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BOOK: The Bradbury Chronicles
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The phantom stayed with Ray from that night on. In the sympathetic, misunderstood character, Ray had seen a bit of himself. Ray's father and his brother, Skip, were athletes, tough, chiseled, and masculine, while Ray was creative, sensitive, and imaginative. Only Neva really understood him, but in November 1926, the family would move away from Illinois and Ray's beloved aunt.

That fall, Ray entered first grade at Waukegan's Central School. His teacher was Miss Morey, the same woman who had taught Neva and Ray's father. But Ray's days in Waukegan, at least for the time being, were short lived. Like his father and grandfather, Leonard Bradbury suffered from wanderlust. He treasured the memory of riding the rails across the country and joining his father in his quest for gold. Leo loved the West and yearned to return. After Samuel Hinkston Bradbury's death, Leo was prepared to leave Waukegan, looking for a new start and a new adventure.

The family packed up and was soon traveling by passenger train from Chicago to the desert of New Mexico. For six-year-old Ray, leaving Neva and everything he knew was devastating.

While it is nothing more than an interesting, coincidental footnote, the first city in which the Bradbury family decided to settle was Roswell, New Mexico. UFOlogists know this southwestern town as the infamous site of a purported crash of an unidentified flying object in July 1947—the year that Ray Bradbury's first book,
Dark Carnival,
was published. While there were numerous reasons that interest in space aliens and UFOs exploded in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, two of them must have been Roswell, New Mexico, and Ray Bradbury, the writer who brought Mars and Martians to life in his 1950 novel
The Martian Chronicles
. For a brief time in the fall of 1926, both Ray and Roswell were connected.

The Bradbury family stayed in Roswell for all of two weeks before his father pressed to go farther west, to Arizona. “My father had been to Arizona when he was sixteen and he was very attached to it,” said Ray. The family moved on to Tucson, traveling, as Ray recalled, in a large taxi with five other passengers. In Tucson, Leonard rented a small duplex apartment on Lowell Avenue, near the University of Arizona.

It was a dramatic change for a boy reared on the prairie. Here the land was parched, with blue hills rising from the horizon, and days blazed well after sundown. Ray, in fact, loved it, though he missed Neva terribly and wrote her every few weeks, begging her to move to Arizona. But Neva was in her senior year in high school and wrote her nephew that she could not leave, though she missed him dreadfully.

Leonard Bradbury was unable to find work, but he was in the West, which was, for the time being, all that mattered. His wanderlust was satisfied. Ray was to discover his own wandering spirit soon, but first he had to give up bottle-feeding. “Who do you know ever took the bottle until he was six years old?” Ray asked, years later. While he only took one bottle a day, usually before his afternoon nap, Ray's father had had enough. “My father got mad one day when I wouldn't eat my vegetables and he took the bottle and he broke it in the kitchen sink. It was very traumatic. That was the end,” said Ray.

Tucson marked the beginning of a newfound freedom for Ray. His overprotective mother was allowing him to explore a bit more, and he was no longer tied to the proverbial apple tree. Though parents today would not dream of allowing their six-year-olds to wander the neighborhood alone, in 1926, Esther Bradbury gave her “Shorty” the run of the area. Tucson, still a primitive rodeo town in 1926, was waiting to be discovered by Ray. “I was immediately in love,” Ray said. “There's nothing like being in a place that's growing, that's being built, the excitement of anything new, that's starting. That applies to all the things we do in our life—a marriage, a new love affair, a new building, a part of a city that needs to be rebuilt, or a town that's growing like Tucson.”

Ray spent sunbaked afternoons running wild across the sprawling grounds of the University of Arizona campus. He roamed the halls of the Natural Sciences building, staring wide-eyed at exhibits of skeletons, snakes, scorpions, tarantulas, and dinosaur bones. In another building, the blond-haired boy watched with piqued curiosity as workers built a locomotive. “I was a student when I was six—the youngest inhabitant of the University of Arizona,” declared Ray. But not everyone was pleased with the cherubic scholar exploring the university's halls. Security guards regularly and roughly escorted Ray out of the buildings and sent him home. But the next day, or the next week, he was back. During this time, many of Ray's interests were either formed or solidified. He marveled at the dinosaur remains in the Hall of Sciences which, many years later, led Ray to write the short story
The Fog Horn
. In 1953, filmmaker John Huston read this story of the last dinosaur on Earth, crawling from the depths of the sea after hearing the bellow of a lighthouse and mistaking it as the plaintive call of its lost mate. Huston sensed a bit of Herman Melville in Bradbury and suggested that Ray write the screenplay for the film of
Moby Dick
. “You pose the question,” Ray said, decades later, “what if I had given up on dinosaurs? I wouldn't have had my career.”

