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 (Herman Melville, on ‘Human Madness’)

“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”—American novelist, short-story writer, and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby-Dick or, the Whale (1851)

In the novel Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab personified “human madness.” Gregory Peck, shown here, played the character in the 1956 film adaptation directed by John Huston.

This Day in Literary History (Ray Bradbury, Lyrical, Starry-Eyed Futurist, Born)

Aug. 22, 1920—Ray Bradbury, who imagined the opportunities and terrors of a science-dominated future in approximately 600 short stories, novels, poems, screenplays, and teleplays of indelible vividness, was born in Waukegan, Ill.

Like other mid-20^th century writers in the sci-fi, horror, and crime genres such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Silberberg, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and Roald Dahl, Bradbury benefited from two vehicles: first, pulp magazines, and second, anthology TV series. These forums furnished the opportunity for these authors to be productive and to expose their work to mass audiences.

In high school one year, I spent an entire quarter on science fiction. The nun who taught the class, Sister Margaret Bradley, did not use the term “science fiction,” but rather “alternative futures,” because she did not want to emphasize gadgetry but speculation on the possibility of changing human nature. Bradbury, I think, was the author who best epitomized what she had in mind.

The best-known work in Bradbury’s seven-decade career is probably Fahrenheit 451 (1953). That warning on the dangers of censorship, coming after the collapse of Nazi Germany but at the height of the McCarthy Era in the U.S., became the basis for a “Read-a-Thon” this Saturday streaming over YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

The Library of Congress, the Los Angeles Public Library, and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, along with other public and university libraries nationwide, joined together for this event.

Bradbury was concerned not just with what human beings might encounter in the future but with how their frailties might lead them to squander the possibilities of all the new vistas opened to them.

Such was the case, for instance, with The Martian Chronicles (1950), in which mankind repeatedly attempts to colonize the Red Planet, only unable to shed longtime prejudices in this new environment.

The fantastic visions of Bradbury’s fiction are manifested through a sensory, even lyrical style, marked by striking metaphors and similes. “Once you hear a metaphor of mine, you won't forget it,” he said in a 1990 interview with Starlog Magazine.  A dinosaur falling in love with a lighthouse, boom, there's your metaphor. Once you hear that, you say, ‘Gee, I gotta read that, I wonder what happened?’"

In the impressionistic opening paragraph of one of his most anthologized stories, “The April Witch” (1952), he conveyed the (literal) flight of fancy of a 17-year-old witch seriously thinking of giving up her extraordinary power if she can only experience human love:

“Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in blossoms, showering away in petals when the breeze blew. She perched in a lime-green frog, cool as mint by a shining pool. She trotted in a brambly dog and barked to hear echoes from the sides of distant barns. She lived in new April grasses, in sweet clear liquids rising from the musky earth.”

Movies started to shape Bradbury’s imagination during the silent-film era, and his education in the performing arts was even more thoroughly grounded in 1940, when he became active in amateur productions of actress Laraine Day’s Wilshire Players Guild for Mormon actors.

From early in his writing career, filmmakers were anxious to adapt his fiction, or even engage him in original work for the screen. But his experiences with Hollywood were frequently unstellar and often unhappy.

It took Bradbury years to see virtues in Francois Truffaut’s first English-language feature, a 1966 adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. The Martian Chronicles gave him a case of double agita: first, when a story from it inordinately influenced an early Twilight Zone episode and damaged Bradbury’s relationship with friend and series creator Rod Serling; and second, when NBC ran a 1980 miniseries based on it starring Rock Hudson that Bradbury dismissed as “just boring.”

But the experience that may have soured Bradbury most deeply on Hollywood was his assignment to adapt Moby Dick for the screen for John Huston. The legendary director, impressed with Bradbury’s short story “The Fog Horn,” asked that the sci-fi author work on adapting Herman Melville’s novel in Ireland, where the film would be shot on location off the coast of County Cork, Ireland.

