The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  Ben Benjamin slammed his office door in Ray Bradbury’s face. But Ray was certain of what he had done. It is telling that the two people he trusted most, his wife, Maggie, and his literary agent, Don Congdon, supported him implicitly.

  “I was proud of Ray for writing that letter,” said Maggie Bradbury. “I was behind him one hundred percent.”

  Added Congdon, “I was all for it.”

  It was a tempestuous time to live and be free in America—especially as an artist. However, as Ray rallied against government censorship, he was unwittingly storing away the components for his next book—his much-anticipated first novel.

  As that time neared, Ray’s latest short-story collection, his first book of mixed fiction, was released. Published in March 1953, The Golden Apples of the Sun was dedicated to the one person who had influenced Ray more than anyone else:

  AND THIS ONE, WITH LOVE, IS FOR NEVA

  DAUGHTER OF GLINDA

  THE GOOD WITCH OF THE SOUTH

  18. FAHRENHEIT 451

  Ray was one of my heroes when I started publishing Playboy.

  —HUGH HEFNER, publisher

  WHEN RAY was nine years old, he learned of the cataclysmic fires that destroyed the Alexandrian library of ancient Egypt. Untold numbers of books, letters, and archival documents were reduced to cinders. At a young age, Ray had embarked upon his singular lifelong love affair with the library; he regularly visited the old Carnegie Athenaeum in Waukegan, Illinois. The very fact that the greatest and most storied library in history—the library at Alexandria—had gone up in flames pained him to his core.

  In the autumn of 1932, when the Bradbury family—Leo, Esther, Skip, and Ray—made the trek across the country, along Route 66, through Depression-era America, at dusk, road-wearied, they often stopped to rest at a bungalow-court motel. “I hit the ground running to the nearest library,” said Ray. “That was my way of sustaining myself on the journey. When I got in the library, the first thing I looked for were the Oz books. They weren’t there. The second thing I looked for were the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books or his Martian books. They weren’t there. That was my education to the fact that certain kinds of books, at least when I was a kid, were not allowed in libraries. It wasn’t censorship. It was taste. The librarians looked down their noses at these books—which were not ‘literature.’” It was Ray’s first exposure to the literary snobbery that would one day plague his own career as an author.

  In 1934, when Ray was living in Los Angeles and watching at least a dozen movies a week, he was shocked at the newsreel footage that rolled before each motion picture feature. Grainy black-and-white images of Nazi soldiers hurling books into fiery blazes flashed before him, singeing his subconscious. Ray sat bathed in projector light, flames reflecting in his round spectacles, and he cried. During the Depression, books—particularly free books from the public library—were his one great solace. “When Hitler burned a book,” Ray wrote in 1966 in an introduction to Fahrenheit 451, “I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh.”

  As Ray watched the House Un-American Activities Committee ignite a Communist witch hunt in Hollywood in 1947, the seeds of a masterpiece—Fahrenheit 451—swirled within his subconscious. It was a mad inquisition that reminded him of his own long-lost relative, Mary Bradbury, convicted of witchcraft at the Salem Witch Trials.

  During this period in the late 1940s, Ray wrote what he would later call “five ladyfinger firecrackers,” which led to the “explosion” of Fahrenheit 451. Each of the stories—“The Bonfire,” “Bright Phoenix,” “The Exiles,” “Usher II,” and “The Pedestrian”—addressed themes of censorship, banned books, book burning, the power of the individual, or the salvation of art from the clutches of those who might destroy it. They were stories of social satire, addressing issues dear to Ray Bradbury. “The Pedestrian,” the final story in the buildup to Fahrenheit 451, sprang from a personal, if bizarre, experience.

  As Ray often told the story, it was a late, windy autumn night in Los Angeles, the Santa Ana breeze carrying the scent of cinders. Ray and a friend (Ray does not recall who this particular friend was) had finished dinner at a restaurant in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles and were walking to the bus stop, deep in conversation. (Neither man owned an automobile.) As he walked, Ray munched on some soda crackers, a box of which, in his typically eccentric fashion, he had brought with him to and from the restaurant. A police car wheeled up beside them. The officer stepped out and approached the two men. He asked what they were doing.