While Ray was discovering new passions, there was excitement in the Bradbury house. On March 27, 1927, a few months after settling in Tucson, Esther Bradbury gave birth. Ray now had a little sister, Elizabeth Jane Bradbury, and was no longer the baby of the family, which quietly gnawed at him. He had been the center of attention, the star attraction, and now he was simply the middle child. Although he loved his little sister, he couldn't help but feel a slight pang of resentment.

At that time, Ray's father made a decision: While he loved the West, there was no work for him, and running short on resources, the family had but one choice—to return to Waukegan.

 

T
HE ANCIENT
Greeks called fate the “daimon,” a concept that derives from Plato's Myth of Er from his masterwork,
The Republic
. In essence, one is hardwired from birth with a calling that one might hear, ignore, misinterpret, or miss altogether; the Romans had a term for this idea, as well, referring to it as the “genius.” Christianity explains it as a “guardian angel.” The Romantics Keats and Blake abided by this theory as well. Author James Hillman examined this notion in
The Soul's Code:
“The concept of this soul-image has a long, complicated history; its appearance in cultures is diverse and widespread and the names for it are legion. Only our contemporary psychology and psychiatry omit it from their textbooks.” Ray Bradbury would caution readers not to look at his creative evolution too “metaphysically,” but as one examines his artistic development, three factors cannot be ignored—the great amalgam, as it were: Neva, Waukegan, and an inner calling, an autopilot program that even Ray has coined. He wrote of this creative encoding in the essay “My Demon, Not Afraid of Happiness.”

“I have a strange and incredible Muse that, unseen, has engulfed me during my lifetime,” wrote Ray. “I have renamed my Muse. In a Fredrick Seidel poem I found a perfect replacement, where he tells of ‘A Demon not afraid of happiness.'

“That perfectly describes that Demon that sits now on one shoulder, now on the other, and whispers things no one else hears.”

As the Bradburys readied to move back east, Ray was returning to Neva and Waukegan. And while he wasn't aware of it, after his brief tenure living in Arizona, his demon was now more awake, more perceptive, more impressionable than ever before.

3. THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION

When I was first learning my way around science fiction as a writer, I didn't find many contemporaries who made me think, “I'd like to write something like that.” Sometimes Theodore Sturgeon did—almost always Cordwainer Smith did—and, in
Fahrenheit 451
and
The Martian Chronicles
, Ray Bradbury certainly did. I saw how his humane concern, the exactness of his writing, his fierce but controlled imagination, all worked together to create beauty, and those vivid scenes you remember from a story decades later as if you'd lived them. So, when my mother was curious why I was writing stuff about space ships, I gave her
The Martian Chronicles,
and said, “Because in science fiction you can do things like this.” She read the book, and I didn't have to explain any further.

—
URSULA K. LE GUIN
,
author

I
N LATE
spring of 1927, the Bradbury family moved back to Illinois, returning as they had left—by passenger train to Chicago's Union Station. They moved back into their old house on St. James Street, which they rented from Ray's grandmother. For Ray, it was a mixed blessing. While he would miss the adventurous Marscape of Arizona, he was coming home to his aunt Neva.

Leo Bradbury returned to work as a lineman with the Bureau of Power and Light. His wanderlust had momentarily been satisfied. Back in “Green Town,” Ray followed Neva like an impish shadow, consuming the
Oz
books under her tutelage. That year Neva graduated from Waukegan's Central School and enrolled at Chicago's School of the Art Institute and took classes in drawing, design, art history, and composition. She spent a few days with friends in the city each week, then took the train north to Waukegan for long weekends. In the St. James house, Neva converted the attic space into an art studio. On the pitched ceiling, she painted faux windows with images of cityscapes, trees, and green pastures behind the false panes; these painted windows, of course, captivated little Ray. In this new art space, Neva housed all her colorful fabrics for sewing, art easel, sculpting clay, and painting supplies. The Bradbury family could often smell the oils and turpentine when she painted. “When mother and father and I were seated at our various tasks of sewing, smoking, and lolling, we could hear the footsteps of all the marvelous people up in Auntie's studio,” Ray said. “The dark people who came and went, the phonograph whining, the tinkling of glasses and the gush of wine. It was the Great Gatsby era, but Neva's world was half-Gatsby, half-Dracula. The people who unlatched her door were writers and painters and absinthe drinkers, or at least I tried to imagine this.”

