But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  Many writers are prolific. What perhaps most distinguishes Ray Bradbury is his influence on other writers, to say nothing of his readers. In the pages of Mr. Weller’s book, you’ll find tributes from and friendships with a diverse group: Bernard Berenson, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Stephen King, Federico Fellini, François Truffaut (who managed completely to screw up the film version of Fahrenheit 451), John Huston (for whom Ray wrote the screenplay to his Moby-Dick), R. L. Stine, Buzz Aldrin (among dozens of astronauts), Walt Disney, John Steinbeck, Charles Laughton, Rod Steiger, the legendary editor Bob Gottlieb (who helped to shape many of these stories), Sam Peckinpah, and Steve Martin. I’ll stop there, other than to say this is but a partial list of Ray Bradbury’s fan club.

  Glittery names, to be sure, but his influence runs even deeper. Literally, it occurs to me. Whenever I’m on a subway, I’m always curious to see what books—if any—kids are reading these days. And the two books that I routinely see teenagers reading, intently at that, are Atlas Shrugged and Fahrenheit 451. The next most-often-sighted book is Dandelion Wine (1957), which many Bradburians insist is his finest work.

  Ray Bradbury has covered the world—indeed, universe—with his themes: small-town America, Mars, fantasy, horror, and science fiction. You could even go so far as to say that we live today in a world that was prefigured by Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, anticipated an age dominated by television, wall-sized plasma-screen TV, and even Sony Walkman–like devices. One of the most chilling stories in this collection, “The Veldt,” published at the start of the TV era, today reads like an Elijah-like warning against surrendering ourselves to the false Edens of the vast wasteland and its bastard offspring, video games.

  There are some ironies here in being warned against all this by one of the most famous writers of science fiction. (He prefers to be known as a writer of fantasy.) But few writers have a crater on the moon named for one of their books (Dandelion Crater, named by the crew of Apollo 15) or have consulted on the U.S. pavilion for a World’s Fair, or on an EPCOT exhibit at Disney World. You’ll learn in Weller’s book that Ray was also the inspiration for the design of a number of leading—brace yourself—shopping malls in America. Then, of course, there’s the Ray Bradbury Park in his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois. Bradbury is that rarity in America: the writer who has made his hometown unequivocally proud.

  Any appreciation of him must begin in Waukegan, where a robotic stork or Martian obstetrician dropped him down the chimney on August 22, 1920. That was the year Prohibition began, the first commercial radio broadcast was made, Harding was elected, and F. Scott Fitzgerald married (don’t do it, Scott!) Zelda. Other notable births that year: Isaac Asimov, America’s most graphomaniacal sci-fi writer; and Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex, a book that, like so many of Ray’s, brought a whole lotta pleasure to a whole lotta people. In 2001, Ray told Salon: “Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby?”

  The town Ray Bradbury grew up in is very much the Green Town of the Dandelion Wine stories. The very first story, “The Night,” begins, “You are a child in a small town.” And there you suddenly are, in a magical and often mystical world of grandparents and pie smells and fireflies and the bang of the screen door. And there are things in the woods beyond. Another story, “Farewell Summer,” was originally included in Dandelion Wine but was cut. It’s haunting. It will take you back to that summer in your own youth when you realized that it wasn’t going to last, and that there were some seriously scary things out there beyond the woods.

  “Grow up?” Ray commented once, after sadly watching a boy balk at entering a toy store in Sausalito. “What does that mean? I’ll tell you: It doesn’t mean anything.”

  There’s a rare note of contempt in that statement, and it’s telling. Ray Bradbury is a sunny, decent, loving, gregarious, generous man, both on the page (at least when he’s not scaring the bejeezus out of you) and in person. The joyousness and zest that he brings to his work—even to the darker works—seem (to me, at least) to arise out of his eternal boyishness. Bradbury has no Inner Child, only an Outer one. On the page, he’s Douglas (note the Fairbanksian name) Spaulding of the Dandelion stories. Douglas is a Huck Finn: prototypically Midwestern, a rule-breaker, adventurer, and dreamer. (Odd, come to think of it, that nowhere in the literature about Bradbury have I found a single reference to Twain. Perhaps it’s not true, as Ray’s fellow Illinosian Ernest Hemingway said, that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”) But to paraphrase Hemingway, all literature by Bradbury certainly comes from Buck Rogers, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Sherwood Anderson, Herman Melville, John Steinbeck, William Butler Yeats, and of course Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli.

