The Bradbury Chronicles (13 page)

 

O
NE AFTERNOON
, Ray visited his friend Grant Beach and his mother at their small home on the corner of Temple and Figueroa in downtown Los Angeles. Grant's father had recently passed away, and Grant had also been diagnosed with heart problems, which would later prove to be a false alarm. That afternoon, when Ray paid a call to the Beaches' house, he found his friend and his mother both in understandably somber moods. They were having trouble carrying on without the patriarch, and Grant's own health problems were weighing heavily on their spirits. After giving it some thought, Ray hatched a plan to cheer up Grant and his mother. He told them, “I'm getting you out of the house.” He enrolled Grant, Mrs. Beach, and himself in a night class in ceramics at a local high school. Ray believed ceramics could cure a lot of ills. “It helps to get your hands in the clay,” said Ray, “to get your mind out of your head.”

Grant Beach soon discovered that he had a talent for ceramics. “There were things in his fingers he didn't know he had,” said Ray. As they continued with the classes and Grant's talent emerged, he asked Ray if he would help him convert his garage into a ceramics studio. Ray obliged and began spending a few nights a week at the Beaches' house helping Grant pursue his dream. Mrs. Beach owned a large tenement building next door, which was inhabited by a mostly Hispanic population, a setting that would inspire many of Ray's later Latino stories, most notably “En La Noche,” “I See You Never,” and “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit.” He also based the character of Fannie Florianna, the overweight, reclusive opera singer in the mystery novel
Death Is a Lonely Business
on a real-life tenant in the building.

Ray brought his portable typewriter with him on the days he stayed at the house at Temple and Figueroa, and he would often spend afternoons in the backyard, behind the Beaches' house, where Grant's father had lovingly built a Japanese garden in the years before his death. It was here on a sun-soaked day that Ray wrote what he deemed his first truly good story. He began by typing the words “The Lake” on the top of a blank sheet of paper. He often did this, scribbling down nouns that bubbled up from his subconscious, and then following whatever path the words gave to his writing. Ray was soon typing furiously. As this oft-told tale goes, two hours later he was finished. Tears ran down his nose and the hair on the back of his neck bristled. He knew he had done something different; he had written a story that was neither imitative nor derivative.

“I realized I had at last written a really fine story. The first in ten years of writing. And not only was it a fine story, but it was some sort of hybrid, something verging on the new. Not a traditional ghost story at all, but a story about love, time, remembrance, and drowning,” Ray explained.

It was anything but a typical “weird tale.” With “The Lake,” Ray had turned inward and explored his childhood memories of Waukegan, Illinois, and in doing so, he inadvertently mined a tale of “autobiographical fantasy” that was at once lyrical, sentimental, and haunting. Ray had, at long last, discovered his distinctive voice.

“The Lake” told of a twelve-year-old boy whose golden-haired girlfriend drowned in the waters of Lake Michigan. Her body was never found. Years later, the boy, grown up and married, returns to the town and strolls the beach on a late-summer day and finds closure when the little girl from his past appears from the depths.

The themes of the story would one day become classic Bradbury motifs—nostalgia, loneliness, lost love, and death. And the story's lyrical tone would resonate throughout his career:

 

It was September. In the last days when things are sad for no reason. The beach was so long and lonely with only about six people on it. The kids quit bouncing the ball because somehow the wind made them sad, too, whistling the way it did, and the kids sat down and felt autumn come along the endless shore.

All of the hot dog stands were boarded up with strips of golden planking, sealing in all the mustard, onion, meat odors of the long, joyful summer. It was like nailing summer into a series of coffins. One by one the places slammed their covers down, padlocked their doors, and the wind came and touched the sand, blowing away all of the million footprints of July and August. It got so that now, in September, there was nothing but the mark of my rubber tennis shoes and Donald and Delaus Schabold's feet, down by the water curve.

Sand blew up in curtains on the sidewalks, and the merry-go-round was hidden with canvas, all of the horses frozen in mid-air on their brass poles, showing teeth, galloping on. With only the wind for music, slipping through canvas.

 

Over the years, Ray has told conflicting versions of the childhood memory that spawned what he has repeatedly called his “first great story.” In a 1961 interview, he said, “I came upon the recollection of a girl I knew who drowned when I was eight or nine. I remember hearing about it and not believing that this could have happened to someone I knew. She was a girl with long golden hair. I never really knew her very well. I don't remember her name now; but, suddenly, she was gone, and she had drowned. I think they found her body several days later, and I was at the lakeshore with my mother when I heard the news. I must have been seven or eight or nine; and then, in playing with my typewriter, when I was twenty-two or twenty-three, I put down these words: ‘The Lake.'”

In the 2001 reissue of
Dark Carnival,
Ray recounted the story differently: “When I was around eight I was down at Lake Michigan. I was playing with a little girl making sand castles, and she went into the water and never came out. When you're eight years old and that happens, what a mystery that is! Well, she never came out—they never found her. So that mystery stayed with me, an encounter with death.”

In recent years, Ray was certain the second rendition of the story was the true origin of “The Lake.” He insisted on this. But in the end, whether he just knew of the girl or he was actually with her when she disappeared, Ray had conjured his own childhood fears, found a memory, and morphed it into a tale of the dark fantastic. This was a formula that, once identified, would prove successful for him time and again. His elation with this accomplishment was tempered, however, when he received notice to report to the draft board office for a physical. Uncle Sam wanted him.

Ray appeared on July 16, 1942, for his physical. He stripped down to his underwear and lined up apprehensively next to the other young men. When it came time for his eye exam, the doctor directed Ray to remove his round, wire-rimmed spectacles and to cover one eye.