By 1927, the Jazz Age was in full swing, ushering in a postwar sophistication and a devil-may-care sensibility, and Nevada Bradbury was in the midst of it all. She looked the part, too. Her hair was cropped in a wavy, flapper-styled bob, and she wore dresses that bared her legs from the knees down. She pursued her passion in art and she socialized with her glamorous friends well past the witching hour. In this staid family—in which the women were reserved and the household was most definitely patriarchal—Neva, like Ray, was an outsider looking in.

In 1927, Calvin Coolidge was nearing the end of his presidency—the first American president to have his inauguration broadcast over radio; Charles Lindbergh flew solo over the Atlantic; and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had just been founded, the organization that would, many decades later, count Ray Bradbury among its coveted membership. And in Waukegan, the doors to the newly constructed Genesee Theatre opened at one o'clock on Christmas Day, 1927. The movie palace featured “an acre of seats,” and tickets were sixty cents apiece. The program for the grand opening featured newsreels, short films, musical acts, and the film
The Valley of the Giants
. That evening, spotlights outside the theater played across the cold Illinois sky, visible from four miles away.

With the arrival of the new year, Ray's sister, affectionately nicknamed “Betty Jane,” was growing into “a beautiful baby,” as Ray remembered. She was Esther Bradbury's delight, and Ray grew ever more envious of the attention, once lavished on him, now given to the new baby of the family. Ray's mind was filled with dark thoughts. He wished his little sister dead. Before sunrise, on the morning of February 8, 1928, Ray and Skip, hearing their mother sobbing in her bedroom, roused from sleep. Betty Jane, who had been suffering from a bad bout of influenza, was lying motionless in her crib; she was not breathing and no one could revive her. At dawn, men arrived and placed the lifeless infant into a wicker basket and carried her out into the morning light. Two days later, Elizabeth “Betty Jane” Bradbury was buried at Union Cemetery, where Samuel Hinkston Bradbury, her grandfather, was also buried.

Esther Bradbury was devastated by the second death of a child. Even Leo, the stoic husband and father, cried; it was the first time Ray had ever seen his father shed tears. Ray felt somehow responsible: He had wished dark thoughts, and they had come true. In Ray Bradbury's work, themes of censorship, loneliness, technology, religion, racism, magic, and nostalgia are prevalent, but the most ubiquitous subject is mortality; “Live Forever” is a phrase that appears time and again in his work. With the death of his grandfather and sister in less than two years, even a boy understood the finality of death. Scarred by loss and guilt, he retreated ever further into fantasy as a means of escape, and immersed himself deeper into the land of
Oz,
into movies and into magic.

 

C
ENTRAL
S
CHOOL
, today replaced by the Waukegan Public Library, once faced the backside of the Academy Theater, and when Ray was in the second grade in 1928, he recalled being awestruck by a large billboard on the rear wall of the Academy. The boy schemed for a way to peel the poster from the brick building and take it home. At least twenty by ten feet, as Ray remembered, the poster pictured Blackstone the Magician. Stage magic was sweeping the nation, and audiences packed theaters nationwide to watch a new breed of vaudevillian magicians, and Harry Blackstone was among the best. “He was at the center of it, surrounded by all of his tricks—the dancing handkerchief, the canary in the cage …,” said Ray.

“His show had lots of action, lots of pretty girls, and lots of energy,” said Daniel Waldron, author of the biography
Blackstone: A Magician's Life,
in a 2003 interview. “It was a very fast-moving show which was quite different from the shows up to the time of the First World War which were much more mannered. He took advantage of the spirit of the time. Blackstone was the perfect embodiment of the Jazz Age.”

The billboard advertising the magician's upcoming Waukegan engagement excited Ray terrifically. “By the time Blackstone finally arrived in Waukegan for his first appearance, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” said Ray. When Blackstone appeared at the Genesee for a week, Ray bought tickets for all the shows and sat in the front row each time. After school Ray rushed to the theater for the matinee shows and stayed until evening, watching back-to-back performances. He made sketches and took copious notes to capture each illusion, and deconstructed many of the complicated tricks. By the time Blackstone left Waukegan, Ray was consumed by magician fever. “Blackstone caused me to be like Ahab, madness, maddened,” said Ray, who began haunting the aisles of the Carnegie Library and borrowing all the books on magic he could find.

In the summer of 1928, a mysterious figure invaded the formerly safe night landscape of Waukegan, a cat burglar nicknamed “the Lonely One,” who, like Blackstone, captivated the eight-year-old's imagination. The idea of a shadowy cat burglar creeping about town, breaking and entering at will, taunting the police, was unbearably tantalizing for Ray, who would later use the Lonely One as a character in what is arguably one of his finest tales of terror, 1950's “The Whole Town's Sleeping” (the story would later be woven into
Dandelion Wine,
in which the Lonely One would play a central role). The identity of the real-life Lonely One would never come to light. The cat burglar was never captured.

