The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  Ray’s career continued to go well, too. Along with the increasing sales of his story rights to dramatic radio, which expanded his audience exponentially, Ray moved into television, a medium in its infancy. While Ray had cautioned his readers about the potential threat of a television-reliant culture in his short story “The Veldt,” he also recognized that for a writer with a wife and two baby girls to support, TV opened up an entirely new arena of financial opportunity. Some might say this made Ray Bradbury a hypocrite. However, Ray recognized the potential power of the burgeoning cultural medium and determined to put it to good use.

  Over the course of his long career, Ray Bradbury was often perceived as a technophobe. He never learned to drive a car; he didn’t fly on an airplane until the age of sixty-two; he owned a computer for only a short time later in life but never bothered to learn how to use it. When his stories began appearing on television in the early 1950s, the Bradbury family didn’t even own a television upon which they could watch the adaptations of his grand creations. Ray always felt there were more imaginative ways in which a family could spend its time. He believed that the overuse of television would surely signify the beginning of the “dumbing down” of America. However, this didn’t mean he disapproved of the technology, or didn’t recognize its great potential. With this in mind, Ray sold the rights to “Zero Hour,” from The Illustrated Man, to the NBC program Lights Out. The program aired on July 23, 1951.

  As Ray’s reach was expanding beyond books into other media, he continued to move beyond the boundaries of North American publishing. Like Dark Carnival, The Martian Chronicles was published in the United Kingdom in September 1951, this time by publisher Rupert Hart-Davis. But Hart-Davis wasn’t so keen on the title; the term “Martian” had hardly entered the global lexicon. Ray wrote Hart-Davis in wholehearted agreement:

  The Martian Chronicles … dropped into a conversation causes people to blink and say, “What?” or “I beg your pardon?” Then I have to spell it.

  “M..A..R..T..I..A..N. You know what I mean?” They blink again. “You know the planet Mars. Martians.” They nod sagely, “Oh, yes!” I’m getting a bit tired of explaining my title to people. In any event, once they learn it’s about Martians, they sidle away from me and apprehensively change the conversation. So …

  May I suggest The Silver Locusts might not be bad at all. I hope you’ll think it over. Either that or Way in the Middle of the Air will probably have to do.

  In addition to changing the title for the British edition, Ray took the opportunity to make changes to the book itself. He was highly critical of his work, even after it had been published. As was his wont, he fine-tuned his published stories whenever given the chance. Ray removed “Way in the Middle of the Air” from the British edition of The Martian Chronicles, published as The Silver Locusts. It told the story of an exodus of African-American settlers leaving the Deep South of the United States for a new life on Mars, free from discrimination, hatred, and racial injustice. It was groundbreaking social commentary, written at the dawn of the American civil rights movement. But in hindsight, Ray felt the story simply didn’t fit in with the rest of the book. “The blacks appear in that one story and then they don’t appear again,” he said. Ray always felt that “Way in the Middle of the Air” was more appropriately paired with its sequel, “The Other Foot,” which was published in The Illustrated Man. The latter story was so strong, in fact, that it earned Ray yet another spot in The Best American Short Stories of the Year anthology for 1952.

  As Ray readied the British edition of his book, he also excised a short story he dearly loved, the macabre and chimerical “Usher II.” It was about a man obsessed with tales of fantasy and horror—in particular those of Edgar Allan Poe—which had long been banned on Earth. In an act of defiance, the man builds a second “House of Usher” with which he lures the people who brought about censorship on Earth, and murders them one by one, employing all of Poe’s deliciously dark and violent devices. Ray loved the tale but, even as he was preparing the original Martian Chronicles manuscript, there were doubts about the role of this story of dark fantasy within the larger pioneering allegory. His editor, Walter Bradbury, had stated in no uncertain terms that he did not feel “Usher II” fit into the larger picture of The Martian Chronicles, but Ray battled to keep the story in the book. The author won out, and it was only after The Martian Chronicles was published by Doubleday that Ray recognized the errors of his ways. “Brad,” Ray wrote Walter Bradbury, “you were right about Usher II. I should have followed your advice and cut it out of The Martian Chronicles. It is a good story, but time and again people have mentioned it to me as the lump in the cake frosting. I let my love for the story blind me to its position in relation to the whole. I should have taken advantage of your more objective view.”

