Green Shadows, White Whale
Page 25
“Tell you when I get there.”
“Move your ass, kid, move your ass.”
An hour later I threw the forty new pages in his lap.
“Who was that on the phone?” he joked.
“Not me,” I said. “Read.”
“Go out and chase the bull around the field.”
“If I did I’d kill him, I feel so good.”
“Go have a drink, then.”
I did.
Half an hour later, John came into the study with a bewildered look, as if he had been kicked in the face.
“Jesus,” he said. “You were right. It’s finished. When do we start shooting?”
“Tell me, John,” I said.
“Did old Herman whisper in your ear?”
“Shouted.”
“I hear the echoes,” John said. “Goddamn.”
“By the way,” he said, as an afterthought. “About our trip to London?”
“Yes?” I stiffened, eyes shut.
“Take the ferryboat,” said John.
Chapter 33
Half a year older, I came into Finn’s a day later, with rain bringing me to the door and rain waiting to take me away.
I set my luggage down by the bar, where Finn leaned over to blink at it, as did Doone and Mike and all the rest.
“Is it going away you are?” said Finn.
“Yes.”
The inhabitants of Finn’s turned and did not drink from their glasses, large or small.
“A remarkable thing happened,” I said. “It was a surprise.”
“The sort of thing that is always welcome here.” Finn laid out a Guinness. “Let us in on it?”
“After all these hours and days and weeks and months, I got out of bed yesterday morning,” I said, “walked to the mirror, stood there and looked at myself, ran to my typewriter and typed steadily for the next seven hours. At last, at four in the afternoon, I wrote ‘Finis’ and called Courtown House and said it’s over, it’s through, it’s finished. And found a taxi and came out to throw the forty pages in himself s lap. And we opened a bottle of champagne.”
“Here’s another,” said Finn, and popped a cork.
He poured it for all and filled my glass.
“At this very moment,” Doone asked, as everyone waited, “are you that one who moved your hand and did the scenes?”
“Am I Herman Melville?”
“That’s the one.”
“No,” I said. “He was waiting to visit and could not stay. I was gathering him up all those days and months, reading and rereading, to make sure he got into my bloodstream or nerves or behind my eyes or whatever. He came because I called. Spirits like that don’t stay. They give of themselves and go.”
“It must have been quite a feeling,” said Doone.
“No way to describe it. You’ll see it on the screen someday.”
“God willing,” said Finn.
“Yes,” I said, nodding. “God willing.”
“Well, here’s to Herman Melville inside or out of this young man,” said Doone.
“Herman Melville,” said all.
“Well, now,” said Finn, “it’s goodbye?”
“Will you ever come back?” asked Doone.
“No,” I said.
“A realist,”said Finn.
“It’s just,” I explained, “I live so far off and I don’t fly. And chances are I’ll never work in Ireland again. And if too much time passes, I wouldn’t want to come back.”
“Aye,” said Timulty, “and all of us old or dead or both and no sight worth seeing.”
“It has been,” I said, nursing a final glass, “the greatest time of my life.”
“You have improved the weather around here,” said Doone, tenderly, wiping his nose.
“And for the hell of it,” said Mike, “let’s pretend that someday you’ll return, and by that time, think of the stuff we’ll have saved up to tell, and you the richer for it.”
“Aye,” said all.
“That’s most tempting.” I smiled. “Dare I say I will miss all of you?”
“Aw, the hell,” said Finn quietly.
“Damn,” said some others, looking at me like a son.
“Before you go,” said Finn. “On the Irish, now. Have you crossed our T’s and dotted our I’s? How would you best describe …?”
“Imagination,” I said quietly.
Silence. They waited.
“Imagination,” I went on. “Great God, everything’s wrong. Where are you? On a flyspeck isle nine thousand miles north of nowhere!! What wealth is there? None! What natural resources? Only one: the resourceful genius, the golden mind, of everyone I’ve met! The mind that looks out the eyes, the words that roll off the tongue in response to events no bigger than the eye of a needle! From so little you glean so much; squeeze the last ounce of life from a flower with one petal, a night with no stars, a day with no sun, a theater haunted by old films, a bump on the head that in America would have been treated with a Band-Aid. Here and everywhere in Ireland, it goes on. Someone picks up a string, someone else ties a knot in it, a third one adds a bow, and by morn you’ve got a rug on the floor, a drape at the window, a harp-thread tapestry singing on the wall, all starting from that string! The Church puts her on her knees, the weather drowns her, politics all but buries her … but Ireland still sprints for that far exit. And do you know, by God, I think she’ll make it!”
I finished my champagne and then went about shaking each hand and buffing each arm with a gentle fist.
“Goodbye, Timulty.”
“Lad.”
“So long, Hannahan.”
“Boy.”
“Mr. Kelly, Mr. O’Brien, Mr. Bannion.”
“Lad.” “Yank.” “Boyo.”
“Mr. Doone, keep sprinting.”
“I’m on me toes.”
“Mr. Finn, keep pouring.”
“The well will never run dry.”
At the door I turned to see them as in a picture lined up there. I was glad they did not come along to see me out. It was as in the old cinema scenes. I looked at them, and they at me.
“God speed you, Yank.”
“God bless you, Mr. Finn.”
They waved, I waved, and went out the door.
Mike got behind the wheel of the 1928 Nash.
“Pray that it starts,” he said.
We prayed. It did. We drove off down the road toward the Irish Sea and the port, away from 1918 and 1922 and 1929 and 1945 and 1953, and I did not look back as Finn’s vanished in the past. I saw with wet eyes that, God, the hills were green. Oh, yes, the hills were green.
