PLOT DEVELOPMENT. Green Shadows, White Whale (1992):

Lecture 6

Green Shadows, White Whale (1992):

Plot Development, Character Development, Themes.

The Recent Works: From the Dust Returned (2001), Let’s All Kill Constance (2003), Farewell Summer (2006).

Green Shadows, White Whale (GSWW) describes the time Ray Bradbury spent in Ireland in 1953 writing the screenplay for the film Moby Dick, directed by John Huston. This novel, like Death Is a Lonely Business and A Graveyard for Lunatics, is one of Bradbury’s semiautobiographical novels, although GSWW dispenses with the conventions of murder mysteries and horror films. Instead, the writing process becomes a major focus of the book along with the narrator’s desire to learn more about Ireland.

Francis King, reviewing the novel in Spectator, notes the “mixture of fact and fantasy” in the novel, observing that “most of the fact is about Huston and the film, most of the fantasy about an Ireland which for Bradbury often seems to be as mythical as the white whale” (King 30). The relationship between the autobiographical sections and the fantasy sections is complex. King also notes the problem with the level of stereotyping of the Irish characters that other critics have noted as well.

Bruce Cook, an Irish critic writing in Catholic World, in “Ray Bradbury and the Irish,” discusses Bradbury’s handling of Irish characters in several short stories and plays, a number of which are included in the novel. According to Cook, “the greatest temptation for a writer in dealing with the Irish is to be taken in by their quaintness” (225). Even Irish writers have to take care in this regard, and Cook notes problems with the stereotypical characters and stock situations in Bradbury’s short pieces.

Other critics have generally praised the comedy, exaggeration, and pace of this novel, which covers approximately a year in the life of Bradbury, including seven months spent in Ireland working with John Huston.

PLOT DEVELOPMENT

The structure of the novel is episodic, consisting of thirty-three numbered chapters, several of which were published as short stories. The narrator has two major goals, which he declares to an Irish customs inspector in the first chapter. The first is to conquer Moby Dick, the imposing novel by Herman Melville, by crafting a screenplay of it for John Huston, one of the narrator’s greatest heroes. The second is to study the Irish. The narrator freely admits to being prejudiced about the Irish, since he spent his youth being beaten up by Irish kids or beating them up in his turn. These two purposes, or quests, shape the plot structure of the novel.

On his first afternoon in Ireland he goes for a cab ride, but ends up on a bicycle when the car breaks down. As he’s riding he meets a man named Mike, who takes him to Heeber Finn’s pub to help him in his project of studying Ireland. While they are drinking, an accident outside catches their attention. A short story, “The Great Collision of Monday Last,” is the basis for the following chapter. It relates how a man staggers into the pub with dramatic news about a collision, which (to the “Yank’s” great surprise) turns out to be an accident involving two men on bicycles. A doctor and a priest are called in, and a great deal of excitement takes place—to the consternation of the narrator, who keeps expecting such a dramatic accident to involve cars.

The writer, late because of his detour to the pub, then has his first meeting with John Huston. The narrator feels worshipful toward the great director, and plans a future working for this genius. A disagreeable scene soon follows in which the director attacks his wife for refusing to help smuggle someone out of Spain. He accuses her of being “yellow,” an insult that he will often hurl at the narrator over the next few months. The narrator responds to this scene with sympathy for Ricki. He also remembers a warning he received before leaving Beverly Hills from the wife of a former screenwriter, who advised him not to go because the director is so monstrous.

Throughout the book, the two structures—the quest for Ireland and the quest for the White Whale—intertwine. Additionally, the plot dealing with the quest for the White Whale mixes with the conflict with John Huston—the Beast—with the narrator comparing himself to the captain Ahab: the narrator is the “pursuer of the Whale. I was a small ahab, with no capital up front,” but the “Whiteness outpaced my poor strokes and my inadequate boat” (68).

