by Ray Bradbury
And no sooner is the man lost in the tides than the tides are becalmed, the sails fall like loose skin on a dying elephant. The ship is fastened to the hot sea like the gold coin forever nailed to the mast.
And in the calm the men begin to fade and die. Exhausted with waiting, with the gold coin on the mast beating on them like a true solar presence, the morale of the men on the ship disintegrates.
And in the long and terrible quiet of many days, Queequeg throws the bones that tell his death and goes to have a coffin built. So in the long silences of heat and waiting, we hear his coffin being sawed and nailed and the whisper as the shavings fall from the proud feather that is the symbol of his tribal power on the shaven lid.
And Queequeg says good-bye to his friend and spells himself into a death trance. How to save him? How to bring him out of his terrible catatonic state?
The book by Melville offers no solution.
One moment Queequeg is frozen and dying by his own secret will, the next he is up and about.
My reasoning went like this: that only one thing could break the spell. Love. That banal thing: friendship. If Ishmael were threatened with death, would not Queequeg from the depths of his own inner hiding places spring forth, summoned by possible murder? It seemed the strong and thus proper solution. Let the men, then, in the first case, threaten dying Queequeg. Ishmael intervenes when he sees a sailor cutting a new tattoo in Queequeg’s stolid flesh with a knife. Thus Ishmael proves his love, his friendship. Now, when the sailor turns on Ishmael and would cut his throat, what is more reasonable than to assume that Queequeg, having secretly seen their friendship proven by Ishmael not a minute before, would shake himself free from his self-suiciding trance and thrust between murderer and his bedmate. The answer is a resounding yes.
And in the moment of Queequeg’s seizing the sailor to bend him across his knee and murder him, why then would this not be a perfect time for, at last, oh, my Lord, yes, at last, the arrival of the White Whale!?
Again, yes.
And the whale is sighted and shouted to view. And Moby Dick heaves into sight, as Ahab pounds across the deck and the men gather at the rail to stare at the great white wonder, and Queequeg in this moment of delivery cannot possibly return to his self-nailed coffin, as Ahab cries to the men to row, row, and row again, out of this silence, this stillness, this damned and becalmed sea.
And the men row out, following Moby Dick, and they row into a wind!
Good grief, the lovely wind.
And I had rowed there, all in a single morn.
Starting with the coin on the mast and the wind at last in the high limp sails, and Moby Dick leading them off across and around the world.
What followed, as metaphor, seemed inevitable that day of writing.
Ahab dares to row out of the calm.
So? The typhoon arrives!
And with it the certain destruction of the Pequod.
And St. Elmo’s fires, which ignite the masts and Ahab’s harpoon. “It but lights our way to Moby Dick,” cries the captain.
Ahab defies the storm and thrusts his fist down along the harpoon, shouting, “Thus, I put out the fire!”
And the St. Elmo’s fires are destroyed, and the storm dies.
And the stage is set for the final lowerings for Moby Dick.
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL … OR, UNHAPPILY EVER AFTER (2003)
It’s Oscar Time, so …
I have often said, and you have heard me say it, that a bright film with a mediocre ending is a mediocre film.
Conversely, a medium-good film with a terrific ending is a terrific film.
I have, over the years, watched various pictures and, in a frenzy, gone home to write new endings for them or to congratulate ordinary films with brilliant finales.
Let’s start with Fahrenheit 451, François Truffaut’s version of my novel, filmed in 1966, with some excellent casting: Oskar Werner as Montag and Cyril Cusack as the Fire Chief.
But his terrible mistake was casting Julie Christie in two confusing roles and eliminating Clarisse McClellan, the girl next door; Faber, the philosopher, and the Mechanical Hound.
An almost bright film with a brilliant ending.
The finale, with the fine Bernard Herrmann score, shows the Book People moving in a snowfall through the woods, whispering the lines from all the books they have remembered. This ending has never failed to move audiences. The film ends on this high note, and one leaves feeling you’ve seen more than was really there.
