But Enough About You: Essays (35 page)

“You worthless . . . bastard,” begins a mock-malevolent letter to his good friend Tom Wolfe, in response to a letter Wolfe wrote to him while on a lecture tour in Italy, “I just got your letter of Feb 25 from Le Grande Hotel in Roma, you swine! Here you are running around . . . Italy in that filthy white suit at a thousand bucks a day . . . while I’m out here in the middle of these . . . frozen mountains in a death-battle with the taxman & nursing cheap wine while my dogs go hungry & my cars explode and a legion of nazi lawyers makes my life a . . . Wobbly nightmare. . . . You decadent pig . . . you thieving pile of albino warts. . . . The hammer of justice looms, and your filthy white suit will become a flaming shroud!”

Reading Hunter Thompson is like using gasoline for aftershave—bracing. “His voice is sui generis,” writes David Halberstam in the foreword. “It is not to be imitated, and I can’t think of anything worse than for any young journalist to try to imitate Hunter.”

So true. Thompson’s maniac style—and pharmacology—made him a folk hero on college campuses about the time these letters were written. Garry Trudeau made him into the character Duke in “Doonesbury.” (Trudeau is referred to here in a letter to Thompson’s lawyer as “that dope-addled nazi cartoonist.”)

Reading these letters does make one consider how relatively pallid our own times are, compared with the stomping mad epoch in which he wrote them. Assassinations, Vietnam, Nixon. Today’s big issues are prescription drugs for the elderly and whither-the-Middle-East-peace-process.
^I
An amphetamine-crazed, Wild Turkey–swilling Hunter Thompson on the press bus today would probably be put off at the first stop, as the British writer Will Self was a few years ago when he was discovered taking heroin aboard Prime Minister John Major’s press plane. It’s doubtful that Thompson’s antics—setting fire to the door of the Jimmy Carter aide Hamilton Jordan’s New York hotel room in 1976—would be looked on as merely
scampish by today’s PC commissars. This isn’t to suggest his antics didn’t eventually wear thin—as anyone who ever sat through one of his college-lecture-circuit performances will tell you—but man was it fun at the time.

The question that lingers is, how much of it was actually
true
? How much of it was journalism, as opposed to something between “new journalism” and out-and-out fiction? The historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited these letters and has written a fine introduction, concludes, “It would be a mistake to claim that
Fear and Loathing in America
answers the question of whether Thompson writes fiction or nonfiction.”

Hm. We find Thompson writing frantic letters to his lawyer Sandy Berger, threatening the Washington writer Sally Quinn and
Esquire
magazine with legal action because the magazine has published an excerpt from her book in which she quotes him saying, “at least 45 percent of what I write is true.” He’s a bit concerned what effect this might have on his employers. A few pages later, in a letter to Quinn, he writes that he usually tells people that
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
was “60 percent–80 percent” true, “for reasons that should be perfectly obvious.” Earlier on, in a letter to Bill Cardoso of
The Boston Globe
, who had coined the term “gonzo journalism,” he calls one of his own articles for
Scanlan’s Monthly
“a classic of irresponsible journalism.” The clincher comes in a letter to his Random House editor, in which he admits that the book “was a very conscious attempt to simulate drug freakout. . . . I didn’t really make up anything—but I did, at times, bring situations & feelings I remember from other scenes to the reality at hand.” He later wrote to the same editor, “I have never had much respect or affection for journalism.”

One feels Brinkley’s pain, but the reasonable reader is left to infer that Thompson’s reportage had an . . . impressionistic element—for which his fans, including this one, are profoundly grateful. These untidy letters are welcome, showing us as they do a great American original in his lair. But a word of advice: If one of his peacocks or Dobermans comes at you, be very, very afraid.

—
The New York Times
, December 2000

I
. This was written in December 2000.

In an episode of the hit TV show
Mad Men
, set in 1962, one of the characters is skeptical about a planned business trip to the West Coast. He asks his boss in a smug New York City way, “What’s in L.A., anyway?”

