Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury

The Boy

The first Ray Bradbury book I ever read was Something Wicked This Way Comes and it left me then, at age 12, and now, a bit older, breathless, panting, sleeping with a flashlight, and hoping that I never take that sucker’s bet to have my dreams comes true. With Bradbury, dreams come along with nightmares, but nightmares come along with dreams, too. No matter how Dark it got, there was a light somewhere at the end of the Merry-Go-Round. Not much of a light, but enough to see a glimmer of hope. I interviewed Mr. Bradbury in his office in Los Angeles. He was an old man then, though it was many years ago, and though we might have been in the room of a nine-year-old boy who lived among stacks of Monsters of Movieland, tin-plated spaceships with battery-operated strobe lights, puzzles, puppets, and toys that allowed the wonders of his mind to spill out and be touched. I had seen Mr. B before, fantastically with Kurt Vonnegut during a photo session, and weirdly arguing with Gore Vidal, also in bookstores, at plays, he tended to be around. You can look up his credits and his bio, his experiences as one of the fathers of modern science fiction, definitely of the sensibility that brought us everything from The Twilight Zone to Star Trek to Star Wars to most of the movies of Steven Spielberg, as well as writing the John Huston adaptation of Moby-Dick, and his strange escapade with Fellini in Rome (These are great stories best read from the brush strokes of the Master.) Bradbury was a Master. Everything necessary to learn from him is in his books and stories and plays. But here’s a little extra, a little something he gave me, and now I give to you. Ray Bradbury from a spring day in Los Angeles when the Jacarandas were in bloom and the circus had not yet arrived, though we could hear its calliope approaching:

I’m a storyteller from way back. My influences were the great storytellers. If you can hook people on your ideas, you can get them to read your stories, or listen to them, or watch them. However they experience the stories, it’s the ideas that count. The history of the world is the history of ideas. We dreamt in caves of being warm, so we invented pajamas—and other things such as learning how to build fires. Eventually that led to television and bad shows, as well as good ones that connect people. The Berlin Wall, Tianamen Square, the Persian Gulf, everyone is watching. That makes life harder for those who prefer to work in the dark. I’ll take that, even with the ridiculous sitcoms that come along with it. I find ideas everywhere. Even among trash. I read the great books, but also the trashy ones. Most of our culture is trash. I’m full of trash. How many hundreds of hours have I listened to the radio? How many thousands of hours of television have I watched? I’ve seen every movie ever made. Starting when I was a kid, I saw 14 movies every week, maybe more. Almost everything I’ve seen, heard, and read is, for the most part trash. What makes something more than trash are the ideas within it. Take the movie Predator, please. Actually, it’s beautifully made, but there’s not a single really interesting idea in it. You watch men get killed and it doesn’t mean anything. Where are the philosophical concepts? What was the meaning of the lives of those men so brutally killed? What about their families, their lovers? Who are they? Who is the so-called monster? Why is everybody doing what they are doing? Tarzan had more brains. At least he had a love affair with Jane. And he had a story. Still, we need all the trash in our cultural lives, all those lousy books and everything else that will turn your brains to mulch, because, if you have any imagination, you will take in all that trash, along with what is truly excellent, and then you become you.

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury, for helping us become us.