  Now with a second chance at publishing The Martian Chronicles across the Atlantic, Ray removed the story from the book. Ironically, he would later lament this decision, as “Usher II” was a story near and dear to him. It also dealt with the theme of censorship, which would later become the foundation for Fahrenheit 451, a book that many would call his masterpiece.

  This proclivity to tinker with previously published work was at odds with the philosophy Ray would assume later in life. “A writer shouldn’t interfere with his younger self,” he proclaimed. His early, constant retooling would eventually lead him to repackaging, and in some cases rewriting, stories he was displeased with from Dark Carnival, rereleasing it as the 1955 book The October Country.

  The Silver Locusts (a reference to the silver Earth rocket ships landing on Mars) was released in Britain in September 1951. Ray sent a copy of the book, in its new incarnation, to John Huston, who responded in a letter dated December 27, 1951, in which he thanked Ray for the copy of “The Silver Locust” [sic], and said, “… There is no doubt in my mind it would make a great picture.... I will try my best to get some studio to let me make your book, providing you still desire that and that there is still such a thing as motion pictures.”

  It was the second flattering note from Huston in less than a year. And now the director was expressing interest in not only working with Ray but also adapting The Martian Chronicles for the screen. When this might occur, Ray didn’t know, but he felt that his dream of working with John Huston would soon become a reality.

  RAY BRADBURY lived his life in a race against time. He had so many things to do and to say, and he felt he did not have enough time in which to accomplish them all. Perhaps that was why he so often wrote of time machines. With devices to travel back to the past and forward to the future, he was able to right the wrongs of yesteryear and to prevent the seemingly inevitable mistakes of tomorrow. To Ray, time represented mortality, an end to his creative output. He did not fear death itself; instead, he was frightened of being unable to write. And so Ray Bradbury wrote as if he were making up for tomorrow’s lost time. Even with the demands of a growing family and a new house, he continued to write a short story a week, or its equivalent in novel pages. He never worked on only a single project, preferring instead to juggle various endeavors in different stages of development. Early on, Ray developed a filing system for his story starts. Often, he would concoct a title or a story concept, begin the story, then slip it into his filing cabinet for a future day. Days, weeks, months, years, sometimes decades later, he would slide open the metal drawer of his filing cabinet and pull out a folder containing a short-story title, or perhaps a half-started tale born of some long-ago inspiration. In this way, he felt, he would always be able to “hotwire his idea machine.” Ray believed that, with each completed creation, he bolstered his quest for immortality; he strove to live up to the words of Mr. Electrico and, through his works, to live forever.

  As he was working on The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, Ray consistently wrote, submitted, and published new tales in magazines. In high school, Ray had written a story about the ravine that ran through his hometown of Waukegan. Since writing “The Lake
” in 1942 and discovering how his youthful memories could generate story ideas, Ray had intermittently written more Illinois stories, in the hope that he was building a novel in the same manner he had used with The Martian Chronicles. It was a novel that his agent, Don Congdon, very much wanted him to write, and a novel that his editor, Walter Bradbury, wanted to publish. After finishing The Illustrated Man, Ray planned to, at long last, complete his Illinois novel that, over the years, had various working titles: The Small Assassins, The Wind of Time, The Blue Remembered Hills, and, by 1951, Summer Morning, Summer Night. After The Illustrated Man was published, Ray signed a contract for the book, which was scheduled for publication late in 1952.

  IN APRIL 1952, Ray and Maggie stumbled upon a piece of art they loved. While on an evening stroll through Beverly Hills, they passed an art gallery. Ray glanced through the storefront window and saw a dramatic lithograph that was, in his mind, the pen-and-ink embodiment of his writing. He felt as if he had discovered a twin—a doppelgänger who had chosen pens and brushes instead of an Underwood typewriter and paper for his creations. The artist’s name was Joe Mugnaini. The piece in the gallery window was a lithograph of a gothic house, a dwelling that Ray’s vampire family might live in, tall and spindly and ominous. But it also evoked an urban aura, with a graffiti-scrawled billboard on a cement wall beneath the house. Standing in the shadows was a dark figure. As Ray said, it was the “sort of place a beast like myself might want to live in.” Ray entered the store and inquired about the price of the art. “The lithograph of the house was seventy-five dollars,” remembered Ray, “and I couldn’t afford that. I asked if I could pay for it on time because I was only making eighty or ninety dollars a week at the time. So I bought the lithograph on time and paid it off over a period of three months. The lady who sold the lithograph to me said, ‘If you like that, there’s an oil painting of that same house in the next room.’”

  Ray and Maggie stepped into the adjacent room and saw a larger painting titled Modern Gothic. After studying the painting for a while, Ray realized that he recognized the grotesque structure. It was the house that had stood across the street from the tenement owned by the mother of his former friend Grant Beach. In love with the painting, Ray desperately wanted to buy it, but Maggie would not hear of plunking down $250 for it. Dejected, Ray spun on his heel and then, on the opposite wall, he spotted yet another dark, haunting oil painting. Again by Joe Mugnaini, this work portrayed a carnival train traveling late at night over a towering, gothic trestle. Aboard the train were dozens of faceless, colorfully dressed celebrants hoisting flags and banners into the night sky. Most bizarre, the bridge on which the train ran abruptly ended at either side. The carnival train was going nowhere. Titled The Caravan, the painting stirred Ray Bradbury’s imagination. It reminded him of his own carnival-inspired stories, in particular “The Black Ferris,” which would a decade later inspire the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes.

  “It was a spooky moment when I saw that Joe’s mind and my mind met somewhere out in space,” Ray said. He wanted to buy the artist’s pieces right there on the spot, but that was impossible. Ray asked the gallery saleswoman for Mugnaini’s phone number. “I called Joe and a friend drove me out to his house in Altadena and I saw all of his beautiful stuff and I said, ‘Mr. Mugnaini, I can’t afford to pay the gallery prices, but you split it fifty-fifty with them, don’t you?’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s right. The gallery keeps half the money.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I can’t afford to pay the gallery price, but if those paintings don’t sell, I’ll buy them from you for the price you would have got. So therefore, I’m not cheating you, you see. I don’t mind cheating the gallery because they’re rich, and to hell with them.’”

  Two weeks later, Joe Mugnaini called Ray to inform him that neither of the paintings had sold. If Ray was still interested, they were his and he could pick them up and pay when he was able.

  Joe Mugnaini was an Italian-born artist who immigrated with his family to the United States as an infant. Eight years older than Ray, Mugnaini remarked that they were “joined at the hip.” Like Ray, Mugnaini was a Depression kid. He was in his late teens the day the stock market crashed, and he worked menial jobs throughout the thirties, like a lot of people, to survive. But he had lofty ambitions and enrolled as a student in the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he studied painting and drawing. California artist Mary Anderson, who studied under Mugnaini in the late 1950s, described him as “enthusiastic, skeptical, vulgar, exhortative, Italian, dedicated. He was an energetic wild man.” It was this energy that made him the perfect collaborative partner for Ray Bradbury: Joe Mugnaini painted like Ray Bradbury wrote.

  “I had heard of [Ray Bradbury],” said Mugnaini, in a 1990 interview in Outré magazine, two years before his death, “because he was a very popular guy. I think a lot of GIs who came out of the Army were reading his books.” Mugnaini recalled the day Ray first visited his house: “He got very excited and told me I was doing graphically what he was doing literally.”

  Ray made arrangements to pay the artist on an installment basis. “Years later,” said Ray, “I found out that he pulled the paintings from the show to give them to me. That’s the kind of guy he was.” A lifelong friendship and partnership was born.