  Who?

  Well, okay, I hadn’t heard of him either: the nineteenth-century Italian astronomer who discovered the allegedly man-made channels on Mars (permanently mistranslated into English as “canals,”), providing Ray Bradbury with the inspiration for The Martian Chronicles.

  Bradbury is perhaps the standout autodidact of late-twentieth-century American literature. His parents couldn’t afford college during the Depression, so he hit the library—three days a week, for ten years. Libraries were his—to use the Spanish word—querencia (“loved place”—in bullfighting, the spot in the ring where the bull feels safe). He was haunted by the destruction of the Royal Library of Alexandria, by the thought of all those books, burning. That obsessive worry, coupled with memories of Hitler-era book burnings and the excesses of the McCarthy era, ultimately inspired his best-known work, Fahrenheit 451, set in a future where the firemen start fires.

  He wrote that book in the stacks at the UCLA library, on rented typewriters, inserting dimes into slots for a half hour of typing time. Hugh Hefner, another fellow Illinosian, liked the manuscript so much that he serialized it in issues 2, 3, and 4 of his racy new magazine, Playboy. A half-century later, the phrase “Fahrenheit 451” has thoroughly permeated the language. Michael Moore filched it for his documentary about the Iraq war, later apologizing to an unflattered and unamused Bradbury. The danger—now—is of another kind. As he put it in 1979, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

  As he approaches his ninth decade, he remains a tireless and ardent voice for reading and libraries. Recently, The New York Times ran a page 1 story on his fund-raising efforts on behalf of the Ventura County Library. The Times photo shows him holding a sign that says APPLAUSE! (Very Bradburian). The caption: “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries.” A few paragraphs down one comes across this: “Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine, and I’d like to spend more time with her.” The story notes that a spokesperson for Ms. Derek confirmed that the two are friends, and said that Ms. Derek “would like to see some more of Mr. Bradbury, too.” Also in the story is a red-hot diatribe against the Internet. Don’t get him started on that.

  “The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs, and books, and other things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table . . .

  “Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

  “It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

  This is not the voice of a crank but that of a word lover who has spent his life creating stories about worlds far more exotic and wonderful than anything dreamed up by a video-game programmer or cyberfabulist. He’s amusingly scathing on the subject of the blogosphere and Internet chat rooms. “Who do you want to talk to? All those morons who are living across the world somewhere? You don’
t even want to talk to them at home.”

  In 1995, he rather bravely told a college audience: “I don’t understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway. Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?” The answer now, fifteen years later, is: more or less everyone. How it will all play out is anyone’s guess. My own is that Ray Bradbury is for the ages. He has been drawing people together for decades, by telling stories.

  John Updike once said that the whole publishing process—printing, distribution, reviewing, promotion—was just a way of getting a book into the stacks of a small-town library somewhere slightly west of Kansas, where a teenage boy is looking for something to read.

  That wasn’t quite how it worked in my case. I was twelve or thirteen, about Doug Spaulding’s age, clutching an illicitly obtained copy of Playboy. And here you may snort with derision, as you did when Mr. Clinton told us that he didn’t inhale. But God’s truth and pinky swear: what caught my attention wasn’t Miss Whatevermonth but the cover line saying, “New Fiction by Ray Bradbury.” It was the story about the time-traveling safari where you could go back and shoot a dinosaur—so long as you stayed on the wooden walkway and didn’t disturb anything. I can still remember getting to the last paragraph and feeling the skin prickle at the back of my neck.

