sidheoghe, or Sheeog, which was “delightful Gaelic for a certain specie of fairy,” recounted Orson. The Galway citizenry turned out “in thousands for the purposes of instructing Sheeog and myself (both novices in the mysteries of cart driving and pulling),” and one local blacksmith even shod the donkey free of charge. Before Orson could leave, however, horse fever descended on the city in the form of the annual Galway Races, which meant several days of “carousing, fun-making, fighting, gambling, drunkenness, and gaiety of every conceivable description.”

The president of the Irish Free State, W. T. Cosgrave, a veteran of the Easter Rising of 1916, arrived to officiate at the races, lodging with the McDonoghs along with the young American. “We grew very friendly,” Orson wrote to Dr. Bernstein. “He is a charming, quiet and extremely intelligent man.” (To Hill, he described Cosgrave somewhat differently, as “a severe, puritan-looking figure.”) Orson took Cosgrave for a ride in his donkey cart and mused about advertising it as “The Cart That Carried the President.” Cosgrave etched “a good-luck sun (for good weather) rather like this [Orson drew a smiley sun] on the side” of his cart, but he mused in his letter, “I don’t suppose I’d ever get [anyone] to believe he did it.”

Finally, Orson tore himself away from the dream of Galway, promising to save his stories for his return—“much shall be recounted at Ravinia firesides.” He started down the winding roads to Clifden. (“The roads are literally ribbons,” he wrote, “six inches of gravel on an endless peat bog. When autos pass over them they shake and sink under their weight.”) Exploring the west coast, he told tales of climbing mountains, escaping quagmires, and even spending a week or so tethered to a band of Travellers (Gypsies).

He often camped on the roadside at night, feeding Sheeog on the mountain grass and cooking over a turf fire before curling up to sleep under his cart. “There were nights too spent in the cottages,” young Orson wrote home, and “most of my daytime meals were eaten among the people.” Sometimes he joined in “weddings, wakes, and matchmakings.” He did a fair amount of painting on the road, with unsatisfying results: “Ten terrible landscapes,” six of which were “hideous abortions,” he reported. Four of them “paid for lodgings” and now hung in mountain dwellings; the others were ruined by weather and “diversions.” He despaired of capturing the island’s beauty in oils. “Ireland is really a water-color country,” he wrote, “and I have learned to my sorrow that whatever craftsmanship I can lay claim to, lies only in the channels of still-life, composition, design and portraits. . . . The almost unearthly quality of the countryside and the mountains in the West and North completely stumped me.”

“Finally at the end of it all,” he wrote, lay Clifden, where he took a room at Joyce’s Hotel. At the town market he enlisted hotel proprietor P. K. Joyce as his auctioneer, selling Sheeog for ten pounds sterling—a fact Joyce boasted about in local newspapers after the “War of the Worlds” sensation of 1938.

Returning by bus to Galway, Orson scouted out the Taibhdhearc, Ireland’s first Gaelic-speaking theater, which the stage designer, writer, and actor Micheál MacLíammóir helped launch with his play
Diarmuid agus Gráinne
in 1928. But MacLíammóir had moved on to the Gate Theatre in Dublin, and there was no place at the Taibhdhearc for an American with meager Gaelic.

He decided on a trip to the Aran Islands. J. M. Synge, the Irish poet and author of
The Playboy of the Western World
, had lived for a while on the three islands off Galway, describing the harsh existence in a famous series of dispatches for Irish newspapers. Irish artist Seán Keating also had made the Arans his subject, painting portraits of their rugged people. Now Orson would see for himself these “three tiny piles of limestone off the West Coast,” as he put it in his letters. He hopped a boat to Inisheer, the smallest of the Arans, twenty-three miles west of Galway Bay, and at the end of the hour-long voyage he found himself in an ancient, inhospitable land of fishermen and farmers—“the most primitive spot in Europe,” he wrote to Dr. Bernstein, “as it has been for many centuries.”