The initial high regard that the two had for each other began to erode as they spent more than half a year revising the script. But Bradbury became particularly angry when the director pulled a maneuver that Orson Welles had originally tried out more than a decade before with Herman Mankiewicz on Citizen Kane: i.e., gaining co-screenwriting credit. Huston proved more successful than Welles in that effort, even managing to overturn the Screen Writers Guild’s decision to award sole credit to Bradbury.

Decades later, the two wrote accounts in which their initial admiration yielded to disgruntlement. In his 1980 memoir An Open Book, Huston confessed to bewilderment about an author terrified by airplanes and fast cars even though his fiction inspired authors, astronomers and astronauts to dream of the stars.

Bradbury responded first with the 1984 short story “The Banshee,” which depicted a screenwriter tormented by a womanizing, sadistic famous director on his remote Irish screen, then nearly a decade later with Green Shadows, White Whale (1992), whose title and quasi-fictional format recalled an earlier screenwriter’s account of working with Huston on location, Peter Viertel’s White Hunter, Black Heart.

Perhaps the most satisfaction that Bradbury derived from adaptations of his work came with The Ray Bradbury Theater, a Canadian-American anthology series that ran for six seasons on cable TV. The series was nominated 10 times and won six for the coveted ACE (Award for Cable Excellence) from 1985 to 1992.

As executive producer and chief contributor to the series, Bradbury took a page from Serling in hosting the show. Unlike his estranged friend, his introductions framed the fantasy elements of the show squarely within his own creative process:

"People ask, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Well, right here.  All this is my Martian landscape.  Somewhere in this room is an African veldt. Just beyond perhaps is a small Illinois town where I grew up. And I'm surrounded on every side by my magician’s toyshop. I'll never starve here. I just look around, find what I need, and begin. I'm Ray Bradbury, and this is The Ray Bradbury Theater. Well then, right now, what shall it be? Out of all this, what do I choose to make a story? I never know where the next one will take me. The trip, exactly one half exhilaration, exactly one half terror.”

Bradbury’s passing in 2012, at the age of 91, elicited an affectionate and admiring post about the author by Nina Munteanu on the Scribophile writing blog.

Flashback, October 1839: Melville Ends First Sea Voyage

When the packet ship St. Lawrence pulled into its berth at sunrise on October 1, 1839, on New York’s South Street on its return from England, Herman Melville might have ended his first voyage out to sea, but was only beginning his restless journey as an adult. The novel he would write a decade later from this initial shipboard experience, Redburn, would constitute, according to critic Lewis Mumford, “the first bitter cry” of Melville’s maturity.

The future author of Moby-Dick, grandson of two Revolutionary War heroes, had shipped out four months before as a callow 19-year-old because his father had died in the wake of his import business going bankrupt. An attempt to rescue the firm, with Melville as clerk and oldest brother Gansevoort picking up the reins, had not succeeded, nor had an attempt to place the teen with an uncle on a farm relieved the pressure on family finances.

These circumstances, along with the savage disillusionment he experienced after watching the squalor and cruelty of life at sea, strongly influenced Redburn, a fictional counterpart to a bestselling memoir from earlier in the decade by another inexperienced scion of a prominent American family shocked by what he witnessed on the high seas, Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. (See my earlier post about the latter.)

Melville wrote as obsessively about the sea as Joseph Conrad would, nearly a half-century later, in England. He would begin with Typee (1846), a somewhat conventional adventure story that made its author famous virtually overnight, and end with Billy Budd (1890), an allegory of innocence in conflict with evil. What he wrote in between represented, if you will, a sea change in creative ambition—and a shipwreck of a career that began with commercial success.

The sailor-turned-author had turned off public and critics with Mardi, a novel that began as one of his familiar South Seas adventures only to take diverge into more satiric and symbolic territory. With a growing family to support, he soon had reason to rue his departure from genre fiction, and he conceived Redburn and another 1849 novel, White-Jacket, as a return to realism. Given his vaulting new creative aspirations, he was inclined to dismiss these new projects, telling his father-in-law, Massachusetts judge Lemuel Shaw, that they were “two jobs which I have done for money—being forced to it as other men are to sawing wood.”