  The same month Ray met Joe Mugnaini, he began a correspondence with Bill Gaines, managing editor and publisher of Entertaining Comics, more commonly known as EC. The comic book company had recently risen to prominence as a leading publisher of horror, science fiction, and fantasy titles. Ray discovered that EC, without permission, had taken two of his stories from The Illustrated Man, “Kaleidoscope” and “Rocket Man,” and combined them into the story “Home to Stay.” (Unbeknownst to Ray at the time, EC had lifted two more of his tales: “The Handler” ran as “A Strange Undertaking,” and “The Emissary” had been published as “What the Dog Dragged In.”) Ray wrote Gaines, but he didn’t admonish EC for its trespass.

  “I pretended they had taken my stories inadvertently; they had read them, and then subconsciously stolen them,” Ray recalled. He requested modest compensation for the plagiarism (a meager fifty dollars), but it was more important for Ray to open up a dialogue with the popular comic book publishing house, for he had an ulterior motive. Gaines responded to Ray, and while denying any plagiarism, he readily agreed to pay the author fifty dollars for the trouble. Ray, in turn, wrote back, thanking Gaines, and proposed the idea of working together on “official” Bradbury comic book adaptations. Gaines, excited, wholeheartedly agreed to Ray’s proposal. EC Comics began adapting the stories of Ray Bradbury in an official capacity later that year. The stories were adapted by some of the top artists in the field, including Wally Wood, Jack Kamen, Joe Orlando, and Al Williamson. The EC adaptations introduced Ray to a younger group of comic book fans, thousands strong, who picked up the Bantam paperback editions of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man.

  As the summer of 1952 neared, Ray had done much work on his Illinois novel, but it was still far from completion. Ray was feeling pressured, but Walter Bradbury was agreeable. The editor had read drafts of Ray’s Illinois manuscript and had a sense that it could well be Ray’s major literary breakthrough. Ray simply needed more time. Walter Bradbury released Ray from his contract to complete the midwestern childhood-inspired novel and, instead, agreed to publish another Bradbury short-story collection. In turn, Ray promised to wrap up the Illinois book as quickly as possible. So Ray began pulling together The Golden Apples of the Sun, but this time the book would be a collection of mixed fiction that well represented Ray’s continuing inroads into the major market literary magazines. While Walter Bradbury had kept Ray within the confines of science fiction with The Illustrated Man, with this next book the editor agreed to a collection comprising not only science fiction and fantasy but also contemporary and literary fiction. Included would be four of Ray’s realistic tales that had been published in the slicks to critical acclaim in the 1940s. The first of these was �
�I See You Never,” originally published in The New Yorker. The story marked Ray’s sole appearance in the magazine over the course of his career. “I probably submitted three or four hundred short stories to them over the years and this is the only one that ever sold,” Ray lamented.

  The other three mainstream stories Ray included in The Golden Apples were “The Big Black and White Game,” Ray’s first tale about race relations; “Powerhouse,” a story about a woman coming to terms with mortality and spirituality as she travels to visit her dying mother; and “Invisible Boy,” a tale of a boy convinced he has turned invisible by the make-believe magic of an old woman.

  Alongside these realistic stories, Ray included his lovesick dinosaur tale, “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” (published in the June 23, 1951, issue of the Saturday Evening Post and later retitled “The Fog Horn”), and “The April Witch,” from his long-in-the-works vampire family novel, a fanciful story based on a character who was a thinly disguised incarnation of Ray’s beloved aunt Neva. Rounding out the collection were five new, as yet unpublished tales: “The Flying Machine,” “The Murderer,” “The Meadow” (a short-story adaptation of his radio script of the same name), “The Garbage Collector,” and the title story, a science-fictional Promethean quest, “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” the title of which was taken from a poem by W. B. Yeats.

  Of all the stories in The Golden Apples of the Sun, only one, “Embroidery,” had appeared in the pulps. With The Golden Apples of the Sun, Ray was assembling his first true book of mixed fiction. He had signed with Doubleday to write for its new science fiction line, but Ray’s latest collection reached well beyond science fiction, offering fantasy and contemporary tales alongside stories of the far future.