The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  Eureka! It was such an obvious solution, Ray thought. Why hadn’t he thought of it? he wondered. To a degree, he had. What Walter Bradbury was suggesting was not far removed from Ray’s own vision of Winesburg, Ohio, on Mars. “I made that note back in 1944,” said Ray, “and I called it Space Toward Mars or something like that. Over the years, my subconscious kept writing Mars stories and then Walter Bradbury comes along and tells me what I’ve been doing.”

  Ray agreed to prepare an outline by the next morning and deliver it to the Doubleday editor. He rushed back to the YMCA, went to his room, pulled out his portable typewriter, and went to work. “It was a typical hot June night in New York,” Ray wrote in the essay “The Long Road to Mars,” an introduction to the fortieth-anniversary edition of The Martian Chronicles. “Air conditioning was still a luxury of some future year. I typed until 3 A.M., perspiring in my underwear as I weighted and balanced my Martians in their strange cities in the last hours before arrivals and departures of my astronauts.”

  While putting his outline together, Ray didn’t have any of his previously penned Mars stories with him. He pieced them together entirely from recollection. In short order, he assembled the stories into a narrative mosaic that would literally change the field of science fiction.

  At noon the next day, Ray and Don Congdon met at Walter Bradbury’s office, and Ray presented his outline. He had decided on the narrative arc that would pull his Martian tales together, one that followed colonists from earth to the Red Planet. The colonists unwittingly brought with them all of their human problems—racism, censorship, environmental destruction, and the threat of atomic annihilation. It was an allegory that would reflect all of humankind’s flaws at the dawn of the Space Age. Thematically, he was wrestling with political, social, and philosophical concerns near and dear to his heart.

  “I decided first of all that there would be certain elements of similarity between the invasion of Mars and the invasion of the Wild West,” Ray wrote in the unpublished essay “How I Wrote My Book,” dated October 17, 1950. “I had heard from my father’s lips, and my grandfather’s, stories of varied adventures in the West, even in the late year of 1908, when things were plenty empty, still, and lonely. So I knew that Mars, in reality, would be that new horizon which Steinbeck’s Billy Buck mused upon when he stood upon the shore of the Pacific and the ‘Going West’ was over, and the adventurers were left with nothing else to do but simmer down.”

  This idea for a novel-in-stories would provide a mirror for humanity, its faults, foibles, and failures. The book would be a cautionary tale, warning against the cultural perils that lay ahead. This was always the reason that Ray loved science fiction; it afforded the writer an opportunity to play social critic by using tomorrow’s metaphors to symbolize today’s problems.

  Walter Bradbury was convinced. He loved the idea behind The Martian Chronicles. He had already read some of the Mars stories in the pulp magazines, and he knew Ray Bradbury was a rising literary talent who could be a key player in Doubleday’s new science fiction line. Walter Bradbury offered Ray a book deal for The Martian Chronicles right there, on the spot. Years later, both Ray and Don Congdon were unclear about certain aspects of the career-altering meetings with Walter Bradbury. It was Ray’s recollection that Walter Bradbury had even suggested the title, The Martian Chronicles. Files in Ray Bradbury’s own papers suggest, however, that Ray had been considering the title The Martian Chronicles for a collection of his Mars-related stories before the now-legendary dinner meeting where the classic book was born.

  After Walter Bradbury had offered Ray a contract for The Martian Chronicles, as the story goes, he asked Ray if he had any other projects. It was Ray’s long-standing recollection that it was at this point that a second Bradbury classic was conceived—The Illustrated Man.

  “I was wrong about that,” Ray said. “My memory was incorrect.” Ray did receive two offers that day. The first was for The Martian Chronicles. The second, apparently, was for The Creatures That Time Forgot, which, as detailed in Ray’s book contract, was to be a fifty-thousand-word novel revised from a Bradbury short story of the same name that had run in the fall 1946 issue of Planet Stories.

