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Jonathan Rosenbaum, in a commentary on the Weart of Darkness film script, notes that Welles had updated Conrad's story to 1939 and that he had transplanted Marlow to America.7 For a variety of reasons, however, this film version of Heart of Darkness was doomed and a new work, which became Citizen Kane, attempted. Bernard Herrmann, composer and music director for Kane, while discounting the uses of this search for a literary "Rosebud," says: "I've always thought that Orson was influenced by a popular work of the time called I am Jonathan Scrivener," a novel in which, finally, according to Herrmann, no light is shed on the leading character. 10 Although the filmic or novelistic influences are not clearly fixed for either work, we can see in both Citizen Kane and The Great Gatsby a reliance on a form of first-person narration, the mode employed by Conrad in Heart of Darkness.

In March, 1941 John O'Hara. in a column of ecstatic praise for Citizen Kane, noted that Orson Welles was as legendary a figure as Scott Fitzgerald had been back in the twenties. O'Hara added that while a silent version of The Great Gatsby had always been one of his favorite movies, the Welles film "must be the best picture he ever saw."1 This early linking of Welles and Fitzgerald has proved prophetic: both are now clearly established as legendary figures who created legendary characters for legendary works. O'Hara does not establish further correspondences between Kane and Gatsby but there are, as well, internal similarities. While these could and should be attributed to a variety of sources, influences and interests, one way to view them is to focus on them as traces of the interest Fitzgerald and Welles shared in the work of Joseph Conrad.

Fitzgerald seems to explain his deep interest in Conrad's literary "principles" when he writes: "Mostly we authors must repeat ourselves . . . we have (only) two or three great and moving experiences in our lives. . . ."2 Believing this, it would follow that how these experiences were offered was of particular importance to Fitzgerald. His interest in Conrad appears to have crystallized while he was casting about for a form for the work which was to become Gatsby. Fitzgerald scholars have noted his wide-ranging interest at this point in the work of other writers. Fitzgerald himself writes, in an Introduction to Gatsby, "I had just re-read Conrad's preface to The Nigger . . . ."3 In this Preface, Conrad offers some of his general principles of literary conception and composition. In words which were to be echoed some years later by D. W. Griffith, he wrote: "My task . . . is, before all, to make you see." Drawing on the sensual appeals offered by the arts of sculpture, painting and music, the literary work would attempt to move from shadow to light, towards truth. Ford Madox Ford's 1924 memoir, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, amplifies these points and develops others made in the Preface. What emerges is Conrad's concern that experiences not be diluted or surrendered by rendering them solely in chronological time, that more than one view of those experiences be offered, and that this multiple view be filtered through a single consciousness.5

One can readily observe the Conradian influence in the pages of The Great Gatsby. That it can be observed as well in Citizen Kane should not surprise too sharply: When Welles came to Hollywood in the summer of 1939, it was to film not Kane but Heart of Darkness, which his Mercury Theatre of the Air had already produced on radio. This film version "was to be told in the first person" and the hand-held Eyemo cameras were to be used subjectively.0 That camera, then, would be the single consciousness through which many views would be filtered. Jonathan Rosenbaum, in a commentary on the Weart of Darkness film script, notes that Welles had updated Conrad's story to 1939 and that he had transplanted Marlow to America.7 For a variety of reasons, however, this film version of Heart of Darkness was doomed and a new work, which became Citizen Kane, attempted.

Thirty years later, in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles tells how it began: "I'd been nursing an old notion . . . the idea of telling the same thing several times and showing exactly the same scene from wholly different points of view . . . "8 This would seem to be an exposition of the Conradian injunction which asks that we select and offer a scene or an incident largely on the basis of the force of the impression on various points of view and, in indirect, interrupted fashion, tell our tale. This concept, says Welles, again in this 1969 talk with Bogdanovich, was readily accepted by Herman Mankiewicz, coauthor of the Kane script.