  “Putting one foot in front of the other,” said Ray, his mouth full of crackers.

  Displeased, the officer asked again what they were doing.

  “Breathing the air,” said Ray, “talking, conversing, walking.”

  As he spoke, bits of cracker flew from his mouth, dusting the police officer’s uniform. The officer flicked the crumbs from his chest and shoulders.

  “It’s illogical, your stopping us,” Ray continued. “If we wanted to burgle a joint or rob a shop, we would have driven up in a car, burgled or robbed, and driven away. As you see, we have no car, only our feet.”

  As Ray recalled it, the police officer was dumbfounded to see two pedestrians out late walking in a city not known for foot traffic. He also took Ray Bradbury as a smart-ass. (In actuality, Ray was just being Ray: innocently impudent, a little naïve.)

  “Walking, eh?” said the officer. “Just walking?”

  Ray and his friend nodded, wondering if they were the victims of some strange joke.

  “Well,” the officer said, “don’t do it again!”

  The officer returned to his patrol car and drove off into the night.

  Incensed, Ray went home and wrote “The Pedestrian,” a story about a future society in which walking was forbidden and all pedestrians were treated as criminals. The tale follows one man, a writer, in the year 2053 who still enjoys the lost pastime of late-night walks, while others sit inside their little homes watching television. Ray’s agent, Don Congdon, sent the story to countless magazines, from the top slicks to the science fiction pulp magazines, but it did not sell. “Probably because it was too political,” Ray surmised. Finally, in August 1951, the story was published in The Reporter, a liberal political magazine put out by Max Ascoli; later, “The Pedestrian” appeared in The Golden Apples of the Sun; and in 1952, it was included in the Best Science Fiction Stories anthology.

  “‘The Pedestrian’—even though it’s not dealing with censorship—resulted in Fahrenheit,’” said Ray. “Because later, I took the pedestrian out for a walk one night again, and when he turned a corner, he bumped into this young girl named Clarisse McClellan and she took a sniff and she said, ‘I smell kerosene, I know who you are,’ and the man she bumped into said, ‘Who am I?’ and she said, ‘You’re the fireman who lives up the block who burns books.’”

  By 1949, the “five ladyfinger firecracker” tales were written. In 1950, Ray set out to write “the explosion,” as he referred to it, that would later evolve into Fahrenheit 451. The earliest draft of this formative novella was titled Long After Midnight, and was written shortly after Ray and Maggie had moved into the Clarkson Road house. Ray had yet to transform the garage into a workable space. One afternoon, as he was roaming the UCLA library stacks, he discovered the perfect spot in which to write.

  “I found the best way to inspire myself,” he said, “was to go to the library in Los Angeles and rove about, pulling books from shelves, reading a line here, a paragraph there, snatching, devouring, moving on, and then suddenly writing on any handy piece of paper.”

  One day he heard the clatter of typewriter keys emanating from a stairwell; he went down the stairs to investigate. In the library basement, he discovered a typing room with rows of desks topped with well-oiled typewriters. Each typewriter had a timer, and could be rented for a dime for each half hour. Ray had found his new office.

  He went t
o work. In a flourish, he set out to draft the story “Long After Midnight,” soon to be retitled “The Fireman.” Ray made a quick outline for himself, a series of plot points he wanted to touch upon, then commenced writing madly. By the end of the first day in his new “office,” he found it difficult to leave the library and ride the bus home.

  In the days that followed, the writer woke at seven in the morning, took the bus to the library, and wrote until dusk. “I cannot possibly tell you what an exciting adventure it was,” he recalled in the 1993 introduction to the fortieth-anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451. “Day after day, attacking that rentable machine, shoving dimes, pounding away like a crazed chimp, rushing upstairs to fetch more dimes, running in and out of the stacks, pulling books, scanning pages, breathing the finest pollen in the world, book dust, with which to develop literary allergies. Then racing back down blushing with love, having found some quote here, another there to shove or tuck into my burgeoning myth.”