The boss, Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm, smiles coolly: “The Jet Propulsion Lab? Ray Bradbury?”

It’s a throwaway line, a fleeting tip of the hat by
Mad Men
’s creator Matthew Weiner to the ultimate Writer’s Writer: Ray Douglas Bradbury, who, as I type these words, is one day shy of his eighty-ninth birthday here on Planet Earth. The middle name derives from Douglas Fairbanks, an idol of a different sort, from another era.

Ray Bradbury published his first short story in 1938, which means that he has been a working author for seventy-one years. He is a self-professed “sprinter” at the short story, rather than a “marathon runner” novelist. It is hard to think of a writer who has done more with the short story form than Ray Bradbury. According to his able biographer, Sam Weller (
The Bradbury Chronicles
, 2005), he has written one every week since he started. By my math, that comes to 3,640. The “Also by” page of a recently published book of his essays,
Bradbury Speaks
, lists thirty-two titles.

Many writers are prolific. What perhaps most distinguishes Ray Bradbury is his influence on other writers, to say nothing of his readers. In the pages of Mr. Weller’s book, you’ll find tributes from and friendships with a diverse group: Bernard Berenson, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Stephen King, Federico Fellini, François Truffaut (who managed
completely
to screw up the film version of
Fahrenheit 451
), John Huston (for whom Ray wrote the screenplay to his
Moby-Dick
), R. L. Stine, Buzz Aldrin (among dozens of astronauts), Walt Disney, John Steinbeck, Charles Laughton, Rod Steiger, the legendary editor Bob Gottlieb (who helped to shape many of
these stories), Sam Peckinpah, and Steve Martin. I’ll stop there, other than to say this is but a partial list of Ray Bradbury’s fan club.

Glittery names, to be sure, but his influence runs even deeper. Literally, it occurs to me. Whenever I’m on a subway, I’m always curious to see what books—if any—kids are reading these days. And the two books that I routinely see teenagers reading, intently at that, are
Atlas Shrugged
and
Fahrenheit 451
. The next most-often-sighted book is
Dandelion Wine
(1957), which many Bradburians insist is his finest work.

Ray Bradbury has covered the world—indeed, universe—with his themes: small-town America, Mars, fantasy, horror, and science fiction. You could even go so far as to say that we live today in a world that was prefigured by Ray Bradbury.
Fahrenheit 451
, published in 1953, anticipated an age dominated by television, wall-sized plasma-screen TV, and even Sony Walkman–like devices. One of the most chilling stories in this collection, “The Veldt,” published at the start of the TV era, today reads like an Elijah-like warning against surrendering ourselves to the false Edens of the vast wasteland and its bastard offspring, video games.

There are some ironies here in being warned against all this by one of the most famous writers of science fiction. (He prefers to be known as a writer of fantasy.) But few writers have a crater on the moon named for one of their books (Dandelion Crater, named by the crew of
Apollo 15
) or have consulted on the U.S. pavilion for a World’s Fair, or on an EPCOT exhibit at Disney World. You’ll learn in Weller’s book that Ray was also the inspiration for the design of a number of leading—brace yourself—shopping malls in America. Then, of course, there’s the Ray Bradbury Park in his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois. Bradbury is that rarity in America: the writer who has made his hometown unequivocally proud.

Any appreciation of him must begin in Waukegan, where a robotic stork or Martian obstetrician dropped him down the chimney on August 22, 1920. That was the year Prohibition began, the first commercial radio broadcast was made, Harding was elected, and F. Scott Fitzgerald married (don’t do it, Scott!) Zelda. Other nota
ble births that year: Isaac Asimov, America’s most graphomaniacal sci-fi writer; and Alex Comfort, author of
The Joy of Sex
, a book that, like so many of Ray’s, brought a whole lotta pleasure to a whole lotta people. In 2001, Ray told
Salon
: “Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby?”

