RAY BRADBURY
1920-2012
America’s premier fantasist, who wrote “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Martian Chronicles,” let love rule in life and words.
For Ray Bradbury, it was always about love.
In an interview with Sam Weller, his authorized biographer, the author of “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles” and “Dandelion Wine” spoke of meeting Frank Sinatra at a Hollywood event and telling him, “My name is Ray Bradbury. I’m a writer, and I love you.” Not “I love your voice” or “I love your movies” but an unadorned “I love you.” (To which the Chairman of the Board reportedly replied, “Right back at you.”)
Bradbury, who died Tuesday at 91, had absolutely no problem professing his love for the people and things he cherished. King Kong, Lon Chaney, and Laurel and Hardy. Halloween, magic acts and Midwestern summers. Public libraries, autumn carnivals and the canals of Mars. Shakespeare and Melville and Dickens. Space travel and sleepy hometowns. Over and over, in stories, novels, plays and poems, he returned to his favorite subjects and imbued them with his own kind of
literary magic.
Born Aug. 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Ill., Bradbury moved to Los Angeles at 14 and never left for any great length of time. His early stories were sold to pulps like Super Science Stories and Weird Tales and first collected in “Dark Carnival,” published by Arkham House, the original publisher of H.P. Lovecraft. As his popularity and mastery of the craft grew in the ’40s and ’50s, Bradbury contributed to slick magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and Mademoiselle (where his vampire family story “Homecoming” was plucked from the slush pile by Truman Capote).
Over the course of seven decades, his stories appeared everywhere from the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy to Playboy and the New Yorker. Some of Bradbury’s best-known story collections include “The Illustrated Man” (1951), “The October Country” (1955) and “S Is for Space” (1966), as well as the mammoth, career-spanning volumes “The Stories of Ray Bradbury” (1980) and “Bradbury Stories” (2003).
Bradbury, who kept writing despite a stroke in 1999, was fond of saying things like “Love is the answer to everything,” and many of his stories reflect that generous optimism. Two people whom many would consider insane prove perfect for each other in “Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby Is a Friend of Mine.” “The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair” uses one of the author’s own adulterous dalliances as a springboard for a meditation on romance and slapstick.
But Bradbury was wise enough to know that love has its destructive side. In “The Small Assassin,” an infant’s instinct for self-preservation takes a deadly twist. A prehistoric beast calls forlornly to a mate that will never answer in “The Fog Horn.”
In 1953, John Huston spirited Bradbury away to Dublin to write the script for “Moby Dick,” starring Gregory Peck as Ahab. The relationship between the filmmaker and the writer was tempestuous at best, and the resulting film didn’t live up to its ambition. Nevertheless, Bradbury found inspiration during his Irish sojourn for a number of stories, some of which served as the basis for the 1992 roman a clef “Green Shadows, White Whale.”
Dust jacket copywriters called him “the world’s greatest living science fiction writer,” largely to capitalize on the success of his lessthan-scientifically rigorous “The Martian Chronicles.” But that appellation was always a misnomer. Written in nine days on a rented typewriter in the UCLA library, “Fahrenheit 451,” with its predictions of social alienation amid ubiquitous news and entertainment, is indisputably a great science fiction novel, but the vast majority of Bradbury’s output works on the level of myth, fable and metaphor. Instead, it’s fair to say that Bradbury was the premier American fantasist of the 20th century, a hugely popular writer whose influence and output are unlikely to be matched any time soon.
Every fan has his or her favorite Bradbury book, but perhaps the 1962 novel “Something Wicked This Way Comes” best exemplifies what sets its author apart from lesser imaginations. Its prose is occasionally purplish and some scenes are overly sentimental, but there’s no denying the elemental power that drives the book. In its depiction of Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show and its reign of terror over a small town, the novel reminds readers young and old that life is finite and uncertain, but still full of wonder and human connection.
At the start of “Something Wicked” Bradbury employs an epigraph from William Butler Yeats: “Man is in love, and loves what vanishes.” Now Ray Bradbury has vanished. But for untold thousands of readers of all ages and backgrounds across the globe, the stories — and the love — remain.