The Bradbury Chronicles (12 page)

In the fall of 1940, Ray published the fourth and last issue of
Futuria Fantasia
. He didn't want to continue borrowing money from Forry Ackerman to fund the 'zine and, after publishing in
Script,
Ray wanted to focus more on his writing. The last issue was illustrated beautifully in black and white by Hannes Bok (in the issue's masthead, Hans Bok had changed the spelling of his first name to “Hannes”). Henry Kuttner contributed a short piece, and Robert Heinlein, under the pseudonym Lyle Monroe, wrote the short story “Heil!” Again, Ray only printed about a hundred issues, making it a highly sought-after collectible for Heinlein fans. But perhaps it was the short story “The Piper” that Ray wrote that makes the last issue of the fanzine most noteworthy. Under the pen name Ron Reynolds, Ray had written his first Martian story.

In the Science Fiction Society, Ray had found a group of people who taught him much. “If I were to give advice to young writers,” said Ray years later, “I would say, number one, they should start writing every day of their lives. Number two, they should go out and seek other people in a similar situation—find an ad hoc church, you might say.”

Henry Hasse was one of those in the “ad hoc church” who also helped Ray develop as a writer. In 1941, Ray and Hasse, whose plotting skills Ray admired, decided to collaborate on several stories. Ray wrote the first drafts and Hasse edited them, cutting them down to their essence. The duo decided to take one of Ray's stories, “Pendulum,” from the second issue of
Futuria Fantasia
and expand its concept. Once done, they sent the 5,500-word story to New York pulp agent Julius Schwartz, who finally, after turning down several of Ray's stories since the 1939 WorldCon, agreed to represent it.

On July 18, 1941, Schwartz sold “Pendulum” to the pulp magazine
Super Science Stories,
which paid a half-cent a word. Ray's first paycheck, before Schwartz's customary 10 percent commission, was $27.50, which he split with Hasse. Ray was elated. He had taken another big step. Many of his friends and mentors in the Science Fiction Society had already broken into the pulps, and he had always felt behind them, even if he was younger than they were. But now he had arrived. The issue of
Super Science Stories
with his short story “Pendulum” hit the Los Angeles newsstands on August 22, 1941—Ray's twenty-first birthday.

Science fiction, science thought, thinking about fantasy, exploring universes beyond are the highest priorities to me. Society just places them a little lower down the ranks. To me Ray Bradbury is one of about three science fiction authors of my time, when I was younger, that you have to place on a pedestal for making us have dreams of wanting to go somewhere in life. Reading his works is really what made me want to do great things with computers.

—
STEVE WOZNIAK
,
cofounder, Apple Computers

L
IKE A
lot of Americans, on December 7, 1941, Ray sat near a radio and listened. He had been visiting a friend in Hollywood when the news came over the airwaves. Two hundred and thirty miles north of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, an armada of Japanese warships had amassed, moving in under cover of night. As the sun rose over the Pacific, the first wave of 183 planes launched from the decks of six imperial aircraft carriers, initiating a surprise attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base. The Japanese warplanes emerged out of the towering clouds just before eight and, one by one, they swooped down, the scream of mechanical gnats breaking the quiet of the American military base below. As the bombers and torpedo planes dropped their shells, American aircraft were destroyed and battleships were sunk. When the Japanese planes were finished, nearly 2,400 men, women, and children had died. War had been raging in Europe for two years, and until now the United States had managed to steer clear of it. But the attack at Pearl Harbor all but guaranteed U.S. involvement in the simmering global conflict. The next day, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his “day of infamy” speech to the United States Congress, and Ray stood at the corner of Norton and Olympic holding a newspaper in the air with the headline proclaiming
WAR DECLARED BY U.S
.

As the early reports of the devastation came over the radio in the living room of the apartment on West Twelfth Street, Leo and Esther Bradbury worried their boys would be drafted; Skip was twenty-five years old and Ray was twenty-one. Skip desperately wanted to fulfill his patriotic duty. When he was summoned for his physical examination, it was discovered that he had a damaged eardrum (perhaps from pursuing his hobby as a surfer), and he weighed far more than the average man of five feet eight inches should. Skip lifted weights every day and, as a consequence, he was 215 pounds. Even though he begged and pleaded to be drafted, he was sent home.

Ray had not been summoned for his physical yet, but he worried about fighting in a war. It was not that Ray Bradbury was unpatriotic; he simply had a sinking feeling, a sense that if he were called to service, he would never come home. He would either die on a muddy battlefield or, even before that, the big, tough American soldiers would chew him up. “I was a geek, a nerd. They would have destroyed me,” noted Ray. Very simply, Ray was afraid. He was also, admittedly, a pacifist. He didn't believe in war.

