Back to the Future: Ray Bradbury’s Pulp Fiction

Ray Bradbury has been old for as long as I can remember. Nearly 89, the wheelchair is new to his octogenarian years, but he’s had the mad scientist’s white shock mop and those bottle glasses for decades. He’s been writing for 77 years.

“Live forever!” a strange carnival wizard once told Bradbury the boy, knighting him with his magic sword.  Did Mr. Electrico give Ray eternal life?

I hope Bradbury needs no introduction. The writer is an institution of America, a sort of literary Abe Lincoln. His boyhood was built on Tarzan comics and penny candy, on pulp short stories and freak shows. With nothing but an American dream, and no education but his imagination, Ray began filling the pulp mags, morphing into a prophet of techno- doom as his first novels came out in the early ‘50s. I’ll assume all who are literate have read the stunning quintuplet of early Ray: The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, and Dandelion Wine. A half century later an asteroid has been named for him, as has a park and a crater on the moon. He has dozens of prestigious awards. Add a Science Fiction Writer’s Association Grand Master designation, and an induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Then there’s the special Pulitzer citation for a “deeply influential” career in science fiction/fantasy.

For all that, Bradbury doesn’t like being known as a science fiction writer. “I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it,” he has famously said.  His stories feature space, creatures, dinosaurs, and time machines, but Bradbury’s conjure is genre-less. He writes novels, plays, poems, and short stories, but in a way, they’re all short stories. His novels gather related stories tied with poetic threads, or bloom from a story. His prose sings with gorgeous detail. He has hundreds, maybe thousands, of stories.

Ray spent his early childhood in the Waukegan, Illinois Library. Escaping with the Wizard of Oz or Tarzan, or with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells stoked his imagination. He thought about being a writer, or a magician.

Labor Day of 1932, fate intervened. Dealt an early blow by death, Ray’s beloved Uncle Lester was shot through the liver by a thief. Ray saw a carnival tent by Lake Michigan and sought to forget his sorrows in the magic tricks of Mr. Electrico. The magician introduced Ray to the oddities of the carnie circus- The Illustrated Man, the fat lady, the human skeleton, and other sideshow freaks we all get to revisit in Dark Carnival and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

“Live forever!” the magician said. Ray “felt something strange and wonderful had happened.” He DID want to live forever, and a few days later, he began to write each and every day, a habit still today, nearly 80 years later. Of that weekend, Ray says, “I was running away from death, running toward life.”

That may be, but teen life for a sci-fi geek proved unpopular. High school was hell. Ray was homely, with pimples and boils. He spent his spare time with a typewriter instead of girls. The other boys played sports and drove cars.  But Ray was furiously penning at least one short story a week, ambitiously sending them to top markets. He graduated, unpublished, in the same suit his uncle had been shot in.

Graduation was one rite of passage, but for most teen boys, hardly the most important one. Shy about his acne, Ray didn’t have a girlfriend, so he and a friend enjoyed a traditional deflowering at 16. Ray’s lady of the evening was a chubby redhead. According to biographer Sam Weller, the long-awaited transition into manhood was over in three minutes.

Bradbury did not pursue college. He sold newspapers- and stories. By 1947, the stories about sideshow freaks became woven into his first book, Dark Carnival.

This year was also significant because he married. Ray met Marguerite in a bookstore. He invited her for coffee. Later, their first kiss “broke my eardrums.” They did it like rabbits on the floor until one day her dad caught them. “We made love underneath every pier along the coast,” Ray said in a biography by Sam Weller. They were married for an astonishing 57 years, with four girls. Death did them part in 2003.

As a writer, and a huge fan of Bradbury’s work, I can’t help but notice that there’s much lauding, mythmaking and hero adulation going on. Yet few have been bold enough to say some truths out loud. Here goes: Ray Bradbury is an uneducated, inflexible, pretentious, cowardly old crab who has been set in his ways since 1937. And he’s afraid to use a computer.

I await the shots to ring out, but if I once went on record with the audacity to say that Henry Miller was an overrated bore who knew nothing about women, I can stand my ground on this one. Ray shuns the science fiction establishment while soaking up all of its highest accoladesy. “I don’t write science fiction. I’ve only done one science fiction book and that’s Fahrenheit 451,” he told Devin O’Leary, a statement so ludicrous that the South Park satirists should have gobbled it up. Ray prefers “fantasy” writer, because, he says, his stories are as enduring and rich as Greek mythology or Old Testament stories. “It’s my ability as a teller of tales and a writer of metaphors. I think that’s why I’m in the schools,” he told writer Joshua Klein.  No one can argue the fact that Ray’s books have changed the world. But the ones that did were all written over 40 years ago, the same ones still read in schools.

Nor does Ray read what’s being written today in the sci-fi fantasy genre. He’s too busy listening to “mainly the Russian composers: Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky.” He slams the cyberpunk genre: “This kind of crud” looks boring to him, though he doesn’t “have time to read these books.” Nor does Bradbury learn about craft from reading his contemporaries’ work, as that is “incestuous.” This from the man who famously said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

I have to wonder which will endure: Quicker than the Eye, or Snow Crash? From the Dust Returned or The Fionavar Tapestry? Hmm.