All that comment proves is that writers are not the best judges of their work. In Redburn, Melville began tentatively to try out settings, characterizations and themes that he would explore with greater artistry shortly. It would take exposure to the tragedies of William Shakespeare and a brief but intense friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne to turn him within two years to Moby-Dick, but he was already thinking, albeit in a limited way, in psychological and symbolic forms that were new to him:

*From the ocean to the city: Most of Redburn occurs on the Atlantic Ocean, but for the first time in Melville’s fiction he writes of urban settings: England’s Liverpool and London. They represent new forms of hell, as does the New York of his disastrous 1852 novel Pierre and his indelible novella about soul-stealing Wall Street, “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

*Naming the outsider: Wellingborough Redburn, Melville's alter ego, regards himself as a “kind of Ishmael” because of abuse by his fellow shipmates. In the epic that followed, Moby-Dick, the famous opening line is “Call me Ishmael.” In the Book of Genesis, an angel predicts a troubling future for this son of Abraham and the Egyptian bondservant Hagar: “a wild man…[with] every man’s hand against him.”

*A depression that clings to a first-person narrator: The opening paragraph of Moby-Dick makes no bones about what influences Ishmael to go continually out to sea: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” In contrast, Redburn does not share Ishmael’s self-destructive streak. The new “boy” on board in Redburn is certainly despairing (“Cold, bitter cold as December, and bleak as its blasts, seemed the world then to me; there is no misanthrope like a boy disappointed”) but there is a discernible reason for his feelings: his family’s genteel poverty has, in effect, forced his expulsion from the paradise of his childhood.

*The chief mate as the crew in microcosm: The chief mate takes an immediate dislike to Wellingborough Redburn (even the first name sounds highfalutin') because of his social status, shouting at him, “You are very green, but I’ll ripen you.” Every time the young man thinks to alleviate his misery (e.g., avoiding a duty that day because of sickness), the mate disabuses him of any such notion. In this, the mate is no worse than the crew, who thrust Redburn out of a circle awaiting food. In contrast, the crew in Moby-Dick, in all their good-natured tolerance for the sea and each other, are no match for the obsessed Ahab—none more so than the religious, deeply kind mate Starbuck, who protests that the captain is hunting an unthinking creature, but eventually, against his better judgment, falls in with the mad quest for the white whale. 

*The crew as representative of American diversity: The sailors aboard Redburn’s ship might be a roguish lot, but they’re a motley one, too—tilted decidedly toward humble origins but with someone of higher status (Redburn) on board, and ranging in race and ethnicity from the black cook to a cockney and an Irishman. The ending of Moby-Dick is catastrophic in more ways than one: the crew not only dies because of Ahab’s mad pursuit, but its on-board experiment—sailors from multiple races living in harmony with each other—ends as well.

*The clash of freedom and authority: Redburn’s departure from his upstate New York home might be a symbolic expulsion from Eden, but, like that latter event, it also puts him face to face with the alternately exhilarating and terrifying prospect of exercising free world in a new environment. The use of that freedom also puts him at loggerheads with the ship’s captain, who lashes out at him for acting too familiarly with him. Proper submission to the authority of a captain poses even more crucial dilemmas—life-and-death stakes, in fact—in both Moby-Dick and Billy Budd.

*A young sailor who unwittingly provokes an older one’s malignity: Redburn provokes fellow sailor Jackson, ‘spontaneously an atheist and an infidel…a horrid desperado; and like a wild Indian, whom he resembled in his tawny skin and high cheek bones, he seemed to run a muck at heaven and earth.” He can think of no reason why the older man views him with such “malevolence,” except that Jackson is conscious of his “miserable, broken-down condition,” whereas “I was young and handsome, at least my mother so thought me, and as soon as I became a little used to the sea, and shook off my low spirits somewhat, I began to have my old color in my cheeks, and, in spite of misfortune, to appear well and hearty.” Redburn is not the only youngster to have excited strong feelings in Jackson—so had a six-year-old stowaway. But the stowaway’s instinctive recoil from Jackson only drives the sailor into further rage, making him one of Melville’s “isolatoes.” Similarly, John Claggart warms initially to the title character of Billy Budd, only to retreat when he realizes that friendship with a subordinate would not be appropriate. Claggart’s subsequent withdrawal and falsehood about the beloved, angelic-looking foretopman precipitates the tale’s tragedy. With main characters depicted as objects of an older man’s gaze, both Redburn and Billy Budd have been viewed as homoerotic fiction.

