THE STORIES OF RAY BRADBURY by Ray Bradbury Knopf; 928 pages; $17.95
A father becomes his son, then takes the youngster’s place in his playground—a lower circle in Dante’s hell. A fully automated house continues to function with mechanical mindlessness long after its inhabitants have been incinerated in a nuclear holocaust. An electrical robot grandmother does more than bake her grandchildren’s favorite pies; she is a model of uncritical love. When the children grow old, she is on standby, ready for their second childhoods. An uninhabited planet resists earthlings who have come to settle it.
Only one mind could have produced these plots: that of Ray Bradbury, author of the classic Martian Chronicles and the gloomily prophetic Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury has long been considered one of the great long-distance runners of fantasy and science fiction. But he is also a sprinter; his poignant and ironic short stories have been anthologized for more than 30 years. Bradbury’s latest book is a highly personal selection of those works: Martian adventures, nostalgic reminiscences about small-town Midwestern life in the ’20s and ’30s, and several evocative anecdotes about Ireland. But its best pieces remain the tales that made the author’s reputation: chillingly understated stories about a familiar world where it is always a few minutes before midnight on Halloween, and where the unspeakable and unthinkable become commonplace.
Few writers can evoke this October country more trenchantly than Bradbury. No reader of The Fog Horn can pass a lighthouse without visualizing the sea creature listening in the darkness. Parents who understand The Small Assassin, the anecdote of a homicidal infant, will always wonder about the Freudian undercurrents coursing through the minds of their children.
Indeed, hypochondriacs might do well to skip Fever Dream altogether. It describes the feelings of a youth who is certain that his body is being taken over by bacteria: “Now he had” no body. It was all gone. It was under him, but it was filled with a vast pulse of some burning, lethargic drug. It was as if a guillotine had neatly lopped off his head, and his head lay shining on a midnight pillow while the body, below, still alive, belonged to someone else.”
Though he manifestly prefers to write such hair-raisers, Bradbury is as entertaining on the sunny side of the street as he is in the land of perpetual twilight. One of his stories shares the delight of a poor Chicano who finds his life magically transformed by the purchase of a white suit. In the hilarious Anthem Sprinters, some rollicking Irishmen make a contest out of their penchant for bolting out of a movie theater before the playing of the national anthem at the end of a show. The Picasso Summer acutely satirizes the dilemma of an art lover. Strolling one evening, he stumbles upon the Master doodling a huge mural in the French sand. Caught without a camera, the tourist moves slowly up and down the beach, trying to make a mental photograph of the masterpiece before a rising tide comes to wash it away.
Bradbury’s spare, economical style reveals the consummate storyteller. But it conceals the moralist. Other science-fiction writers may celebrate technology; Bradbury warns readers to be wary of it. Other fantasists may admire power or cunning; Bradbury saves his praise for the fragile fabric of civilization, and extols the basic virtues of common sense and human affection.
Newcomers to Bradbury risk sensory overload by galloping through the book in the manner of the author’s anthem sprinters. It is best to amble through this delightful collection. The volume, after all, contains 100 stories. A careful reader, consuming one a night, can make it last into the New Year. —By Peter Stoler
∙ ∙ ∙
He refuses to fly. He does not drive. He was once stopped by the police in Los Angeles for the highly suspect act of walking at night through his residential neighborhood. He was also detained by the Irish Garda Siochdna (Civil Guard) for being “drunk, and in charge of a bicycle.” Ray Bradbury would seem, from his prodigious output, to be the most sedentary of men. He is, in fact, one of the most peripatetic. By bus, boat, train and car, he has thoroughly explored the U.S., Mexico, Ireland and Europe. By means of his imagination, he has penetrated the farthest reaches of the solar system and the deepest, darkest abysses of the human mind. “I’ve gone a long way,” says Bradbury. “I’ve come even farther.”
That he has. When he first started writing for a living back in the ’40s, Bradbury, 60, considered himself fortunate when he was able to average $30 a week and pay the rent on his apartment in a less-than-stylish section of Venice, Calif. Now he finds himself something of a celebrity, sought by editors, television and movie producers, and talk-show hosts. “I’ve been lucky,” Bradbury admits. “We hanker after instant fame, but that’s wrong; if fame comes too quickly, it spoils us. For me, recognition came at just the right pace.”
Bradbury began writing science fiction as a teen-ager in Waukegan, Ill. But it was not until François Truffaut filmed Fahrenheit 451 in 1966 that he was widely saluted as one of the masters of the genre. “My life has been full of myths,” says Bradbury, whose fiction often suggests an amalgam of the classic fables, Frank Baum’s Oz books and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
The myths continue to animate his fiction. Bradbury’s work may vary with his mood, ranging from bleak to bright. But his stories rarely fail to reinforce a classic piece of American mythology: that a boy from a small Midwestern town can make it in America—without becoming an adult.
After all, the author never quite grew up. His prose style may have matured over four decades. But Bradbury, the benign father of four daughters who peers at the world through thick if not always rose-colored glasses, remains the quintessential boy, bemused by his ability to whip out a story (he does most first drafts in a matter of hours) and thrilled by his success. Most people lose the capacity for wonder as they grow older. Not Bradbury. “I’m one of the few people I know who still say ‘Gee, whiz,’ ” he admits. “I say it at least five times a day.” ∙
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