Appreciations: Ray Bradbury’s Tale of Irish Halloween Terror, ‘Banshee’

“It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence. All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spiderweb and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight.

“It was, as they said, banshee weather. I sensed, I knew this as my taxi hummed through a final gate and I arrived at Courtown House, so far from Dublin that if it died in the night, no one would know.”—American novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), “Banshee,” originally published in Gallery, September 1984 issue, reprinted in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003)

I suspect that my readers will want to explore the rest of this story, based simply on this ominous opening by Ray Bradbury. But I came to the tale by a different route: from watching a few years ago a nearly 40-year-old adaptation on the cable TV series Ray Bradbury Theater.

As I noted in this blog post from August 2020, it struck me that the plot of the story—a meeting over a potential project between a meek screenwriter and a veteran Hollywood director—reenacted, in a fictional setting, the rocky collaboration between Bradbury and Hollywood legend John Huston over the 1956 adventure movie Moby-Dick. 

While preparing a recent talk on Huston, his daughter Anjelica and father Walter, I was struck anew by how this tale of Hibernian horror provided unexpected insights into his complex personality.

Bradbury came from America in 1953 to meet with Huston—first in London, then Dublin, and finally the Georgian manor outside the Irish capital that the director was renting.

Late in life, Huston complained that his reputation for sadistic dealings with film personnel stemmed from a single figure: Freud leading man Montgomery Clift, who, in this telling, had presumed on his host’s tolerance by engaging in a late-night encounter with another male guest at his Irish home.

Huston was gilding the lily, however. At least two other people who worked with him accused him of the same misbehavior, albeit under different circumstances.

Irish novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Edna O’Brien declined to speak to Huston biographer Jeffrey Meyers in significant detail about their work adapting A.E. Ellis’ novel The Rack. 

But a few years later, in her 2014 memoir Country Girl, she was more open, accusing Huston of insulting her screenplay as “half-baked rubbish” after praising it earlier in their discussions. Following a crying fit, she blurted out to Anjelica Huston that her father was “a terrible man, a cruel, dangerous man,” according to the actress’s A Story Lately Told.

O’Brien’s anger was so pronounced that she felt the need to vent twice in print. 

The first time was expressed more obliquely, in the title story of her 1990 collection Lantern Slides. Alluding several times to James Joyce’s novella “The Dead,” which Huston adapted into his final feature film, O’Brien depicted him as a dinner party latecomer called “Reggie,” “obviously a man of note” with “something of the quality of a panther.” 

For all his charm and attractiveness there is something ruthless about him, conveyed nowhere more devastatingly than when the female protagonist, “Miss Lawless,” discovers that he has been “chasing young girls, his wife hardly cold in the grave.”

That same callousness towards ex-lovers and prospective new ones becomes the principal count in Bradbury’s indictment of “John Hudson.” The author hinted far more bluntly than O’Brien had about the source of the character. 

Not only do the transparently “fictional” and real-life characters have similar-sounding surnames, but each is working on a film where the hero is “plowing the sea,” with wife and children off in a foreign land during the screenwriter’s visit. Even the locale of the meeting, “Courtown,” is the name of Huston’s home at the time.

The story is not merely “autofiction”—a genre in which the author and the protagonist are deeply similar but not identical—but more like an autofictional revenge story.

Bradbury, still smarting three decades later over Huston’s condescension and practical jokes at his expense, gave the director’s fictional counterpart a grisly end delivered, appropriately enough, by a ghost of one of the many women he seduced and dumped. 

(A “banshee,” for those unfamiliar with the term, is, according to Irish folklore, a female spirit whose wailing warns of an impending death.)

Ray Bradbury Theater lasted six seasons; this adaptation was the season one finale, indicating how close the author felt to this material.

Ironically, the TV version of “Banshee” starred Peter O’Toole, who had visited Huston’s estate when they both resided in Ireland’s County Galway. 

I’m not sure if Huston even heard about the episode in the year and a half between its airing and his death; his emphysema had grown so bad that he needed to be connected to an oxygen tank, so he might have been beyond caring about his portrayal by then. 

In contrast, Bradbury continued to care very much. Like O’Brien, his disenchantment with his former cinematic hero remained so intense that he needed to exorcise it a second time.

