Listen to the Echoes

by Ray Bradbury

  BRADBURY: When you develop a photograph in a darkroom, you put it in one emulsion and then you put it in another emulsion and the picture emerges. That’s what the great Impressionists do. They are emulsions and they bring up life the more you look at them. Renoir was one of my favorites. His work is evocative. His son, Jean Renoir, wanted to do a film with me, “The Picasso Summer.” The studio people wouldn’t accept him. He was too old. They were afraid he would die making the film, and they had no insurance then. Isn’t that terrible? He became a friend. I saw him at least four times, a wonderful man.

  WELLER: Do you have a favorite painting?

  BRADBURY: “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” by Georges-Pierre Seurat. That is terrific. It demands that you sit and enjoy that Sunday with all those people. You become part of the mob. And you walk along the water and you look at each person and you say, “I wonder why that person came here?” And now I’m here. I’m part of the mob. That’s what that painting does to me.

  WELLER: What are your opinions of Abstract Expressionists? Jackson Pollock, for example?

  BRADBURY: Jackson Pollock didn’t know how to paint. There’s nothing to see there.

  WELLER: How do you account for his popularity? His paintings are worth millions.

  BRADBURY: People are stupid.

  WELLER: What about Andy Warhol?

  BRADBURY: I was there at the opening of his show in Los Angeles on La Cienega Boulevard. I saw him there surrounded by stupid people, and I knew that he was stupid too. He did terrible things. He put out a film called Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. That’s not his film. He took someone else’s film and put his name on it. He’s a dishonest man. And if you do that sort of thing, I don’t like you.

  WELLER: What influence did photography have on you?

  BRADBURY: When I was a teenager I loved looking at Infinite Riches in a Little Room, the miniature magazine put out by Esquire. I couldn’t afford it, but I picked up copies here and there and occasionally I would buy it for a dime, and I would tear out the pictures and I’d write stories around the pictures. I didn’t know what I was doing! I started writing prose poetry based on all those pictures from the magazine. My intuition told me to write, and I was doing prose poetry, but I didn’t even know what the term meant. Sometimes there were pictures of semi-nude women, or photographs of seascapes or deserts or skies. Then I’d write prose poems from them.

  Ray Bradbury, age three, outside his boyhood home at 11 South Saint James Street, Waukegan, Illinois, summer 1924.

  Ray standing on his grandparents’ lawn on the corner of Saint James and Washington Streets in Waukegan, circa 1923. The lawn would serve as inspiration for the novel Dandelion Wine.

  Ray Bradbury, with his brother Leonard “Skip” Bradbury, Waukegan, Illinois, circa 1924.

  Ray Bradbury (left) in the petrified forest in Arizona, seated alongside his father Leonard Bradbury and his brother (wearing hat) Leonard “Skip” Bradbury, Jr., 1932.

  The young writer in Santa Monica in the early 1940s as he was establishing his name in the pages of pulp fiction magazines.

  Ray Bradbury, far right, standing next to his friend Donald Harkins in Hollywood on Highland Avenue, outside the Max Factor Building, summer 1935.

  Alongside his father and brother, 1938.

  Young newspaper salesman, hamming it up at the corner of Olympic and Norton in Los Angeles, circa 1938.

  Early publicity photo, 1945.

  March 27, 1946 telegram acceptance for the classic Bradbury short story “The Homecoming” from Mademoiselle editor George Davis. This story was discovered in the office slush pile by then-assistant, Truman Capote.

  Outside the gates of Paramount Pictures with Marlene Dietrich, 1935.

  Standing outside his home at 670 South Venice Boulevard in Venice, California, 1942.

  Maggie Bradbury in front of their home in west Los Angeles, January 1953, at the same time her husband was writing Fahrenheit 451.

  Maggie Bradbury in front of the couple’s first apartment at 33 South Venice Boulevard holding their firstborn, Susan Marguerite Bradbury, 1950.

  Publicity photo outtake, 1950.

