by Sam Weller
Though Ray was too young to understand every nuance, listening to the voices of the gathered adults, he noted a palpable loneliness of those days. No matter how beautiful these times were, they always came to an end. He described this atmosphere in Dandelion Wine:
About seven o’clock you could hear the chairs scraping back from the tables, someone experimenting with a yellow-toothed piano, if you stood outside the dining room window and listened. Matches being struck, the first dishes bubbling in the suds and tinkling on the wall racks somewhere, faintly, a phonograph playing. And then as the evening changed the hour, at house after house on the twilight streets, under the immense oaks and elms, on shady porches, people began to appear, like those figures who tell good or bad weather in rain or shine clocks.... Sitting on the summer-night porch was so good, so easy and so reassuring that it could never be done away with. These were the rituals that were right and lasting.
When he was two, radio entered Ray’s life. Grandfather Bradbury had built a crystal radio in 1922, using the standard components—a piece of crystal, a spool of sewing thread, and some copper wire. He kept the radio in an upstairs bedroom and one day brought little Ray up there, sat him on one knee, and placed a set of headphones over the child’s ears. “I could hear music in Far-Schenectady. And that was my first real experience with radio,” remembered Ray. “Listening to far music with distant voices. I didn’t realize at the time that I was listening to the future.”
The convergence of mass-media influences on the impressionable mind of Ray Bradbury had begun. Little more than a year later, in the winter of 1924, the dazzling flicker of a silent black-and-white movie cast a glow over the boy, enrapturing him for the rest of his life.
ESTHER BRADBURY was passionate about the cinema, and she passed this love on to her baby boy—her greatest influence on her son’s future; the cinema would forever play a vital role in his life and his writing. Her husband didn’t share this fever, so she would often take her baby boy to afternoon matinees. Ray believed that his mother averaged at least a film a week. On hot days, when the sun pressed down hard on northern Illinois, she escaped with Ray to the darkness of the cinema, into another world. She likewise bundled him on cold winter days to seek out the warm embrace of the movie theater.
It was February 1924 when Esther and Ray first walked the short distance from home to the Elite Theatre in downtown Waukegan. The marquee heralded the arrival of Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame; the cost of a bargain ticket for the two-hour-and-thirteen-minute film was fifty-five cents. While Ray never recalled much about the old theater or the crowd on that winter day, he never forgot the black-and-white images that flickered on the screen before him. To say that the three-year-old was stunned would be an understatement; this movie laid the groundwork in his fertile mind for what would later become Ray’s trademark—the strange, the fantastic, the imaginative all wrapped up in a story most decidedly human.
“God created me as a metaphoric stick ’em creature,” Ray elaborated. “Any metaphor I saw stuck to me, starting with The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
This movie classic featured Lon Chaney in his most ambitious role as the Hunchback, a distorted outcast with a fragile heart. “The Hunchback appealed in some secret way to something inside me which made me feel at the age of three, impossible as it seems, that perhaps I was some sort of Hunchback myself. How this film could have evoked in a three-year-old a feeling of sympathy, I don’t know, except Chaney was so incredible at doing his portrayal and his lost love was so touching and immediate that my whole soul went forward at that young age and, it seems amazing that in my small body, I would crouch down inside myself and become the Hunchback, but that’s what happened,” Ray said.
Even at three years old, Ray Bradbury had the sense that he was somehow different from his family—somehow an outcast himself. The Hunchback of Notre Dame comforted him; it showed him that he was not alone, that he had a kindred spirit who lived in a high tower in the macabre world of medieval Paris. But the Hunchback did more than fascinate a boy who felt like an outsider. The Hunchback of Notre Dame ignited a lifelong love of film—a medium that later forged his keen sense of story and his grasp of quick narrative movement. Like the best films, so much of the work of Ray Bradbury can be defined as “high concept.” His ideas are simple. They are memorable and they are metaphorical, and because his ideas are so cinematically visual, generations of schoolchildren have flocked to the imaginative literary worlds of Ray Bradbury as if, as he put it, he were “the Pied Piper.” “When I talk of myself as being a child of my time, perhaps the biggest truth is that I am a cinematic child of my time, in that this influence has probably had a lot to do with the direction my writing has taken over the years, the type of writing I have done, and the way I have expressed myself,” mused Ray.