  Nine days after he had started, at a total cost of $9.80 (forty-nine hours of typewriter time), Ray Bradbury had written a 25,000-word novella; it was the story of a fireman named Montag in a distant future in which firemen, instead of putting out blazes, started them. They burned books.

  As with some of his other politically charged tales, such as “The Pedestrian” and “The Other Foot,” many editors rejected “The Fireman.” Don Congdon shopped the story to magazines such as Harper’s and Esquire, but none of the major literary publications was interested. Finally, “The Fireman” sold for three hundred dollars to Horace Gold, the editor of Galaxy magazine, a science fiction pulp publication, and was published in February 1951. It was the same month that Ray’s third book, The Illustrated Man, was published. Other stories, other books, myriad film and radio projects then took hold of his attention, and Ray set “The Fireman” down for two years. He had initially hoped to include it in The Illustrated Man and then in The Golden Apples of the Sun, but decided to cut the lengthy story from both when editor Walter Bradbury thought “The Fireman” unfit for both collections. Fahrenheit 451 would have to wait two more years before it would come to life.

  IN 1953, in Los Angeles—and all across America, for that matter—it appeared as if economically prosperous Americans had forgotten the war years. The horrors of Nazi Germany had been largely brushed aside in favor of a Kodachrome culture, a new society of tract homes with white picket fences. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s voice had become background noise on suburban-living-room television sets.

  But not everyone was wearing red, white, and blue blinders. Despite the relative prosperity of the nation, Ray feared for the future of his two towheaded daughters. He was frightened by the new atomic world and the potential consequences of what society would do with modern technology. In addition, the “Red Scare” moved Ray to explore the alarming possibilities of a dark, dystopian future.

  With The Martian Chronicles, Ray had cleverly unified a series of his Mars-themed short stories, written in the late 1940s, into a thinly veiled novel. While widely acknowledged for his mastery of the short-story form, as well as for his poetic, luminous style, Ray Bradbury had yet to prove himself with a work of longer fiction. And this posed the question: Could he do it? Could Ray Bradbury’s inspiration-fueled writing process be sustained over the course of creating a novel-length work?

  “Being hit and run over by a short story is exhilarating,” Ray remarked in his 1966 introduction to the book. “But how does one get hit and run over and exhilarated by such a long thing as a novel? How does one stay exhilarated day after day so the whole damn thing stays honest, so one does not begin to rationalize and spoil the process, become self-conscious and ruin the whole?”

  In The Martian Chronicles, Ray had explored issues at that time uncommon to the science fiction genre. While the book was set fifty years in the future on the planet Mars, the stories actually confronted contemporary concerns such as racism, the anti-Communist witch hunt, environmental pollution, and nuclear war. Ray’s examination of these hot-button topics would lead to the writing of Fahrenheit 451.

  By the summer of 1952, the publishing industry was abuzz with the news about publisher Ian Ballantine and his new endeavor, Ballantine Books. Ballantine and editor Stanley Kauffmann had left positions at Bantam Books, publisher of the paperback reprint editions of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. Because of their affordability, the Bantam paperbacks had managed to do what had thus far eluded Doubleday’s hardcover Bradbury titles—bring Ray Bradbury to a larger, mainstream audience. “Certainly the paperbacks and library-bound hardback editions became the way that the younger generation learned to love Bradbury and to see him as an American master,” said Jonathan R. Eller, coauthor (with William F. Touponce) of Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, a scholarly survey of Ray’s publishing history.

  Ray’s prominence in the literary landscape was growing, and while he loved his editor, Walter Bradbury, and owed much to his creative insights, Ray was still frustrated by Doubleday’s myopic vision. The publisher was insistent on marketing Ray as a science fiction writer to a science fiction audience. Ian Ballantine recognized not only the growing popularity of science fiction, but also its literary potential.

