The New Ray Bradbury Review Number 3 (2012)

William E. Touponce

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781612776583
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en la ciencia ficción

The New Ray Bradbury Review is designed principally to study the impact of Bradbury's writings on American culture and is the chief publication of The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies—the archive of Bradbury's writings located at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. Like its pioneering predecessor, the one-volume review published in 1952 by William F. Nolan, The New Ray Bradbury Review contains articles and reviews about Bradbury but has a much broader scope, including a thematic focus for each issue. While Bradbury's effect on the genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction is still being assessed, there is no doubt about his impact, and to judge from the testimony of his admirers, many of them now professional writers themselves, it is clear that he has affected the lives of five generations of readers.In this third number, the Center presents an all-archival issue devoted to Bradbury's fragments. A prolific writer, Bradbury composed openings for stories that he never finished, together with pages of notes, sketches, and drafts that he kept in suspension for possible use in some form at some place in various narrative projects he was considering, as well as fragments of completed stories that are now lost. These pages are of great interest to anyone drawn to Bradbury's creative mind, for they reveal his imagination at its most spontaneous. Readers will be excited to discover in this issue Bradbury's sketches for "The Venusian Chronicles, " revealing a landscape and characters that, while clearly incomplete, carry on the themes of The Martian Chronicles. Included is a checklist of Bradbury's extensive fragments, compiled by Donn Albright and Jonathan R. Eller.Fans and scholars alike will welcome The New Ray Bradbury Review, as it will add to the understanding of the life and work of this eminent author, whose work has received both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

From the Archives:
A Selection of Ray Bradbury’s Fragments

EDITED WITH COMMENTARY BY WILLIAM F. TOUPONCE

Part One
Youth, Old Age, and Death

WHEN THE WEEPING STOPPED

a story by Ray Bradbury^*

One day the old man began to cry and then they knew that soon there would be a death that would end and life would begin, a glorious time.

So they all went to the graveyard, weeping and took the coffin out of the earth and stopped crying because then there were the magic rituals at the hospital which caused the dead body to move and life began and went on forever.

For here in this part of the retrograde universe death was always stopping and life was always beginning and going on forever.

While in the other part of the universe, the reverse was true, people were born, grew old and died, and the weeping never stopped.

Here the weeping was always stopping and death was ceasing and life went on and on forever and forever.

Come along and see!

And at the far end of life, when you are very small, you go back to the hospital again and find this woman that you vanish back into, cup in cup, cup in cup, down and down throughout the generations, and you are alive when you vanish into her and she stays alive with you in her and she gets smaller and smaller and vanishes into yet another woman, and how glorious it is, you see, don’t you agree, what a universe is this! What a gift of eternal life!

And then what about all the things that die every day, every day hell every hour, every minute. We know it happens. We see it, we file and forget it. Or maybe it’s not truly forgotten but put away under a lot of other trapdoors. The dog opened one and there was a domino effect. Door after door after door flapped wide. And suddenly I remembered the million fellows that died today or in the last hour, all across the world. And the billion insects in the last hour, or the trillion bacteria in the last second. Every single damned moment of the day filled with destruction, corruption, even as every moment is crammed with rebirth, flowering, seedtime, harvest time, funerals and celebrations on every hand, in confusions and repetitions. Silly all of it. Gross, brutal, terrible, wondrous fine. But, too much, too much, finally, to encompass. So we focus on a few deaths, a few births, or we’d go mad.

It seems something in me has gone mad. It all floods back. Not just part, all. I am filled right now with a billion billion mortalities. Every dog I ever knew that’s now long gone. All the cats out under our lawn tonight, ghosts that want in and we can’t let them. All the ghosts of our living girls, our daughters, running across that same lawn every Easter yelling with joy, shrieking with frustration when one of them got too many eggs and the others found too few.

And then there was a day in an old used book shop down by the sea I came upon some high school yearbooks from some strange school across country in 1934, 1926, 1905, my God, the years! but the terrible thing was, I knew all the faces, I knew them, Christ, I went to school with every face. The names were different, but it was the eyes, or something about the mouth, all those years back, that killed my soul. Who were those people, how many still alive, how many gone, it didn’t matter, they mattered to me, strangers each and everyone, but friends. Their faces searched out of the book, asking for discovery, wanting to be remembered, hoping to live again. And I looked and this overwhelming sadness swept over me and my eyes blurred and I said to myself, to each and every one: yes, I remember you. And you, girl with the bow in your hair, and you, boy with the biceps and surly smile, and you football hero midfield in 1916, and you girl just back from the June prom, and you, and you. And I shut the book. It was like closing a great tomb. I heard a marble slab fall into place and echo. The echoes have been in me all those years. Last night, I heard the tomb open again, the book open, and all the faces on all the pages began to whisper. Christ. No wonder I can’t stop.

THE ONE WHO FELL

He was the one who fell. He lay outside the tent now where they had carried him and laid him out, long and quiet, and a doctor had come to listen to his chest for a moment but there was nothing to hear. Every one had gone away now, the acts were still performing inside; you could hear the music of the band. He lay with his hands half open as if he had given life away with them, as a gift. His eyes were closed and he looked very quiet. His body was still packed into his tight costume, but there was something wrong with it, the way it fitted bone to bone, now. It was somewhat unreal and distorted. Sometimes, when people came to look at him, he seemed like a pale image under water or something frozen in ice.

He had been very good on the high trapeze. He had gone back and forth across the high lighted tent year after year and never faltered or slipped. But today he was the fallen one, the quiet one.

april 19th, 1955

THAT’S HOW DEATH IS.

