In high school, when copies of the neo-Renaissance magazine Coronet fell into my hands (I couldn’t afford to buy it), I tore out photographs by Stieglitz, Karsh, and others and wrote poems to them. I didn’t name what I did, just collected to worship pure image.
Lon Chaney dominated my life at three with The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Viewing it again when I was seventeen, I told friends I recalled the entire film. My friends scoffed. Okay, I said, there’s this scene and that scene and this scene. Go see. We went, we saw. All the scenes were there as I remembered from my third year.
Much the same happened with Phantom of the Opera and The Lost World. Chaney’s Phantom and Willis O’Brien’s dinosaurs haunted my childhood.
Chaney died in my tenth year and Death as a symbol fell into his grave. When his Phantom was re-released that year, I attended in agony, thinking that an abdominal pain was appendicitis. Weeping, I had to see the film even if I died. I lived, to dine on Chaney’s metaphors for the rest of my life.
Some years later I formed a lifelong friendship with Ray Harryhausen, who ran dinosaur metaphors in his garage to become the greatest stop-motion animator of our age. My God, the persistence of metaphor in our incredible friendship!
Laurel and Hardy have shaped three of my fictions. I arrived in Dublin in October 1953, and there in the Irish Times saw this:
Today Only
In Person
Olympia Theatre
Laurel and Hardy
“My God,” I cried, “we’ve got to go!”
My wife said, “Go!”
One ticket remained, front row, center.
I sat, tears streaming, as Stan and Ollie performed scenes from all the years of my life.
Outside their dressing-room door I watched Stan and Ollie greet friends. I didn’t intrude, relishing their ambience, then went away.
Their ghosts went with me. I wrote two stories about Stan and Ollie. And, now, a third for this book.
In other words, once a metaphor, always a metaphor.
I learned more of my inner self from film director Sam Peckinpah, who loved to pour vodka in my beer. He wanted to film my novels.
“Sam,” I said, “how will you do it?”
“Rip the pages out of your books,” Sam said, “and stuff them in the camera!”
So I found that by a lifetime of mad film attendance the mad paragraphs of my novels were close-ups and long shots.
With my Ray Bradbury Theater on television, I learned I could type my stories straight from the book into teleplays.
“Stuff your pages,” echoed Sam, “in the camera!”
Thus I had digested cinema metaphors, in ignorant bliss, to deliver forth films.
Then again, simply put, I have never been jealous of other writers, only wanted to protect them. So many of my most beloved authors have suffered unhappy lives or incredibly unhappy endings. I had to invent machines to travel in time to protect them, or at least say I love you. Those machines are here.
And here, finally, is that downpour of images from photos, films, cartoons, encounters that have tracked through life without an umbrella.
How fortunate I’ve been to pace such storms and emerge wonderfully drenched and alive to finish this book.
Ray Bradbury
Los Angeles, April 2001
The World of Ray Bradbury …
… is a marvelous, magical place, full of awesome wonders, delicious terrors, and the simplest of pleasures. We invite you to experience the storytelling genius of Ray Bradbury in the following selection of excerpts from some of his best known works. All you have to do is turn the page …
Dandelion Wine
Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather’s renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley’s bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine who can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future.
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.
Douglas Spaulding, twelve, freshly wakened, let summer idle him on its early-morning stream. Lying in his third-story cupola bedroom, he felt the tall power it gave him, riding high in the June wind, the grandest tower in town. At night, when the trees washed together, he flashed his gaze like a beacon from this lighthouse in all directions over swarming seas of elm and oak and maple. Now …
“Boy,” whispered Douglas.
A whole summer ahead to cross off the calendar, day by day. Like the goddess Siva in the travel books, he saw his hands jump everywhere, pluck sour apples, peaches, and midnight plums. He would be clothed in trees and bushes and rivers. He would freeze, gladly, in the hoar-frosted ice-house door. He would bake, happily, with ten thousand chickens, in Grandma’s kitchen.
