by Sam Weller
RAY WAS always one for nostalgia—a sentimental fool, as the saying goes. He was even feeling nostalgic for Ireland, where he had spent some of the hardest months of his life, feeling suicidal, working for a man who played him for all of his boyish, small-town, by-golly naiveté. But as painful as many of the memories were, there was something undeniably romantic about the loneliness he had felt there. Loneliness was a theme that at once frightened Ray and, at the same time, invigorated him. Ireland had that allure—the inclement weather, good, decent people, the boys at Heeber Finn’s Pub, and the Royal Hibernian Hotel and its staff who became family. Returning to Ireland in his imagination, Ray wrote his first Ireland story (one of many to follow), “The First Night of Lent.” The tale was, as Ray described it, the entirely true story of his taxi driver, the man who brought him day in, day out, from Dublin to Kilcock and back to Dublin again in the late hours of the night. “My Irish cabdriver was a human being when drunk, but as soon as he sobered up for Lent he was a demon-monster. My only advice to him was: Stay drunk … I love you that way.”
“The First Night of Lent” sold to Playboy and was published in the March 1956 issue. Ray wrote to his book editor, Walter Bradbury, to share his enthusiasm for writing about Ireland: “All of the months of walking the Dublin rains is now beginning to simmer up in me. I lay in bed the other night until five in the morning thinking of Ireland and got so many damn fine ideas I got up gibbering to put them down on paper.” But Ray wasn’t just feeling nostalgic for Ireland; as always, he was nostalgic for his childhood and his young adulthood. Given the tone and themes of many of his science fiction tales, with their rocket ships straight out of H. G. Wells, one might say that Ray Bradbury was even nostalgic for the future. And he was unashamed of it. Over the years, he was taken to task by some literary critics for being overly sentimental, and his response to that criticism was, “You’re Goddamned right!”
But perhaps more than any other time or place he visited in his fiction, Ray regularly conjured Green Town. He had long been writing short stories about his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, and had sold many, including “The Season of Sitting” (Charm, August 1951); “The Lawns of Summer” (Nation’s Business, May 1952); “The Swan” (Cosmopolitan, September 1954); and “Summer in the Air,” which appeared in the February 1956 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. This simple summer tale, about a boy and his new tennis shoes, would later be retitled “The Sound of Summer Running.” It would one day become a staple of junior high school reading lists, a favorite of students and teachers alike. It, too, as with so many Bradbury tales, had its origins in a real-life experience.
Ray had been riding on a Los Angeles city bus when he noticed a young boy with an unmistakable spring to his step. Ray looked down at the boy’s feet. He was wearing a brand-new pair of sneakers, white, perfect, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound (or at least, Ray imagined, the owner of the shoes thought so). This one image sparked in Ray memories of a rite of passage from the summers of his own youth, when his mother would take him to Genesee Street to buy new tennis shoes every June. After Ray got off the bus, he went right home and wrote “The Sound of Summer Running”:
Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.
What Ray had been doing all along, at his own pace—which was important to him, because he didn’t like to feel pressured—was assembling a pastiche of Illinois stories that he hoped one day to combine into a novel. He’d had the idea for a long time, since the mid-1940s, when he told Don Congdon, who was then still an editor at Simon & Schuster, about the concept. Congdon had always been enthusiastic about the idea, and over the years had gently prodded Ray to finish it. It had always been assumed that Ray’s first novel would be his Illinois book. But then a little book called Fahrenheit 451 ignited Ray’s imagination, so to speak, and it became the first.
