Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Bradbury and I

by Janet Berliner

As often as I’ve met Ray Bradbury, he’s always said, “Do I know you?” each time. I’ve seen him riding around Santa Monica on his bicycle. I wave and he waves back, but I imagine him saying to himself, “Have I met her?”

The first time I officially interviewed Ray was in Santa Cruz, around the mid-eighties. Since many people had interviewed him before, I decided to keep one question paramount: What kind of inner world does a man like this inhabit? I knew that it would be difficult it was going to be to sort out the emotional overload of an hour with him, so my I asked my psychiatrist friend, Stancil, the one we had met in Santa Barbara, to design and ask the questions. My motives multiple and selfish. Stancil has an unusual perspective on human behavior. We were working together on an annotated Winnie-the-Pooh. He’d never done an interview or had anything published (since then he’s the proud author of the definitive book on Frisbees–I am not kidding) but he wanted to learn and I thought his knowledge of behavior might come in handy.

We had arranged the interview for lunchtime, at a Chinese food restaurant. Lunch with Ray Bradbury is definitely an event. His creative unconscious, that which psychiatrists call the “primary process,” bubbles like a flowing artesian well, no matter where he is. What makes it fun is that, while this “primary process” pours forth, it sweeps his listeners–and at times Bradbury himself–into uncharted waters. Though a virgin to Chinese food, or so he said, he attacked the food zealously. When one last Szechuan dumpling lay on his plate, he looked at it regretfully and stood up. “Every once in a while, when I am at someone’s house or at a party,” he said, “my enthusiasm runs away from me. I hear my voice ricochet off the far wall, and I know it’s time to leave.”

His timing was magical. We had run out of tape and out of energy. Not so Ray. Ready to tackle the afternoon session of a day-long seminar, he headed for the limousine that had sparked our first questions of the interview: Why does a man who is part space traveler and an architect of arcane worlds refuse to drive, and why is he afraid to fly?

Ray doesn’t believe in short-form answers. “I’ve flown for the first time within the last five years, but I was terribly drunk when I did it. When I was young, I was too poor to own a car because my income didn’t start to go up until I was 35, or at least 32. Gradually over the years, I realized I didn’t miss it. You know, you don’t miss it because you’ve never had it. And then I saw a lot of people killed on the highway when I was young. I don’t like high places, either, and I think imagination makes things worse than they really are. I think I was afraid of being afraid.”

I had told Stan to jump in at any time, preferably with something more sophisticated than standard psycho-babble. Jump in he did. “In psychiatric treatment today, it’s suggested that the way to overcome a fear is to face it…behavior therapy, you know,” Stan said. “What about the fear that many writers have of being successful? How did you overcome that?”

My first reaction was to think the question rather too simplistic but, always happy to find a way to talk about his mentor, Robert Heinlein, Ray launched into his answer.

“I had someone to encourage me–Bob Heinlein. He was my teacher. I met him when I was 18. I joined the Science Fiction/Fantasy Society in L.A. We had meetings at Clifton’s Cafeteria every Thursday night because we were all poor and you could eat there cheap, or you could eat there free too. Mr. Clifton had a rule, and it’s still there today. He’s given away millions of free meals over a period of 45 years or so. I met Heinlein there and Kuttner and Edmund Hamilton and Leigh Bracket, Ross Rockman. All of them became my friends and teachers. I used to go to Heinlein’s house and watch him type, which was exciting because I’d never sold anything myself.”

Bradbury added that life in general, and the war in particular, contrived to keep him from seeing Heinlein for thirty or so years. They finally had a chance to talk at Jet Propulsion Lab, a couple of years before Heinlein’s death.

Joseph Mugnaini, artist, filmmaker, teacher, writer and, that day, part of Ray’s entourage, offered the information that Heinlein had his place in Santa Cruz electronically protected, which meant that he was imprisoned every time the electricity went off. He considered that to be “…a wonderful Science Fiction irony.”