Melville had little time to rest once back on land. Later in October 1839, his mother had fallen into such dire straits that he felt compelled to take a job as a schoolteacher—a job that was likely ill-fitting, as he found himself wandering again in 1840—and a short time after that, he had shipped out to sea again, on a voyage that provided the raw material for Typee.

Like another adopted New Yorker with illustrious ancestral ties, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Melville began by writing with the authority of success and ended with the authority of failure. And he was as wrong as the latter to disparage work he churned out under financial pressure as being of little if any value.  

Redburn can still be read, with great interest, as a novel of youthful initiation, a genre that may be more popular now than in Melville’s time.  While not as epic in scope as Moby-Dick, it is taut and leaner and is filled with vivid descriptions. The miasma of depression and defeat that hangs over the book assures, despite its author’s misgivings, that it could never really be a concession to public taste.

This Day in Theater History (O’Neill’s ‘Iceman’ Cometh to Bway)

October 9, 1946—Premiering at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theater, The Iceman Cometh lasted nearly 4½ hours, featuring drunks in a desperate dive, an implicit challenge to America’s sense of optimism following victory in World War II, a continuation of its playwright’s decades-long argument with God, and a leading man who kept forgetting his lines. The only wonder is that the Theater Guild production made it to 136 performances rather than two.

Eugene O'Neill had finished his tragedy in the 1930s, but held it back from production not only until after the war was finished, but—seemingly just to be on the safe side—for another year on top of that. Evidently, he feared the work would fail.

There were, of course, ways, then and now, to assure that would not happen: notably, compromise with the audience. This O’Neill simply refused to do. He could, for instance, have trimmed any of the innumerable references to “pipe dreams” that fill the play, thereby assuring that suburban playgoers got home at a human hour, but he steadfastly refused to do so.

The playwright who had opened the American stage to more than just melodrama in the 1920s had been largely absent from Broadway since then. Part of the reason was the extraordinarily ambitious project on which the playwright had embarked in the late 1930s, an 11-play, multi-generational cycle on an American family that had occupied him until a devastating neurological disease prevented him from even holding a pencil. But he also feared critical and popular reaction to his projects.

Not surprisingly given its subject matter, the first reviews of Iceman were mixed, with the voice of the opposition summed up most sardonically and memorably by novelist-critic Mary McCarthy: “To audiences accustomed to the oil virtuosity of George Kaufman, George Abbott, Lillian Hellman, Odets, Saroyan, the return of a playwright who—to be frank—cannot write is a solemn and sentimental occasion.”

Whatever benefit the playwright received from Eddie Dowling, another old theater hand of Irish-American descent unafraid of tackling heavy metaphysical themes (he had previously helmed Philip Barry’s 1938 Here Come the Clowns) was dissipated by the performance of James Barton as traveling salesman Theodore (“Hickey”) Hickman. Barton was not only thrown off by the rhythms of his character’s lines, but also, more basically, by an inability to recall them. The latter turned out to be a huge liability when Barton had to recite Hickey’s climatic, extraordinarily long monologue.

Barton’s subpar performance prematurely convinced many that the role of Hickey was essentially unplayable. It took another decade, with an Off-Broadway revival directed by Jose Quintero and directed by Jason Robards, before critics changed their minds. That production, along with the Broadway premiere of the posthumously published and produced Long Day’s Journey Into Night, led to a more positive reconsideration of O’Neill’s career.

For the purposes of Iceman, many observers came to see that the show was not a mess, but in actuality an acting challenge on the order of King Lear and Hamlet. In the years since, several other actors have taken a crack at Hickey, including James Earl Jones in the 1970s, Jason Roberts (again) in the 1980s, and Kevin Spacey in 1999. (Nathan Lane has been slated to assume the role in a 2012 production at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, with Brian Dennehy as the cynical old anarchist—and O’Neill’s stand-in—Larry Slade.)

