The literary progress of a writer who refused to limit himself to fantasy fiction
MICHAEL CAINES
REMEMBRANCE Selected correspondence of Ray Bradbury
JONATHAN R. ELLER, EDITOR 528pp. Simon and Schuster. $35.
THE JOKE WAS NOT LOST on him: Ray Bradbury, whose imagination was always winging away to Mars or the fantastical future, suffered for much of his life from a fear of flying. Flying by aeroplane, at least. “Balloons are more my speed”, he confessed in 1966 to François Truffaut, who had urged him to come to the Venice Film Festival for a screening of Fahrenheit 451.
A couple of years later Bradbury had to decline another invitation, this time to receive two literary awards in Florida. One of them was for his essay “An Impatient Gulliver Above Our Roofs”, published in Life, which he had written after spending some time with astronauts at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. He had travelled to Houston to meet “all those fast people”, he explained, “via a very slow train”. But his schedule at the time of the awards was “full to the brim”, and getting to Florida, for this non-flyer, “would be a task that would put strain on Jules Verne’s hero in Around the World in 80 Days”. He suggested that one of those fast people should stand in for him.
That reference to Verne strikes one of the recurring notes in Remembrance: Selected correspondence of Ray Bradbury. It is just the quip you might expect of him; there can be few writers as popularly associated with science fiction and fantasy (although there are also mystery novels and collections of poems in his extensive oeuvre) who are so consistently minded to dwell on the past. As life rushes on – and as the author matures from eager kid to young gun to seasoned pro to literary lion – there is always time in Bradbury’s letters for recalling or reflecting on early literary influences and experiences. “Nostalgia is a Prime Mover for me”, he wrote in 1950, turning to glance back having just glanced forward (“one day ... man will fly into space”). This, at the advanced age of thirty. On the verge of publishing The Martian Chronicles, after twelve years of establishing himself as a notable writer of short stories, he could take stock of science fiction as a genre and observe that it needed to recapture “a little more of that early wonder” expressed in the pages of pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories. It was the wonder that counted. Who needs jet propulsion when you read “The World of Giant Ants” by A. Hyatt Verrill at the age of eight?
Born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920 – the same year as Frank Herbert and possibly Isaac Asimov (the exact date is uncertain) – Bradbury was a distinctly American phenomenon. His family eventually moved to Los Angeles, but not before he had spent some crucial ye
