The Bradbury Chronicles (50 page)

And finally, to my wife, Jan Nguyen, who has stood by me throughout this fantastic voyage—a more loving and loyal partner does not exist. Jan assisted on every conceivable level and, in the end, delivered the miracle that is our baby girl, Mai-Linh Nguyen Weller. In the days that followed, in between a blur of changings and feedings, and in the throes of book revisions, Jan became my collaborator—implementing edits, reading the manuscript numerous times, and rewriting me. She very literally delivered two babies and, for this, I am forever in her debt. I love you.

P. S.

Insights, Interviews & More …

The author and Ray Bradbury, November 30, 2009
Credit:
Zen Sekizawa

Meet Sam Weller

S
AM
W
ELLER
familiarized himself with the words of Ray Bradbury even before he was born. During the infamous Chicago blizzard of January 1967, as drifting blankets of snow created white-out conditions in the Windy City, William Weller, Sam's father, read Bradbury's seminal classic
The Illustrated Man
aloud to his pregnant wife, Barbara. The baby, nine months in utero, turned and listened with keen interest.... 

Flash forward to the present.

Sam Weller is the authorized biographer of one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century—Ray Bradbury, the poet laureate of the dark fantastic; the gatekeeper to “October Country”; the man who immortalized Green Town, Illinois, the planet Mars, and a dark dystopia where books are banished forever.
The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury
is the first-ever biography of Ray Bradbury, a creator and visionary who, more than any other author, altered the fabric of popular culture.

Sam Weller is the former Midwest correspondent for
Publishers Weekly.
He is a regular feature writer for the
Chicago Tribune Magazine,
as well as the Chicago Public Radio program
848.
He is a frequent literary critic for the
Chicago Tribune
and the
Chicago Sun-Times.
He writes about punk rock for
Punk Planet
magazine and his essays have appeared on the National Public Radio's
All Things Considered.
He is a contributor to Playboy.com and a former staff writer for the alternative weekly
Newcity,
where he was given the Peter Lisagor Award—the highest honor in Chicago journalism. His short fiction has been published in
Spec-Lit,
an anthology of science fiction edited by the noted SF author Phyllis Eisenstein. Sam is a frequent lecturer on the life and works of Ray Bradbury, as well as on the writing process and getting published. In February 2004, he was the special guest of the Commonwealth Club in San Jose, California.

Sam Weller is a professor in the fiction department at Columbia College, Chicago. He lives in Chicago with his wife, baby daughter, and two dogs. He is at work on a graphic novel about truck drivers who save the universe, as well as a fictional suspense novel about the real-life Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo.

 

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

All's Weller That Ends Weller

by Ray Bradbury

 

I
'VE ALWAYS CONSIDERED
that allowing someone to write one's biography is an act of supreme egotism.

Commenting on the finished product seems to me to be even more outrageous. Nevertheless, I will try to weigh Sam Weller's book and give you my prejudiced opinion.

If anything, the book seems to me to be an adjunct to my book
Zen in the Art of Writing,
which was published many years ago.

I can recommend it on this level because I see my younger self, as portrayed in Sam Weller's book as the untalented youth who wanted to write stories, essays, poems, plays, or screenplays, but didn't know how.

When you start with very little or nothing, the advancement you make over the years can be of some mild interest to other writers starting out on the road.

One way or another I was able to ignore my seeming lack of talent by doing two things that Weller writes about again and again: spending my life in the library from the end of one year to the other, and writing every single day of that year and the years to follow. I was so busy writing that there was no time to notice how inadequate was the result, and the library provided me with a haven where the talents of other writers caused me to believe, by some reflected glory, that perhaps one day I would achieve their talent. On these two levels I'm able to comment comfortably and without my ego getting in the way.

I must confess that I rather like my younger self because I wrapped my ignorance around myself and got my work done.

Over the years when people have asked if I was an optimist, I said and proved otherwise. In other words, I was an optimal behaviorist. Any writer coming to this biography will find that I behaved every day of my life as if I knew where I was going.

The lessons that can be learned from this book are simply that if you write for a single day, at the end of that day you're pleased with the fact you wrote something. If you write every day for a week, you're even more pleased. And at the end of a year if you can look back on 365 days of writing every single day, a feeling of optimism rewards you.

