The Bradbury Chronicles (18 page)

But the little apartment within earshot of the thundering Pacific surf was perfect in all of its cramped imperfection. These were thrilling days, with new surprises and accomplishments around every corner.

One evening, Ray joined Bill Spier and other members of the
Suspense
cast and crew for a drink after the radio broadcast, at a restaurant near the radio studio in Hollywood. He brought a copy of
Dark Carnival
as a gift for his friend. “I went in and found Bill Spier,” remembered Ray. “He was sitting with Orson Welles and Ava Gardner.” Ray was introduced to the Hollywood heavyweights and he handed his book to Spier. After Spier admired it, Welles asked to see it. He held the book in his hands, admiring the cover with the images of haunting Mexican masks. After a few moments, Welles looked up at Ray. “I, too, have masks,” he said, in his deep, resonant voice. And that's all he said. Ray, of course, said more, taking the opportunity to tell Welles how much he admired his work. “When I saw
Citizen Kane
in 1941,” said Ray, “I told all of my friends I've just seen the greatest film ever made and that's the way it turned out. It tops every list all over the world.”

On November 13, 1947, Ray's third radio piece, “Riabouchinska,” aired on
Suspense
. Ray and Maggie were in the theater the night the program was performed and broadcast.

The days and months of 1948 flew by; it was a splendid year. Ray's script “The Meadow,” written for ABC's radio show
World Security Workshop,
was included in
The Best American One-Act Plays of 1947–1948
. His short story “Powerhouse,” which had been summarily rejected by
Harper's
and
Collier's,
was finally published in
Charm
magazine, and it went on to win third prize in the 1948
O. Henry Prize Stories
collection, behind Truman Capote and Wallace Stegner, respectively.

And, as if these accomplishments weren't enough, Martha Foley, the editor who had selected “The Big Black and White Game” for the
1946 Best American Short Stories
anthology had again named Ray to her 1948 collection, this time giving the nod to his
New Yorker
story “I See You Never.” But even with the sales to major magazines and the new radio work, Ray and Maggie were still broke. In 1948, according to their income tax return, they earned as a couple only $4,883.94.

In early 1949, Don Congdon had shopped a new collection of Bradbury stories to Farrar, Straus with poor results. The respected New York publishing house had deemed Ray's material subpar. “They sent it back and said that the writing wasn't good enough,” said Ray. “They said that some of the stories were good, but others had overtones of pulp writing. It was a very snobbish letter, and I was angered because some of the stories that they half indicated as being pulp were stories that had been in the quality magazines, or quality stories that had been in the pulp magazines. So I knew they were not sure themselves, and that there was some sort of prejudice against me because I had come up through the pulp magazines.”

It was fast becoming a recurring theme. In high school, Ray's short stories were misunderstood because they were science fiction. When Ray first submitted material to mainstream literary magazines, he did so under an assumed name so he wouldn't be recognized as Ray Bradbury the pulp writer. He had long been concerned with being stigmatized for writing genre material and, with the rejection from Farrar, Straus, his fears of being discriminated against had materialized.

In the spring of 1949, still smarting from the rejection of his second collection of short stories, there was more pressure put on Ray to increase his annual income, and quickly. Maggie was pregnant, and the baby was due in November. “I was panicked,” said Ray.

Ray's new friend Norman Corwin had some sage advice. “He insisted that I go to New York.” Corwin and his wife would be in New York in June and offered to accompany Ray around the city. Maggie would soon be quitting her job at Abbey Rents, and as she was the primary wage earner, Ray desperately needed to make some big sales.

Corwin suggested that Ray put a face to his name, shake some hands in New York, pitch some stories, make his presence known. In June 1949, just as he had done a decade earlier in June 1939, with just eighty dollars in the bank, Ray boarded a Greyhound bus for New York City.

Well, of course without Ray Bradbury, there
is
no Stephen King, at least as he grew. Bradbury was one of my nurturing influences, first in the EC comics, then in
Weird Tales,
then in Arkham House editions which I saved up for over a period of months (and in the case of
Dark Carnival,
years—that was a lot of summer jobs). I never “studied” him, I just absorbed what he was up to, mostly in the early small-town horror stories but also in the early science fiction stories (mostly
The Martian Chronicles)
, as if through my pores. What was striking was how far down into the viscera he was able to delve in those stories—how far beyond the prudish stopping-point of his 1940s contemporaries. In that sense, Ray was to the horror story what D. H. Lawrence was to the story of sexual love.

—
STEPHEN KING
,
author

O
NE COULD
never accuse Ray Bradbury of an inability to multitask. While he was assembling his first collection,
Dark Carnival,
he had been simultaneously writing and submitting new stories to major literary magazines. He was also pitching stories to radio programs and continuing to sell tales to the pulps. As if that weren't enough, he had several book-length concepts in various stages of development. And, of course, there was the highly autobiographical novel based on his Illinois childhood.

