Sam Weller - The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury

L IKE MANY in my generation, I am a lifelong, card-carrying member of the Intergalactic, Time-traveling, Paleontology, Mummies, Martians, Jack-o-Lanterns, Carnivals, and Foghorn-coveting Ray Bradbury fan club.

But truth be told, Ray Bradbury belongs to all generations, not just my own. The G.I. Generation, for exampleveterans of World War Two, read Ray Bradburys early pulp magazine stories on the muddy battlefields of war-ravaged Europe. Baby Boomers blasted off to Mars with The Martian Chronicles, stumbled into the freak show tent with The Illustrated Man, and ran across the grassy fields of Green Town, Illinois, in Dandelion Wine . And they didnt just read his stories, they listened to them over the nighttime airwaves, as Ray Bradbury became a fixture in dramatic radio. Generation X discovered Ray Bradbury all over again, reading his lyrical prose in junior high and high school literature classes. More important, we read his stories when we werent in school. Those tales of stainless steel rocket ships and of a fireman who burned books in a dark, dystopian world were at once brilliant, luminous, and, to wax Gen-X eloquent, incredibly cool.

A new generation is claiming Ray Bradbury yet again. This time as a legend, an American literary icon who has taken his place in the pantheon occupied by the ghosts of literature past, Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens, Poe. Certainly, some critics in the literati might scoff at the very notion that Bradbury, a so-called writer of science fiction, is even in the pantheon at all. But these critics have long since missed the rocket ship, they hardly appreciate Ray Bradburys metaphors, his musical language, and most important, the myths he has created. Indeed, they have mislabeled Ray Bradbury altogether. He is much, much more than simply a science fiction author, as his life story illustrates.

The millennium babies will discover Ray Bradbury for themselves the way we all haveby picking up his books. And it is certain that this new generation will lionize him for themselves, in their own way, because he belongs to all the generations. So many of us are members of the fan club.

I suppose I joined while I was still in the womb, when my father read Bradbury aloud to my pregnant mother in 1967. Eleven years later, I read my first Bradbury book, a frayed paperback copy of The Illustrated Man I found on my fathers bookshelf. On the cover of the book was a painting of the Illustrated Man himself, sitting naked on a wooden crate, his tattooed back to the viewer. The landscape around him was eerie, dreamlike, molten red. I remember staring at that cover endlessly. Every year after that, under every glowing Christmas tree, my father made sure there were Ray Bradbury books wrapped up all shiny, waiting to be opened, waiting to be read. To my mothers delight, I often had my nose buried in books.

In my early twenties, I found myself back home in Illinois caring for my mother, who was dying of cancer. My parents had separated, my older siblings moved away. I was in that house with all that illness and all that sorrow and my mother, in her early fifties, was struggling to live. She was able to sleep only a few hours at a time, and in those rare moments of peace, I would retreat into my bedroom. I remember a winter night, as I was looking out my window, large, wispy snowflakes drifted down, illumined by the glow of street lamps. It was then that I first listened to an audiobook copy of Ray Bradburys The Toynbee Convector . I put the tape in my small cassette player and, with the lights off, listened to Ray Bradbury, in his comforting voice, read his own words. It was pure magic and so very cathartic for my soul, which enjoyed a brief respite from my mothers illness and all that sadness. There was a profound melancholy to one of the talesBless Me, Father, For I Have Sinned, and in that moment, I felt a kinship. I was not alone. I was not alone.

Is that not what good storytelling is? To help us to relate? To help us understand the universal truths? To me this prose poet saw beauty in sorrow.

Eight years after my mother passed away in 1992, this book was born. I was at the Tribune Tower, pitching stories to the editor of the Chicago Tribune Magazine . I proposed a celebratory profile of Illinoiss native son, stepchild of Mars, Ray Douglas Bradbury, the gatekeeper to that chimerical underworld known as the October Country, Librarian Emeritus for the Athenaeum of the Imagination. My favorite author was turning eighty that year. What better time to recap his amazing life? My editor approved the story, and I was off to Los Angeles to visit Ray at his home, a sprawling, multilevel house painted, quite appropriately, dandelion yellow. As I bounded the dozen or more stone steps up to the front door, skittish cats darted out from the surrounding shrubbery. The doormat at the top of the steps was silk-screened with images of carved Halloween pumpkins hollering Boo!

When the Bradburys longtime maid escorted me into the foyer, the first thing I noticed was the painting. It was the original molten artwork from the paperback cover of The Illustrated Man that I had so loved as a teenager. I had arrived.

The man I encountered on that fine Los Angeles afternoon on Memorial Day weekend in the year 2000 was nothing short of miraculous. Since his stroke seven months earlier, he moved cautiously. Physically, this great, jolly blurt of a man had been slowed down. But here he was, hobbling to and fro with the use of a four-pronged cane, talking at light speed, pontificating, philosophizing, positing solutions for the future of all humankind, and, most of all, referencing the past with reverie and respect. I thought this man was a great contradiction, a beautiful paradox. He wrote of the far future, but did it with the machines of old, cog-and-gear ironclad throwbacks to Wells and Verne; he wrote of the far past with a pained longing, as if to tell us all that our future would only be well served if we looked to yesteryear. Indeed, he was a contradiction. Ray Bradbury was a nostalgic visionary: He predicted the past and remembered the future.

The Bradbury house was a veritable shrine filled with what Ray liked to call his metaphors. These were the symbols, the charms, the talisman, he said with a laugh, of his life and career. Each room was jammed wall-to-wall with the runoff of Rays staggering collection of everything under the sun and the moon and, for that matter, Mars. That afternoon, gold-dusted sunlight beamed in through wide, white wooden shutters, illuminating a Tutankhamen-like realm of Bradburian treasure. The original cover artwork to the first edition of Fahrenheit 451, drawn by Rays old friend and collaborator Joseph Mugnaini, hung on one wall. Lucite awards and shiny metal statuettes, accolades gathered over the decades, lined the fireplace mantel in the living room. In a hallway, just a few months after my visit, Ray would place the lifetime achievement medal he received in November 2000 from the National Book Foundation for his Contribution to American Letters, affirmation of his transcendence into mainstream literature. In a closet sat a thick stack of acetate animation cels, hand-painted originals from Dumbo, Cinderella, Pinocchio, and many other Disney classics given to Ray personally from none other than Walt Disney. Virtually every flat surface, every table and chair in the house, was piled high with mountainous stacks of papers, old photographs, story starts, newspaper articles, manuscripts, and plastic milk crates holding countless files. There were toys in every room, too: Giant stuffed animals perched on sofas; tin rocket ships and windup robots waited in corners to come to mechanized life. And in nearly every room, built-in bookcases groaned under the tremendous weight of thousands and thousands of books.