It has always been my belief that optimism comes from action, not from imagined things about yourself and the future.

One of several things I can point out in this book, and of which I am mildly proud, is the fact that I wrote for thousands of days, pretending not to notice that I was inside the skin of a mildly ignorant person, on his way somewhere, who was going to the library for the information that I needed to get there.

So as a preamble or sequel to my
Zen in the Art of Writing,
I cannot help but recommend Sam Weller's patient recitation of my early days to show other young talents how to keep so busy that they won't be able to recognize their failures or their inadequacies.

Beyond that, Weller's discussion of the accomplishments and the rewards that came late in life is most pleasant, but nevertheless of no practical use to anyone planning a future of writing.

Sam Weller's
The Bradbury Chronicles
is a handbook of days—my days—where progress was slow, but continuous. I can only stand back and recommend Weller himself and let him speak with no further comment from me.

 

A Passage to Somewhere

by Sam Weller

 

T
O ME
, good research is often written with invisible ink. You can't see it, but it's there. It's only later, after reading an entire work that the apparition of all the inquiry begins to emerge and shimmer and rise to the surface. In writing
The Bradbury Chronicles,
I hoped to take nearly five years of fact-finding and to weave it well under the surface of a compelling, inspirational narrative—in this case, the fantastic life-voyage of Ray Douglas Bradbury.

Obviously, research is paramount to a credible biography, and I was always committed to contributing to Bradbury scholarship. I am confident I have done so. But, in my opinion, nothing stops a biography faster than the eight-hundred-page doorstop written in the tweed-and-tobacco vernacular of dissertation babble. With this mission in mind, to emphasize research, but to integrate it into rich, gripping storytelling, my journey began in a mysterious, often dizzying realm—a graveyard of ghosts Ray Bradbury liked to call: “Somewhere.”

This notion of “somewhere” was a running joke between us. It began early in my research, when I would fly out every two or three weeks from my home in Chicago to visit Ray Bradbury at his home in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. We would spend mornings and early afternoons doing interviews. Then, Ray would take his requisite nap, a battery-charging ritual of sorts he has carried on throughout his life. During this time, I was free to explore the catacombs of the Bradbury house. I foraged through boxes, rifled filing cabinets, crept through cobwebs in the garage, and I rummaged deep through the vast laboratory of the imagination that is Ray Bradbury's storied basement office. I remember the very first time my eyes zeroed in on a file cabinet with a drawer marked “Novels in Progress,” and another labeled “Short Stories in Progress.” The files were bursting. But discovering documents and manuscript pages and letters often led to more questions than it gave answers. When Ray would awake from his siesta, I would ask him if he knew where I could find a particular letter, or a contract, or a photograph.

He would always laugh and sigh. “Oh… it's
somewhere!”

Somewhere meant anywhere. Ray's house was organized chaos, much to the dismay of Maggie, his beloved wife of fifty-six years. Often times Ray could perform a miracle and direct me straight toward what I was looking for. But more often than not, I was left to my own devices—like Howard Carter sifting Egyptian sands on the mighty quest for Tut.

And somewhere meant elsewhere. During my years working on
The Bradbury Chronicles,
Ray Bradbury's birthplace of Waukegan, Illinois, very nearly became a second home. One January afternoon, temperatures in the single digits and my own body temperature nearing a flu-induced 103 degrees Fahrenheit, I prowled through snow-blanketed local graveyards hoping to piece together the enigma of the vast Bradbury family tree. I spent days in the deeps of Waukegan's city hall, poring through records. I spent more time staring blurry-eyed into microfiche machines in the town library. Green Town is where Ray's imagination was born, and it was essential for me to illustrate how it came to be.

My travels took me to New York for a who's-counting-martini-lunch with Ray's agent of seven decades, Don Congdon. In my travels, I found every house Ray Bradbury had ever lived in. Bradbury geeks rejoice! I interviewed Maggie Bradbury for hundreds of hours. And in the post–9/11 world, where government information is often restricted Fort Knox–style, I hounded the Federal Bureau of Investigation through a Freedom of Information Act request to divulge that, indeed, they had a file on Ray Bradbury and that agents had parked on his palm-tree-lined street in the late 1950s to watch him, assuming he was a communist sympathizer. I interviewed hundreds of people, collected an office brimming to the rafters with transcribed interviews, archival letters, manuscripts, contracts, diaries, and photographs. I charged myself with funneling it all into visual story. I wanted
The Bradbury Chronicles
to read like a movie. Gripping! Amazing! A thrilling wonder-story about a boy born into nothing who made something incredible out of his life. This was premier in my mind. For I believe that Ray Bradbury's rich sense of storytelling was born, in large part, of his early love of the cinema. It all started on an ice-gusted day in February 1924 when Ray's mother took her son to see
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
starring Lon Chaney.