He also had a new short-story collection in mind, which would include a broad-ranging survey of his science fiction, fantasy, and weird tales, as well as his realistic fiction. The working title for the book was
The Illustrated Man
. And, in 1948, Ray came close to working with
New Yorker
cartoonist Charles Addams. The project had garnered interest from Helen King, an editor at William Morrow. The Bradbury/Addams collaboration was to be a Halloween gift book of Addams's illustrations accompanying Ray's vampire family stories. But Addams's asking price was three hundred dollars a drawing, which was much too high. The artist refused to lower his fee, and the project was shelved. Both men would soon become entrenched in their own projects and, sadly, outside of the beautiful artwork Addams furnished for “Homecoming” in
Mademoiselle
(later used as the cover artwork for 2001's
From the Dust Returned
), the collaboration between two creative powerhouses never occurred.

While juggling all of his various projects, Ray had been steadily writing a series of short stories set on the planet Mars. The first tale, “The Million Year Picnic,” had been published in the summer of 1946 in the pulp magazine
Planet Stories
. It was followed by many more tales, as yet unconnected, set on the Red Planet.

The long road to Mars began in 1944, when Ray's friend and mentor, Henry Kuttner, had given him a copy of Sherwood Anderson's novel
Winesburg, Ohio
. After reading it, Ray had made a note to himself to one day combine midwestern Americana with his love of Mars, which had first been sparked by his discovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars stories. Ray hoped someday to write a book like
Winesburg
, but to set it millions of miles in outer space, on Mars.

In June 1949, Ray arrived by Greyhound in New York City, with a suitcase in one hand and his (new) portable typewriter in the other. With very little money to his name, he checked into the Sloane House YMCA. “I took my stories around to a dozen publishers,” Ray recalled. “Nobody wanted them. They said, ‘We don't publish short stories. Nobody reads them. Don't you have a novel?' I said, ‘No, I don't. I'm a sprinter, not a long-distance runner.'”

Fortunately, Don Congdon had managed to drum up some interest from Doubleday in a collection of Bradbury short stories. The publishing house was launching a list of science fiction books. They would consider a Bradbury collection but wanted only his science fiction material; they weren't interested in Ray's fantasy stories, his weird tales, or his contemporary fiction. Near the end of Ray's weeklong stay in New York, Don and he met Walter Bradbury (no relation) for dinner at Luchow's restaurant, a time-honored German establishment on East Fourteenth Street near Union Square. During dinner, Walter Bradbury said, “What about all those Martian stories you've been writing for
Planet Stories
and
Thrilling Wonder
? Wouldn't there be a book if you took all those stories and tied them together into a tapestry?”

Eureka! It was such an obvious solution, Ray thought. Why hadn't he thought of it? he wondered. To a degree, he had. What Walter Bradbury was suggesting was not far removed from Ray's own vision of
Winesburg, Ohio,
on Mars. “I made that note back in 1944,” said Ray, “and I called it
Space Toward Mars
or something like that. Over the years, my subconscious kept writing Mars stories and then Walter Bradbury comes along and tells me what I've been doing.”

Ray agreed to prepare an outline by the next morning and deliver it to the Doubleday editor. He rushed back to the YMCA, went to his room, pulled out his portable typewriter, and went to work. “It was a typical hot June night in New York,” Ray wrote in the essay “The Long Road to Mars,” an introduction to the fortieth-anniversary edition of
The Martian Chronicles
. “Air conditioning was still a luxury of some future year. I typed until 3
A.M
., perspiring in my underwear as I weighted and balanced my Martians in their strange cities in the last hours before arrivals and departures of my astronauts.”

While putting his outline together, Ray didn't have any of his previously penned Mars stories with him. He pieced them together entirely from recollection. In short order, he assembled the stories into a narrative mosaic that would literally change the field of science fiction.

At noon the next day, Ray and Don Congdon met at Walter Bradbury's office, and Ray presented his outline. He had decided on the narrative arc that would pull his Martian tales together, one that followed colonists from earth to the Red Planet. The colonists unwittingly brought with them all of their human problems—racism, censorship, environmental destruction, and the threat of atomic annihilation. It was an allegory that would reflect all of humankind's flaws at the dawn of the Space Age. Thematically, he was wrestling with political, social, and philosophical concerns near and dear to his heart.

“I decided first of all that there would be certain elements of similarity between the invasion of Mars and the invasion of the Wild West,” Ray wrote in the unpublished essay “How I Wrote My Book,” dated October 17, 1950. “I had heard from my father's lips, and my grandfather's, stories of varied adventures in the West, even in the late year of 1908, when things were plenty empty, still, and lonely. So I knew that Mars, in reality, would be that new horizon which Steinbeck's Billy Buck mused upon when he stood upon the shore of the Pacific and the ‘Going West' was over, and the adventurers were left with nothing else to do but simmer down.”

This idea for a novel-in-stories would provide a mirror for humanity, its faults, foibles, and failures. The book would be a cautionary tale, warning against the cultural perils that lay ahead. This was always the reason that Ray loved science fiction; it afforded the writer an opportunity to play social critic by using tomorrow's metaphors to symbolize today's problems.

