by Ray Bradbury
WELLER: You have so much stuff in your house. All your toys and collectibles and ephemera collected over the course of your career. You also have an amazing art collection. With all these possessions, do you think that you are materialistic?
BRADBURY: No. That’s not materialistic. That’s aesthetic. That’s dream-world stuff. My love of art is not materialistic. There are some people who collect art for profit, but that’s not what I do. I collect it because it makes me fly.
WELLER: And all the toys? Is that art to you?
BRADBURY: Those toys are all my metaphors. The ectoplasm that comes out of ghost’s mouths. All of those things are a part of my tissue. My being.
WELLER: Is your pack-rat personality an affect of your upbringing during the Depression?
BRADBURY: I don’t know. I don’t think so. My brother didn’t save things like I do. And my mother and father didn’t either.
WELLER: When have you been on the receiving end of what you call “joy envy”?
BRADBURY: When I was nine, Buck Rogers came into the world. October 1929, at the start of the Depression. And I took a look at one single panel of Buck Rogers and I was hooked on the future. I began to collect the Buck Rogers panels. And all the kids in the fifth grade made fun of me. There was no future. We weren’t going to build rocketships. We weren’t going to the moon. We weren’t going to Mars. How stupid for me to do what I did.
Well, I listened to them and I tore up my Buck Rogers comic strips. It’s the worst thing I ever did. Three days later, I started to cry. And I said to myself, “Why am I crying? Who’s dead?” And the answer was, “You. You’re dead. You killed the future. You listened to these fools. Now what can you do to cure this?” I went back to collecting Buck Rogers, and I’ve never listened to one damn fool after that. Best lesson I ever had.
In the hallway here at the house, one of my fans sent me in a frame that first panel of Buck Rogers, torn in half, put back together again as a symbol, the metaphor in my life. I learned how to never listen to anyone about films, about books, about cartoons. Since that experience, I’ve collected comic strips all my life.
WELLER: With the exception of the six months you spent in Ireland writing the Moby Dick screenplay, you’ve lived in Los Angeles continuously since April 1934. Did you ever consider moving?
BRADBURY: No. My roots are too deep. I have too many friends here. And I love LA.
WELLER: Yet I would call you, unequivocally, a “prairie writer.” The Midwest—the heartland—is central to so much of your work. Something Wicked This Way Comes, Dandelion Wine, The Halloween Tree, to name but a few. Perhaps more than any other writer, you have personified autumn. One only needs to read a story like “The Emissary” to see the proof. As much as you love fall, how have you been able to live away from it for so long?
BRADBURY: Because fall is even better in my imagination than it is in real life. I always have fall up in my head.
WELLER: Do you even have a fall in Los Angeles?
BRADBURY: Not really. As William Faulkner once said, autumn in LA is when one leaf falls in Laurel Canyon.
WELLER: Los Angeles is certainly known as a city proud of its car culture. Why is it that you have never driven?
BRADBURY: I saw a terrible car accident when I was fourteen. I was visiting my friend Eddie Barrera down on Washington Street in LA. We heard a terrible noise and ran out of his house down to the street corner. A car had come along doing sixty or seventy miles an hour, and right in front of a cemetery, it hit a telephone pole. The car was cut right in half. There were six people inside. Three of them were killed instantly. We were the first at the scene. I ran up and looked at one woman lying there, and I bent over to help her. Her jaw had been torn and was hanging by one hinge. Her eyes met mine, then they fluttered and she died. I was stunned. I stumbled home that day in shock, clutching to trees and to walls of buildings for support. I still have dreams about that woman. I wrote the short story “The Crowd,” from Dark Carnival, about that experience. That one experience, along with all the people I knew who had been killed by automobiles, is the reason why I have never driven a car.
WELLER: You’ve never driven. Not a single time?
BRADBURY: No. But I was at a jet propulsion lab two months ago, and they took me into a room and said, “You’re not a driver, are you?” I said, “No.” Then they said, “You don’t have a license?” I said, “No.” They said, “We’re giving you a license now. We’re going to let you drive the rover on Mars. Here’s the screen, and the controls are here, and you control where you want the rover to go over the landscape.” So I drove the Mars Rover! It was a real sight, over the Martian landscape.
WELLER: Given the adversity you have faced in life—you experienced a lot of death during your childhood—how have you managed to stay so positive? The week after your wife passed away, you got back to writing. How were you able to do that?
BRADBURY: Work is the only answer. I have three rules to live by: Get your work done. If that doesn’t work, shut up and drink your gin, and when all else fails, run like hell.
chapter thirteen
VISIONS OF THE FUTURE
SOME HAVE GONE SO FAR AS TO CALL BRADBURY A LUDDITE AND A technophobe. Even though he began to write for dramatic television in the early 1950s, the Bradbury home went without a television until 1955, when the entire Bradbury brood—parents and four young daughters—contracted the measles, and they needed entertainment to abate the boredom of being on interminable house arrest.