The title of his 1992 novel, Green Shadows, White Whale, echoes another roman a clef about a thirtysomething screenwriter’s creative tension with a director closely modeled on Huston, White Hunter, Black Heart.

(Jennifer Dale, pictured here, played the troubled, wailing supernatural spirit in "Banshee," while Charles Martin Smith was Bradbury's alter ego, the young, much-put-upon screenwriter Doug.)

Quote of the Day (Alvah Bessie, on Meeting Hemingway in Spain)

“Hemingway was eager as a child, and I smiled remembering the first time I had seen him, at a Writers' Congress in New York. He was making his maiden public speech, and when it didn't read right, he got mad at it, repeating the sentences he had fumbled, with exceptional vehemence. Now he was like a big kid, and you liked him. He asked questions like a kid: ‘What then? What happened then? And what did you do? And what did he say? And then what did you do?’…. ‘What's your name?’ said Hemingway; I told him. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I'm awful glad to see you; I've read your stuff.’ I knew he was glad to see me; it made me feel good, and I felt sorry about the times I had lambasted him in print; I hoped he had forgotten them, or never read them. ‘Here,’ he said, reaching in his pocket. ‘I've got more.’ He handed me a full pack of Lucky Strikes.”— Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (1939)

Ernest Hemingway’s (on the right in the image, in a photo taken in WWII) entrance to the world was announced at 8 in the morning on this date in 1899, with a blast from a cornet by his proud father, an obstetrician in Oak Park, Ill. It may have been the last time that anyone beat him to the punch in blowing a horn on his behalf.

You sense, from this account by Alvah Bessie (who, incidentally, died on what would have been Hemingway’s 86th birthday) of their encounter in the Spanish Civil War, about why so many were drawn, initially, to the Nobel laureate: It was hard not to get caught up in all that exuberance. That child-like penchant for questions led to a career first as a foreign correspondent, then to a writer of fiction. Like a kid he was ready to share his goods and his activities—what mattered most to him—not just cigarettes and drink, but also hunting, fishing, and bullfighting expeditions.

In fact, there are only two hints of the darker Hemingway that many associates would get to see after a while, and that the wider reading public would come to know in the 54 years after his death by suicide. The first comes in that speech, delivered “with exceptional vehemence”—directed at himself this time, but at others—wives, children, friends, even to the point of fisticuffs—on other occasions. The second hint is Bessie’s hope that Hemingway had forgotten or never read his criticisms. 

And well this member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (and future blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter) might wish that. Hemingway was not the type to turn the other cheek, or to take criticisms gently. In fact, the only people who endured worse at his hands than those who criticized him may have been were people who did him good turns when he was young, when they had some measure of fame or fortune but he didn’t: Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ford Madox Ford, Sinclair Lewis, and Scott Fitzgerald.

And yet…It’s impossible to eradicate completely that image of generosity. Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost (2012) is a melancholy chronicle of the novelist’s psychic and creative deterioration, but even as his star fell, from its height when Bessie knew him, to his 1961 death, Hemingway was still capable of astonishing acts of unselfishness and helpfulness: to writers in need of a hand, to others down on their luck, to a friend’s dying son.

Ultimately, Hemingway’s greatest gift to others might have been the example of his own fiction—at its best, a purification of language. One unlikely author attesting to that influence is the Irish novelist/short-story novelist Edna O’Brien, who, in her consideration of people’s most intimate relations, is as far removed from Hemingway as an writer I know. And yet, in an interview with The Paris Review, O’Brien recalled her feelings of astonishment over the unexpectedly powerful opening of A Farewell to Arms:

“[Critic Arthur] Mizener read out the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms and I couldn’t believe it—this totally uncluttered, precise, true prose, which was also very moving and lyrical. I can say that the two things came together then: my being ready for the revelation and my urgency to write.”