We had been introduced to Joe as a special man whose friendship and work had long been a part of Ray’s life. He had a wonderfully craggy face and an intensity that rivaled Ray’s. I determined that I would arrange to interview him, too, at another time and place, and asked Ray if he had any ties to SFWA–The Science Fiction Writers of America

“Oh, I belong,” he said, “but there’s no time to get involved in any of their fights or arguments. I can’t keep up with all the writing. It’s impossible, so then I just feel ignorant. If I kept up with the writing, I’d have to quit writing myself.”

Hoping to find someone we knew in common, I asked him if he had read much Harlan Ellison.

“Yeah,” Ray said, “I’ve known Harlan for years. I haven’t read all that much, but a certain number of his short stories, which I like. And Harlan is great fun. A lot of people hate him, but I love him. We’re totally different…totally different people. Maybe that’s why we get on so well. I find him very funny. Yes, I’ve played pool with him at his house. He’s an enthusiast, you see. And I respond to someone who’s that manic about things. It’s Harlan who’s rebuilt his house and put caves in it and rabbit holes…he has Vivaldi on half the time, which is super.”

Ellison and Bradbury! Harnessed, they could replace the Diablo Canyon reactor, I thought.

In a matter of a few minutes, we had moved from Heinlein to Ellison, from mushu pork to rabbit holes. We were staying ahead of the cataract that is Ray Bradbury only with great effort.

I looked for a change of pace. “We’ve heard you’re a Francophile. How’s the Science Fiction there? Any outstanding writers?”

Ray was off and running. “Oh, they’re mad for it. They’ve got a lot of Science Fiction bookstores. There are no contemporary French Science Fiction writers that I know of. I think there were a couple of Russian boys living in Paris that write. I can’t think of their names, I think they’re twins. There are very few good Science Fiction writers in the world in general, and they’re all Americans with a few English, but there are no French. The Russians write it, but boy are they stodgy.

“You know what motivated our first trip to France? The French government invited me over to celebrate Jules Verne’s birthday. So we got a free trip over and a car and a driver, and all the best hotels, all the three-star restaurants for three weeks. We went down to the South of France. The French government asked, ‘Who do you want to meet?’ My wife said Charles Asnavour, so we spent a day with him.”

Asnavour! I practically melted. Ray laughed. “So you’re in love with him, too.”

I nodded. “What about you?” I asked. “What did you want?”

“Two things. First of all, I wanted to stay at Vaux-le-Vicomte, the 17th-century chateau built by Nicolas Fouquet. Tourists come there in the daytime and look around, but it is owned by a private family. No one is allowed to stay there. They gave me what I requested, but I had to arrange it myself. I wrote to Connoisseur Magazine editor Thomas Hoving, with whom I’d once lectured in San Jose. Hoving arranged an overnight stay in exchange for an article. Fouquet, you know, was Louis XIV’s finance minister. When Louis came out to see vaux-le-Vicomte, he was infernally jealous that it was better than anything he, Louis, had. He suspected that maybe the money had come out of France’s treasury, which it hadn’t, and sent D’Artagnan to arrest Fouquet, who was jailed for the rest of his life, fifteen years. The legend of the man in the iron mask grew up around Fouquet. So the whole thing is full of romance as well as horror. There’s a room with a tapestry screen with all of Fontaine’s animals worked into it. Fontaine slept there. The sculptured ceilings and the bas reliefs are all so beautiful and warm. There is an amorous, frivolous touch to it. The angels are just a little more than angels. You feel you could really pinch them.

“As for which living person I wanted to meet, it was Jean Louis Barrot. See, I was supposed to do The Martian Chronicles directed by Barrot in 1968, and then the students ruined the theater. I’ll never forgive them. When revolutions run over my projects, I get very illiberal sometimes. To hell with them. Why would they close down a theater? We weren’t doing anything political.

“I’m a liberal democrat, but I admire ideas, not parties.”

“The world knows you best as the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, and of innumerable short stories and film scripts,” I said. “You’re in love with France, in love with life, in love with Chambord, a spired castle that grew out of the imaginations of kings. You’ve slept among tapestries and danced in the halls of monarchs. Where would you like to play next?”

I don’t know what I expected to hear, but Ray’s answer took me by surprise.

I’ll tell you about it next month.

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