It was the cinema that first launched this soaring imagination. It was the cinema that first exposed him to what he called “the breakfast of champions”—metaphors. It was the cinema that set Ray Bradbury rocketing off into the future.
2. GLINDA THE GOOD
He is a long-lived inspiration of the fantasy world that tweaks our curiosity.
—EDWIN “BUZZ” ALDRIN, Apollo 11 astronaut
THERE WAS one person who, more than any other, influenced young Ray Bradbury. Neva Bradbury, just ten years Ray’s senior, was always more than an aunt—she was a partner in the fantastic, a fellow outcast. A creative person, Neva painted, made linoleum block cuts, sewed costumes and dresses, acted in the high school dramatics club, and loved cartooning. With all her energy and flair and passion for the arts, there was something in her that kept her from professionally attaining her own artistic aspirations. “She flinched from life,” Ray said, always with a hint of sorrow when talking about his aunt’s great, unrecognized talent. Her nephew was perhaps Neva’s greatest creation; in many ways, Neva gave the world Ray Bradbury. Certainly, his imagination and drive would have developed without her—Ray Bradbury was born to be Ray Bradbury, but Neva helped foster and steer him.
Ray spent the third and fourth years of his life sheltered by his mother, and fed, in part, by a bottle. His mind was fueled on a steady diet of movies, but at Christmas in 1925, Neva, a petite teenager, with short chestnut hair and striking gray eyes, gifted her little friend with true nourishment. Christmas at the Bradbury home had a simple, heartland charm that perfectly embodied a gathering of what Ray described as “a middle class—fallen on their luck” family. There was little money for presents. Still, each year, there was a tree in Ray’s house on St. James and at his grandparents’ home next door. Both trees were adorned with real candles. Neva always led the charge to decorate, for she loved holidays, particularly Christmas and Halloween.
On Christmas Day, snow covered Waukegan. Ray and his brother, who slept together in a pull-out sofa bed in the living room, woke up eager, like all kids, to open their gifts. Among the packages under the tree was a present addressed to “Shorty,” Ray’s nickname. (Ray’s brother, Leonard Jr., now went by the nickname “Skip.”) The gift, from Neva was Once Upon a Time; it was his first fantasy book and it would change his life. (Though Ray Bradbury would later be pigeonholed by critics and scholars as a science fiction writer, he would maintain that if a label must be used at all, he was a fantasy writer.) Once Upon a Time was a collection of timeless fairy tales—“Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Tom Thumb,” “Cinderella,” and many others. First published by Rand McNally and Company in 1921, the collection was edited by Katharine Lee Bates, the author of the 1893 poem “America the Beautiful,” which would become, very literally, a second United States national anthem.
Ray’s parents had been teaching their son how to read that winter of 1925. Fittingly, as he is a child of popular culture, Ray learned to read by studying the words in the Sunday comic strips. “They taught me by reading ‘Happy Hooligan,’ ‘Bringing up Father,’ and what have you.” While he relished the stories in Once Upon a Time, it was th
e lavish illustrations of Margaret Evans Price that captivated him. “Now, when I go into a bookstore,” Ray said at the age of eighty-two, “I rush right to the children’s section because of the illustrations.” It is certain that the early allure of illustration influenced Ray to direct the cover art of nearly all his books and even, in certain cases, the interior artwork. One might say that the reason Ray Bradbury’s work is so very visual, so driven by concrete imagery, springs in large part from his lifelong love of illustration—and of the cinema.
When Ray was five, his aunt Neva showed him her collection of books, which included the Oz series, and he was enchanted. The series by L. Frank Baum was like nothing he had ever read; it was full of colorful illustrations and alive with myth and whimsy and dreams. “I have often thought that Neva was from Oz herself,” Ray wrote in a 1940s unpublished essay about his aunt, entitled “The Wingless Bat.” She launched the beginning of what he liked to call his “Journey to Far Metaphor.” Despite the very ordinary trappings of his life with his mother, father, and brother, and later, with his own wife and daughters, it was a journey that would never end.