Perhaps as no other O’Neill play, Iceman blended immersion in the playwright’s dark past with far wider sociological and theological considerations. America’s only Nobel Prize-winning playwright, as critic Harold Bloom has noted, flew directly against the optimistic Emersonian-Whitmanesque spirit that had long dominated American literature. America’s “main idea,” he noted, just before the opening of his show, “is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside it.”

In a way, Hickey can be thought of as a kind of counterpart to Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Both fulfill what O’Neill sees as America’s “main idea” by exerting their considerable charisma on polyglot Americans in what amounts to a death mission. Ahab, vowing that he’d “strike the sun if it insulted me,” enlists his crew in his quest to hunt and destroy the white whale that maimed him; Hickey, a reformed alcoholic, seeks to strip each man at Henry Hope’s bar of the illusions or “pipe dreams” that allow them to continue living.

Both O’Neill and Melville make explicit their versions of these uniquely American quests with flag imagery. John Frankenheimer’s 1973 filmed version of the play begins by focusing on the American flag, gradually pulling away to reveal campaign memorabilia. (The year in which the play is set--1912--featured a four-way race among Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt and Eugene V. Debs.) The major action of Moby Dick concludes with the Pequod slipping beneath the waves as the American Indian Tashtego, obeying Ahab’s final command, is caught in “the act of nailing the flag faster and faster to the subsiding spar.”

One last point. “The thing that explains more than anything about me is the fact that I’m Irish,” O’Neill once told his son Shane. “And strangely enough, it is something that all the writers who have attempted to explain me and my work have overlooked.” Perhaps in no instance did his ethnicity come into play more than in his tortured relationship with the Roman Catholic Church.

As Yale critic Harold Bloom observes, the playwright, coming from a strict, Jansenist background, went on to have a long, lifelong battle with God. O’Neill may have launched his most sustained, if symbolic, assault on the Church with his carefully worked out structure of the characters in Iceman. It’s easy to see the drama as a kind of parody of the Last Supper, with Hickey as a false messiah.

Consider the following points:

• The 12 male figures waiting for Hickey correspond in number to the twelve apostles.

• Hickey, like Christ, attempts to bring about a new order, only to cause consternation among his old friends.

• Don Parritt, the son of Larry Slade’s lover, is the Judas figure in the play, killing himself for betraying his mother, a member of a radical movement.

• Slade, at play’s end, has become the one true convert in the group to Hickey’s unillusioned but hopeless philosophy—like St. Peter, “the rock” upon which Hickey’s/Christ’s vision will remain.

• The three female hookers correspond in number to the three women standing at the foot of the cross for Christ.

Creating The Iceman Cometh was terrifying for O’Neill, since it required him to relive the events of 1912, when, mired in alcoholism, he had attempted to take his own life while helplessly drunk, day after day, at a New York bar called Jimmy the Priest’s. Out of his own personal anguish, he crafted a play with enormous metaphysical implications.

Tony Kushner, probably the one major current American playwright whose theatrical ambition matches O’Neill’s, took note of the theological significance of O’Neill’s work when interviewed several years ago for a PBS documentary of his great theater forebear: “In O'Neill, there's this absolute, sort of God-ordained mission, which is to keep searching, even if in the process he discovers that there is no God. It's a terrifying sort of mandate, but it also I think should be the mandate of all artists, and in a way, of all people."

