by Ray Bradbury
BRADBURY: I lived next door to an old powerhouse when I was in Venice in the early 1940s. I used to go out at night and just stand there, listening to the machinery. It was very simple. The hum of all that tremendous equipment was a religious hum to me. And that hum said things to me and stirred up my soul. So I went and wrote the short story, all because that old powerhouse hummed at me.
WELLER: One of the most popular stories in The Martian Chronicles is “There Will Come Soft Rains,” about the mechanized house going through its automations after the atomic bomb has been dropped. There are no people in that story. Where did you get the idea for that?
BRADBURY: I picked up the newspaper after Hiroshima was bombed, and they had a photograph of a house with the shadows of the people who lived there burned into the side from the intensity of the bomb. The Japanese people were gone, but their shadows remained. It affected me so much, I wrote the story.
WELLER: I’m curious about the origins of another apocalyptic tale, “The Last Night of the World,” which appears in The Illustrated Man. You must have been quite bothered by the devastation of World War II and the escalation of the Cold War.
BRADBURY: I went to bed one night, not long after marrying Maggie, and thought, “What if we never wake up?” The US government was experimenting with bombs at Eniwetok, part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. I wondered if these bombs would mean the human race would be dead forever. So I had to write that story.
WELLER: What do you recall about writing “And the Moon Be Still as Bright”?
BRADBURY: Maggie gave me a lot of these ideas by quoting poetry to me. We were walking down the street one night—we went to a movie in Hollywood—and all of a sudden she started reciting the poem, “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving.” I said, “That’s a lovely poem, what is that?” She said, “Have you ever read it? It’s by Lord Byron.” So I went and read it. Oh my God! It’s a great poem. So I wrote a story around it. It was wrapped around that poem because Maggie recited it to me that night.
WELLER: Where did you get the idea that became “The Parrot Who Met Papa”?
BRADBURY: Sid Stebel has been my friend forever. And Russ Burton was a good friend. He worked for Time-Life. One day in 1952, Sid called me and said, “Ernest Hemingway has a new novel called The Old Man and the Sea appearing in Life magazine tonight. There’s a printing plant over on the east side of town, and Russ and I are going to go and pick up copies of Life magazine as they come off the press. You want to come with us?” I said, “Oh God, yes, I do.” So at midnight we went over to the plant and stood by the presses and copies of The Old Man and the Sea came off and we each got one. Our hero, Hemingway!
We carried them off to a bar that was still open, and we sat and read The Old Man and the Sea, and we talked about Papa and how much we loved him. While we were there, Russ said, “I was in Cuba a couple of years ago, and I never met Papa myself, but I visited the bar where he used to go near Finca Vigía in Havana. When I was in this bar, they had a parrot there, and the bartender said to me, ‘Do you know whose parrot that is? That parrot knew Papa. And he talked to Papa.’ ” When I heard that story, I knew I had to write it. It was wonderful! So I made a note of it and brought it home and put it in my files down in the basement. That was 1952.
A decade later, Hemingway killed himself. Sometime after that I was looking through my files and I came across that note from that night we were at the bar reading The Old Man and the Sea. The note said, “The parrot who knew Papa,” and I thought, “My God! What if that parrot is still alive, and papa told him his final story?” So I sat down and wrote the short story that day. It’s a great story. I love it. So you see how stories happen? They just happen.
WELLER: How important is this notion of “What if” to your ideas? “What if” Hemingway recited his last masterwork to a talking parrot? “What if” atomic war came to earth and a mechanized house continued to operate with no people there? “What if” the last dinosaur on earth, living in the deep sea, heard the sad moan of a lighthouse foghorn and mistook it for the call of its long-lost mate? Is the “What if” question central to your ideas?
BRADBURY: You must never ask questions of yourself when writing a story. Never think about stories. Do them. All of these stories came to me, boom, like that! When I’m up late at night and watching an old movie on television, I’ll recognize a bit actor and their name will come to me and I’ll know what films they did. It all comes to me and I don’t think about it. It jumps right out of my head. So it’s either in there, or it’s not in there. Trust your subconscious to have all these springs in there. All you have to do is poke them, and they pop out.