Bradbury didn’t fly in an airplane until 1982, when he was sixty-two. Prior to that, he always crossed the country by passenger rail, and he ventured to Europe by ocean liner. But in 1982, while celebrating the opening of the EPCOT Center in Orlando, Florida, his train was unexpectedly cancelled. Needing desperately to return home to work, he acquiesced to his aviophobia and told his Disney hosts to buy him a plane ticket, give him three double martinis, and “pour him on the airplane.” From that moment on, Bradbury conquered his fear of flying.
“I discovered that I wasn’t afraid of flying,” he remarked. “I was afraid of me. I was afraid that I would run up and down the aisles screaming for them to stop the plane.” When his fears did not come to fruition, Bradbury embraced the airplane, and from that point forward, he became a frequent flyer.
Even still, he has always been slow to adapt to new technology in his own life. As for computers, Bradbury has never owned one and says he never will. His one capitulation to modern convenience is the fax machine. There is a room in the Bradbury home dedicated to the device, known as “the fax room.” And while there isn’t yet a shrine around the small machine, there may as well be. The Bradbury fax whirs around the clock. It is his chosen form of communication with his business associates, his editor, his agent, and his daily assistant, his youngest daughter Alexandra.
In 2009, the Bradbury writing process would go like this: Bradbury dictates a first draft over the telephone to his daughter, who resides in Arizona. She transcribes the story and then faxes it back to her father in extra-large bold typeface so he can begin editing it by hand with a Sharpie marker. This process has been part of the routine since his stroke in 1999.
Despite Ray Bradbury’s resistance to the digital age, he has been hailed as a technological visionary. In his books, stories, films, stage plays, and more, he predicted a vast number of innovations: flat-panel televisions, earbud headphones, virtual reality, twenty-four-hour banking machines, even live television broadcasts of fugitive chases.
It begs the question: What does Bradbury envision next?
WELLER: You have been critical of the Internet. Why?
BRADBURY: It’s distracting us. It’s causing us to not pay attention.
WELLER: How so?
BRADBURY: People are talking too much about nothing. Blah blah blah blah blah. Too much talk. Come on. The CEO of Yahoo called me recently and asked if I would write a novel to put up on the Internet. I told him to go to hell. I said, “Prick up your ears
! Prick up your ears! Go to hell!” That’s not a book. You cannot hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. I don’t care what they say about “e-books.” A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book: a book is new, it smells great; a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. So a book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.
WELLER: You’ve heard about the Amazon Kindle?
BRADBURY: Yeah, but you can’t hold the book. It’s just a reproduced page on a TV screen.
WELLER: With the publication of Fahrenheit 451, you were hailed as a visionary. The novel is a cautionary tale, addressing the decline of reading and the rise of mass media, among other pressing themes. What might you warn us about today?
BRADBURY: Our education system has gone to hell. It’s my idea from now on to stop spending money educating children who are sixteen, seventeen years old. We should put all that money down into kindergarten. Three-, four-, and five-year-old kids have to be taught how to read and write. Then we’d solve the problem for the whole educational system. If children went into the first grade knowing how to do everything, how to read and write, we’d be set for the future, wouldn’t we? So we must put out books with mythological educational pictures.
When I was five years old, my Aunt Neva gave me a copy of a book of wonderful fairy tales called Once Upon a Time, and the first fairy tale in the book is Beauty and the Beast. That one story taught me how to read and write because I looked at the picture of that beautiful beast, but I so desperately wanted to read about him too.
By the time I was six years old, I learned how to read and write completely. I want to go back and get people who are drawing the Sunday funnies, people like Bill Watterson who does Calvin and Hobbes, and use the comics to teach children how to read. Calvin and Hobbes could lead our children through kindergarten, from the age of five to six years old. This one comic strip could educate our children because it is filled with beautiful pictures and beautiful ideas. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts—same thing. So we’ve got to go back and spend all of our money today on kindergarten and save the children. We must not let them grow into fourth and fifth graders not knowing how to read.
We should forget about giving them mathematics. They’re not going to use it ever in their life. Give them simple arithmetic—one plus one is two, and how to divide, and how to subtract. Those are simple things that can be taught quickly. But no mathematics because they are never going to use it, never in their lives, unless they are going to be scientists later, and then they can simply learn it later.
My brother, for example, didn’t do well in school, but when he was in his twenties, he needed a job with the Bureau of Power and Light. He got a book about mathematics and electricity. He read it and educated himself and got the job. If you are bright, you will learn how to educate yourself with mathematics if you need it. But the average child never will. So it must be reading and writing. Those are the important things. And by the time children are six, they are completely educated, and then they can educate themselves. The library will be the place where they grow up.
WELLER: How important is arts education to your vision? Where do painting, music, and theater fit into your scenario?
BRADBURY: All of them are very important because they are a way of acting out what is in you. When my daughters were three, four, five, and six years old, I bought them batons and we sat in the front room of our house and I put on recordings of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and the score of the Walt Disney film Fantasia. “Night on Bald Mountain” is a great piece of music. So my daughters all stood around in the living room with a baton and conducted. They acted out and they learned about great music. It was wonderful!