 

R
AY'S GRANDMOTHER'S
library, where his grandfather had spent many golden afternoons reading the newspaper, had a large bay window, several easy chairs, a reading lamp, a sofa, and a bookcase that filled an entire wall, housing all five hundred volumes of Samuel Hinkston Bradbury's books. On the west wall was a framed black-and-white picture of Ray's uncle, Samuel Hinkston Jr., wearing his dark brown hair in a short mop. In the photo, he is dressed in his gray bridge coat from the West Point Academy. “When my grandmother was seated in my grandfather's reading chair by the lamp, she could look across the room and there was her son forever,” Ray said. “I grew up thinking I knew him because I saw him every day of my young life.” On another wall was Neva's bookcase, lined with, among others, the
Oz
books,
Alice in Wonderland,
and Edgar Allan Poe's
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
. The library also had a console radio, around which the family would gather to listen. Grandmother Bradbury's regular house boarders also used the library, and among the guests lodging in the house in 1928 was a boisterous girl in her late teens who left the fall edition of a pulp publication,
Amazing Stories Quarterly
, in the room. The issue's cover story was “The World of Giant Ants,” by A. Hyatt Verrill, an author, archaeologist, explorer, and noted authority on South America; the cover art by Frank R. Paul, an acclaimed illustrator deemed “the best candidate for Father of Modern SF illustration” by
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction,
depicted an African-American hunter chased by a rampaging, supersized ant. Much like the illustrations in the
Oz
books, the cover of the
Amazing Stories Quarterly
caught Ray's fancy; and the stories of mythical creatures, distant planets, flying machines, rocket ships, and steel-riveted, cog-driven technology born of Victorian times sparked his imagination.

With each new popular culture discovery Ray Bradbury was subconsciously taking notes, preparing for his eventual contributions in film, fantasy, and pulp science fiction. Notably, though, Ray was never very interested in the technological underpinnings of science fiction. Indeed, esteemed science fiction writer, editor, and critic Damon Knight said that though Ray Bradbury “has a large following among science fiction readers, there is at least an equally large contingent of people who cannot stomach his work at all; they say he has no respect for the medium; that he does not even trouble to make his scientific double-talk convincing; that—worst crime of all—he fears and distrusts science.” The purists, in their myopic love affair with hardware, did not understand that Ray Bradbury cared little about technological accuracy. His stories are, at their nucleus, human stories dressed in the baroque accoutrements of his early science fiction influences.

Soon after discovering the copy of
Amazing Stories Quarterly
in the family library, Ray began reading
Wonder Stories
, another popular pulp magazine. Nearly twenty-five years later, Ray Bradbury would rise to the summit of the field he fell in love with in 1928; in 1953,
Time
magazine labeled him “the Poet of the Pulps.”

 

I
N THIRD
grade, Ray was a self-described “wimp.” He had little athletic ability and lived in the muscular shadow of his older brother, Skip. Further complicating matters, unbeknownst to him or anyone else, Ray's eyesight was worsening. When his brother, his father, or his friends tossed him a football, he inevitably dropped it. In school he had trouble reading words on the blackboard. Ray was a chatty student and compensated for his lack of physical prowess with verbal acumen, which thoroughly displeased some of his teachers; they had quite a time quieting the blond boy who loved to talk.

His energy seemed boundless until one day, in late 1928, he was besieged by a bout of whooping cough. Having already lost two children to illness, Esther Bradbury swiftly removed her boy from school and quarantined him to bed for six weeks. Being bedridden for that long a time for this energetic eight-year-old was akin to restraining a Saturn rocket after liftoff. Still, Ray's parents were strict disciplinarians and their two boys listened well; if they misbehaved, well, there was the leather strop hanging on the kitchen wall. So Ray spent his days resting in his parents' bedroom, on their large brass bed, reading. Sometimes Neva visited and read to him. “Neva was constantly around while I was sick,” Ray recalled. “She read to me from
Alice in Wonderland
and Edgar Allan Poe.” Forced to remain in bed, Ray delved further into the realm of the imagination. At every turn, every moment of discovery, there seemed always to be an illness, a specter of death, or some sorrow lurking. All too soon, another tragic turn of events struck Ray, his family, and the nation—the stock market crash in October 1929.

BOOK: The Bradbury Chronicles
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