Listen to the Echoes

by Ray Bradbury

  WELLER: As for Asimov, when did you first meet him?

  BRADBURY: We met when we were both nineteen at the World Science Fiction Convention in New York City in 1939. He was already established. He had sold his first short stories and I was two years away from selling anything.

  WELLER: Did you know Philip K. Dick?

  BRADBURY: Forty years ago we were together at a bar and we talked. You meet people and you realize they don’t like being alive. They don’t like talking. He seemed pretty negative.

  WELLER: The first introduction you ever wrote in a book was for Theodore Sturgeon’s Without Sorcery in 1948. When did you first meet Sturgeon?

  BRADBURY: I met him when I was back in New York in the late 1940s. We had lunch and became good friends. I told him how much he influenced me when I was younger. He moved ahead of me with his career and wrote some wonderful short stories, which I devoured, in Astounding and Worlds Unknown. Anyway, he asked me to do the introduction, and that was the very first one I ever did. It’s overwrought, I think, but it’s very honest. He was strange in a wonderful way. He told me he had an apartment, and the floor of the apartment was one big mattress so when he brought girlfriends home and opened the door, he tripped them onto the floor and it was all over in no time.

  WELLER: Let’s talk about science fiction in film. In your opinion, what is the best science fiction movie?

  BRADBURY: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s the greatest film of science fiction ever made. They should run it in the Vatican. They should go to St. Peter and have Pope John’s ghost come see it. Why? Michelangelo wrote the script. Michelangelo had God reach down with his all-powerful finger, and Adam reached up the other way and they touched, and Close Encounters is God encountering man and man encountering God. It’s a religious film. There’s only one religious film ever made by a science fiction director and Spielberg did it.

  I called him the day after I saw Close Encounters and I said, “Mr. Spielberg, I saw your film last night, can I come see you?” He said, “Yes, you want to come to my office?” So I ran to his office at Universal City. I walked into his office and he said, “How’d you like your film?” I said, “What?” He said, “I would never have made Close Encounters of the Third Kind if I hadn’t seen It Came from Outer Space when I was a boy.” I said, “Oh God, I’m honored, because I think you’ve made the greatest science fiction film I’ve ever seen.” Before I left his office I told him, “I now adopt you as my honorary son.” When he wrote me years later, at the end of the letters, he always wrote, “Am I still your son?”

  WELLER: What did you think of the Star Wars films?

  BRADBURY: The first three were wonderful. The second film, The Empire Strikes Back, is the best because it has Zen Buddhism in it. My friend Irv Kirchner directed it, and my great teacher Leigh Brackett wrote it. I stayed in touch with Irv. He’s a very fine director, and he’s done some very fine films, but that’s his best film of all.

  WELLER: What is Zen about The Empire Strikes Back?

  BRADBURY: The message of Zen—I’m a Zen Buddhist—is something I have been teaching people for years when it comes to writing. It’s what Yoda says, “Don’t think, do.” That’s pure Zen.

  WELLER: Do you really consider yourself a Zen Buddhist?

  BRADBURY: It’s a nice label, but I don’t like labels. I don’t need a label.

  WELLER: Were you a fan of Star Trek?

  BRADBURY: It was very good. I knew Gene Roddenberry. He wanted me to write for the show. He showed me his pilot, and I said, “I can’t do it because they are your characters and your ideas, they’re not mine.” I spoke at his memorial service. On the way there, I met up with my friend Stan Freberg. I went to visit him because it was a sad day and I wanted to be cheered up. I went over to Stan’s studio where he was making a commercial. He introduced me to a young woman who was a musical composer. She said, “Oh, Mr. Bradbury, I just loved Star Trek.” And I said, “No, my dear, I’m on my way to bury him. I’m on my way to his funeral right now.” She was so embarrassed. I said, “No, it happens all the time.”

  So I got over to the memorial service for Roddenberry and I was the first speaker. I got up and said, “It happened again just now: On my way here today I was mistaken for Gene Roddenberry. I can imagine sometime in the future I’ll be walking down the street in Beverly Hills and a woman will come running up to me and say, ‘Oh, Mr. Roddenberry, I thought you were dead!’ And my answer will be, ‘Not as long as I’m alive.’ ”

  WELLER: Who is writing science fiction and fantasy today that has the potential to be a new Ray Bradbury?

  BRADBURY: I haven’t read science fiction or fantasy for more than fifty years. But from what I can tell, the nearest thing to me is Greg Baer. I’ve known him since he was in high school. I’m his papa. He was an artist, and he came to me with his paintings and then gradually he became a writer. I encouraged him, and now he has more awards than I do. He’s the nearest thing to me. But the nearest real thing to me, years ago, was Charles Beaumont. He was one of my students too. He died young. He was maybe thirty-eight. He had some peculiar disease that aged him. It was like a horror story. He turned eighty overnight.

  WELLER: How do you respond when science fiction purists criticize you for flawed technology in your stories?

  BRADBURY: Who cares? I spoke at a graduation ceremony at Caltech a few years ago, and they introduced me by saying, “Here is Mr. Ray Bradbury, the man who put an atmosphere on Mars.” So they make a joke of it. They put up with me.