Quote of the Day (Edna O'Brien, on Why ‘Love Is So Painful’)

“She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.”— Irish novelist Edna O'Brien, Saints and Sinners: Stories (2011)

Quote of the Day (Novelist Edna O’Brien, on Her Relationship With Ireland)

“My relationship with Ireland is very complex. I could not live there for a variety of reasons. I felt oppressed and strangulated from an early age. That was partly to do with my parents, who were themselves products and victims of their history and culture. That is to say, alas, they were superstitious, fanatical, engulfing. At the same time they were bursting with talent—I know this from my mother’s letters, as she wrote to me almost every day. So I have to thank them for a heritage that includes talent, despair, and permanent fury. When I was a student in Dublin my mother found a book of Sean O’Casey in my suitcase and wanted to burn it! But without reading it! So they hated literature without knowing it. We know that the effect of our parents is indelible, because we internalize as a child and it remains inside us forever. Even when the parents die, you dream of them as if they were still there. Everything was an occasion for fear, religion was force-fed…. So much for the personal aspect. As for the country itself, it is no accident that almost all Irish writers leave the country. You know why? Ireland, as [James] Joyce said, eats her writers the way a sow eats her farrow. He also called it a warren of ‘prelates and kinechites.’ Of course there’s the beauty of the landscape, the poetry, the fairy tales, the vividness. I have shown my love and my entanglement with the place as much as I have shown my hatred. But they think that I have shown only my hatred.”— Edna O’Brien, “The Art of Fiction No. 82” (interview with Shusha Guppy), The Paris Review, Summer 1984

Edna O’Brien was born and lived much of her early life in County Clare, the area of rural Ireland where my father was born. Though a prolific writer of marvelous short stories, novels, plays, screenplays and biographies, she has still never achieved the major bestseller status that her books deserve. 

The issues she raises in the above quote account for much of the alienation of intellectuals from the Irish Republic for so much of its early history, as well as why the reaction against the Roman Catholic Church in the last two decades has left the nation’s citizens in dire need of spiritual sustenance, just at the moment when the collapse of the Celtic Tiger has underscored the hollow pursuit of material things.

In the late 1980s, just a few years after this interview, I saw O’Brien at a lecture and book signing at Fairleigh Dickinson University, not far from where I live in Bergen County, N.J.  It was fascinating to hear her speak of the same farm environment described vividly for years by my father, but from a far different perspective: not that of a man, but of a woman of a romantic, rebellious spirit and restless intellectual instincts that could not be satisfied on this land.

At the same time, she was profoundly aware of the power of this landscape, which has informed the bulk of what she has written since: “When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees: maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious,” she once observed.

“Maimed, stark and misshapen” describes the society, deformed by an overarching patriarchy, that pushed O’Brien into exile. Taking its cue from the Irish Censorship Board, which banned her first six novels, and her pastor, who denounced and burned the first and most notorious of them (The Country Girls), her own community turned on her in a torrent of ugly abuse and drove her away.

For most of the last 55 years, O’Brien has lived in London, as the same kind of urban expatriate to whom she alluded in the above quote, James Joyce. But unlike the author of Ulysses, she lived to see the old order brought asunder. Toward the end of her 2012 memoir, Country Girl, O’Brien, now in her seventies, beholds a new Ireland:

“The sway of the bishops and their clerics was no more….The countless revelations of beatings, hunger, chastisement, and ongoing sexual abuse were all the worse because they had been so sedulously denied with the collusion of Church and state. The anger was scalding and heartbreaking. At Easter Sunday, outside the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin, railings were draped with infants' shoes, tied in black ribbon, for all the lost childhoods, and messages on various placards revealed bitter life stories. One, referring to the millstone in St. Luke's Gospel, read 'Some Millstone. Some Neck. Jesus Wept.'”

It is inarguable that the Church hierarchy had no one but themselves to blame for the acrimony that Ms. O'Brien described. For years, their attitude toward her and too many others was unwelcoming and unforgiving. At the same time, I am afraid that now, when the Irish could use a spiritual anchor, none is left to hold onto.

Following her divorce in the early 1960s, O’Brien, with her soft, dark good looks, lived a glamorous life for awhile, in a period that led Vanity Fair Magazine to call her “The Playgirl of the Western World.” That judgment, in a way, ratifies the often pessimistic worldview she adopted in her fiction concerning the fate of women who stepped outside established lines to reach for freedom. 

For all her considerable critical success, she never became a brand-name bestselling author a la Maeve Binchy—and it is a real question how much worldly success could have compensated her for the world of hurt and alienation, much of it foisted on her by men, of her early years.