Orson Welles, Italo Calvino and artistic ambitions

My partner and I recently watched Chimes at Midnight, the Orson Welles film about Falstaff that reinterprets pieces of Shakespeare's plays about Henry IV and Henry V. Until recently, it wasn't easy to find a copy. In 2006, Roger Ebert had to scare up a DVD from Brazil to rewatch it for the first time since 1968. He wrote:

"The crucial point about 'Chimes at Midnight' is that although it was rejected by audiences and many critics on its release, although some of the dialogue is out of sync and needs to be adjusted, although many of the actors become doubles whenever they turn their backs, although he dubbed many of the voices himself, although the film was assembled painstakingly from scenes shot when he found the cash—although all of these things are true, it is a finished film, it realizes his vision, it is the Falstaff he was born to direct and play, and it is a masterpiece. Now to restore it and give it back to the world."

It has been restored and re-released since, and we were able to find it pretty easily, thank goodness.

The Wikipedia article about the film includes this quotation from Welles, from a BBC interview:

"If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that's the one I would offer up. I think it's because it is to me the least flawed; let me put it that way. It is the most successful for what I tried to do. I succeeded more completely in my view with that than with anything else."

It might seem odd that Welles himself didn't think that the groundbreaking and powerful Citizen Kane was the film that would get him into heaven–if we think of heaven as being a legacy here on Earth, anyway. But I get it. I feel that way about The Valkyrie: it's the book of mine that most closely matches my original vision, the book that I feel I executed most competently, and as a craftsperson, that endears it to me.

There’s no reason that should necessarily matter to the reader or viewer, though, a person who probably had no idea what the artist’s vision was anyway, and doesn’t care how close the final product got to it. My debut novel The Chatelaine, I would say, was more of a struggle between vision and execution, and even though I got a chance to polish it up when it was rereleased, it remains, in my mind, imperfect, a reaching toward something. Yet that's the book of mine that other writers tend to praise—because it does reach, I suppose. Because it takes a lot of chances and is unusual in a few ways.

The Embroidered Book, for its part, is my most "commercial" so far–it's attracted the most readers, and it also has its fans among other writers, and I'm also very proud of what its editor (Jack Renninson) and I achieved with it as a piece of art, so I suppose it's in the centre of the Venn diagram. 

It's impossible to know, when you're in the course of something, how a book will settle in your mind as an artistic project. (I remember being absolutely convinced, at several stages, that I would never be able to write The Valkyrie the way I wanted it to be.) 

At the moment, I am well into the second half of the first draft of Mercutio. It's been a slower first draft than my usual, but in a good way, because I've been taking time to rewrite each chunk of it until I get it solid. I've been enjoying taking that time with it. It's not quite within my grasp yet–at this point I'm like the MC in a circus ring and the big trapeze act and the finale haven't happened yet–but I love it more than anything I've ever written, and it brings me great joy. 

Lately I've been listening to audiobooks by Italo Calvino in the car, including his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a series of lectures on writing he was preparing to give at Harvard when he died in 1985. One of the virtues in writing he discusses is "lightness", and I was delighted to find that he uses two of the characters I've included in Mercutio to illustrate what he means. Calvino talks about an anecdote told by Boccaccio, of the Florentine poet and philosopher Guido Cavalcanti leaping over a gravestone to get away from his irritating friends. (Cavalcanti turns up briefly in my novel, although I haven't found a way to have him leap over a gravestone.) And Mercutio himself, Calvino says, exemplifies lightness:

“I would also like Mercutio's dancing gait to come along with us across the threshold of the new millennium.”

Calvino also once told the New York Times that Mercutio was the character he would most like to be, because:

“Among his virtues, I admire above all his lightness in a world of brutality, his dreaming imagination—as the poet of Queen Mab—and at the same time his wisdom, as the voice of reason amid the fanatical hatreds of Capulets and Montagues. He sticks to the old code of chivalry at the price of his life, perhaps just the sake of style, and yet he is a modern man, skeptical and ironic - a Don Quixote who knows very well what dreams are and what reality is, and he lives both with open eyes.”

I hope I can do some justice to that vision of the character, which gets at some of the reasons I wanted to write about him too. It's a neat coincidence that I came across this touchstone as I was elbows-deep in this project.

I've also recently had a boost of support from my community for the novel, in the form of a $5,500 cultural funding grant from the City of Ottawa, for which I'm immensely grateful. I've never had a grant for anything before, and never applied for any before this project. I struck out at the federal and provincial levels, so the fact that my city came through for me is lovely. It will make a big difference to my ability to cut back a little on freelance work and work on the novel.

Not, of course, that I ever have just one thing on the go… I'm also working on a new Secret Project novel (which is also great fun).

And of course, we're getting ready to launch The Tapestry of Time in the fall. The other day, I was consulted on the choice of audiobook narrator, a part of the process I always enjoy. The final proofread has happened (there will always be something that gets through; it's a law of the universe.)

It's very strange, getting ready to promote this book about the last time fascists overran Europe, while watching the elections in France and the other signs of creeping authoritarianism in the U.S. and elsewhere. I always think: surely people cannot have forgotten. But the thing is, it wasn't necessary for all people to forget. Some people always wanted fascism, and were happy to get it at the time, despite the horrific cost to their friends and neighbours and to their own souls. I think a lot about the fact that (in simplified terms) the Allies only marched into Paris after Paris liberated itself–but that Paris only liberated itself when the Allies were on the march. People will rise up in support of freedom, but not when the conditions make it seem futile.

I'm still too close to The Tapestry of Time to judge it as an artistic project. I'm very proud of the work (and grateful to my editor, Jane Johnson), but I'll have to see how readers react. When it comes to my ambitions for it, I think that adding one small reminder to the pile about why Nazism was so insidious would be more than enough for me.

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News roundup:

I mentioned this in the last edition, but I thought I’d include one more reminder that registration is open for the Summer Showcase for Carleton's Life Learning Program, which is open to the public of all ages (in person in Ottawa). I'll be giving a two-hour lecture on July 22 on developing a writing practice.