  By the time Ray boarded the Greyhound for his return voyage to Los Angeles, he had with him a check for $1,500—$750 for The Martian Chronicles and $750 for The Creatures That Time Forgot. The Martian Chronicles was due to the publisher in just three months. With a pregnant wife waiting for him in California, the money and the book deals lifted a tremendous burden. For the short term, at least, he was rich. “Fifteen hundred dollars was a lot of money in those days,” Ray said.

  Maggie had quit her job at Abbey Rents and Ray was now the sole breadwinner. If his friend Norman Corwin hadn’t pushed him to go to New York, there’s no telling what would have happened to Ray’s career. Certainly, without the meeting and creative recommendation of Walter Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles would never have been written as what Ray called “a book of stories pretending to be a novel.”

  When the bus arrived at the Greyhound terminal in downtown Chicago on the afternoon of June 23, 1949, Ray decided to live lavishly for the first time in his career. He got off the bus, retrieved his luggage and his typewriter, and went to Chicago’s Union Station. He’d had it with the four-day journey across the nation by motor coach. Ray bought a ticket for a seat on the Union Pacific train The City of Los Angeles, departing at 7:45 that evening. Ray boarded, took seat number 42 in car four. He was headed home. And for the first time, doing it in relative luxury.

  Upon his return to Los Angeles, Ray set out to write a book that would be considered one of his greatest achievements. With Maggie at home in the tiny Venice apartment, each morning Ray rode his bicycle down Venice Boulevard to his parents’ house. In the corner garage office of 670 Venice Boulevard, he began work on The Martian Chronicles. Mornings were usually spent at his typewriter, pecking out the book at a quick clip. At lunchtime, Ray would take a break and go into his parents’ house, where Esther would prepare him an egg sandwich. At two in the afternoon, he bicycled home to take his daily nap. Afterward, he’d return to the garage office to put in a few more hours’ work on the book.

  While assembling The Martian Chronicles, something he was fond of calling a “half-cousin to a novel,” Ray had an epiphany. “When I set out to write it, I thought, ‘How in hell am I going to take all of my Mar-tian stories and make a novel?’”

  Ray harked back to The Grapes of Wrath, which he had read in 1939 while crossing the country by Greyhound bus, returning from the First World Science Fiction Convention. “I looked at that book and thought, my God, Steinbeck put together his novel with every other chapter serving as a metaphorical prose poem about turtles, or religion, or the atmosphere of the time, and I could learn from that.” With Steinbeck’s story structure in mind, Ray began to piece together his various Mars tales by writing short “bridge chapters” to set up and connect the disparate stories. Throughout the summer of 1949, Ray reviewed his more than two dozen Martian stories, deciding which ones to weave into the tapestry of the book. Some, like “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright” and “The Earth Men” had already appeared in print. As he had done with Dark Carnival, Ray seized the opportunity to fine-tune and polish previously published stories before they appeared in book form.

  Ray’s Mars was influenced by the visions of Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli, a nineteenth-century Italian astronomer who discovered and mapped a series of deep lines crisscrossing the Martian surface. Schiaparelli called the lines “channels,” but when translated into English, it became “canals.” The very thought of waterways on Mars ignited a Victorian-era uproar over the possibility of life on the Red Planet. But Ray’s Mars was influenced even more by Percival Lowell, an American astronomer who furthered the idea of canals. Lowell had published three books detailing his telescopic research of the Red Planet beginning in 1895; he created lavish maps of the Martian surface, diagramming the hundreds of lines and intersectio
ns he concluded were waterways and oases that could only have been constructed by intelligent beings. Crystalline water flowed through this system, he theorized, from the melting polar ice caps, feeding dark areas on the planet that Lowell posited were lush with vegetation. Bright spots on the surface, he surmised, were deserts. It was this romantic Victorian vision that imprinted itself onto Ray’s image of the planet.

