RAY BRADBURY GRADUATED FROM THE LIBRARY WHEN HE WAS
27.
LAST WEEK, SCI-FI AUTHOR RAY BRADBURY DIED. So last
Friday I was ready to share with you part of the interesting interview1 I had read on the Paris Review long time ago when I received some mail from a young lady, and I thought Mr. Ray Bradbury could wait. Unlike
the media, I always give priority to the living being.
So here we go.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you write science
fiction?
RAY BRADBURY
Science fiction is the fiction of
ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going
and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.
Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but
soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be
the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the
world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible,
never the impossible.
Imagine if sixty years ago, at the
start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who
swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of
women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was
within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If
I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting
that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States
and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction
is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile
appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it
did.
INTERVIEWER
Does science fiction offer the writer
an easier way to explore a conceptual premise?
BRADBURY
Take Fahrenheit
451. You’re dealing with book burning, a very serious subject.
You’ve got to be careful you don’t start lecturing people. So you put your
story a few years into the future and you invent a fireman who has been burning
books instead of putting out fires—which is a grand idea in itself—and you
start him on the adventure of discovering that maybe books shouldn’t be burned.
He reads his first book. He falls in love. And then you send him out into the
world to change his life. It’s a great suspense story, and locked into it is
this great truth you want to tell, without pontificating.
I often use the metaphor of Perseus
and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into
the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a
reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of
Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it’s really
looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us. So you have a
ricochet vision, a ricochet that enables you to have fun with it, instead of
being self-conscious and superintellectual.
INTERVIEWER
How early did you begin
writing?
BRADBURY
It started with Poe. I imitated him
from the time I was twelve until I was about eighteen. I fell in love with the
jewelry of Poe. He’s a gem encruster, isn’t he? Same with Edgar Rice Burroughs
and John Carter. I was doing traditional horror stories, which I think everyone
who goes into the field starts out with—you know, people getting locked in
tombs. I drew Egyptian mazes.
Everything went into ferment that one
year, 1932, when I was twelve. There was Poe, Carter, Burroughs, the comics. I
listened to a lot of imaginative radio shows, especially one called Chandu
the Magician. I’m sure it was quite junky, but not to me. Every
night when the show went off the air I sat down and, from memory, wrote out the
whole script. I couldn’t help myself. Chandu was against all the villains of
the world and so was I. He responded to a psychic summons and so did I.
I loved to illustrate, too, and I was
a cartoonist. I always wanted my own comic strip. So I was not only writing
about Tarzan, I was drawing my own Sunday panels. I did the usual adventure
stories, located them in South America or among the Aztecs or in Africa. There
was always the beautiful maiden and the sacrifice. So I knew I was going into
one of the arts: I was drawing, acting, and writing.
INTERVIEWER
You’re self-educated, aren’t you?
BRADBURY
Yes, I am. I’m completely library
educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in
grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long
days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on
Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the
racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest.
I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands
before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you
begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s
far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and
you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids
were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded
on—well, what if you don’t like those books?
I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love
with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my
curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school
in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every
week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married,
I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven.
I discovered that the library is the real school.
INTERVIEWER
You have said that you don’t believe
in going to college to learn to write. Why is that?
BRADBURY
You can’t learn to write in college.
It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know
more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry
James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John
Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose
work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t
understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the
other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret.
You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for
yourself.
INTERVIEWER
But your books are taught widely in
schools.
BRADBURY
Do you know why teachers use me?
Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a
metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate
things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these
metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what
kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space,
tales of dinosaurs. All my life I’ve been running through the fields and
picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there’s a story. And
that’s what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I’m
in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in
metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel
Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to,
but they did.
INTERVIEWER
How important is it to you to follow
your own instincts?
BRADBURY
Oh, God. It’s everything. I was
offered the chance to write War and Peace for the screen a few decades
ago. The American version with King Vidor directing. I turned it down. Everyone
said, How could you do that? That’s ridiculous, it’s a great book! I said,
Well, it isn’t for me. I can’t read it. I can’t get through it, I tried. That
doesn’t mean the book’s bad. I just am not prepared for it. It portrays a very
special culture. The names throw me. My wife loved it. She read it once every
three years for twenty years. They offered the usual amount for a screenplay
like that, a hundred thousand dollars, but you cannot do things for money in
this world. I don’t care how much
they offer you, and I don’t care how poor you are. There’s only one excuse ever
to take money under those circumstances: If someone in your family is horribly
ill and the doctor bills are piled up so high that you’re all going to be
destroyed. Then I’d say, Go on and take the job. Go do War
and Peace and
do a lousy job. And be sorry later.
INTERVIEWER
Do you keep a tight work
schedule?
BRADBURY
My passions drive me to the
typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was
twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always
exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the
typewriter right now and finish this.
INTERVIEWER
Where do you do your writing?
BRADBURY
I can work anywhere. I wrote in
bedrooms and living rooms when I was growing up with my parents and my brother
in a small house in Los Angeles. I worked on my typewriter in the living room,
with the radio and my mother and dad and brother all talking at the same time.
Later on, when I wanted to write Fahrenheit 451, I went up to UCLA and
found a basement typing room where, if you inserted ten cents into the typewriter,
you could buy thirty minutes of typing time.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever used a computer?
BRADBURY
Up until my stroke, I used a
typewriter. An IBM Selectric. Never a computer. A computer’s a typewriter. Why
would I need another typewriter? I have one.
INTERVIEWER
Most would argue that a computer
makes revising a whole lot easier. Not to mention spell-check.
BRADBURY
I’ve been writing for seventy years,
if I don’t know how to spell now . . .
Bon voyage, Mr. Bradbury! Thanks for sharing your wisdom.
BOB DIAMOND: “Being from Earth, as you are, and using as little of
your brain as you do, your life has pretty much been devoted to dealing with
fear.”