Fifteen chapters focus on the narrator’s search for Ireland, usually inside Heeber Finn’s pub or a Dublin pub that is open on Sundays, the Four Provinces. A great part of his search for Ireland is satisfied by stories that Heeber tells him. The first story is what happened in Kilcock during the Easter Uprising on 1916, a failed attempt to achieve Irish independence that led to the execution of fourteen men in Dublin. In Kilcock, according to Heeber, the fathers of the pub regulars decided to burn down the house of Lord Kilgotten, but forgot to take along matches. The Lord invited them in, offered refreshments, and talked them first into putting off their plans until the next evening because it would be more convenient, and then into helping him save his art works. The men agree, but when they run into problems getting the art home or into their houses, they return them to the lord and go peacefully home.

Heeber’s second story is about the time the Dublin College of Surgeons got drunk and sent a cable inviting the American Medical Association to Dublin. The Americans made an unfavorable report about Dublin hospitals and were thrown out of Ireland and ignored. His third story is about the time George Bernard Shaw, a famous playwright, got lost and ended up at Heeber’s pub with a flat tire. Shaw, a teetotaler and the author of scandalous plays, engaged in a philosophical debate about the nature of the Irish and the existence of God with the local priest, Father O’Malley.

The narrator also learns about Ireland by accompanying Mike on a “wild night out.” The narrator wonders if “beneath the rain-drenched sod, the flinty rock…was there one small seed of fire which, fanned, might break volcanoes free and boil the rains to steam? Was there then somewhere a Baghdad harem…the absolute perfect tint of woman unadorned?” (30). However, the wild night out consists of dog races, where he wins a couple of shillings, and ends by ten o’clock.

One aspect of Ireland that gives the narrator particular trouble is Dublin’s beggars, described in chapter 13, originally published as a short story, “The Beggar on O’Connell Bridge,” and chapter 23, originally published as the short story “McGillahee’s Brat.” The narrator sees numerous beggars in Dublin and is never able to resist giving them money, with the exception of one man who stands on O’Connell Bridge without a hat. The narrator is at first angry with the man, feeling that he is faking his blindness, and then tries to make amends for never giving him money by buying him a cap. Unfortunately, the man commits suicide by jumping from the bridge before the narrator arrives with the gift.

The second beggar story is less grim and more fantastic: the narrator, while giving money to a beggar woman with a baby, recognizes them as beggars he had seen on his earlier trip to Ireland in 1939. They try to escape him, but he searches for them for days until he finds them in the Four Provinces, drinking. He finally convinces them that he is not a threat, and hears the “Brat’s” story: he is not a baby, or rather, he has remained the size of a baby for forty years. Born into a family of beggars, he never grew up; his parents died, and the woman he now begs with is his sister. But they have saved nearly enough money to emigrate to New York.

The narrator also learns about Ireland by directly experiencing life there, primarily from living in a hotel. When John persuades his friend Tom Hurley to come to Ireland with his fiancée Lisa Helm for a Hunt Wedding, the narrator is drafted to help do a great deal of the work, including finding a Protestant minister in the Catholic part of Ireland who is willing to marry two adults who openly admit they have been living in sin.

In chapter 15, originally published as “The Haunting of the New,” the narrator gets a call at three in the morning call from Nora, an old friend whom he met on his first trip to Ireland. A member of the wealthy elite in Ireland, Nora inherited a house, Grynwood, and has lived a lavish life of parties and debauchery ever since. When her house burned down four years ago, she went to great lengths to rebuild it exactly as it was. However, in one of the more fantastic elements in the novel, this new, “innocent” house has rejected her, and all her friends, as sinful. She thinks she can give it to the narrator, but the house rejects him as well.

Alcohol plays a major part in the narrator’s quest for Ireland, which occurs mostly in pubs. In chapter 22, originally published as “The First Day of Lent,” the narrator learns that his friend Mike drives smoothly and slowly only when drunk. When Mike gives up alcohol for Lent, he turns into a demon driver who terrifies the narrator so much that he brings him a bottle of whiskey and begs him to give something else up for Lent. The narrator happens to be in the pub when the news comes that Lord Kilgotten has died and left a secret codicil specifying that his wine collection be poured over his coffin. Deciding that the will does not specify how the wine moves from bottle to grave, the men (including the narrator) end up standing around the grave drinking the wine.

