Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu

Exhaustive, and slightly exhausting, biography of Orson Welles, covering his life from birth up to the making and release of Citizen Kane. In his introduction, Simon Callow promises a second volume but, so far, there have been two. With a fourth said to be on the way. This may be why it can be a little tiring to read. Because the author has a lot to say.

He can really write, though. His prose is a pleasure and I sped through the opening chapters of Welles’ early years. The subject most definitely comes to life. But when the ‘Boy Wonder’ reaches New York and proceeds to write and direct a series of ground-breaking plays that shake up conventions left, right and centre, the research goes into overdrive and I begin to flag a little.

In particular, we’re offered pages and pages of reviews and reactions to those plays and I don’t know about anyone else but reading reviews of something I haven’t seen, and will never see, doesn’t help me to experience it. I’ve no way of judging them. Of relating to them. Nobody has.

With the film, it’s different. It’s still available for us to watch and react to. (As is the famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which is out there on CD and YouTube.) I can set my experience of both against all the comments so exhaustively quoted. I can’t do that for the plays.

All of which begs the question: how much detail do we want in a biography? It must be so tempting for an author who’s conducted the research to want to include it all. I mean, they did all that work! But not so rewarding, perhaps, for the reader having to plough through it?

(None  the above, by the way, is going to stop me looking for the other volumes in the series. But I’m probably going to be skipping several pages when I start to read.)