The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  12. DOWN MEXICO WAY

  Ray’s books were actually some of the very first I bought with my own money. I would have been about nine years old and the English boarding school I was at had a traveling book shop that would turn up once a term and set up in the music room. The first thing I bought was a book called The Silver Locusts. That was immediately followed by The Golden Apples of the Sun, followed by Dandelion Wine, and then somewhere in there I read The October Country and realized that my favorite story since I was about seven was actually a Bradbury story, “Homecoming,” which I’d read in some big, old hardback anthology at a friend’s house.

  —NEIL GAIMAN, author

  AS AUGUST Derleth was putting together the forthcoming dark fantasy anthology Who Knocks?, he wrote Ray and suggested they do a book of Ray’s weird fiction. Ray was, not surprisingly, elated by Derleth’s offer and wrote the publisher back on January 29, 1945:

  First, I want to thank you for your suggestion that some time in the next two years Arkham House might try an anthology [sic] of Bradbury stories. I certainly hope to continue turning out stories of the calibre [sic] necessary to make such a volume possible. Some of my early stories, if ever reprinted, would need quite a bit of rewriting to re-shape them into my present way of thinking and producing. For over a year now I’ve been working and planning an entire volumn [sic] of short stories concerning children in fantasy and weird settings … this volumn [sic] to be titled A CHILDS [sic] GARDEN OF TERROR. I hoped to eventually submit the completed book to a publisher in 1946 or 1947, depending on the development and quality of each yarn. And now that you’ve suggested ARKHAM might be interested later in my work, I hope I shall one day be able to submit the finished work to you. I think it would be a definite off-trail thing, something a little different in the outré pattern … and I’m especially pleased with the title. Anyway, the project gives me much to look forward to and work on. Thanks very much for the generous offer.

  The groundwork for Dark Carnival, Ray’s first book, had been established. Of course, there was the business of Ray’s initial title, A Child’s Garden of Terror. Derleth wrote back suggesting the title was too limiting, and Ray quickly agreed. Harking back to his days of wandering circus and carnival grounds, of meeting Mr. Electrico and the other after-hours freaks, Ray rechristened his collection-in-progress Dark Carnival. He even suggested a cover concept for the book:

  The cover jacket might possibly illustrate a small carnival that has set up its merry-go-round and side-show tent and banners in a dark green woodland glade at twilight—the entire atmosphere of the picture would be one of remoteness, of a carnival in the wilderness going full steam, but with no one in sight except one small boy in the foreground, tiny, very alone, staring at the moving carousel and the high banners. And on the banners instead of portraits of Fat Ladies, Thin Men and Tattooed Freaks would be pictures of strange, nebulous creatures. And on the carousel, instead of horses sliding up and down the gleaming brass poles, would be other, impossible, vaguely, disturbingly delineated creatures of such indistinct cast and line that one’s imagination could make them anything in the whole universe.

  So there is the Dark Carnival, discovered in a forest, glowing with light, the new night over and around it, and silence, and the small boy standing alone and struck numb in the foreground, listening but hearing nothing....

  It was during this time that he wrote “The Big Black and White Game.” “[M]any of my short stories were not based on my knowledge of other people’s characters at all, or on any great philosophical knowledge of the world and its problems; but, more often than not, I wrote about my own childhood or about childish people or my immediate fears of some sort, very immediate things, very close to me in my life,” mused Ray. “It’s interesting that when I made my break over into the quality field, it was with the story of a boy again.”

  It was 1945—well before the civil rights movement—but in “The Big Black and White Game,” Ray had prophetically painted a picture of a national dilemma. According to Ray, he didn’t consciously consider this when he wrote the story; he simply remembered an incident from his childhood about a baseball game that pitted blacks against whites and, in retelling the tale, stumbled onto something much deeper. He submitted the manuscript to American Mercury magazine and, to his astonishment, it sold. “The Big Black and White Game” was published in the August 1945 issue of the magazine.

  By late summer 1945, World War Two had finally ended. Soldiers were coming home; the pall of the Great Depression had lifted; and things were, at long last, looking up for the Bradburys—Leo had steady work. Ray’s friend Grant Beach proposed they take a road trip through Mexico—a young man’s quest for high adventure. Ray was intrigued by the concept, but his short stories were earning him, on average, forty or fifty dollars apiece from the pulps and he had no extra money. Grant encouraged Ray to submit more stories to mainstream publications, which paid much more than the pulps.

  Throughout 1945, Ray established himself as one of the brightest new stars in pulp fiction. But he feared that this would interfere with his ability to move into the mainstream. That summer, though, he had written a story, “Homecoming,” about a lovingly ghoulish family of monsters coming together for a family reunion, that scholar David Mogen later deemed an “extraordinary perspective on the ordinary,” and it was one of the stories that would soon propel Ray outside the realm of the pulps.