Rather than fretting or allowing anger to gnaw at him, he tried to turn his emotions into creative energy. As the United States marched to war in Europe and the South Pacific, Ray Bradbury focused on his writing regimen. At the beginning of 1941, he made a silent pledge to write one story a week, every week, for a year. He thought that if he wrote fifty-two stories that year, “at least one of them had to be decent.”

He was right. After selling “Pendulum,” Julius Schwartz landed two of Ray's stories in
Captain Future
magazine that year, “Gabriel's Horn,” another Bradbury/Hasse collaboration, and “The Piper,” a reworking of the Mars story that was first published in the final issue of
Futuria Fantasia
. Schwartz was now officially acting as Ray's agent. “Gabriel's Horn” and “The Piper” fetched sixty dollars each, but the collaboration between Ray and Henry Hasse had run its course. “I discovered that collaborators use each other as crutches and you lean on the other person,” Ray admitted. “You need to learn to walk by yourself.” He broke the news to Hasse, who was none too pleased. “He never forgave me.”

With his stories selling, Ray was growing ever more confident and wanted to work on his own. Now, with war consuming the headlines and shadowing his dreams, he was more determined than ever to stick to his pledge—a short story a week. During this time, Ray's friend writer Leigh Brackett, a fellow member of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society (and also a client of Julius Schwartz), began mentoring Ray. Leigh, five years older than Ray, had achieved considerable success in 1940 and 1941 in the pages of
Planet Stories
and in John W. Campbell's
Astounding Science Fiction,
and she was another member of the older crowd whom Ray greatly admired. Perhaps even more than Heinlein or even Henry Kuttner, Leigh Brackett became Ray Bradbury's greatest writing mentor.

Ray and Leigh had much in common (even their middle name was the same, though Leigh's was spelled “Douglass”). Like Ray, she adored everything from Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars to the actor Douglas Fairbanks. The two had lost loved ones early in life; Ray had experienced the heartbreaking loss of his grandfather and baby sister, Elizabeth, and Leigh had known tragedy when her father died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.

In the 1940s, Leigh Brackett, as writer Jack Williamson described her, was although “maybe not beautiful, attractive enough, athletic and bright and engaging.” She was toned and tanned from playing volleyball at Santa Monica Beach, and with her chiseled body and her short hair, she was often mistaken for being a lesbian (for the record, she married fellow society member and longtime Bradbury friend Edmond Hamilton in 1946). And Ray, with his unusually long locks of sun-bleached blond hair, his “purple” language, and his deep sensitivity, was more than once accused of being gay himself. They were an inseparable duo, and it is a marvel that Ray Bradbury did not pursue a romantic relationship with Leigh. “We were very close to an affair at one time,” Ray admitted. “She drove me home a couple nights from Science Fiction Society meetings and along the way she gave heavy hints that she wouldn't mind climbing in the backseat with me.” But he decided against it, as Ray said, “to protect our friendship.”

In the early forties, Leigh lived in Venice, close to the beach, in a bungalow near the Pacific. On Sunday afternoons, Ray visited her at Santa Monica's famous Muscle Beach, an early stomping ground for the weight-lifting, Charles Atlas crowd. Often dressed in faded blue denims, Ray was “an ebullient kid,” according to Leigh Brackett in the 1978 book
Speaking of Science Fiction,
“bursting at the seams with drive and talent that he hadn't yet learnt to control.” And, as she contended, he made horrible puns and lived on a diet of hamburgers and pineapple malts.

On those Sunday afternoons, Ray brought his short stories and sat with his toes buried in the warm sand and read Leigh's work as she read his. When Leigh showed Ray her latest
Planet Story
adventure he proclaimed it “gorgeous” and wept. “There was nothing I could criticize, it was always perfect, a wonderful adventure in its own terms, and then she'd read my stories and kick the hell out of them, God bless her,” Ray recalled. They had what they called “The Odd Muscles, Malts, Manuscripts, and Bergman and Bogart Society.” They played volleyball, swam in the ocean, lay in the sun, and talked writing. Leigh introduced Ray to a score of new writers, including many of the greats of detective-noir, such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett; she also was a fan of Hemingway and persuaded Ray to read much more of the author.

They were glorious, magical Sunday afternoons. The beach, the salty air, the muscle-bound subculture, and the long Santa Monica pier stretching out into the shimmering, cool Pacific. They were afternoons that changed Ray Bradbury's life. “Leigh taught me pure story writing,” said Ray. “Her stories were very simple, and well plotted, and very beautiful. I learned from her how to pare my stories down and how to plot.” He spent almost every Sunday afternoon for nearly five years learning from Leigh.