THE BRADBURY house on St. James Street in Waukegan was modest and ordinary. The home had only one bedroom, a tiny kitchen, a dining room, and a living room in which the boys slept. Leo and Esther’s bedroom was a tiny space consumed by a brass bed so long that its end stuck out of the sliding, double doorway at the entrance to the room. At the foot of the bed was a phonograph record player that Ray listened to frequently. His mother collected the phonograph albums, and her young son would play them continually. Ray distinctly recalled listening to a scratchy version of the song “The Lady Picking Mulberries” over and over. While Neva directly introduced Ray to her creative interests, Ray’s mother left her own indirect impression; she loved movies and she loved music and young Ray picked up on these passions.
In the little house on St. James Street, there was a staircase off the living room leading upstairs to the attic, and the only bathroom in the house. Ray wrote about his fear of waking in the middle of the night and having to venture upstairs into the darkness to use the lavatory in the story “The Thing at the Top of the Stairs” from the collection The Toynbee Convector. The Bradbury family was so thrifty that Leo Bradbury kept the light off at the top of the stairs to save on the electric bill. This meant that little Ray, terrified of the dark, had to climb into the unknown. He was convinced that a monster lurked in the attic, so he would rather hold it or urinate on the staircase. Frustrated, Ray’s father placed a chamberpot under Ray and Skip’s sofa bed.
Ray Bradbury turned this boyhood fear, as he did with other childhood memories, into a metaphor in his work. The question Ray is asked most frequently, as are most writers, is where he finds his ideas. His response? He often took life events and imbued them with the dark fantastic. Bradbury scholar David Mogen, author of the critical work Ray Bradbury, called these particular stories, numerous throughout Ray’s oeuvre, “autobiographical fantasy.” “Bradbury discovered early in his career that his best prose symbolically interprets personal experiences, that he could bring exotic subjects to life as metaphors for things we know.... Transforming fact into fiction, Bradbury weaves myth and fantasy out of both commonplace and bizarre experiences in his own life,” wrote Mogen.
By the spring of 1926, thanks to Neva and his own proclivities, Ray was sodden with the power of fantasy. But tragedy struck his family: Samuel Hinkston Bradbury, Ray’s beloved grandfather, fell ill. This quiet man, long troubled by the financial failure of his gold-mining endeavors, had contracted meningitis. He spent weeks in his upstairs bedroom; Ray recalled visiting him one late-spring afternoon and talking to his grandfather as he lay dying. On the morning of Friday, June 4, 1926, after lying in a coma for six days, Ray’s grandfather Samuel died. Gone was the cornerstone of evening porch rituals; gone was the man who quietly smoked his cigar into the hushed hours. Gone, too, was the voice of primitive radio, that baritone heard through the floorboards.
The last Fourth of July that Ray spent with his grandfather—nearly a year before Sam Bradbury’s passing—remained Ray’s fondest memory of him. On that warm summer evening, the family had gathered on the porch and on the front lawn. Ray’s uncle Bion had brought his small homemade brass cannon, which he fired off, thunderclapping the still night to the children’s delight and to the adults’ dismay. Ray spoke of this memory in an unpublished 1971 interview with his agent, Don Congdon.
… when all the fireworks were gone and my Uncle Bion had cracked a few windows with a last blast of his home-made cannon, it was finally the end of Fourth of July Night, and the special time, the sad time, the time of beauty, the time of rare philosophy exemplified in my helping my Grandpa carry out the last box in which lay, like a gossamer spirit, the paper-tissue ghost of a fire balloon waiting to be breathed into, filled, and set adrift on the midnight sky.