Walter Bradbury was convinced. He loved the idea behind
The Martian Chronicles
. He had already read some of the Mars stories in the pulp magazines, and he knew Ray Bradbury was a rising literary talent who could be a key player in Doubleday's new science fiction line. Walter Bradbury offered Ray a book deal for
The Martian Chronicles
right there, on the spot. Years later, both Ray and Don Congdon were unclear about certain aspects of the career-altering meetings with Walter Bradbury. It was Ray's recollection that Walter Bradbury had even suggested the title,
The Martian Chronicles
. Files in Ray Bradbury's own papers suggest, however, that Ray had been considering the title
The Martian Chronicles
for a collection of his Mars-related stories before the now-legendary dinner meeting where the classic book was born.

After Walter Bradbury had offered Ray a contract for
The Martian Chronicles,
as the story goes, he asked Ray if he had any other projects. It was Ray's long-standing recollection that it was at this point that a second Bradbury classic was conceived—
The Illustrated Man
.

“I was wrong about that,” Ray said. “My memory was incorrect.” Ray did receive two offers that day. The first was for
The Martian Chronicles
. The second, apparently, was for
The Creatures That Time Forgot,
which, as detailed in Ray's book contract, was to be a fifty-thousand-word novel revised from a Bradbury short story of the same name that had run in the fall 1946 issue of
Planet Stories
.

By the time Ray boarded the Greyhound for his return voyage to Los Angeles, he had with him a check for $1,500—$750 for
The Martian Chronicles
and $750 for
The Creatures That Time Forgot
.
The Martian Chronicles
was due to the publisher in just three months. With a pregnant wife waiting for him in California, the money and the book deals lifted a tremendous burden. For the short term, at least, he was rich. “Fifteen hundred dollars was a lot of money in those days,” Ray said.

Maggie had quit her job at Abbey Rents and Ray was now the sole breadwinner. If his friend Norman Corwin hadn't pushed him to go to New York, there's no telling what would have happened to Ray's career. Certainly, without the meeting and creative recommendation of Walter Bradbury,
The Martian Chronicles
would never have been written as what Ray called “a book of stories pretending to be a novel.”

When the bus arrived at the Greyhound terminal in downtown Chicago on the afternoon of June 23, 1949, Ray decided to live lavishly for the first time in his career. He got off the bus, retrieved his luggage and his typewriter, and went to Chicago's Union Station. He'd had it with the four-day journey across the nation by motor coach. Ray bought a ticket for a seat on the Union Pacific train
The City of Los Angeles,
departing at 7:45 that evening. Ray boarded, took seat number 42 in car four. He was headed home. And for the first time, doing it in relative luxury.

Upon his return to Los Angeles, Ray set out to write a book that would be considered one of his greatest achievements. With Maggie at home in the tiny Venice apartment, each morning Ray rode his bicycle down Venice Boulevard to his parents' house. In the corner garage office of 670 Venice Boulevard, he began work on
The Martian Chronicles
. Mornings were usually spent at his typewriter, pecking out the book at a quick clip. At lunchtime, Ray would take a break and go into his parents' house, where Esther would prepare him an egg sandwich. At two in the afternoon, he bicycled home to take his daily nap. Afterward, he'd return to the garage office to put in a few more hours' work on the book.

While assembling
The Martian Chronicles,
something he was fond of calling a “half-cousin to a novel,” Ray had an epiphany. “When I set out to write it, I thought, ‘How in hell am I going to take all of my Mar-tian stories and make a novel?'”

Ray harked back to
The Grapes of Wrath,
which he had read in 1939 while crossing the country by Greyhound bus, returning from the First World Science Fiction Convention. “I looked at that book and thought, my God, Steinbeck put together his novel with every other chapter serving as a metaphorical prose poem about turtles, or religion, or the atmosphere of the time, and I could learn from that.” With Steinbeck's story structure in mind, Ray began to piece together his various Mars tales by writing short “bridge chapters” to set up and connect the disparate stories. Throughout the summer of 1949, Ray reviewed his more than two dozen Martian stories, deciding which ones to weave into the tapestry of the book. Some, like “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright” and “The Earth Men” had already appeared in print. As he had done with
Dark Carnival,
Ray seized the opportunity to fine-tune and polish previously published stories before they appeared in book form.

Ray's Mars was influenced by the visions of Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli, a nineteenth-century Italian astronomer who discovered and mapped a series of deep lines crisscrossing the Martian surface. Schiaparelli called the lines “channels,” but when translated into English, it became “canals.” The very thought of waterways on Mars ignited a Victorian-era uproar over the possibility of life on the Red Planet. But Ray's Mars was influenced even more by Percival Lowell, an American astronomer who furthered the idea of canals. Lowell had published three books detailing his telescopic research of the Red Planet beginning in 1895; he created lavish maps of the Martian surface, diagramming the hundreds of lines and intersections he concluded were waterways and oases that could only have been constructed by intelligent beings. Crystalline water flowed through this system, he theorized, from the melting polar ice caps, feeding dark areas on the planet that Lowell posited were lush with vegetation. Bright spots on the surface, he surmised, were deserts. It was this romantic Victorian vision that imprinted itself onto Ray's image of the planet.