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2. Classics for the Masses: Dickens and Welles
- Southern Illinois University Press
- Chapter
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2WP_cTa! Classics for the Masses: Dickens and Welles The star director will go out as quickly as the old time star before him. He has begun to decline already. —Orson Welles, 1939 It is impossible to doubt, of course, that Welles is an auteur in the fullest sense. —Grahame Smith, 2003 As developed in his radio series, Welles’s first-person-singular approach to adaptation depended on the insertion of a contemporary, critical eye/I into a classic text. No author interested Welles more consistently than Charles Dickens during the era of Welles’s shift from radio to Hollywood,1 in part because of Dickens’s cultivation of a performative style of literature that explores the fissures between personal and public identity. Dickens’s interest in narrative experimentation evoked a complex, socially constructed, firstperson singular that fascinated Welles. Adapting Dickens as a classic author also heightened the Wellesian brand by association. Finally, Dickensian style translated well into Wellesian performance with its brief, serial form, which included vivid visual scenes and populist themes. Welles’s adaptations of Dickens from 1938–40, which range from popular radio projects to a proposed screen version of Pickwick Papers, reflect the zenith of his use of the serial form and the classic literary narrative. Classic adaptation, always to remain part of the Wellesian brand, was essential to the initiation of his relationship with RKO. The association between Welles and fellow populist showman Charles Dickens helped Welles’s career move from radio into film, and established his entertainment brand as both geared to the masses and culturally respectable. Welles’s relationship to master authors enhanced (and continues to enhance) CLASSICS FOR THE MASSES his reputation as artist and was key to establishing the Wellesian brand. The story of Welles’s evolving relationship with Dickens captures the process of diversifying the Wellesian entertainment brand as it moved from radio into film. This diversification of his commercial potential suggests a key difference between an auteur and a star director: the auteur, over time, establishes a market presence based on elite credibility rather than mass popularity. A “classic” rather than a “star,” the auteur often finds a niche market based on perceived artistry rather than a mass market based on box-office sales. Whereas the next chapter will discuss the connection between Joseph Conrad’s style of modernist expressionism and Welles, this chapter looks at the aspects of authorship that he shared with Dickens’s very different literary personality. Dickens, associated with popular culture and often credited with creating mass literary circulation, blends the concepts of “author” and “entertainer,” and provides an interesting counter example of Welles’s use of literary adaptation when juxtaposed against Conrad’s “high” modernist style. Critics have suggested that Dickens’s writing style lends itself to visual adaptation, arguing that his precinematic sensibility frames him almost as prophet, and several critics link his narrative style directly to that of Welles. For example, Grahame Smith suggests that “Welles’s major stylistic tool, his reliance on long takes made possible by deep focus, would have been the perfect filmic embodiment of Dickens’ vision.”2 Welles and Dickens are linked by their efforts to circulate their work among the mass populace, to spread their art beyond elite associations. In this way, Dickens and Welles share a certain “vulgarity” that flouts the very notion of “classic” by courting mass appeal.3 Welles is similar to Dickens in that he created a serialized form of literature-based popular entertainment and that he was able to parlay his popularity into a lucrative career that paid him as much to be a public personality as to be an “author” of “texts” (to the great chagrin of the RKO studio executives). From 1938 to 1941, Orson Welles underwent tremendous transitions in his life, moving from theater to radio and then to film, divorcing his wife, breaking with long-time collaborator John Houseman, and encountering a roller-coaster ride between public appreciation and derision. In July 1938, he debuted his First Person Singular CBS radio series—also known as Mercury Theatre on the Air and, later, as Campbell Playhouse—intending to wed the performance experimentation that he had brought to the Federal Theatre Project with the income and commercial appeal that radio had consistently afforded him since his 1935 appearances in March of Time.4 Over the course of 1938, Welles produced four radio plays based on the work of Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two...