Next, consider Network, one of Sidney Lumet’s finest films, but with an ending—to me, anyway—that has always seemed incomplete.
It’s the story of a network reporter (played by Peter Finch) who announces his imminent suicide. Resultantly, his ratings go up and the network gives him more power, leading to that memorable scene in mid-film where he shouts for people to throw open their windows across the country and yell, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
When his power diminishes, the network has him shot.
At the finale, he lies dead in the television theater.
I left the film with a dreadful feeling of incompleteness and published my own ending in the Los Angeles Times:
If you’re going to kill the Finch character, tell the public, so that on his death night his TV ratings go up again.
The next day, hold his funeral on the evening news with Walter Cronkite. His ratings go up again.
On the third day, you stash his body in a Forest Lawn Cemetery cave and roll a large rock in front of it as millions watch.
A week later, you roll the rock aside, find the tomb empty—and you have a television series.
That was my ending I sent to Sidney Lumet with apologies.
Now consider Rosemary’s Baby, a nice film but with a cowardly finis.
Its last scene finds Rosemary, whose child is Lucifer’s, searching for her lost baby, kidnapped by a witches’ coven in the next apartment.
Breaking in with a butcher knife, Rosemary confronts the coven and stares at a crepe-ribboned crib lying nearby.
The witches urge her, “Rock your child.”
She rocks the crib in which her lost baby cries. The end.
Not for me it wasn’t.
No normal mother would rock the crib. She should seize the baby and race down into the streets, pursued by the witches in rain and lightning.
At the nearest church she should run down the aisle and up onto the altar to lift the baby and plead, “Lord-God—God, take back your son.”
Pull the camera away, up in the church ceiling. The film ends.
So Rosemary’s Baby missed the chance after billions of years to heal the wound between Heaven and Hell, good and evil.
Now let me describe Hecht-Hill-Lancaster forty-five years ago, when they finished Sweet Smell of Success.
They asked me—along with Carol Reed, the fine director of The Third Man—to sit in on a private screening to help them with the last reel.
It is the story of a man played by Burt Lancaster, a true monster, who runs Manhattan lives with a high hand and with rampant malice.
At the finale, his sister and her boyfriend walk away, leaving him high in his penthouse, isolated and in despair.
When the lights came on, Carol and I turned to Lancaster and producers Harold Hecht and Jim Hill and said, “You can’t end the film this way. This man is too monstrous. Learn from the great masters like Lon Chaney that evil must be punished. It’s not enough to have his sister abandon him.”
I went on: “People come to films drowned in reality, leaving behind heart failures, cancer, failed marriages, bad jobs, mean bosses, and future sickness. What they need is not happy endings, but proper endings.
“The proper ending for this film is for the sister or the boyfriend to shove Lancaster off the roof. We watch him go down and down, to smash on the street.
“A proper ending. Not a happy one, but the one that we all wish for that man who is such a beast.”
Hecht-Hill-Lancaster demurred, and I continued, “If you release the film in this form, it will never make a dime because the character, as written and acted, is too terrible. Kill the son of a bitch and then you’ll have a successful film.”
The rest is history. Sweet Smell never regained its cost.
Today, with all the technical facilities available, you could digitalize hands to knock Lancaster off his penthouse. His fall would create an unhappy happy finale. You could re-screen the film and at last make a dime.
Thirty years ago, Sylvester Stallone and director John Avildsen called film critic Pauline Kael and me to MGM Studios to show us their just-finished Rocky.
“How does it end?” they asked. “Does Rocky win the fight or lose?”
Pauline Kael and I, almost in unison, responded. “It doesn’t matter,” we said. “If he wins, he wins—a happy ending. And if he loses, having fought bravely, with his wife rushing to embrace him, you still have a happy ending, because he’s behaved incredibly well.”