Dublin Revisited
I had never thought about visiting Ireland. I had never thought it could possibly be anywhere in my future. On the other hand, I had always responded to people who said, “When are you going to write a screenplay?” with “When John Huston asks me.” So the two things came together: one, not wanting to visit Ireland necessarily and two, wanting to work with John Huston.
It all came about because I gave him a copy of The Golden Apples of the Sun in early 1953, little realizing that one story, “The Fog Horn,” read by Huston, would cause him to call me to his hotel in August of that year.
When I arrived at his hotel he put a drink in my hand, sat me down, stood over me, and said, “How would you like to come live in Ireland and write the screenplay for Moby Dick?”
I was stunned. My response was, “I’ve never been able to read the damned thing.”
Huston, in turn, was stunned. He’d never heard anything like that from any screenwriter. After a long pause, he said, “Well, kid, why don’t you go home tonight, read as much as you can, and come back and tell me if you’ll help me kill the White Whale.”
I went home that night and said to my wife, “Pray for me.”
“Why?” she said.
I responded, “Because tonight I’ve got to read a book and tomorrow do a book report.”
I read as much as I could and dis
covered that as in the case of most nineteenth-century writers, Melville was a writer of metaphors, fantastic ones, and by the scores and multiples. I read as much as I could and went back the next day and took the job and quite suddenly we were on our way to an island that I never considered worth visiting.
We arrived in Dublin in October and stayed until April, and I spent all those months trying to understand Melville and the White Whale.
While there, friends in America wrote to me and said, “Are you gathering material?” and “Will you ever write about Ireland?”
I replied, “No, I’m too busy with Huston, Melville, and the Whale. I’m not seeing anything.”
That was quite wrong. I was walking in Dublin every night in the rain and mist and fog. I’ve always loved the rain and when I saw it outside the window I went out and strolled through Dublin, night after night, seeing the homeless, watching the beggars in front of the hotels, going to the theater, and all-in-all soaking in as much of Ireland as I could possibly take in.
When I got home a year later I didn’t think I’d seen much, but one night a voice called in my head, “Ray, darlin’.”
I sat up in bed and said, “Who’s that?”
The voice said, “Why, it’s Nick, your cab driver. Do you remember all those nights of my driving you from Heeber Finn’s, back past Meynooth, and into Dublin? I must have driven you a hundred times from John Huston’s house back into the city.”
I said, “Yes, I remember.”
The voice in my head said, “Well, Ray, darlin’, would you mind putting it down?”
I got out of bed the next morning and began to write a poem about Dublin, and a week later an essay, and a month later a short story, and a year later a play.
After many years it all began to come together in my head.
But during that time, I was also reluctant to speak of my experience in Ireland because I don’t believe in gossip, and being around Huston I had gathered a lot of intimate detail that I didn’t want to talk about to anyone; I didn’t feel it was anyone’s business.
So the years passed and I never wrote anything or allowed myself to be interviewed about Huston and Ireland.
But finally, along came Katharine Hepburn, who did a book about Africa and The African Queen and Huston, without really revealing anything.
When I read the book I called my publisher, who was also her publisher, and said, “Why didn’t you get Hepburn to write more about her experience? This is a very skinny book.”
They said that they had asked Hepburn to provide more material, but she had refused. Faced with this, after many years I said to myself, “Well, I think I know Huston as well as anyone and I will try and do a book which is fair, which presents the Huston that I loved along with the one that I began to fear on occasion.”
So I put all the material together: the poems, the essays, the stories, and it turned into a novel, which you now hold in your hands. I think it’s a pretty fair examination of the trials and tribulations I went through trying to understand Melville and trying even harder to understand John Huston.
Years have passed and rereading the material, I have no reason to revise my opinion. The bottom sum is John Huston changed my life forever. By offering me Moby Dick, my first screenplay, he gave me a chance to move out into the world and be recognized for the first time.
—Ray Bradbury
About the Author
RAY BRADBURY, the author of more than thirty books, is the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Some of his best-known works are Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. A writer for both theater and cinema, he has adapted sixty-five of his stories for television’s The Ray Brad-bury Theater. He won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He lives with his wife, Marguerite, in Los Angeles.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Books by Ray Bradbury
Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines
Dandelion Wine
Dark Carnival
Death Is a Lonely Business
Driving Blind
Fahrenheit 451
The Golden Apples of the Sun
A Graveyard for Lunatics
Green Shadows, White Whale
The Halloween Tree
I Sing the Body Electric!
The Illustrated Man
Journey to Far Metaphor
Kaleidoscope
Long After Midnight
The Martian Chronicles
The Machineries of Joy
A Medicine for Melancholy
The October Country
One More for the Road
One Timeless Spring
Quicker Than the Eye
R Is for Rocket
The Stories of Ray Bradbury
S Is for Space
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The Toynbee Convector
When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
Yestermorrow
Zen in the Art of Writing
Copyright
The following chapters were previously published in different form: 4, under the title “The Great Collision of Monday Last”; 12, “The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place”; 13, “The Beggar on O’Connell Bridge”; 15, “The Haunting of the New”; 18, “One for His Lordship, and One for the Road”; 21, “Getting Through Sunday Somehow”; 22, “The First Night of Lent”; 23, “McGillahee’s Brat”; 27, “Banshee”; 28, “The Cold Wind and the Warm”; 29. “The Anthem Sprinters.”
Chapter 9 appeared in the May 1992 issue of The American Way under the title “The Hunt Wedding.”
GREEN SHADOWS, WHITE WHALE. Copyright © 2002, 1992 by Ray Bradbury. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 0-380-78966-3
EPub Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780062242068
10 11 12 13 14 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollins.com
%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share