WELLER: Why have politicians ignored addressing education for so long? This is a cause that you have been speaking out on for decades.
BRADBURY: Politicians are not librarians. That’s why they don’t get it. I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week to educate myself. I did this every week for ten years, and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.
WELLER: Do you think the current model for education is completely flawed? Would you revamp the entire system?
BRADBURY: Just start teaching reading and writing earlier. We have a million people in jails right now, mostly, who cannot read and write very well. Our educational system is partially responsible for our prisons being full, because if you don’t have any words in your head, you can’t think. And if you can’t think, you’ll be a criminal, huh? You have to do something with yourself. Women don’t have that problem. They are automatically good students. If children learn to read and write, then they’ll escape being criminals. But we’re not paying attention to that right now.
Both political parties are bankrupt, and we’ve got to say to them, “For God’s sake, before it’s too late, let’s not have another generation of moron criminals.” Not one of these so-called politicians is emphasizing this. They say, “We’re gonna put money into education,” but they don’t target it.
WELLER: You have long been a vocal advocate of space exploration. Will humankind ever get to Mars?
BRADBURY: Sure. If we stop having wars and pay attention to the future. We’ve got to go. We should have never given up on the moon. We could have built a lunar base in the last twenty-five years to deliver what we need to go on to Mars. Now it’s going to take a lot of years to build a base. We’ve been talking about space stations—they won’t work! You can’t go to Mars with that, it’s not firm enough. You need a firm foundation on the moon, to build a city there first and then go to Mars. That will happen about twenty-five years from now. It’s a shame. All that wasted time.
WELLER: And China may get there before the US.
BRADBURY: Let them. Then it will truly be “the red planet.”
WELLER: But seriously, do you think China as an emerging superpower will ever pose a threat to the United States?
BRADBURY: No. They have too much to lose and so do we. The policy we have had of bringing Wall Street in under the Communists is working. The more technologies they have, the more they want. That helped undermine Communism. There was a time when Russia didn’t have radios and television. But once they got those things, and they heard and saw what other countries had, they wanted more. And when President Reagan stood his ground over nuclear disarmament against Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, it scared Russia. Gorbachev told me this when I had lunch with him, that Reagan was our best president. He forced Russia to either spend billions of dollars they didn’t have to keep up the Cold War, or to reconsider negotiating peace.
WELLER: Back to the final frontier. Why is space exploration so important to you?
BRADBURY: So that we can live forever. We can live a million years. A million years from tonight, we’ll be able to look back to events like the first lunar landing and say, “Those people started it all, and we owe it to them.” And they’ll build a memorial to von Braun and the other space travelers a million years from tonight. But it’s got to start here, you see. We’ve got to be the starters.
WELLER: On September 11, 2001, you told me, “This is the darkest day in American history.” As a man hailed as a visionary, how do you suggest we handle terrorism?
BRADBURY: All the uproar over the fact that the FBI and the CIA should have known that we were going to be attacked—come on. I’m a science fiction writer. I predict futures. You would think it would have entered my little brain that maybe someone would hijack an airplane and turn it into a bomb. That never crossed my mind. All the security measures we’ve put in place are relatively useless because all the terrorists have
to do is do something else next time. They will always adapt. I can go to the corner drugstore right now and make a bomb. There are two elements you can buy cheap at any drugstore, mix them together, and you have a bomb. They are in every drugstore in America. What are you going to do about that?
This is the answer: We must soon make decisions on which will depend peace in the world for the next fifty or one hundred years. This is a time of great crisis, and we must carefully study the alternatives. We are confronted with a war inflicted upon us by invisible assassins who very much hate the United States of America. A good part of the Muslim population holds us in disgust.
We were attacked and are now fighting this war on terrorism, a war that may well last for many decades. But we have not asked ourselves the basic questions: “Why this war? Why this hatred? Why do so many of the Muslim countries of the world hate us so very much?” Unless we answer these questions, we will continue to fight a war and panic ourselves in the coming years.
WELLER: So what are the answers to the questions you raise?
BRADBURY: I believe that the Muslim nations and populations of the world distrust and hate us because of the policy we have been entertaining relative to Israel and Palestine. I have no prejudice against Israel. I have no prejudice against Palestine. I have no prejudice against the United States of America. But I do have a prejudice against a policy we have followed which has been unequal. We must go before the United Nations Council and ask them to join us in providing a virtual wall or a real wall between Israel and Palestine so that they will not be able to hurt one another. If we can insert such a wall and prevent destruction on both sides, we can then turn to all the nations of the world and ask them to join us in providing funds to finish the building of Israel and the rebuilding of Palestine so that during the next five or ten years we will have two nations created, whole and clean and right, and the two nations will have given up war because we stood between and would not allow their conflict. So at the end of that five-year or ten-year period, the Muslim nations of the world will see that we are proceeding with a policy of equality between these two nations.
