Written By Summer 2010 : Page 31

Written by F.X. FeeNey A Lion at 90 Zen in the art of Ray Bradbury’s life. sets foot on the surface of Mars. He looks and feels 40 or younger. Improvements in medical science, as foreseen by his creator, have accelerated alongside progress in space travel with a Herculean force. Bradbury’s timetable seems a tad optimistic in retro- I spect, but the next 50 years could still prove him prophet- ic: 80 might yet be the new 40. He’s been right before. What is touching now, rereading this story (“The Third Expedition,” in The Martian Chronicles) is that we’re told that the octogenarian space-traveler was born in Illinois, in 1920—exactly like his progenitor Bradbury, who at age 26 was clearly (and typically) thinking ahead to whom he’d like to be in the future. This might explain why the 89-year-old guy who wel- comed us into his study in April 2010 was so phenome- nally young at heart and agile of mind. He is always plan- ning ahead. A stroke eight years ago has checkmated him physically—these days it’s hard for him to move his legs— but he is proving tougher and more resilient than any of his imaginary astronauts. His enthusiasm booms for life and work alike. Appropriately, Los Angeles is planning a “Ray Bradbury Week” in August, when he’ll turn 90, and n April 2000—by which I do not mean the 2000 we all remember, but the 2000 imagined shortly after World War II by Ray Bradbury—an 80-year-old astronaut Ray plans to be there for it, as well as for other outings to such public events as ComiCon. “I’ll be there for all of these things,” Bradbury vows, “if I can still leave the house!” He writes every day. His fingers no longer can operate a keyboard—he sighs, stoic about their digital decline—so he tells stories by phone to his daughter Alexandra, who lives in Arizona. She then faxes him a printed version, whose revisions he directs during their next session. It’s a productive arrangement. This year alone he has five books coming out. Three are fresh anthologies of vintage work: The Stories of Ray Bradbury, in two hefty volumes from the Everyman Library; A Pleasure to Burn (Subterranean Press), which are early, long-buried sto- ries related in diverse ways to the themes and evolution of his 1953 classic Fahrenheit 451, which is also newly re-emerging as a graphic novel, adapted and illustrated by Tim Hamilton. Come fall, there will be a collection of entirely new stories, including the one we are honored to debut in these pages: “The Dog With the Red Bandana.” A quick revisit to The Martian Chronicles—particu- larly that tale of the 80-year-old astronaut who discovers a 1920s American suburb on the Martian surface, then wonders if such uncanny order isn’t proof of God’s exis- tence—makes obvious that metaphysics are ever the main S U M M E R 2 0 1 0 W G AW W r i t t e n B y • 31

A Lion at 90

F.X. Feeney

A Lion at 90Zen in the art of Ray Bradbury’s life. In April 2000—by which I do not mean the 2000 we all remember, but the 2000 imagined shortly after World War II by Ray Bradbury—an 80-year-old astronaut sets foot on the surface of Mars. He looks and feels 40 or younger. Improvements in medical science, as foreseen by his creator, have accelerated alongside progress in space travel with a Herculean force. Bradbury’s timetable seems a tad optimistic in retrospect, but the next 50 years could still prove him prophetic: 80 might yet be the new 40. He’s been right before. What is touching now, rereading this story (“The Third Expedition,” in The Martian Chronicles) is that we’re told that the octogenarian space-traveler was born in Illinois, in 1920—exactly like his progenitor Bradbury, who at age 26 was clearly (and typically) thinking ahead to whom he’d like to be in the future. This might explain why the 89-year-old guy who welcomed us into his study in April 2010 was so phenomenally young at heart and agile of mind. He is always planning ahead. A stroke eight years ago has checkmated him physically—these days it’s hard for him to move his legs— but he is proving tougher and more resilient than any of his imaginary astronauts. His enthusiasm booms for life and work alike. Appropriately, Los Angeles is planning a “Ray Bradbury Week” in August, when he’ll turn 90, and Ray plans to be there for it, as well as for other outings to such public events as ComiCon. “I’ll be there for all of these things,” Bradbury vows, “if I can still leave the house!” He writes every day. His fingers no longer can operate a keyboard—he sighs, stoic about their digital decline—so he tells stories by phone to his daughter Alexandra, who lives in Arizona. She then faxes him a printed version, whose revisions he directs during their next session. It’s a productive arrangement. This year alone he has five books coming out. Three are fresh anthologies of vintage work: The Stories of Ray Bradbury, in two hefty volumes from the Everyman Library; A Pleasure to Burn (Subterranean Press), which are early, long-buried stories related