My grandfather was the high priest and I his altar-boy at such moments.... I helped take the lovely red, white, and blue paper ghost out of the box and Grandpa lit the little cup of dry straw which hung beneath the balloon. Once the fire got going the balloon whispered itself fat with the hot air rising inside. By that time, I was generally brimming with tears, anyway. Even that young I was beginning to perceive the endings of things. Things, like this lovely paper light, went away. That same year, my Grandpa was to go away for good. I think it is incredible that I remember him so well; the two of us on the lawn in front of the porch with twenty relatives for audience, and the paper tissue held between us for a final moment, filled now with warm exaltations, ready to go. But I could not let it go. It was so lovely, with the light and shadows dancing inside. And only when Grandpa gave me a look, and a nod of his head, gently, did I at last let the balloon drift free and go away up past the porch, illumining the faces of my dear family, off up above the apple trees over the beginning to sleep town and away across the night country among the stars. We stood watching it for at least ten minutes, until we could no longer see it any more, and by that time tears would really be streaming down my face and Grandpa, not looking at me, would at last clear his throat, and shuffle his feet, and the relatives would begin to go in the house or around on the lawn to their other houses, leaving me to smell the firecrackers on my hands and brush the tears away with sulphured fingers.
The story of Grandpa Bradbury and the fire balloon, like all great Ray Bradbury stories, is a metaphor—a metaphor for letting go—and it is a recollection that Ray was quite fond of telling. He further examined his last Fourth of July with his grandfather in his essay “Just This Side of Byzantium,” which became the introduction to later editions of Dandelion Wine. The memory would also turn into the Martian fantasy “The Fire Balloons,” collected in The Illustrated Man.
Samuel Hinkston Bradbury was buried at Union Cemetery on Waukegan’s west side. At age fifty-four, Minnie Bradbury was now widowed; Leo Bradbury, his younger brother, Bion, and seventeen-year-old Neva had lost their father. They all felt an immense loss. They also felt a financial burden. After Samuel Hinkston passed away, to make ends meet, Minnie Bradbury decided to rent three bedrooms of her house to boarders. Some guests stayed a short time, others lived at 619 Washington much longer.
With his grandfather’s passing, little Ray, not yet six, had experienced death for the first time. In the days and weeks after Samuel Hinkston Bradbury’s death, Ray took in every detail, every overheard conversation, all sounds and smells, and humdrum objects in the house; they were all triggers for his runaway-freight-train mind. In the wake of death, he saw the world in a different light. His imagination was maturing every day.
Ray often liked to press his hands against the cool stained-glass window in his grandparents’ home. The two rectangular windows were set into the wall on the staircase to the second floor. Sometimes, Ray stuck his nose to the glass and peered out through the kaleidoscope hues reminiscent of marmalades, jellies, and iced summer beverages. Yellow dandelions speckled the tiny lawn along the
side of the house. Occasionally, through the stained glass, Ray spied a cat slinking across the grass or a pedestrian strolling by. He loved looking at the world through this sweet spectrum that altered the universe, and long after he moved from Waukegan, he still viewed the world in much the same way—through the rainbow lens of his grandparents’ stained-glass window. These windows appeared in his short stories “The Man Upstairs” (originally collected in Dark Carnival) and “The Strawberry Window” (A Medicine for Melancholy); both stories may be classified as “autobiographical fantasy”—tales of the fantastic, mined from memory.
In 1926, Ray and his brother, Skip, went to see the movie The Phantom of the Opera at the Academy Theater in downtown Waukegan. Lon Chaney’s performance as the phantom captured Ray’s imagination, much as Chaney’s Hunchback had mesmerized him three years earlier. The boy was enraptured by the theme of unrequited love, and he empathized with the tragic figure who lived in the underworld. The film let out by nine at night, and the two brothers walked home from downtown Waukegan, taking the path through the ravine, as they were wont to do. There were wooden steps into the green darkness, and Skip, sprinting ahead of his brother, ducked beneath the bridge over the creek. Ray moved tentatively down the steps; his older brother loved to “ditch him,” and Ray trembled at the darkness. “When I crossed over, afraid of the dark,” said Ray, “Skip jumped out and I screamed all the way home.” Not a prankster, Leo Bradbury fumed when he saw Ray burst through the front screen door, in tears. When Leo was provoked he pulled out a leather strop. “My father beat the hell out of Skip,” said Ray, “and,” he added with a laugh, “I was very happy.”