But I admit it was this was what got to me most, said to Joshua Klein: “There’s a lot of junk around… they sell in the millions… There have always been soap operas and summer-reading books. That goes back 100 years. Look at Gone With The Wind. That was a big bestseller 60 years ago. But, you know, it’s very shallow. It’s a woman’s book.”

Clearly, Ray’s never read Margaret Mitchell’s classic, a work so far from the shallow end that readers need a life preserver. The great Biblical and Shakespearian themes of love, war, deception, truth, slavery, identity, roots, race, gender, class, social mores and values, grief, loss, faith, materialism, and spirituality weave seamlessly together in this detailed and riveting depiction of survival during the social upheaval of the Civil War, a book whose threads of characterization are never lost or left untied, even after 900 pages. Frankly, it’s not a book that our short story master could pull together. Ray must have seen the romantic movie, but he couldn’t have read this tome before commenting. If he had, he’d know why these people who never existed- Rhett Butler, Melanie Wilkes, Belle Watling- are as real as anyone born of flesh and blood. Now what was that kid’s name in Dandelion Wine?

Perhaps if he had read the book, he would have known more about women- and men- and never have committed adultery. That Maggie had expressed discontent in their marriage in 1968 meant “I couldn’t trust her anymore” and so Ray went on to tryst with a woman decades younger who of course hunted him until he was weak from refusal. Five years of lusty romance went by, until another woman called to wish Ray a happy 54th birthday. He invited her up to his office and began another four-year infidelity. He loved his wife, and believes Maggie never knew. I sincerely hope she had secrets of her own.

It’s not just his wife who played the fool. All of Ray’s contemporaries in fiction, in filmmaking, are idiots. Though he’s never been to university,  “All the people at all the studios are stupid.  They’re so goddamned dumb…They’ve all gone to college, and they think they know how to write…” When asked by the Smithsonian to pep up a planetarium presentation, they critiqued his factual errors. Ray didn’t feel those were important, as long as the audience felt the excitement of the solar system.  Seems not even scientists know better.

Then there was the skirmish with Michael Moore, who “stole” Ray’s title by naming his film Fahrenheit 9/11. The Oxford English Dictionary dares to use the word, too, but Bradbury railed against Moore’s robbery of his intellectual property. I’m assuming a man with a Pulitzer citation and honorary doctorates knows titles aren’t copyrightable, and that Moore could have called his movie Gone With the Wind if he’d wanted to. I’m also assuming that Ray knew he was making literary allusions when he used titles like The Golden Apples of the Sun and I Sing the Body Electric. But that didn’t stop the old codger from calling Mike Moore a “screwed asshole” in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter.

The writer is also so busy listening to Russian classical and reading Shaw that he’s had no time to learn computers. He’s not a Luddite, though- it’s just that “I don’t do Windows.” Everyone on the computer writes nefarious junk. “We are multitudinous lemmings driven by wireless voices to hurl ourselves into the Internet seas where tides of mediocrity surge, pretending at wit and will but signifying nothing,” he writes in Bradbury Speaks. I would protest that just like the magazine and book industries, there’s plenty of pulp fiction along with the real deal. John Kumpunen, an online commenter, said it better. “About writing: Reality is that 99.9% of writing is terribly bad. Uninspiring, dead, clumsy, and just stylistically awful word vomiting like Bradbury’s … ‘multitudinous lemmings driven by wireless voices to hurl ourselves into the Internet seas where tides of mediocrity surge…’ Now, THAT is bad. Salieri waving his baton to drown out Mozart.”

But aside from that, computers “make mistakes,” Ray told journalist David Boyne. “I don’t make mistakes.”  I see.

“Ray Bradbury has been dusted with so much glory lately that it’s high time his reputation got a good sullying,” wrote Bryan Curtis for Slate in 2005. He laments his lost “pulp god.”  “So now that Bradbury has officially been accepted into the halls of Literature, can we lesser life forms please have him back?” he asks. For him, “It’s the pulpy, childlike terrors that stick.” Bryan believes in Ray the fabulist, in the stories of dinosaurs and giant reptiles, of time machines and aliens and magic elixirs and things that go bump in the night.

You can read all the dang Dickinson and Edith Wharton you want to, but you can’t take the Tarzan out of the boy.

Maybe, just maybe, the remarkable achievements, the prolific works, the recognition, the magic- maybe none of these have ever obliterated the earnest, pimply boy who couldn’t get a girl or be a writer, the boy who sold papers on the corner and penny stories to pulp magazines. If that’s the case, then the very human Bradbury is much like the very fiction Adrian Mole. Sue Townsend’s brilliant, zitty creation fancied himself a writer and an intellectual, but his poetry, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland! never got accepted by the literati. If this is indeed the case, then all of Ray Bradbury’s blustery self-importance and maniacally driven productivity is just a young boy’s bravado after all.

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