  Ray’s Mars was beautifully impossible. His planet had an atmo-sphere, and it had blue hills. For the author, science was not the point. If his readers could believe in his stories, even if the science was flawed, then accuracy was simply unimportant. It was the metaphor that mattered. His Mars was at odds with the hard science fiction established by Astounding editor John W. Campbell. And this is why Ray Bradbury was always considered an outsider to purists in the field, a writer excluded from the big triumvirate of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke (although Ray is popularly considered one of the “ABCs of Science Fiction”: Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke). This never bothered Ray. In his mind, he was working on something much bigger: He was creating a myth.

  Ray’s Mars story was shaping up to be a human story, filled with human problems, populated by human themes, an allegory transplanted to another world. In creating his version of the Red Planet, he let his imagination run amok.

  “[Bradbury] created moods with few words,” wrote Isaac Asimov in 1981. “He wasn’t ashamed to tug on the heartstrings and there was a semipoetic nostalgia to most of those tugs. He created his own version of Mars straight out of the nineteenth century, totally ignoring the findings of the twentieth century.

  “In fact, one gets the idea that Bradbury lives in the nineteenth century and in the small-town Midwest in which he grew up....”

  As The Martian Chronicles neared completion, Maggie typed the final manuscript even as her due date was fast approaching. Ray worked on one typewriter in the garage at 670 South Venice, while Maggie retyped all of Ray’s stories into a single manuscript on another typewriter in the apartment at 33 South Venice. They were an efficient team.

  In early October 1949, Ray sent his completed manuscript to Walter Bradbury. The book consisted of eighteen stories and eleven bridge chapters. In all, the book ran a little long. A large part of his revision process entailed cutting, and Ray anticipated having to excise a few of the stories from the submitted manuscript.

  As Walter Bradbury was reviewing The Martian Chronicles, the big day in the tiny Bradbury apartment finally arrived. “We didn’t have a car,” recalled Maggie Bradbury, “so we had made arrangements with the people who lived in the apartment next door. They said, ‘When you’re ready, come knock on our door and we’ll take you to the hospital.’” On the fifth of November, just after midnight, they did just that. With his heart pounding, Ray rapped on his neighbors’ door and the two couples raced to the Santa Monica Hospital. Maggie was in labor well into the morning while Ray, playing the expectant-father stereotype, paced the halls, sat restlessly on the hospital’s front steps, and stole a few moments of sleep in the waiting room. At 9:38 A.M., Maggie gave birth to a girl, whom they named Susan Marguerite Bradbury. The young parents were elated. Ray wrote August Derleth to share the news, humorously referencing one of his own stories about a murderous baby: “I am pleased to announce that we have a baby girl! … A very healthy, pink little girl, with siren lungs and improper manners. She does not, alas, resemble in any way, a Small Assassin.”

  Ray and Maggie brought their little girl home, and with no space in their apartment for a crib, little Susan slept in her baby buggy. She was a colicky infant, and her fits of tears stirred Ray’s memories of his own childhood, and his deep-seated fears of the dark. He worried that his girl would one day have the same nightmares. In response to this, just a week after Susan was born, Ray decided to write his first children’s book, Switch on the Night. The eleven-page manuscript followed a young boy overcoming his fears of the night with the help of a girl named Dark. Ray’s original manuscript was simply a storyboard, with the script of the story to the left and his own primitive illustrations and magazine cut-outs to the right.

  Even though Ray had received a generous advance for two books from Doubleday, the family was still living without many luxuries. Ray applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in November 1949, seeking and receiving the requisite recommendation letters from an impressive group. Writing on behalf of Ray were Martha Foley, series editor of The Best American Short Stories of the Year anthology; August Derleth, author and publisher of Ray’s first book; Ray’s friend the noted radio writer and director Norman Corwin; and respected author and University of California at Berkeley English professor Mark Schorer who had, as Ray remembered, struck up a recent correspondence with him.

  But the Guggenheim Fellowship wasn’t meant to be. Ray was turned down. He believed that once again, prejudice against his genre background had played a hand in the decision. Even with all of his appearances in high-brow literary magazines and in lauded literary anthologies, at the end of the day, Ray Bradbury was still considered a genre writer. He couldn’t shed the label.

