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Language of the Night:Bradbury "Green Shadows White Whale" Autobiography + the Irish Stories [1]
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Date: 2025-02-24
Ray Bradbury’s Language of the Night:
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('Green Shadows White Whale' is Bradbury’s Fiction+Autobiographical writings on his experience in Ireland 1953-1954 )
Ireland (picture released under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic dk images library)
Green shadows, white whale : a novel of Ray Bradbury's adventures making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland Bradbury, Ray, 1920-2012
texts
About the author (1992)
One of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of all time, Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920. He moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1934. Since his first story appeared in Weird Tales when he was twenty years old, he published some 500 short stories, novels, plays, scripts and poems. Among his many famous works are Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles. Ray Bradbury died in 2012 at the age of 91.
Bibliographic information
TitleGreen Shadows, White Whale
AuthorRay Bradbury
Editionreprint
PublisherHarperCollins, 1992
ISBN0006476341, 9780006476344
Length288 pages
SubjectsFiction
Performing Arts
Film, Television & Radio
Fiction / Biographical
Fiction / Performing Arts / Film, Television & Radio
From Moby Dick
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"Stories of ghosts and haunts and things in jars that I had seen in sour armpit carnivals, of friends lost to the tides in lakes, and of consorts of three in the morning, those souls who had to fly in the dark in order not to be shot in the sun"
-Ray Bradbury
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“The Great Collision of Monday Last” was caused by my picking up a copy of the Irish Times in Dublin and reading the terrible fact that during the year 1953, 375 bike riders had been killed in Ireland I thought, how amazing. We rarely read anything like that at home; it was always people dying in car accidents. Investigating further I discovered the reason. There were tens of thousands of bicycles all over Ireland; people going 40 or 50 miles an hour and colliding head on, so that when their heads struck, they sustained serious skull injuries. I thought: Nobody in the world knows this! Maybe I should write a short story about it. Which is what I did." -RB
Bradbury’s Green Shadows White Whale was a change for him- although he'd often written fictionalized accounts of himself as a child in stories ("Douglas Spaulding ") this was his first actual "admitted" written account of himself in any book- which makes it extremely interesting, as well as his writing about Ireland first hand, in the 50s.
"When I was working for John Huston in Ireland on the screenplay of Moby-Dick, we spent many late evenings, sitting around the fire, drinking Irish whiskey, which I did not much care for, but only drank because he loved it. And sometimes Huston would pause in the middle of drinking and talking and close his eyes to listen to the wind wailing outside the house. Then his eyes would snap open and he would point a finger at me and cry that the banshees were out in the Irish weather and maybe I should go outdoors and see if it was true and bring them in. He did this so often to scare me that it lodged in my mind and when I got home to America I finally wrote a story in response to his antics."
(on Banshee one of his Irish Stories)
"I’ve never been in charge of my stories, they’ve always been in charge of me. As each new one has called to me, ordering me to give it voice and form and life, I’ve followed the advice I’ve shared with other writers over the years: Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down" -RB
“The Haunting of the New” happened because John Godley, Lord Kilbracken, wrote me from Ireland describing his visit to a house that had burned and been replaced, stone by stone, brick by brick, in imitation of the original Within half a day of reading Kilbracken’s postcard, I had first-drafted the tale"
-RB
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"Bradbury goes mainstream with a hymn to Ireland and alcohol, focusing on writing a screenplay with John Huston for the director's film Moby Dick. Set in Dublin and the Irish countryside where legendary director Huston has settled in as a squire, the story and the Irish gift for gab allow Bradbury's love of metaphor to find a basis he's never known before. With all of the silver-tongued folk speaking inspiredly in the normal tenor of their stout-and whiskey-fueled conversation, Bradbury spouts eloquence as naturally and exuberantly as John Millington Synge—and fine talk it is you'll be hearing. Young Bradbury arrives at the Huston estate in awe of Huston and instantly finds himself in company with a laughing ogre given to whiskey pranks and the famed man's false bonhomie. The episodic plot circles about a wedding that Huston decides to throw for a longtime friend, less about the actual scriptwriting and difficulties met in harnessing the White Whale to the needs of Hollywood. Other eddies include the (fictitious) arrival of teetotaler George Bernard Shaw at Heeber Finn's pub, during which the old renegade outtalks even the most inspired of the whiskey-laced barfolk; the pub's reaction to a visiting team of gay ballet dancers, which turns wittily on Finn's recognition that the Irish male is closer in nature to these gays than one would suspect; and on Huston's savaging of Bradbury's self-esteem. It rains twelve days out of ten in Ireland, we discover: "I stood looking at the gray-stone streets and the gray-stone clouds, watching the frozen people trudge by exhaling gray funeral plumes from their wintry mouths, dressed in their smoke-colored suits and soot-black coats, and I felt the white grow in my hair." Despite the apt but sad romanticizing of alcohol, and an unfortunate title echo of Peter Viertel's novel White Hunter, Black Heart (about Viertel's scripting The African Queen with Huston), Bradbury's triumph. He has never written better" www.kirkusreviews.com/...
"When I arrived in Ireland many years ago I opened the Irish Times and discovered therein a small ad, which read: A BENEFIT FOR THE IRISH ORPHANS LAUREL & HARDY IN PERSON! I ran down to the theater and was fortunate enough to purchase the last available ticket, front row center! The curtain went up and those dear men performed the most wonderful scenes from their greatest films. I sat there in joy and amazement, with tears rolling down my cheeks. When I got home I looked back on all this and remembered an occasion when a friend of mine took me to the stairs up which Laurel and Hardy had carried the piano box, only to be chased down the hill by it. My story had to follow." RB
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"What about Ireland? There is every kind of Irish story here because after living in Dublin for six months I saw that most of the Irish I met had a variety of ways of making do with that dreadful beast Reality. You can run into it head-on, which is a dire business, or you can skirt around it, give it a poke, dance for it, make up a song, write you a tale, prolong the gab, fill up the flask. Each partakes of Irish cliché, but each, in the foul weather and the foundered politics, is true"
"I got to know every beggar in the streets of Dublin, the ones near O’Connell’s Bridge with maniac pianolas grinding more coffee than tunes and the ones who loaned out a single baby among a whole tribe of rainsoaked mendicants, so you saw the babe one hour at the top of Grafton Street and the next by the Royal Hibernian Hotel, and at midnight down by the river, but I never thought I would write of them. Then the need to howl and give an angry weep made me rear up one night and write “McGillahee’s Brat” out of terrible suspicions and the begging of a rainwalking ghost that had to be laid. I visited some of the old burnt-out estates of the great Irish landowners, and heard tales of one “burning” that had not quite come off, and so wrote “The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place.” “The Anthem Sprinters,” another Irish encounter, wrote itself down years later when, one rainy night, I recalled the countless times my wife and I had sprinted out of Dublin cinemas, dashing for the exit, knocking children and old folks to left and right, in order to make it to the exit before the National Anthem was played."
-RB
Bradbury on Bradbury- in his own words- this book is essential reading for those who love the writer
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Thanks for reading LOTN
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