Ray Bradbury's Moby Dick

In the paleolithic age I was introduced to Ray Bradbury through a Bantam paperback "Something Wicked This Way Comes". The only citizen of Los Angeles who doesn't and won't drive a car--he has a pathological fear of them--Ray Bradbury keeps writing his marvelous short stories and novels. He has entered the pantheon of American great writers with his own Center of Ray Bradbury Studies at the University of Indiana. From their archives comes Bradbury's 1954 screenplay for the John Huston film of Moby Dick. Bradbury has chronicled this traumatic time in a wonderful book of his time in Ireland working with a cantankerous John Huston. Bradbury had never read Moby Dick until he was asked to write the screenplay and he had only one screenplay to his credit, an appropriate science ficton space opera. Upon arriving in Ireland and receiving no guidance from Huston about what he wanted, Bradbury experienced writer's block and finally overcame it by imagining that he was Herman Melville himself. The screenplay "Moby Dick" was published by Subterranean Press in 2008.

In 1969, Bradbury at the UCLA American Film Institute taped an interview about his experience and his views on Moby Dick. In the current national climate,I think Bradbury's observations are worth repeating:

" Moby Dick is the most American novel that has ever been written. It's far more American than anything that has been written since. We don't have anyone writing today who really combines the kind of American character that Ahab illustrates in this story. Blasphemy--that's what we are. We're blasphemous people. We have always been and we always will be. We are people who promulgated the industrial revolution in the world. It didn't start there, but we finished it off. Our technologies, our sciences,our medicines--all go against God. We fear death. We make people live to be older. This is all blasphemous. Ahab is really the instructor of our blasphemy. While I was working on the screenplay I realized this."

Bradbury later tried to update Moby Dick for the space age with Leviathan '99, which was dedicated to Herman Melville.

For Melville fans like me, we are promised in March the Newberry Library's definitive edition of Billy Budd, which was discovered in a trunk of Melville papers and only published in 1921.