“Read that chart,” the physician said, pointing to an eye exam chart hanging on a wall.

“What chart?” Ray asked.

“That chart,” the doctor said, pointing again at the poster with the standard pyramid of letters.

“I don't see a chart,” Ray responded.

Ray was, of course, as good as blind without his glasses, so the physician listed him as “4-F”—physically ineligible. He would not be sent off to battle or be devoured by the big, black bulldog of his dreams. He would be left to, as he put it, “live for his country.”

While Ray was quietly elated by the news, at least one of his friends was incensed. Robert Heinlein, a graduate of the naval academy and a former officer who could no longer serve because he had been diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis, felt that Ray was betraying his country, that he was a coward. Heinlein believed that this, if any, was the time to heed the call to arms. If Ray couldn't serve because of his health, fine. He could somehow volunteer. During the war, Heinlein moved to Philadelphia, where he worked as a civilian at the naval yard. He was also able to persuade his friends and fellow science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp to join him. But perhaps Heinlein sensed that Ray did not believe in war; Ray was a pacifist, while Heinlein felt there was no higher calling than to defend the honor of one's country. As a result, Heinlein cut Ray off, and they didn't speak again for decades.

Like many young men who were ineligible for the draft, Ray did, in fact, find another way to contribute to the war effort. He began working for the American Red Cross, writing promotional materials. He wrote advertising copy as well as radio spots encouraging blood donation. Robert Heinlein had left Los Angeles by then, and had no way of knowing that Ray had, indeed, done his duty for God and country.

The day after Ray's appearance at the draft office for his physical, Julius Schwartz sold Bradbury's short story “Promotion to Satellite”—another attempt at a traditional science fiction tale—to
Thrilling Wonder Stories
. Ray was again dabbling in the science-heavy realm of writers influenced by editor John W. Campbell, notably Asimov and Heinlein.

Even though Ray had found his voice with “The Lake,” he had returned to writing imitative pulp stories (it would take two years for “The Lake” to be published). “Did I learn a hard, fast, or even an easy lesson from ‘The Lake'? I did not. I went back to writing the old-fashioned ghost story,” mused Ray. It would take some time for him to fully understand what he had accomplished in writing “The Lake.”

But soon after, he wrote another story that strongly suggested his writing was indeed maturing. The story, “The Wind,” was a gothic, paranoid tale of a man convinced that the howling winds he hears at night mean to kill him. Again, the story began with a noun; Ray had written the words “the wind,” and it prompted him to recall the chilling sound of the prairie winds of his Illinois childhood. “The Wind” was what longtime Bradbury friend, researcher, and author William F. Nolan called the first “classic” Bradbury story. Ray was beginning to decipher what it was that he had subconsciously accomplished with “The Lake.”

At the end of 1942, “The Wind” sold to
Weird Tales
. After this and the other two sales of his stories in 1942, Ray was feeling more assured and, confident that he could make a living as a writer, finally quit his job as a newspaper salesman. His instincts were correct. The following year, 1943, Ray sold twelve stories, including what would become the Bradbury dark fantasy classics, “The Crowd” and “The Emissary,” as well as his first quality science fiction stories, “King of the Gray Spaces” and “I, Rocket.” Along the way he was earning a name and a following for himself in the pulp magazines. On these publications' covers, his name appeared next to those of his heroes and mentors, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, and August Derleth. Derleth, the Arkham House publisher, was himself a well-regarded writer for
Weird Tales,
and Ray had been corresponding on and off with Derleth since 1939. The pen-pal friendship would soon yield big dividends.

 

O
N
D
ECEMBER
31, 1943, Ray joined the throng of Angelenos for the downtown New Year's Eve celebration. Pershing Square was packed with people waiting for midnight to arrive. Ray spotted a group of police officers as they slowly made their way through the thick crowd, stopping young men and questioning them. Ever curious, Ray went over to investigate. The police were asking for draft cards and when Ray approached them, they asked for his. “My heart sank right there,” recalled Ray. Two days earlier he had lost his card, which proved that he was, indeed, registered. When Ray couldn't produce his card, the officers escorted him to a patrol car, and he was driven to a local police station, where he was transferred to a paddy wagon that would take him downtown for booking. When Ray climbed in the back of the paddy wagon, it was crowded with mostly drunken and disorderly men. As the vehicle pulled way, Ray sat in the back in complete fear; he had been arrested. During the trip, an altercation ensued between two drunks, and arms and legs flailed about in the tight confines of the police wagon. Punches landed with terrific thuds and young, innocent Ray Bradbury looked on in terror from just a few feet away. He crouched on the floor with his knees tucked up in a fetal position and closed his eyes. “I kept thinking,” Ray said, “that this is the last night of my life.”

He survived nonetheless and was brought to a police station, where he was booked, photographed, and fingerprinted (this was the only time Ray was ever arrested). He was allowed the customary phone call, and reached his brother, Skip, who reassured him that everything would be okay and that he would come down to the jail.

Ray was escorted to a large cell, where, as he remembered, at least another hundred men were being held. All eyes fell upon the fresh-faced kid who stood five feet ten inches tall, but felt at that moment smaller than ever before. It would take some time for the police to verify that Ray was registered for the draft: It was a Friday night and nothing could be done until Monday morning, when the draft board reopened. Ray would have to spend the weekend behind bars.

The jail cell was cold. Tin-sheeting bunk beds lined the walls, three tiers high. Ray found a top bunk and climbed up near a heat duct and tried to stay warm. What if the draft board had lost his records, he wondered. What then? Would he be locked away for years?