in diverse ways to the themes and evolution of his 1953 classic Fahrenheit 451, which is also newly re-emerging as a graphic novel, adapted and illustrated by Tim Hamilton. Come fall, there will be a collection of entirely new stories, including the one we are honored to debut in these pages: “The Dog With the Red Bandana.” A quick revisit to The Martian Chronicles—particularly that tale of the 80-year-old astronaut who discovers a 1920s American suburb on the Martian surface, then wonders if such uncanny order isn’t proof of God’s existence— makes obvious that metaphysics are ever the mainEvent in his imagination, rockets and other planets the means to get there. “I’m a Zen-Buddhist,” Bradbury replies when I ask him about this. “These things and themes you ask me about come naturally. I don’t think about them; I do them. I don’t believe in thinking about things, I believe in doing. Everything is love. You do things for love, not money.” Is this his creative process, that he doesn’t even structure outlines? “Everything is an explosion, everything is a surprise,” he says of his writing. “As soon as I get an idea, I sit down and write it. If something is suggested to me, I write it. I was walking with my wife one night 50 years ago, and she mentioned a poem by a lady poet [Sara Teasdale, 1884–1933] called ‘There Will Come Soft Rains,’ and that night I wrote the story, and it became part of The Martian Chronicles. So that’s the way I work. I fell in love with that poem, I wrote the story immediately.” That poem, published in 1920, evokes a lovely landscape filled with birdsong, only to imagine in the final lines that (owing to some manmade catastrophe) there are no humans left to enjoy it: Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, / If mankind perished utterly; / And Spring herself when she woke at dawn / Would scarcely know that we were gone. Bradbury’s story evokes an empty California house in the year 2026, still being carefully maintained by home-computers and robot appliances long after its former occupants have been vaporized along with the rest of humanity in some unrecorded war. Food is prepared and disposed of, uneaten, and right before the house is accidentally destroyed at day’s end by a burning tree bough that crashes its roof, the computer (programmed to pick a poem-a-day) recites Teasdale’s 12 lines in their entirety, thus not only acknowledging her as the story’s source, but crowning her as a ghostly mistress-of-ceremonies while what remains of us is cleared away. Much as he trusts his work to come forth in a gush, Bradbury is a careful reviser. A sample manuscript page of his, published in the most recent Paris Review, reveals this. Peek under the myriad corrections and crossings-out and it’s plain that the prose comes to him crisply and coherently the first time around. The sentences sing conversationally, with the intuitive immediacy of good talk by candlelight—but afterward each word is sharpened, dialogue heightened, every stray phrasing made more energetic by shrewd cuts. Write a short story a week has long been his advice to younger writers. It’s a policy he himself has maintained since he began writing at age 15 and carried on through his life and beyond his stroke at 82, in 2002. “That slowed me somewhat,” he grins. Christopher Buckley, in his introduction to the Everyman edition, does the math and estimates that overall Bradbury has written 3,640 stories. What we have is only a fraction of that output. One recent collection, The Cat’s Pajamas, is selected from early gushers that we’re told were too green the first time, but which Bradbury was able, after a lifetime of honing his craft, to fish from his archives, assess, and rewrite. The Bradbury Chronicles Small wonder there’s an armada of dedicated Bradbury scholArship afloat—an authorized biographer in Sam Weller; an unauthorized biography, titled Uncensored!; bibliographers; even a scholarly institute called The Bradbury Center—that have for years been dedicated to sorting through these files and rescuing neglected gems. Recently, the 1954 screenplay of the film directed by John Huston, Moby Dick, has been collated and distilled from Bradbury’s many solo drafts and published in 2008 [edited by William F. Touponce with Jonathan R. Eller]. Of the 65 stories that became The Ray Bradbury Theater (a Canadian- filmed TV series from the mid-1980s, entirely written by Bradbury), one of the funniest and most fascinating is The Banshee, which stars Peter O’Toole as a grandly macho movie director whose initials are “JH,” and who cheerfully toys with a relatively naïve young writer named “Doug.” (Bradbury’s alter-ego in Dandelion Wine is named Doug, played here by Charles Martin Smith.) JH greets Doug at the door of his remote Irish castle and, like a warm-blooded Dracula, invites him inside with an eye to draining not his blood but his brainpower. “Masterpiece,” he growls, as he speed-reads the screenplay Doug has just handed him, rapidly dropping each