Ray Bradbury died some days ago and I'm sure everyone has seen an obit for him... I just came across this one which is from the World Socialist Website
The death of American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury June 5 at
the age of 91 in Los Angeles has prompted a good deal of analysis of the
author’s work, as well as the rather flimsy claim by some on the
political right that he was one of them.
Certainly, Bradbury did declare his admiration for Ronald Reagan and King Vidor’s film version of
The Fountainhead
(1949—based on the novel by Ayn Rand). In the months before his death,
moreover, Bradbury expressed the wish that the upcoming election would
see a reduction in the size of government, to be followed by a further
reduction “soon.”
Bradbury in 1975
This
only demonstrates that the relationship between the conscious political
views of an artist and the sense he or she makes of the world through
his art is not a simple or mechanical one. Bradbury, something of a
“libertarian,” was a self-educated, or as he later put it, a “public
library-educated” man, who even in his old age would hold readings to
benefit a local library. His work evinces a humanism and sympathy for
the oppressed completely at odds with the imbecilic selfishness of the
Rand cult.
This is the same man, after all, who wrote stories such as “Way in the Middle of the Air,” from early editions of
The Martian Chronicles,
about persecuted African-Americans taking to the skies to settle on
Mars, away from the bigots. Like so many of his stories, this is a
hopeful piece, a search for a solution to a seemingly intractable
problem on Earth. It was also a bold story to put out at that time—first
appearing in
Other Worlds in 1950, before the eruption of the
civil rights movement—and shone a harsh light on the prejudice and
violence faced by so many.
One might suggest that Bradbury, like
other, more prominent literary figures before him, was “compelled to
withdraw into the past” (Trotsky) by the conditions of his time. His
oft-idealized hometown of Waukegan, Illinois made an appearance in a
number of his works. Though generally writing about the future, Bradbury
was often reaching back to the past with an almost Hawthorne-esque
shake of the head at what science, technology and even desire had
wrought.
In his own life, Bradbury rejected much of technology, agreeing only last year, for example, to have one of his books,
Fahrenheit 451,
released as an ebook. The writer was, not to put too fine a point on
it, a bit of an eccentric, even a technophobe. He never learned to drive
a car, quite extraordinary for a resident of Los Angeles his entire
adult life. Bradbury did not board a commercial airliner until the age
of 62.
Yet
Fahrenheit 451 (1953)—about a future America
where books are banned and a fireman’s job is to burn them—is remarkable
for its almost predictive qualities when it comes to gadgets such as
tiny personal radios, flat-screen televisions and in-ear communication
devices.
Bradbury’s writing on occasion even inspired the development of such things. In an interview with
Book Magazine
in 1998, Bradbury explained, “I’ve never set out to predict. I just
write what later seems to evolve and be true.” He continued, “I was in
Japan working on a short film, and one of my hosts came to me and put a
Walkman on my ears and said, ‘Fahrenheit 451, Fahrenheit 451!’ The young
man who invented it had read [about such a device in] the story and
decided to build it.”
There can also be genuine pessimism in Bradbury’s works. In
Something Wicked This Way Comes
(1962), for which he also wrote the screenplay, this comes out quite
strongly. The attempts to change what the characters are not satisfied
with—in most cases their ages—lead to disaster. Those who do succeed in
altering their condition end up dead or enslaved, and the lesson learned
by the central characters seems to be to just accept what is.
There was bravery as well in what he wrote. In releasing
Fahrenheit 451
at the height of the anti-communist witch-hunt, Bradbury took a
significant risk. However, the writer insisted that a statement against
McCarthyism was not his intention. Although the novel was viewed and
taught for decades as a work aimed against censorship, Bradbury often
downplayed the latter issue, and asserted the danger he was warning
about was the phenomenon of television.
One can view a video at
his site
entitled “Bradbury on Censorship/Television” in which the author
declares, “I wasn’t worried about freedom. I was worried about people
being turned into morons by TV.” When the interviewer notes that Sen.
Joseph McCarthy had banned books, Bradbury dismisses this with a casual,
“Well, [President Dwight] Eisenhower said put them back, so it was, you
know, a few days.” He exhorted librarians to “just quietly put the
books back” if censors removed them.
It is doubtful that such comments will stop the use of
Fahrenheit 451
as a literary “poster child” for those fighting censorship—after all,
Bradbury noted this same thing in a number of other interviews over the
years. However it does bring up the question of what happens when an
author’s work takes on a meaning not consciously intended by its
creator.
Fahrenheit 451, far from being a mere complaint
against television, is a beautifully wrought work which has inspired
generations of free-speech advocates.
In his introduction to
Dandelion Wine (1957),
Bradbury makes a comment that may reveal more than the writer intends:
“It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered
into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each
morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words
that happened along in my head.
Bradbury in 1959
“I
would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an
assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my
own life.”
Bradbury was in his “early twenties” in the midst of
World War II, the greatest slaughter in world history. Did this and
subsequent events have an impact on the writer?
According to
Bradbury’s version of things, he wrote instinctively, with his
unconscious mind creating the subject and his conscious mind giving it
direction. Perhaps, for various reasons, Bradbury was unable to locate
himself consciously as an opponent of racism, or McCarthyism. Perhaps
his approach was the only way by which he could take on the complex and
often grim realities of the time, and offer up his concerns and
opposition. He seems to have responded to the difficult present with a
series of morality stories encased within a semi-futuristic wrapping.
Bradbury
was apparently compelled to project into the future a solution to the
problems of racism, the threat of nuclear war, the stultifying
atmosphere of the period. It may not be that Bradbury was “repelled” by
the new, so much as he was deeply troubled by the post-World War II
period. How could he not have felt the impact of the Holocaust, the
dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the onset of the Cold
War? Bradbury’s dilemma was one that confronted an entire generation of
artists and intellectuals in the US, many of whom turned to the right
and helped strengthen a reactionary cultural climate.
Bradbury’s
output was remarkable: over 600 short stories, numerous scripts for
films and (the loathed) television (including those he wrote for his own
show in the 1980s and early 1990s), poetry, nonfiction and children’s
books. Most impressive is the quality of the writing itself; he had a
tremendous respect for language and brought to the science
fiction-fantasy genre a standard to which many subsequent writers have
aspired.
Bradbury himself was well read, and inspired by such
authors as W. Somerset Maugham and Ernest Hemingway. In an early mantra
typed in or around 1947, according to his biographer Jonathan Eller in
Becoming Ray Bradbury
(2011), he wrote, “Keep chapters to FOUR pages, no more than EIGHT
pages. The purpose of a chapter is to contain ONE IDEA! And ONLY one!
See Jane Austen! See Tolstoy, Dostoevsky!”
In his own
uncompromising approach, Bradbury often found himself at odds, for
example, with the writer and anthologist August Derleth, who, as editor
of
Weird Tales, Bradbury felt was pushing him to produce
formulaic work. He resisted and persisted, a struggle from which we have
all benefited.
