The New Ray Bradbury Review : Number 4 (2015) [1 ed.] 9781631011672, 9781606352533

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THE NEW RAY BRADBURY REVIEW The New Number 1 (2008)

Ray BRadBuRy Number 4 (2015) Review Edited by Jonathan R. Eller Editor: William F. Touponce Production Editor: David E. Spiech

NTER F OR E CE H T

IE S

BR

D

Y RA

CRBS AD

T B U RY S

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Published by The Kent State University Press

The Kent State University Press kent, ohio

EDITORIAL STAFF Jonathan R. Eller Editor Robin Condon

Associate Editor

Joseph D. Kaposta

Associate Editor

David Spiech

Production Editor

Mattie Hensley

Research Associate

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Donn Albright

Pratt Institute

Jeffrey Kahan

University of La Verne

Sarah Lawall

University of Massachusetts

Phil Nichols

University of Wolverhampton

THE NEW RAY BRADBURY REVIEW Number 4 (2015)

CONTENTS Editor’s Preface: Blind Vitality Jonathan R. Eller 7 Introduction: Editing Bradbury’s Story Openings William F. Touponce 9 Figure One—Twaddle

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From the Archives: A Selection of Ray Bradbury’s Fragments E dited by William F. Touponce 15 Part One: Story Ideas 1 MY DAUGHTERS’ LIVES 2 THE MOUNTING PINS 3 THE BALANCING MACHINE 4 RICHARD THE CHICKEN-HEARTED 5 THE SOUND OF WINGS 6 THE MAN WHO RETURNED EACH DAY 7 THE EXPERIMENT 8 SPACE COLLISION 9 THE WOMAN OF A THOUSAND LIVES or THE TRAVELLER 10 THE MINSTRELS 11 MOORL 12 There Was a Castle Upon 13 THE BUTCHER, THE BAKER, THE CANDLESTICK MAKER 14 THE CHOCOLATE PARTY 15 THE EARTHEN CYCLE 16 DARK IS THE NAME 17 THE DARK YEARS Figure Two—The Chocolate Party

15 16 16 16 17 17 18 18 20 20 21 21 22 23 24 24 25 27 3

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Part Two: Fragments: Story Openings and Endings 1 ADDRESSEE DECEASED 2 THE DIGGERS 3 SOMETHING TO TELL AND NO WAY TO TELL IT 4 THE DAY EVERYTHING BEGAN TO HAPPEN 5 THE NET 6 [“Shut up, you!”] 7 THE ALTAR 8 THE LONG WAY HOME 9 THE GARGOYLE 10 HOBNAILS RETREAT 11 ANOTHER LOVE STORY 12 APOLLO/ADONIS TRANSCENDENT 13 DEAD BUT NOT BURIED 14 THE ATTIC Figure Three—Coming up the road

28 29 29 30 30 31 31 32 32 33 34 34 35 35 36

Part Three: Fragments: Extended Story Openings 1 A BREATH OF AIR 37 2 A BREATH OF FIRE 40 3 “A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY” 42 4 AS FRIEND REMEMBERED NOT 43 5 AN EVIL MAN HAS AN EASY JOB 44 6 AN OLD STORY BUT NEW 46 7 THE ARMS OF THE VENUS DE MILO 47 8 BACKWARD O BACKWARD TURN TIME IN THY FLIGHT 50 9 BEEK’S MOTHER-IN-LAW 51 10 BLESSED ARE THE CHILDREN 52 11 CAMERA OBSCURA 54 12 CAPTAIN NEMO, TO YOU! 55 13 ATTIC 58 14 THE ATTIC 59 15 THE BIRDS 60 16 CHIMNEY SWEEP 62 17 WITH A DOOR LIKE A SUMMER SKY 64 Figure Four—Colored windows 66 Figure Five—Conscience! 67



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The Albright Collection: Supplementary Fragments List Joseph D. Kaposta 68 Fragmentary Futures: Bradbury’s Illustrated Man Outlines—and Beyond Jonathan R. Eller 70

Copyright © 2015 by The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Address permissions requests to: The Kent State University Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions, PO Box 5190, Kent, OH 44242-0001. Story fragments and illustrations are copyright © 2015 by The Ray Bradbury Living Trust and are reprinted with the permission of the Ray Bradbury Living Trust and Don Congdon Associates, Inc. These fragments and illustrations may not be quoted, reproduced, used or adapted in any way without the permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. and the Ray Bradbury Living Trust. isbn 978-1-60635-253-3 Manufactured in the United States of America To order call 800-247-6553 or order online at www.kentstateuniversitypress.com. The New Ray Bradbury Review is edited by Jonathan R. Eller at The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, Institute for American Thought, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, 902 E. New York Street, ES 0010, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202, and published periodically by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242. The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies accepts no responsibility for statements of fact or opinion made by contributors. Send inquiries and submissions to Jonathan Eller, Director, The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at [email protected]. Submissions to The New Ray Bradbury Review should be typed and double-spaced in 12-point Times on letter-sized paper. Electronic submissions on disk or via e-mail must be in Microsoft Word. If photographs, diagrams, or other graphic material accompany the document, include each in a file separate from the text or send them as individual e-mail attachments. Scanned greyscale images must be in TIFF format at 300 dpi or higher resolution; line images should be in TIFF format at 1200 dpi or higher resolution. Any material owned by third parties must be accompanied by complete copyright information for proper acknowledgment. Authors are required to obtain written permission from the rights holder(s) of such material submitted for inclusion in The New Ray Bradbury Review.