  Walter Bradbury passed on “The Fireman” and agreed to allow Ray to publish it elsewhere, so long as it was not published as a novel, but within a collection of stories. Walter Bradbury did not want his prized author to write his first novel for another publisher.

  In the meantime, Don Congdon spoke with Ballantine, to see if there was any interest in a new Bradbury collection. In the early 1950s, Ray Bradbury, while not yet a household name, was one of the top players in the science fiction field; he was a celebrity to fans of science fiction, horror, and fantasy. The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man—thanks in large part to healthy paperback sales—had sold respectably. Ray’s first book of mixed fiction, The Golden Apples of the Sun, had received more reviews than all of his previous three books combined. And the reviews were largely glowing. The New York Times stated, “He writes in a style that seems to have been nourished on poets and fabulists of the Irish Literary Renaissance. And he is wonderfully adept at getting to the heart of his story without talking all day long about it and around it.”

  In Bradbury, publisher Ian Ballantine recognized the potential for much more. Ballantine wanted Ray Bradbury to write a book for his company—a company that would break new ground in publishing by offering, simultaneously, both paperback and hardcover books. After discussions, in late 1952, Ray signed with Ballantine to write a collection that would include the novella “The Fireman,” to be rewritten with an additional 25,000 words. All parties involved agreed that the story could be elaborated on. The advance for this new book was five thousand dollars. Though his stature as an American writer had grown dramatically, Ray was still financially strapped, and the advance from Ballantine was welcome.

  By now, the two Bradbury girls, Susan and Ramona, were aged three and two, respectively. Full of toddler energy, they liked to romp about the three-bedroom home on Clarkson Road and play in the backyard, where there was a man-made pond. The girls especially adored watching the tadpoles in the pond, and inside the garage, which Ray had finally converted into an office, Ray tried to work as the girls called to him from outside the window. The girls threw pebbles at the garage window and their father giggled as he typed. A playful man, easily distracted and ever the child at heart, Ray could hardly ignore the pleas of his kids, so he almost always gave in and ran outside to play. But he had a book to write, and he needed a real office. However, with a meager annual income and monthly mortgage payments, the Bradburys could ill afford it. In addition, they had bought a dishwasher and a dining-room set on installment. When Ray Bradbury opened the first dishwasher bill and saw the amount going to interest, he was alarmed and swore to finish the payments quickly. So, he again returned to UCLA, this time to finish his book for Ballantine.

  Another round of days and dimes ens
ued. Ray Bradbury joined the typists in the typewriter rental room to add 25,000 new words to “The Fireman.” In revising his novella, he knew he had to consult his original story, “The Fireman,” but at the same time, he didn’t want to overintellectualize his approach to writing; it ran counter to his usual style.

  “I feared for refiring the book and rebaking the characters,” noted Ray. “I am a passionate, not intellectual writer, which means my characters must plunge ahead of me to live the story. If my intellect caught up with them too swiftly, the whole adventure might mire down in self-doubt and endless mind play.”

  Despite these concerns, Ray Bradbury was determined to turn “The Fireman” into a short novel. However, the story would be just a centerpiece, surrounded by other stories, to adhere to his agreement with Doubleday.

  As he wrote the book, he determined not to consult the original story. “I just let the characters talk to me,” he said, remembering his first hours writing Fahrenheit 451 and invoking the age-old writer’s cliché. “I didn’t write Fahrenheit 451, it wrote me.” The plot line was still the same, the characters still in place: Fireman Montag; his pill-popping wife, Mildred; Clarisse McClellan who told Montag about the power of the books that he burned each night. There were some minor changes: Fire Chief Leahy became Fire Chief Beatty, certain scenes were tossed out, others were fleshed out, the language waxed more poetic, and the story expanded as Ray wrote. Additionally, he hyped up the fire and sun symbolism. Once again, in just nine days, he finished, this time producing the first draft of the book.

  In January 1953, Ray returned to his garage office to revise the draft. He was still without a title for the book; he sought a particularly powerful, symbolic title. On the afternoon of January 22, as sunlight streamed in through the garage windows, he had a revelation.