WELLER: Stephen King once referred to your first book, Dark Carnival, as “the Dubliners of American Gothic.” One of many frightening tales in that remarkable collection is the story, “The Jar.” What can you tell me about the origins of that one?
BRADBURY: When I was fourteen, I went into an exhibit on Venice Pier that had all these fetuses in jars, including a cat, and other animals, and then little, tiny human fetuses. They got bigger and bigger and bigger, jar by jar, until there was a full grown baby at the end. There were no explanations for these things, but I sensed it. I didn’t know anything about sex or conception at that point in my life, but I had an idea. That’s the inspiration behind “The Jar.”
WELLER: I’m curious about a more recent short story, “Unterderseaboat Doktor,” from the collection Quicker than the Eye. What can you tell me about that one?
BRADBURY: One day my friend Russ Burton was talking about a psychiatrist that he knew who was a former submarine commander for Hitler. I said, “My God, a psychiatrist who was a submarine commander. How Freudian!” So I jotted down a note and later wrote the short story about this psychiatrist. I’m lying on his couch one day being analyzed, and all of a sudden he cries, “Dive! Dive!” and I roll off the couch and get under it and look up and there’s a periscope going into the ceiling. The lesson there is to be alert to what you hear from other people, as well as to what you say. That’s where stories come from.
When I was in Ireland sixty years ago working for John Huston, we’d sit around the fire late at night out at his estate and we’d get terribly drunk. I was not a hard-liquor person. I’ve always been a wine drinker and started drinking beer later in life. But John was great for all kinds of whiskies. So we’d sit around the fire and get maudlin, and John would say things like, “You know, Ray, the problem with our relationship is you don’t love me half as much as I love you.” I’d say, “Come on, John, I do so.” So one night we were sitting by the fire drinking Scotch, and John said, “You hear that, Ray, outside, just now? You hear that, out there in the wind?” I said, “What?” And he said, “Do you know what that is? Do you know? That’s a banshee, Ray. A banshee. A ghost, mourning for the dead. Tell you what, Ray, why don’t you put on my coat and go out and bring the banshee in?” I said, “No, no, John, I don’t want to do that,” and he said, “Don’t be yellow, Ray, don’t be yellow. Now get out there!”
Well, I never did go out and get the damn banshee, but I wrote the short story “Banshee” later that starred John Huston, and in the story I killed the son of a bitch! I’ve had nightmares for years since writing Moby Dick where someone bangs on my front door in the middle of the night, and I run down and open it and John Huston is standing there with a snorkel outfit on. He has a harpoon, a mask, an oxygen tank, and he says, “Okay, kid, let’s go down to the ocean and I’ll teach you how to snorkel,” and I say, “No, I don’t want to do that, John.” And he says, “Don’t be yellow, Ray, now come on!” and he takes me down and drowns me and I wake up. The point I’m trying to make is that there’s so much in our heads already that we don’t know is there. The more we test it, the more we drag it out, the more that follows. This is where I get my stories.
WELLER: As a teacher, I firmly believe that you are the perfect bridge author between young-adult books and literature. Your ideas are exciting to young readers—yo
u write of rocket ships and new sneakers and dinosaurs—while utilizing all the techniques of great literature.
BRADBURY: All my books are children’s books. I never knew that I was writing for kids, but when I do book signings, eight-year-olds show up with The Illustrated Man or Fahrenheit, it’s quite amazing.
WELLER: Why do you think you appeal to so many young readers?
BRADBURY: I write Greek myths and Roman myths, and that makes the difference. When we are kids, we love the Greek myths. It’s all about love, and we don’t know exactly what love is. I was influenced by the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Norwegians, the Chinese, and the Swedish—the Norse Eddas. That’s why my stories are so popular with children. Because they can remember them and they don’t hurt. You can talk about death. You can talk about sex, which is a mystery, a beautiful mystery. And something stirs in them, and I don’t know if I’m stirring them, but there it is.
