Listen to the Echoes

by Ray Bradbury

  I am deeply hopeful that as a result of this, forgiveness will begin. Hatred will begin to disappear. At the end of a period of time, the invisible war will vanish and we will live quietly again, not in panic or in fright of the future.

  WELLER: In Fahrenheit 451, you predicted everything from flat-panel televisions to iPod earbuds and twenty-four-hour banking machines. How do you suppose you envisioned so much in that book? It’s uncanny.

  BRADBURY: It shocks me as much as anybody. I don’t know. I was just using my imagination when I wrote it. My characters wrote that book: Clarisse, Montag, Beatty, and Faber. All of the ideas came from them. When my characters speak, I always listen to them.

  WELLER: Since you were able to predict so much, particularly as it related to the proliferation of mass media, what do you think is the future of television?

  BRADBURY: I hope there are more channels like Turner Classic Movies. A channel like that is a time machine. I turn it on and there’s my past. Every movie I’ve seen since I was three years old. We need more channels like The History Channel that are time machines that tell us about our past. We mustn’t forget our past. We must learn from it.

  WELLER: Much has been made of our societal dependence on foreign oil. How should we move away from oil as a primary source of energy?

  BRADBURY: To start, we need better public transportation. We need to use more alternative sources of energy, like the windmill farms out near my house in Palm Springs. But more than anything, we need to look at the French. They have been using nuclear power safely for many years now. Eighty percent of their energy comes from nuclear power, and they’ve never had an accident. We must move away from oil and toward nuclear energy. France and Japan have it right.

  WELLER: What is the future of humanity on planet Earth?

  BRADBURY: We’re going to make it. We’ve already made it this far. We’ve conquered diseases. My sister died of the flu when I was seven. My brother’s twin died in the flu epidemic in 1918. My uncle died in the same outbreak. In those days, there were no medicines. We forget, because today’s generation has grown up with penicillin and sulfonamide. People have stopped dying, but before that we died from the simplest things. So we conquer things. We survive. We always have. We will live on.

  appendix

  THE LOST PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW

  THE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW WITH RAY BRADBURY WAS CONDUCTED in 1976 for The Paris Review. It never appeared in print. A single, undated letter from journalist and writer William Plummer, the interviewer, indicates that Review editor George Plimpton was dissatisfied with the tone of the conversation, finding it “a bit informal” and “maybe overly enthusiastic.” It certainly could not have helped that during the interview Bradbury lambasted the New York literary establishment.

  Plummer returned the thirty-five-page typed transcript to Bradbury, along with two and a half pages of additional typed notes and questions for Bradbury to address. Bradbury never got around to rewriting this rather illuminating interview.

  Bradbury finds the act of writing and creating as mysterious in nature. He is an emotional writer rather than an intellectual one. He bristles when asked to specifically examine his own approach to the craft of writing. A writer who relies heavily on a subconscious creative state, Bradbury turns a deaf ear when critics and scholars endeavor to analyze his work. “I don’t want to know what I’m doing!” is the usual spirited response.

  George Plimpton was right. Bradbury is most definitely enthusiastic. And when it comes to explicating his own creative process, Bradbury can be downright elusive. Not by intent, however. For Ray Bradbury has always compared his approach to writing to a magician’s sleight of hand. In Bradbury’s case, the magic is often as mysterious to him as it is to his audience.

  This unpublished Paris Review interview is an important document and time capsule that reveals the mind and spirit of Ray Bradbury circa 1976.

  PARIS REVIEW: Tell me why you write science fiction.

  BRADBURY: Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world, you are writing science fiction. It’s always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

  PARIS REVIEW: Can you give me an example?

  BRADBURY: Sure, let’s say thirty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman swallowing a pill and destroying the Catholic Church and thereby causing the advent of women’s lib. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds, I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. You see, science fiction is always the art of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

  If I had been a beggar on the streets of Baghdad or a teller of tales in Bombay two thousand years ago, my science fiction story would have run like this: “Sometime in the next two to three hundred years a new science will come into the world.” The children sitting there in the afternoon sunlight would have said, “What kind of science?” “The science of horsemanship,” I’d say. And they’d say, “Come on, the science of horsemanship?” So the Persians come along and invent the true art of horsemanship. And what do they do with it? They push back the Roman Empire and change the world.

  PARIS REVIEW: There appears to be a new interest in science fiction, especially among young people. Does science fiction satisfy where mainstream writing does not?

  BRADBURY: That really nails it right there. Yes, it does satisfy, because the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last twenty years. The major ideas of our times have been neglected. Only the science fiction writers have paid attention to the impact of, say, the hydrogen and atom bomb on our lives and on politics. Years ago, we thought the atom bomb meant the end of the world. A lot of stories were written about this. We were terrified, and it’s exactly this terror that has caused us to begin to behave like Christians. It’s been up to science fiction to pay attention to this sort of truth; the mainstream ignores it.

