The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury
By Sam Weller
Morrow, 384 pages, $26.95
Back in the days when there still was a Soviet Union, a distinguished Soviet academic came to see me. He was a specialist in science fiction who had written the only Russian-language book on the subject. When I offered to take him anywhere he wanted to visit in the Chicago area, he said: “Yes, please. Can you drive me in your car to 11 S. Saint James St. in Waukegan, Illinois?” I said I’d be glad to. I also asked what it was that he wanted to see in Waukegan, and he said, “Simply to see boyhood home of the most famous science-fiction writer in the world, Mr. Ray Bradbury.”
As Sam Weller, who teaches creative non-fiction at Columbia College, points out in his new, authorized biography, “The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury,” in those old Waukegan days, Bradbury hadn’t become very famous yet, although he had come from an interesting family. (One great-great-many-times-great grandmother, Mary Perkins Bradbury of Salem, Mass., had been convicted of witchcraft in 1692, though she somehow managed to escape execution.) Later generations had not prospered, and that modest St. James Street house had only one bedroom. Worse, it had only one bathroom, and that at the top of the stairs from the living-room bed Bradbury shared with his brother Leonard, usually called “Skip.” (Bradbury’s own family nickname was “Shorty.”)
What made everything worse still was that Bradbury’s father thriftily kept the upstairs lights turned off. Bradbury feared the monsters that, he was pretty sure, lived in that second-floor blackness, which was a problem when he had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. He knew what he was supposed to do. He didn’t always manage to do it. The situation ultimately led to (a) his father’s decision to provide him with a chamber pot and (b) a few years farther along, the writing of one of Bradbury’s most famous short stories, “The Thing at the Top of the Stairs.”
Bradbury’s childhood was quite normal for that place and that time, with a few exceptions (such as his claim to remember his actual birth and circumcision, not to mention his custom of eating back-yard dirt by the spoonful). Like most of his generation, he was an early addict of the movies; like all too many, he lived in a family with money problems. The good jobs were getting scarce for his father. What the elder Bradbury did about it was to take his family out west, as far as Tucson, Ariz., where he hoped there might be adventure, or at least a better job. The job never materialized, and after a precarious few months the family returned to Waukegan.
The failed attempt at a better life was a disappointment to Bradbury’s father. Bradbury himself didn’t much mind, though. He liked Waukegan and, besides, he had discovered the magazine Amazing Stories Quarterly, which published wonderful stories about alien planets and future worlds. It was Bradbury’s first encounter with science fiction.
In those days science fiction had an even more irresistible appeal for young readers than it has today. It wasn’t just adventure and heroic deeds in excitingly un-Earthly places. Those were the years when the Great Depression was beginning to bite. The real world outside of the magazines was gray, grim and worrisome, but in those science-fiction stories were glimpses of more fulfilling lives in more pleasing futures. Unlike any of the other pulp varieties, the science-fiction magazines actually led some of their readers to try to find ways to get together and discuss these won-derful things–in the form of fan clubs.
When his father again attempted–this time successfully–to go west, Bradbury made the connection. He fell in with the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, a club that still holds regular meetings (though “Fantasy” has replaced “Fiction” in the club’s name). It was a fortunate event for him and the club, and maybe even more so for the millions of Ray Bradbury fans who have come along since, because it was in that heady environment that Bradbury first began to produce the wonderful short stories that made his name.
The first of Bradbury’s professionally published science-fiction stories was “Pendulum,” a collaboration with an already professionally published writer named Henry Hasse, and the magazine that bought it, in July 1941, was Super Science Stories. (I had been that magazine’s founding editor but had left just three or four months before my successor, Alden H. Norton, bought the story; by so little did I miss becoming the editor who discovered Ray Bradbury.)
And the stories began to improve. That was inevitable, because through the Los Angeles science-fiction community, Bradbury was receiving mentoring from some of the best writers in the field: Robert A. Heinlein, C.L. Moore, Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner and, perhaps more than most, that great gentleman among writers (still writing and mentoring others at age 96), Jack Williamson. ” ‘I would go over to [Williamson’s] apartment and I’d take some of my dreadful short stories and show them to him,’ ” Weller quotes Bradbury. ” ‘He could hardly keep his gorge from rising they were so bad. But he was so sweet. [H]e treated me as an equal even though I wasn’t.’ “
It wasn’t just that Bradbury’s stories were getting better. They were also beginning to appear in markets that were better-paying and more highly regarded than the science-fiction magazines–such periodicals as American Mercury, Mademoiselle, even that biggest of all big-name slicks, The Saturday Evening Post. Bradbury was getting famous, and, willy-nilly, beginning to move in more rarefied social circles. Over the next few decades he became a friend, often an intimate, of such glamorous figures as Walt Disney, Orson Welles, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, John Huston, Federico Fellini, even art critic Bernard Berenson.
And that is where Weller’s biography disappoints. We learn something of Bradbury’s relationships with some of these celebrities. After reading Bradbury’s story “The Lighthouse,” Huston hired him to write the screenplay for Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” a stormy partnership that sometimes approached fisticuffs, and Disney invited Bradbury to help plan his vast Florida theme park Epcot.
Disappointingly, however, for most of these famous men the details of the relationships are sketchy, or omitted entirely. We can wonder what Berenson found to say to Bradbury, or Bradbury to Berenson, but we will find few answers in this book. Weller dots every “i,” dates every event and drops every name, but his coverage is sometimes only skin deep. That is a pity. Ray Bradbury deserves a warmer and more insightful account of his life, perhaps written by that best of all choices for a Ray Bradbury biographer, Ray Bradbury himself.
