The illustrative man
Ray Bradbury taught me how to write. Or at least he did on one October day in fifth grade, after I had digested the fantasy writer’s short story, “All Summer in a Day” during English class. In the story, a class of schoolchildren on Venus are allowed to leave their biodome for two hours every seven years, a period when the perpetual rain stops and the sun gloriously, briefly shines. One of the children from Earth, Margot, is mocked because she arrived on Venus only a few years ago and can still describe what sunlight is like; so the other kids lock her in a classroom closet. As they bask in the sun’s first rays and begin to frolic in its rare glow for the first time, they forget about Margot; only the first few thunderclaps and raindrops two hours later remind them, as they head back, full of shame, to the biodome classroom.
I was struck at an early age by Bradbury’s short sentences. He wasn’t afraid of full stops. Fragments. Simple declarations of the “See Spot run” variety were allowed. They were Bradbury’s tools of childlike contemplation, the way a kid will sometimes pick up a pebble and study its tiny occlusions and colorful striations with endless fascination for what seems like a full summer’s day. Bradbury didn’t call himself a science fiction writer, though his stories were full of scientific possibilities, and they were fictional; he preferred the title “fantasy writer.”
As a fifth grader, I tried my hand at rewriting “All Summer in a Day” in that classroom, this time telling the story strictly through sounds (Drip, drip, drip… Whoosh…) and imagined dialogue to capture the rhythm that I detected in his story. I then moved on quickly to other Bradbury books I had found in the local library: The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 and especially The Illustrated Man.
The Illustrated Man, in the paperback edition, is fondly remembered for its semi-psychedelic cover: an illustration of a seated man’s back, covered in swirling tattoos. He’s seated on a desert-like plain that looks like Mars. A lot of Bradbury’s imagination was directed toward Mars: The Martian Chronicles (1950) was a string of stories about Earth’s first colonists on the red planet. Today, the US is embarking to send its first astronauts to Mars by 2050, a century after Bradbury’s imagination first ran with the idea (he may have been influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs of John Carter fame). I was always struck by the way Bradbury could weave the commonplace, ordinary details of ordinary lives into his fantasies: the way a small Ohio town is transformed from wintry frost to boiling heat by a nearby rocket launchpad; the way various workers take on various everyday jobs on the newly colonized planet.
Of course, everyone knows the phrase “Fahrenheit 451”: it’s the temperature at which paper ignites, and which Bradbury used as the title of his 1953 novel about a future in which books are banned, set ablaze by a government agency that roots out free thought. Francois Truffaut saw the story’s poetic possibilities and expanded on them in his 1963 film version. The very idea itself — firemen who burn books instead of putting out fires — seems timely as ever, with Bible belt pastors burning Korans and free speech always on the verge of being incinerated — not to mention the threat to physical books posed by the Internet. So his hero, Guy Montag, joins up with a renegade group of book lovers who recite passages of favorite books from memory. They’re hunted by mechanical hounds dispatched by the government (foreshadowing today’s military drones?) and try to rebuild society after a nuclear conflagration.
Bradbury was the man responsible for opening up the possibility of science fiction — and fantasy — to every budding writer of a certain generation, and indeed every budding reader. Ironically, he died last June 5, the day that Venus transited across the Sun, a sort of reverse celestial event of the one depicted in “All Summer in a Day.” In interviews, even in his 80s and after a serious stroke, Bradbury was jovial and thoughtful, constantly thinking about new ideas and stories. As he told the Paris Review a few years back, his credo has always been “Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.” From his first magazine-published works in the ‘50s to the 2000s, he kept on turning over that summer pebble, studying its many facets. Some labeled him a sentimental writer, and his reminiscences on summertime (say, in Something Wicked This Way Comes) can be cloying, but this is possibly because Bradbury was seriously tuned into summer, that time of year for boys and girls when all new possibilities begin: that woodshed out back could contain an evil robot, that local pond could contain swamp monsters; Mr. Dark could run the local carnival where all wishes come true. Bradbury knew about the excitement that mixes with fear during the summertime, when you are suddenly let off the leash, allowed to explore the world without the constant redirections of parents and teachers, if only for what seems like a few hours.