  Bradbury at the office of Sid Stebel in Los Angeles.

  Bradbury at the Bards Meeting, 1948.

  1964 ticket stub from Bradbury’s Pandemonium Theater company’s production of The World of Ray Bradbury.

  Ray Bradbury with film director Alfred Hitchcock, circa 1963-64.

  Speaking at Cal Irvine, 1971. (Courtesy Marci Mauthe)

  Bradbury outside in Houston, Texas, in January 1967 while working on a story about the Apollo space program for Life magazine.

  Forrest J. Ackerman and Maggie Bradbury at a screening of the Charlton Heston film Diamond Head, January 1963.

  Charlton Heston, Caspar Weinberger, Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke at a Washington, DC, dinner, 1984.

  “My twin! My twin!” Bradbury with Federico Fellini at the Hotel Hassler in Rome in the early 1990s.

  Man in a Wonderful Ice Cream Suit outside of Paris, 1978.

  Bradbury reflected in his glasses, Paris, 1992. (Courtesy Michel Fainsilber)

  In 1952 when I met Aldous Huxley, he said to me, “You know what you are? You’re a poet.” I couldn’t believe it. I’d wanted to be a poet all those years. In high school I was terrible. I never once wrote anything that was any good. And at long last, because I started by doing the intuitive things—looking at photographs and writing evocations—eventually I became a poet. It was all intuitive.

  WELLER: In 1952 Bernard Berenson, the renowned Renaissance art historian, wrote you a fan letter. When you were done writing the screenplay for Moby Dick, you visited Berenson at his estate in Florence, Italy. You have said often that he became a second father to you. What did you learn from Bernard Berenson about art?

  BRADBURY: He let me teach him. That’s how he worked. I recognized things in art, and he wanted me to tell him, rather than the other way around. He wanted me to discover things, rather than him just telling me what to discover. The first day we were in Florence we went out to roam around the city. I hired a horse-drawn carriage, and I said to the driver, I want to see the Michelangelo Plaza, but the driver misunderstood and we wound up at a church. So we were at the wrong place, but we went in anyway, and there were murals on the walls. I’d never seen murals like that before.

  We went back and had lunch with Berenson, and he asked about our morning. I told him about the church we had visited and told him about the murals. He asked me what I thought. I told him, “They look like the work of a man who was turning the Renaissance sideways. He was looking at things from a new perspective.” I thought that this painter was changing the Renaissance, and I asked Berenson if this made any sense. He said, “You nailed it.” So my perception was absolutely correct. He loved the fact that I found that out by myself without being told. That was how Berenson worked.

  WELLER: At the end of Fahrenheit 451, people have gathered in the wilderness, and they have memorized a book in order to save it from ruin. What book would you memorize?

  BRADBURY: I would memorize Bernard Shaw’s gigantic book of prefaces to his plays. There are as many pages of essays as there are pages to his plays. Those essays on how to be creative, and how he created those plays, makes for a wonderful book. It’s a huge thing, about two thousand pages long. I have two copies. That book is my bible. The other book I might select is A Christmas Carol. That story is a hymn of life and death. It’s everything about birth and living and dying and surviving. And it makes me weep. It makes me cry, because Scrooge is so beautiful.

  The film adaptation with Alastair Sim is a great version. When he survives at the end and dances with joy, I dance with joy. When I saw A Christmas Carol on Christmas Day, I said to Maggie, “I better write to this man. His Scrooge is the greatest Scrooge ever, and the film is so beautiful and I have to thank him.” So I wrote him a love letter that said, “Dear Mr. Sim, thank you for your Scrooge. You are the greatest.
God bless you.” And I sent the letter to my agent in London and said, “I don’t know where this man lives, but if you can get in touch with him and give him this letter, I want him to know how much I love him.” So two months went by and I didn’t hear from him, and I figured he didn’t get my letter. I was so upset. Finally, a letter came in the mail from Alastair Sim. It read: “Dear Mr. Bradbury, your letter reached me in hospital and made me well.” Isn’t that beautiful? I can’t find that letter now. It’s somewhere in my house. But anyway, A Christmas Carol went on to influence me in so many ways. It is the reason I wrote The Halloween Tree. The Halloween Tree is A Christmas Carol all over again. My character Mr. Moundshroud is a semi-evil Mr. Scrooge.

  chapter eight

  POLITICS

  SOME HAVE PERCEIVED IT AS A SEISMIC IDEOLOGICAL SHIFT. WHAT the heck happened to Ray Bradbury’s political views?