  Surrendering to Grant Beach’s pressure, he asked his agent Julius Schwartz to submit some stories to more prestigious publications. However Schwartz had few connections to the New York literati, so he suggested that Ray send the manuscripts himself. In the same week, Ray submitted three tales—“Invisible Boy” to Mademoiselle; “The Miracles of Jamie” to Charm; and “One Timeless Spring” to Collier’s—under the pseudonym William Elliott (Ray borrowed the surname from writer T. S. Eliot). The odds were almost insurmountable. The chances that a story by a young, unknown writer with no publishing history whatsoever might be plucked from a Manhattan magazine slush pile were slim to none. The probability that all three would be selected and make it through the arduous, hierarchical editorial process was little better than zero. In short, Ray didn’t stand a chance.

  In the third week of August, Ray received word from not one but all three magazines congratulating William Elliott on his excellent stories. The news of the sale of the third and final story, “Invisible Boy,” came on August 22, his twenty-fifth birthday. “I’ve never had a week like that since,” said Ray.

  All three tales had sold, collectively, for a thousand dollars. It was twice as much as he had earned in an entire year of selling newspapers. He was rich! Unfortunately, the checks had been made out to William Elliott. Ray quickly contacted the various editors and told them about the pseudonym. Checks were redrafted, payable to Ray Bradbury. And his stories appeared under his own name. He had broken out of the pulps and into the slicks.

  Since Grant Beach had been the one to push him, Ray felt an obligation to take the road trip to Mexico, although he had no burning desire to do so. In late September, they loaded into Grant’s Ford V8 and hit the highway. It would prove to be a bumpy ride.

  Ray Bradbury had never been the adventurous type. He was a mama’s boy, hesitant to stray beyond the border of his comfort zone. He had gone through his first twenty-five years eating, almost exclusively, hamburgers, egg sandwiches, Campbell’s tomato soup, his mother’s Swedish meatballs, and her strawberry shortcake. (This was his primary diet. It’s a wonder he lived to write as much as he did.) He never ate vegetables and he wouldn’t try salad until he met his wife, Marguerite, in 1946. He never ate seafood after a childhood bout with food poisoning. To put it mildly, he was a finicky eater. Add to this the fact that he didn’t know how to drive a car, and the road trip to Mexico was doomed from the onset.

  Nonetheless, Ray packed his suitcase and his typewriter and piled into the passenger seat of Grant’s Ford, agreeing to act as navigator. They were off. They crossed
the border at Laredo, Texas, and ventured down through Monterrey, Mexico, staying in fine hotels. “You could get anything in Mexico for a dollar,” Ray remembered. “The best hotels for a dollar a night.” But soon Ray and Grant’s friendship was beginning to show cracks. Grant quickly tired of acting as sole driver. He wanted a break, but Ray couldn’t drive. After having witnessed the aftermaths of the fatal car accident in 1935 and being legally blind without his glasses, Ray never got behind the wheel. And he wasn’t doing a particularly good job as navigator, either. Grant would send Ray into service stations for directions or to find lodging, but Ray knew very little Spanish and could not communicate with anyone. Grant felt as if he was doing everything, and the two friends began bickering. “The whole trip was a mistake,” said Ray. “It was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have gone.”

  Still, Mexico helped Ray mature. Amazingly, at the age of twenty-five, Ray ate for the very first time asparagus, corn, peas, and filet mignon, which he ordered thinking it was hamburger steak, and ended up choking down with water and bread. (He couldn’t find a burger south of the border to save his life.) He resented it at the time, but these experiences would help him socially in the years to come when wining and dining with great film directors, renowned authors, even world leaders. However, that was all a long way off. For now, he was in Mexico and hating every minute of it.

  Mexico disturbed Ray. The economy was depressed, and Ray felt as if many of the people hated him, assuming he was a rich American. He didn’t speak the language. The food was foreign. The landscape was alien and desolate. But above all, the thing he feared the most, the thing that permeated so much of his writing, seemed to be ubiquitous: death. Passing through one Mexican town after another, Ray and Grant encountered numerous funerals—lavish and ornate death marches, processions of somber families moving toward age-old graveyards. Most troubling to Ray were the funeral marches in which grief-stricken fathers carried their children’s caskets hoisted above their heads. The deeper into Mexico Ray and Grant traveled, the more fearful Ray became. Within a week, they had driven into green jungle country where nature reigned supreme. Ray felt insignificant in the face of it all. What if they broke down? They had heard the stories of murderous machete-wielding natives from town locals.

  “We got out in the jungle one day,” Ray recalled, “and all of a sudden an Indian, a naked Indian, popped up on the road near us wearing just a loincloth, trotting along carrying a machete. Well, you know, immediately I thought, this is it. Goodbye, world, my head’s gonna go. Well, he didn’t care about us. He was on his way somewhere, I don’t know where, but he was running, and the last I saw of him he took off through the jungle on his own business, carrying a machete to clear his way.”

  Ray was a long way from Los Angeles. He would lie in bed at night with his eyes wide open. All the images of death coupled with his sense of vulnerability were almost unbearable. Added to this, the annual Day of the Dead celebration—Día de los Muertos—was fast approaching. The Mexican holiday, held at the end of October and the beginning of November, is a colorfully macabre celebration of the dearly departed, whose spirits, as the legend goes, are believed to return during the festival. In preparation, families decorate gravesites with flowers, candles, skeleton figurines, and wild-eyed masks. Celebrants eat, drink, and dance late into the night to commemorate the return of the dead. Death, it seemed, was all around Ray. He couldn’t escape it.