of its hundred and more pages on the floor one-by-one as he reads, muttering: “Genius: Genius!” This was exactly how Huston dealt with Bradbury, and The Banshee (a droll fantasy in which an aggrieved female spirit runs howling in woods behind JH’s castle) must have gotten the juices flowing, because a year or two later Bradbury realized he was going to have to make a fulllength book of his Moby Dick adventure— Green Shadows, White Whale (Knopf, 1992). The portrait of Huston there is electric with life: Bradbury entered their relationship as a hero-worshipper but left as a bruised adversary. “You know anything about hypNotism, kid?” Huston asks early on. “Ever been hypnotized?” When Bradbury resists, Huston swirls his whiskey “languidly” (it’s after midnight at the castle) and, having learned the science of hypnosis during the war for his documentary Let There Be Light, assures him: “You’ve never been in the hands of a pro… You want to go under, son? I’ll put you there.” This, in a nutshell, was their relationship. Bradbury lived in Ireland for roughly a year while he wrote the Moby Dick screenplay. (He’d not read the novel before taking the assignment, but read it three times cover to cover, “and 10 times, piecemeal,” as he wrote the script. Melville became a leading light in his imagination, superseded only by Shakespeare.) We are inclined now to wrap Huston in the cozy mantle of his kindlier, cannier old age—as self-mocking survivors go, the man earned his heroic legend—but through Bradbury we get a bare-knuckled sense of what a problematic monster he could be, a literal Lord of Mischief (former boxer; lifelong gambler) who would always push a situation to its most entertaining extreme, no matter who else shed tears. Over lunch with Bradbury, Huston would mercilessly needle his wife Ricki, who sat head bowed at the other end of the table, tears streaming, because she was recently too intimidated by Franco’s police to help Huston smuggle a Spanish refugee over the border to France, and he won’t let her forget it. “I hate to think I am married to a woman with no guts,” he tells Bradbury, who doesn’t have a clue how to reply. Later, in a much funnier but no less ferocious instance, Huston nearly drives the marriage of two young friends off the rails, before it can even start, by insisting they stage their wedding ceremony on his estate, as the crowning event of a fox hunt. The poor couple fought over everything, in advance: the denomination of the ceremony, the liquor, their rings. “John loved it all,” Bradbury writes. “ ‘Always love a good scrap,’ he exclaimed, his grin so wide it needed sewing. ‘My cash is on the lady’s nose. [He] may ride the days, but she’ll win the nights.’ ” Fifty years later, Bradbury recalls with a booming laugh, “He was a fine director, but he was a lousy writer. He was jealous of me. He wanted to be a screenwriter. He never was, you know. He stole scripts all along the way.” This comment touches on a particularly sore point, because Bradbury and Huston ultimately fought over screen credit with a vehemence that ended any further professional connection between them. (Too bad: During their brief honeymoon phase, they spoke of doing The Martian Chronicles together. Given the abiding beauty of Moby Dick, that is an unmade film to be mourned.) As Huston saw it, Bradbury had lived virtually at his castle for months and been directed through his many drafts, so therefore their work together was a head-to-head collaboration. As Bradbury saw it, he alone was the writer, solving the riddles of structure and overall unity. It had been his idea to send Ahab down with the whale at the end, as opposed to the relatively minor harpoonist, Parsee Fedhallah, as in Melville. Whatever Huston’s contributions to the screenplay were, Bradbury says—however shrewd, seasoned, or experienced Huston’s proposals—none falls under the header of writing, all come from directing. Bradbury won the first round of the arbitration. As he recalls now: “If you see the ads in Daily Variety the month before Moby Dick opened, it says, screenplay by ray bradbury. And then John came to town and said, ‘I want credit on the script. It’s got to read, script by ray bradbury and john huston.’ And they gave it to him.” Bradbury protested, to no avail. “So I became paranoid. I tell you, if I’d met John in the street around that time, I would have knocked him down. But it’s a great film, a beautiful film. I’m so proud of it.” He laughs: “I’ve gotten over being paranoid.” Although he has never shied from a fight, Bradbury counsels a philosophical stance: “Once a studio has paid for your work, there’s really nothing you can do, except make your point of view known as clearly and logically as you can.” The film failures he’s witnessed have been self-fulfilling prophecies, because the powers-that-be on a given project thought they could solve problems more effectively than the original storyteller. “The Illustrated Man was a bad film because they did a bad