  WELLER: When you were a younger writer, did you worry more about the science in your work? Did you research?

  BRADBURY: Here and there, but not much, really. If you’re going to write The Martian Chronicles, you can’t have people walking around in space suits. You have to just say, “No, there’s an atmosphere after all. We didn’t know that.”

  WELLER: Do you believe there is life on other planets?

  BRADBURY: There are a million planets out there. Of course.

  WELLER: But you don’t believe we’ve been visited?

  BRADBURY: No, there’s no proof. Roswell is a bunch of shit. It’s all a lie.

  WELLER: Do you think humans will ever reach Andromeda, the nearest galaxy to our own?

  BRADBURY: If we can create the technology to travel at the speed of light.

  WELLER: Will that happen?

  BRADBURY: I think so, yes.

  WELLER: And what about time travel?

  BRADBURY: No, time travel will never happen. It’s totally impossible.

  chapter twelve

  LIFE, LIVING & THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

  RAY LIVES EACH DAY WITH IMMENSE GRATITUDE. HE HAS ALWAYS been this way, even when he was a little boy. Ebullient. Excitable. A lover of life. Each time Bradbury leaves his rambling West Los Angeles home, he steps outside and notes the beauty of the day. He comments on the blooming flowers in the small flower garden along the side of the house. He looks to the sky, shields his eyes with his hand, and squints at the glory of the cascading sunshine.

  “It’s David Lean light!” he says, referring to the great British filmmaker, a personal favorite. “Lean liked to photograph his films late in the afternoon or early in the morning so everything had that golden patina of sunshine.”

  This is how Bradbury sees the world. He yearns to have more days on this Earth to create and, quite simply, to celebrate living.

  WELLER: Do you consider yourself an optimist?

  BRADBURY: Well, if you’re not going to be an optimist, you better not go on living. I mean, if you start every day saying, “I’m gonna lose,” what kind of a day is that? I’m going to win, maybe I won’t. I want to try this, let’s see if it works. If it doesn’t work, do something else. What the hell! But I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know what you can do. You haven’t done it yet. So that’s
optimal behavior. And when you behave that way you have a feeling of optimism. There’s a difference. Not to be optimistic, but to behave optimally. At the top of your lungs, shout and listen to the echoes. You must live life at the top of your voice!

  I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother, and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, “God! That was beautiful.” And my brother said, “No, it was good.” Do you see the difference?

  WELLER: Do you consider yourself a hopeful man?

  BRADBURY: Action is hope. There is no hope without action. So at the end of each day, you’ve done your work and you lie there and you think, well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. And at the end of the week you have all of this accumulation, and at the end of a year, you look back and say, “I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.”

  WELLER: You suffered a stroke on November 4, 1999. What are your recollections of that experience?

  BRADBURY: I was out at my house in Palm Springs working on a short story and a novel, and all of a sudden, I couldn’t walk very well. I was walking around the house and suddenly I got unstable, and I couldn’t talk very well, either. I called my wife and she sent my driver out to get me, and when he arrived I said, “I want to go home,” and he said, “No, no, I’m taking you right to the hospital.” So he saved my life. He took me to the Eisenhower Hospital in Palm Springs, and they ran tests on me, and they saw I was in lousy condition. My leg was paralyzed, my arm was paralyzed, I couldn’t talk very well, but getting me to the hospital that quickly saved my life.

  WELLER: Tell me about your recovery.

  BRADBURY: It’s severe because you can’t move. You lie in bed and you say to your leg, “Okay, move,” and it doesn’t. It’s like a dead dog. “Roll over, dead dog, roll over.” And does your hand move? No. So after a period of weeks, finally, slowly, you get a finger to move, you get your toes to move. Time begins to go by, and you think you’ll never get through the first month, but you do. And finally your leg begins to come alive. God has been good to me. I’ve been given good genetics, and the whole experience was good for me because I’ve taken off all this weight. So my blood sugar is normal now. I don’t have to take medicines for that. My blood pressure is normal again after many years. I did all this to myself. I have no one to blame: lots of beer, lots of wine, overweight by seventy pounds, and it was time to take it off.

  WELLER: Is it your intention as a writer to inspire your readers?

  BRADBURY: Yes. I wrote an article once called “Marvels and Miracles, Pass It On.” That’s my job. To remind you of your potential and how wonderful life is constantly.

  WELLER: Have you ever experimented with drugs?

  BRADBURY: Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Christopher Isherwood called me one day, and they wanted me to try some drugs. Huxley was experimenting with drugs for his book The Doors of Perception. They said it was all perfectly safe, and they had a nurse with them. I said, “Look, I don’t want to try any of these drugs you’re willing to offer me. I have a trapdoor up here on my head. Every day I open it, and I reach in and grab one lizard and pull it out, and I nail it to the typewriter! The next day, I reach up and open the trapdoor and reach in and get another lizard, and I close the trapdoor and bring the lizard down and hammer it to the typewriter. I have a good relationship with my trapdoor and my lizards. I don’t want you to set all the lizards free at the same moment with your drugs.”

  WELLER: So you never did drugs?