  PARIS REVIEW: I’ve noticed, too, that well-known critics are beginning to pay attention to science fiction. Leslie Fiedler and H. Bruce Franklin, to name just two, have compiled anthologies and done studies. What’s going on?

  BRADBURY: As always, the intellectuals are ten, fifteen, twenty years late. They’re always late, and they’re generally wrong. They’re so busy being intellectual, they don’t know how to feel, they don’t know how to love, they don’t know how to care. Which is a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Leslie Fiedler should have done his study of science fiction twenty years ago, when we really needed him. All of the important book reviewers and critics and analysts should have recognized science fiction sooner, recognizing that America, of all the countries of the world, is the most important culture of ideas. We have changed the world with these ideas in medicine and in the other sciences. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery.

  PARIS REVIEW: And now the field is becoming respectable?

  BRADBURY: Twenty-five years ago if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers. Of course, twenty-five years ago hardly any books were being published in the field. The earliest publications of Doubleday and of the Simon and Schuster science fiction series were in 1949 or 1950. Before that it was lucky if one or two books a yea
r were published; we couldn’t afford to buy them anyway, since we were all too poor. Back in 1946, as I remember, there were only two science fiction anthologies published. That’s how bereft we were, that’s how sparse the field was, that’s how unimportant it all was. And when the first books began to be published, lots of them in the early 1950s, they weren’t reviewed by responsible magazines, good literary magazines. And that’s still pretty much true. If you opened the pages of The American Scholar for the last twenty-five years you wouldn’t believe that any of the science fiction writers of our time even existed. So we had to come to birth undercover. We were all closet science fiction writers. Very slowly, people have begun to allow us out in the open and have stopped making fun of us.

  PARIS REVIEW: Do you think science fiction offers the writer an easier way to get at ideas?

  BRADBURY: Ideas are uncomfortable to write about if you do them in straight stories. You write a novel like Fahrenheit 451. You’re dealing with book-burning, aren’t you? A very serious subject. You’ve got to be careful you don’t start lecturing people. So you put your story a few years into the future and you invent a fireman who has been burning books instead of putting out fires—which is a grand idea in itself—and you start him on the adventure of discovering that maybe books shouldn’t be burned. He reads his first book. He falls in love. And then you send him out into the world to change his life. It’s a great suspense story and locked into it is the truth you want to tell, without pontificating.

  I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, into the face of Medusa, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield, then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it’s really looking at a reflection of the truth that is immediately in front of us. So you have a ricochet vision, a ricocheted truth, which enables you to swallow it and have fun with it, instead of being self-conscious and super-intellectual.

  PARIS REVIEW: Do you read your S.F. contemporaries?

  BRADBURY: I’ve always believed that in your own field you should do very little reading once you’re into it. At the start it’s good to know what everyone’s doing. So, when I began, when I was seventeen, of course I read everything by Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke, and the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and van Vogt, all the people who appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, but my big science fiction influences would have to be H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. They are the traditional authors for all of us. And of course I’ve gone back to read Verne in later years and found in him many of the qualities which I’ve developed in myself. In other words, he’s a writer of moral fables, an instructor in the humanities; he believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally. His hero Nemo—who’s sort of the flip side of Melville’s madman, Ahab—goes about the world taking weapons away from people to instruct them toward peace.

  PARIS REVIEW: How about newer people, the Robert Silverbergs and Ursula Le Guins?

  BRADBURY: I prefer not to read the younger writers in the field. Quite often you can be depressed by discovering they’ve happened onto an idea you yourself are working on. What you want is simply to get on with your own work.

  PARIS REVIEW: You mentioned a minute ago about beginning at age seventeen …

  BRADBURY: Actually, I began earlier than that.

  PARIS REVIEW: Did you always want to be a writer?

  BRADBURY: I think so. It started with Poe. I fell in love with the jewelry of Poe. Hey, that’s pretty good. He’s a gem encruster, isn’t he? I began to imitate him from the time I was twelve or so until I was about eighteen. And I was busy imitating Edgar Rice Burroughs, of course, and John Carter. I was doing traditional horror stories, which I think everyone who goes into the field starts out with … you know, getting locked in tombs. I drew Egyptian mazes. I loved to illustrate, too, and I was a cartoonist. I always wanted my own comic strip. So I was not only writing about Tarzan, I was drawing my own Sunday panels. I did the usual adventure stories, located them in South America or among the Aztecs or in Africa. There was always the beautiful maiden and the sacrifice. So I knew I was going into one of the arts: I was drawing, acting, and writing.

