As America and Russia continued to progress into space, Ray Bradbury saw the efforts as a new phase in man’s spiritual consciousness. God, Bradbury declared, wanted man to approach the universe. The encounter with space was  a “Cry of the Cosmos.” As such, science fiction as a genre was entering not just respectability, but the very mainstream.

Ray Bradbury Unbound by Jonathan R. Eller (324 pages, University of Illinois Press, 2014)

“All of my work has been touched with romance, particularly my Space Fiction concerning our future on other worlds,” Ray Bradbury explained at the end of the 1960s. “I have always considered romance as absolutely necessary in the life of boys, young men, and, for that matter, men, which means a kind of special wild love, a fanatic thing, that pulls or drives them to make a reality of the particular dream romanticized.’

Could one find a greater American romantic of the era? Almost certainly not.

Jonathan Eller’s masterful Ray Bradbury Unbound (2014), volume two in his three-volume biography of the mighty twentieth-century author (I reviewed volume I here), covers Bradbury from 1953 to, roughly, 1970. That is, Unbound looks at the man from age 33 to age 50. As Mr. Eller wisely notes, Bradbury had been crazily (supernaturally?) productive in the first 10 years of his writing career.

By the late summer of 1953, 33-year-old Ray Bradbury had become one of the most recognized names broadly associated with fantasy and science fiction. His initial pulp fiction successes had quickly opened out into an ever-widening range of major market magazines since the end of World War II, and his first three Doubleday titles—The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and The Golden Apples of the Sun—were already on their way to becoming perennial classics. His newest title, Ballantine’s Fahrenheit 451, was nearing release amid a barrage of prepublication publicity. During the previous six years, individual Bradbury tales had been featured in three of the annual Best American Short Stories anthologies and two volumes of O. Henry Prize Stories.  In little more than a decade, he had published nearly 200 professional stories.

By the late 1960s, however, he was publishing next to nothing in the way of fiction, though he had become, for all intents and purposes, the spokesman of the American space era. He was, after all, “Ray Bradbury.”

There were incredible publishing successes in these years, 1953-1970, too. In 1955, Bradbury successfully repackaged his first book, Dark Carnival (1947), as The October Country, which considerably tightened the original vision. Additionally, two of Bradbury’s most successful novels, Dandelion Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), were published during this phase of the author’s career. He also published a number of collections of his short stories: R is for Rocket (1962); The Machineries of Joy (1964); S is for Space (1966); and I Sing the Body Electric (1969).

And still (when it comes to Bradbury, there’s always an “and still”), Bradbury also became deeply immersed in “Hollywood.” Yes, I put “Hollywood” in quotation marks, to emphasize that I mean movies and TV shows. In particular, John Huston, the famed director, asked Bradbury to screen-write Moby Dick. It was a major moment in Bradbury’s life, bringing him money and fame when he least expected either.  As it turns out, he and Huston did not like one another, however, but Bradbury gave his absolute best to the endeavor. The time investment, though, was rather immense. “The original plan had been to spend perhaps two months on the screenplay and tour Europe for eight or nine months,” Mr. Eller explains.  “In actuality, the time line was nearly reversed—Bradbury spent seven months to the day working on Moby Dick.” Out of his European adventure, though, Bradbury gained three truly important things.  First, he came to love Ireland and wrote a number of Irish stories over the years.  Second, he grew thicker skin by dealing with Huston (which proved very important for Bradbury’s later Hollywood encounters).

Third, he was able to visit Bernard Berenson, the famed art historian of the Renaissance. His friendship with Berenson—according to Mr. Eller—reshaped the entirety of Bradbury’s life, giving him a depth of western civilization he had previously lacked, especially absent a college education. Berenson served as a serious mentor for Bradbury.

Berenson wasn’t the only famous person who found himself attracted to Bradbury. C.S. Lewis, privately, took notice of the young American. “Bradbury is a writer of great distinction,” Lewis wrote, but he found their work to be fundamentally at odds. “In his style almost too delicate, too elusive, too nuanced for S.F. matter? In that respect I take him and me to be at opposite poles; he is a humble disciple of Corot and Debussy, I an even humbler disciple of Titian and Beethoven.” Though Lewis never formally reviewed Bradbury and given these are only brief snippets of private correspondence, Lewis’s views greatly matter. After all, without exaggeration, one could state that the two together—Lewis and Bradbury—made science fiction a respectable genre.

Some reviewers—Kingsley Amis, in particular—found Bradbury’s writing, however, to match that of another Inkling, Charles Williams. This seemed especially true in the terrifying portrayal of evil in the figures of Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark from Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Again, though, as the 1960s proceeded, Bradbury spent less and less of his time writing fiction. Indeed, Something Wicked This Way Comes seems to have been his last great work of that decade. As Mr. Eller notes, Bradbury published only one short story in 1967, and, in 1968, he published no fiction at all.

Bradbury, however, spent a considerable amount of time on screenwriting and screen work, but he also, critically, started to become the spokesman for America’s participation in the Space Race and really the spokesman of the Space Age. Even before Sputnik, and much to the chagrin of his audiences, Bradbury was predicting a moon landing within a decade. He was a few years off, but it wasn’t a bad guess.

As America and Russia continued to progress into space, Bradbury saw the efforts as a new phase in man’s spiritual consciousness. God, Bradbury declared, wanted man to approach the universe. The encounter with space was, as Bradbury explained in a Life Magazine article, a “Cry of the Cosmos.” As such, science fiction as a genre was entering not just respectability, Bradbury proclaimed, but the very mainstream. Though never with the verve of a Walter Miller or a James Blish, Bradbury had often asked deep theological questions in his short fiction, but especially in his famous stories, “The Fire Balloons” and “The Man.”

Though Ray Bradbury Unbound is not quite as exciting as Becoming Ray Bradbury, this is no fault of the author, Jonathan Eller, but rather of the changes in Bradbury’s own approach to life. Indeed, in some ways, Becoming Ray Bradbury is a cautionary tale about being distracted by Hollywood, but still a brilliant one. Mr. Eller has done an amazing thing with this volume, and he deserves our highest admiration for it.

Now, on to volume III….

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics as we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

All comments are moderated and must be civil, concise, and constructive to the conversation. Comments that are critical of an essay may be approved, but comments containing ad hominem criticism of the author will not be published. Also, comments containing web links or block quotations are unlikely to be approved. Keep in mind that essays represent the opinions of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Imaginative Conservative or its editor or publisher.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email