The Bradbury Chronicles (21 page)

Through Isherwood, Heard, and Huxley, Ray had infiltrated the inner sanctum of a well-regarded trio of intellectuals. He also recognized, however, that as kind as these great writers, philosophers, and thinking men were, they still wore the armor and attitude of the intellectual elite. But he had been invited into an arena that had been, until that point, largely off-limits to a perceived writer of science fiction and fantasy. It was a turning point for him, as his insecurities over being categorized as a genre writer continued to haunt him. Isherwood, Heard, and Huxley reassured Ray. They listened to him. They told the young writer that he had talent and ought to relax and enjoy the long and splendid ride. They predicted that the name Ray Bradbury would be etched in the annals of literary history. Most important, they reassured Ray that he wasn't a science fiction writer at all. “You're a
writer,
” they said. One afternoon, Heard took the praise a notch higher. “You're not a writer, you're a poet,” he said. To prove his point, Heard opened his copy of
The Martian Chronicles
and read aloud a sampling of the book's passages.

“It was the first time a group of intellectuals said, ‘This guy's a great writer,'” said Sid Stebel. “Sci-fi was considered a kind of trashy form and a lot of sci-fi writers were trying to achieve respectability. Isherwood and his friends said, ‘Forget what genre Ray Bradbury is writing in. He's a fabulous writer.' They saw all kinds of psychological and philosophical things in Ray's work.”

The psychedelic drug movement wouldn't take flight until the sixties, but in the early to mid-1950s, Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, ever the philosophers of alternative consciousness, were already trying mescaline, a natural chemical that prompted hours-long, colorful hallucinations. Heard and Huxley were not interested in experimenting with mind-dulling drugs, but rather with psychoactive stimulants that heightened perception, so they took mescaline, a legal substance at the time, under the watchful supervision of a doctor. One day, they asked Ray to participate. Heard and Huxley must have been tremendously curious to know how mescaline would interact with a mind like Ray Bradbury's. “They offered me mescaline because Huxley had done several books, one called
The Doors of Perception,
that all had to do with drugs and getting a heightened perception by using them. They looked at it all very scientifically,” Ray explained. He declined their offer, puzzling them. “I told them, ‘No, I can't do that.' They said, ‘Why not? We'll have a doctor in attendance.' And I said, ‘Yes, but what if the top of my head comes off and the doctor can't put it back on?' And of course, they had no answer, because a lot of people went insane in those days taking drugs. I told them, ‘I don't want to have a lot of perceptions, I want to have one at a time. When I write a short story, I open the trapdoor on the top of my head, take out one lizard, shut the trapdoor, skin the lizard, and pin it up on the wall.'” Ray was afraid that if he took mescaline, he would be unable to, as he put it, “shut the trapdoor and all my lizards would escape.”

 

D
OUBLEDAY WAS
pleased with its prolific young author, but had to take care—Ray was in demand. Bantam Books had approached Don Congdon about the possibility of Ray serving as an anthologist for a fantasy collection, and offered an advance of $500. Congdon countered, asking for $1,000, and with classic negotiation protocol, the two parties settled on the fee of $750, payable upon publication. Ray set out to pick a book's worth of tales—stories of terror, magical realism, dark fantasy, hope, and promise. Ray endeavored to find stories by authors not generally associated with the fantasy genre; he also looked for material that hadn't appeared in other fantasy anthologies. “They were stories that I had read over the years that I loved,” Ray said. “And so it was very easy to, in a single day, decide the contents of the book.” Ray chose a wide-ranging group of tales, by authors as diverse and unexpected as John Steinbeck, E. B. White, Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, and John Cheever, to name but a few. In many ways, the list reflected something few people knew about Ray Bradbury: He did not read exclusively within his own field. In high school, he had expanded his reading list to include nongenre literature, and shortly thereafter he began reading both contemporary and mainstream work as well as the classics. He stopped reading science fiction, fantasy, and horror altogether, except for works by his personal friends in the field. “Instinctively,” Ray said, “I knew that if I read within my own field that I'd never develop. I'd be stealing ideas from other writers or imitating them or else I'd discover that someone in the field was doing a story similar to mine and I'd become discouraged and I wouldn't finish my own story. You must not read in your field. Read everything else.” With his table of contents selected, the first anthology of fantasy selected by Ray Bradbury,
Timeless Stories of Today and Tomorrow,
was scheduled for publication in the fall of 1952.

