Bradbury (and others) versus John Huston

A well known part of Ray Bradbury lore is the time the author spent working on Moby Dick (1956) with Oscar-winning writer-director John Huston. Bradbury spent less than a year with Huston, yet that brief period had a lasting effect on the rest of Ray's life and career.

The screenplay credit on the film opened doors for him, enabling him to become a screenwriter who had freedom to choose which projects to devote his time to. The historical accident of Huston wanting to work in Ireland (where he had a home) led to Ray falling in love with Dublin and its people, some of whom would turn up as characters in the plays and stories he was inspired to write in the following decades. And the intense engagement with the text of Moby Dick itself led Bradbury to a fascination with the novel's mechanisms and symbolism, a fascination he had to work through for himself in his play, radio play, opera and novella Leviathan '99 - a space-age retelling of Herman Melville's book.

Eventually - about forty years after working with Huston - Bradbury felt compelled to pull together his recollections and his fantasies into a novel: Green Shadows, White Whale. The reader is left wondering how much of the novel to believe. On the one hand, it is a genuinely accurate reminiscence of some of his adventures with Huston, confirmed by third parties who were there at the time. But on the other, there are stories within - such as the ghostly "Banshee" - which can't be anything but the work of a master fantasy writer.

 

Bradbury isn't the only person who felt compelled to put their experiences with Huston on record...

Novelist Peter Viertel fictionalised his adventures in White Hunter, Black Heart, later filmed by Clint Eastwood. It can't be coincidence that the wording and rhythm of Bradbury's title Green Shadows, White Whale matches that of Viertel's.

 

 

Katharine Hepburn, who suffered through Huston's filming of The African Queen, wrote up her experiences in The Making of The African Queen. Bradbury reported that it was Hepburn's book which confirmed that there was a good story to tell of working with Huston.

 

 

But way back before anyone else was writing up accounts of time with Huston, there was Charles Hamblett. He was with Huston in the Canary Islands during the filming of some of the shipboard action of Moby Dick, and found the whole thing so bizarre that he had to write a humorous novel about the whole affair, The Crazy Kill.

 

 

Bradbury in Ireland

In 1953, Ray Bradbury went to Ireland to write the screenplay for Moby Dick. John Huston was living there - reportedly because he was fond of Irish fox hunting.

While Bradbury and family holed up in central Dublin's Royal Hibernian Hotel (demolished in 1991), Huston was living it up in a lordly mansion which he was renting. Courtown Demesne was built in 1815, replacing a previous property which was destroyed. According to this report in the Irish Times, it's a huge building with three floors.

In 2012, Courtown Demesne was still up for sale, its asking price having been almost halved... to ten million euros. It is thanks to its proposed sale that we can see detailed shots of its exterior and interior: there is a gallery here on a property sales site; and you can download the detailed sales brochure for the property from sales agents Knight Frank here!

In Bradbury's account of his Irish experience with Huston, Green Shadows, White Whale, he describes a number of visits to Courtown. The most notable of these is in the chapter adapted from his short story "Banshee", where a fictionalised Bradbury visits his director with a finished draft of the Moby Dick screenplay, and manages for once to get the upper hand over Huston.

Bradbury's weekly trip out to Courtown - driven by Mike (in the book; Bradbury recalled his real name was Nick) - provided many of the ideas for his Irish tall tales which first emerged as short plays, later being re-written as short stories, before finally being incorporated into the grander narrative of Green Shadows, White Whale.

There's more about Bradbury's Irish experience in my earlier post on Bradbury's Dublin.

Mixed Reviews...

Ray Bradbury's affection for Ireland and the Irish is well known, and well documented in his fictional account of his time in Dublin, Green Shadows, White Whale. The feeling isn't always mutual, unfortunately. On 2nd March 1963, the Irish Times published a brief review of Bradbury's then new book Something Wicked This Way Comes:

Finally to a novel which, because, it seems, I have read only the best of Ray Bradbury, appeared to me to be a sorry lapse. It is a piece of horrific whimsy about a sort of satanic carnival which arrives outside a little town in the middle of the night with all sorts of weird devices for the destruction of its citizens, in particular of the two wholesome boy heroes. It seemed to me incredibly puerile, but I am informed that is is "usual" Ray Bradbury, and that a volume in which a brilliant and truly horrible story called "The Next in Line" appeared is not typical. Perhaps, therefore, readers who really know their Ray Bradbury will not be too disappointed with his latest offering.

The review was written by Irish novelist and short story writer Val Mulkerns. I appreciate her honesty in admitting to only a partial knowledge of Bradbury's body of work, but wonder at the editorial wisdom of allocating the review to someone apparently ill-equipped to appreciate its qualities.

Bradbury's Dublin

I recently took a brief trip to Dublin. While I was there I dashed about with a camera trying to grab some pictures of places with a Ray Bradbury connection.

Click on any of these pictures to view larger versions.

It is an oft-told tale that Bradbury stayed in Dublin in 1953-54, when he was writing the screenplay for Moby Dick for director John Huston. This relatively short visit - a mere few months out of Bradbury's nearly 88 years on the planet to date - provided an incredible amount of inspiration. Not only did he complete the screenplay, he left Ireland with material for a number of short plays, short stories, the play (and later novella) Leviathan '99 and eventually the partly autobiographical novel Green Shadows, White Whale.

My first priority in Dublin was to get to O'Connell Bridge. Not only is this the only major bridge in Europe to be wider than it is long, it was the location for Bradbury's finest Irish story, "The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge". First published as "The Beggar on the Dublin Bridge" in the Saturday Evening Post in June 1961, the story is an account of Bradbury's experiences of being accosted by beggars whenever he left his hotel. The story can be found in Bradbury's short story collections The Machineries of Joy and Bradbury Stories. It can also be found, slightly modified, as a chapter in Green Shadows, White Whale - where John Huston strangely takes the place of Bradbury's wife.

