Danse Macabre (54 page)

Rather than trying to row against this strong current (as Golding and Hughes do), Bradbury uses it in
Something Wicked This Way Comes
; blending the myth of childhood with the myth of the dream-father, whose part is played here by Will's dad, Charles Halloway . . . and, if Bradbury himself is to be believed, who is also played by that Illinois power-linesman who was Ray Bradbury's Dad. Halloway is a librarian who lives his own life of dreams, who is enough boy to understand Will and Jim, but who is also enough adult to provide, in the end, what the boys cannot provide for themselves, that final ingredient in our perception of Apollonian morality, normality, and rectitude: simple accountability.

*The only novels I can think of that avoid making childhood into a myth or a fairy tale and still succeed wonderfully as stories are William Golding's
Lord of the Flier
and
A High Wind in Jamaica
by Richard Hughes. Someone will write me a letter and suggest that I should have added either Ian McEwan's
The Cement Garden
or Beryl Bainbridge's
Harriet Said
, but I think that, in their differing ways (but uniquely British outlook), both of these short novels romanticize childhood as thoroughly as Bradbury ever did.

Childhood is the time, Bradbury insists, when you are still able to believe in things you know cannot be true:

"It's not true anyway," Will gasped. "Carnivals don't come this late in the year. Silly darn-sounding thing. Who'd go to it?"

"Me." Jim stood quiet in the dark.

Me, thought Will, seeing the guillotine flash, the Egyptian mirrors unfold accordions of light, and the sulphur-skinned devil-man sipping lava, like gunpowder tea. They simply believe; their hearts are still capable of overruling their heads. They are still sure that they will be able to sell enough boxes of greeting cards or tins of Cloverine Salve to get a bike or a stereo, that the toy will really do all the things you saw it do on TV and that "you can put it together in just a matter of minutes with a few simple tools," or that the monster picture going on inside the theater will be as scary and wonderful as the posters and stills outside. That's okay; in Bradbury's world the myth is ultimately stronger than the reality, and the heart stronger than the head. Will and Jim stand revealed, not as the sordid, dirty, frightened boys of
Lord of the Flies
, but as creatures built almost entirely of myth, a dream of childhood which becomes more believable than reality in Bradbury's hand. Through noon after noon, they had screamed up half the rides, knocked over dirty milk bottles, smashed kewpie-doll-winning plates, smelling, listening, looking their way through the autumn crowd trampling the leafy sawdust . . .

Where did they come by the wherewithal for their day at the fair? Most kids in a similar situation have to count their finances and then go through an agonizing process of picking and choosing; Jim and Will apparently do everything. But once again, it's okay. They are our representatives in the forgotten land of childhood, and their apparently endless supply of cash (plus their dead-eye aim at the china plates and pyramids of milk bottles) are accepted with delight and little or no rational hesitation. We believe as we once believed that Pecos Bill dug the Grand Canyon one day when he came home tired, thus dragging his pick and shovel behind him instead of carrying them over his shoulder. They are in terror, but it is the unique ability of these myth-children to enjoy their terror. "They both stopped to enjoy the swift pound of each other's heart," Bradbury relates.

Cooger and Dark become Bradbury's myth of evil, threatening these children not as gangsters or kidnappers or any realistic bad guys; Cooger is more like Old Pew returned from
Treasure Island
, his blindness exchanged for a hideous fall of years that has been dropped upon him when the carousel goes wild. When he hisses at Will and Jim, "A . . . sssshort . . . sad life . . . for you both!" we feel the sort of comfortable chill we felt when the Black Spot was first passed at the Admiral Benbow.

Their hiding from the emissaries of the carnival, who come into town looking for them under the pretense of a free parade, becomes Bradbury's best summation of this childhood remembered in myth; the childhood that might really have existed in short bursts between long stretches of boredom and such cheesy chores as carrying wood, doing dishes, putting out the trash, or sitting baby brother or sister ( and it's probably significant to this idea of the dream-child that both Jim and Will are only children).

