But Enough About You: Essays (36 page)

In 1995, he rather bravely told a college audience: “I don’t understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway. Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?” The answer now, fifteen years later, is: more or less everyone. How it will all play out is anyone’s guess. My own is that Ray Bradbury is for the ages. He has been drawing people together for decades, by telling stories.

John Updike once said that the whole publishing process—printing, distribution, reviewing, promotion—was just a way of getting a book into the stacks of a small-town library somewhere slightly west of Kansas, where a teenage boy is looking for something to read.

That wasn’t quite how it worked in my case. I was twelve or thirteen, about Doug Spaulding’s age, clutching an illicitly obtained copy of
Playboy
. And here you may snort with derision, as you did when Mr. Clinton told us that he didn’t inhale. But God’s truth and pinky swear: what caught my attention wasn’t Miss Whatevermonth but
the cover line saying, “New Fiction by Ray Bradbury.” It was the story about the time-traveling safari where you could go back and shoot a dinosaur—
so long as you stayed on the wooden walkway and didn’t disturb anything
. I can still remember getting to the last paragraph and feeling the skin prickle at the back of my neck.

I got that same prickle rereading some of the stories in here. It seems to me ironic—to say the least—that someone with Bradbury’s profoundly sunny disposition should be able to induce such gooseflesh. But take it from a far better source—Stephen King—who wrote in a memoir, “Without Ray Bradbury, there would be no Stephen King, at least as he grew. Bradbury was one of my nurturing influences, first in the EC comics, then in
Weird Tales.
 . . . What was striking was how far down into the viscera he was able to delve in those stories—how far beyond the prudish stopped-point of his 1940s contemporaries. In that sense, Ray was to the horror story what D. H. Lawrence was to the story of sexual love.”

Here’s a paragraph, from “The Next in Line,” in which a husband and wife tour the catacombs of Guanajuato and walk between two rows of mummified cadavers:

There was an embarrassment of horror. You started with the first man on your right, hooked and wired upright against the wall, and he was not good to look upon, and you went on to the woman next to him who was unbelievable and then to a man who was horrendous and then to a woman who was very sorry she was dead and in such a place as this.

Do you hear an echo of Hemingway in there? A few pages on, there’s an unmistakable echo of the original master of American horror, Edgar Allan Poe, as the cemetery’s docent shows the horrified couple a case of premature burial:

Believe me, señor, rigor mortis pounds upon no lids. Rigor mortis screams not like this, nor twists nor wrestles to rip free nails, señor, or prise boards loose hunting for air, señor. All these others are open of mouth, sí, because they were not in
jected with the fluids of embalming, but theirs is a simple screaming of muscles, señor. This señorita, here, hers is the muerte horrible.

I myself have seen these grotesques in Guanajuato. Bradbury missed nothing; or as Poe might have put it, “caught all.”

Turn, then, to “The Parrot Who Met Papa,” one of the most delicious, inventive, and downright funny short stories anywhere, in which he channels—canals?—Hemingway and Poe again. This is Bradbury at his most antic: “The final Hemingway novel of all time! Never written but recorded in the brain of a parrot! Holy Jesus!”

Bradbury is a master at the ending that sucks your breath away, and in this he seems very much in the Maupassant/Saki/O. Henry tradition. As I sat down to reread the stories here, I found myself wondering how many of them had been adapted for TV’s
The Twilight Zone
, whose amazing twist endings left my circa 1962 generation buzzing for days.

The answer, oddly, is only one. Bradbury sold “I Sing the Body Electric!” to Rod Serling, but Serling went back on his word that he wouldn’t change it, and left out a key scene. Bradbury never quite forgave him. Later, Serling admitted having lifted parts of
The Martian Chronicles
, and apologized. One speculates: if there had been no Bradbury, would Rod Serling have come up with
The Twilight Zone
?

For a man who never flew on an airplane until he was sixty-two years old, and who has never had a driver’s license, Bradbury has seen a bit of the world and returned with wonderful stories, especially here in “McGillahee’s Brat,” a story of an encounter with a beggar woman in Dublin. Therein lies—another—tale.

