Book Review of ‘The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury’
Ray Bradbury was interviewed after the Viking lander settled down on Mars in 1976. He wrote about it years later in a Readers Digest article.
“The interviewer said to me, ‘Mr. Bradbury, you’ve been writing about life on Mars all of your life. Now the first photographs have come through, and there is no life on Mars. How do you feel about that?’
My answer was, ‘Fool! There is life on Mars. And it is us.’ “
That anecdote doesn’t appear in The Bradbury Chronicles, but I’ve always loved it. I’ve also always loved the work of Ray Bradbury, so it was a joy to see this biography.
Ray Douglas Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. His middle name was given him by his mother, after the actor Douglas Fairbanks, and presaged Bradbury’s own work in film years later.
By the age of 15 Bradbury, who now lived in Los Angeles, California, knew what he wanted to do – to write, to direct, to act. He began to write movie reviews and articles for his school paper. At age 16 he joined the Science Fiction Society, with soon to be famous members: uberfan Forrest J. Ackerman, and writers Roy Squires, Arthur K. Barnes and Henry Kuttner.
1939 was the dawn of science fiction’s “Golden Age”, when pulp magazines cost a nickel or a dime, and practically anyone could be published. He sold his first science fiction story in 1941, “Pendulum,” which was published in Super Science Stories, and he was paid a half-cent a word. He was 21 years old the day the issue appeared on the newsstands. From then on Bradbury never looked back.
His collection of short stories, The Martian Chronicles, is what catapulted him to fame, however, and took him away from science fiction and in to literature.
Biographer Sam Weller does a fantastic job with his subject. He first met Ray Bradbury in 2000, when he wrote a tribute piece about his favorite, 80-year-old author for Chicago Tribune Magazine. The two men hit it off right away, and soon they decided to work on a biography of Bradbury together.
Readers get the best of all worlds. Bradbury’s still alive to give his side to every story, while as a journalist Weller has interviewed dozens of Bradbury’s friends and family to give us a detailed portrait of this complex and amazing man…who never learned how to drive and yet sent men to Mars (albeit a Mars routed deeply in the 19th century) in his Martian Chronicles.
I knew Bradbury didn’t drive, I didn’t know he did start to fly, finally, at the age of 62. ” ‘I took my first flight and I didn’t panic. I discovered that I wasn’t afraid of flying. I was afraid of me. I was afraid that I would run up and down the aisles screaming for them to stop the plane.’ When that didn’t happen, Ray’s fear of flying abated and he began flying regularly.”
It’s all here. Ray’s early life as a science fiction writer, his ground-breaking The Martian Chronicles which catapulted him to fame and out of science fiction into literature, his work as a scriptwriter in Hollywood for Moby Dick starring Gregory Peck and directed by John Huston, his forays into television, and his work on such famous novels as Fahrenheit 451 and Dandelion Wine.
Beadbury’s writing secret?
“At the beginning of 1941, he made a silent pledge to write one story a week, every week, for a year. He thought that if he wrote fifty-two stories that year, “at least one of them had to be decent.”
Bradbury and World War II?
He was ruled 4F because of his eyesight. “He would be left to, as he put it, “live for his country.”…While Ray was quietly elated at the news, at least one of his friends was incensed. Robert Heinlein, a graduate of the naval academy and a former officer who could no longer serve because he had been diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis, felt that Ray was betraying his country, that he was a coward.”
Bradbury and John Huston?
“The relationship between Ray and Huston was splintering by the day. When Ray arrived in London, Huston barely spoke to him. To John Huston, Ray Bradbury was blemished; he was not living according to the Hemingway code. “This man,” wrote Huston in his autobiography, “who sent people on exploratory flights to the distant stars, was terrified of airplanes. You could hardly coax him into a car.”
Bradbury and Disney’s version of his “Something Wicked This Way Comes:
“Ray would soon realize that he made a big mistake. In 1983, the day before filming began, Ray met with Clayton. “I sat across the table from him,” Ray recalled, “and he handed me the script.” Jack said, “We’ve got a new script for the film.” Ray was incredulous. *He had written the screenplay based on *his novel, a screenplay he had meticulously honed according to Clayton’s detailed instructions in 1977. Who had written a new screenplay? *Why had someone written a new screenplay?”
In his introduction, Sam Weller describes the man that the general public knows:
“…Ray Bradbury belongs to all generations…The G.I. Generation…read Ray Bradbury’s 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 didn’t just read his stories, they listened to them over the night time 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 school and high school literature classics. More important, we read his stories when we weren’t 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.”
Bradbury’s foibles and flaws, dedication and talent are all on display here. Bradbury had a burning ambition since he was a young man: to be a great American author. The book ends on November 17, 2004, when President George W. Bush awarded Bradbury the Medal of Arts in the Oval Office. Sam Weller takes us on Ray Bradbury’s journey to that Oval Office.