Watch Rocky again and see what Stallone and Avildsen decided about the last reel.
Now consider Nicolas Cage’s Oscar-nominated film this year, Adaptation. A better title would be Incompletion.
Adaptation is the story of a cowardly screenwriter and his brighter twin who writes successful screenplays that please the studios. The cowardly twin remains in the shadows, not able to succeed at writing or at life.
At the end, the smart brother dies in the arms of his cowardly twin brother. That is almost the finale of the story as it was played out by Nicolas Cage.
My ending, please, would run like this:
Lying on the road with his smart, wonderful, successful twin, Cage sees that his brother’s jacket lies open and his wallet is half revealed. He feels his hand move to take his own wallet from his pocket and shift it into his dead twin’s coat. He then takes his brother’s wallet so that when the police arrive, he has changed identities.
The cowardly brother now returns to a Hollywood life of success, riches, and perhaps along the way he may learn, given time, not to be a failure.
Which brings us at last to my laying hands on that truly great film, Lawrence of Arabia.
As you recall, we see Lawrence being motored out of Arabia by an army sergeant. A man on a motorbike rushes past them and roars down the road toward the horizon.
You’re supposed to feel that this is the ghost of a metaphor reminding us that somewhere up ahead Lawrence, in England, will be killed on the road.
Better, I thought, if—with some small license—you have Lawrence instead climb on a motorbike, race down the Arabian road, go off into the distance, duplicating at the film’s conclusion what occurs at the start, in England, when you see Lawrence thrown from his bike as he avoids bicyclists on the road.
There you have it. All of my endings.
Oh, yes … When I sent my Network ending to Sidney Lumet, he wrote back:
“Where were you when we needed you?”
REMEMBRANCE OF BOOKS PAST (2004)
Fifty years ago in The Nation I explained my love of writing science fiction. Some weeks later, a letter arrived, signed in a spidery hand. “B. Berenson, I Tatti, Settignano, Italia.” I thought, This can’t be Berenson, the great Renaissance art historian, can it? The letter read: Dear Mr. Bradbury: This is the first fan letter I’ve written in 80 years. Your article on why you write your particular fiction is so fresh and different from the usual heavy machinery of literary essays that I had to write you. If you ever touch Italy, please call. Bernard Berenson.
From this letter grew a friendship in which I gave B.B. a copy of my new novel, Fahrenheit 451.
In it, the wilderness Book People memorize all the great books, so they are hidden between their ears.
Berenson was so fascinated that at lunch one day at I Tatti he said, “Why not a sequel to Fahrenheit 451 in which all the great books are remembered by the Wilderness People and are finally reprinted from memory. What then?
“Wouldn’t it be,” he continued, “that all would be misremembered, none would come forth in their original garb? Wouldn’t they be longer, shorter, taller, fatter, disfigured, or more beautiful?
“Instead of angels in the alcove, might they be gargoyles off the roof?”
I was so fired by Berenson’s suggestion that I wrote an outline, thinking, Oh God, if only I had the genius to know some of the really great books of history and rewrite them, pretending to be my future Book People, trying to recall the details of an incredible literature.
I never did this.
But coming upon my note and remembering Berenson fifty years later, I thought, Why not outline Berenson’s idea and urge my readers to follow and do the same?
What if you could pick your favorite? Kipling, Dickens, Wilde, Shaw, Poe. These, memorized and reborn thirty years from today, how would they, unwillingly, change?
Would Usher fall but to rise again? Would Gatsby, shot, do twenty laps around his pool? Would Wuthering Heights’ Cathy, at Heathcliff’s shout, run in out of the snow?
War and Peace. With a century of totalitarian dictatorships behind us, wouldn’t Tolstoy’s concepts, misremembered, be politically rearranged so that various conflicts in Russian society would come to different ends?
Jane Austen’s sweet young ladies recalled by a women’s libber. Wouldn’t they be realigned as chess pieces of nineteenth-century social life as women further up the ladder, full-blown and arrogant?