Another element I have recognized about my stories, and why they appeal to young readers, is that you can write sequels to many of them. You say to a kid, “Do your own version of ‘Kaleidoscope.’ If you were falling through space with your friends, what would you say? Or, if you had, an illustrated man, what tattoo would you see on his body? Or—” God, I could name a dozen other stories you can do that with. Same thing.
WELLER: What is the difference between myth and metaphor?
BRADBURY: They can be similar, but they can be different. A metaphor can be pure of history. It can be pure of all that went before. You can make a new metaphor. But a myth has a metaphor, which works on every level; it’s very complete. I never thought of that before. That’s a very good question. I’d like to explore it some more.
WELLER: Getting back to some of your short fiction, the 1945 short story “The Big Black and White Game” was one of your first publications in a slick magazine and not in the pulps. It is also a straightforward, literary narrative about racial tensions on a baseball field. At that point in your career, you were writing fantasy stories almost exclusively. Was there a conscious effort to write a literary tale stripped of the fantastic elements to break into a more respected magazine?
BRADBURY: No. It just happened because I had witnessed that baseball game when I was a boy. That story is, oh, probably eighty-percent true. You see, I never know anything about anything. All my stories are written because they have to be written. You must never interfere with the gut.
WELLER: In 1950 you wrote the 25,000-word novella, “The Fireman.” Three years later you added 25,000 more words to the story, turning it into your classic novel Fahrenheit 451. I would imagine you had to consult the original story in order to turn it into the novel. How did you do this if you don’t like to intellectualize while writing?
BRADBURY: I just asked the characters to talk to me some more. I had the fire chief talk more. I had Faber talk more. So I just listened to them.
WELLER: How closely did you work from the original novella in reworking it into Fahrenheit 451?
BRADBURY: I tried not to look too much. When you write a play, don’t look too much at the original. Write it first, then see what you’ve left out. That’s what I did when I wrote Fahrenheit. I’ve never gone back to read the original to see how much I changed.
WELLER: Much of the text is different, including the classic opening line at the beginning of the novel, “It was a pleasure burn.”
BRADBURY: Yes. That was new. Again, I let Montag speak and I listened. Later, when I wrote the play, the fire chief came to me and said, “Would you like to know why I’m a fireman?” That’s not in the book. And he gave me an explanation. He was a romantic. An idealist. At a certain time in his life, too many people died. There was cancer with his mother, suicide with his father, and when he opened his books, they were empty. They couldn’t help him. So he turned on the books. I wish now I could add this to my novel, but I don’t want to mess around with the original.
WELLER: But again, you edited and in some cases rewrote stories when you published The October Country in 1955, and that book was a repackaging of your first collection, Dark Carnival. Why was it okay then, as you put it, to “mess around with the original”?
BRADBURY: I’ve never done that to a published novel. I’ve reworked short stories that were first published in Weird Tales. I was also very young when I wrote them, so I had to go back and take out the clumsy things.
WELLER: Upon publication, Fahrenheit 451 was hailed as a visionary work of social commentary.
BRADBURY: You have to be very careful. If you write about certain subjects, you have to realize that no one is going to pay attention. All social subjects, all political subjects, they go out of style and they are gone. Fahrenheit 451 has social commentary in it, but it’s hidden in an adventure story. It’s a James Bond adventure. It has science-fictional tricks to keep your interest. The mechanical dog is a science-fictional device. There’s flesh all around the social concepts in the book. From the very start of the novel, everything is fantastic, everything is futuristic—and so you read because you are fascinated. How does a fire department work in the future? Especially since it starts fires. Well, that’s just a great idea.
So you read that and along with that you get the message, you shouldn’t be burning books. Except, I don’t argue about that. I argue the reverse, which keeps your interest. Let’s burn books. Why? And then Captain Beatty tells you. They are dangerous. They get you to thinking and that makes you unhappy. There’s no room for diversity because as soon as you become diverse, you begin to argue with people. And then you go to bed very unhappy. So everything in Fahrenheit 451 is presented in the reverse, and you have fun with it and I keep provoking you. Faber gives you some ideas and the captain gives you ideas about the fact that they don’t really have to burn books at all because the education system got provoked by all the minorities, like we’re going through today. You can’t read Huckleberry Finn because of Nigger Jim. Everyone is offended by something. You have to treat the Jews a certain way. Don’t offend the Catholics. Don’t offend the gays.