screenplay. They didn’t okay the screenplay with me. If I could have looked at the script before they filmed it and made some suggestions, they could have had a good film.” As proof positive, he cites Fahrenheit 451, the 1967 film directed by François Truffaut, with which Bradbury had no active involvement—though he later learned that the film’s star, Oskar Werner, repeatedly (and successfully) urged Truffaut to solve problems by trusting Bradbury’s book. A more draMatic triumph is Something Wicked This Way Comes, the 1983 hit film, which Bradbury wrote based on his own 1962 novel and was invited to take over, after the version directed by Jack Clayton fell flat at a test-screening. Clayton, once a friend, had originally been brought aboard to direct at Bradbury’s request, but relations deteriorated from there. “After the failure of the test screening, the studio bosses were afraid I’d say, ‘I told you so,’ but I told them: ‘I’m here to help.’ ” In effect, Bradbury says, he took over the direction, shooting additional scenes, reshooting others, and (with a typically accurate eye for the future) ordering a superb, entirely new music score from a newcomer he happened to admire named James Horner—thereby launching the composer’s career. Zen Writer, Zen Life Had he been born in 1950, not 1920, it is easy to imagine a writer of Bradbury’s public nature gravitating more completely into the director’s chair, if only to better protect and project his stories, but Bradbury is radiantly content. His life is full: He clearly makes the most of every moment. That he has made a life in Los Angeles is an accident, but one he embraces. “I remember my dad in 1934, tears falling off the end of his nose as he wept after a long day of looking for work. He’d brought us all out west from Illinois, looking for a fresh start, and he just hadn’t found it. We could have just as easily gone back to Illinois, but at the last minute he found work at $12 a week.” Bradbury had thus grown up too poor to go to college so between the ages of 15 and 27 (while selling newspapers for a living on an L.A. street corner) devoted three and four days a week submerged at the public library. “That was my college,” he says now, and cannot recommend it strongly enough to any young person facing similar hardships here in the new century’s Great Recession. Fahrenheit 451 grew from his love of libraries. He even married his favorite librarian, Marguerite, and they were together for more than 50 years. His daughter Alexandra, one suspects, might have been named for the greatest of libraries. His embrace of Chance, of letting creation be a joy, has constantly opened Bradbury’s life to unexpected turns and fulfillments. Bernard Berenson, the great scholar of medieval art, once noticed a short paragraph Bradbury published about his creative process, and dropped him a note that read: Dear Mr. Bradbury: This is the first fan letter I’ve written in 89 years. I’ve just read your article in The Nation where you describe your writing, not as heavy industry, but as a lark! If you ever touch Italy, come see me. “I went to see [Berenson] in Italy,” Bradbury recalls, “and he became my father, all because of that article. And we wrote 80 letters back and forth to each other for the next five years. I visited him on two occasions, and we became very close. We talked about the Renaissance. He took me on a tour of Florence and showed me the great works of Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo. He asked me about my early life, and I told him about Illinois and making dandelion wine there with my grandfather when I was three years old. He said, ‘Why don’t you write that?’ It had never occurred to me, until that moment. So I sat down and wrote Dandelion Wine because of Bernard Berenson. I became his son. He became my father, all because of that small article.” Berenson was 90 then, Bradbury nearly 90 now. Bradbury’s memory of him wonderfully rounds out our conversation. Before we leave, Bradbury offers to sign a few books. Love – love – love! He writes, with a still steady hand. He asks about a fellow master of fantasy, often referenced in Written By: “Are you still in touch with Harlan Ellison?” he asks. “I like to call him the ‘The Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang!’ Tell him I love him!” This thought triggers a lovely parting aria, Bradbury’s most ardent advice to other writers, young and old: “Everything is love. Love what you do, and do what you love. Go to the edge of the cliff, jump off and build your wings on the way down. Don’t think about writing; do it. It’s pure Zen. Only write what you love. Do not write for money. Stay away from people who want to give you money. If they pay you money for your love already, that’s different. But it’s got to be your love. That’s why I wrote my stories, my screenplays. That’s why I love writing poetry, that’s why I love reading, period. Everything has been love.”

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