Pauline Kael, in her introduction to The Citizen Kane Book, offers her version of how it all began:'' . . . Mankiewicz proposed to Welles that they make a 'prismatic' movie about the life of a man seen from several different points of view." In their search for a big American figure as hero, they came up with Howard Hughes, but quickly discarded him in favor of the press lords Kael says Mankiewicz offered his idea of Hearst because, much earlier, he had been working on a screenplay about Hearst. She places this early Mankiewicz endeavor somewhere in the Fall of 1 925, or a few months after the publication of The Great Gatsby. 9

Other possible precursors of Citizen Kane, in theme or mode of narration, mentioned by Kael include the films The Power and the Glory; I Loved a Woman; and John Meade's Woman. Bernard Herrmann, composer and music director for Kane, while discounting the uses of this search for a literary "Rosebud," says: "I've always thought that Orson was influenced by a popular work of the time called I am Jonathan Scrivener," a novel in which, finally, according to Herrmann, no light is shed on the leading character. 10

Although the filmic or novelistic influences are not clearly fixed for either work, we can see in both Citizen Kane and The Great Gatsby a reliance on a form of first-person narration, the mode employed by Conrad in Heart of Darkness. The later works could be seen as separate halves of Ford's summary of the Conrad philosophy which suggests that "It is obviously best if you can contrive to be without views at all," but that if this should prove impossible, "You must then invent, justify and set going in your novel a character who can convincingly express your views." 11 While Fitzgerald opted for the narrator who would carry his views, Welles, through Thompson the reporter, leans toward narration "without views at all."

Carraway and Thompson are further joined through the methods by which the plot details of the two works are revealed. In his study of Fitzgerald, James Miller suggests the three methods by which Nick Carraway reveals the details of Gatsby: his own experiences; what others have told him; and what he had pieced together from various other sources such as "newspapers, servants, his own imagination."12 Much of this is paralleled in Citizen Kane when Thompson views the filmed newspaper, "News on the March"; queries Bernstein and Leland, the former business employees; Raymond, the servant; the ex-wife, Susan Alexander; and visits the Thatcher Library to peruse the entombed papers of Kane's guardian. Unlike Nick, however. Thompson has no opportunity to meet or talk with the central figure.

Not only are there structural parallels in the two American works, there are as well thematic unities. Like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, both Thompson and Carraway offer us a view of a figure of lengendary proportions. "There was," says Bernard Herrmann, "a tradition in America, particularly in the Middle West where Orson was born, of this type of millionaire," and he adds that Welles had heard all the tales when he was growing up. 13 Fitzgerald, too, grew up in the spell of this tradition and as a boy in St. Paul often confronted the enormous stone mansion of the family of the legendary railroad magnate, James J. Hill.

When Welles's legendary figure, Charles Foster Kane, is a Midwestern youngster of five, he is transferred (like a piece of stock) by his mother to an Eastern bank for his own good (or, for the good of his goods) after she discovers that some seemingly worthless stock in the Colorado Lode has proven extremely valuable. His father, who at first protests, ("The idea of a bank being the guardeen . . . .") reconciles himself to the loss of his son rather soon after he is told he and his wife will receive the sum of $50,000 a year under the new arrangement. Uprooted at five, Charles is provided with a tutor by his new "parents," the Eastern bank. It is not surprising, then, that just as he was "acquired" by the bank, he subsequently spends much of his adult life acquiring not only possessions, but people.

After his marriage to Emily Norton has gone sour, Kane meets Susan Alexander. He seems fascinated by her, possibly because, like his real parents before the arrival of the miner's millions, she responds to him as a person. When Susan tells Kane of her mother's dream that she be an opera star, Kane's money and force (all that he really trusts) will then provide the opera career for Susan which she, it develops, is desperate to avoid. His acquisition of Susan is made the subject of a newspaper exposé which causes Kane to lose his bid for the governorship. After Susan and Kane marry, she refuses to continue to play at singing and, after her suicide attempt, he grudgingly agrees to let her off.

