In search of the great white film director
Francis King
GREEN SHADOWS, WHITE WHALE by Ray Bradbury HarperCollins, £14.99, pp. 266 Novelists have a way of repeatedly returning to scratch over some small area of their lives, as though in an attempt to make it intelligible not so much to their readers as to themselves. For Ray Bradbury, such a small area is the seven month period which, a young man way back in 1953, he spent in Ireland writing the screenplay of Moby Dick for John Huston. At that time Huston, with his passion for hunting and the turf, Was resident near Dublin.
Clearly, the two men loved each other; but no less clearly impulses of murderous hatred zig-zagged like lightning between them. One guesses that ever since that time Bradbury has asked himself the twin goes- tions: why did I love him so much? Why did I loathe him so much? He has alreadY written a number of stories about Huston; and now he has returned to him in a novel which is an odd mixture of fact and fantasY. Most of the fact is about Huston and the film, most of the fantasy about an Irelane which for Bradbury often seems to be. a5 mythical as the white whale then hauntal.g him as it had once haunted both Captain Ahab and Melville. Huston — as a number of films from The Treasure of Sierra Madre to The Dead unequivocally demonstrate ' was a genius. But there was an undeniable cruelty to him. Bradbury suffered from a!' irrational terror of flying; so, because of his, refusal to enter a plane, Huston woulu repeatedly accuse him of having 'a Yell° streak'. Bradbury was then not so fallicItis, as he is now, and like many other writers a_ii the outset of their careers, often hau doubts about the reality of his talent. Instead of exerting himself to banish those doubts, Huston took pleasure in aggraval ing them. 'That was John,' the Bradbury- narrator sums up at one moment. 'Kick you in the tripes, then pour on the wild sweet honey by the larder ton.' Huston's baiting and bullying extended from Bradbury to the latest of his wives. Such was his treat- ment of her that one is hardly surprised that, by the close of his life, he had worked his way through some half-dozen.
The passages, making up about a quarter Of the book, which deal with this always uncomfortable and sometimes excruciating relationship might have been extracted from a volume of autobiography still being written. Like Hemingvvay's, Huston's code IS shown as one of consciously heroic maleness; and yet, as in the case of Hemingway, one knows that there was far more to his life than his victories as lover, warrior and sportsman. There are times When Bradbury seems to be implying that buried deep in Huston's character, as in Hemingway's, there was some element of homosexuality, a source of dread and Shame to him, and that it was this that so Often drove him to callousness and even cruelty.
When not writing about his relationship With Huston and his work with him on the script — seven months does seem to be an extraordinarily long period for such an assignment — Bradbury writes about Ireland itself. In doing this, he has Produced what are, in effect, a number of disconnected short stories, most of which, in slightly altered form, have already achieved magazine publication. Fantasy wraps itself round these tales in the manner of a winter fog wrapping itself around a Dublin tenement. In one of them, the narrator is badgered by one of the city's litany beggars, a baby in her arms. A closer look reveals that the baby is, in fact, a middle-aged man, a dwarf, who is the brother of the beggar. In another a rich Woman reconstructs her Georgian Mansion, destroyed in a fire, in every detail, even having an artist reproduce her vanished Old Master's.
Another tale is concerned with 'anthem- sprinting' — a contest to see who can leave a cinema the quickest before the national anthem begins to grind out at the close of a Performance. Yet another — fact now merging with fantasy — deals with the ghost of a woman, once seduced and abandoned by Huston, which wails inconsolably in the dark and rain outside his house.
Writing of the Irish people — whom he characterises as 'a crossword puzzle with no numbers' — Bradbury accepts with little question the image of them which, over the Years, their own writers have so assiduously Projected. His male characters (there are few female ones) are illogical, charming, tazY, kindly, dishonest, generous, treacher- ous, hard-drinking, hen-pecked, gifted with tile gab. Eventually one wishes that he could occasionally distance himself from such stereotypes, amusing though they are. Bradbury never expresses anything simply. Another writer might have written 'I got into Mike's car.' Bradbury writes, 'I opened the door of Mike's car, took my legs apart to get in.' But it is impossible not to admire the vigour of his prose, similes and metaphors constantly cascading from his imagination and scattering like bright beads. Is the narrator in particularly good form? 'I sat listening to my own tongue wag, aim and fire, damn well pleased at my own comic genius.' Does an old woman play the harp?
Her hands, all alone, jumped and frolicked on the air, picked and pringled the strings, two ancient spiders busy at webs quickly built, then, torn by wind, rebuilt.
It is when he is creating dialogue that this kind of writing seems altogether too effort- ful. For example, would Huston have ever said: 'Let's see what my genius, my left ventricle, my right arm has birthed'? Would even Bernard Shaw have ever said in the course of a pub conversation that the Irish 'squeeze the last ounce of joy from a flower with no petals, a night with no stars, a day with no sun'?
In its mixture of fact and imagination, of scrupulous underwriting and hectic over- writing, this is not an entirely satisfactory book. But as in the case of Ireland itself, described by Bradbury with so much love and so little cynicism, its silken charm fully compensates for its rough inadequacies.
Previous page