The cover illustration, Ray Bradbury’s “Mixed Metaphors” (1997), is used with permission of the estate of Ray Bradbury and Don Congdon Associates, Inc. This drawing may not be adapted, copied, stored, or published in any format without the permission of the author’s agents and Executor.

Editor’s Preface Blind Vitality “No memory wishes to be lost. These special children of the senses merely wait to be born.” This observation, taken from Bradbury’s unpublished 1993 essay “Dry Spell, Arizona,” frames his gentle reminder that all writers must be patient. He would always be patient with his own Muse, relying on mysterious upwellings from what he sometimes called “the old Subcon” to spark an unexpected blaze of creativity. His chipped and battered 1950s clipboard, bearing a series of self-directed admonitions typed on torn paper labels, includes a template for the method he devised early in his career to sustain each blaze. “Remember Every Week: To Throw things on Paper with Great Vigor and Blind Vitality, to See what Will happen In the Explosions That Follow! To Hell With Thinking! Do!” Bradbury’s Blind Vitality resulted in a prolific and highly influential seven-decade career, but it also left a decades-long debris field of fragmentary works and unfulfilled idea notes that Donn Albright, Ray Bradbury’s longtime friend and principal bibliographer, painstakingly pulled together and preserved. William F. Touponce, founding editor of The New Ray Bradbury Review, traced the development of many themes across a wide range of these fragments, and presented a groundbreaking thematic sequence of Bradbury fragments in the third issue of the Review. Dr. Touponce, now professor emeritus, has made my job as his successor infinitely easier by bringing together—and writing an introduction for—another group of fragments that further extends our understanding of Bradbury’s creativity and his process of composition. It’s well worth noting in this preface that Bill Touponce’s contributions to Bradbury studies (and to the comparative study of authorship and literary genres in general) extend well beyond the pages of the Review; since retiring, he has authored Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys (Scarecrow, 2013). I’m also deeply grateful to Bill for his service and vision as cofounder and first director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, and as founding general editor for The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, a multivolume critical edition published, like the Review, by The Kent State University Press. I look forward to Bill’s continuing good counsel and friendship in the coming years. The fragments that he has gathered and introduced for this fourth issue of The New Ray Bradbury Review are presented in three categories: (1) story ideas, (2) story openings and endings, and (3) extended story openings. Because this issue is a companion to the third, the fragments are followed by associate editor Joseph D. Kaposta’s listing of new fragments added to the Albright Collection since the comprehensive fragments compilation published in issue three. Ray Bradbury’s bequest of his remaining papers 7

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to Donn Albright, and Donn’s subsequent gift of many of these papers and books to the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies following Mr. Bradbury’s passing, has resulted in the discovery of the pages described in the new fragments listing. The issue concludes with my essay “Fragmentary Futures,” a survey of the evolving book outlines and future book timelines that share much of the Blind Vitality evident in the story fragments themselves. The fragments presented in this issue illustrate Bradbury’s progressive stages of creativity during story composition, and to that end some of the physical elements of presentation are preserved in layout. Bradbury’s in-line or interlineated revisions are indicated by carets inserted before and after the revision, and his cancellations are presented as strikethrough text. Spelling and capitalization are silently regularized unless they represent the author’s intent or preferred usage. Bradbury composed almost exclusively in typescript, but his fragments contain occasional titles, comments, or brief textual passages in his hand; these holograph passages are presented in italic type. Typed words that Bradbury underscored to show emphasis or to indicate a title are presented in their original underlined form. This convention prevents confusion with the presentation of Bradbury’s handwritten passages, but it also combines with the other conventions described above to preserve the “work-in-progress” quality of these unfinished stories. The overall effect is not intended as facsimile or even quasi-facsimile presentation, but is intended to impart the preliminary flavor of the fragments as Bradbury left them, so many years ago. “Better to try for a swift and exciting first draft in one day, than to dawdle along the way and risk being intellectual about a process as simple and basic as a heartbeat.” This core reflection on his composing process, buried within his lengthy 1964 Show magazine interview, barely hints at the hidden consequences for a writer like Bradbury—literally thousands of pages of story ideas and story openings where selfconscious rational thought extinguished the subconscious upwelling of character and scene early on, causing him to set these fragments aside for a day that never came. Herein you’ll find a record of heartbeats forever paused between diastole and systole, many of them rich in creative potential, and all of them offering insights that illuminate Bradbury’s remarkable range of imagination. Jonathan R. Eller

Introduction: Editing Bradbury’s Story Openings william f. touponce A beginning is a very delicate time. —Princess Irulan

