The Bradbury Chronicles (20 page)

As ever, Don Congdon was steadfastly working on Ray's behalf. Along with Maggie, Congdon was Ray's most loyal partner. He was a thorough editor, working to help shape Ray's stories. Congdon was also a tremendous personal influence. When he got a crew cut, so did Ray. Congdon was an avowed liberal Democrat and his political leanings certainly reinforced Ray's own beliefs. He also knew that Ray had a keen ability to pitch stories; when Ray would make his periodic trips to New York, Congdon would take Ray to magazine offices to meet editors. It was an unusual sales strategy, eschewing the traditional manuscript and cover letter submission. But Congdon knew full well that Ray's infectious energy and enthusiasm would often sell his own stories.

As Ray put his new short-story collection together, Congdon sold “The Illustrated Man,” a tragic tale of a carnival freak, to
Esquire
. In 1948, Ray had envisioned it as a title story for a collection of short stories. But when he took this idea to his editor in 1950, Walter Bradbury wasn't quite sold on the idea. The editor felt the story didn't fit with the science fiction motif of the rest of the collection. However, Walter Bradbury liked the title and the two men agreed to consider it as a name for Ray's new collection. Another possibility was taken from a recently penned short story, “Perhaps We Are Going Away.”

As Ray worked on the new book of short stories, the Bradburys were experiencing growing pains. The apartment in Venice was too small, so Ray and Maggie began searching for a house, and found one they loved in a rolling, quiet nook of West Los Angeles. It was a white single-story tract home, located at 10750 Clarkson Road, and had three bedrooms and one bathroom. It had a putting-green backyard and a detached garage—a perfect office space for Ray. Ray and Maggie borrowed the down-payment money from their parents and bought the home for twelve thousand dollars. They moved in on August 3, 1950.

A few weeks later, Christopher Isherwood's review ran in the premiere issue of
Tomorrow
magazine and it was a glowing tribute. Until then,
The Martian Chronicles
had received only a smattering of reviews, and none from the powerhouse publications. Now this high praise from a highbrow critic signaled that perhaps there would be a paradigm shift in the way the intelligentsia handled genre fiction. Ray certainly hoped this was the case.

“Poe's name comes up,” wrote Isherwood on Bradbury, “almost inevitably in any discussion of Mr. Bradbury's work; not because he is an imitator (though he is certainly a disciple) but because he already deserves to be measured against the greatest master of his particular genre.”

It was perhaps the most important and salient distinction in Isherwood's review that vindicated Ray from the trappings of the science-fictional pigeonhole. Isherwood stated in no uncertain terms that Bradbury transcended genre: “His brilliant, shameless fantasy makes, and needs, no excuses for its wild jumps from the possible to the impossible. His interest in machines seems to be limited to their symbolic and aesthetic aspects. I doubt if he could pilot a rocket ship, much less design one.”

As
The Illustrated Man
neared publication, a final element was added to the book. “Somewhere along the line,” said Ray, “Walter Bradbury said, ‘We've disguised
The Martian Chronicles
as a novel, do you think we can somehow do the same thing with
The Illustrated Man
?'” Ray thought long and hard about his editor's words. While Walter Bradbury had passed on the eponymous short story “The Illustrated Man,” Ray had an inkling of how it might loosely tie his entire new story collection together. Just before sending his editor the manuscript, Ray devised a clever narrative frame that incorporated the character of the illustrated man, even though it had been decided that the story by the same name would not be included in the book. Ray wrote a haunting prologue for his new collection of short stories that began with a young man—the story's narrator—walking the back roads of Wisconsin. It is a hot and humid summer day, late in the afternoon, when the narrator meets another wanderer—a former carnival freak, out of work and out of luck. He is an “illustrated man,” a sideshow spectacle bearing tattoos from head to toe. And, ironically, that is why this tragic figure cannot find work. His tattoos are somehow different: They come alive at night, swirling in colorful smears of water-colored fright, predicting dark and dreadful futures.

