Jeffrey Frank's Blog - Posts Tagged "ray-bradbury"
Ray Bradbury
Twenty-three years ago, I interviewed Ray Bradbury for the Washington Post. News of his death made me go back and see what I’d written. It was, as I’d feared, embarrassing; one should beware of writing about the artists who hypnotized you when you were young.
Bradbury did that to me, although sitting face to face in a New York hotel room, he did not look like a hypnotist. “He is, if truth be told, a bit pudgy,” I wrote. “He wears tennis shorts, white socks and sneakers.” And then I sort of lost it, adding, “there is nothing about him that betrays a careful knowledge of post-atomic landscapes or golden-eyed Martians who may lie in wait for innocent Earthlings. Yet consider the evidence: Almost no one can imagine a time or place without the fiction of Ray Bradbury. It's as if he has always been with us, his books always fresh on the shelves.”
By “us” I meant a certain romantic audience, dreaming of the future. While a few writers, such as Christopher Isherwood and Angus Wilson, were early fans, he was otherwise deposited in the genre bin. “I don't exist,'' he said, although not unhappily. ''The New York Review has never acknowledged that I was born. I never had a review there. The New Yorker did one review, 35 years ago. . . They don't know where my handle is, they don't know how to pick me up. And I don't, either.” (The magazine did publish a Bradbury short story in 1947, and just last week published a lovely, short reminiscence.) He believed deeply in his genre—the idea, as he said that day, that science fiction remains ''the growing edge of all the ideas of mankind. It's the most important fiction. It deals with the changing of a dream into a fact, of a concept into a reality. It's the most important fiction that ever has been written because that's our whole history from the cave to here.''
I’ll always love “The Martian Chronicles” with its evocation of “Rocket summer,” set in 1999—the distant future!--when “The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.'' And those books still on my shelf, including “Dark Carnival” and “Illustrated Man” and “Fahrenheit 451” and his much anthologized and imitated short stories, such as “The Small Assassin.”
He told me that he was off to Paris that night (he hated flying, but had learned to live with it), and I figured I’d never see him again; and I never did. But he did surprise me by sending me a postcard a few days later, thanking me for having euphemistically described him as “a bit pudgy.” It was the very least I could have done.
Bradbury did that to me, although sitting face to face in a New York hotel room, he did not look like a hypnotist. “He is, if truth be told, a bit pudgy,” I wrote. “He wears tennis shorts, white socks and sneakers.” And then I sort of lost it, adding, “there is nothing about him that betrays a careful knowledge of post-atomic landscapes or golden-eyed Martians who may lie in wait for innocent Earthlings. Yet consider the evidence: Almost no one can imagine a time or place without the fiction of Ray Bradbury. It's as if he has always been with us, his books always fresh on the shelves.”
By “us” I meant a certain romantic audience, dreaming of the future. While a few writers, such as Christopher Isherwood and Angus Wilson, were early fans, he was otherwise deposited in the genre bin. “I don't exist,'' he said, although not unhappily. ''The New York Review has never acknowledged that I was born. I never had a review there. The New Yorker did one review, 35 years ago. . . They don't know where my handle is, they don't know how to pick me up. And I don't, either.” (The magazine did publish a Bradbury short story in 1947, and just last week published a lovely, short reminiscence.) He believed deeply in his genre—the idea, as he said that day, that science fiction remains ''the growing edge of all the ideas of mankind. It's the most important fiction. It deals with the changing of a dream into a fact, of a concept into a reality. It's the most important fiction that ever has been written because that's our whole history from the cave to here.''
I’ll always love “The Martian Chronicles” with its evocation of “Rocket summer,” set in 1999—the distant future!--when “The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.'' And those books still on my shelf, including “Dark Carnival” and “Illustrated Man” and “Fahrenheit 451” and his much anthologized and imitated short stories, such as “The Small Assassin.”
He told me that he was off to Paris that night (he hated flying, but had learned to live with it), and I figured I’d never see him again; and I never did. But he did surprise me by sending me a postcard a few days later, thanking me for having euphemistically described him as “a bit pudgy.” It was the very least I could have done.