Welcome to the fourth issue of The New Ray Bradbury Review. In this issue we continue to explore the textual worlds of Bradbury’s unfinished materials culled from his Nachlass, a preliminary survey of which was given in the previous issue (an updated supplement is provided in this volume). Someday it may be possible to date all of this story material and publish scholarly volumes encompassing all of it. But for now we must be content with a selection. But how shall we proceed with our selection? Bradbury, of course, never intended this material to be seen by his reading public. There are no aesthetic “works” here to edit, but only texts that reflect varying degrees of incompleteness. Nonetheless, I thought literary criticism and theory might come to the aid of editing. One way of presenting this material is to arrange Bradbury’s fragments thematically, as in the previous issue. As I explained in the introduction to that issue, a number of themes structure Bradbury’s imaginative universe, so that a theme about the magical space a house attic can provide runs through several of his published works (take the opening of Dandelion Wine, for example) and many fragments written at different times. Indeed, in the current volume, the reader will find several story fragments relating to attics as a space of magical consciousness. This is one way of showing the inner cohesion of the fragments, which is really that of Bradbury’s own creative mind. But as I was editing the fragments thematically, I was thinking of another equally valid way of presenting them. Literary scholars have long been drawn to the problems of ending a story (Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending), but I have always been equally intrigued by the openings of stories, for it is here that the most delicate and subtle strategies and devices of style are used to involve the reader in the story. Without these basic storytelling strategies—the enigma, the riddle—no one would continue reading the story. I thought presenting a selection of Bradbury’s story ideas and story openings by length (and also how the story might end, if he provided such information) would enable us to see a master storyteller at work doing what he does best—involving the reader in the distinctive atmosphere of a Bradbury story. We would have on display Bradbury’s creative mind in its most engaging form. Accordingly, I have made a selection based on what I thought were interesting openings and arranged them according to length. For a short story, interest has to 9

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be created quickly. Sometimes a strange conversation, or a startling metaphor, draws us in. Below are some brief comments on certain stories and narrative strategies that interested me. Aside from the difference in editing selection and arrangement, this volume follows the same editing regime as The New Ray Bradbury Review #3: spelling and capitalization are corrected silently (except where Bradbury had his own unique spelling). Every effort has been made to make the text clearly readable. The only exceptions to this rule are the interlineations in which Bradbury crossed out a word and added text above or below the line, and the handwritten afterthoughts, which I thought interesting to preserve. Several facsimile pages with Bradbury’s doodles have been included to show how he would continue a story in caricatures and drawings. In Part One and throughout I have arranged Bradbury’s story ideas according to the genres he chose to write in: fantasy, science fiction, horror—the fantastic genres—and, opposed to these, realism, though it should be acknowledged that Bradbury’s outlook is ultimately that of a magical, or fantastic, realist. Each of these genres has a different way of apprehending reality and a corresponding narrative strategy. The fantastic attracts and involves the reader through a reversal of narrative ground rules (see Eric Rabkin’s The Fantastic for discussion; the classic example here is Alice in Wonderland). The fantastic typically reverses, or inverts, the real world, often refreshing or recasting the literary devices and conventions of the past that have become worn out. The novel, on the other hand, involves a system of critical perspectives on an object, especially the realist novel. There are many varieties of realism, but they all acknowledge the importance of different perspectives on the world. These perspectives can be linked ultimately to a writer’s awareness of the social ideologies of his period (i.e., class-consciousness). We can see both realism as a system of perspectives and Bradbury’s more fantastic variety of it on the same page of the opening fragment, “My Daughters’ Lives.” In a very basic outline, Bradbury imagines writing a story in which we never see the narrator’s daughters, but only learn of them from the dozen or so men with whom they come into contact. Below this is a note for a story that reverses the familiar saying of “you can’t take it with you”: on his death a winemaker has ten thousand bottles of his best wine emptied into his grave. Further, his tombstone reads “HE DID TAKE IT WITH HIM!” thereby transforming the lugubrious genre of tombstone inscriptions. Perhaps it could be said that the system of perspectives in a realist novel is a kind of balancing machine. That is the premise of “The Balancing Machine,” in which an artist loses his perspective (becomes dissolute) in thinking himself selfsufficient and his own best critic. Interestingly, the opening paragraph of this story involves the reader in a scene at a penny arcade in which there are a number of perspectives/machines all operating at once. “Richard the Chicken-Hearted” is a story idea about a dog who is so comical that he “somehow refreshes” the old jokes that are applied to him.