  In November 1952, just after the presidential election that put Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Oval Office, Bradbury, while becoming a name writer but still grappling to reap the financial rewards of his newfound literary credibility, took out an expensive full-page advertisement in Variety, the trade magazine for the motion picture business. In the ad, Bradbury lambasted the Republican Party for employing fear tactics to win the election and decried the escalating witch-hunt that would lead to the rise of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. The following year, Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451, a scathing indictment of mass media, totalitarianism, and censorship.

  But even before Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury’s writing reflected a viewpoint of abiding liberal humanism. In short stories such as “The Big Black and White Game” (anthologized in Best American Short Stories: 1946) and “The Other Foot” (anthologized in Best American Short Stories: 1952), the author was examining issues of race relations and civil rights. In 1950’s The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury used science fiction as a passageway to contemporary social commentary, musing on environmental issues, nuclear proliferation, colonization, and war, among other pressing concerns.

  Yet sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, Bradbury’s views began to shift. His voting record certainly reflected the change. Some would say that the metamorphosis could be attributed to the age-old maxim: “If you are young and not a Democrat, you have no heart. If you are old and not a Republican, you have no brain.”

  Bradbury himself dislikes political labels. Even more, he has great disdain for partisan politics. In truth, Ray Bradbury’s political opinions are far more nuanced than can be summed up through one party or another. The only real way to get a handle on his opinions is, quite simply, to ask the man himself.

  WELLER: In the late 1930s, while you were in your late teens, you were involved in the Technocracy political movement. How did you get involved with that?

  BRADBURY: Russ Hodgkins, the head of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, joined, and he invited representatives from the Technocracy movement to come talk to our group at Clifton’s Cafeteria. After that, I went to more Technocracy meetings and joined. I still have my membership card. I was involved with it for about two years, and it finally sank in that I was boring everybody to death. I was lecturing all the time, telling people how wonderful Technocracy was, the same way people preached about Communism and Fascism. Any of these “isms” are very dangerous.

  WELLER: What was the ideology of Technocracy?

  BRADBURY: The basic idea was to have a government where experts were elected to run departments. Engineers and scientists would run the Department of Energy, and so on. People were given posts based on talent rather than political ambition. In many ways, it’s not such a bad idea. They predicted, because things were so bad during the Depression, that the whole entire system would collapse and Technocracy would take over. Well, that was wishful thinking. The war came along and rescued us. Meanwhile, I went around talking about Technocracy to everyone, and I bored the hell out of them. I put everyone to sleep.

  WELLER: Why did you move away from Technocracy?

  BRADBURY: I went to a meeting at the Shrine Auditorium with my friend, Muriel Kay, and Howard Scott, the head of Technocracy, was there. He came out onstage and he was surrounded by men, all wearing gray suits. That was their costume. And as I looked at all those people, I thought, “This isn’t that much different from Fascism or Communism, where people get together and wear the same suits, they have the same emblems, and speak the same jargon.” So I quit.

  WELLER: You were twenty-one when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Why did you not serve in World War II?

  BRADBURY: Without my glasses, I’m legally blind. I went down for my test, stood there naked with everyone else, came up to the oculist who was testing everyone’s eyesight. He said, “Take off your glasses. Read those letters over there.” I said, “What letters?” He said, “The letters on the card.” “What card?” “The card on the wall.” “What wall?” You see, when I take my glasses off, you disappear. So he turned to me and said, “Do you really want to be in the Army?” And I said, “Uh, I don’t think so.” He said, “You’re not.” And that was it.