WELLER: How much of the fictional totalitarian system in Fahrenheit 451 was based on Nazi Germany? After all, you wrote the book just eight years after the conclusion of World War II.
BRADBURY: All during the mid-Thirties, they had newsreel footage in movie theaters. I remember seeing newsreel footage of the Nazis burning books in the streets. And Russia was just as bad. And then along came McCarthy, and he handled things very badly. He came to Hollywood and looked for Communists because it was easy to stigmatize them. But people don’t talk about Russia, even though they killed millions of people. All of that is in my book.
WELLER: What do you make of Fahrenheit 451 landing on banned-books lists? Isn’t that ridiculously ironic?
BRADBURY: It was nothing important. It was a schoolteacher here, a school board member there. It all blew over in one or two days. It wasn’t censorship.
WELLER: How did you get to the UCLA library every day for those now-storied nine days in which you wrote Fahrenheit 451? It was a mile or two away from the home you were living in on Clarkson Road.
BRADBURY: On the bus. One day when I was working on Fahrenheit, I went out to get on the bus and there was this young man sitting on the bench with me. I was twenty-nine years old, and he was about twenty-two, carrying a lot of books, and the bus was late in coming. I looked at his books—they were all science books. We got to talking. I said, “Taking all these subjects?” “Yeah,” he said. “Do you belong to the science fiction club up at UCLA?” He said, “Yeah, I do.” I said, “Who are your favorite writers?” He said, “Well, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein …” I kept waiting, and then he said, “Bradbury,” and I said, “Ohhhh! Do you like Bradbury?” “Yeah, very much.” “Would you like to meet him?” He said, “Oh, yeah, I’d love that.” I said, “He’s right here.” He went into shock, okay.
So we sat there and the bus came. We got on, and I sat with him and asked where he was from. He said, “I’m from Cuba.”
I said, “Oh. Where about in Cuba? Havana?” “Yeah.” “Any special place near Havana?” “Well, yeah. Pica de Via.” I said, “What’s your last name?” He said, “Hemingway.” It was Hemingway’s son! It turned out he lived a couple of blocks from me. I invited him over to the house the next night with his wife and baby.
chapter six
FAITH
LATELY, AS AN OCTOGENARIAN WIDOWER, RAY BRADBURY HAS BEEN spending many of his days sitting alone in a small, shady room in the back of his West Los Angeles home. There, he is surrounded by shelves of books and mountains of papers, letters, story starts, play starts, and manuscripts in various stages of revision, along with copious stacks of fan mail that he spends time answering each day. There is also a large flat-screen television in one corner of the room. For those familiar with Fahrenheit 451, the irony of this is duly noted. Ray’s response: “I’m not against all television, I’m just against bad television!”
Ray sits in an oversized, comfy brown leather chair and goes about his daily writing. In front of him is a TV tray shelving his telephone and an assortment of prescription medications, a necessity of his advancing age. There is a door in the room that leads outside to a back patio. Ray often leaves this door open to let the sunlight and Pacific air pour in. There is just a slight hint of oceanic salt swirling about, along with the stronger scent of hibiscus and rose blossoms that bloom year-round in the small backyard. This garden was the pride of Ray’s beloved wife of 56 years, Marguerite, who passed away on November 24, 2003.
For the last year, Ray has had a visitor come through the doorway, a courageous little black bird that, at first, only stared into the darkened chamber from a safe distance out on the patio. The bird moved in manic hops, each day venturing closer to the doorway, staring in at the elderly man sitting in the cool, shadowy room. When Ray first noticed the avian visitor, he was delighted. He would break up a saltine or a piece of bread and hold it out to the creature.