Listen to the Echoes

by Ray Bradbury

  PARIS REVIEW: That’s very important to you, isn’t it? Going by your own likes and dislikes.

  BRADBURY: Oh God. It’s everything. I was offered the chance to write War and Peace for the screen twenty years ago. The American version, with King Vidor directing. I turned it down. Everyone said, “How can you do that? That’s ridiculous, it’s a great book!” I said, “Well, it isn’t for me. I can’t read it. I can’t get through it, I tried.” That doesn’t mean the book’s bad; just I am not prepared for it. It portrays a very special culture. The names throw me. My wife loves it. She’s read it once every three years for twenty years. They offered the usual thing for a screenplay like that, a hundred thousand dollars. People said, “How can you turn that down?” I said, “Because I’m not a liar.” It’s just that simple. You cannot do things for money in this world. I don’t care how much they offer you, and I don’t care how poor you are. There’s only one excuse ever, ever, ever to take money under those circumstances: If someone in your family is horribly ill and the doctor bills are piled up so high that you’re all going to be destroyed. Then I’d say, Go on and take the job. Go do War and Peace and do a lousy job. And be sorry later.

  PARIS REVIEW: Why did you do Moby Dick?

  BRADBURY: I fell in love with John Huston’s work when I was in my twenties. I saw The Maltese Falcon fourteen, fifteen times, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre scores of times. I went to a screening when I was twenty-nine. John Huston sat right behind me, and I wanted to turn, grab his hand, and say, I love you and I want to work with you. But I held off and waited till I had three books published, so I’d have proof of my love. I called my agent and said, Now I want to meet John Huston. We met on St. Valentine’s night, 1951, which is a great way to start a love affair. I said, “Look, here are my books. If you like them, someday we must work together.” He went to Africa and wrote me from the African Queen location. He said, “I read your books on the plane coming over, and you’re right, someday we’ll work together.” I didn’t see him again for two years, then he came back to LA and called me up. He said, “You got some time to come to Europe and write Moby-Dick for the screen?” I said, “I don’t know, I’ve never been able to read the damn thing.”

  So here I was confronted with a dilemma: Here’s a man that I love and whose work I admire. He’s offering me a job. Now, a lot of people would say: Grab it! Jesus, you like him, doncha? I said, “Tell you what, I’ll go home tonight and I’ll read as much as I can, and I’ll come back for lunch tomorrow. By that time I’ll know how I feel about Melville. Because I’ve had copies of Moby-Dick around the house for years.” So I went home and I got out Moby-Dick. Strangely, a month before I’d been wandering around the house one night and picked up Moby-Dick and said to my wife, “I wonder when I’m going to read this thing.” So here I am sitting down to read it.

  PARIS REVIEW: It’s sort of like the Bible, isn’t it? You read in it.

  BRADBURY: I read it the way I use libraries. I dove into the middle of it instead of starting at the beginning. I came across a lot of beautiful poetry of the whiteness of the whale and the colors of nightmares and the great spirit’s spout. And I came upon a section toward the last where Ahab stands at the rail and says, “It’s a mild, mild day and a mild-looking sky, and the wind smells as if it blew from the shadow of the Andes where the movers are laying down with their scythes.” I turned back to the start: “Call me Ishmael,” and I was in love! You fall in love with poetry. You fall in love with Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board. I found out later that what I recognized was my old friend Shakespeare, and I’d been in love with Shakespeare since I was fourteen. I was able to do the job not because I was in love with Melville, but because I was in love with Shakespeare.

  The first day I went to see Huston, I asked, “Should I read up on the Freudians and Jungians and their interpretations of the white whale?” He said, “Hell no, I’m hiring Bradbury! Whatever is right or wrong about the screenplay will be yours, so we can at least say the skin around it is your skin.” That pleased me.

  So after I’d read the book multitudinous times, I wrote the beginning on the way to Europe on the boat, and that stayed; that was fine. But everything else was so difficult, and I had to borrow bits and pieces from the end of the book and the middle and push them up front, because the book is not constructed like a screenplay. It’s all over the place, a giant cannonade of impressions. And it’s a play, too. Shakespearian asides, stage directions and everything.

  I got out of the bed one morning in London, walked over to the mirror and said, “I am Herman Melville.” The ghost of Melville spoke to me and on that day I rewrote the last thirty, thirty-five pages of the screenplay. It all came out in one passionate explosion. I ran across London and took it to Huston. He said, My God, this is it.

  PARIS REVIEW: The ending’s Bradbury, right? Not Melville?

  BRADBURY: But it really works, because I came up with a revelation. One of the things I said to Huston when I got over there was: First thing, we got to get rid of Fedalla; Fedalla’s a terrible bore. Nobody really likes Fedalla. A few people in the Melville society think he’s okay. But he’s the extra mystical symbol that breaks the whale’s back. Just as O’Neill is difficult to adapt for the screen because there’s too much of him, so is Moby-Dick. It’s a huge book and you’ve got to decide what to throw overboard. I didn’t want Fedalla because he’d turn the whole thing into comedy. If you’re not careful in tragedy, one extra rape, one extra incest, one extra murder, and it’s hoo-haw time all of a sudden. So I got rid of Fedalla, and that leaves us at the end with no one to go down with the whale. So, hell, it’s only natural that Moby Dick takes Ahab down with him and comes back up with all these harpoon lines and Ahab gestures, so when the men follow him they are destroyed. Well, that’s not in the book. I’m sorry but I’m proud of that. Awfully proud of that. When I said, “I am Herman Melville,” I had him in my blood.