  So I’ve had a chance to live for my country. No one ever talks about that, and they should. It’s one thing to die for your country—a horrible, horrible thing. How about living for your country? But you can’t think this way and you don’t dare say anything about it because it’s too egocentric. The truth is, if I died fifty years ago, there’d be a big hole there, somewhere, wouldn’t there? All those books that you read, that you liked, you’d have to depend on J.D. Salinger instead.

  I was at a Halloween party when I was twelve and I ran out to a hall, but it wasn’t a hall, it was stairs going down into a cellar. I fell all the way down and it was a miracle I wasn’t killed or I didn’t break any bones. But I’ve often thought back to that day. What if I’d been killed? All of my work wouldn’t exist, and who would come in to fill the gaps? It’s very strange.

  WELLER: Do you consider yourself conservative, liberal, or moderate?

  BRADBURY: You mustn’t put labels on people. This is what is important: Somebody somewhere along the line had to give the taxes back to the people. Roosevelt never did it, Hoover never did it. They could have cured the Depression in 1932 when my father was out of work for ten years. My father suffered. They should have given him back his tax money. Nobody thought of that, and nobody did anything. Kennedy was the first to experiment with it. The year before he died, there were a few experiments with giving the taxes back, but there was never the chance to really experiment fully, and he died. So it was never mentioned again until Reagan came along and cut the taxes, and then we began to get jobs. When he came into office, there were millions of people unemployed. He lowered taxes all over the United States and created millions of jobs. And I got so curious about this, I called the Department of Labor Statistics in Washington the first of every month, and I got to know a guy there. I’d call and say, “How many jobs did we put out last month?” And we made five million new jobs, nine million new jobs—it kept going up and up and up. So Reagan’s experiment worked. That’s not being conservative, that’s not being anything except sensible.

  WELLER: Sounds to me like fiscal conservative thinking.

  BRADBURY: No, no. No labels. I don’t believe in them.

  WELLER: George W. Bush cut taxes very early in his presidency, and in the fall of 2009, just before he left office, by most accounts, the United States was in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. What happened?

  BRADBURY: Wall Street’s what happened. Do you understand Wall Street? I don’t understand Wall Street. Nobody understands Wall Street. We have a dislocation of understanding investment. We made a lot of mistakes with credit cards, we made a lot of mistakes with mortgages. I don’t believe in mortgages. I’ve been a poor writer most of my life. I don’t believe in mortgages. Pay them off as soon as you can. So when I sold that house on Clarkson Road in 1958, we got twenty-eight thousand dollars for it. I took all that money and put it in this house, so I only owed another
thirteen thousand after that, and I paid that off in five years and owned this house completely in just a few years. If you let yourself be endangered, you’re going to lose your house.

  A lot of people are stupid. They didn’t pay attention to their expenses. They had too many credit cards, they spent money without knowing it. I want to have a day, celebrate it, I want to have it announced by our new president. We should have a card-burning day. We don’t need to burn books, we should burn credit cards. A lot of people have too many credit cards. I know people with six or seven credit cards. I have two credit cards, I only use one. But if you have credit cards, you don’t know what you’re spending, you forget to check. It’s too easy to sign your name. It’s dangerous. So we should have a day when we say to people all over the United States, on this day, take out your wallet and count your credit cards and burn at least three of them, and we can improve the economy. We can be a check against Wall Street being what it is—it’s a danger.

  And now on to mortgages. We should make a deal: The government should say that all the people in the United States should get three months’ freedom from paying their mortgage right now and not lose their house. Give them a chance to make the money and come pay it off sooner. There are a lot of people losing their houses today because they didn’t pay attention to the fact that it was creeping up on them. The day of burning the credit cards and the day of delaying the mortgage payment. We could save the whole society! But we’re not doing hard thinking. I want to be in charge, goddamn it!