Literary daring comes in many forms. Some authors attempt to redraw the boundaries of traditional genre. Others try daring new themes that have previously been verboten in the society of their time, and though some gain lasting fame in this way, others find that, over time, what was once daring becomes banal. The discussion or destruction of sexual taboos, for instance, often goes this route unless the work that pushed those boundaries is noteworthy for some more fundamental achievement. A few, like Ernest Hemingway, change the stylistic preferences of a generation, showing in his case how a few words in a very short sentence can speak volumes.
One year ago, a legend of modern American fiction died. I grew up with that legend, still in his prime as I was barely learning my craft in high school and beyond. Ray Bradbury was 91, and his work had spanned most of a century, though the bulk of it emerged from his fertile imagination in the space of a quarter-century after World War II. He reshaped American fiction in his own way, not through stylistic finesse, though his style was among the best, and not by reinventing literary forms, though he used them very well, but by demonstrating the power of the human imagination to expand and alter our perceptions of reality. He took us to distant worlds to hold a powerful mirror to the one in which we already live. Despite the tendency in many quarters over many years to pigeonhole him as a science fiction writer, one can say of him in that regard something like what was said (by the New York Times) of Walter Van Tilburg Clark with regard to The Ox-Bow Incident: “[It] bears about the same relation to an ordinary Western that The Maltese Falcon does to a hack detective story.”
Why am I writing about Bradbury now? Admittedly, the daily news media wrote what it needed to write about Bradbury within 48 hours of his death and moved on. Personally, when Bradbury died, I was at the front end of a busy six-day stay in Hawaii, at the invitation of the University of Hawaii’s National Disaster Preparedness Training Center to speak at a conference and guest lecture. More importantly, I see no need for this blog to hurry anything into print. The world is not waiting breathlessly to hear what I have to say. That said, I would rather say something important in due time than to say something trivial quickly.
I did not absorb the story fully until I returned and had the chance to read the Chicago Tribune. Bradbury, after all, was a local boy made good, born in Waukegan, Illinois, who moved to Los Angeles with his family in his teens. The Depression had sent his father, a utility worker, to the West Coast in search of work. Almost 80 years later, Bradbury’s death was the top headline, and his story filled an entire inside page. Waukegan Main Street is planning a Bradbury museum in part of the now-shuttered Carnegie library that Bradbury had deemed a second home in his youth. If Salinas, California, can have its Steinbeck Center, a wonderful facility I visited in late April, then Waukegan shall have its Bradbury museum.
And there is no better home than the old Carnegie library. Books were the center of Bradbury’s life and fueled his imagination; they expanded his world far beyond Waukegan, but his literary imagination ultimately brought him back in such classic works as Dandelion Wine. For Bradbury, as for many great writers, childhood was a nearly inexhaustible mine of material from which he sculpted his themes and refined his fiction.
I have had the honor of judging two books detailing Bradbury’s life from two varying perspectives. For several years, since stepping down as the past president of the Society of Midland Authors, I have been tapped for service as one of three judges on the biography panel for the annual SMA book awards. The awards are for authors anywhere in 12 Midwestern states who excel in any of six categories. In 2006, we awarded the biography prize to Sam Weller, a professor who teaches creative writing at Columbia College in downtown Chicago. Earlier this year, one entry among the 2011 books was Becoming Ray Bradbury, by Jonathan R. Eller, an English professor at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, and the cofounder there of the Center for Bradbury Studies. This latter book, which did not win a prize, is nonetheless well worth reading for Bradbury fans because its tack is to examine the evolution of Bradbury’s style and thematic focus as a writer, at least up to the time of his emergence as a major author with Fahrenheit 451 and a subsequent offer from film maker John Huston to write the screenplay for Moby-Dick. That last act more than established Bradbury’s versatility. It is apparent that Eller is planning to continue the story of Bradbury’s evolution in future volumes moving through the remainder of his career.
But by far the better book is The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury. Weller spent considerable time with the author, who entrusted him with producing an authorized but honest biography that displays Bradbury with both warts and halos. The warts in Bradbury’s case are largely ordinary peccadilloes and some bad choices that have relatively little to do with his literary productivity. Far more interesting are the ideas that he induced millions of the rest of us to ponder. Big ideas in many cases, but even the smaller ideas had this way of nestling into your brain and making you see something differently. And that was Bradbury’s obsession in life—to change the lens through which the rest of us viewed the universe around us.
One of his earliest big ideas surfaced in The Martian Chronicles. In this book, Bradbury envisions humans crossing space to settle on the very foreign world of Mars, where they encounter an ancient and alien but intelligent race whose ways they cannot understand. The inevitable result is a clash of cultures in which only the intruders can survive. The Martians are extinguished, but back on Earth so are the humans, where thermonuclear war finally takes its toll as the last interplanetary nomads make their trek to a new home, unable to return.
Lest readers think this big idea too pedestrian, too predictable, think about when The Martian Chronicles was published—in 1950, at the height of American paranoia and self-congratulation, the two going hand in hand with World War II still close in the rear-view mirror, a horde of totalitarian Communists invading South Korea, and the Cold War producing fears of nuclear annihilation. The idea that dominant human cultures often despoil others with which they come in contact was not exactly what most wanted to hear, yet the book found an audience and made an impact that continues to be felt to this day because its message cuts close to the bone.