  I got that same prickle rereading some of the stories in here. It seems to me ironic—to say the least—that someone with Bradbury’s profoundly sunny disposition should be able to induce such gooseflesh. But take it from a far better source—Stephen King—who wrote in a memoir, “Without Ray Bradbury, there would be no Stephen King, at least as he grew. Bradbury was one of my nurturing influences, first in the EC comics, then in Weird Tales. . . . What was striking was how far down into the viscera he was able to delve in those stories—how far beyond the prudish stopped-point of his 1940s contemporaries. In that sense, Ray was to the horror story what D. H. Lawrence was to the story of sexual love.”

  Here’s a paragraph, from “The Next in Line,” in which a husband and wife tour the catacombs of Guanajuato and walk between two rows of mummified cadavers:

  There was an embarrassment of horror. You started with the first man on your right, hooked and wired upright against the wall, and he was not good to look upon, and you went on to the woman next to him who was unbelievable and then to a man who was horrendous and then to a woman who was very sorry she was dead and in such a place as this.

  Do you hear an echo of Hemingway in there? A few pages on, there’s an unmistakable echo of the original master of American horror, Edgar Allan Poe, as the cemetery’s docent shows the horrified couple a case of premature burial:

  Believe me, señor, rigor mortis pounds upon no lids. Rigor mortis screams not like this, nor twists nor wrestles to rip free nails, señor, or prise boards loose hunting for air, señor. All these others are open of mouth, sí, because they were not injected with the fluids of embalming, but theirs is a simple screaming of muscles, señor. This señorita, here, hers is the muerte horrible.

  I myself have seen these grotesques in Guanajuato. Bradbury missed nothing; or as Poe might have put it, “caught all.”

  Turn, then, to “The Parrot Who Met Papa,” one of the most delicious, inventive, and downright funny short stories anywhere, in which he channels—canals?—Hemingway and Poe again. This is Bradbury at his most antic: “The final Hemingway novel of all time! Never written but recorded in the brain of a parrot! Holy Jesus!”

  Bradbury is a master at the ending that sucks your breath away, and in this he seems very much in the Maupassant/Saki/O. Henry tradition. As I sat down to reread the stories here, I found myself wondering how many of them had been adapted for TV’s The Twilight Zone, whose amazing twist endings left my circa 1962 generation buzzing for days.

  The answer, oddly, is only one. Bradbury sold “I Sing the Body Electric!” to Rod Serling, but Serling went back on his word that he wouldn’t change it, and left out a key scene. Bradbury never quite forgave him. Later, Serling admitted having lifted parts of The Martian Chronicles, and apologized. One speculates: if there had been no Bradbury, would Rod Serling have come up with The Twilight Zone?

  For a man who never flew on an airplane until he was sixty-two years old, and who has never had a driver’s license, Bradbury has seen a bit of the world and returned with wonderful stories, especially here in “McGillahee’s Brat,” a story of an encounter with a beggar woman in Dublin. Therein lies—another—tale.

  One of Bradbury’s most famous short stories is “The Fog Horn.” It came to the attention of the director John Huston, who invited him to come to Ireland with his family for seven months to write the screenplay for his adaptation of Moby-Dick. That tumultuous, not exactly fun experience is related in Ray’s novel Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). Rereading “The Fog Horn,” with the Huston–Moby-Dick connection in mind, one comes across an almost eerie number of Melvillian tropes within two paragraphs: “a cold November evening” . . . the ocean “rolls and swells a thousand shapes” . . . “the God-light flashing out from [the lighthouse]” . . . “They never came back, those fish, but don’t you think for a while they thought they were in the Presence?”

  Another fan of Ray Bradbury was Christopher Isherwood, the British expat lover of W. H. Auden, and L.A.-based mystic. Isherwood was a friend of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard; the three of them were early experimenters with LSD and mescaline. Weller’s biography tells the story of Bradbury receiving a glowing, highbrow review of The Martian Chronicles from Isherwood. It was a welcome signal from the world of Serious Lit that they considered him no mere writer of pulp fiction.