Most of the encounters with the Irish involve men. The only two Irish women are the beggar girl (in chapter 23, where the main focus is on the Brat) and an old woman who plays the harp on the streets. In this encounter, the narrator is depressed one Sunday afternoon in Dublin. He goes to the Four Provinces in the afternoon and meets an old man who is drinking and complaining about how people are never grateful for all the wonders of life. The narrator leaves in a bad mood, and then hears harp music, played by an old woman on the street. He praises her playing and tells her how it has helped him. Imagine, he says, being lonely and stuck in a hotel, then you “turn a corner, and there’s this little woman with a golden harp and everything she plays is another season—autumn, spring, summer…a free-for-all. And the ice melts, the fog lifts, the wind burns with June, and ten years shuck off your life” (151). His praise angers her, and she cannot play because he’s spoiled it all. He goes around a corner and waits because he hears her trying to play. She regains her music, then he sneaks by, her eyes are shut and her hands were “moving...like the fresh hands of a very young girl who has first known rain and washes her palms in its clear waterfalls” (153). He realizes the only way to thank her is to go back to his own creative work and do it as well as he can.

This event, with its focus on the work of creating art, whether music or writing, connects the quest for Ireland to the quest for the White Whale, which also involves the conflict with John Huston. This second quest is the focus of thirteen chapters. At the beginning of the novel, the writer is elated to be in Ireland with one of his greatest heroes. The first chapters do not focus on writing the screenplay: rather, the writer works alone in his room and spends time with Huston, engaging in his social activities or masculine rituals. One afternoon, Huston tries to start his own bullfight as they are crossing a field. Later he encourages the writer to take up foxhunting, requiring the purchase of riding clothes and riding lessons.

In chapter 8, Huston plays the hypnotist and puts the reluctant writer under, eliciting the “subconscious” message from the writer to himself to write the “greatest, most wonderful, finest screenplay in the history of the world” (35). The narrator also has to spend a great deal of time working on the Hunt Wedding. By chapter 11, the writer has begun to have problems with his writing, and his conflicts with Huston intensify.

By chapter 16, the narrator is hiding out from the director, not wanting to continue riding lessons. When he finally confronts Huston, it’s to give him a choice: getting the screenplay or having his writer learn to ride for a foxhunt. Huston immediately backs down. Successful confrontations with Huston occur throughout the rest of the novel.

A major conflict occurs in chapter 24 when the narrator receives a cable announcing that he has won a national literary award and five thousand dollars. Rushing out to tell Huston about it, the narrator finds himself challenged by both Huston and his friend Jake, who jeer at his plans to spend the money on a house for his family, demand that he invest it, and then suddenly start to theorize about how men are attracted to other men. The two men each relate stories of homoerotic attractions from their youth (their own or their friends’), then challenge the narrator to tell his secret. The narrator strikes back by telling them that he never felt any attraction to males in the past, but that he’s in love with Huston now, and that he will knock on Jake’s door later that night. The two men deflect the narrator’s challenge to their masculinity by threatening to bet all his prize money on a horse, and then argue about the narrator’s cowardice over money. He admits he’s a coward, but then says he will bet all his money on Oscar Wilde (an Anglo-Irish playwright jailed for homosexuality).

The next conflict comes when Huston jokingly tells reporters they are lunching with that the narrator doesn’t really care about the screenplay. The narrator confronts him about the accusation, only to be told it was a joke. He gets his revenge by writing a short horror story in which a director named John plays practical jokes on a writer. The writer meets a banshee, the spirit of a woman who returns to confront her betrayer, a womanizing man. By the end of the story, the writer has sent John out to meet the banshee and, probably, to his death as well.

In the novel, the narrator gives the story to Huston to read, prompting the latter to swear off practical jokes. The final conflict, ending with the narrator winning decisively, comes after he tries to hypnotize Huston. The narrator wins this competition by completing the screenplay in a seven-hour bout of inspired writing. As a result, Huston gives up on his plan to force him to fly to London (the narrator is terrified of flying) and begins to speak to him again. In a sense, the novel can be read as a complex extension of the banshee story—a story of a conflict the writer wins.

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