Seekers of Tomorrow (47 page)

The Depression hitting bottom in 1932 may have been one factor in the Bradburys' moving from Waukegan to Arizona. There, he struck up a friendship with a youth who had a boxful of old amazing stories and wonder stories, and he borrowed and read them all. Bradbury also never tires of telling of his fixation on Edgar Rice Burroughs' tales of Tarzan and Mars at the age of 12, and how, lacking money, he pounded out his own sequels on a toy typewriter with all capital letters.

Two years later, in 1934, his family made its final move, to Los Angeles. Richard Donovan, in his article
Morals from Mars
in the reporter for June 26, 1951, refers to the Bradbury of this period as "a fat boy who wore spectacles and could not play football satisfactorily. Humiliated, he turned to writing." A turning point in his life came in early September, 1937, when while poring through the books and magazines in Shep's Shop, a Los Angeles book store that catered to science-fiction readers, he received an invitation from a mem-ber to visit the Los Angeles Chapter of the Science Fiction League. At the September 5, 1937, meeting, held at the home of one of the members, he was handed the first issue of a club magazine titled imagination! The possibility that he might actually get something published in that amateur effort was the convincer. He joined at the following, October, meeting. Bradbury's first published story,
Hollerbochen's Dilemma,
appeared in the fourth (January, 1938) issue of imagina-tion! It was scarcely a distinguished literary work, but its plot of a man who generates a tremendous amount of energy by "standing still in time" and blows himself and the city off the map when he resumes his normal place, is repeated so closely in A. E. van Vogt's first Weapon Shops story,
The
Seesaw,
published in astounding science-fiction for July, 1941, as to raise a question. This story was almost out of character for Bradbury at the time, who apparently played the role of the club clown. One of the members described him as "the funny man of the Los Angeles League. In other words, he is the Big Joke." Most of his published works of that period were pathetically inept attempts at humor, both in fiction and nonfiction. Today, they are the despair of the collector trying to put together all of Bradbury's writings, having been published in obscure amateur mimeographed journals with titles like d'journal, fantascience digest, nova, mikros, fantasy digest, polaris, and sweetness and light. An amusing and surprisingly accurate account of Bradbury's physical appearance at that time was supplied by himself in the June-July, 1939, fantasy digest: "That horrid thing in the mirror has toddled through life wearing glasses, blue eyes, a frowsy hank of blondish hair, twin ears, hot and cold running drool, and a nose that would pass for a cabbage in a dim light. He has white teeth, his very own, and a reddish complexion (weaned on catsup, you know). He stands (or rather leans) to five feet and ten inches not counting the green familiar that rides around on his eyebrows on cool days and sings 'Frankie and Johnnie.'" Virtually every early description of teen-age Ray Bradbury by a personal acquaintance speaks of unfailing affability, puncture-proof good nature, constant buffoonery, and self-effacement. He appeared to be a man without a tart opinion on any subject. The stark contrast with the fear-haunted, angry, sensitive, and hurt Bradbury revealed in his later writings suggests a deliberate early facade. A possible confirmation of this surmise rests in the ap-praisal of Bradbury made by one of his closest early friends, T. Bruce Yerke, in a booklet entitled
Memoirs of a Superflu-ous Fan,
published in December, 1943. "The feature which marked him among the members of the group was his mad, insane, hackneyed humor," wrote Yerke, "but underneath his ribald and uncontrollable Bacchus . . . was a deep under-standing of people and signs of the times."

The Los Angeles club was a very good thing for Bradbury. Among the members at the time were selling fantasy authors like Henry Kuttner and Arthur K. Barnes, and later, Robert A. Heinlein and Leigh Brackett. When Bradbury graduated from high school in 1938 he shed his theatrical ambitions and even his dreams of becoming an artist. A few of his attempts at stenciled illustrations were published. Now he seriously gave priority to the notion of becoming a writer, and the local writing members and frequent visiting professional au-thors found Bradbury a veritable leech, insatiable in his quest for the formula to successful professional writing.