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Both “The Sound of Wings” and “The Man Who Returned Each Day” are examples of fantastic, or magical, realism. In the former, a woman sees a set of wings growing on her husband’s back, signifying that he will leave her, and the second tells the story of a man who loves funerals and parks. Bradbury’s description of what the man enjoys in these funereal places reverses our normal perspectives on them. “The Experiment” has a science-fiction premise—that is, a what-if situation: could you possibly spend a hundred years alone in a small room on Mars if you knew you would be rewarded with $50 million, youth, and happiness? Also science-fictional is “Space Collision,” which vividly describes the sensations of passengers onboard a space rocket that collides with a meteor. There are indications that the sensations are in some way being simulated. “The Woman with a Thousand Lives” is a fantasy based on one of Bradbury’s female characters, Cecy, who appears in a number of his published stories (“The April Witch”). Because she can inhabit different minds and bodies, Cecy has “novelistic” potential, but will not quite create a system of perspectives herself. Instead, each week, presumably in a radio or television show, she will inhabit a different human character. “Moorl” is a fantasy creature inhabiting another world reached by the visions of a dreamer. Bradbury’s wonderfully metaphorical description of her as a kind of spirit of creative fantasy makes us want to read on. “There Was a Castle Upon” is a reverie in the Dunsany manner that creates a mood or atmosphere of a spectral castle. We want to read on and to discover what kinds of beings live there. “The Minstrels” is science fiction, imagining a world in which children are born to the music that obstetricians play. We are drawn in immediately to the strange scenario of sterilized musical instruments. So too are we amused at “The Chocolate Party” in which Bradbury envisages a future social ritual in which humans, aided by machines (the Sonovox), can regularly rid themselves of neurotic disturbances. “The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker” presents very clearly the outline for a realistic novel based on a system of perspectives. The object of this system is the life of a businessman, “and therefore a town.” We are given indications of what character perspectives or professions will be assigned to the novel in the list of characters, and also the problem inherent in such a process in the following page: this will only create a series of ‘specialist’ perspectives. No matter how individually dazzling (the description of the dentist is my favorite), they do not give us the image of totality, which is the perspective of the entire social body. That can be given only by the author himself who is “the specialist in the whole man,” who must slay the giant Goliath, a figure for the novel itself. This fragment is a good indication of Bradbury’s thoughts on novel writing and its dangers. “The Earthen Cycle” is not so much a novel project as a “realistic” meditation on the impermanence of human cultures in the face of natural forces, of form arising out of formlessness and then returning back again, in the Mexican landscape. It tries to capture something of the long temporal rhythms of another culture.

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The remaining fragments point unmistakably to Bradbury’s ongoing intentions to write an important novel reflecting the problems of modernity. “Dark Is the Name” is merely a prologue and a list of chapters about an ambivalent “dark ”’ character who embodies contradictions (“he dreamt but did not dream”). But “The Dark Years” is the outline of an early novel that Bradbury wrote and that is now lost (see critical discussion in Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, 199–201). Bradbury’s point-of-view character in this future period of nihilism is William Donne, an assassin, who is ironically a living symbol of Death. In addition to killing people in an arena, he also destroys the art of the past, in this case the Mona Lisa (Bradbury’s short story “The Smile” came out of this). The plot involves Donne becoming profoundly dissatisfied with his occupation, his attempt at suicide, and the efforts of the authorities to keep him alive and functioning. The novel outline marks the appearance of the abject hero in Bradbury’s postwar writings (another can be found in “Pillar of Fire” which Bradbury turned into a play). In Parts Two and Three, we have a selection of Bradbury’s story openings, and in some cases endings, mostly without any statement on his part of the idea or premise of the story. I find these pages fascinating for, as I have noted in the epigraph, a beginning is a very delicate time. We must enter into the realm of aesthetics because the opening has to grab our attention and interest on its own. Probably hundreds of ways of doing this exist, but I don’t think anyone has cataloged them. I cannot comment on each story opening, but in general one of Bradbury’s most frequently used strategies is to start with an enigma or mystery. Why has a letter been returned marked “deceased” (“Addressee Deceased”)? How can a man discover his own name on a tombstone (“The Diggers”)? How can a whole town appear to be painted in a short space of time (“The Day Everything Began to Happen”)? These are all so many ways of involving the reader in the solution to a mystery, what narratologists call the hermeneutic code (Roland Barthes, S/Z). Very often the title is an important clue to the mystery of the story. “The Gargoyle,” for instance, makes it clear that the story will center on this grotesque object and will probably be fantastic in its premise. Very soon we discover that the last remaining gargoyle will tell the story of the mysterious origins of the church to a young boy in a manner that is very reminiscent of the Notre Dame episode in Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree. Part of the excitement generated by a Bradbury story is the realization that the narrator is no longer entirely human. How exactly he or she got that way is part of the special mystery of the story (“Dead but Not Buried”). Among the extended openings, “A Friend of the Family” is an especially spooky instance of this strategy. The extended story openings of Part Three allow us to mark out a progress in Bradbury’s development as a writer. “A Breath of Air” is a story with a pulp science fiction premise: in the future, after a series of devastating wars, humans live underground in caves where oxygen is a precious commodity doled out to the survivors who vaguely remember the days when oxygen was free and completely taken for



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granted. The strategy of this story is defamiliarization, the making strange of objects that we take for granted, hardly noticing their presence in everyday life. It produces the particular effect of cognitive estrangement that has become associated with the genre of serious science fiction (in Frank Herbert’s Dune, it’s water that is defamiliarized). In almost the opposite way, “A Breath of Fire” tries to deal with the strangeness of scientific theories by familiarizing them as the effects of God’s breathing in the universe. With this type of story, Bradbury began to show clear stylistic signs that he had left the confines of pulp genre fiction far behind, in the process creating his own unique brand of humanistic, high-spirited fantasy literature. In “As Friend Remembered Not,” “An Evil Man Has an Easy Job,” “An Old Story but New,” and especially “The Arms of the Venus de Milo” and “Chimney Sweep,” Bradbury was devising a mature fantasy style that still has premises—the missing arms of a famous statue are in the possession of an eccentric collector who now wants to give them to the Louvre—but which unfolds a story while alluding to the narrative voice and style of Dickens and even Shakespeare. Among the humorous realistic pieces, like “Beek’s Mother-in-Law,” one can still find a story with a science-fiction premise. In “Blessed Are the Children,” for example, a machine might be invented to put a man in a child’s body in order to experience life for a day without mortality; the story is clearly part of Bradbury’s unique program to humanize technology. This new spirit of renewing old formulas can be found in such story collections as I Sing the Body Electric! (1969). Each reader will no doubt find his own favorites among the selections provided here. I cannot help but muse on the fact that one of the finest fragments Bradbury has left us is a story about a man who intends to restore the lost arms of the Venus de Milo. We have become so accustomed to the statue without its arms that restoring them might truly make the familiar strange! Readers of The New Ray Bradbury Review #3 will be interested to find that “Camera Obscura” is the story Bradbury finally devised from reading Edith Wharton’s short story, “Souls Belated.” Whether or not you prefer the old pulp Bradbury or the “literary” Bradbury, there is much to admire here and many mysteries to explore and savor. As always, then—enjoy!