In the end,
The Bradbury Chronicles
is the biography of an immense imagination and the origin of ideas. And this is the question Ray Bradbury is asked most often. Where do you get your ides?

The answer, simply?

Ray will tell you. “Somewhere!”

Or, better yet, as you hold this book in your hands, the real solution will emerge. Where does Ray Bradbury get his ideas? The answer appears in ever-materializing research. Wait a bit longer. Wait. Wait. You see it? You
will.

The answer is written in invisible ink. All you need to do is hold it up to the light.

The Books That Shaped My Imagination

by Ray Bradbury

 

Buck Rogers,
comic strips by writer Phil Nolan and artist Dick Calkins

For me, it all starts with a comic book. Buck Rogers came into the world in October 1929 at the start of the Great Depression. I began to collect it, and it plummeted me into the future. It changed my life. Ray Bradbury, born August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois: destined to travel to Mars and never return from that year on.

Tarzan of the Apes,
Edgar Rice Burroughs

Male animals want to control the world. When you're a nine-year-old boy, you're still trying to find your way in the world and you're just starting to learn about death. How can you conquer death? And Tarzan, this great masculine character, says, “I'll tell you what, watch me. I'll do it. And you do the same.”

The Wizard of Oz,
L. Frank Baum

I could hardly wait for summer vacation because I would sit by the open door of our house and look out the screen and reread
The Wizard of Oz.
I would play all the parts. I was a budding actor.

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

God created me as a metaphoric stickum creature; any metaphor sticks to me. The stories of Poe are all metaphors: “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Wonderful stories.

The Invisible Man,
H. G. Wells

In my teens, Wells understood my native-born paranoia. Boys of seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen are paranoid. All the novels of H. G. Wells are paranoid. The invisible man said, “If the world doesn't behave, I will teach it to behave.” Young men are full of that. They try to control what can't be controlled. By reading a good story by Wells, you can purge yourself of this.

Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth,
Thomas Wolfe

Certain novelists open the gates of life to us. Wolfe says about life, “Look at that banquet out there. Fantastic, isn't it? How are you going to eat it all?”

The Grapes of Wrath,
John Steinbeck

On my way back from New York, I went to Waukegan and bought a copy of
The Grapes of Wrath
at the United Cigar Store. I got on the Greyhound bus and I went west on the same Route 66 that the Okies took going to California. Can you imagine a better circumstance to read that book? I was out of my mind!

Winesburg, Ohio,
Sherwood Anderson

Finishing the book, I said to myself, “Someday I would like to write a novel set on the planet Mars, with similar people.” I immediately jotted down a list of the sorts of folks I would want to plant on Mars.

Moby-Dick,
Herman Melville

I went to see
Moby Dick
at a silent film theater. I came home and I had a copy of
Moby-Dick
in the living room and I said to my wife, Maggie, “I wonder how long it will be before I finally read this book.” A month later, John Huston said to me, “Read the book. I want you to write the screenplay for my adaptation.” I read it and immediately saw the metaphors. I went back the next day to John and said, “I'll do it.”

Plays by George Bernard Shaw

I have always thought that George Bernard Shaw deserved to be the patron saint of the American theater. Avant-garde in 1900, he remains light years ahead of our entire avant-garde today.

 

And the Films …

by Ray Bradbury

 

Robin Hood
(1922)

Douglas Fairbanks was the star of this picture and I was named for him when I was born. So many of these early favorite films all had the same theme—unrequited love. I must have made the connection at some secret level. Maybe I was preparing myself for a failed love affair.

The Phantom of the Opera
(1925)

I saw it when I was five and there was an element in me that reacted to the metaphor. If his mask could have stayed on, perhaps the phantom could have had real love. The more I look at my life and all of the films that influenced me, there's always the metaphor there.