However, not only did sales elude the youthful Bradbury, but even among the amateur science-fiction fan magazines, which then rarely rejected anything, he received a surprising-ly negative response. There was only one thing to do. In the early Summer of 1939, Ray Bradbury mimeographed his
own
periodical, futuria fantasia. The first issue featured a cover by Hannes Bok, who was then virtually unknown, and a story by Ray Bradbury under the pen name Ron Reynolds.

More significantly, most of the issue was devoted to pro-moting a movement known as Technocracy, Inc. Under the direction of Howard Scott, Technocracy briefly gained ground during the depths of the Depression. Hugo Gernsback turned out two issues of a magazine titled technocracy review (February and March, 1933); wrote an editorial
Wonders of Technocracy
in the March, 1933, wonder sto-ries, and in the same issue published a story
The Robot Technocrat
by Nat Schachner. He presented the idea objec-tively and then dropped it, made uncomfortable by the com-pany he was keeping.

The technocratic masterminds had a theory that the Amer-ican economic system would collapse by 1945. They were prepared to step in with an appointive hierarchy of scientists, who would run the country with complete scientific pre-ciseness and infallibility. They estimated that under their system there would be the equivalent of $20,000 annually for every individual in the country, redeemable in energy certifi-cates. People would work four hours a day, five days a week. The country would be split into one hundred zones and an industrial complex allocated to take care of the needs of each zone. Bradbury said then: "I think Technocracy combines all of the hopes and dreams of science fiction. We've been dream-ing about it for years—now, in a short time it may become a reality." Bradbury today is excoriated for his antiscientific attitude. His fear of science misused is real and evident. This attitude was
not
present in 1939 when he idealistically forecast that a country run completely according to the dictates of a scien-tific technate was a good thing. The fact that there were no provisions for elections in this system did not bother him because he felt, at that time, that a "limited dictatorship" was desirable.

Within weeks after publishing the first issue of futuria fantasia, Ray Bradbury attended the First World Science Fiction Convention, held in New York over the July 4th weekend in 1939. On July 7th he went up to see Farns-worth Wright, the editor of weird tales, with a dual pur-pose. First, to examine possibilities of selling stories to that magazine and, second, to show Wright samples of the art-work of Hannes Bok, whose specialty was a baroque style ideally suited for the weird tale. The latter mission was a complete success. Wright enthusiastically purchased Bok's work and Bradbury was the instrument of that artist's ap-pearing on the professional scene.

From the long-range viewpoint, the most important thing Bradbury accomplished during his New York visit was to meet Julius Schwartz for the first time. Schwartz was then the leading literary agent specializing in science fiction and fantasy. The Fall, 1939, issue of futuria fantasia contained Ray Bradbury's story
Pendulum,
published anonymously. Bradbury induced Henry Hasse, an enthusiast who had previ-ously sold a number of science fiction stories on his own, to help him rewrite it. This Schwartz dutifully attempted to market as a collaboration, hoping Hasse's reputation would ring up a sale, but nothing happened. In the summer of 1941, Julius Schwartz and writer Edmond Hamilton decided to rent an apartment together in Los Ange-les for the months of July and August. Schwartz would vacation and Hamilton would pound the typewriter. The first afternoon, Schwartz strolled fifty yards from the apartment on Norton Street to the corner of Olympic, to be stopped by the call: "Paper, Mister?" He turned to discover that the news-boy was Ray Bradbury. Bradbury sold newspapers every afternoon on that corner, his main source of income between the years 1938 and 1942.

Bradbury was relentless. Before and after his newspaper stint he was everlastingly underfoot at the Schwartz-Hamilton apartment. The situation became all but impossible when on July 18, 1941, news arrived that
Pendulum
had been purchased for $27.50 by super science stories. This story, which appeared in the November issue of that magazine, told of a scientist of the future, who in demonstrating a new discovery, accidentally kills two dozen of the world's leading savants. As punishment, he is imprisoned in a giant swinging pendulum. The motion renders him almost immortal and he watches the centuries pass, ultimately to dissolve into dust when invaders from outer space stop the action of the pendu-lum. In both writing and plotting, the story was below the minimum level of acceptability, even for that period. Credit for the discovery of Bradbury (despite the fact that he published, without pay, a short nonfiction bit in script seven months earlier) belongs to Alden H. Norton, who had taken over the editorship of super science stories only a week previously from Fred Pohl. Norton went on to become associate publisher of Popular Publications.