Figure One—Twaddle



a selection of ray bradbury’s fragments

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From the Archives: A Selection of Ray Bradbury’s Fragments edited by william f. touponce

Part One Story Ideas MY DAUGHTERS’ LIVES ______________________________ Story of a man whose life is taken up with visits from his 4 daughters boyfriends, or husbands. The daughters are never seen, but we learn about each from seven, eight, ten, twelve different men. Screenplay? Teleplay idea? Do story of winemaker who had 10 thousand bottles of his best emptied in his grave after his death. On his Gravestone read: HE DID TAKE IT WITH HIM!

Reprinted with permission of the estate of Ray Bradbury and Don Congdon Associates, Inc. These excerpts may not be adapted, quoted, copied, stored, or published in any format without the permission of the author’s agents and Executor. © 2014 by the estate of Ray Bradbury. All rights to these excerpts are reserved by the Ray Bradbury Living Trust.

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THE MOUNTING PINS In the museum there are cases of insects suspended over squares of white cardboard, pierced through the chest or thorax with a long silver mounting pin. It is so strange to see them, impaled upon those pins, forever flying nowhere beneath glass. ---- Steve and Laurel in a great glass case with seventy other humans just like them; impaled upon huge silver needles that passed through their chest or abdomens and held them up into the shining light, like those specimens of insects at the museum, to be viewed by gigantic, curious faces ever above them............. THE BALANCING MACHINE He slid the quarter across the counter of the small dimly lighted booth and the woman jacked out twenty-five pennies from a little levered machine and poured them into his hands. Then he turned and went back, smiling amiably, toward his wife. She was waiting by the machine. Behind and beyond her people were peeking into penny crank movies, tossing balls down small bowling alleys, tilting pinball contraptions, weighing themselves, clasping electric shockers, testing their punch, taking their pictures. “Give me some.” She held out her hands. He gave her half the pennies and she turned and put one in the machine and began to shoved in the slotter. THEME: The Artist as Self-Sufficient critic...who, through self-assurance and carelessness, lets his art, heretofore perfect, become dissolute. ENDING: She was looking at him as he tore up the letter. He felt violently irritable. He did not want her looking at him. What’re you looking at? he demanded, shrilly? I was just thinking, she said. Well, don’t, for God sakes, think! he cried. From now on, she said, I’ll try not to. RICHARD THE CHICKEN-HEARTED a story of a dog. Richard The Chicken-Hearted was his name. We also referred to him as Grendel, the Wonder-Dog. We wondered what he was. Old joke. But old jokes were somehow refreshed when applied to Richard.



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THE SOUND OF WINGS It was the merest breath, a tremoring, a whisper. But yet it was there and no denying. There was a soft motion upon the air of the room in the dark as her husband moved and undressed for bed and turned about to slip on his pajama top, exposing his back. And there, yes there for a moment she thought she saw, in a great opening fan of thistled feather, bone and tissue, the spread of vast and incredible wings. Then, as the move of those wings stirred the summer night again, the husband turned, fixed his pajama-top in place, walked around the bed, and drew back the covers. Her eyes followed him and then returned to the place he had been, remembering the wings. She said nothing at all, and, hours later, finally went to sleep. [And she knows from this sign that he will leave her—that the wings mean he WILL go—and the story must tell of her quiet battle to make him shed the wings—she sets about finding ways to show her love—and—in the end—the wings are shed. R. ] The Man Who Returned Each Day THE MAN WHO RETURNED EACH DAY story idea. loves funerals and parks. He came to the graveyard every Monday and Thursday, alone. He alighted from the streetcar and walked among the green ways of the park, triumphant among the stones, alive while they were dead. “Tombstones, I love them. Cold stones, cut stones.” “And the withered wee flowers.” “Especially them.” “And the butterflies all about. Like flowers.” “And the warm day, the hot sunny tombstones, the smell of cooked granite.” “The hum of insects in the green, hot lighted ravine. All the light gathered there, as through immense green and glaring yellow cathedral windows. All water green light in sun yellow light. And the stream bubbling clearly along in crystal drops and spreads. Bird melting on the limbs. All of it, all of it. Insects knitting the whole green-gold pattern together with golden threads of flight. The impertinent darning needles plucking at drowsy leaves. Spiders constructing little moist harps between bush and bush. Flies pyramiding on steaming filth. Earth smelling dark. The sky atremble with heat wave, humming. And here the silent loam, the indestructible stone with such erasures in