  On the eve of the festival, following hundreds of revelers, Grant and Ray took a dugout canoe and, with an Indian guide, paddled out to the island of Janitzio in Lake Patzcuaro in west central Mexico. The island’s annual celebration was the stuff of international legend. Janitzio’s small cemetery was adorned with exotic flowers and flickering votives. “The whole scene was lit by a thousand candles so it looked like a constellation fallen from the sky and landing in the middle of the graveyard,” remembered Ray. Women and children knelt at grave sites placing old photos of their departed loved ones next to tombstones. Men stood around the periphery of the cemetery eating home-cooked food and drinking tequila long after midnight. A few of them strummed guitars. While on the island, Ray and Grant met an elegant Frenchwoman named Madame Man’Ha Garreau-Dombasle, and her teenage daughter, Francion. Ray struck up a conversation with the aristocratic woman, who took great interest in Ray’s writing career and was duly impressed by his recent accomplishments in the pages of the literary magazines. They all ended up spending the entire night chatting and watching the festival.

  The next morning, after they had returned from the island, Ray and Grant were walking the streets of the highland town of Patzcuaro when a limousine wheeled up alongside them and a window slowly lowered. A woman’s voice called out. It was the woman from the island with whom they had talked until dawn. She formally introduced herself as the wife of the French ambassador to Mexico. She had enjoyed Ray’s company and told him that if he was ever in Paris, to look her up. In the twenty-odd times he traveled to Paris in the decades to follow, he met and dined with Madame Garreau-Dombasle often. He wrote her each year on the anniversary of Día de los Muertos, and dedicated his 1972 book, The Halloween Tree, to her. Before they had bid adieu on the streets of Patzcuaro, Madame Garreau-Dombasle spoke of another haunting spectacle the two boys might investigate: the mummies of Guanajuato. Just the sound of it gave Ray the chills.

  Grant was battling illness—he had suffered a strep throat earlier in the trip—and they were still bickering as they rumbled into the town of Guanajuato. Roughly four hours northwest of Mexico City, Guanajuato was tucked into a mountainous landscape. The narrow cobblestoned streets and alleys were lined with buildings in the French and Spanish colonial styles. Flowers cascaded from balconies of the colorful pastel-hued stucco buildings. Ornate mission bell towers marked the city skyline. On Madame’s word, Ray and Grant’s morbid curiosity brought them looking for the infamous mummies of Guanajuato. Ray and Grant were directed to a local cemetery, where they descended a long stairway to a lengthy subterranean corridor. There, stacked against the walls, some of them wired in place, stood more than one hundred naturally mummified corpses. The bodies had been exhumed and displayed as a form of extortion by graveyard groundskeepers after families fell behind on payments for the plots. When the dues were paid in full, the deceased would be returned six feet under. In the meantime, an odd natural phenomenon occurred with the recently unearthed corpses—because of the soil composition and the dry climate, the bodies had been naturally mummified. The visit to the mummies of Guanajuato would haunt Ray Bradbury—and his work—for decades.

  Grant and Ray next made their way to Mexico City, where they stayed at a bed-and-breakfast that had been recommended to them by Neva’s friend Anne Anthony. While personal relationships and sexuality were never discussed in the Bradbury household, Anne Anthony was Neva’s lifelong partner; they shared a home for decades until Neva’s death in 2001. While Ray never discussed Neva’s sexual preference or her relationship with Anne, it is likely that they were already a couple in 1945. Anne was a photographer, and had traveled through Mexico on assignment for National Geographic magazine.

  Ray and Grant checked into the charming private home and on their first morning, while in the breakfast room, a large sheepdog with, as Ray recalled, one blue eye and one brown eye bounded in, followed by its owner, a tall man who was just a little tipsy from a morning cocktail or two. The man was John Steinbeck.

  “I went into shock,” Ray said. He recognized the author right away. Steinbeck was in Mexico as the film version of his book The Pearl was being produced nearby. The Grapes of Wrath had been one of Ray’s very favorite books ever since he first read it in the summer of 1939. Now Ray was sitting across the breakfast table from its author. “He was a happy drunk,” recalled Ray, who remembered Steinbeck as having a great sense of humor. Ray, uncharacteristically, was too shy to tell Steinbeck that he, too, was a writer. He was too shy even to mention his great love of The Grapes of Wrath. He simply sat there in awe.

/>   Meeting one of his great literary idols was the high point of the trip for Ray, along with a letter he received in Mexico City, which had been forwarded by his parents. The letter was from an editor named Don Congdon at Simon & Schuster Publishers in New York. Congdon had just left his post at Collier’s magazine, where, before leaving, he had heard office scuttlebutt about a recent short-story acquisition, a tale titled “One Timeless Spring,” written by an unknown named William Elliott. Congdon wrote Ray a fan letter, unaware that the Elliott name was a pseudonym:

  Dear Mr. Elliott:

  The people in Collier’s fiction department, of which I was a member until a month ago, tell me you write very well and might be interested in doing a novel. If you are considering anything of length, I’d like very much to hear from you.