They . . . hid in old garages, they . . . hid in old barns . . . in the highest trees they could climb and got bored and boredom was worse than fear so they came down and reported in to the Police Chief and had a fine chat which gave them twenty safe minutes right in the station and Will got the idea of touring churches and they climbed all the steeples in town and scared pigeons off the belfries . . . . But there again they began to get starchy with boredom and fatigued with sameness, and were almost on the point of giving themselves up to the carnival in order to have something to do, when quite fortunately the sun went down.

The only effective foil for Bradbury's dream-children is Charles Halloway, the dream-father. In the character of Charles Halloway we find attractions which only fantasy, with its strong myth-making abilities, can give us. Three points about him are worth mentioning, I think. First, Charles Halloway understands the myth of childhood the two boys are living; for all of us who grew up and parted with some bitterness from our parents because we felt they didn't understand our youth, Bradbury gives us a portrait of the sort of parent we felt we deserved. His reactions are those which few real parents can ever afford to have. His parenting instincts are apparently supernaturally alert. Early on, he sees the boys running home from watching the carnival set up, and calls their names softly under his breath . . . but does no more. Nor does he mention it to Will later, although the two boys have been out at three o'clock in the morning. He's not worried that they've been out scoring dope or mugging old ladies or
shtupping
their girl friends. He knows they have been out on boys' business, walking the night as boys sometimes will . . . and he lets it go.

Second, Charles Halloway comes by his understanding legitimately; he is still living the myth himself. Your father cannot be your pal very successfully, the psychology texts tell us, but there are few fathers, I think, who have not longed to be buddies with their sons, and few sons who have not wished for a buddy in their fathers. When Charles Halloway discovers that Jim and Will have nailed rungs under the climbing ivy on their respective houses so they can escape and reenter their bedrooms after bedtime, he does not demand that the rungs be torn down; his response is admiring laughter and an admonition that the boys not use the rungs unless they really have to. When Will tells his father in agony that no one will believe them if they try to explain what really happened in Miss Foley's house, where the evil nephew Robert (who is really Mr. Cooger, looking much younger since he has been reissued) framed them for a robbery, Halloway says simply, "I'll believe." He will believe because he is really just one of the boys and the sense of wonder has not died within him. Much later, while rummaging through his pockets, Charles Halloway almost seems like the world's oldest Tom Sawyer: And Will's father stood up, stuffed his pipe with tobacco, rummaged his pockets for matches, brought out a battered harmonica, a penknife, a cigarette lighter that wouldn't work, and a memo pad he had always meant to write great thoughts down on but had never got around to . . . .

Almost everything, in fact, except a dead rat and a string to swing it on. Third, Charles Halloway is the dream-father because he is, in the end, accountable. He can switch hats, in the blink of an eye, from that of the child to that of the adult. He proves his accountability and responsibility by a simple symbolic act: when Mr. Dark asks, Halloway gives him his name.

"A fine day to you, sir!"

No, Dad ! thought Will.

The Illustrated Man came back.

"Your name, sir?" he asked directly.

Don't tell him! thought Will.

Will's father debated a moment, took the cigar from his mouth, tapped ash and said quietly:

"Halloway. Work in the library. Drop by sometime."

"You can be sure, Mr. Halloway. I will."

. . . [Halloway] was also gazing with surprise at himself, accepting the surprise, the new purpose, which was half despair, half serenity, now that the incredible deed was done. Let no one ask why he had given his true name; even he could not assay and give its real weight . . . .

But isn't it most likely that he has given his true name because the boys cannot? He must front for them—which he does admirably. And when Jim's dark wishes finally lead him into what seems utter ruin, it is Halloway who emerges, first destroying the fearsome Dust Witch, then Mr. Dark himself, and finally leading the fight for Jim's life and soul.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
is probably not Bradbury's best work overall—I believe he has always found the novel a difficult form to work in—but its mythic interests are so well suited to Bradbury's dreamy, semipoetic prose that it succeeds wonderfully and becomes one of those books about childhood (like Hughes's
A High Wind in Jamaica
, Stevenson's
Treasure
Island
, Cormier's
The Chocolate War
, and Thomas Williams's
Tsuga's Children
, to name just a few) that adults should take down once in awhile . . . not just to give to their own children, but in order to touch base again themselves with childhood's brighter perspectives and darker dreams. Bradbury has introduced his novel with a quotation from Yeats: "Man is in love, and loves what vanishes." He adds others, but we will perhaps agree that the line from Yeats is text enough . . . but let Bradbury himself have the final word, concerning one of Green Town's fascinations for the two dream-children of whom he has written;

"As for my gravestone? I would like to borrow that great barber-pole from out front of the town shoppe, and have it run at midnight if you happened to drop by my mound to say hello. And there the old barberpole would be, lit, its bright ribbons twining up out of mystery, turning, and twining away up into further mysteries, forever. And if you come to visit, leave an apple for the ghosts."