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name, time, place, as are caused by wind or rain. The old anonymous stones, hollowed by the hurrying tread of the years, thinned to attrition by the time. All of this he loved. And the funeral rites. The quilted blanket, the bright clenched groups of flowers, the black mannequins in front with the small red eyed fountains of tears cascading. The minister closing his eyes, shutting his limp leather book raising his manicured hand into the dusty light, intoning the words. THE EXPERIMENT. “What if you knew that you had one hundred years of waiting ahead of you and that at the end of that time you would get rewards unparalleled, the most beautiful woman on Mars, fifty million dollars, youth, happiness, and more. Could you possibly then, sit out that one hundred years in a six foot long cell, seven feet high, well ventilated, with one window looking out upon a dead sea, three meals a day, no books to read, no one to talk to, no radio, nothing day after day, night after night, for 365 days times one hundred? Could you do that?” “I could try,” said Menlo, and put the paper down after reading it again. He looked up at the man behind the desk. “But I’m twenty six now. How do I know I’ll live that long.” “You’ll be in a cell protected from any sort of harm, disease, sudden death, or old age. One hundred years from today, you’ll still look, act and feel like a man of 26 years. We’ll see to that.” SPACE COLLISION an idea by Ray Bradbury SPACE COLLISION Bradbury The ‘passengers’ board the ‘rocket’ twenty to thirty at a time. They lie out on takeoff chairs as the ‘rocket’ blasts off, thundering. We hear the voices announcing the distances, a thousand, a million, then ten million, twenty, thirty million miles in space. Then:



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“Collision! Space Collision! Meteor through Number Four Engine Bulkhead! Atomic Reactor out of control! Explosion imminent! Explosion imminent! Abandon ship! Abandon ship!” The lights flash on. The ‘passengers’ are herded into the airlock. “All men to airlocks! All men to airlocks! Use space equipment! Use space equipment!” Then singly, or in pairs, the ‘passengers’ are locked into space-suits, led to the airlock door which opens upon empty space, and at a signal, thrust out, falling, as it were, through empty space, away from the rocket. As the passenger ‘falls’ through the vast darkness among a million stars, he hears voices from aboard ship in the last moments: “Captain! One away, two away! Three away! Abandoning ship, sir!” “Good! Proceed double time! Atomic reactor at danger point! We’re almost—” A titanic explosion rocks spaces. The stars, which have been wheeling steadily, to give the ‘passenger’ the feel of twisting, turning, falling, are shocked by a mighty concussion. To one side, below, the ‘passenger’ sees the rocket explode in fiery wreckage, blasted apart. He sees other ‘passengers’ small, remote, falling in various directions, through space. “Captain! You all right!?” “Okay! Ship’s gone! No time to radio earth!” “We’re falling toward Mars!” “No—I don’t think so! Wait!” And from the vast million-starred gulfs of space, MARS looms up beneath the ‘falling’ passenger, and passes away.

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THE WOMAN OF A THOUSAND LIVES format idea by or Ray Bradbury THE TRAVELLER MUSIC: INTRODUCTORY THEME. IN BACKGROUND FOR FOLLOWING. CECY: My name is Cecy. I can travel anywhere, any time. I can be anyone I want to be. At night, I lie in my bed, and I send my thoughts out over the dark green land. Ten thousand miles, my mind flies on the wind! MUSIC: HARP AND WIND. CECY: And I send my mind into the body of a dog or a cat, or a bird, or a man or a woman. I can live their lives, for an hour, secretly, without them knowing suspecting. I can ride in their heads, looking out through their eyes, without them knowing. And in this way, you see, I am the woman of a thousand lives! MUSIC: UP AND FADE. CECY: What about my body? It stays home in bed while my mind rides the wind in four directions, to seek adventure! MUSIC: ESTABLISH NEW MOOD. CECY: One night, in the spring of the year, I lay upon my bed, and let my mind drift free. Out, out, under the stars, over the drowsy villages, across rivers, until I reached a house....etc., etc., (NOTE: USE ABOVE FORMAT EACH WEEK TO OPEN SHOW. NEW STORY EACH WEEK, WITH CECY INSIDE NEW CHARACTER EACH WEEK, TO BE TIED IN WITH ABOVE INTRODUCTION, FOLLOWING HER LAST SPEECH “—until I reached a house—”. R.B.) THE MINSTRELS a short novel They brought the woman into Obstetrics Seven. The music was one of the Chopin Preludes. A piano played the music softly and expertly. The doctor and his assistants moved in their white gowns, their hands gestured and steam lifted from the surgical ovens. The music grew somewhat louder. “Are we ready?” “Yes, doctor.” The naming of things, then. The passing of bright instruments from rubber-gloved hand to hand. The music was quite loud.



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MOORL And now, with a shock of recognition, yet not recognition, he saw Moorl clearly. And he sat up in bed, holding his breath, a light shining in his eyes. . . . . . . . . . . .

The wind played the trees like a harp all night. The young girl lay on the scattered leaves and the dried ferns, learning every thing she could of what there was to know of the night. Her bones slender as knives in lambs-wool scabbards, she lay as a shadow on the leaves. Not far away she saw the jewel rows of Trile gleaming like the stars, and she smelled the odorous musty battlements of Cycole forest. At her bare waist was a leathern pouch of liquids, from this she took her sustenance in little, quiet sips. Her hair shone platinum and straight to her shoulders, ending in puffs of white smoke, and her eyes were like moonlight off a drawn sword. Just before dawn ascended, she rolled over, covered her eyes with the soft crook of her elbow arm and began creating fantasies. premise: The wind played the trees like a sycamore harp And I was one string that was strung The storm shook the tower top fervidly And tilting, the bells were rung. There Was a Castle Upon [SEND ALL THESE STORIES - TO DON CONGDON IN N.Y.C.] There was a castle upon the edge of a moon-whitened sea. In the daytime the sun burned the walls and the towers. In the night time the moon cooled the stones and the yards. In the high windows, replacing the glass, were webs of delicate color hung there by tapestry spiders. The sea no longer rolled upon the shore but it had retreated on the long shore of years, whispering away, until now it was no more than a dream that occurred each night, in which one imagined waves salting down and hurling upon the shore in continuous thunder. They moved within the castle. A stir, a shadow, a whisper, no more than that. A touch of moonlight, the shudder of a wing, the click of a heel upon a ramp. Ellie le lo,lwlke kkeklw llekk wli3il ioel ldilw fkield ldirkl lowlsl lsoelwk ppoql lsiwp; adseq khit papkr kfik lfqllrool lfoorllfk jjgujkr lifkw eftasdf efadeta olioli iplasde wertyuion ipkimlik werfghaa

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THE BUTCHER, THE BAKER, THE CANDLESTICK MAKER a novel outline by r. bradbury april 12, 1953 THE BUTCHER THE BAKER THE CANDLESTICK MAKER THE SHOESHINE THE BILLIARDS HALL MAN THE DOCTOR THE LAWYER THE MERCHANT THE CHIEF THE WIFE THE SON THE DAUGHTER THE DENTIST THE BARBER THE BARTENDER THE MADAM THE SHOEMAKER THE TAILOR THE THEATRE MANAGER THE POPCORN MAN THE UNDERTAKER.

It might be interesting some day to do an entire study of a man, and therefore a town, through the eyes of all the people that knew the man. This book should be the study of a business man, perhaps, through the eyes of his doctor, wife, shoeshine boy, son, daughter, etc., as listed to the left. Each would have his specialists’ prejudice, of course, and would judge the man through the materials the man bought from the specialist. The shoe man would judge the Hero’s taste through his selection of shoes, the way he kept them up, shined them, let them run down, etc. And so with all of the others. It might make a good book. Pure tourde-force, of course. And therefore it could be very bad, if not careful. [R.]

If you want to know what a town is, it’s the specialists you’ve got to go see. The bartender will tell you how many drink and how much. The undertaker will tell you how they die, good or bad, rich or poor, and what they look like under the tweed and the silk facade. The doctor will tell you what they died of; souring of the intellect, an obstruction of the gusto, elimination of the zest, and a great sulfurous [illeg strike out] tiredness lowering upon them like a snuffer putting out a white-wax candle. The doctor will also mention, but ignore them, tuberculosis, pneumonia, cancer, and varieties and assortments of bugs and bacterial ghosts that can be seen haunting only the lower depths of a magnifying glass. The dentist can tell you how their mouths were, fabulous grottos of silver and gilt, fabulous caverns for echoes and whispers of gossip. The barber can tell you how much the mouths were used and for what purpose. But none of these specialists are right, either. They see only a neck or a tonsil or the hairs in a nostril or the pupil of an eye. They hear only the wheeze of the



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lungs and the whistle of breath in the mouth. The face is lost for the pores. Take what you can learn from these specialists, who are invariably cynical because they are specialists, and combine it with what you yourself, a specialist in the whole man, sees, and you might possibly, you just might, see the town and the people as a Goliath. Then you wind up your book and cast it and try to bring the Giant down. You won’t, of course. But you might stagger it. You might give it pause, you might make it feel momentarily faint. More often, you’ll miss the Giant completely and it’ll just stride on, not knowing you even tried. It’s worth a try, anyway. And good luck. THE CHOCOLATE PARTY do story about a future Chocolate Party, an electronic Chocolate Party where all the invited guests, veiled or masked, and in amorphous costume and disguise, with Sonovox at their throats, secretly, can vent their spleen, declare their passions, rid themselves of the hard forming shells of neurosis, anxiety, and guilt, speak out politically, morally, socially for or against things, and rid themselves of their inferiority complexes. Framework to rest upon tension between people’s party guests finally relaxing, and everyone leaving their neuroses, like an invisible clutter of greasy bones in the middle of the dark and now emptying room, as after a grand banquet. They ‘fly home like beautiful moths.’ The great tension of the early pages, tremendous, neurotic, explosion, is now eased, erased, gone. It might build tomorrow again, but for tonight, gone, gone, gone. They are unweighted feathers for the moon to take with it over the sky toward morning.

