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.)