Quote of the Day (Melville to Hawthorne, on His “Whale” and Home)

“The ‘Whale’ is only half through the press; for, wearied with the long delay of the printers, and disgusted with the heat and dust of the babylonish brick-kiln of New York, I came back to the country to feel the grass -- and end the book reclining on it, if I may. -- I am sure you will pardon this speaking all about myself, for if I say so much on that head, be sure all the rest of the world are thinking about themselves ten times as much. Let us speak, although we show all our faults and weaknesses, -- for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it, -- not in [a] set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation. -- But I am falling into my old foible -- preaching. I am busy, but shall not be very long. Come and spend a day here, if you can and want to; if not, stay in Lenox, and God give you long life. When I am quite free of my present engagements, I am going to treat myself to a ride and a visit to you. Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together. This is rather a crazy letter in some respects, I apprehend. If so, ascribe it to the intoxicating effects of the latter end of June operating upon a very susceptible and peradventure feeble temperament.”—Herman Melville, to friend and inspiration Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 29, 1851, in The Letters of Herman Melville, edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (1960)

A year before writing this letter from Arrowhead, his farmhouse in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, Herman Melville was part of what was probably the most consequential picnic in American literature—the day he met Nathaniel Hawthorne. A prior post of mine dealt with that event, as well as the larger course of their relationship.

But I think it’s worth revisiting here, because “The Whale” that Melville is referring to is his epic of the sea, Moby Dick—a novel certainly inspired by the two writers’ “ontological heroics.” That relationship is reflected in the book’s dedication to Hawthorne.

Melville certainly did have a “very suspectible and peradventure feeble temperament.” When Hawthorne was coming, the younger man would slip out to the barn, away from the sound of his workers and the smell of household privies, and engage his visitor in feverish discussions on metaphysics and on his hulking manuscript about a malignant white whale and the maimed sea captain obsessed with destroying it.

A month after meeting Hawthorne in 1850, Melville bought the Pittsfield homestead—without first selling his New York home, without shopping around for a better property, and without considering that its $65,000 cost was more than the combined sales of his first five books.

That financial rashness would produce great misery in his marriage, and even the friendship with Hawthorne would more or less conclude by 1852, for reasons that biographers can only speculate about. But even knowing all of this, a reader wishes he could have been a fly on the wall as Melville celebrated his distance from “the heat and dust of the babylonish brick-kiln of New York” by sharing a “heroic drink” with the reserved but great man he respected so much.

This Day in Literary History (Melville Meets Hawthorne)

August 5, 1850—In one of the most consequential picnics in American literature, the brooding ex-sailor Herman Melville, searching for a voice that would allow him to burst the mold of his traditional sea fiction, met saturnine, sin-obsessed Nathaniel Hawthorne (in the image accompanying this post) as part of a small literary group that went on a small day’s hike from Stockbridge to Monument Mountain in Western Massachusetts.

The two writers, both living in the Berkshires, found themselves in different stages—even moving in different directions—in their careers at the time of their momentous encounter. 

The 31-year-old Melville, though he had five books to his credit already, had lost readers as he moved away from the conventional realistic mode that had made Typee a bestseller. In contrast, Hawthorne, 15 years his senior, had found his commercial niche at last only a few months before with The Scarlet Letter, a heavily symbolic novel. 

When a rainstorm made the literary picnickers (who also included publisher David Dudley Field and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes) seek shelter, Hawthorne and Melville had an opportunity to talk at greater length, discovering that they were kindred spirits. 

As Melville would shortly put it, in an essay on his new friend: “In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other great masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth—even though it be covertly and by snatches." 

Melville made his most heroic attempt at “the great Art of Telling the Truth” thousands of miles from where he could smell the spray of the Pacific Ocean or hear the cries of the whaling crews that sailed it in a quiet farmhouse deep in Pittsfield, not far from where he encountered Hawthorne. 

 In one way, the millions of readers enthralled by Moby Dick should not be surprised by the distance between the turbulent world Melville created and the tranquil environment in which he did so. For the novelist’s imagination brought all things close to him, with such power that as he looked eastward from his study, he likened the twin peaks of Saddleback and Mount Greylock looming in the distance to the humps of a whale. 

“My room seems a ship’s cabin,” Melville wrote his friend Evert Duychinck, “and at nights when I wake up and hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, and I had better go on the roof and rig in the chimney.” 

One hundred and fifty years after the sailor-turned-novelist moved his family here, RUVs and pickup trucks rumble more loudly and more often down the road that passes Arrowhead, the Melville homestead in Pittsfield, than the haywagons of his day did. 