Deprived of his past by his parents, his generational immortality periled by the death of his son by his first wife in an automobile accident, his public immortality threatened by the failure of his ploy for political power, Kane, in 1 925, begins to build for Susan their Florida Xanadu. She, however, loathes this enforced exile with its requirement of total submission to the will of Kane and departs for New York, refusing any longer to be a bird in his gilded cage. He is left alone at Xanadu, where we glimpse him through the bars and gates, attended by a servant, huddled "in a bath chair, swathed in steamer rugs, being perambulated through his rose garden, a desolate figure in the sunshine" (p. 121).

Like Kane, Gatsby left the Midwest to come East after an exchange of parentage.14 As James Gatz, he had exchanged his own parents for Dan Cody, to whom he offered himself in the guise of Jay Gatsby. Cody is described by Fitzgerald as a 50-year-old millionaire, a "product of every rush for metal since seventy five." Like Kane, Cody has been, with the aid of the reporter Ella Kaye, the victim of newspaper scandal involving a woman. Cody acts as Gatsby's "guardian" for five years while they sail around the Continent. After Cody's death, Gatsby was due to inherit $25,000, but the money goes instead to Ella Kaye, who presumably cheats Gatsby not of the natural upbringing by his natural parents (as in Kane) but of the financial legacy from his "adopted" parent. 15

Fitzgerald says of Gatsby after Cody's death that "He was left with his singularly appropriate education." That education, for Gatsby as well as for Kane, had to do with power and money. Kane gained enormous wealth, legally; Gatsby, illegally. Kane would swing presidential elections, legally; Gatsby would be linked in illegality "with the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919." Gatsby's education, like Kane's, suggested to him that the American Dream could be bought without corrupting the American Dreamer.

Gatsby determined to amass his fortune because only with it could he have Daisy, his Dream, the girl with "a voice like money" and a proper American past. He couldn't believe that she wouldn't return. When she transferred her allegiance, legally, to Tom Buchanan, he determined to acquire those "things" which would permit her return. For her, he built his Long Island Xanadu. For her, he gave his big parties, to which everyone came and where, foreshadowing Kane, he remained an isolated figure. Having denied his own heritage by renouncing his natural parents, Gatsby then found that his link (the legacy) to his adopted parent was as well denied him. He was a man without a past. Yet, if he regained Daisy, would he not also gain her past? His essential need, therefore, was to go back to the days when it seemed to him that Daisy was his. "Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously." "Why, of course you can."

As in Kane, the automobile, that early herald of the technology which altered America, brings awareness of mortality. As a result of the automobile accident. Daisy comes easily and surely to a repositioning of herself in her nasty but "safe" marriage to Tom. Like Kane. Gatsby is alone at his death, with only the servants and Carraway to hear, from a distance, the automobile mechanic Wilson's shots.

R. W. Stallman notes that in Gatsby "everyone tumbles from some heightened promise of life." 16 Nick Carraway conjectures that Gatsby must have surmised in those last moments of his life not only that Daisy would not telephone but what her true worth was. Finally, then, one feels that Gatsby ascertained the truth about how much Daisy and his Dream had cost him. With that reality established and the knowledge of the waste in his life open to him, the world (Nick suggests) must have seemed to Gatsby a place where even a rose was a grotesque object. It is not only awareness of the fall, but knowledge of the horror of the descent that Gatsby. along with Kurtz, evidences just before his death.

Welles tells us that in Kane he has given us a portrait of a man who "sets himself up against the law, against the entire tradition of liberal civilization . . . at once egotistical and disinterested . . . at once an idealist and a swindler, a very great man and a mediocre individual."17 Kane, like Kurtz, plundered the heart of another civilization for the gratification of his own lust. Kane, again like Kurtz, had not kept faith with his own principles. In the Declaration of Principles he had given to Leland, he promised to serve the people as "a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and human beings." When this Declaration is sent back to him, in shreds, it jolts Kane to an awareness of how far he has strayed from his announced purpose. In pronouncing this Declaration an "antique." Kane is attempting to deny the validity òf the Past, perhaps because to remember the Past is not only to invoke standards of morality against which his own actions would be measured, but to acknowledge that his parents cast him out.