On one hand, there are vivid reminders from the past. For Americans, most of whom would prefer to be left in ignorance on this point, there is the history of our fiftieth state, Hawaii. Essentially disconnected from the rest of the world until 1776, it was encountered (let’s not say “discovered”) by Captain James Cook in the same year that Americans were launching a revolution against the British Empire. Cook died at the hands of the Hawaiians as the result of serious cultural misunderstandings, to put it mildly, some of which continue to be disputed. Did Hawaiians actually think Cook was Lono, the moon god? You can read the disputation in How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example, in which Marshal Sahlins, Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, takes issue with Sri Lankan Gananath Obeyesekere’s The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, which argues that the Hawaiians were too rational to have thought any such thing. Sahlins’s counterargument, which strikes me as valid, is that the Hawaiians were rational within the context of their own vision of the world.
Both books came long after Bradbury’s portrayal of life on Mars, but they deal with the same disturbing question: the clash of cultures that leads to the end of one way of life and the triumph of another. One wonders at times whether this is the only way in which we can get to know each other on this planet or any other. Some might argue that a certain amount of creative destruction, like that which many economists advocate, is necessary for progress. Certainly, in this case, Hawaiians rapidly progressed in adapting to new circumstances before being overwhelmed with the power and influence of the United States. It is also hard to argue that life was paradise for the natives before Westerners arrived. In fact, Hawaiians fought each other fiercely and frequently, and only stopped when one of them—Kamehameha—knocked enough heads together, aided by the acquisition of modern weaponry, to put an end to the divisiveness forever. One can get much of the flavor of Hawaii’s violent transition to modernity by reading The Warrior King: Hawaii’s Kamehameha the Great, the often gory biography by Richard Tregaskis of this physically powerful man who ultimately united the Hawaiian islands. (Tregaskis, for the record, has that element of redundancy in his descriptions that betrays a hack writer, but on the other hand, there are few other biographies of Kamehameha.)
That we seem not to learn from all this is evident from the rash of cultural and political missteps that clearly accompanied the U.S. invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush. The dismissive arrogance of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld toward critics as the conflict progressed would be almost comically clichéd if it had not produced such tragic consequences. Just when you think the human race is starting to mature just a little, we are pulled back to the theme of The Martian Chronicles, which doesn’t look so trite after all. Quite the contrary. Bradbury shaped the outlook of a new generation of artists, most notably James Cameron in the film Avatar, which features human military and economic exploitation of a remote planet rich in exotic resources prized on commodities markets. In Avatar, the “indigenous” become expendable until they rise up in revolt. One has to be rather obtuse to miss the artistic connection between Bradbury and Cameron. The plot may differ, but the underlying theme is fundamental. Humans with advanced technology but limited cultural understanding, or more importantly with a cramped understanding of their own motives in life, are like bulls in a china shop. Nothing is safe that lies in their path.
Paranoia—a consuming fear of the alien or unknown—often pairs easily with hatred. Each one fuels the other. Bradbury throughout his life, but particularly early in his life, displayed a profound and progressive concern for racial injustice. It is not hard to connect the themes in The Martian Chronicles with Bradbury’s observation in Weller’s book that “even if we are not aware of them, we all have our hidden prejudices.” No one presented these quite so eloquently as Bradbury in his short story, “The Big Black and White Game,” featuring two baseball teams of opposite race playing each other. The story arrived on the literary scene just a couple of years before Jackie Robinson was to make his entrance into the major leagues with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Bradbury was 25 when the story was published, a young author with a very fresh new viewpoint who nonetheless had to labor very hard in the vineyards before he found himself under the bright lights with a best seller. On a positive note, Bradbury must have been cheered with much of the racial progress of the last half-century, despite its occasional roller-coaster features. And he certainly became a bigger fan of the national space program than The Martian Chronicles alone might have suggested. Of course, there is no intelligent life on Mars to worry about. Those alien cultures, in reality, are all on our own planet and always have been. We must learn to live with ourselves.
It did not take too many years for the bright lights to find Bradbury, for his imagination was prolific and his work ethic rock solid. By 1953, just 33 years old, he launched what surely is his most enduring literary legacy, born of the book-burning, blacklisting, paranoid legacy of the McCarthy era—Fahrenheit 451. When I was in college, back in the turbulent era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, discovering this book about a future society in which books were burned as contraband was a delicious experience that opened insights in ways that still resonate for me today. I regard this as Bradbury’s masterpiece, in large part because of the way in which he slowly but surely reveals Montag’s evolution from a naïve fireman, in a world where homes are fireproof but books are deemed dangerously subversive, to a man with growing doubts about his mission in life and about the intellectually anesthetized society around him. There is nothing wrong with an inquiring mind, Bradbury seemed to be telling me, even if everyone around you wants you to accept the status quo. I link that in my own mind with my favorite quote from Studs Terkel, who always insisted that his epitaph would be, “Curiosity did not kill this cat.”
But it has killed many people in many places. We need look no farther in recent times than North Korea, Syria, Libya, Iraq, and China, or even much of Latin America before the wave of democratization replaced most military juntas. If we wish to make ourselves uncomfortable, we can even look inside the U.S., at the South before integration, at much of the racist reaction to the tragedy of 9/11, and other efforts to stifle intellectual, cultural, and religious diversity, to know that the repressive instinct remains strong within us. We are our own worst enemies in resisting the liberation of the mind, or to quote Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”
When we insist on seeing the world the way we want to see it, we tend to construct a hall of mirrors that eventually betrays us.
But let us not concentrate on cursing the darkness. There remains Montag, stumbling through the darkness, almost accidentally finding the light through that spark of humanity that will not be suppressed, asking questions, eventually the right questions, and finding his way to the Book People. Welcome to the light. And thanks, Ray. We owe you a lot.
Jim Schwab
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