You look around as you get off the block onto the horse and you can breathe the sky in through your nostrils it’s that clear and that good. It doesn’t matter that it’s blue—it’s wonderful—like being under water in a creek that’s running fast and clear and cool over the stones and you’re one of the stones.^

In any event it is one of the perfect days when you can feel the rain deep down in the grass making it grow, when you can feel the gyroscope in your body tilting warmly this way and that, making balance between all attractions, all gravities, moving you out of shadow and into sun and away from walls and sharp corners. Your hands, at your sides, can hold anything they touch and shape anything they hold. Your face is easy on its foundations, ready to become anything a friend, or even enemies want it to be. There will be no arguments today, no loud noises, no quick storms passing away to sullen and dripping skies. The sun will be up all day and will spend more than its customary time at noon before drifting like a warm balloon, hushed and wondrous, toward the west.

On the horse’s back you survey the Irish countryside, the last few shreds of mist, the dew in a great bright beaded scattering on the grass.

And you start off at a walk with your horse into the field. And the horse stumbles and almost goes down. And death, quite suddenly, is there. That’s how death is, always somewhere. Always in the middle of the tapestry you’re working on this day or any day.

ALL GOOD THINGS ARE OVER

Have you ever noticed how all good things are over and past. All the good fine things are done. All the beautiful things are concluded and brought to a gentle halt. Why this should be there is no telling, save that we only know when a thing is good when it is through, and then it is too late. It is like a wine now in the digestive process that we have wanted to linger upon; how to recall and savor it? No way. We are lost. Memory fades. The good thing is beyond our power of reproduction. We are desolate.

Perhaps it is just as well, for, knowing that this that or the other thing would be good, we might destroy it by loud smackings, by roiling of the tongue in our cheeks, by superhuman attempts to extract from it, all out of proportion to its ability to give, the sweet delights we seek, and in seeking, destroy.

We cannot predict the flight of love, nor imagine that that which lies tenderly in arm, in hand, will tomorrow dust away on the air. Sensing, might we not bruise the white fruit and set it into fermentation and destruction far sooner. Seizing, might we not break the fragile petals into soft ruin. Touching, might not the snow flake rain away into a tear upon the palm?

Figure One—Grammy

^*Reprinted with permission of Ray Bradbury and Don Congdon Associates, Inc. These excerpts may not be adapted, quoted, copied, stored, or published in any format without the permission of the author and his agents. © 2012 by Ray Bradbury. All rights to these excerpts are reserved by Ray Bradbury.

Part Two
Other Writers

We have Art that we may not perish from Truth.

So said Nietzsche.

So say we all, if we have any sense.

Yet everywhere, and especially in motion pictures, we are being treated to that inescapable perishment ^trauma^ supplied by vast overdosages of Truth. So dies our Civilization, made to sit in a corner, with dunce cap on, knowing what is good for it, being poisoned day by day by the data collectors who stone us to death and wonder why we are ill, with pebbles, rocks, and gigantic boulders of realism. Smothered in the avalanche, we ^are tempted to^ give up the ghost of imagination and expire.

^Books—magazines—T.V.—radio

Too much information!

And too little to make it into metaphors we pass from hand to hand!^

THE MENACING MARTIANS IN OZ

Bradbury

There came a time in OZ, as it must come to everyone everywhere, when life became a bore.

“Not a small bore, said the Scarecrow, “but a large bore, with a capitol B.” “True”, said the Tin Woodman, “nothing ever happens. The villains and varlets have subsided. Peace and calm reign everywhere. Gone are the witches who threw us in ditches. I can no longer rust, since the invention of this fine new oil which covers my body. Even if I lay in the rain for a thousand years, I would not fear rust. What a bore indeed. And you, Scarecrow, you are filled with non-combustible straw.”

“True, I no longer fear matches, or for that matter, flame-throwers. I could walk on a bed of charcoals and not so much as smoke.”

1.Boredom.

2.The Martians Land

3.Tik-Tok is distributed over a thousand mile area.

4.The Scarecrow is restuffed.

5.The Tin Woodman is afflicted with Martian Rust.

6.Polychrome is banished to Mars.

7.The Martians invade Oz, on their way to conquering the world.

8.The Wizard blows a fuse and his magic fails.

9.Professor Wogglebug meets a Martian Scientist.

10.Dorothy and Toro are lost in space.

11.Ruggedo and Kiki plan to rescue Dorothy.

12.The Search for Tik-Tok.

13.The Dragons Meet.

14.

Edith Wharton

1. Opened Edith Wharton’s book of Collected Stories. Leafed through to page 90 where I came upon her story SOULS BELATED.

2. Read only the first paragraph: “Their railway carriage had been full when the train left Bologna; but at the first station beyond Milan their only remaining companion—a courtly person who ate garlic out of a carpet-bag—had left his crumb-strewn seat with a bow.”

3. Which immediately made me think, remember: the day Maggie, the kids, Regina and I left Venice for Paris, on the Orient Express. At lunch, or dinner, thinking: at this moment, my camera is being stolen. Going back to the compartment to find that, yes, indeed, the camera was stolen.

4. which made me think that is a good start to a short story.

5. next instantaneous thought—what if, a week later, in another Italian town, the same camera is offered for sale to its original owner, who seizes it, decries the bewildered thief, who flees, or is turned over to police.

6. the next quick thought: the camera-owner, a writer, finds film still in the camera. Half the film, or a bit less, 6 to 8 pictures, are pictures of his wife, children.

7. next thought: the other half of the pic...