A Social History Since 1450. the Story of Orson
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at least as Ackroyd tells it. Yet Ackroyd illustrated volume takes the next step, which does do many things right. One is to set is to give historical context to our under- forth the terms and trying conditions of standing of ornamental hierarchies and of Blake’s great project without explaining the rules shaping ornament’s private and away (or worse, psychologizing) his vision- public uses. Today’s postmodern designers ary genius. Such tact, though leaving us like to think they are beyond such consider- eager for more answers, turns us toward ations, but, as the authors wisely point out, the only reliable source—the works of the “If rules are broken, then people choose to artist himself. do that consciously; the very process of —Jay Tolson breaking rules emphasizes the fact that nor- mally they are there.” ORNAMENT: —Martha Bayles A Social History since 1450. By Michael Snodin and Maurice ROSEBUD: Howard. Yale Univ. Press and the The Story of Orson Welles. Victoria and Albert Museum. By David Thomson. Knopf. 448 pp. $30 232 pp. $45 Forget the aging, obese Orson Welles, Upper-class English ladies have never who promised to “sell no wine before its worn tattoos. Or have they? In 1901, Lady time” on television in the 1970s and ’80s. Randolph Churchill celebrated the corona- This biography begins with the golden, tion of Edward VII by having a tiny serpent whirling days of Welles’s early career, when tattooed on her forearm. Tattoos were all the the handsome boy out of Kenosha, rage at the time. By 1920 the traditional prej- Wisconsin, had boundless creative vitality— udice against tattooing had returned, and and the power to charm anyone, in the the- Lady Churchill was never seen in public ater or out. In 1931, the 16-year-old Welles without a bracelet covering the spot. was appearing at the Gate Theater in The authors of this fascinating book do Dublin. In 1935, he was staging a sensation- not say whether Lady Churchill ever regret- al Macbeth with black actors in Harlem. ted her tattoo. But they do explain much Two years later, he was directing and star- else, including the likely reason why she ring in Doctor Faustus, working with John chose the serpent motif. Snodin, head of the Houseman and Marc Blitzstein on the designs collection at the Victoria and Albert inflammatory prolabor musical The Cradle Museum, and Howard, an art historian at Will Rock, and lending his plummy voice to the University of Sussex, begin their survey the radio role of Lamont Cranston in The in 1450, when the invention of printing led Shadow. Welles (and Houseman) launched to the circulation of Renaissance and other the Mercury Theater with a revelatory Julius design ideas throughout Europe. By the Caesar. When the Mercury began a weekly mid-1500s, art patrons were poring over radio series in 1938, Welles hoodwinked the “emblem books” in search of “visual symbols nation with War of the Worlds, his notorious of personal qualities that a patron aspired fake news broadcast of a Martian invasion. to.” In this context, the serpent was “a sym- Then Welles invaded Hollywood, where bol of eternity.” Hence the serpent embroi- he directed a first feature that many regard as dered in the sleeve of Elizabeth I in the the best film ever famous “Rainbow” portrait (c. 1600). made by an Amer- As a social history of ornament, this book ican: Citizen Kane is a first. Snodin and Howard explain that (1941). He went on 19th-century “grammars of ornament” classi- to make a second, fied visual motifs (everything from the darker movie, The Corinthian acanthus to the Chinese Willow Magnificent Amber- Pattern) according to a hierarchy of aesthet- sons (1942), that ic and moral value. With the 20th century might have been came a different approach, one that read psy- even greater had it chological meanings into various recurring been released in the images. (Need we dwell on what Lady form Welles intend- Churchill’s serpent would have meant to a ed. But he was in generation raised on Freud?) This lavishly Brazil spending— Books 97 wasting?—RKO’s money on a new film beyond treatment, so knowing that no doc- (which he left incomplete) when the studio tor ever had a chance with him.” This book edited 40 minutes out of Ambersons to give it traces the arc of his tumultuous life with more box office appeal. It was not the last surprising and admirable dispatch. time Welles would let a project slip out of Too bad, then, that Thomson keeps his control—and in so doing seem to dis- intruding. His memory of seeing Citizen avow what he had created. Kane for the first time, as a teenager alone in The cliché about Welles is that everything a revival house in London, is typical of the went downhill after these first two films. But missteps: “I struggled with Kane because I as Thomson, an actor and the author of sev- knew that its show was more intense than eral books about film, makes clear, this was anything I had seen, because I felt aroused not so—except in the sense that Welles by the need to run a little faster, because the never surpassed Kane. (But then, who has?) shining young Kane was so entrancing.” To be sure, Welles was forever beginning Even more irksome are the imaginary dia- projects, dropping them, and taking them up logues between Thomson and—whom? his again years later in makeshift locales and publisher? his alter ego?—that occur at even with different casts. Yet despite a pro- irregular intervals without so much as a fessional life that often resembled a Ponzi caveat lector. These are meant to dangle scheme, Welles the charlatan was also a qualifications, questions, and alternative practicing magician, reaching into his shab- interpretations before our wondering eyes, by hat and pulling out movie treasures such and in their general fruitiness they are per- as Macbeth (1948), Touch of Evil (1958), haps echt-Wellesian (the hokum Welles, The Trial (1962), parts of his admittedly dis- that is). But mostly these dialogues recall the jointed Falstaff saga, Chimes at Midnight moments you faced as a child when a movie (1966), The Immortal Story (1968), and F Is turned “icky” and you went to buy popcorn, for Fake (1973). hoping the actors would return to their sens- Thomson’s Welles is monumentally es by the time you returned to your seat. Too imperfect, full of passion, appetite, guile, bad Thomson can’t resist trying to upstage lies, manipulation, misjudgment, arro- his subject. He of all people should have gance, doubt, and, of course, a kind of realized that no one ever upstaged Orson genius. He is a manic-depressive egotist, Welles. “vividly disturbed and hysterically well, —James Morris Science & Technology THE END OF SCIENCE: “science” that is . well, anxious, evocative, Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the literary. In Horgan’s words, “One must accept Twilight of the Scientific Age. the possibility—even the probability—that By John Horgan. Addison Wesley the great era of scientific discovery is over. By Longman. 320 pp. $24 science I mean not applied science, but sci- Ours is a time of endings: not just of a cen- ence at its purest and grandest, the primordial tury but of a millennium. Honoring custom, human quest to understand the universe and we daily announce finalities. Academics lec- our place in it. Further research may yield no ture on “late”—not “advanced”—capitalism. more great revelations or revolutions, but only Optimists foresee the demise of talk shows, incremental, diminishing returns.” pessimists the death of the humanities. Can Horgan is the well-known author of pro- modern science, gray with 300 years, be far files appearing in Scientific American, where behind? he has explored the thinking and (more According to Horgan, many of the best and effectively) the personalities of a galaxy of brightest scientists, mathematicians, and stars, or at least scintillators, among those philosophers are resigned to defeat. What who have been doing science or meta- looms is a “postempirical” and “ironic” ap- science for the past few decades. His finely proach: the abandonment of the search for crafted interviews have been adapted for The fundamental laws of nature, and the rise of a End of Science, with new material added. 98 WQ Summer 1996.