Electing to stay in Inisheer, young Orson found “a wonderful little old thatched cottage by the sea” that he turned into a painting studio, and vowed to create “nothing but portraits now, simple sketches of men and women I have known here. . . . There is a quality in the Erin eye a thousand times more elusive than the blue in the Conemarra hills, a something in the clean, naïve smile that plays on the Aran mouth, a twinkle that dances in an Erin eye—an
intelligent candour
and something more . . .
¹¹

“To paint
that
is to paint
God
.”

Inisheer was a remote paradise—“a kind of lost Eden,” Orson wrote, invoking what was already becoming a signature phrase for him. His letters from Inisheer were timed for the weekly boat—“weather permitting—and it never does!”—that carried mail as well as passengers. Sometimes he wrote them at four in the morning “after a very full evening” at Patch Litman’s, “yarning and ‘talking fairies,’ ” followed by a “shindy,” fiddling and jigging at John Connelly’s. He waxed rhapsodic over these shindys, full of “fine Erin men in indigo homespun” with “smiling colleens in nice red skirts and sienna jackets, all whirling about in the intracasies [
sic
] of ‘the stalk of barley,’ and stamping their leathern slippers on the flaggings as the orchestra plays on.” It was all so wonderful. “I am really drinking too deeply of Ireland to write about it,” he said in a letter.

During his few weeks on Inisheer, Orson boasted, he became “really intimately” acquainted with all its inhabitants. Though most of them spoke Gaelic, a language of which he’d absorbed the merest smattering, he felt a great kinship with the islanders. “I have lived with these people, farmed, gathered kelp, fished, sang, drank, eaten and even wept with them,” he wrote, “when Mourteen’s three boys were beaten to death on the rocks almost at my doorstep.” His only disappointment was his own painting, which was still “something of a flop.” “At the end of three weeks,” Orson explained woefully, “I shall carry away with me perhaps a half dozen [portraits]. Some of them will be bad pictures and some fair . . . but as portrayals of that undefinable Erin spirit they will all be dismal failures.”

One day, after nearly a month on Inisheer, he woke up “desperately in need of money,” Orson wrote. “Yesterday—for the first time, I checked up thoroughly on all my accounts—0.” He was almost as helpless with money as his brother, he confessed. “The same blood that flows in Richard’s veins,” he wrote to Dr. Bernstein, “flows also in mine.”

The young American went shooting and fishing with the islanders, and hunted birds with a Catholic priest who made a regular circuit of the three islands. Orson claimed subsequently to have spent a little too much time with the local lasses, his dalliances catching the priest’s attention. “These great, marvelous girls in their white petticoats,” Welles later recalled, “they’d grab me. It was as close to male rape as you could imagine. And all with husbands out in their skin-covered canoes. All day, while I had nothing to do. Then the girls would go and confess it all to the priest.” As they tramped the island together, the gun-toting priest hinted unambiguously that young Orson might consider moving on in his Irish travels—and so he did.

Orson must have had a little money to spare, for after returning to Galway he embarked on a tour of the south and east, visiting Limerick, Kerry, Kilarney, Blarney, Tipperary, and Wicklow before returning to Limerick. There he purchased a bicycle—dubbing it “Ulysses,” a nod to Homer and Joyce—and met up by prearrangement with Michael Conroy from Galway to continue his travels. The two explored on their bikes and hitched a ride on beer barges floating up the Shannon. Orson used his journal to sketch people he met on the road, while chronicling his adventures with Conroy, whom he disguised in the journal as “O’Connor” portraying him as “a more sober counterpart to Orson’s madcap self,” as Simon Callow notes. “They seemed to have had a delightful time of it.”

By October, near the end of his cash, Orson found himself in Athlone, a town on the Shannon about halfway between Galway and Dublin. Roaming Battery Heights, he crested a hill and spied something amusing.