The town Ray Bradbury grew up in is very much the Green Town of the
Dandelion Wine
stories. The very first story, “The Night,” begins, “You are a child in a small town.” And there you suddenly are, in a magical and often mystical world of grandparents and pie smells and fireflies and the bang of the screen door.
And there are things in the woods beyond.
Another story, “Farewell Summer,” was originally included in
Dandelion Wine
but was cut. It’s haunting. It will take you back to that summer in your own youth when you realized that it
wasn’t
going to last, and that there were some seriously scary things out there beyond the woods.

“Grow up?” Ray commented once, after sadly watching a boy balk at entering a toy store in Sausalito. “What does that mean? I’ll tell you: It doesn’t mean anything.”

There’s a rare note of contempt in that statement, and it’s telling. Ray Bradbury is a sunny, decent, loving, gregarious, generous man, both on the page (at least when he’s not scaring the bejeezus out of you) and in person. The joyousness and zest that he brings to his work—even to the darker works—seem (to me, at least) to arise out of his eternal boyishness. Bradbury has no Inner Child, only an Outer one. On the page, he’s Douglas (note the Fairbanksian name) Spaulding of the
Dandelion
stories. Douglas is a Huck Finn: prototypically Midwestern, a rule-breaker, adventurer, and dreamer. (Odd, come to think of it, that nowhere in the literature about Bradbury have I found a single reference to Twain. Perhaps it’s not true, as Ray’s fellow Illinosian Ernest Hemingway said, that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn
.”) But to paraphrase Hemingway, all literature by Bradbury certainly comes from Buck Rogers, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Sherwood Anderson, Herman Melville, John Steinbeck, William Butler Yeats, and of course Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli.

Who?

Well, okay, I hadn’t heard of him either: the nineteenth-century Italian astronomer who discovered the allegedly man-made channels on Mars (permanently mistranslated into English as “canals,”), providing Ray Bradbury with the inspiration for
The Martian Chronicles
.

Bradbury is perhaps the standout autodidact of late-twentieth-century American literature. His parents couldn’t afford college during the Depression, so he hit the library—three days a week, for ten years. Libraries were his—to use the Spanish word—
querencia
(“loved place”—in bullfighting, the spot in the ring where the bull feels safe). He was haunted by the destruction of the Royal Library of Alexandria, by the thought of all those books, burning. That obsessive worry, coupled with memories of Hitler-era book burnings and the excesses of the McCarthy era, ultimately inspired his best-known work,
Fahrenheit 451
, set in a future where the firemen start fires.

He wrote that book in the stacks at the UCLA library, on rented typewriters, inserting dimes into slots for a half hour of typing time. Hugh Hefner, another fellow Illinosian, liked the manuscript so much that he serialized it in issues 2, 3, and 4 of his racy new magazine,
Playboy
. A half-century later, the phrase “Fahrenheit 451” has thoroughly permeated the language. Michael Moore filched it for his documentary about the Iraq war, later apologizing to an unflattered and unamused Bradbury. The danger—now—is of another kind. As he put it in 1979, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

As he approaches his ninth decade, he remains a tireless and ardent voice for reading and libraries. Recently,
The New York Times
ran a page 1 story on his fund-raising efforts on behalf of the Ventura County Library. The
Times
photo shows him holding a sign that says
APPLAUSE
! (
Very
Bradburian). The caption: “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries.” A few paragraphs down one comes across this: “Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine, and I’d like to spend more time with her.” The story notes that a spokesperson for Ms. Derek confirmed that the two are friends, and said
that Ms. Derek “would like to see some more of Mr. Bradbury, too.” Also in the story is a red-hot diatribe against the Internet. Don’t get him started on
that
.

“The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs, and books, and other things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table . . .

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

This is not the voice of a crank but that of a word lover who has spent his life creating stories about worlds far more exotic and wonderful than anything dreamed up by a video-game programmer or cyberfabulist. He’s amusingly scathing on the subject of the blogosphere and Internet chat rooms. “Who do you want to talk to? All those morons who are living across the world somewhere? You don’t even want to talk to them at home.”