On the two occasions I visited the home over the last decade, I found that the mountain landscape that inspired the great novelist remains majestically impervious to developers’ depredations. 

Even as a child, years before he bought the property, Melville had found these hills a source of serenity amid the financial catastrophe that overwhelmed his parents. 

Once settled here, he quickly made friends with Hawthorne, who lived in nearby Tanglewood and whose example encouraged him to explore new dark, richly symbolic territory in his fiction. 

 For the next two years, Melville and Hawthorne visited and wrote each other frequently. During this time, Melville wrote Moby Dick, which he dedicated to the older man. 

Longtime readers of this blog know of my fascination with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Now, it might at first seem a bit of a stretch to compare the two Lost Generation authors with Hawthorne and Melville, but I think a case can be made for some fascinating similarities. 

In each case, a younger writer—one who craved action—benefited by direct exposure to an older craftsman, and the results became quickly apparent. 

Melville took his cues from Hawthorne more by example than anything else; Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises benefited greatly from judicious editing by Fitzgerald, who wisely urged his friend to cut almost all of the wise-guy opening that threatened to overshadow reader recognition that the situation of Jake Barnes and his circle was inherently tragic. 

Both sets of writers found common ground by perfectly capturing the prevailing zeitgeist. Fitzgerald and Hemingway, writers with deeply ambivalent views of faith, wrote of characters who tried to find grace in blasted moral landscapes.

Characters in Hawthorne’s and Melville’s most famous novels suffer wounds that initiate wider tragedies. Hawthorne’s Roger Chillingworth becomes guilty of what Hawthorne called “the unpardonable sin” when he tries to discover what is in the soul of the man he rightly suspects of cuckolding him, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale. Melville’s Captain Ahab is literally wounded, so maimed by a past encounter with Moby Dick that he will pursue the great white whale to the far corners of the world—and take every member of his (characteristically American) multicultural crew (except narrator Ishmael) down with the ship in the mad attempt. 

The friendship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway fractured, for a thousand reasons chronicled by themselves and their associates. The more reticent times in which Hawthorne and Melville lived ensured that at this juncture, we’re unlikely to know the precise reasons why they drifted apart after two years. 

The following conjectures have been offered, with varying degrees of probability: 

* Hawthorne was embarrassed by his failure to secure gainful employment for Melville. The author of The Scarlet Letter did not make a huge number of friends, but one was important indeed—Franklin Pierce, winner of the 1852 Presidential election. Hawthorne, the college classmate of the Democratic victor in this election, lent Pierce key support in what is believed to be the first American Presidential campaign biography. Pierce would reward him eventually by naming him the American Consul stationed in Liverpool. Yet, for all that, Hawthorne couldn’t secure a post for Melville, who by this time needed such a job much more than the older man.

* Melville grew too emotionally needy for the reticent Hawthorne. Coming to Arrowhead as a best-selling writer of adventure stories—a kind of combination of Sebastian Junger and John Irving—Melville proceeded to write at breakneck speed a series of challenging metaphysical novels and short stories. But he also could be, as Hawthorne’s beloved wife Sophia noted, “generally silent and uncommunicative.” Hawthorne’s brilliance drew the younger man out of his shell, something that Melville acknowledged in a tone that more than one modern critic has described as “homoerotic”: “Already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him.” The handsome Hawthorne had felt squeamish about being stared at by female admirers openly on the street; can you imagine his discomfort, in that more straitlaced time, about being the object of an unabashed male’s adulation?

* Melville’s literary and personal situation was deteriorating so drastically that he might not have felt he could reach out to Hawthorne. Melville’s follow-up to Moby Dick, Pierre, with its hints of incest, still has the capacity to shock today. In its time, it must have seemed like an act of literary self-immolation. Neighbors and relatives were remarking this time on his habit of working relentlessly at night, leaving him exhausted and depressed the next day, and his tendency toward metaphysical speculation in his novels. In recent years, scholarly speculation has grown that Melville might have been an alcoholic and a wife-beater.