“I came upon three little boys, their bellies flat upon the grass,” Orson wrote to Roger Hill, “peeping furtively over the brink. I tiptoed up behind them to see what was the object of their attention and was amused to discover two young persons of the opposite sex reclining in the trench and making violent and enthusiastic love.

“But what delighted both performers and audience was the presence of a matronly lady—fat in a respectable kind of way and obviously the chaperone of the party—stretched out alongside of the delighted lovers, snoring lustily!

“Rather than disturb so happy a scene, I descended the hill on the side farthest from Romeo and his dark-eyed Juliet. This brought me quite near the slumbering chaperone. Imagine my astonishment when upon passing to discover that lady manufacturing the sounds of sleep with her twinkling eyes wide open! Thunder struck, I gazed down at her and as I turned away she closed one of those very Irish organs in an elaborate wink.” Next to this Orson drew a long-lashed lady’s eyes, one wide open, decorated with Z’s and exclamation marks. (This letter was meant for the worldly Skipper Hill alone—not for Dr. Bernstein, prim holder of Orson’s purse strings.)

A seventy-five-mile bus trip then took Orson to Dublin, where he was hoping for an infusion of cash from home. He was broke, but as blissful as he would ever be.

“I am riding into Dublin,” he jotted, drawing a bus with the sun shining overhead, “thinking glad thoughts about Ireland.”

The glad thoughts wouldn’t last. When he got to town, Orson rushed to American Express—only to be disappointed. There was no wire from Dr. Bernstein. Crestfallen, he shrieked “so loudly that traffic stopped on College Green,” he wrote later. As soon as he settled into his hotel, the electricity failed, preventing him from sitting down to write at length about “the anguish that was in my soul—and it was anguish—the despairing ready-for-the-river anguish one experiences when unknown and alone in a big city.”

He was down to only “a few shillings,” Orson recalled, which he decided to blow on “a good dinner.” And after the dinner he lit a quality cigar, having taken up cigars in Ireland on the theory that smoking them made him look older, like his father or Ashton Stevens.

From the start of his Irish travels, Orson strove—somewhat obviously—to make the adventures he described in his letters seem accidental, to lull Dr. Bernstein into believing all his blarney. But he had a strategy. He had jumped ship at Galway, where the Taibhdhearc was located, with its direct links to Micheál MacLíammóir, and the Gate Theatre. He had insinuated himself into the well-known Ó Conaire family in Galway, where he also met Cathal Ó Ceallaigh, a folklorist and actor who happened to be performing a small role in the Gate’s current production. Now with his few remaining coins, Orson purchased a ticket to the evening’s program: a new drama by the Earl of Longford called
The Melians: A Tragedy of Imperialism.

The Melians
was an ambitious work that offered a nationalist spin on Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War, with Ireland standing in for the occupied island of Melos. MacLíammóir had the lead role—a privilege he customarily alternated with Hilton Edwards, the cofounder of the Gate, his partner in art and, quite openly, in life. (In later years they cheerfully dubbed themselves “The Stately Homos of Ireland.”)

The two had met in the mid-1920s as players in the Intimate Shakespearean Company, led by actor-manager Anew McMaster. McMaster’s troupe crisscrossed the island, playing country towns and church halls—what Orson called “the smalls of Ireland.” McMaster was MacLíammóir’s brother-in-law and (possibly) his onetime lover, and he was a mentor to both him and Edwards. Hilton Edwards had occasional affairs with women, MacLíammóir had flings with other men, but the two remained a couple throughout their lives.

Together, in honor of McMaster, they had founded the Gate Theatre in 1928. When Orson arrived the Gate was in its fourth season, presenting original and Irish-language plays from its own core group of dramatists and translators, along with Irish premieres of classical and West End plays. The Gate had recently vacated the Peacock Theatre, a small experimental stage annexed to the state-subsidized Abbey Theatre, in favor of a new four-hundred-seat theater carved out of the Rotunda building on Parnell Square.