REST IN PEACE, Mr BRADBURY
I've just heard about the passing of Ray Bradbury, not unexpected but a very great loss nevertheless. He was an enormous influence on my writing, and in tribute, I'm going to re-post a piece I wrote about his work for a longer examination of science fiction's debt to metaphor and mythology:
OF MYTH AND MEMORY
Recently, after hearing Ray Bradbury speak at a session of UC Riverside’s Eaton Conference, I picked up a copy of Dandelion Wine, replacing my original copy lost many moves ago. I looked forward to reacquainting myself with a classic example of his work. I wasn't disappointed. The experience caused me to re-examine just what it is in a piece of literature that captures me, what makes a story unforgettable and moving beyond the surface levels of plot, or good writing, or even believable characters.
I was introduced to Bradbury long ago by a twelve-year-old boy whose parents were visiting on their way up the California coast. We were living in San Luis Obispo at the time, and friends traveling between Los Angeles and San Francisco frequently took a break halfway at our house. The boy’s parents and my husband were musicians, and when he and I found ourselves left out of their very technical conversation, we began to talk about books and learned we were both avid readers. As our guests were leaving, he gave me his paperback copy of The Illustrated Man which he’d finished reading on the family trip - highly recommended, he said. I didn’t recognize the name of the book or its author, but since I’m addicted to reading at bedtime, and had run out of things to read, I turned to his offering. The rest is history, as they say. I fell in love with Bradbury's voice as much as the stories themselves, saturating myself in his music. Bradbury's prose is really poetry, and best read aloud.
In fact, I realized, as I re-visited these stories of life in a vanished time and place in America, that it's not the story itself that grabs me and never was. Most of the stories have sparse plots that would sound ho-hum if summarized in a sentence or two. And the characters, the innocent children and wise old adults that populate the pages, probably had few counterparts even in Bradbury's own childhood in Illinois. But that's not really the point. The magic of these stories lies in the fact that they’re metaphors, translating Bradbury’s personal memories into transcendent myth.
Of course, I'm not the first to remark that so many Bradbury lines enchant the ear out of all proportion to the information they actually carry. Consider the opening paragraph of the first “chapter” (Bradbury doesn't name or number them as such) in Dandelion Wine:
It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.
Here's another opening, from a chapter in the middle of the book:
And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until all the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you see the last apple on the tree, and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky and drop you down and down....
A lesser writer might have written, “It was an early summer morning,” for the first, and “In Autumn, when apples fall from the trees” for the second - and would've missed the dreamlike world that Bradbury's words create, a world we immediately recognize as true to our own mythic childhood. My childhood passed in wartime London, crowded, grubby, dangerous, and certainly lacking apple trees, but that image is emotionally more real to me than broken paving stones and dusty privet bushes and the sound of air raid sirens. Bradbury's Spring and Autumn are the way the seasons should be in childhood, not the way they actually may be. Nor can we avoid the poetic transfer of subject that occurs from the Narrator observing the fall of the apples, to the Narrator becoming the apples themselves, surely a mythic transformation!
I re-read the book with a great deal of pleasure, recognizing the parts I'd admired before when I knew so much less about the skill that lies behind the apparently effortless ability of simple words to stir emotion. Bradbury, like all the best poets, makes it seem easy. And that realization brought me to remember the work of another poet I've always loved, whose work was a rhapsody about simple places and simple people: Dylan Thomas.
I hadn't read Under Milk Wood, a radio play, in a very long time, though I re-read Thomas's collected poems at least once a year. I remember hating “modern poetry” while I was in high school, until I encountered Richard Burton’s reading of Thomas's poem, “Fern Hill.” For the first time, I had the experience of being swept away by the emotional torrent of images, with only the slightest understanding of what the poem meant. (The American poet Archibald MacLeish was speaking of this experience when he wrote, “A poem should not mean/But be.”)
Like Bradbury, Thomas loved childhood and small towns, though his are in his native Wales:
...herring gulls heckling down to the harbour where the fishermen spit and prop the morning up and eye the fishy sea smooth to the sea's end as it lulls in blue. Green and gold money, tobacco, tinned salmon, hats with feathers, pots of fish-paste, warmth for the winter-to-be, weave and leap in it rich and slippery in the flash and shapes of fishes through the cold sea-streets.
I've never lived in towns anything like either poet describes, yet I seem to remember them; the music of the words conjures them in my imagination. How real those men propping up the morning! How vivid the smell of the herring flashing under the cold waves! I have no memory of a place like that - how could I? Yet I know its seasons intimately. Here's another example:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the slowblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishing-boat bobbing sea.
The thing is, these aren't memories of the places where Bradbury and Thomas spent their childhoods either. These visions are dreams, metaphors their authors have constructed about remembered places, and as such they’re truer than bricks and stones; we may call them “mythic”. Myths and dreams arise from the unconscious, and their insights are not analyzable by daytime logic; they’re neither true nor false. The powerful emotional reaction they provoke, a response to the numinous long before intellectual understanding takes place, is the hallmark of myth. And thus, through poetry - a language our hearts respond to even when our brains have difficulty understanding the words - they remake our own memories into something richer and more meaningful.