  Bradbury formed a friendship with Isherwood and Heard, and through them with Huxley, author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception (the title, from William Blake, would later become the name of Jim Morrison’s rock band). Heard was especially complimentary, telling Bradbury, “You’re not a writer, you’re a poet.” Huxley and the others were at this point deeply into mescaline—under a doctor’s supervision (personally, I always found it more fun not under a doctor’s supervision). They tried to get the author of The Martian Chronicles to tune in, turn on, and drop out, dangling before him the prospect of marvelous and abundant perceptions. Bradbury demurred, telling the psychedelically inclined trio: “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.”

  There are some quite amazing lizards in this collection, of every description. It’s strange to consider that they all somehow sprang from the mind of a once-small boy from Waukegan, Illinois. That may be putting it a bit disingenuously. The boy from Waukegan moved to L.A. in his early teens. At the age of fourteen, he wrestled his roller skates away from Al Jolson (who’d purloined them for his onstage act). He got W. C. Fields’s autograph one day outside the Paramount Studios. Fields told him, “There you are, you little son of a bitch.” At about the same time, Bradbury persuaded a young and dapper George Burns to let him watch him do his radio broadcast. He sold newspapers on the street corner, got his first stories published in Weird Tales at half a cent a word. Years later, he was still in the same town, presenting an award to Steven Spielberg. And there in a corner of the room was George Burns. They hugged. An American story.

  Spielberg said of Ray Bradbury that his “most significant contribution to our culture is showing us that the imagination has no foreseeable boundaries. . . . Today we need Ray Bradbury’s gifts more than ever, and his stories have made him immortal.”

  Tributes from Stephen King and Steven Spielberg. One drools. As jacket quotes go, you really can’t do better than that. Toward the end of Mr. Weller’s biography, attempting to sum up this un-sum-upable man, he takes note of Bradbury’s prodigious output. Bradbury’s comment: “Every time I’ve completed a new short story or novel . . . I say to the mailbox, ‘There, Death, again one up on you.’ ”

&n
bsp; When he was twelve back in Illinois, he met at a circus a Mr. Electrico, who took the boy under his wing and told him, “Live forever!” Bradbury adopted that as a mantra, and here he is, all these years later, still living, still writing, still championing libraries and reading—leaving a little time, of course, for Bo Derek.

  Literary immortality is tricky to predict. The author of Moby-Dick was all but forgotten until right about the time Ray Bradbury was born. But these hundred stories, only a sampling of the canon, surely amount to a miraculous legacy. Each one, whether about the young boy in Green Town or a heartbroken dinosaur or a mischievous animatronician or a man at war with his own skeleton or a homicidal infant or a grandmother who has gone up to her room quietly to die, comes from the heart of a man with a soul as big as the Mars Ritz.

  “My job,” he told college students in 1995, “is to help you fall in love.”

  So we did.

  —Introduction to The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Everyman’s Library, 2010

  TO-GA!

  Has it really been almost thirty years since Animal House first filled the big screen? We grow old. The movie, on the other hand, hasn’t aged a bit. “Double secret probation,” “See if you can guess what I am now? I’m a zit! Get it?” and the immortal chant “To-ga, to-ga!” are classic, time-defying, laugh-out-loud moments encased in celluloid amber. I’ve watched the movie with my father, now eighty, and my son, fourteen; both were on the floor gasping for breath.

  Comes now Chris Miller, Dartmouth Class of ’63, who wrote the screenplay along with Harold Ramis and Douglas Kenney, to give us, as his subtitle demurely puts it, “the awesomely depraved saga” of Alpha Delta Phi, the fraternity whose bacchanals and outrages provided the inspiration for the movie, along with Ramis’s and Kenney’s own experiences of Greek life. (Not to be confused with Plato or Pythagoras.) Miller calls this book,I on its cover, “a mostly lucid memoir.” It’s unclear whether lucid is a typographical error. Miller may well have intended lurid.