The Grapes of Wrath might be recalled not as a quietly social statement, but as a full-blown socialist revolt lodged in a dilapidated tin lizzie on Route 66.
Or a semi-demi baroque closet occupant, given the task of echoing Death in Venice—mightn’t he, thirty years on, imagine the beautiful seaside Tadzio falling into Aschenbach’s arms to be toweled dry with laughter in which that Freudian joy might slay the old author?
Or consider a macho dyslexic who dimly discards every third word in Marcel Proust’s Parisian landscape to remember his past so ineptly, dwindling to Toulouse-Lautrec size instead of all those languorous perambulations.
And Moby Dick. In full recall, mightn’t we be tempted to hurl Fedallah, the Parsee, that boring obstruction, into the sea? Which would then allow Ahab to be yanked overboard by the White Whale. At this point it could easily happen that the motion picture, rather than the book, is recalled and Ahab, latched to the White Whale, with his dead hand beckons the crewmen to follow. So the book would be lost and the film remembered.
What a literary parlor game!
List your ten favorite novels, and, in great detail, outline their plots, then renew your acquaintance with these to find out how you have scarred, beautified, or mutilated those incredible books. What a pastime for all of us in the near future.
And of the books lost in the Book People wilderness, which would be easiest to remember? Not the great ones; they are too complex in different ways. But James Bond, easily remembered, could be set free again, shaken but not stirred by time.
Most mysteries would remain intact, and the great poems. Think of Yeats’s “Golden Apples of the Sun” or “Dover Beach” or Emily Dickinson’s quatrains or the snow poems of Robert Frost. These, in the tradition of the ancient tellers of tales, would cross time to arrive abundantly fresh and new.
Children’s books, also. It would be hard to imagine The Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland disfigured by inept recall.
The great plays, Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and Richard III, might arrive, somewhat dwarfed, but that incredible language would ring across the centuries.
Mark Twain’s Nigger Jim, afloat on that raft down the Mississippi with Huck, might still keep his name in spite of the politically correct critics shouting along the shore. It’s a good game. I wish I’d written on it fifty years ago when Berenson first made the suggestion to me.
Go find your bliss, name your favorites, and see if your long umbilical memory has been cut or you are still wonderfully tied to the things you loved in libr
aries a long time ago.
ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION
PREDICTING THE PAST, REMEMBERING THE FUTURE (2001)
“Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”
That says it all.
The last line of William Butler Yeats’s hypnotic poem “Sailing to Byzantium.”
It describes the entire history of mankind on Earth.
It tells the whole history of science fiction in a few incredible words.
For history and science fiction are inseparable.
Poppycock?
No, humanity’s truth.
For all that human beings have ever thought about is the future.
Hiding in caves, discovering fire, building cities—all of these were science-fictional endeavors. We can see the depiction of possible futures scrawled on cave walls in southern France, where the first science-fiction tales illustrated how to find, kill, and eat the wild beasts.
The problems that faced primitive man had to be solved. They dreamed answers to dire questions; that is the essence of the fiction that becomes science. Once a vivid dream was realized in their heads, they were able to act on it. So the creatures of old time planned for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. What is true of them certainly is true of us. We wonder about tomorrow morning, tomorrow evening, and the day after that, so as to plan our schools, marriages, and careers. Everything that we do has to be imagined first.
In the castle walls at Pierrefond are embedded cannonballs that signified the destruction of walled cities forever. The land barons who inhabited them had dreamed walls to a certain height and a certain thickness. Their fictional dreams had reared the castles, and now the invention of gunpowder and the cannon was a fiction made real that brought the castles down, to change history.
When Cortés invaded Mexico, for every one of his conquistadors who died, one hundred of Montezuma’s men were destroyed because of a dream of destruction, a fictional concept that made a reality of the guns the Spaniards carried.