OF MYTH AND MEMORY
Recently, after hearing Ray Bradbury speak at a session of UC Riverside’s Eaton Conference, I picked up a copy of Dandelion Wine, replacing my original copy lost many moves ago. I looked forward to reacquainting myself with a classic example of his work. I wasn't disappointed. The experience caused me to re-examine just what it is in a piece of literature that captures me, what makes a story unforgettable and moving beyond the surface levels of plot, or good writing, or even believable characters.
I was introduced to Bradbury long ago by a twelve-year-old boy whose parents were visiting on their way up the California coast. We were living in San Luis Obispo at the time, and friends traveling between Los Angeles and San Francisco frequently took a break halfway at our house. The boy’s parents and my husband were musicians, and when he and I found ourselves left out of their very technical conversation, we began to talk about books and learned we were both avid readers. As our guests were leaving, he gave me his paperback copy of The Illustrated Man which he’d finished reading on the family trip - highly recommended, he said. I didn’t recognize the name of the book or its author, but since I’m addicted to reading at bedtime, and had run out of things to read, I turned to his offering. The rest is history, as they say. I fell in love with Bradbury's voice as much as the stories themselves, saturating myself in his music. Bradbury's prose is really poetry, and best read aloud.
In fact, I realized, as I re-visited these stories of life in a vanished time and place in America, that it's not the story itself that grabs me and never was. Most of the stories have sparse plots that would sound ho-hum if summarized in a sentence or two. And the characters, the innocent children and wise old adults that populate the pages, probably had few counterparts even in Bradbury's own childhood in Illinois. But that's not really the point. The magic of these stories lies in the fact that they’re metaphors, translating Bradbury’s personal memories into transcendent myth.
Of course, I'm not the first to remark that so many Bradbury lines enchant the ear out of all proportion to the information they actually carry. Consider the opening paragraph of the first “chapter” (Bradbury doesn't name or number them as such) in Dandelion Wine:
It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.
Here's another opening, from a chapter in the middle of the book:
And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until all the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you see the last apple on the tree, and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky and drop you down and down....
A lesser writer might have written, “It was an early summer morning,” for the first, and “In Autumn, when apples fall from the trees” for the second - and would've missed the dreamlike world that Bradbury's words create, a world we immediately recognize as true to our own mythic childhood. My childhood passed in wartime London, crowded, grubby, dangerous, and certainly lacking apple trees, but that image is emotionally more real to me than broken paving stones and dusty privet bushes and the sound of air raid sirens. Bradbury's Spring and Autumn are the way the seasons should be in childhood, not the way they actually may be. Nor can we avoid the poetic transfer of subject that occurs from the Narrator observing the fall of the apples, to the Narrator becoming the apples themselves, surely a mythic transformation!
I re-read the book with a great deal of pleasure, recognizing the parts I'd admired before when I knew so much less about the skill that lies behind the apparently effortless ability of simple words to stir emotion. Bradbury, like all the best poets, makes it seem easy. And that realization brought me to remember the work of another poet I've always loved, whose work was a rhapsody about simple places and simple people: Dylan Thomas.
I hadn't read Under Milk Wood, a radio play, in a very long time, though I re-read Thomas's collected poems at least once a year. I remember hating “modern poetry” while I was in high school, until I encountered Richard Burton’s reading of Thomas's poem, “Fern Hill.” For the first time, I had the experience of being swept away by the emotional torrent of images, with only the slightest understanding of what the poem meant. (The American poet Archibald MacLeish was speaking of this experience when he wrote, “A poem should not mean/But be.”)
Like Bradbury, Thomas loved childhood and small towns, though his are in his native Wales:
...herring gulls heckling down to the harbour where the fishermen spit and prop the morning up and eye the fishy sea smooth to the sea's end as it lulls in blue. Green and gold money, tobacco, tinned salmon, hats with feathers, pots of fish-paste, warmth for the winter-to-be, weave and leap in it rich and slippery in the flash and shapes of fishes through the cold sea-streets.
I've never lived in towns anything like either poet describes, yet I seem to remember them; the music of the words conjures them in my imagination. How real those men propping up the morning! How vivid the smell of the herring flashing under the cold waves! I have no memory of a place like that - how could I? Yet I know its seasons intimately. Here's another example:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the slowblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishing-boat bobbing sea.
The thing is, these aren't memories of the places where Bradbury and Thomas spent their childhoods either. These visions are dreams, metaphors their authors have constructed about remembered places, and as such they’re truer than bricks and stones; we may call them “mythic”. Myths and dreams arise from the unconscious, and their insights are not analyzable by daytime logic; they’re neither true nor false. The powerful emotional reaction they provoke, a response to the numinous long before intellectual understanding takes place, is the hallmark of myth. And thus, through poetry - a language our hearts respond to even when our brains have difficulty understanding the words - they remake our own memories into something richer and more meaningful.