As Ray wrote the prologue story, each tattoo on the body of the illustrated man represented a short story in the book. It was a stroke of creative inspiration. Ray wrote a few more interludes between the first few stories in the collection, setting the tone, showing the tattoos changing shape, blurring, becoming different visions of the future. Ray ended the book with an epilogue in which the narrator, lying beside a campfire with his fellow drifter, at long last peers at “that empty space upon the illustrated man's back, that area of jumbled colors and shapes.” The book ends with one more vision of the future—the final tattoo morphs and bleeds into a coherent work of skin art. It shows the illustrated man strangling the narrator.

Ray turned in the manuscript for
The Illustrated Man
on August 19, 1950, and continued to correspond with Walter Bradbury as they polished the book for publication early the following year. Ray had won a small victory in convincing his editor to remove the words “science fiction” from the cover of the new book, but he still wasn't satisfied. Walter Bradbury wanted the Doubleday Science Fiction logo at least to appear on the book's title page, and Ray rebelled. It was a symbolic battle for Ray Bradbury, a quiet struggle against being tagged a genre writer that he had been fighting since his high school days. Ray wrote to Walter Bradbury on September 29, 1950, asking him once more to remove the science fiction tag altogether.

 

… May I ask now, very humbly, that we remove it from the title page also? I think we could have gotten more reviews from the big people on CHRONICLES if it hadn't been for that science-fiction label.... Can't we do something about this, please, Brad? Must the light remain under the bushel-basket? I realize your financial position on books of short stories, but there's no reason one kind of advertising won't work on book-store-managers, and another, devoid of the s-f shadow for the general public and the critics. My name is known well enough among s-f readers now so they'll investigate the book, with or without a special label, don't you agree? You have been a good friend to me on so many details, and I hate to plagge
[sic]
you again about this, but the Isherwood review only brings it to the surface once more. If he likes the book, then why wouldn't the reviewers at Atlantic, Harper's, SRL, and the other big sources? Haven't we lost at least a thousand sales, to put it mildly, by not getting the CHRONICLES to certain reviewers without the s-f label? I have admired [Aldous] Huxley for years, but never heard him referred to as a science-fiction writer. Or George Orwell. I do not mean to sound conceited, but I only want a certain amount of recognition among people I admire and look up to....

 

Ever the hands-on author, after wrangling over the science fiction cover label, Ray had strong opinions on the cover art for his new collection. He envisioned a very loose and abstract rendering of a man, with primitive symbols stamped all over his body: symbols that resembled age-old cave etchings, drawings of suns and moons, snakes and human figures. Down to the orange and red color scheme, the design was all Ray Bradbury. Luckily, Walter Bradbury liked Ray's jacket-art concept and forwarded the idea to the Doubleday art department, and they liked it, too. “The Art Department tells me to pass along to you their feeling that you are an excellent jacket designer,” Walter Bradbury wrote Ray on October 10, 1950.

As Doubleday prepped
The Illustrated Man
for its impending release, Ray and Maggie settled into the new house on Clarkson Road. After living in the tight confines of the one-bedroom apartment in Venice, the three-bedroom home afforded them room to breathe. And they were going to need it: Maggie was expecting again.

 

O
NE AFTERNOON
Christopher Isherwood telephoned Ray and asked if he could stop by for a visit. He wanted to bring a friend, the noted author and philosopher Gerald Heard. Heard was a distinguished intellectual, sixty years of age at the time, a former Oxford University lecturer, BBC science commentator, as well as the author of dozens of books, most notably on the evolution of human consciousness. Heard had asked Isherwood specifically to introduce him to Ray Bradbury. Ray was incredulous. He couldn't fathom that a man of his repute, an intellectual held in such high regard, wanted to meet him.

“We'd only been in the house a few weeks and we had no furniture,” said Ray. “In the living room we only had a sofa but no other chairs. I told Christopher, ‘You can't bring him over if we have nowhere to sit.' And Christopher said, ‘He'll sit on the floor.' I said, ‘No, I'll sit on the floor!'”

On a still Los Angeles evening, twilight settling over Clarkson Road, there was a rap at the front door. It was Christopher Isherwood and Gerald Heard, standing on the front steps of Ray and Maggie Bradbury's new home. Heard was given a seat on the sofa, alongside Maggie, and Ray and Christopher Isherwood sat on the floor. As they conversed, Heard asked many questions of Ray. He wanted to know Ray's background, and he asked how
The Martian Chronicles
came to be, attempting to understand the cogs and machinations that made Ray Bradbury tick. As Ray recalled, Heard had the ability “of making you feel as if you were the intellectual, you were the one with the IQ, you were the one who deserved attention rather than himself. There are not many intellectuals who have this gift. They're so busy talking and listening to themselves, they don't want to pay attention to you. But Heard, for the first time, I really think for the first time, made me feel that I was worthwhile to myself.”

A few weeks after the meeting, Heard called Ray with an invitation for tea at his house. “I was really frightened,” said Ray, “and I said to my wife, ‘What am I going to say to him? I'm going to go down there and I'm going to spend two hours at tea. What do we have to talk about? I have no education. I've never been to college. I haven't read any of the books that this man has read and my career is just beginning. What could he possibly want to talk about?'”

Despite his trepidation, Ray went to see Heard at his Pacific Palisades home, a small rented cottage behind a larger house. “He put me at ease immediately,” said Ray, “and we talked about life on other worlds and space travel and things I felt comfortable about. I found we got on fine, and I dared to say many foolish, or what I thought were foolish, things about life and myself and creativity, and I found that he felt this way, too—this whole thing about fun in writing, and enjoying and loving your work.”

Ray dined periodically with Isherwood and Heard, and Ray's friend Sid Stebel occasionally joined them. Stebel had met Ray in 1948 while putting a literary magazine together called
Copy
. Stebel and another friend paid a visit to Ray's apartment on Venice Boulevard one afternoon to ask if he might contribute to their magazine. He did, giving them the story “The Highway.” Ray and Sid Stebel remained close friends from then on. The two pals shared all sorts of grand times, including evenings spent with Gerald Heard.

“Gerald Heard was a charming man. He was very wizened,” professed Stebel. “He had a little pointed goatee, a Van Dyke, I think they called it, and very mischievous eyes.” One evening while Ray and Stebel were visiting, turmoil ensued when a moth fluttered into the house, prompting Isherwood and Heard into action. “There was quite a to-do over this moth,” Stebel said. “My instinct would have been to kill it and their instinct was to shepherd it out because it was a life.”

Soon, Christopher Isherwood and Gerald Heard introduced Ray to another member of their intellectual clique, Aldous Huxley. Ray had read and admired Huxley's work, particularly
A Brave New World,
in his late teens and early twenties, during his imitative period, just before he began publishing and prior to discovering his own voice as a writer. “I tried to be artsy-fartsy like him,” Ray said, “including science and aesthetics and anthropology and archeology and all those things, which of course I couldn't do.”

On an afternoon late in 1950, Heard invited Ray to his home for tea with Huxley. Of course, Ray didn't have a car and even if he did, he never learned to drive, so, as he often did, he asked a friend to give him a lift. Ray Harryhausen obliged, driving Ray to Heard's home. Even as Ray had been uniformly accepted by this esteemed group of intellectuals, he learned that as cordial and accepting as Heard and Huxley were, there were still the underpinnings of snobbery. “Ray Harryhausen brought me to Heard's house on a Sunday afternoon and they didn't invite him in,” remembered Ray. “He had to sit outside and I was so embarrassed. He waited an hour for me to come out and I apologized to him. I said, ‘Those people are so impolite.' Of course, he was nobody then. He hadn't made any films. He was unknown. If he'd been famous, they'd have asked him in, of course.”