By RAY KELLY
A previously unknown English-language novel credited to Orson Welles has been discovered in the archives of the National Museum of Cinema in Turin.
The bound hardcover typescript of V.I.P. ― mistakenly cataloged at one point by the museum as a treatment for the movie The V.I.P.’s or V.I.P ― is an English version of Welles’ French novel Une Grosse Legume (A Big Shot), translated by Maurice Bessy and published by Gallimard Editions of Paris in 1953, according to Matthew Asprey Gear, author of At The End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City.
“This carbon copy of a cleanly typed 198-page manuscript was professionally bound in hardback by California Bookbinding (6369 Selma Avenue, Hollywood),” Gear told Wellesnet in an email. “Orson Welles’s authorship is embossed on the cover and asserted on the title page. It would have been uncharacteristic for Welles to have had this manuscript bound himself ― he rarely even put his name on his own screenplays and made few gestures towards posterity ― so it is likely this copy was specially presented to him and then filed away in his office. But by whom? Good question. And when was it bound? During his brief return to Hollywood in 1956-1957? It appears very likely that V. I. P. was intended for publication but for some reason the plans fell through and only the French translation appeared in 1953.”
A political farce, V.I.P. has its roots in Buzzo Gospel (also known as The Dead Candidate), a February 1952 episode of the British radio series The Lives of Harry Lime. Welles wanted to adapt his radio script into a feature film for producer Alexander Korda. When that failed to happen, the Bessy translated novel was published.
Welles, who claimed to have never written a novel, described Une Grosse Legume to Jonathan Rosenbaum in 1972 as Bessy’s translation and adaptation of the film treatment he prepared for Korda.
“The Turin archive had catalogued V. I. P. as a ‘treatment’, so I was thrilled to find instead the long-lost English language version of Une Grosse Legume ― an entertaining, fast-paced comic novel written in the third person and the past tense,” Gear said. “It is in no way a screen treatment. I have now compared a page of the French novel with the corresponding page of the English manuscript, and they are in parallel sentence-by-sentence.”
“Whether the novel is in fact entirely Welles’s own work or a ghost-written novelization of his lost screen treatment (or, alternatively, of the Buzzo Gospel radio script) remains to be determined,” Gear said. “Nevertheless, I’m reasonably certain that this English language novel was the basis for the French version — and not the other way around (in the strange manner of the English Mr. Arkadin novel). Much of V. I. P.‘s dialogue is word-for-word identical to the radio version, which makes it unlikely that it could be an English re-translation of a French novelization of an English treatment. Moreover, Maurice Bessy’s credit on Une Grosse Legume is merely for translation, whereas for the French edition of Mr Arkadin he is credited for both translation and adaptation.”
Welles described the plot of V.I.P. to Peter Bogdanovich in This Is Orson Welles as “a farce about capitalist imperialism, the Communist menace and all of that.”
“Set, I am sorry to say, in one of those mythical kingdoms, some place about the size of Luxembourg but in the Mediterranean — the last place on earth without either a Pepsi or a Coca-Cola concession. It’s about competing imperialism and the Cold War,” Welles said. “They have been living off American aid ever since the war in order to keep off the Communist menace. The truth is, they have no Communists — but that’s their own well-kept secret.”
No English-language version of the novel was known to exist prior Gear’s discovery.
He will detail some of his other Turin findings in an upcoming article for Wellesnet.
Gear has been in Turin thanks to a research grant from the Ernest Hemingway Society’s Lewis-Reynolds-Smith Founders Fellowship.
The University of Michigan Special Collections Library in Ann Arbor, which houses the largest archive of Welles materials in the world, does not have a copy of V.I.P. in its vast holdings, according to Philip A. Hallman, curator of the Screen Arts Mavericks & Makers Collections there.
Turin’s once overlooked archive of Welles scripts and personal correspondence has received a great deal of attention in recent months thanks to Massimiliano Studer, co-founder of Forma Cinema, and Alessandro Aniballi, co-founder of Quinlan.it. The two Italian film scholars publicized the contents of the little-known collection earlier this year.
The National Cinema Museum acquired V.I.P. and other Welles papers with little fanfare at an auction in 1995. Turin archivist Carla Ceresa sorted through the materials, arranged them in categories and completed a detailed inventory in 1998. The documents have been categorized and span Welles’ career from the 1950s to 1976.
Sergio Toffetti, president of the National Cinema Museum, said he hoped the recently discovered V.I.P. might breathe new life into Une Grosse Legume, adding he was unimpressed with the Bessy translation when he read it some 20 years ago.
Toffetti noted that rights issues, which would likely involve the Welles estate and Gallimard, would have to be resolved before V.I.P. could be published.
Wellesnet has apprised the estate of Toffetti’s interest and the two sides have begun communication.
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For additional information on the Turn archive, read Matthew Asprey Gear’s article VIVA ITALIA! – Report on archival discoveries in Turin.
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