The Bradbury Chronicles (14 page)

“In the middle of the night,” said Ray, “I got up to go to the bathroom. When I came back there was a big black guy up on my bunk and his head was swathed in bloody bandages from a fight he had been in the night before. It was like Muhammad Ali sitting up there. I looked up at him and all the people in the jail cell were watching me.

“Sir,” Ray said. “You're sitting on my bunk.”

The big man sitting in the darkness slowly looked down at the wholesome kid standing below. “This blanket and this bunk got your name on it?” he asked.

“No, sir,” said Ray, his voice a mouse squeak.

“This tin here on this bunk, got your name on it?”

Ray looked around. All the inmates were watching him.

“No, sir,” Ray said.

“Then it ain't your bunk, is it?” the man asked.

And again, in his terrified voice, Ray said: “No, sir.”

Ray later found another bed without a heat duct, away from immediate trouble. But his jailhouse nightmare was far from over. By sheer coincidence, as Ray recalled, there was a man in the cell by the name of “Ray Bradley.” This man with the unfortunately similar name was servicing willing inmates under their blankets. Ever naïve, Ray was mortified. “I thought the guards outside would hear there was someone in the cell named Ray Bradley in there relieving all these people!”

Ray spent the weekend in terror. Skip came and assured him that he would be let out as soon as the draft board offices opened and the FBI could find proof of his registration. “By Sunday morning,” Ray said, “I was feeling pretty sorry for myself.” A church choir visited the jailhouse that morning—followers of the popular female evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. They rolled in an organ and gathered around it. “The six people in the choir asked for requests,” said Ray, “and I said, ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.'” He had no idea why he requested that. The Bradbury family had never been particularly religious, and were a Christmas- and Easter-only family. The choir and the organ kicked into the first bars of the hymn:

 

Onward, Christian Soldiers,

Marching as to war,

With the cross of Jesus,

Going on before!

 

Ray, frightened and feeling alone, listened and cried. “The next morning, Monday, my draft board was open and the FBI checked me out and I got out of jail. But never again. Never again.”

 

T
HROUGHOUT
1943 and 1944, Ray cemented a reputation as a different sort of science fiction and fantasy scribe. His stories were untraditional, even for these untraditional genres; they were profoundly human, filled with poetic prose, and high on crystalline imagery. By now Ray had become a regular contributor to the pulps. “The Lake” was finally published in the May 1944 issue of
Weird Tales,
and it boosted his popularity more so.

In 1944, still writing a story a week, he sold twenty-two tales. Writer and publisher August Derleth took notice. Derleth, who was planning an anthology of weird fiction, approached Ray for a story. Ray was ecstatic about the offer. If it came to fruition, it would be his first story published in book form. Initially, Derleth and Ray thought they would use the story “There Was an Old Woman,” first published in the July 1944 issue of
Weird Tales
. But instead they chose “The Lake.” They both knew it was Ray's best.

Following in Leigh Brackett's footsteps, Ray also began writing for the detective pulps, particularly
Dime Detective,
edited by Ryerson Johnson. Johnson purchased a number of Ray's stories in 1944. “He encouraged me and promoted my stories in his magazines a couple of issues ahead to tell readers that he had my stories coming up. He's one of the few editors who ever did that,” Ray said. Decades later, Ray considered most of these stories to be generally mediocre. But he was publishing more and more, writing every day, and improving greatly.

Plans for August Derleth's collection of short stories,
Who Knocks?
, were firmed up; it would include “The Lake.” Corresponding with Derleth, Ray pondered a professional name change:

 

It might be wise, since I hope to make the better markets eventually, to change my name now. I was baptized Ray; my mother didn't think to give me the longer form of the name. Perhaps one of the names listed below would sound more appropriate:

Ray Douglas Bradbury

Douglas Bradbury

R. D. Bradbury

I'd like your opinion. Of the three listed above, my preference is for the first. It seems to be a good compromise between pomposity and flippancy. I hope you agree; if not, tell me, and I'll mull the matter around some more.

 

In the end, it was decided that Ray would keep the byline he had been using in the pages of the pulps. Ray Bradbury would remain Ray Bradbury. Ray's letter to Derleth also indicated that, even at this early stage of his career, he had his sights firmly set on breaking out of the pulps and into the literary market.

His career was gaining momentum. Over the course of 1944, nineteen Bradbury stories appeared in print. Some of these tales, “The Lake,” “There Was an Old Woman,” and “The Jar,” would become Bradbury classics. At twenty-four, he had developed a following of pulp magazine readers across the country, and would soon be published in a book by fan-favorite Arkham House publishers (though he was still living at home, still sharing a bed with Skip). At this time, the editors of
Weird Tales
were pressuring him to conform to the conventions of genre fiction. As Ray remembered it, editor Dorothy McIlwraith (who replaced the ailing Farnsworth Wright in May 1940) had grown weary of his poetic tales of ghosts and ghouls, and suggested he write more traditional tales of the macabre. He was writing too many tales rooted in his childhood. Ever the nonconformist, Ray refused to alter his stories.

Although he was publishing regularly, it wasn't enough for him. He was in a hurry to make his mark on literary history, and he was frustrated that he was not achieving this kind of success quickly enough. Ray knew that his friend Grant Beach had been seeing a psychiatrist, and asked Grant if he could pay a visit to his therapist. It was twenty dollars for a forty-five-minute visit—twice what Ray had earned in a week as a newspaper salesman. “I saved up my money and I went to see the doctor,” Ray recalled. “In his office, I sat across from him and he asked, ‘What is it that you want to find out about yourself? What do you want?'”

Ray was quiet for a moment. He knew what he wanted. And so he blurted it out: “I want to be the greatest writer who has ever lived.”

The psychiatrist gently laughed. “Well then,” he said, “you're going to have to wait a while, aren't you?”

The psychiatrist suggested that Ray pull out the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and read about the lives of history's famous writers. Some of them got ahead very quickly, he explained to Ray, while others took ten or fifteen years. “But read their lives,” Ray remembered him saying. “Read their lives and you'll understand what writing is, and what fame is, and all about getting established.”

It wasn't advice that rattled the Earth to its core, but Ray heeded it. He went to the library and began reading up on the lives of famous writers. And in doing so, it made him want to secure his own immortality even more.

Trying to help his friend reach greatness, Grant Beach suggested that Ray was far better than the pulps and recommended that he send his story to the “slicks,” as they were called, high-quality magazines such as
Mademoiselle, American Mercury,
and
The New Yorker
. Ray was hesitant. Although he was confident in his ability, he had submitted to many of these publications while he was in high school and had been summarily rejected by every one of them. But Grant was persuasive. After all, Ray had helped him; he had assisted Grant in converting his garage into a pottery studio, which Grant christened “Tortilla Flats,” in a nod to the recent John Steinbeck novel, and Grant's ceramic art was selling to respected galleries in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Now Grant wanted to return the favor. But Ray's name had been plastered across the cover of so many pulp magazines in recent months that he worried he would be pigeonholed. In high school, many of his fellow writing classmates hadn't understood or respected his inclination toward genre fiction. Now he was concerned that the editors of the fine New York literary magazines would do the same. He had gained a reputation as “The Poet of the Pulps.” The big question was: Could he now break free?

Ray's books were actually some of the very first I bought with my own money. I would have been about nine years old and the English boarding school I was at had a traveling book shop that would turn up once a term and set up in the music room. The first thing I bought was a book called
The Silver Locusts.
That was immediately followed by
The Golden Apples of the Sun,
followed by
Dandelion Wine
, and then somewhere in there I read
The October Country
and realized that my favorite story since I was about seven was actually a Bradbury story, “Homecoming,” which I'd read in some big, old hardback anthology at a friend's house.

—
NEIL GAIMAN
,
author

A
S
A
UGUST
Derleth was putting together the forthcoming dark fantasy anthology
Who Knocks?
, he wrote Ray and suggested they do a book of Ray's weird fiction. Ray was, not surprisingly, elated by Derleth's offer and wrote the publisher back on January 29, 1945:

 

First, I want to thank you for your suggestion that some time in the next two years Arkham House might try an anthology [sic] of Bradbury stories. I certainly hope to continue turning out stories of the calibre
[sic]
necessary to make such a volume possible. Some of my early stories, if ever reprinted, would need quite a bit of rewriting to re-shape them into my present way of thinking and producing. For over a year now I've been working and planning an entire volumn
[sic]
of short stories concerning children in fantasy and weird settings … this volumn
[sic]
to be titled
A CHILDS [sic] GARDEN OF TERROR.
I hoped to eventually submit the completed book to a publisher in 1946 or 1947, depending on the development and quality of each yarn. And now that you've suggested ARKHAM might be interested later in my work, I hope I shall one day be able to submit the finished work to you. I think it would be a definite off-trail thing, something a little different in the outré pattern … and I'm especially pleased with the title. Anyway, the project gives me much to look forward to and work on. Thanks very much for the generous offer.

 

The groundwork for
Dark Carnival,
Ray's first book, had been established. Of course, there was the business of Ray's initial title,
A Child's Garden of Terror
. Derleth wrote back suggesting the title was too limiting, and Ray quickly agreed. Harking back to his days of wandering circus and carnival grounds, of meeting Mr. Electrico and the other after-hours freaks, Ray rechristened his collection-in-progress
Dark Carnival
. He even suggested a cover concept for the book:

 

The cover jacket might possibly illustrate a small carnival that has set up its merry-go-round and side-show tent and banners in a dark green woodland glade at twilight—the entire atmosphere of the picture would be one of remoteness, of a carnival in the wilderness going full steam, but with no one in sight except one small boy in the foreground, tiny, very alone, staring at the moving carousel and the high banners. And on the banners instead of portraits of Fat Ladies, Thin Men and Tattooed Freaks would be pictures of strange, nebulous creatures. And on the carousel, instead of horses sliding up and down the gleaming brass poles, would be other, impossible, vaguely, disturbingly delineated creatures of such indistinct cast and line that one's imagination could make them anything in the whole universe.

So there is the Dark Carnival, discovered in a forest, glowing with light, the new night over and around it, and silence, and the small boy standing alone and struck numb in the foreground, listening but hearing nothing....

 

It was during this time that he wrote “The Big Black and White Game.” “[M]any of my short stories were not based on my knowledge of other people's characters at all, or on any great philosophical knowledge of the world and its problems; but, more often than not, I wrote about my own childhood or about childish people or my immediate fears of some sort, very immediate things, very close to me in my life,” mused Ray. “It's interesting that when I made my break over into the quality field, it was with the story of a boy again.”

It was 1945—well before the civil rights movement—but in “The Big Black and White Game,” Ray had prophetically painted a picture of a national dilemma. According to Ray, he didn't consciously consider this when he wrote the story; he simply remembered an incident from his childhood about a baseball game that pitted blacks against whites and, in retelling the tale, stumbled onto something much deeper. He submitted the manuscript to
American Mercury
magazine and, to his astonishment, it sold. “The Big Black and White Game” was published in the August 1945 issue of the magazine.

By late summer 1945, World War Two had finally ended. Soldiers were coming home; the pall of the Great Depression had lifted; and things were, at long last, looking up for the Bradburys—Leo had steady work. Ray's friend Grant Beach proposed they take a road trip through Mexico—a young man's quest for high adventure. Ray was intrigued by the concept, but his short stories were earning him, on average, forty or fifty dollars apiece from the pulps and he had no extra money. Grant encouraged Ray to submit more stories to mainstream publications, which paid much more than the pulps.

Throughout 1945, Ray established himself as one of the brightest new stars in pulp fiction. But he feared that this would interfere with his ability to move into the mainstream. That summer, though, he had written a story, “Homecoming,” about a lovingly ghoulish family of monsters coming together for a family reunion, that scholar David Mogen later deemed an “extraordinary perspective on the ordinary,” and it was one of the stories that would soon propel Ray outside the realm of the pulps.

Surrendering to Grant Beach's pressure, he asked his agent Julius Schwartz to submit some stories to more prestigious publications. However Schwartz had few connections to the New York literati, so he suggested that Ray send the manuscripts himself. In the same week, Ray submitted three tales—“Invisible Boy” to
Mademoiselle;
“The Miracles of Jamie” to
Charm;
and “One Timeless Spring” to
Collier's
—under the pseudonym William Elliott (Ray borrowed the surname from writer T. S. Eliot). The odds were almost insurmountable. The chances that a story by a young, unknown writer with no publishing history whatsoever might be plucked from a Manhattan magazine slush pile were slim to none. The probability that all three would be selected and make it through the arduous, hierarchical editorial process was little better than zero. In short, Ray didn't stand a chance.

In the third week of August, Ray received word from not one but all three magazines congratulating William Elliott on his excellent stories. The news of the sale of the third and final story, “Invisible Boy,” came on August 22, his twenty-fifth birthday. “I've never had a week like that since,” said Ray.

All three tales had sold, collectively, for a thousand dollars. It was twice as much as he had earned in an entire year of selling newspapers. He was rich! Unfortunately, the checks had been made out to William Elliott. Ray quickly contacted the various editors and told them about the pseudonym. Checks were redrafted, payable to Ray Bradbury. And his stories appeared under his own name. He had broken out of the pulps and into the slicks.

Since Grant Beach had been the one to push him, Ray felt an obligation to take the road trip to Mexico, although he had no burning desire to do so. In late September, they loaded into Grant's Ford V8 and hit the highway. It would prove to be a bumpy ride.