An apple . . . or maybe a dead rat and a string to swing it on.

7

Richard Matheson's
The Shrinking Man
(1956) is another case of a fantasy novel packaged as science fiction in a rationalistic decade when even dreams had to have some sort of basis in reality—and this mislabeling of the book has continued right up to the present, for no good reason other than this is how publishers do things. "One of the most incredible Science Fiction classics of all time!" booms the cover of the recent Berkley reissue, ignoring the fact that a story in which a man shrinks at the steady rate of one-seventh of an inch a day has really gone beyond even the furthest realms of science fiction.

Matheson, like Bradbury, has no real interest in hard science fiction. He brings forth an obligatory amount of mumbo-jumbo (my favorite is when a doctor exclaims over Scott Carey's "incredible catabolism") and then drops it. We know that the process which eventually results in Scott Carey's being chased through his own basement by a black widow spider begins when he is doused by a curtain of sparkling radioactive spray; the radioactivity interacts with some bug spray he had ingested into his system a few days earlier. It is this double play that has caused the shrinking process to begin. It is the most minimal nod at rationality, a mid-twentieth-century version of pentagrams, mystic passes, and evil spells. Luckily for us, Matheson, like Bradbury, is more interested in Scott Carey's heart and mind than in his incredible catabolism.

It's worth noting that in
The Shrinking Man
we're back to the old radioactive blues again, and to the idea that horror fiction helps us to externalize in symbolic form whatever is really troubling us. It is impossible to see
The Shrinking Man
separated from its background of A-bomb tests, ICBMs, the "missile gap," and strontium-go in the milk. If we look at it this way, Matheson's novel (his second published book, according to John Brosnan and John Clute, who collaborated on Matheson's entry in
The Science Fiction Encyclopedia
, citing Matheson's
I Am
Legend
as the first; I believe they may have overlooked an earlier Richard Matheson novel, a war story titled
The Beardless Warriors
) is no more science fiction than such Big Bug movies as
The Deadly Mantis
or
Beginning of the End
. But Matheson is doing more in
The Shrinking
Man
than having radioactive nightmares; the title of Matheson's novel alone suggests bad dreams of a more Freudian nature. Concerning
The Body Snatchers
, we'll remember Richard Gid Powers saying that Miles Bennell's victory over the pods is a direct result of Miles's resistance against depersonalization, his fierce individualism, and his defense of more traditional American values. These same things can be said about the Matheson novel, * with one important variation. It seems to me that

*Nor is this the only time that these two very different writers have taken up a similar theme. Both have written time-travel stories of men who are driven to escape a terrible present for a friendlier past: Finney's
Time and
Again
(1970), in which the hero returns to turn-of-the-century times on America's east coast, and Matheson's
Bid
Time Return
(1975), in which the hero returns to turn-of-the century times on America's west coast. In both cases, their desire to escape what Powers calls "cultural depersonalization" is a factor, but more different treatments of the idea—and different outcomes—cannot be imagined.

while Powers is right in suggesting that
The Body Snatchers
is in large part about the depersonalization, even the annihilation of the free personality in our society,
The Shrinking
Man
is a story about the free personality's loss of power and growing impotency in a world increasingly controlled by machines, red tape, and a balance of terror where future wars are planned with one eye always cocked toward an "acceptable kill ratio." In Scott Carey we see one of the most inspired and original symbols of this modern devaluation of human currency ever created. Carey muses at one point that he is not shrinking at all; that instead, the world is growing larger. But seen either way—devaluation of the individual or inflation of the environment—the result is the same: as Scott shrinks, he retains his essential individuality but gradually loses more and more control over his world anyway. Also like Finney, Matheson sees his work as "just a story," and one he is not even particularly in touch with anymore. His comments: