How we take these spirit-soaring liberators of the mind for granted, whether they are writers or otherwise gifted! And how uncommon it is, in the throwaway society, for creators such as Bradbury to hold center stage for 10, 20, 30 years or longer! Rock stars and starlets are born, have their careers, thrust their young before a microphone or a camera—and something new, and wonderful, by Bradbury, has just been published!
Nonpareils generously span the decades with their gifts to us, bridging them above, undergirding that which is worth saving below; and a few carpers cannot egotistically cope with inferences they’re left to draw: that titans at Bradbury’s level are simply more extra-special than extraterrestrials, national treasures, giants who, while merely walking in our midst, seem surfacely so much the same.
Yet Bradbury, a modest and amiable man, describes himself in his Stories introduction as a man whose “child inside . . . remembers all,” even his moment of birth! And irrespective of his work’s quality, Ray has produced more short stories than most authors. He tells how in his introduction to A Memory of Murder (Dell, 1984): “Starting back in the year when I left Los Angeles High School, I put myself on a regimen of writing one story a week for the rest of my life.” He knew, Bradbury rebukes the insatiable revisionists, “that without quantity there could never be any quality
Now, having written The Martian Chronicles, Dark Carnival, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Fahrenheit 451, surely Bradbury does not sustain such a regimen? He does. In continuing to write between 18 and 32 pages weekly, he’s even finished his first “mystery suspense novel,” Death is a Lonely Business.
“Does Bradbury ever write horror?” That question was asked by several people I know, incredibly enough. Aside from a fact made quite clear by such expert practitioners as Dennis Etchison, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and Ramsey Campbell—namely that monsters and murderers are solely obligatory only to makers of horror movies—the answer is: Yes; Ray Bradbury writes horror—some of the finest and most frightening, strangely imaginative, sometimes-beautiful horror ever written. In a way, that is where he began. Ray tells, in “Drunk, and in Charge,” of writing his first stories “long after midnight,” beginning at the age of 12—tales about “ghosts and haunts and things in jars. He recalls having used his relatives for vampires, and anyone who doesn’t know such Bradbury characters as Uncle Einar have another treat in store.
Point of fact, many yarns by the Midwestern master—born August 22, 1920, he has roots in both Illinois and Wisconsin—may be more at home in horror collections than elsewhere. Unless, of course, it’s in a mammoth unpublished volume called The Very Best American Stories, period. What monsters could be more effectively terrifying than the dinosaur in “The Fog Horn,” basis for the motion picture “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms”? And what about the individual chapters or tales comprising Martian Chronicles? Will anybody—it’s almost everyone—who read “Mars is Heaven” forget Captain John Black, and the moment he realized that the “man” sleeping beside him was not his brother?
Or—quickly now—what about “Small Assassin,” “Heavy Set,” “The Town Where No One Got Off,” “The Crowd,” “The Veldt,” “The October Game,” “The Lake,” “The Coffin “The Playground,” or “The Black Ferris”? And don’t write to tell me I forgot one; or 10; or 20—I know.
These dark mysteries Ray explores and describes are, in one sense, more disturbing than those written by writers (I am one) who set out primarily to create horror; and a disturbed or bothered or “things-aren’t-right” feeling can anticipate and follow the horrific outrage. The creative and pragmatic hemispheres of Bradbury’s brain are ideally blended and work in healthy cooperation, you see, as he peers into unhealthy, illusory, evil, or fantastic realms. He quests in order to perceive what life and death are really about, so that we shall know which to celebrate, and when. He has the courage not of the curious, with one mental knee bent for a leap backward, to safety, but of the “child inside” who wants, as happily as possible, to belong, to wonder, and to know—but not too much. The poem which follows, written originally as a Christmas greeting to his legendary friends, aseasonally serves to ask questions about our eventual destinations. But being written by Ray Bradbury, the alternatives are reversed—and not necessarily limited to hell, or to heaven.
Long after Ecclesiastes:
The First Book of Dichotomy,
The Second Book of Symbiosis,
What do they say?
Work away.
Make do.
Believe.
Conceive
That by the bowels of Christ It may be true—
There’s more to Matter Than me and you.
There’s Universe Terse
In the microscope.
With hope find Elephant
beyond—
God’s fond of vastness there.
And everywhere? spare parts!
This large, that small!
His All spreads forth in seas
Of multiplicities
While staying mere.
Things do adhere, then fly apart;
The heart pumps one small tide
While brides of Time train by in
Comets’ tails.
Flesh jails our senses;
All commences or stops short
To start again.
The stars are rain that falls on
twilight field.
All’s yield, all’s foundering to
death.
Yet in an instant God’s sweet breath sighs Life
again.
All’s twain yet all is twin
While, micro-midge within,
Dire hairy mammoth hides in
flea.
I hop with him!
And trumpet to the skies!
All dies?
No, all’s reborn.
The world runs to its End?
No: Christmas Morn
Where my small candle flickers
in the dark.
My spark then fuses Catherine
Wheel
Which ricochets wild flesh in
all directions;
Resurrections of hope and will
I feel.
Antheaps of elephants do mole
in me.
In good Christ’s crib by shore of
Galilee
We all step forth to feast
On star in East which rises in
pure shouts.
We hug our doubts, but love,
For we’re above as well as low;
Our bodies stay, our senses go
And pull old blood along;
We move to grave ourselves on
Moon and Mars
And then, why not, the stars?
But always mindful on the way
to sense
Where flesh and Nothing
stop/commence;
Where shuttling God in swift
osmosis
Binds abyss sea In space born flea
And give us war-mad men some
hope
To fire-escape psychosis,
Moves tongues to say
What’s day is night, night-day,
What’s lost to sight is found
The Cosmic Ground which
shrinks us small
But dreams us tall again.
Our next desire? Space!
We race to leap into that fire,
To Phoenix-forth our lives.
God thrives in flame,
Do we game and play,
God and Man one name?
Under pseudonym,
Does God scribble us,
We Him?
Give up being perplexed,
Here’s a text that’s final,
God, the spinal cord,
We, the flesh of Lord.
In the Pleiades,
Read both, if you please.
Immortality’s prognosis
Scriptured, shaped, designed,
Palmer pen
ned and signed:
The First Book of Dichotomy!
The Second Book of
Symbiosis!
My Grandmother’s Japonicas
(With Tributes)
Charles Beaumont
The “man who needs no introduction” is, likely as not, the man (or woman) who would win the Most Often Introduced award in his profession or purview. Editors do these things, I’ve found with mild horror, because it’s always done—atrocious motivation for a maverick who spins fantasies. What, ultimately, can I tell you about the likes of Bradbury or Bloch that you are hungering to know?
The pity is that you probably will benefit from some remarks about Charles Beaumont unless you’re 40-plus or an attentive reader of names on the old Twilight Zone credit crawl. He wouldn’t be 60 yet, if he were still with us, but he’s been gone for almost 20 years.
And not to know Charles Beaumont or his work is, for a reader of Masques, akin to never having read or heard of Ray, Bob, or Richard Matheson. Or Peter Straub, Stephen King, Fritz Leiber, Ira Levin, or Tom Tryon. Or Serling, Dahl, Shirley Jackson; or Fredric Brown. Any experienced writer in Masques; or Dunsany, Lovecraft, Blackwood; O’Connor, Oates—
Or James Thurber; Mark Twain; Herman Melville.
We are talking about the man whom Ray Bradbury used as an example for new writers: Write, he told them, write often, work at it, the way Chuck did.
But first, ah-h, first you get an idea somewhere. Anywhere; read something or listen to two kids talking. Get it and poke at it, question and explore it, twist it around, enjoy it, work with it! For it was Bradbury’s observation, in his introduction to Bantam’s Best of Beaumont (1982), that nobody goes around telling Hemingway’s ideas; or those of Faulkner, and Steinbeck. “Idea is everything,” says Bradbury—please copy: Ray Bradbury!—and Chuck, somewhere, bobs his head and pounds on the table: YES. Along with, Bradbury suggests, Verne, and Hawthorne.
I did not know Charles Beaumont. Yet within a day after John Maclay, Baltimore publisher, asked me to select writers for Masques, I wanted—unreasonably, I assumed; Chuck’s gone—something, anything unpublished, which he’d written. That was my idea. Or maybe it was Mort Castle’s. Ardath
Mayhar put me in touch with Joe Lansdale, who said William F. Nolan was one of Beaumont’s best friends; Bill and I became chums and he told me, bluntly, to forget it. There was simply nothing.
What he’d forgotten, a few weeks before the anniversary of Chuck’s death, was the extraordinary masterwork that is lovingly conveyed to you between the tributes of Ray Russell and Nolan. On one of those incredible Forever Days—the kind that reinforce your acceptance of zones, third levels, wonderlands—Bill’s package arrived, his letter joyously announcing the contents: a photocopy of Charles Beaumont’s last unpublished work, “My Grandmother’s Japonicas.”
Instantly I read it, then reread it. It occurred to me I might never have enjoyed reading anything else quite so much since my boyhood.
Bill ached to have his tribute to Chuck included. Matter of respect. Ray Russell did, too—and got my letter filled with raves for “My Grandmother’s Japonicas” on that anniversary I mentioned. As Playboy editor, it was Ray who “ran in to Hefner’s office, demanded that he read” Chuck’s “Black Country,” then. It was Richard Matheson who pointed out how we could obtain the rights to publish “Japonicas” for the first time. What those immensely talented gentlemen got for their considerable trouble was the ineffably doleful joy of seeing their colleague’s final work where it belongs: ready for you to read, and reread it.
A Short, Incandescent Life
Ray Russell
When Charles Beaumont died on February 27, 1967, his friends and family were, in a sense, prepared. He had been dying gradually for years, of a rare disease. I happened to be out of the house, delivering the rough manuscript of a novel to my typist, when the news came. Ironically, the novel was The Colony, in which Beaumont appears in the fictional guise of “Chet Montague.” When I got back from the typist’s, I saw in my wife’s face that something had happened. She told me there had been a phone call from a friend of ours. “Chuck died this morning,” she added gently.
After phoning Chuck’s widow, Helen, I sought the seclusion of my study, where I sat alone for quite a long time, communing with my memories. I heard Chuck’s voice, and mine, overlapping in ebullient conversation, often raucous, frequently ribald; I heard shouted arguments about literature and drama (strangers “discuss,” friends argue); I tasted the meals we had shared in restaurants all over Los Angeles, Chicago, New York; I saw again the first manuscript of his I had accepted as an editor, and felt its weight in my hands (10,000 words, typed on heavy bond); I remembered the grinding days we had spent collaborating on a screenplay. Outside my study, it was quiet; just a few birdcalls and the occasional soft plop of the red, berrylike fruit of the Brazilian pepper tree, falling to the ground outside my window.
Finally, I took the cover off my typewriter and tapped out a few paragraphs about Chuck, which I mailed to Playboy magazine in Chicago. Beaumont had been one of their best writers, and I felt sure they would want to publish a short eulogy. As a friend of his, and as the magazine’s former executive editor, I considered myself amply qualified to write it. They surprised me by declining, giving as their reason: “We’ve decided to limit obits to full-time major staffers.” Obituaries and eulogies of
Chuck appeared in many other quarters, of course: among them, The Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and a fine article in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, written by William F. Nolan. [Published, following “My Grandmother’s Japonicas,” for the first time in book form.—Ed.] But the following words, intended for Playboy, were never published anywhere until now:
CHARLES BEAUMONT
1929-1967
Charles Beaumont is dead, at the age of 38. He was one of Playboy’s most popular contributors for over a decade—from 1954, our first year of publication, to 1965, when the illness that was to be his last halted his typewriter.
That machine—a massive German “Torpedo,” built to take rigorous punishment—was seldom silent, for Beaumont was a voluminous and variegated writer, equally adept at fiction and non-fiction. Such Playboy stories as “The Dark Music,” “Night Ride,” “The Hunger” will come to mind; and any number of his nostalgic articles—“Requiem for Radio,” “The Bloody Pulps,” “The Comics.” Outstanding among the large body of his work for us is the novella, “Black Country” (September 1954) and the essay, “Chaplin” (March 1960). “Chaplin” won him our Best Article award. If we had been presenting awards in 1954, “Black Country” assuredly would have earned him the Best Fiction honor in that year.
Chuck Beaumont, however, was more to us than a talented writer. He was a close friend. From the beginning, when we gave him his first publication outside the science-fiction field, he was indelibly associated with this magazine, and proud of the connection. The feeling was mutual.
His home was in California, but he paid numerous visits to our Chicago offices, frequently staying in town for weeks at a time while he polished a piece for a pressing deadline. During such stays, many convivial glasses were raised with the editors, and many nights sped by swiftly, propelled toward dawn by good talk, high spirits and laughter.
Although much of his fiction dealt with the macabre, his personality was anything but morbid. He was full of wit and warmth, and was not ashamed of being a deep-dyed romantic. Given a choice between a long, drab life and a short, incandescent one, it is entirely possible he might have chosen the latter—and his short life truly was incandescent in its brightness and intensity. Chuck loved fast cars and often raced them in competition; he loved movies and comic strips and fine books and good music; he loved trains and travel; he loved language, our motley, marvelous English language in particular; most of all, he loved to write. Enthusiasm and a sense of wonder were his hallmarks—his greatest qualities as a man and his most valuable assets as a writer.
<
br /> He left behind six books: The Hunger, Yonder, Night Ride and Other Journeys, The Magic Man (collections of his short stories), Remember? Remember? (his nostalgic pieces) and a novel, The Intruder, which dealt with the agonies of racial integration.
He also wrote several motion pictures and an impressive number of television plays, but he always admitted to being happiest “when I’m doing prose.” We feel privileged to have published the best of that prose and grateful to have known its author. We mourn his death and the untimeliness of it; we mourn the unborn works he was not granted the years to create; but we do not mourn his spirit. That, and our memory of it, we fondly toast.
* * *
Chuck had often told me and his other friends about “My Grandmother’s Japonicas.” He had a special fondness for it. When we’d ask him why he’d never offered it for publication, he’d always reply, somewhat mysteriously, “I’m saving it,” hinting that it would be an important chapter of a larger work, such as an autobiographical novel. I read it only after he died, and I do believe it to be wholly or in great part autobiographical.
It fits everything he ever told me about his boyhood in Everett, Washington, back in the days when he was still Charles Leroy Nutt—a name he wisely abandoned when he embarked on a career as a professional writer. I have no personal conviction—other than the most wishful of thinking—that Chuck is “looking down” on us at this moment; but I wouldn’t dream of denying the possibility that he may be. And if he is, I think he’s pleased that the story of his Baba’s non-existent japonicas is being published at last . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My Grandmother’s Japonicas
Charles Beaumont
I’ve lost track now of the number of people who died in my grandmother’s rooming house in Everett, Washington—but when I was going on sixteen the count stood at an even dozen—eight men and four women. They were mostly old folks: pensioned-off railroad workers, lonely widowed ladies of the town, a few from the heart of the family itself—my uncle Double-G, cousin Elmina—but some were not so old. Joe Alvarez, for instance, was only thirty-something when he breathed out his last. And there was a pretty young girl about whom I remember just that her face was very white and she had once taught school.
Masques Page 23