  BRADBURY: Once, and I didn’t know it. I went to a party thrown by the young man who played the lead actor in “The Life Work of Juan Diaz,” an episode I did for the Alfred Hitchcock show, which was directed by Norman Lloyd. At the party given by that young actor, they gave me a couple of brownies. And when I had to pee later, I went to the bathroom and discovered I had a twelve-inch penis. I said, “Oh my God! What happened?” It had to be the brownie.

  So on the way out of the party, I said to the young actor, “Do you have an extra brownie to give me?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “I want to keep my twelve-inch penis. You don’t mind, do you?” He said, “No,” and gave me a brownie.

  Another time, someone handed me a joint at a David Bowie concert, but I couldn’t smoke anything. I coughed. When I was fourteen years old I picked up a cigarette and tried to smoke it in the street. I lit the cigarette and coughed and choked and realized I’d never be a smoker.

  WELLER: You were married for fifty-six years before your wife passed away in 2003. What was the secret to the longevity of your relationship?

  BRADBURY: In marriage, if you don’t have a sense of humor, you don’t have a marriage. This dumb film came out called Love Story, and there’s a line in it: “Being in love means never having to say you’re sorry.” That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Being in love means saying you’re sorry every day for some little thing or other. You make a mistake. I forgot the light bulbs. I didn’t bring this home from the store, and I’m sorry. You know? So being able to accept responsibility, but above all a sense of humor—so that anything that happens can have its amusing side—is the secret to a good marriage.

  WELLER: Did you ever go to a psychiatrist?

  BRADBURY: Only once, which had nothing to do with a psychological need. It had to do with my place in the world. I was twenty-four years old. I was selling short stories to Weird Tales, but no one knew that I existed. I had something in Weird Tales every issue, every month, but no one came up to me on the street and said, “Oh, are you Ray Bradbury? Oh, geez, you’re great.” I was making fifteen dollars a story, twenty dollars a story. All the stories are in my first book, Dark Carnival. So I talked to a friend of mine about this, and I knew he was going to a psychiatrist for his problems. I said, “Will you lend me your psychiatrist for half an hour some afternoon?” He said he would. And I could just barely afford that because I think he was charging twenty-five dollars for forty-five minutes, and my income was eight or nine dollars a week, selling newspapers.

  So I went to him. His name was Dr. Neilsen—a very famous psychiatrist at the time. The psychiatrist sat there and said, “What’s your problem?” I said, “Well, nobody knows that I exist. That’s my problem. I want to be known.” He said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to write the greatest book that was ever written.” At the age of twenty-four to have the nerve to say this! But at least I knew where I wanted to go. Maybe it was impossible. Maybe it couldn’t be done. But then on the other hand, why not try, huh?

  So he said, “Well, you know, if that’s what you want, you’ve got to wait a while. How old are you?” I told him I was twenty-four. He said, “Well, while you’re waiting to become famous and loved, go read the Encyclopaedia Britannica and see what happened to all the writers through history. Some of them were famous overnight. But a hell of a lot of them had to wait.”

  WELLER: Why was it important to you at twenty-four to be famous and loved?

  BRADBURY: In high school, I’m quoted under my picture in the yearbook as saying, “Headed for Literary Distinction.” How could I say that? I wasn’t headed anywhere! I hadn’t written a good short story yet. I hadn’t written a good poem. A good essay. How could I say that? God told me to say that, and I listened.

  WELLER: So did fame motivate you?

  BRADBURY: Love motivated me. Love is the answer to everything. I was in love with life.

  WELLER: Do you ever get depressed?

  BRADBURY: Only occasionally. I learned the secret is: Get to your work. All these books about depression, half the people who write them are totally wrong. You’re depressed because you’re not doing something. For Christ’s sake, get off your ass and go do something! It doesn’t matter what it is, but do it. Blindly. And then, after you do it, find out why in the hell you did.

  WELLER: You are still so filled with childlike wonder. How have you been able to keep in touch with your inner
child?

  BRADBURY: I learned a lesson about this crap, “growing up.” Come on. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything! Behaving in a certain way, being very proper, very stolid. I was in Sausalito about twenty years ago. I was outside this toy store and I went in, and when I came out a bunch of boys ran by, all around twelve, thirteen, from the seventh grade maybe. They’re all running down the street. This one boy stopped and stared into the store. Under my breath I said, “Go in. Go in.” And all the other kids said, “Ah, come on! That’s kids’ stuff.”

  Do you see what they were trying to do to him? They were trying to take away his happiness. We’re always talking about penis envy, but there’s a thing called joy envy. And if people see you’re too happy, if they can do anything, not directly, but they might just feel like they’d like to kick your sandcastle down. And the boy stood there wavering between the toy store and the kids. And I kept saying, “Go in, for God’s sake, go in.” And finally he ran off with them. And it killed my soul.

  WELLER: Looking around your home, I see that you still avidly collect toys.

  BRADBURY: Every time I go anywhere, I go to the toy store. Every Christmas I always told my wife to give me toys. There are two stuffed cats over there. There are stuffed animals all over my house. I love them. So I don’t let my kids or my wife give me anything but toys. I love them. They cause you to use your imagination.