The Lost World
(1925)

The dinosaurs were instant loves. I knew that they had existed millions of years before and I was amazed at the size and the beauty of these things and the fact that they had been dead for millions of years and with all my heart and soul I wanted them to be alive again. And this movie provided me with a means to make them to be alive. Dinosaurs have been constant companions through all of my life.

The Black Pirate
(1926)

This was Douglas Fairbanks again. It was one of the first Technicolor films and I saw it while I lived in Tucson in 1926. It had wonderful color. The tales of derring-do. The romantic adventures of people like pirates influenced me very much when I was quite young.

The Mysterious Island
(1929)

Jules Verne was the master of metaphor either under the sea or on mysterious islands or visits to the moon or around the world in eighty days or traveling to center of the earth. The immense size and complexity of the metaphors shocked me.

The Skeleton Dance
(1929)

When I was eight years old, they showed
The Skeleton Dance
by Walt Disney at the Genesee Theater in Waukegan and I was so enchanted with it that I stayed on and saw it at least three times. And they were running a terrible film, I believe with Adolphe Menjou, full of love and mush. I put up with it. I ran to the bathroom a lot and came back and saw
The Skeleton Dance
and realized that I had seen something that had changed my life. My father had to come to the theater that night to drag me out and to take me home. I didn't want to leave.

The Mummy
(1932)

Again, it's unrequited love. The mummy is trying to bring back his lost love from 4000 years before and it's an impossible situation. I saw the film at a theater in the center of Tucson when I was twelve. The theater was having some sort of union trouble and someone threw a stink bomb inside so that people would be uncomfortable and wouldn't stay for the performance. But they couldn't do that to me. I stayed through with my brother and I thought it was one of the most beautiful films ever.

King Kong
(1933)

I remember every theater I saw every film in. I saw
King Kong
in the Fox Theater in Tucson, Arizona. I sat there in the front row and when Kong hit the screen, boy, I tell you, he fell on me. It was a concussion. He was so titanic. It's so simple. It rises and rises and rises to series of climaxes and then a super climax. This film changed my life forever. After seeing it, I went home and wrote the screenplay on my dial typewriter. It took forever, but I wanted to remember the dialogue. Later, in 1934 when we had moved to Los Angeles, the girl who lived next door had her father's typewriter and I went over and retranslated my screenplay and submitted it in my short-story class at high school. My teacher, Jeanette Johnson, was very sweet. She wrote on the script, “I don't know what you're doing, but you're doing it very well.” All of my early stories were bad imitations like this. I hadn't found myself yet so I was busy imitating.

Things to Come
(1936)

H. G. Wells was very paranoid and so much of his stuff was negative. But at the end of this film, where they shoot the rocket off to the moon and Cabal and his partner watch the image on a giant screen and his partner says, “Is that all there is? I mean, what is this all about?” And Cabal says, “Which shall it be, the stars or the grave?” I left the theater after seeing this and I was crying. The music came up and the voices kept repeating, “Which shall it be… which shall it be…” and I knew which one it had to be. I saw this film three or four times in the next week sneaking in each time because I had no money.

Fantasia
(1940)

I saw it in the summer of 1940 with my aunt Neva. We couldn't go to the premiere because it cost, maybe, two or three dollars and we didn't have that. But I think the first night after the premiere it was a dollar. Neva and I went and I came out raving—raving about the film. Of course, my Aunt Neva was crazy for it too. I was selling newspapers on a street corner at the time and I took all of my money and invested it in tickets to
Fantasia.
I took my friends to see it and I watched their faces during the film. And if they didn't like it that was the end of the friendship!

Have You Read?
More by Ray Bradbury

AHMED AND THE OBLIVION MACHINES

Ray Bradbury's wondrous children's fable traces the adventures of a lost boy who makes the acquaintance of a long-forgotten, though very powerful, ancient god.

BRADBURY SPEAKS

A highly personal, deeply felt collection of essays,
Bradbury Speaks
offers an intimate look into one of the most fertile and dazzling imaginations of the modern age.

BRADBURY STORIES

The one hundred stories in this volume were chosen by Bradbury himself, and span a career that blossomed in the pulp magazines of the early 1940s and continues to flourish in the new millennium.

THE CAT'S PAJAMAS