Now, in 1956, the Illinois book was finally coming together. Walter Bradbury even suggested to Ray that he write and send him a chapter a week so that the book would finally be completed. Walter Bradbury certainly did not hound him, but he let Ray know that he wanted the book. Ray assured his editor that he would do his best; he was, at the very least, making slow and steady progress toward finishing it. He had written another story, “The Last, the Very Last,” first published in Reporter, in June 1955 (later retitled “The Time Machine” in the Bradbury collection Classic Stories 1). It told of an elderly Civil War veteran, Colonel Freeleigh, who had bottled up inside of him all the memories of famous magicians of yesteryear, buffalo stampedes on the wild plains of 1875, and the smell of gunpowder drifting in the air of the battlefields at Bull Run, Shiloh, and Antietam. In this story, Ray wasn’t writing a tale of fantasy, he was writing about a real-life, honest-to-goodness time machine—an old man who had lived, nearly died a hundred times, and carried on to the summer of 1928 to share his tales of time-traveling adventure with a group of appreciative boys. The character was a composite of the Civil War veterans Ray recalled marching in Waukegan parades when he was a child; himself, now an adult, looking back on his younger self; and, most important, a “time machine” he had recently encountered in an Italian villa not far from Florence, eighty-eight-year-old Bernard Berenson.
As was his wont, Ray wrote about magic in his Illinois stories. This time, however, magic had to do with neither rocket ships nor circus freaks; the magic of this novel was the magic of memory. Ray conjured Summer 1928, sitting on the porch with his grandfather lighting his pipe as dusk settled, a boy wearing new tennis shoes, listening to the first lawn mowing of the season. And, of course, the family ritual of making dandelion wine during the height of Prohibition. Each bottle of sun-kissed elixir was labeled with a date, stoppered in an empty ketchup bottle, and stored in the cellar to be opened some far-off winter day for a taste of summer. It was vintage Bradbury metaphor: memories stored away to be tapped at a later date. After several years of working sporadically on the stories of Summer 1928, Ray was nearly done with the book.
By August 1956, Ray had sent his editor a table of contents listing the tales to be included in the Illinois novel-in-stories, now officially titled Dandelion Wine, after one of the stories. The nearly completed book, as it stood, followed young Douglas Spaulding (a thinly veiled young Ray Bradbury: Douglas was Ray’s middle name; Spaulding was his paternal grandmother’s maiden name) from the summer of 1928 to the summer of 1929.
When Walter Bradbury saw the manuscript of loosely connected short stories, he had an idea. He told Ray that he saw two books within the manuscript. “If you just take hold of this book by the ears and rip it apart, it will fall into two halves. Every other chapter should go out, and the remaining chapters will fall back into place. They will be your first book, and every other chapter will be your sequel,” Ray recalled his editor counseling him.
Ray heeded Walter Bradbury’s advice and removed half the stories from his manuscript. The half that remained was still titled Dandelion Wine; the half that was removed would become its sequel, still unpublished as of 2005, a book Ray would title Farewell, Summer. To smooth over the gaps left by the extracted stories, Ray wrote bridge chapters as he had done for The Martian Chronicles. Dandelion Wine emerged as a string of short stories about a young boy, Douglas Spaulding, who, with his brother Tom, comes to terms with time and mortality. As well as writing bridge passages to unify the narrative, Ray removed the short-story titles from each chapter, to further lend the appearance of a novel. Had the titles remained, the table of contents of Dandelion Wine would have run as follows:
1. Bridge Chapter
2. “Illumination”
3. “Dandelion Wine”
4. “The Sound of Summer Running”
5. Bridge Chapter
6. “The Season of Sitting”
7. Bridge Chapter
8. Bridge Chapter
9. “The Night”
10. Bridge Chapter
11. “The Lawns of Summer”
12. “The Happiness Machine”
13. Bridge Chapter
14. “Season of Disbelief”
15. Bridge Chapter
16. “The Last, the Very Last”
17. Bridge Chapter
18. “The Green Machine”
19. “The Trolley”
20. “Statues”
21. Bridge Chapter
22. “Exorcism”
23. Bridge Chapter
24. “The Window”
25. Bridge Chapter
26. Bridge Chapter
27. “The Swan”
28. Bridge Chapter
29. “The Whole Town’s Sleeping”
30. Bridge Chapter
31. “Good-by, Grandma”
32. Bridge Chapter
33. “The Tarot Witch”
34. Bridge Chapter
35. Bridge Chapter
36. “Green Wine for Dreaming”
37. Bridge Chapter
38. “Dinner at Dawn”
39. Bridge Chapter
Ray sent the new version of the Dandelion Wine manuscript to Walter Bradbury at the end of 1956, though he continued to edit the book over the next few months. Ray, of course, was fastidious as ever about the rewriting process, honing and polishing, until the manuscript had to be pried out of his hands and sent to the printer.