One of Bradbury’s most famous short stories is “The Fog Horn.” It came to the attention of the director John Huston, who invited him to come to Ireland with his family for seven months to write the screenplay for his adaptation of
Moby-Dick
. That tumultuous, not exactly fun experience is related in Ray’s novel
Green Shadows, White Whale
(1992). Rereading “The Fog Horn,” with the Huston–
Moby-Dick
connection in mind, one comes across an almost eerie number of Melvillian tropes within two paragraphs: “a cold
November evening” . . . the ocean “rolls and swells a thousand shapes” . . . “the God-light flashing out from [the lighthouse]” . . . “They never came back, those fish, but don’t you think for a while they thought they were in the Presence?”

Another fan of Ray Bradbury was Christopher Isherwood, the British expat lover of W. H. Auden, and L.A.-based mystic. Isherwood was a friend of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard; the three of them were early experimenters with LSD and mescaline. Weller’s biography tells the story of Bradbury receiving a glowing, highbrow review of
The Martian Chronicles
from Isherwood. It was a welcome signal from the world of Serious Lit that they considered him no mere writer of pulp fiction.

Bradbury formed a friendship with Isherwood and Heard, and through them with Huxley, author of
Brave New World
and
The Doors of Perception
(the title, from William Blake, would later become the name of Jim Morrison’s rock band). Heard was especially complimentary, telling Bradbury, “You’re not a writer, you’re a poet.” Huxley and the others were at this point deeply into mescaline—under a doctor’s supervision (personally, I always found it more fun
not
under a doctor’s supervision). They tried to get the author of
The Martian Chronicles
to tune in, turn on, and drop out, dangling before him the prospect of marvelous and abundant perceptions. Bradbury demurred, telling the psychedelically inclined trio: “I don’t want to have a lot of perceptions. I want to have one at a time. When I write a short story, I open the trapdoor on the top of my head, take out one lizard, shut the trapdoor, skin the lizard, and pin it up on the wall.”

There are some quite amazing lizards in this collection, of every description. It’s strange to consider that they all somehow sprang from the mind of a once-small boy from Waukegan, Illinois. That may be putting it a bit disingenuously. The boy from Waukegan moved to L.A. in his early teens. At the age of fourteen, he wrestled his roller skates away from Al Jolson (who’d purloined them for his onstage act). He got W. C. Fields’s autograph one day outside the Paramount Studios. Fields told him, “There you are, you little son of a bitch.” At about the same time, Bradbury persuaded a young and
dapper George Burns to let him watch him do his radio broadcast. He sold newspapers on the street corner, got his first stories published in
Weird Tales
at half a cent a word. Years later, he was still in the same town, presenting an award to Steven Spielberg. And there in a corner of the room was George Burns. They hugged. An American story.

Spielberg said of Ray Bradbury that his “most significant contribution to our culture is showing us that the imagination has no foreseeable boundaries. . . . Today we need Ray Bradbury’s gifts more than ever, and his stories have made him immortal.”

Tributes from Stephen King and Steven Spielberg. One drools. As jacket quotes go, you really can’t do better than that. Toward the end of Mr. Weller’s biography, attempting to sum up this un-sum-upable man, he takes note of Bradbury’s prodigious output. Bradbury’s comment: “Every time I’ve completed a new short story or novel . . . I say to the mailbox, ‘There, Death, again one up on you.’ ”

When he was twelve back in Illinois, he met at a circus a Mr. Electrico, who took the boy under his wing and told him, “Live forever!” Bradbury adopted that as a mantra, and here he is, all these years later, still living, still writing, still championing libraries and reading—leaving a little time, of course, for Bo Derek.

Literary immortality is tricky to predict. The author of
Moby-Dick
was all but forgotten until right about the time Ray Bradbury was born. But these hundred stories, only a sampling of the canon, surely amount to a miraculous legacy. Each one, whether about the young boy in Green Town or a heartbroken dinosaur or a mischievous animatronician or a man at war with his own skeleton or a homicidal infant or a grandmother who has gone up to her room quietly to die, comes from the heart of a man with a soul as big as the Mars Ritz.

“My job,” he told college students in 1995, “is to help you fall in love.”

So we did.