  PARIS REVIEW: What about Gregory Peck’s Ahab?

  BRADBURY: Oh, I have mixed feelings, and I’ve told Greg, too. He’s one of the nicest people I know. And a sweet, gentle man. But he’s not paranoid. And that’s a problem. You’ve got to be paranoid to be Ahab. Some people go crazy one way, some another. If Greg Peck ever went mad, I can’t imagine him being paranoid; he’d be catatonic. Olivier is the man I really wanted for the part. Olivier has incipient paranoia in many of the roles he’s done on the screen. But even with this reservation, the film’s going to be around a long time. It works, even though it’s flawed and we know it is.

  PARIS REVIEW: How do you feel about the film adaptation of The llustrated Man?

  BRADBURY: There’s just nothing there that’s right. There’s an arrogance that goes with certain kinds of filmmakers—I suppose that applies to every field. Until they own you they say that they love you and that you’re a genius and they’re going to do beautiful work with you. Then once they own you and they have your name on a contract and they’ve paid you, you see, there’s nothing you can do then, it’s too late. You can’t give the money back.

  PARIS REVIEW: Did you do the screenplay?

  BRADBURY: No, Christ, if I’d done the script it would have been beautiful. No, the producer did the script, and he belongs back selling real estate in New Jersey somewhere. Truffaut did a much better piece of work on Fahrenheit 451. The essence is there, and that is everything. You can change a lot of things, as long as the essence remains the same. See, I changed some of the words of Elijah, but that essence is Melville. That’s the important thing.

  PARIS REVIEW: Do you write for an ideal reader or for a particular audience?

  BRADBURY: Every time you write for anyone, regardless of who they are, no matter how right the cause you may believe in, you lie. Steinbeck is one of the few writers out of the 1930s who’s still around, because he didn’t write for causes at all. He wrote human stories that happened to represent causes indirectly. Grapes of Wrath and some of his other books
are not political treatises at all. Fahrenheit 451 is in a way a political treatise, but it isn’t, because all it is saying, emotionally, is: Everyone leave everyone else alone!

  PARIS REVIEW: Does literature, then, have any social obligation?

  BRADBURY: Not a direct one. It has to be through reflection, through indirection. Kazantzakis says, “Live forever.” That’s his social obligation. Any great work does that for you. His Saviors of God celebrates life in the world. All of Dickens says, “Live life at the top of your energy.” Edgar Rice Burroughs never would have looked upon himself as a social mover and shaker with social obligations. But as it turns out—and I love to say it because it upsets everyone terribly—Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.

  PARIS REVIEW: Really?

  BRADBURY: By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special. That’s what we have to do for everyone, give the gift of life with our books. Say to a girl or boy at age ten: Hey, life is fun! Grow tall! I’ve talked to more biochemists and more astronomers and technologists in various fields, who, when they were ten years old, fell in love with John Carter and Tarzan and decided to become something romantic. Burroughs put us on the moon. All the technologists read Burroughs. [Laughs]

  PARIS REVIEW: This is literally true?

  BRADBURY: I was at Caltech a couple of years ago with a whole bunch of scientists and they all admitted it; they hadn’t before. Arthur Clarke was there, and he admitted the influence of Burroughs on him. That’s natural, though; most of the people in the field grew up with him. But two of the leading astronomers—one from Cornell, another from Caltech—came out and said, Yeah, that’s why we became astronomers. We wanted to see Mars more closely. But I find this in most fields. The need for romance is constant, and again, it’s pooh-poohed by intellectuals. As a result they’re going to stunt their kids. You can’t kill a dream. I believe a lot of delinquency is the killing of a dream, one way or another. Social obligation has to come from living with some sense of style, high adventure, and romance. It’s like my friend, Mr. Electrico.

  PARIS REVIEW: He makes a brief appearance in Something Wicked, doesn’t he?

  BRADBURY: Yes, but he was a real man, that was his name. He came through my hometown in his seedy little carnival, and he sat in the electric chair every night. They pulled the switch and he’d reach out with his sword and dub everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword, and he was prickling around his ears and his hair stood up. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said, [whispers] “Live forever.” And I decided to. He was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that he had a little weirdy kid there who was twelve years old and wanted lots of things. So I went back and got to know him. We walked along the shore of Lake Michigan and I talked my big philosophies and he talked his little ones. He let me talk and he treated me like a grown-up. He told me that we’d met before on the battlefield of the Argonne, and that I had died in his arms in 1918 in France. Here I was back alive in the world again, his old friend returned. Why he told me this I don’t know, but I’ve remembered it to this day. And he gave me importance; he gave me immortality; a mystical gift for whatever reasons … maybe he had a dead son, maybe he had no sons, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was an ironical jokester … who knows?