Meanwhile, in February 1957, Ray accepted an offer from the production company Hecht-Hill-Lancaster to serve as a script consultant and writer on the film White Hunter, Black Heart. He would collaborate with film and television screenwriter John Gay, who was under contract with the company. White Hunter, Black Heart was based on the Peter Viertel book about the making of the John Huston film The African Queen. Ray’s tumultuous tenure with Huston made him the perfect candidate to work on the film; he had invaluable insight to share.
As Gay recalled, the two writers sat together at the Hecht-Hill-Lancaster office and Ray would tell his John Huston stories, and then they’d look at the Viertel book, but they found themselves spending whole days doing just that and not much more. “Ray was a most unusual character,” Gay recalled. “He could talk your arm off. He was full of ideas, he had more ideas in that brain than anybody.” As Ray remembered, they were able to outline the book to a degree and write about thirty pages of material. But that was all. Ray had not collaborated on anything since his attempt to do so with Henry Hasse back in the early 1940s. “God knows,” said Gay, “I wasn’t made for collaboration, but I said to Ray, ‘You definitely were not made for collaboration.’ This was the most impossible combination ever brought together.” Even though Ray was being paid a thousand dollars a week, he realized that he and Gay were going in circles. The two writers decided it was best to tell producers Harold Hecht and Jim Hill that the collaboration had failed. “They were fine with it,” said Gay. “They said, ‘Well, we tried.’”
As ever, as Ray was endeavoring to work on White Hunter, Black Heart, and as Dandelion Wine was in the prepublication stages, he continued to craft new short stories.
Ever since Ray and Maggie had visited Bernard Berenson in the spring of 1954 at his Italian villa, Ray had remained in touch with the aged Renaissance scholar. The two men corresponded often, writing each other letters touching upon any number of subjects, from space travel to the aesthetic hurdles that confronted artists. It was a tender relationship, a father-and-son bond that Ray never had with his own father. Leo Bradbury was a tough guy, a blue-collar man, never one to wear his emotions on his shirtsleeves, though he had a terrific sense of humor, and he loved his son, but he was never able to relate fully to his sensitive imaginative, anomalous offspring. In Bernard Berenson, Ray had found a man who shared his enthusiasm for the love of the creative process. In Ray Bradbury, Berenson had found a young man who shared his passion for the arts, and for creating. What Berenson found most remarkable about Ray was his ability to articulate this love concisely. “All my life I have been trying to say what the artist does to us and I have never succeeded in doing it better or half so well as you,” he wrote Ray.
With each letter from Berenson that arrived in Ray’s mailbox, he continually pointed out that his time on Earth was nearing its end. With each letter, Berenson expressed his desire to see Ray and Maggie soon, for it could be their last visit. This pained Ray no end. Even as his star had risen dramatically since working on Moby Dick, he and Maggie still did not have enough money for a return trip to Europe. The occasional television work helped, but with three little girls to support, they had just enough money to live comfortably, but had nothing left for luxury. A trip to Europe was out of the question, and Ray feared that he might never see Bernard Berenson again.
But in the summer of 1957, fate intervened. Writer Graham Greene had read Ray’s short story “And the Rock Cried Out” and brought it to the attention of film director Sir Carol Reed. The director was looking for a new project, and one afternoon, as Ray recalled, Reed happened to be on the telephone with Harold Hecht, for whom Ray had been working on White Hunter, Black Heart. Ray was in Hecht’s office when the call came in. Reed asked Hecht if he had ever heard of this young writer named Ray Bradbury, as Reed was interested in working with him on a film adaptation of “And the Rock Cried Out.” “As a matter of fact,” Harold Hecht told Reed, “he’s standing here right this minute. Would you like to talk to him?”