He may have never gone off to college, but Ray never stopped being a student. He still frequented the library, feasting on books as wide ranging as ancient Egyptian history to the annual O. Henry Prize anthologies. Left to his own devices, he was getting what Bradbury scholar Garyn Roberts called “a liberal arts degree,” and doing it on his own. Along the way, he had a host of accomplished writers who taught him much about the art of writing. From Robert Heinlein, he had learned that all good stories are of human beings; from Henry Kuttner, he had learned to cut the “purple” language and not blurt out his ideas until they were written; and in Leigh Brackett, Ray found a dear friend and possibly his best mentor. Those Sunday afternoons on the sprawling Santa Monica beach with Leigh were supremely invaluable to Ray's development.

In the years to follow, like Ray, Leigh Brackett traveled far beyond the field of the pulps. She cemented her name in the annals of science fiction and fantasy with novels such as
The Long Tomorrow;
the 1944 crime book
No Good for a Corpse,
a hard-boiled story that dripped of the influence of one of her heroes, Raymond Chandler; and the 1946 film
The Big Sleep,
in which she collaborated with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman. As she was cowriting the screenplay to
The Big Sleep
for director Howard Hawks, she was also working on a novella, “Lorelei of the Red Mist,” for
Planet Stories
. Overextended, she turned to Ray for assistance. She told Ray, “I can't finish this. Will you finish it for me?” After all the Sunday afternoons reading stories and analyzing writing, Ray knew Leigh's style inside and out. With typical Bradbury flourish, Ray wrote his half of “Lorelei” in a few short days of wild inspiration. As he acknowledged many times over the years, “I wrote the last half of the novella and you can't tell where Leigh's writing ends and mine starts. To this day, I'm still not even sure myself.”

She continued working with Howard Hawks on more pictures, including 1958's
Rio Bravo;
and her last screen credit was for the second film of the
Star Wars
trilogy,
The Empire Strikes Back
. Leigh Brackett was certainly a talent, and her best student was Ray Bradbury.

 

I
N
J
UNE
1941, Ray finished the macabre tale “The Candle,” which he sent to Henry Kuttner, who was at that time living in New York. Kuttner wrote Ray back, telling him he didn't think the ending was quite right and included a page with an alternate ending for the story. After reading Kuttner's suggestion, Ray responded, “I can't think of a more perfect way to end this story. Do you mind if I use your ending?” Kuttner gave Ray his heartfelt approval, and on June 2, 1941, Julie Schwartz sold “The Candle” to
Weird Tales,
marking Ray's entrée into the esteemed pulp publication and into the dark fantasy genre. It was a portent of grander things to come.

At this time, Laraine Day decided to halt the meetings of her theater group, the Wilshire Players. Day's career was taking off and she no longer had time for the weekly gatherings. While Ray loved his involvement with the group, thanks to his string of recent publishing successes, he was already leaning away from acting.

On February 15, 1942, Ray was forced to face his fear of going to war. He registered with the draft board. While waiting to be called for a physical examination, Ray steadfastly adhered to his self-imposed writing schedule. “On Monday morning, I wrote the first draft of a new story,” said Ray. “Tuesday I did a second draft. On Wednesday a third. On Thursday a fourth. On Friday a fifth. And on Saturday, at noon I mailed the sixth and final draft to New York.”

Soon after Ray registered with the draft board, Leo Bradbury was offered a job as a utility lineman with the Bureau of Power and Light in the Los Angeles coastal community of Venice. Throughout the Depression, Leo had been in and out of work, and from 1934 to 1937 often had to rely on money his son Skip sent home while working in the Civil Conservation Corps. The Venice offer included a small rental home, located at 670 South Venice, for thirty dollars a month. Leo took the job and the family moved to the small beach community. Ray kept his job selling the
Los Angeles Herald Express,
even though it meant that he had to commute across town by streetcar each day. He was not yet making enough as a writer to give up his day job.

Venice, California, in 1942 was a once-gleaming coastal community on a long, sad decline. Built at the turn of the century, it was modeled after Venice, Italy, with its stretch of canals, now filled with stagnant black swamp water layered with trash. The old Venice amusement pier, with its three roller coasters, dance hall, and arcades, had also fallen into disrepair.

The Bradburys' house in Venice was a Craftsman-style bungalow, built in 1923. Painted white and nestled a little less than a mile inland from the ocean, the 750-square-foot home had two bedrooms, a small kitchen with a window that looked out on the yard and driveway, and a small bathroom. Skip and Ray shared a bedroom, but at least now, for the first time, they had a real bed rather than a sleeper sofa. Next door to the house was a humming redbrick powerhouse that the Bureau of Power and Light owned. This structure would be the inspiration for the 1948 story “Powerhouse,” first collected in
The Golden Apples of the Sun
. Set back just a short distance from the new house was a one-car garage, with a workroom in the rear corner that Ray commandeered as an office. He set up a small desk with his typewriter and continued with his mad story-a-week production schedule. He was to stick to this prolific work ethic for virtually the entirety of his career.