  Everything went into ferment in one year, 1932, when I was twelve. There were Poe, Carter, Burroughs, the comics, and I was surrounded by carnival and circus people. I listened to a lot of imaginative radio shows, especially one called “Chandu the Magician,” which was recently exhumed as a nostalgia item. I’m sure it was quite junky, but not to me. Every night when the show went off the air I sat down and, from memory, wrote out the whole script. I couldn’t help myself. Chandu was against all the villains of the world and so was I; he responded to a psychic summons and so did I.

  PARIS REVIEW: Where did you do your acting?

  BRADBURY: One day in Tucson, Arizona, in that same year, when I was twelve, I told all my friends I was going to go down to the nearest radio station and become an actor. My friends snorted and said, “Do you know anyone down there?” I said no. They said, “Do you have any pull with anyone?” I said, “No. I’ll just hang around, and they’ll discover how talented I am.”

  So I went to the radio station, hung around for two weeks emptying ashtrays and running out for newspapers and just being underfoot. And two weeks later I wound up on radio every Saturday night reading the comics to the kiddies: Bringing Up Father, Tailspin Tommy, and Buck Rogers.

  PARIS REVIEW: You seem to have been open to a variety of influences.

  BRADBURY: A conglomerate heap of trash, that’s what I am. [Laughs] But it burns with a high flame. I’ve had my “literary” loves, too. I like to think of myself on a train going across midnight America conversing with my favorite authors, and on that train would be people like George Bernard Shaw, who was interested in everything, interested in the fictions of ideas. He himself on occasion wrote things that could be dubbed science fiction. We’d sit up late into the night turning over ideas and saying: Well, if thus-and-so is true about women in 1900, what is it going to be in 1975 or in the year 2000?

  PARIS REVIEW: You’ve mentioned Burroughs, Carter, Poe. Who else would be on that train?

  BRADBURY: A lot of poets: Hopkins, Frost, Shakespeare. And then, writers like Huxley, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe …

  PARIS REVIEW: How have they been of use to you? Say, Wolfe, for example.

  BRADBURY: He was a great romantic, of course. When you’re nineteen, he opens the doors of the world for you, doesn’t he? We use certain authors at certain times of our lives, and we may never go back to them again. Wolfe is perfect when you’re nineteen; if you fall in love with Shaw when you’re thirty it’s going to be a lifetime love. And I think that’s true of certain things of Thomas Mann. I read Death in Venice when I was twenty, and it’s gotten better every year since. Style is truth. Once you nail down what you want to say about yourself and your fears and your life, then that becomes your style and you go to those teachers who can teach you how to use words to fit your truth.

  I learned from Gerald Heard, and a hell of a lot from John Collier. And also from people like Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter. There were a lot of women writers that I was madly in love with. Edith Wharton, I still go back and reread her, and Jessamyn West. Friendly Persuasion is one of my favorite books of short stories. I learned from John Steinbeck how to write objectively and yet get all the truths in there without too much extra comment.

  PARIS REVIEW: Some of the passages I like the most—especially in The Martian Chronicles—are intensely lyrical …

  BRADBURY: That comes from reading so much poetry every day of my life. My favorite writers have been those who’ve said things well. I used to study single lines out of Eudora Welty. She had the remarkable ability, and I gather she still does, of giving you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. In one l
ine! And you must study these things to be a good writer. Eudora Welty would have a woman simply come into a room and look around. In one sweep she gave you the feel of the room, the sense of the woman’s character, and the action itself. All in twenty words. And you say: How’d she do that?! What adjective? What verb? What noun? How did she select them and put them together? You study that.

  I was an intense student. Sometimes I’d get an old copy of Wolfe and cut out paragraphs and paste them in my story, because I couldn’t do it, you see. I was so frustrated! And then I’d retype whole sections of other people’s novels just to see how it felt coming out. Learn their rhythm. I don’t know how many young people do that nowadays; I suppose a lot of people do.

  PARIS REVIEW: Certain writers are notably missing from your train. Proust, Joyce, Flaubert, Nabokov, writers who tend to think of literature as a series of formal problems. Has that line of thought ever interested you?

  BRADBURY: No. If people put me to sleep, they put me to sleep. God, I’ve tried to read Proust so often, and I will recognize his style and the beauty of his expression. But he puts me to sleep. And Joyce, the same. Joyce doesn’t have many ideas. You see, I’m completely idea-oriented, and I appreciate certain kinds of French writing and English storytelling more. I just can’t imagine being in a world and not being fascinated with what ideas are doing to us.

  PARIS REVIEW: You’re self-educated, aren’t you?

  BRADBURY: Yes, I am. I’m completely library-educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down when I was in grade school, high school, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I see some of the books my kids are forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers and be graded on, well, what if you don’t like those books?