The snow-scene ball which Kane finds in Susan's room after her departure is the catalyst which eventually requires that he remember and acknowledge his past. When they first meet, Kane is on his way to see his mother's things in the storage warehouse. In her rooms, he plays for Susan games a child would enjoy, basking in her easy warmth and friendliness. ("But you like me, don't you? Even though you don't know who I am?") He had planned to search for his youth in the warehouse; he found it instead with Susan. Yet, because he couldn't risk facing the truth of his life, he soon made of her merely another acquisition. With Susan's departure, he is forced to "see" his situation: there are now no unpaid people in his life.

The large public funeral belies the private, lonely dying, and Kane understands what his end will be. In permitting himself to utter the word "Rosebud," Kane acknowledges that both his actions and guidelines were not as they should have been. This, the long unacknowledged cry, reconciles him with a Past which is then restored to him.

The snow-scene ball and the Declaration of Principles have parallels in Gatsby. At the Plaza Hotel, Jordan Baker tells Nick Carraway that just before the bridal dinner for Daisy and Tom, she found Daisy drunk in bed holding a letter. Reaching into the wastebasket, Daisy came up with Tom's $350,000 string of pearls which she gave to Jordan, asking that she go downstairs and tell everyone she had changed her mind about the marriage. Instead, Jordan recruited Daisy's mother's maid and together they put Daisy, still holding the letter (certainly Jay's), into a cold tub. "She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up into a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap-dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow" (p. 77). Half an hour later, Daisy was wearing Tom's pearls, "the incident was over," and the exchange was completed. The white pearls have a ,grisly counterpart in Wolfsheim's cufflinks, made of "oddly familiar pieces of ivory," but they are both forceful symbols of the decadence of the civilization and of its willingness to forget its origins and its past. In form and function, all are related to Kurtz's ivory in Heart of Darkness.

Fitzgerald's Gatsby. suggests Stallman, "is shaped in the same circular form as Heart of Darkness." 18 Rather than circular, what seems to be true is that for both we end where and how we begin. This is true as well of Citizen Kane which, like Heart of Darkness, 19 has a "frame" narrator. In the Welles film, it is the eye ("I") of the camera; in the Conrad tale, it is the "I" of one of the auditors in the boat. Kane begins and ends with the "No Trespassing" sign on Kane's estate gate.

If we assume a meaning here which suggests that we trespass only when we are too quick to judgment and condemnation, we see that all three narrators are not found wanting. In cautioning that "The mind of man is capable of anything . . . who can tell? - but truth - truth stripped of its cloak of time," Marlow urges us to an awareness of the dangers of judging another solely within the limitations of our own experience. Similarly, Nick tells us at the outset that his father urged him always to reserve judgment on others, thus gently suggesting the breadth of moral experience which still awaited the young man. Thompson, too, at the inconclusive end of his quest, cautions, "I don't think any word explains a man's life."

As is Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby and Citizen Kane are imbued with a strong sense of the relationship of place and character. Throughout the Conrad novel, we are confronted with the impossibility of surviving the shocks of a transplantation attendant on such a journey. When Marlow tells us that Kurtz's soul had gone mad, he attributes the madness to his "being alone in the wilderness." In The Great Gatsby, the East functions as wilderness. Nick tells us that Gatsby and all the other Midwesterners who had gone East, there possessed some flaw. When Nick returns to the Midwest, that flaw is no longer apparent.

The function of the East is similar in both Gatsby and Kane. Of Kane, Welles has said, "All he had was charm - beside the money ... he was raised by a bank, remember." 20 In Citizen Kane, one of the ways in which Welles insists on the viewer's recognition of the importance of place is through consistent use of frames composed with the benefit of Gregg Toland's wide angle lens, permitting a portrayal of the characters' situation in their environment. If the world is absurd and the vision grotesque, we can expect no other: Both men had, like Kurtz, gone too far, alone.