  But within three months after my last meeting with him forty-four years ago, I began to write full-time and I’ve never stopped. Kinda beautiful, isn’t it? There are people like that in the world who go and change people. So that’s social obligation, you see. Theologians do it wrong by pontificating. Kazantzakis does it right by making you care about the whole universe and the way he looks at the stars. He says, My God, I want to live! There’s more theology in that gesture than in all the papal bulls ever written.

  PARIS REVIEW: Do the novel and short story present different problems to you?

  BRADBURY: Yes, the problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it and has its own intensity and its own life, its own reason for being. There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down. Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard to do. Don’t let people interfere with you; boot ’em out, shut down the phone, hide away, get it done. So then you have one truth. But if you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.

  But a novel has all kinds of pitfalls because it takes longer and you are around people, and if you’re not careful you will talk about it. The novel is also hard to write, just in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days. [Laughs]

  PARIS REVIEW: Are there any specific problems you’ve had with any of your novels?

  BRADBURY: With Something Wicked This Way Comes I did two months of intense writing to finish a draft. Then I put it away for six months, because I knew the big truth was eluding me. The way to describe writing a novel is to go after Moby-Dick first and just run like hell. After you’ve harpooned him, what happens? All the little killer sharks come up underneath the whale, and then the little minnows come up underneath the killer sharks, and then the barnacles begin to form on the bottom. So, get the big truth first. If you get the big truth the small truths will accumulate around it. Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and then cling to it. That’s what happens: You put it away and you wait for the little truth to show up and say: Hey, I need to be born, too, now that you’ve got the big one.

  With Fahrenheit 451, Montag came up to me and said, I’m going crazy. I said, What’s the matter, Montag? I’ve been burning books, he said. I said, Well, don’t you want to anymore? He said, No, I love them. I said, Go do something about it; and he wrote the book for me in nine days. The big truth and all the little truths came up under.

  It’s a way to live, a passionate way to live that works like gangbusters. You’re so busy covering the walls with frescoes, you don’t notice there are people in the room.

  PARIS REVIEW: Do you keep a tight work schedule?

  BRADBURY: No, because my passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. I’m always going mad for some new subject, some new idea. Sometimes it’s a poem, sometimes it’s a play, sometimes it’s a screenplay, sometimes it’s an essay. But always some new thing is exploding in me; and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It tells me: For God’s sake, get to the typewriter right now and finish this.

  PARIS REVIEW: What time of day do you write?

  BRADBURY: Well, I generally start between nine and ten every morning, though I sometimes work late into the afternoon or evening if I get an idea.

  PARIS REVIEW: Where do you do your writing?

  BRADBURY: I can work anywhere. I wrote in bedrooms and living rooms when I was growing up with my parents and my brother in a small house in Los Angeles. I worked on my typewriter in the living room, with the radio and my mother and dad and brother all talking at the same time. Later on, when I needed an office and wanted to write my novel Fahrenheit 451 twenty-five years ago, I went up to UCLA and found a basement typing room where, for ten cents which you inserted into the typewriter, you could buy yourself thirty minutes of typing time.

  PARIS REVIEW: Do you keep a notebook?

  BRADBURY: No. Because as soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. Everything’s done within the minute of getting the idea. I’m sensible enough to rush off to the typewriter and get it done. Or, if I’m not near a typewriter, I carry a
pad and write a complete story on the street, if necessary. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn’t quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. If a story is half-finished and for some reason doesn’t finish itself out, I put it in the file. I come back later, I look through the titles, and I give myself a sort of immense Rorschach test, I study all the titles.

  It’s like a father bird coming with a worm, and opening the file. You look down at all these hungry little beaks—all these stories waiting to be finished—and you say to them: Which of you needs to be fed? Which of you needs to be finished today? And the story that yells the loudest, the idea that stands up and opens its mouth, is the one who gets fed. And I pull it out of the file and finish it within a few hours.

  PARIS REVIEW: I suppose it’s unnecessary to ask whether you enjoy writing.

  BRADBURY: Yes, it’s obvious that I do. It’s the exquisite joy and madness of my life, and I don’t understand writers who have to work at it. If I had to work at it I would give it up, because I don’t like working. I like to play.

  PARIS REVIEW: Yet intellectuals, I’ve noticed in the course of our talk, seem to dampen the joy you take in writing. I know that Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, and Gilbert Highet have praised your work, and that you place a high value on your friendship with Highet and Bernard Berenson. Is it fair to say that you’re ambivalent about intellectuals?

  BRADBURY: I’ve learned to differentiate among them. Gilbert Highet is a true intellectual: He’s an all-around man and a scholar, but he’s also a sweet and gentle man. Gerald Heard, the same. They don’t throw their weight around. See, a lot of intellectuals think the reason they gained all that knowledge is to beat people over the head with it. Intellectuals are in love with hierarchies. They come out of the universities where they’ve already been indoctrinated in hierarchies and they move into critical circles where they prescribe and proscribe.