Ray, Maggie, and the girls were soon off to London, where Ray would adapt his own short story into a screenplay for Sir Carol Reed. It was a stroke of serendipity and, most important to Ray, the opportunity allowed him to visit Bernard Berenson one last time. Around this time, Ray learned that his work on White Hunter, Black Heart would be all for naught. Hecht-Hill-Lancaster was unable to find a studio to back the picture. The film would have to wait several more decades, when new writers would adapt the novel for director Clint Eastwood.
Ray spent that summer in London, writing the screenplay, which turned out to be an exhilarating creative experience. Carol Reed was no John Huston. He encouraged Ray, reading the screenplay’s completed pages and telling him to just “keep doing what you’re doing.” In a matter of weeks, Ray finished the script, but his work was in vain. Once again, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, the producers of And the Rock Cried Out, was unable to procure funding. To this day, according to those who have read the script, it is Ray Bradbury’s best unproduced screenplay.
When Ray had completed work on And the Rock Cried Out in August, he and his family traveled south to Italy to meet with Bernard Berenson. “We were reunited in joy,” Ray wrote in the essay “The Renaissance Prince and the Baptist Martian,” “as if three years had not passed since our last fireworks. B. B. was, of course, even more the trembling gray moth now: the bones had thinned within the mother-of-pearl, crushed-flower flesh, but his spirits were good and his mind clean.”
Ray and Maggie shared sumptuous lunches and exquisite late-afternoon teas with “B.B.” It was their last visit with this extraordinary man, who was a kindred spirit, a father figure, and an unlikely fan of Ray’s. Although Bernard Berenson lived two more years after this visit, Ray and Maggie would not return to Europe in time to see him again. He died October 6, 1959.
WHILE IN Italy, the Bradburys visited Rome. It was on a golden afternoon, with the city spreading out before their hotel balcony window, that Maggie turned to Ray and told him that she no longer loved him. She wanted a divorce. Ray was dumbfounded; he had never sensed any such feelings in Maggie before, and decades later, he maintained that he was unaware that Maggie was unhappy. He was a faithful husband, a loving father, and a hard worker. Ray could hardly understand why she would ask for a divorce, but she told him that she w
as through.
“I suppose she was tired of raising four children,” Ray surmised, counting himself as the fourth child. In the Bradbury household, Maggie did most of the parenting. She was the disciplinarian; she helped the girls with their homework; she attended all the parent-teacher conferences. Ray, of course, did his share: He was the enthusiast, always willing to cart the girls off to the movies, to play games, to paint, to tell bedtime stories. But apparently Maggie carried the brunt of parenting. At least, this was how Ray perceived it when confronted by Maggie’s dissatisfaction. Somehow, Ray didn’t remember how, he managed to talk Maggie out of leaving and, many years later, when he asked her why she had asked for a divorce, why she had said what she did in Rome, Maggie replied that she recalled none of it.
THE BRADBURYS arrived stateside and, upon their return home, Ray learned that his father had been admitted to the hospital with a burst appendix. The initial prognosis had looked good, so Esther Bradbury refrained from telling Ray, fearing that he would worry too much and that his vacation would be spoiled. Unbeknownst to anyone, Leo had been misdiagnosed. He did not simply have a burst appendix; he was in fact suffering from peritonitis, an acute inflammation of the inner lining of the abdominal cavity. “Had they operated immediately, they might have saved his life,” Ray lamented.
Before Ray left for Europe, he had given his father an advance copy of Dandelion Wine. Leo Bradbury loved it. Ray had given copies of all of his books to his parents upon publication (he even dedicated The Illustrated Man to “Father, Mother, and Skip”), but this book was different. After all, it poetically evoked Leo Bradbury’s hometown, too. Dandelion Wine was published in September 1957 as Ray’s father was hospitalized.
During this time, Ray remembered, Maggie again asked for a divorce. He was heartbroken. But with an indefatigable spirit, he determined to set things straight. First, he had to tend to his father. Ray wanted him moved. Leo had been admitted to a veterans’ hospital where he had to share a room with several other patients; Ray wanted his father to have his own room. In recent years, Ray had come to love and appreciate his father, particularly since the tear-filled turning point when Leo Bradbury had given him Samuel Hinkston’s gold pocketwatch.