Another collaboration with Henry Hasse,
Gabriel's Horn,
was going the rounds and would eventually sell to captain future, but at the moment Bradbury's chief consideration was how to accomplish sale number two. He dug back into the files of FUTURIA fantasia and in its fourth and final issue found
The Piper
under his pen name Ron Reynolds. Back he was on the doorstep of Schwartz's apartment. It was a hot day and both of them sat down on the curb, revising
The Piper
according to Schwartz's instruction. Whenever they took a break, Bradbury would have a hamburger and a malted milk, the staples of his diet in those days.

The Piper
was the first sale Bradbury made on his own and his first tale of Mars. Well written, it appeared in thrilling wonder stories for February, 1943, and told of the last civilized Martian who lures a primitive race out of the hills through music to destroy the Jovians who are exploiting the planet The original version in futuria fantasia, while inferior, was much closer to the style Bradbury would eventually adopt Instead of Jovians, the exploiters of Mars were Earth-men. The description of their cities is very close to
The Martian Chronicles.
The history of this story reveals that in attempting to ape the methods of the selling writers Bradbury made a mistake. He would have made it quicker and better on his own.

Bradbury had no one to tell him this. He rented an office with a typewriter and a desk, and for eight hours a day ground out stories, none of which sold. He eventually burned three million words of manuscript and in desperation sheered away from science fiction and tried to get into the pages of weird tales. To this end he enlisted the help of Henry Kuttner, who actually wrote the last two hundred words of
The Candle.
This very weak tale of death wish and retribu-tion was bought by weird stories for $25 and published in its November, 1942, issue.

Promotion to Satellite,
a short story of an Italian who dies in space saving members of the crew of his ship and whose body is permitted to become a satellite circling Earth as a monument to his heroism, was the next sale and this ap-peared in thrilling wonder stories for Fall, 1943. This story almost came off and showed early traces of the later, more successful, Bradbury.

Up to now, Bradbury had been trying to imitate other science-fiction writers. In
The Wind
in weird tales, March, 1943, he chose as his model Ernest Hemingway and the bulk of a longish short story of a man threatened and finally absorbed by the wind is related in trim dialogue so character-istic of the master. Hemingway remained a major stylistic influence on Bradbury thereafter.

The following May, 1943, issue of weird tales contained his short story
The Crowd,
clearly a variant of Edgar Allan Poe's
Man of the Crowd,
dealing with those people who seem to spring from nowhere when an accident occurs.

The Scythe,
appearing in weird tales for July, 1943, was a chilling allegory of the Grim Reaper, but Bradbury really rang the bell with
The Ducker
in the November, 1943, issue. The story of Johnny Choir, who thought that real war was a children's game and came through unscathed, was Bradbury's first tapping of the rich mine of childhood memories that was to make him famous. Reader response was so immense that a sequel featuring the same character,
Bang! You're Dead,
appeared in the September, 1944, weird tales. The magazine requested and ran his biography, and Bradbury was off to his first big reputation. The slow, discouraging progress in selling science fiction forced him to redouble his efforts on fantasy. The top market in the science-fiction world of 1942 was astounding science-fiction, and its editor consistently got first look at every Bradbury story and just as consistently turned it down. He finally invested $45 in a near-fantasy submitted as
Every-thing Instead of Something
which was published in the Sep-tember, 1943, astounding science-fiction as
Doodad.
The story, a transparent take-off on van Vogt's Weapon Shops idea, concerned a store that sold gadgets from other time periods capable of doing virtually anything. The hero uses them to defeat a gangster in as pitiful a piece of fantasy as ever appeared in astounding.

Astounding science-fiction's companion magazine, un-known fantasy fiction, next bought one of Bradbury's weird tales. Ironically, the publication collapsed before the story could be published, and
The
Emissary
eventually ap-peared in Bradbury's first hard-cover collection,
Dark Carni-val,
published by Arkham House in 1947. The contrast in quality to
Doodad
is incredible. In
The Emissary,
the story of an invalided boy whose dog regularly brings a kindly young woman to visit and who finds the animal has succeeded one last time in his mission, after she is dead and buried, Brad-bury created a minor classic in terror.