Ray Bradbury had never been the adventurous type. He was a mama's boy, hesitant to stray beyond the border of his comfort zone. He had gone through his first twenty-five years eating, almost exclusively, hamburgers, egg sandwiches, Campbell's tomato soup, his mother's Swedish meatballs, and her strawberry shortcake. (This was his primary diet. It's a wonder he lived to write as much as he did.) He never ate vegetables and he wouldn't try salad until he met his wife, Marguerite, in 1946. He never ate seafood after a childhood bout with food poisoning. To put it mildly, he was a finicky eater. Add to this the fact that he didn't know how to drive a car, and the road trip to Mexico was doomed from the onset.

Nonetheless, Ray packed his suitcase and his typewriter and piled into the passenger seat of Grant's Ford, agreeing to act as navigator. They were off. They crossed the border at Laredo, Texas, and ventured down through Monterrey, Mexico, staying in fine hotels. “You could get anything in Mexico for a dollar,” Ray remembered. “The best hotels for a dollar a night.” But soon Ray and Grant's friendship was beginning to show cracks. Grant quickly tired of acting as sole driver. He wanted a break, but Ray couldn't drive. After having witnessed the aftermaths of the fatal car accident in 1935 and being legally blind without his glasses, Ray never got behind the wheel. And he wasn't doing a particularly good job as navigator, either. Grant would send Ray into service stations for directions or to find lodging, but Ray knew very little Spanish and could not communicate with anyone. Grant felt as if he was doing everything, and the two friends began bickering. “The whole trip was a mistake,” said Ray. “It was a bad idea. I shouldn't have gone.”

Still, Mexico helped Ray mature. Amazingly, at the age of twenty-five, Ray ate for the very first time asparagus, corn, peas, and filet mignon, which he ordered thinking it was hamburger steak, and ended up choking down with water and bread. (He couldn't find a burger south of the border to save his life.) He resented it at the time, but these experiences would help him socially in the years to come when wining and dining with great film directors, renowned authors, even world leaders. However, that was all a long way off. For now, he was in Mexico and hating every minute of it.

Mexico disturbed Ray. The economy was depressed, and Ray felt as if many of the people hated him, assuming he was a rich American. He didn't speak the language. The food was foreign. The landscape was alien and desolate. But above all, the thing he feared the most, the thing that permeated so much of his writing, seemed to be ubiquitous: death. Passing through one Mexican town after another, Ray and Grant encountered numerous funerals—lavish and ornate death marches, processions of somber families moving toward age-old graveyards. Most troubling to Ray were the funeral marches in which grief-stricken fathers carried their children's caskets hoisted above their heads. The deeper into Mexico Ray and Grant traveled, the more fearful Ray became. Within a week, they had driven into green jungle country where nature reigned supreme. Ray felt insignificant in the face of it all. What if they broke down? They had heard the stories of murderous machete-wielding natives from town locals.

“We got out in the jungle one day,” Ray recalled, “and all of a sudden an Indian, a naked Indian, popped up on the road near us wearing just a loincloth, trotting along carrying a machete. Well, you know, immediately I thought, this is it. Goodbye, world, my head's gonna go. Well, he didn't care about us. He was on his way somewhere, I don't know where, but he was running, and the last I saw of him he took off through the jungle on his own business, carrying a machete to clear his way.”

Ray was a long way from Los Angeles. He would lie in bed at night with his eyes wide open. All the images of death coupled with his sense of vulnerability were almost unbearable. Added to this, the annual Day of the Dead celebration—Día de los Muertos—was fast approaching. The Mexican holiday, held at the end of October and the beginning of November, is a colorfully macabre celebration of the dearly departed, whose spirits, as the legend goes, are believed to return during the festival. In preparation, families decorate gravesites with flowers, candles, skeleton figurines, and wild-eyed masks. Celebrants eat, drink, and dance late into the night to commemorate the return of the dead. Death, it seemed, was all around Ray. He couldn't escape it.

On the eve of the festival, following hundreds of revelers, Grant and Ray took a dugout canoe and, with an Indian guide, paddled out to the island of Janitzio in Lake Patzcuaro in west central Mexico. The island's annual celebration was the stuff of international legend. Janitzio's small cemetery was adorned with exotic flowers and flickering votives. “The whole scene was lit by a thousand candles so it looked like a constellation fallen from the sky and landing in the middle of the graveyard,” remembered Ray. Women and children knelt at grave sites placing old photos of their departed loved ones next to tombstones. Men stood around the periphery of the cemetery eating home-cooked food and drinking tequila long after midnight. A few of them strummed guitars. While on the island, Ray and Grant met an elegant Frenchwoman named Madame Man'Ha Garreau-Dombasle, and her teenage daughter, Francion. Ray struck up a conversation with the aristocratic woman, who took great interest in Ray's writing career and was duly impressed by his recent accomplishments in the pages of the literary magazines. They all ended up spending the entire night chatting and watching the festival.