But now—a familiar task awaited him.
One night each week he was allowed to leave his father, his mother, and his younger brother Tom asleep in their small house next door and run here, up the dark spiral stairs to his grandparents’ cupola, and in this sorcerer’s tower sleep with thunders and visions, to wake before the crystal jingle of milk bottles and perform his ritual magic.
He stood at the open window in the dark, took a deep breath and exhaled.
The street lights, like candles on a black cake, went out. He exhaled again and again and the stars began to vanish.
Douglas smiled. He pointed a finger.
There, and there. Now over here, and here …
Yellow squares were cut in the dim morning earth as house lights winked slowly on. A sprinkle of windows came suddenly alight miles off in dawn country.
“Everyone yawn. Everyone up.”
The great house stirred below.
“Grandpa, get your teeth from the water glass!” He waited a decent interval. “Grandma and Great-grandma, fry hot cakes!”
The warm scent of fried batter rose in the drafty halls to stir the boarders, the aunts, the uncles, the visiting cousins, in their rooms.
“Street where all the Old People live, wake up! Miss Helen Loomis, Colonel Freeleigh, Miss Bentley! Cough, get up, take pills, move around! Mr. Jonas, hitch up your horse, get your junk wagon out and around!”
The bleak mansions across the town ravine opened baleful dragon eyes. Soon, in the morning avenues below, two old women would glide their electric Green Machine, waving at all the dogs. “Mr. Tridden, run to the carbarn!” Soon, scattering hot blue sparks above it, the town trolley would sail the rivering brick streets.
“Ready John Huff, Charlie Woodman?” whispered Douglas to the Street of Children. “Ready!” to baseballs sponged deep in wet lawns, to rope swings hung empty in trees.
“Mom, Dad, Tom, wake up.”
Clock alarms tinkled faintly. The courthouse clock boomed. Birds leaped from trees like a net thrown by his hand, singing. Douglas, conducting an orchestra, pointed to the eastern sky.
The sun began to rise.
He folded his arms and smiled a magician’s smile. Yes, sir, he thought, everyone jumps, everyone runs when I yell. It’ll be a fine season.
He gave the town a last snap of his fingers.
Doors slammed open; people stepped out.
Summer 1928 began.
The Illustrated Man
Here are eighteen startling visions of humankind’s destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin—visions as keen as the tattooist’s needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body. Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man is a kaleidoscopic blending of magic, imagination, and truth, widely believed to be one of the Grandmaster’s premier accomplishments: as exhilarating as interplanetary travel, as maddening as a walk in a million-year rain, and as comforting as simple, familiar rituals on the last night of the world.
“Hey, the Illustrated Man!”
A calliope screamed, and Mr. William Philippus Phelps stood, arms folded, high on the summer-night platform, a crowd unto himself.
He was an entire civilization. In the Main Country, his chest, the Vasties lived—nipple-eyed dragons swirling over his fleshpot, his almost feminine breasts. His navel was the mouth of a slit-eyed monster—an obscene, in-sucked mouth, toothless as a witch. And there were secret caves where Darklings lurked, his armpits, adrip with slow subterranean liquors, where the Darklings, eyes jealously ablaze, peered out through rank creeper and hanging vine.
Mr. William Philippus Phelps leered down from his freak platform with a thousand peacock eyes. Across the sawdust meadow he saw his wife, Lisabeth, far away, ripping tickets in half, staring at the silver belt buckles of passing men.
Mr. William Philippus Phelps’ hands were tattooed roses. At the sight of his wife’s interest, the roses shriveled, as with the passing of sunlight.
A year before, when he had led Lisabeth to the marriage bureau to watch her work her name in ink, slowly, on the form, his skin had been pure and white and clean. He glanced down at himself in sudden horror. Now he was like a great painted canvas, shaken in the night wind! How had it happened? Where had it all begun?
It had started with the arguments, and then the flesh, and then the pictures. They had fought deep into the summer nights, she like a brass trumpet forever blaring