O'Connell Bridge isn't difficult to find. Nor is it difficult to find a beggar on O'Connell Bridge. There always seems to be one right in the middle, exactly where Bradbury says. Unfortunately, however, none of the real modern day beggars are as colourful or as entertaining as Bradbury's concertina playing, possibly blind (or possibly not), sweet voiced beggar:

For a moment, while we had been talking in the cold rain, the beggar had been silent. Now, as if the weather had freshened him to life, he gave his concertina a great mash. From the folding, unfolding snake box he squeezed a series of asthmatic notes which were no preparation for what followed.

He opened his mouth. He sang.

The sweet clear baritone voice which rang over O'Connell Bridge, steady and sure, was beautifully shaped and controlled, not a quiver, not a flaw, anywhere. The man just opened his mouth, which meant that all kinds of secret doors in his body gave way. He did not sing so much as let his soul free.

When he arrived in Dublin in October 1953, Bradbury stayed in the Royal Hibernian Hotel, which can be seen in this old postcard of Dawson Street. Here is how Sam Weller describes it in The Bradbury Chronicles:

In Dublin, the Bradburys checked into the old yet opulent Royal Hibernian Hotel on Dawson Street and were given two rooms. Ray and Maggie's room - number 77 - had a fireplace, and in this room Ray would do much of his work on the screenplay. Regina [the Bradburys' nanny]and the girls were placed in a separate room, with a coin-operated heater into which Regina continually fed money to keep the room warm.

Alas, the Royal Hibernian is no more, torn down for redevelopment in the 1970s. In its place today stands a small shopping mall, the Royal Hibernian Way.

Not far from the Royal Hibernian site is St Stephen's Green, a park where Bradbury would occasionally take his children for a walk. This gets several mentions in Green Shadows, White Whale as the narrator desperately tries to solve the mystery of the beggar-woman:

God, how that woman could race.
She put a block between her backside and me while I gathered breath to yell: "Stop, thief!"
It seemed an appropriate yell. The baby was a mystery I wished to solve. And there she vaulted off with it, a wild thief.
So I dashed after, crying. "Stop! Help! You there!"
She kept a hundred yards between us for the first half mile, up over bridges across the Liffey and finally up Grafton Street, where I jogged into St. Stephen's Green, to find it ... empty.
She had absolutely vanished.
Unless, of course, I thought, turning in all directions, letting my gaze idle, it's into The Four Provinces pub she's gone . . .

The entrance to the park closest to Grafton Street is Fusilier's Arch, a memorial erected after the Boer War. In this photo, the arch is flanked by the St Stephen's Green Shopping Centre. Although constructed in the 1980s, this Centre looks rather Victorian with its conservatory-style domed glass roof, which was suposedly design to complement the architecture of the Gaiety Theatre opposite. (After Ray's family left for Italy in 1954, he attended the ballet season at the Gaeity.)

Speaking of theatres, legend has it that on Bradbury's first day in Dublin he saw a newspaper ad which said "Laurel & Hardy - Live - For One Night Only". He promptly dashed down to the Olympia Theatre and bought the last remaining ticket. The Olympia still stands in the Temple Bar area of Dublin, and remains a popular venue for drama, comedy and music.

If the legend is accurate, Ray must have arrived in Dublin on Sunday 11 October 1953, as it was on that night that Stan and Ollie had decided to give a single charity performance of a show they had been preparing for touring in Belfast and London. The picture here shows them outside the Royal Marine Hotel where they stayed throughout their time in the city. A detailed account of Laurel and Hardy in Dublin can be found in this programme for a recent Sons of the Desert convention.

It's impossible to be in Dublin without noticing the references to the great literary figures all around, in statues, museums, public art. You can find out more than you would ever want to know at the fascinating (but small) Writer's Museum where you will find this fellow, hero of Ray Bradbury and immortalised in the story "GBS - Mark V" (1976).

Oh, and the wee fellow in the background? That's Oscar Wilde!

Apart from Shaw, Bradbury was also greatly influenced by another Dublin writer, W.B.Yeats. It is Yeats, of course, who provided Bradbury with the title for his short story "The Golden Apples of the Sun." Joe Mugnaini's line art for this story is shown here.

Fahrenheit 451 - Moscow style. Herman Melville - Bradbury style.

The Moscow Times has published a review of a new Russian stage adaptation of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It's not clear whether this is a translation of Bradbury's own play, or a completely new adaptation. Read John Freedman's review here.

Subterranean Press, which has produced some excellent limited edition versions of Bradbury books, has announced the first book publication of Moby Dick - Ray Bradbury's original screenplay for the 1956 feature film directed by John Huston. This is an important publication, since it finally gives us a chance to see what Bradbury brought to the adaptation, without the distortions imposed by Huston, Huston's friends, and others such as Orson Welles.

Why does it matter? For at least three reasons. First, Huston grabbed co-script credit from Bradbury, and somehow managed to overturn a Writer's Guild of America ruling on script credit which had gone in Bradbury's favour. Second, because the innovations in Bradbury's version of Moby Dick are so powerful that many of them have been carried over into more recent adaptations of Melville's novel, as if Bradbury's text were superior to Melville's. Third, because (as I have argued elsewhere) Bradbury's experience on the Moby Dick project had a major influence on the next fifty years of his development as a writer: through his Irish stories and plays, his endless wrestling with the Melville tribute Leviathan '99, his novel Green Shadow, White Whale, and much else.