Notes on the life and death of Ray Bradbury.

When word came of the death of writer Ray Bradbury at the age of 91, I started receiving notes from friends I went to high school with. Also included is a Bradbury memory I shared.

This is very sad news for me.
Not only was he a brilliant icon of science fiction,
But a kind and very accessible member of the community.

I wrote to him about a year ago…I knew he must be
Failing because he always answered letters…
A response never came.

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When my father passed away ten years ago, I was going through a box of his papers and I found a letter from Ray Bradbury. 
During the Vietnam War my dad participated in organizing a group of artists and Hollywood types against the war. Apparently my dad had written Bradbury, asking for his participation and support.
Bradbury’s letter was a response to my dad’s request. He was opposed to the War, of course, But he explained how much he hated groups and meetings. His description of them was hilarious.
He offered to make any other contribution the group needed from him. 
But he just wasn’t going to attend any meetings of any groups.
I quite clearly remember that the first book I ever checked out of the West Hollywood public library on San Vicente was Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man.

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Remember when he came and spoke at a Fairfax assembly? A classmate, Lou Berger, ditched the rest of the day to hang out with him, he said they rode buses all over LA; which was what Ray Bradbury said he liked to do best.

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When I was in AP English I used “Something Wicked This Way Comes” as the basis of a treatise on aspects of hell (not a preferred source for Mrs. Kadlick, but she let me do it).

Afterward I wrote Ray B about my analysis and received back a 2 page letter. He signed Ray B, putting a devil’s tail point on the Y.

When he came to speak at the assembly, I snuck backstage before he went on. He was talking to Mr. Tunney (our principal) who immediately tried to shoo me out.  I blurted out about our correspondence…this was just like in a movie.

Ray B stopped Tunney and said yes, yes, she did write and actually had done the most astute analyis of the book he had ever seen.

I was in heaven. It was a peak experience of life, for sure.

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It looks like Ray Bradbury is traveling with the Venus Transit, not a bad way to exit, I imagine, in his mind. 

 

Bradbury was my earliest modern-day writer influence; his collection of short stories,Dandelion Wine,  flowed as smoothly as a mountain brook, describing things out of the ordinary: a sea monster’s love calls to a lighthouse’s foghorn; circus freaks in books escaping from the bookshelves to chase a boy locked inside a library at night.  And there was one short story of his that will always ring true: about that zippy feeling of putting on a new pair of sneakers.  That Dandelion Wine paperback was in my pocket whenever I rode a bus or hitched a ride out to Santa Monica to body surf.  His work was my literary surfboard, you might say.

 

That was why I proposed bringing Ray Bradbury to speak to the student body at Fairfax, and the motion carried, to our great delight.  His message at Fairfax was about seeking and building upon what was true and valuable in ourselves–not chasing what he called “the golden buck”.  Imagination does not work for pay; it works for some inner reward: the thrill of new adventures spun out of ideas held together with the fragility yet awesome symmetry  of a dried dandelion waiting for a gust to spread it floating in all directions.  His mind was like that, and seemed to have touched us all.

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I guess I have to tell my Ray Bradbury story.  When I was at JB I went with a friend to Ray Bradbury talking on a Sunday afternoon at the library of the Westside Jewish Community Center (yes, the same library where we used to have Student Sane hootenannies.  Bradbury was not well known then, and there were only three other people there.  I remember his talking a lot about how he became a science fiction fanatic by reading Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter novels.  (Curiously, he wrote about their influence on him in last week’s New Yorker.)

 

I remember the assembly.  What I remember the most was his telling the fairly mundane but very typical LA origin of probably his most anthologized story, “The Pedestrian.”  He lived in Westwood and wrote late at night.  One evening  he took a walk down Wilshire Blvd. eating saltine crackers and thinking about the story he was writing.  (This is when that strip of Wilshire had two story Spanish style apartment building as opposed to the towers that make it a canyon today.)  He was stopped by a police car, and the officers got out because they considered him a suspicious character for walking on Wilshire Blvd.  When he first tried to explain, he talked with the crackers in his mouth, which made the situation worse.  The police gave him a hard time but finally let him go.  He then wrote “The Pedestrian,” which was the basis for probably his greatest novel, Fahrenheit 451, which he wrote at the height of McCarthyism.