—Introduction to
The Stories of Ray Bradbury
, Everyman’s Library, 2010

Has it really been almost thirty years since
Animal House
first filled the big screen? We grow old. The movie, on the other hand, hasn’t aged a bit. “Double secret probation,” “See if you can guess what I am now? I’m a zit! Get it?” and the immortal chant “To-ga, to-ga!” are classic, time-defying, laugh-out-loud moments encased in celluloid amber. I’ve watched the movie with my father, now eighty, and my son, fourteen; both were on the floor gasping for breath.

Comes now Chris Miller, Dartmouth Class of ’63, who wrote the screenplay along with Harold Ramis and Douglas Kenney, to give us, as his subtitle demurely puts it, “the awesomely depraved saga” of Alpha Delta Phi, the fraternity whose bacchanals and outrages provided the inspiration for the movie, along with Ramis’s and Kenney’s own experiences of Greek life. (Not to be confused with Plato or Pythagoras.) Miller calls this book,
^I
on its cover, “a mostly lucid memoir.” It’s unclear whether
lucid
is a typographical error. Miller may well have intended
lurid
.

His book is sophomoric, disgusting, tasteless, vile, misogynist, chauvinist, debased, and at times so unspeakably revolting that any person of decent sensibility would hurl it into the nearest Dumpster. I couldn’t put it down. I make this self-indicting admission with all due trepidation, but there it is. For better or worse, this an utterly hilarious book.

Toga-wise, Miller’s book is to
Animal House
, the movie, what
Caligula
is to Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove’s
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
. There’s enough radioactive material in here to shock everyone, and perhaps that’s its strength: it’s a nuclear bomb—and a dirty one at that—of political incorrectness.

It’s hard to imagine this book being published in the 1980s or
’90s. That it’s appearing now, at a time when HBO’s hit series
Entourage
, a guy’s version of
Sex and the City
, is playing, may indicate that some paradigm shift is under way. There seems to be some resurgent testosterone in the body cultural. Either that, or someone spilled a giant bottle of Old Spice over the country.

Animal House
—the book—also manages somehow to be elegiac. How Miller accomplishes that is truly beyond me, but he does. By the end, he has you—depraved me, at any rate—almost sighing for the good old days. Polymorphously perverse it may have been, still it all sounds like it was a blast.

I seem to be digging myself in deeper. I hereby take back everything I have said so far. It’s a disgusting, horrid, loathsome book. Miller should be ashamed. No—he should be executed. I issue a fatwa.

Normally, a reviewer quotes from the book. However, since there are very few sentences in these 321 pages that do not contain an obscenity or moral atrocity, we will not be quoting extensively from the text. The more’s the pity, because Miller is a genuinely witty writer. He’s also a crackerjack storyteller. Wince you may—and if you have any modesty, you should—but bored I guarantee you will not be.

There must be
something
quotable. How about:

“Doberman had crawled onto the hood of the hearse and licked the bugs off the windshield, explaining to Flea, who was driving, ‘I just wanted to make sure you could see.’ ”

Or this description, right out of Jane Austen, of a fraternity brother:

“Rat’s hair was short as a marine’s, his belly hung over his belt, and he wore Dumptruck-type glasses, big with black rims. He’d gotten his name last week.
The Adelphian
naming thing had worked again—he resembled a big, bloated water rat, creeping out of some Amsterdam canal, dripping with stuff you didn’t want to know about.”

Or this touching moment, in which Pinto—I can’t go into the derivation of his fraternity name—waxes nostalgic about the really good old days: “Pinto’s eyes were starry, hearing about the ‘ooooold AD’s,’ as the brothers referred to their forebears. He loved these
tales of a fabled, earlier time when the AD house was at some kind of crazed behavioral zenith and outrageous Adelphians strode the earth like depraved gods, doing whatever they felt like, and the good times never stopped.” Given what Pinto and his brothers were doing in 1960, it beggars the imagination what deplorable antics their predecessors were up to; in fact, I don’t
want
to know.

Anyone remember “norgling”? What a “double hogback growler” was? Sorry, can’t explain that one, either. There are, on the other hand, a few relatively innocent terms, like the synonyms for breasts:
jehoshaphats
,
ba-boos
,
wazookies
,
ka-hogas
, and of course
gabongas
. The Inuit language contains—what?—seventeen different words for “snow”? The ADs had twice that many for “vomit.” But vomiting is but one of the many bodily functions extensively, indeed, exhaustively explored in the pages of
The Real Animal House
.