In February 1951, advance copies of
The Illustrated Man
arrived in the mail. Ray had recently signed on with Famous Artists, the renowned Hollywood talent agency, to market his stories to the movie industry. His agents, Ben Benjamin and Ray Stark, had connections to John Huston, and at long last Ray felt ready to meet his hero. It had been a year since Ray had encountered him at one of Norman Corwin's United Nations radio broadcasts, but he hadn't felt up to meeting the larger-than-life film director then. He now had
Dark Carnival,
The Martian Chronicles,
and
The Illustrated Man
to show for himself, not to mention his recent radio work, his inclusion in
The Best American Short Stories of the Year
anthologies, and his O. Henry Prize stories. “After I had published three books, and I could prove my love to John Huston,” said Ray, “I called my agent, Ray Stark, and asked him to arrange a meeting.”

In early 1951, Ray met Huston at Mike Romanoff's restaurant, a posh Hollywood eatery that was a favorite of the 1950s Tinsel Town elite. Minutes after being introduced to Huston, Ray expressed his admiration for Huston and his work, and followed it by boldly declaring that he believed they were destined to work together. It was yet another towering proclamation made with Bradburian bravado. He then slid his three books across the table and told Huston that if he liked the books, to give him a call. Through it all, John Huston listened with keen interest, taking the books in his hands and admiring them with curiosity. The dinner lasted an hour and as it wound down, Huston invited Ray to a screening of his latest film, an adaptation of the Stephen Crane classic
The Red Badge of Courage,
the following evening at the Pickwick Theater.

“I went to the theater the next night and John Huston was there with his girlfriend, Olivia de Havilland. He had left his wife somewhere,” Ray said with a laugh. “I went in and sat by myself. John sat in back with his friends and they ran the preview of
The Red Badge of Courage
and by the time the film was half over, the theater was almost empty. People were leaving and they were bored and they didn't like the film. And I sat there in despair and thought, ‘Oh my God! Here's my hero with a flop on his hands, because the film was far too long and needed cutting.'”

Dore Schary, then vice president in charge of production at MGM, the studio behind the film, described the preview debacle as “disastrous.... The audience began to file out toward the end of the first hour, the pace of exodus increasing as the second hour wore on.” By the end of the screening, Huston knew his film was doomed, and he made haste to travel overseas to begin work on his next picture. Ray wandered out into the lobby, where Huston spotted him and told him that he was traveling to England and then to Africa to make the film
The African Queen
. “I'll write you,” promised the director.

As Ray recalled, it was a week later that he received a handwritten note from the director thanking him for the books. Huston went on to give Ray high praise. “Impressed is hardly the word for my state of mind,” he wrote. He cited the stories “The Tombstone,” “The Traveler,” and “The Other Foot” as just a few of his favorites. John Huston ended his letter with a sentence that caused Ray to do a double take: “… [T]here's nothing I'd rather do than work with you on a picture.”

 

I
N THE
days, even weeks, after reading the director's missive, Ray was walking at least a few inches off the ground. John Huston had told him that he was a great writer. He had also said in no uncertain terms that there was a good chance that someday Ray Bradbury would be writing a screenplay for a John Huston film.

Ray Bradbury has been one of my idols since I first came upon
The Martian Chronicles
while I was still in high school, and I fell hopelessly in love with both his stories and his storytelling. Ray challenges the imagination—indeed all the senses—in the simplest way of all—by finding the inner truths about humanity. From Mars to East Los Angeles, from the lilt of Ireland to a grim place where books are burned, from October Country to the magic of a new pair of tennis shoes … Ray knew who we all were, and where we came from, and most of all he knew all the secret places where we—and he—wanted to travel to.

—
ROY E. DISNEY
,
former vice chairman of the board of directors of Walt Disney Productions

T
HE ILLUSTRATED
Man
was published on February 23, 1951. Ray was all of thirty years old. More and more of Ray's work was appearing on the radio, as Don Congdon sold Ray's stories to several dramatic programs. Ray's story “Mars is Heaven!” (titled “The Third Expedition” in
The Martian Chronicles
) aired on the National Broadcasting Company radio program
Dimension X
. “Mars is Heaven!” followed a group of American astronauts who landed on Mars only to discover the green grass, Victorian homes, and front porches of their own childhoods. More startling, they also found all of their dearly departed loved ones—grandfathers, grandmothers, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters—apparently alive once again. It was a nostalgic/futurist vision that could only come from the mind of Ray Douglas Bradbury. The story crackled over radio speakers across the nation, in New York tenements, Iowa farmhouses, California bungalows, Texas ranch homes. And, in Portland, Maine, a boy named Stephen King placed his small fingers on the radio dial and tuned in to listen.

“My first experience with real horror came at the hands of Ray Bradbury—it was an adaptation of his story ‘Mars Is Heaven!' on
Dimension X,
” King recalled years later in his book
Danse Macabre
. “This would have been broadcast in 1951, which would have made me four at the time. I asked to listen, and was denied permission by my mother. ‘It's on too late,' she said, ‘and it would be too upsetting for a little boy of your age.' I crept down to listen anyway, and she was right: it was plenty upsetting.... I didn't sleep that night; that night I slept in the doorway, where the real and rational light of the bathroom bulb could shine on my face.”

Ray's work was moving beyond books, and his influence was starting to permeate the outer reaches of popular culture. At the same time, his family was growing. On May 17, 1951, a second daughter, Ramona Anne, was born. Once again, neighbors were called upon to bring Maggie to the hospital, as the Bradburys still had no car. And this time out, unlike the long labor Maggie endured with the birth of Susan, the arrival of little Ramona was relatively quick and easy. The new parents had assumed that their newborn would be a boy, and had chosen the name “Ray Jr.” for their new child. But when their second daughter arrived, they quickly improvised, adapting the name Ray into a feminine version.

Ray's career continued to go well, too. Along with the increasing sales of his story rights to dramatic radio, which expanded his audience exponentially, Ray moved into television, a medium in its infancy. While Ray had cautioned his readers about the potential threat of a television-reliant culture in his short story “The Veldt,” he also recognized that for a writer with a wife and two baby girls to support, TV opened up an entirely new arena of financial opportunity. Some might say this made Ray Bradbury a hypocrite. However, Ray recognized the potential power of the burgeoning cultural medium and determined to put it to good use.

Over the course of his long career, Ray Bradbury was often perceived as a technophobe. He never learned to drive a car; he didn't fly on an airplane until the age of sixty-two; he owned a computer for only a short time later in life but never bothered to learn how to use it. When his stories began appearing on television in the early 1950s, the Bradbury family didn't even own a television upon which they could watch the adaptations of his grand creations. Ray always felt there were more imaginative ways in which a family could spend its time. He believed that the overuse of television would surely signify the beginning of the “dumbing down” of America. However, this didn't mean he disapproved of the technology, or didn't recognize its great potential. With this in mind, Ray sold the rights to “Zero Hour,” from
The Illustrated Man,
to the NBC program
Lights Out
. The program aired on July 23, 1951.

As Ray's reach was expanding beyond books into other media, he continued to move beyond the boundaries of North American publishing. Like
Dark Carnival, The Martian Chronicles
was published in the United Kingdom in September 1951, this time by publisher Rupert Hart-Davis. But Hart-Davis wasn't so keen on the title; the term “Martian” had hardly entered the global lexicon. Ray wrote Hart-Davis in wholehearted agreement:

 

The Martian Chronicles
… dropped into a conversation causes people to blink and say, “What?” or “I beg your pardon?” Then I have to spell it.

“M..A..R..T..I..A..N. You know what I mean?” They blink again. “You know the planet Mars. Martians.” They nod sagely, “Oh, yes!” I'm getting a bit tired of explaining my title to people. In any event, once they learn it's about Martians, they sidle away from me and apprehensively change the conversation. So …

May I suggest
The Silver Locusts
might not be bad at all. I hope you'll think it over. Either that or
Way in the Middle of the Air
will probably have to do.

 

In addition to changing the title for the British edition, Ray took the opportunity to make changes to the book itself. He was highly critical of his work, even after it had been published. As was his wont, he fine-tuned his published stories whenever given the chance. Ray removed “Way in the Middle of the Air” from the British edition of
The Martian Chronicles,
published as
The Silver Locusts
. It told the story of an exodus of African-American settlers leaving the Deep South of the United States for a new life on Mars, free from discrimination, hatred, and racial injustice. It was groundbreaking social commentary, written at the dawn of the American civil rights movement. But in hindsight, Ray felt the story simply didn't fit in with the rest of the book. “The blacks appear in that one story and then they don't appear again,” he said. Ray always felt that “Way in the Middle of the Air” was more appropriately paired with its sequel, “The Other Foot,” which was published in
The Illustrated Man
. The latter story was so strong, in fact, that it earned Ray yet another spot in
The Best American Short Stories of the Year
anthology for 1952.

As Ray readied the British edition of his book, he also excised a short story he dearly loved, the macabre and chimerical “Usher II.” It was about a man obsessed with tales of fantasy and horror—in particular those of Edgar Allan Poe—which had long been banned on Earth. In an act of defiance, the man builds a second “House of Usher” with which he lures the people who brought about censorship on Earth, and murders them one by one, employing all of Poe's deliciously dark and violent devices. Ray loved the tale but, even as he was preparing the original
Martian Chronicles
manuscript, there were doubts about the role of this story of dark fantasy within the larger pioneering allegory. His editor, Walter Bradbury, had stated in no uncertain terms that he did not feel “Usher II” fit into the larger picture of
The Martian Chronicles,
but Ray battled to keep the story in the book. The author won out, and it was only after
The Martian Chronicles
was published by Doubleday that Ray recognized the errors of his ways. “Brad,” Ray wrote Walter Bradbury, “you were right about Usher II. I should have followed your advice and cut it out of
The Martian Chronicles
. It is a good story, but time and again people have mentioned it to me as the lump in the cake frosting. I let my love for the story blind me to its position in relation to the whole. I should have taken advantage of your more objective view.”

Now with a second chance at publishing
The Martian Chronicles
across the Atlantic, Ray removed the story from the book. Ironically, he would later lament this decision, as “Usher II” was a story near and dear to him. It also dealt with the theme of censorship, which would later become the foundation for
Fahrenheit 451,
a book that many would call his masterpiece.

This proclivity to tinker with previously published work was at odds with the philosophy Ray would assume later in life. “A writer shouldn't interfere with his younger self,” he proclaimed. His early, constant retooling would eventually lead him to repackaging, and in some cases rewriting, stories he was displeased with from
Dark Carnival,
rereleasing it as the 1955 book
The October Country
.

The Silver Locusts
(a reference to the silver Earth rocket ships landing on Mars) was released in Britain in September 1951. Ray sent a copy of the book, in its new incarnation, to John Huston, who responded in a letter dated December 27, 1951, in which he thanked Ray for the copy of “The Silver Locust” [
sic
], and said, “… There is no doubt in my mind it would make a great picture.... I will try my best to get some studio to let me make your book, providing you still desire that and that there is still such a thing as motion pictures.”

It was the second flattering note from Huston in less than a year. And now the director was expressing interest in not only working with Ray but also adapting
The Martian Chronicles
for the screen. When this might occur, Ray didn't know, but he felt that his dream of working with John Huston would soon become a reality.

 

R
AY
B
RADBURY
lived his life in a race against time. He had so many things to do and to say, and he felt he did not have enough time in which to accomplish them all. Perhaps that was why he so often wrote of time machines. With devices to travel back to the past and forward to the future, he was able to right the wrongs of yesteryear and to prevent the seemingly inevitable mistakes of tomorrow. To Ray, time represented mortality, an end to his creative output. He did not fear death itself; instead, he was frightened of being unable to write. And so Ray Bradbury wrote as if he were making up for tomorrow's lost time. Even with the demands of a growing family and a new house, he continued to write a short story a week, or its equivalent in novel pages. He never worked on only a single project, preferring instead to juggle various endeavors in different stages of development. Early on, Ray developed a filing system for his story starts. Often, he would concoct a title or a story concept, begin the story, then slip it into his filing cabinet for a future day. Days, weeks, months, years, sometimes decades later, he would slide open the metal drawer of his filing cabinet and pull out a folder containing a short-story title, or perhaps a half-started tale born of some long-ago inspiration. In this way, he felt, he would always be able to “hotwire his idea machine.” Ray believed that, with each completed creation, he bolstered his quest for immortality; he strove to live up to the words of Mr. Electrico and, through his works, to live forever.

As he was working on
The Martian Chronicles
and
The Illustrated Man,
Ray consistently wrote, submitted, and published new tales in magazines. In high school, Ray had written a story about the ravine that ran through his hometown of Waukegan. Since writing “The Lake” in 1942 and discovering how his youthful memories could generate story ideas, Ray had intermittently written more Illinois stories, in the hope that he was building a novel in the same manner he had used with
The Martian Chronicles
. It was a novel that his agent, Don Congdon, very much wanted him to write, and a novel that his editor, Walter Bradbury, wanted to publish. After finishing
The Illustrated Man,
Ray planned to, at long last, complete his Illinois novel that, over the years, had various working titles:
The Small Assassins, The Wind of Time, The Blue Remembered Hills,
and, by 1951,
Summer Morning, Summer Night
. After
The Illustrated Man
was published, Ray signed a contract for the book, which was scheduled for publication late in 1952.

 

I
N
A
PRIL
1952, Ray and Maggie stumbled upon a piece of art they loved. While on an evening stroll through Beverly Hills, they passed an art gallery. Ray glanced through the storefront window and saw a dramatic lithograph that was, in his mind, the pen-and-ink embodiment of his writing. He felt as if he had discovered a twin—a doppelgänger who had chosen pens and brushes instead of an Underwood typewriter and paper for his creations. The artist's name was Joe Mugnaini. The piece in the gallery window was a lithograph of a gothic house, a dwelling that Ray's vampire family might live in, tall and spindly and ominous. But it also evoked an urban aura, with a graffiti-scrawled billboard on a cement wall beneath the house. Standing in the shadows was a dark figure. As Ray said, it was the “sort of place a beast like myself might want to live in.” Ray entered the store and inquired about the price of the art. “The lithograph of the house was seventy-five dollars,” remembered Ray, “and I couldn't afford that. I asked if I could pay for it on time because I was only making eighty or ninety dollars a week at the time. So I bought the lithograph on time and paid it off over a period of three months. The lady who sold the lithograph to me said, ‘If you like that, there's an oil painting of that same house in the next room.'”