  RAY was no longer using his “office” phone across the street at the filling station since the news of Maggie’s pregnancy; they had a telephone line installed in their apartment. In December 1949, at the age of twenty-nine, Ray had his first long-distance conversation, discussing with Walter Bradbury what stories needed to be cut from the manuscript of The Martian Chronicles. It was determined that four chapters would be excised—“They All Had Grandfathers,” “The Disease,” “The Fathers,” and “The Wheel.” These stories remain to this day unpublished.

  Ray had forged a close working relationship with Walter Bradbury and relied on him to help him see the proverbial forest through the trees. Throughout his career, Ray surrounded himself with a small and dependable inner circle that included his wife, Maggie; his agent, Don Congdon; various editors over the years; and a few friends. As Ray tightened up The Martian Chronicles for publication, he consulted closely with his editor to determine the proper flow to the stories. Walter Bradbury expressed concerns over two more tales in the book. The editor had reservations about “The Earth Men” and its importance to the overall architecture of the Mars story, as well as “Usher II.” Walter Bradbury felt the latter tale, about a man inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe who builds a second house of Usher on Mars, was a bit too fantastical. Ray agreed to rework “The Earth Men,” and convinced his editor to leave the other tale in the book as is. The Martian Chronicles was coming together on short order.

  In early 1950, Norman Corwin invited Ray to a new program he had developed for United Nations Radio. As Ray took his seat in the front row, he noticed a couple moving into the row directly behind him. It was John Huston and his pregnant wife, Ricki. Ray was completely awestruck at the sight of Huston, his favorite director. Ray had seen both The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon numerous times. “He knew how to get actors to live inside the skin of their characters so you weren’t watching actors acting, you were watching people living,” Ray said. “When a director can do this, you forget that you are looking at a motion picture.”

  Ray was occasionally asked by his friends when he was going to write a screenplay. His response was always the same: “When John Huston asks me to.” It was a typically brassy Bradbury response, similar to telling his friends in 1939 that he would land a part in Laraine Day’s theater group before he had even met the actress, and when, at the age of twelve, he proclaimed that he would get a job on air at radio station KGAR in Tucson, Arizona, and did. As Ray said, “I’ve known my destiny all along, haven’t I?”

  Sitting at the Corwin radio broadcast, it took all Ray’s self-control not to turn around and confess his profound admiration for the Hollywood director. After the broadcast, Corwin invited Ray to join him and the Hustons at a Sunset Strip restaurant. In an unusual response, Ray declined the dinner invitation. “Well, it’s one of those times in your life when you want to jump
up, turn around, shake hands, and introduce yourself; but, at the time, I’d only had one book published, and I felt I should have had a few more published to be fully armed to meet Huston,” admitted Ray.

  The Martian Chronicles was scheduled for publication in May 1950, and Ray planned a trip to New York to mark the event and to visit his agent, Don Congdon, and his editor, Walter Bradbury. Maggie and Susan stayed behind in Los Angeles with Maggie’s parents. He didn’t take the bus this time, as there was enough money to travel by rail. On his way across country, Ray made a brief stop in Chicago to have lunch at the Art Institute with a science fiction fan with whom he had been corresponding. As Ray ascended the broad steps of the museum, a group of people rushed toward him. They were science fiction fans and they all clutched brand-new copies of The Martian Chronicles. The friend Ray was meeting had told them that the author was in town. And somehow—Ray never knew how—they had all obtained copies of his new book days before its official publication. On the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago, the group of young adults swarmed Ray, their hands reaching out in his direction, holding copies of books and pens. They all wanted Ray Bradbury’s autograph.

  16. THE ILLUSTRATED MAN

  The idea of a futuristic society where being an astronaut was a routine job, something as tedious as a long-distance truck driver was fascinating, psychedelicize this with some drug culture references and a little peripheral esoteric mumbo-jumbo and presto. My main goal, however, was to project a sense of the overwhelming loneliness space offers us; in this I think we succeeded.

  —BERNIE TAUPIN, lyricist for Elton John’s “Rocket Man”