Storytellersunplugged

by Janet Berliner

Last month in my column Bradbury And I, I left you dangling, wondering where Ray Bradbury would say he wanted to play next.

“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.

“Mary Poppins. I’d love to camp out on the roof among all those wonderful chimneys and spend all night there. I’d love to shoot a film up there. We’d have a ball and invite people and have all the foods among all the chimneys. I’m going to have to live forever to explore everything that fascinates me. Earth’s past, for example. It sparks my creative imagination every bit as much as the untapped future. It’s like you begin to suffer from the Thomas Wolfe syndrome once you hit any country. You find out a little bit, then find out how dumb you really are in every other area. Then you run over there and discover how stupid you are about over there, so you start reading about Francis I. Then you discover you don’t know a damn thing about the Hundred Years War, then you discover that you don’t know enough about England because they’re going back and forth all the time.”

It is Bradbury the writer speaking now, effortlessly integrating research and experience. Mentioning England reminds him of Blenheim Palace, which he visited during a lightning and thunder storm. “Boy, what a way to visit that place! Because the Battle of Blenheim is going on around you outside while you’re inside looking at history. Wonderful!”

The word “history” wrenched him back to France.

“I started reading books on Francis I, which got me hooked on Lafayette. I discovered how important the French were in the American Revolution and became involved with Lafayette as a fantastic character. He arrived here when he was twenty, about the same age as Thomas Jefferson–you forget how young these people were–and this vital young man helped our revolution and then went home and started the French revolution. I hadn’t realized how intimately he was connected to both.”

Clearly, wherever Bradbury went, he remained fascinated by the concept of time, how the past and future affect the present.

“I went leaping all around through time,” he said, “reading about Ben Franklin…that whole history about Franklin is amazing, makes you wish we had a man like that alive today. We’ve never had a president as smart as Franklin. He was a real Renaissance man.”

Asked how he felt about socialistic attitudes in France, Bradbury answered emphatically. “You can’t tax people and have a society, that’s all. As I said, I’m a liberal democrat, but I admire ideas, not parties. Otherwise, we’ll have another depression.”

Bradbury’s trips to France have become trysts in a continuing love affair with that country. “Most of all, I just like to travel around,” he said. “I hire a car and driver so we can enjoy ourselves. We don’t look at the bills, we just pay.”

I asked Ray whether, like Heinlein, he might find the Monterey coast an inspiring place to live and write. His imagination immediately flew to the Cote d’Azur, of which the Monterey coastline reminds him. It is not the brilliant blue of France’s coastline that captures his imagination, he said, but the creative environment, which has existed there since the early sixteenth century. “Francis I brought da Vinci to his court from Italy in his last years and gave him security and allowed him to create there. That, to me, is a fabulous king.”

With that, Ray Bradbury stood up and made his exit speech, leaving us with his leftover dumpling and with the task of analyzing the answer to the question we had originally posed: What kind of inner world does a man like that inhabit?

We had interviewed a Perseus with vertigo, a man compelled to fly on the wings of words, yet afraid to fly any other way. The interview had taken us from the Monterey coast to the Cote d’Azur, from Heinlein to Ellison, from the virtues of Chinese cooking to the vicissitudes of politics.

The answer eluded us until weeks later, when I ran away from the world of grown-ups to take a ride on a boardwalk carousel. The timpani of the merry-go-round connected with the child in me, as it inevitably does, and I found myself circling into the never-never land of childhood promise, where everything is possible.

That’s where Ray Bradbury lives.

Many years after that interview, I had the pleasure of getting a story from Ray for the first of two anthologies I edited with David Copperfield. “Quicker Than The Eye” was a marvelous story of a man who sees his doppleganger at a magician’s performance, but I thought there were some points where it could have been better. I called Ray (in those days, I could still hear a little bit on telephones) and said, “It’s a good first draft, Ray.”

“That’s a fourth draft, Berliner,” he replied, the chuckle evident in his voice.

“Well, it could use another.”

He laughed heartily then. “Only you, Berliner. Go ahead, bloody it up and send it back to me.”

That story, of course, became the title piece of one of his collections a couple of years later, and Ray made one of his rare appearances at a group signing in Los Angeles with me, David, Ray Feist, and S.P. Somtow.