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opening paragraph & closing paragraph of: THE EARTHEN CYCLE September 1st, 1954 driving back from Rosarita Beach to Tijuana, this idea occurred among the hills... First there was the earth, dry in the sun and then wet in the rain, and only when it was wet could you shape it into anything. And out of this earth they shaped a wall and then another wall and suddenly one day the house was there, adobe clay and drying in the noon heat and the pressing blaze of the sun. And then, with the family gone and the house empty, the rains came feeling over the house to see if there were any protectors there, anyone to fight the rain, and there was no one. So the rain swept a great pouring drench over the house again and again and smoothed the clay down into its old formless original state once more. And after fifty years you could not tell a house had been there. Intervals of sun and rain followed each other, after that, forever. FINIS. DARK IS THE NAME a novel by Ray Bradbury ________________________ DARK IS THE NAME Bradbury

Prologue

He was asleep but not asleep. He was dead but not dead. He was filled with night, yet shot through with peculiar beams of light. He dreamt but did not dream. He yelled soundlessly. He wept until he laughed and laughed until he once more unleashed his tears. He was very still but all the while exploding. And then at last again, after a long moment that could have been a year, ten



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thousand years, or a mere second, he opened his eyes. And was born again. And his name was Dark.

CONTENTS Prologue and Birth Walks Pauses Flights Temptations Demises Epilogue and Death

THE DARK YEARS a novel of the future by Ray Bradbury Chapter One: In the arena, the crowd roars. Below, in the night, the guards stand outside the dressing room door. Above, the arena shakes, the ceremony is ended. Down the rampways comes the crowd, at the heels of William Donne, the Great Assassin. He wipes his sword with a cloth and throws the cloth to the floor where it is snatched and kept by the crowd and the members thereof. In the dressing room, William Donne orders everyone out. Alone, with his manager, he confesses that it is all over and done. He is finished. The meaning has gone out of killing. The manager argues with him. Donne must not quit. Donne is the symbol of Death, and Death is the symbol of the world now, in these the Dark Years. Chapter Two: It is the year 2249, in the fiftieth year of the Dark Years, in the years of the cities spread to ruin and dust and rubble. In this year there is nothing but man spitting upon his past and making certain of his future with values contrived out of and making use only of Death. In the arenas of the world, people fight for the privilege of dying at the hand of The Great Assassin. What is there to live for? was there ever anything to live for? Never! The philosophers of the past were fools, lying to themselves, to everyone, that life could be worth anything at all. Where is God? The scientists killed him. And now the scientists,

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the mighty men, are dead, the cities are dead, and man is dying, in the spirit, in the mind, and now, at his own hand, in the body. In the town square of the ruined land, a crowd forms in the morning. In a roped area, stands the Mona Lisa original portrait. The crowd has waited until dawn for a chance to file by, to spit upon the portrait. A policeman prevents any violence, and rock-throwing. In this line stands a small boy, who, at the last moment, unlike the others, cannot bring himself to spit upon it. He is pummeled and batted away and laughed at by the others, and runs off, crying. Chapter Three In his room, in a ruin overlooking the town, William Donne, the Great Assassin, tries to commit suicide, and is prevented by his followers, his manager, and the hangers-on. He refuses to continue as the world symbol of darkness and glorious death. They remind him that it is his duty to, tonight at nine o’clock, destroy, in ceremony, the Mona Lisa that has been on display for a week. He tries to escape. They hold him. They send a woman to him, to reason with him. But he remembers a strange sad, wise young woman he saw on the road a week before, one who talked of life and other things besides this day of death, of killing and assassinating. And his manager realizes that this strange woman is responsible for the change in the Great Assassin. He sends the police to find and hold the woman. If The Great Assassin turns coward, dies, falls from power, the manager’s source of riches and power will crumble. The woman is found and held as hostage to insure that William Donne performs his tasks. Chapter Four The destruction of the Mona Lisa by William Donne. In the crowd, watching, the little boy from the day before, who could not spit upon the portrait, snatches a fragment of the destroyed painting and runs off into the dark streets with it. Chapter Five William Donne spends a sleepless night, thinking of the treasure he has destroyed.



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Figure Two—The Chocolate Party

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Part Two Fragments: Story Openings and Endings

ADDRESSEE DECEASED by Ray Bradbury April 8, 1956 It is a fine morning in summer and you lie in bed for a moment listening to the birds in the tree outside your window and rise slowly and sit on the edge of your bed smiling to yourself for no reason except you feel good. Then you go downstairs to breakfast and halfway through your toast and orange-juice, the front door mail-slot clicks open and a single letter jumps through and falls to the floor. You finish your coffee and then something about the envelope draws your attention. You realize it is one of your own envelopes, one you mailed a week ago to an old friend. You get up and go over and bend down and pick up the envelope and turn it over in your hand. Yes, there is the address: MR. RALPH POWERS 23 w. 98th st. New York, New York And across the envelope, stamped twice in purple (why not black?) ink, the words: ADDRESSEE DECEASED. You read it again. ADDRESSEE DECEASED. Why don’t they come out and say it, you wonder. Why elaborate on such a common thing. Why not put it right: ADDRESSEE DEAD. Would that be too brutal? Perhaps. This way, holding the envelope, turning it over and over in your hand, you have time to think about the term used

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here. Deceased. Deceased. Done with. Gone. Expired. Dead. You are even moved to try the dictionary, to be sure you know what the word means. But finally you accepted it, and your body turns cold. THE DIGGERS I went out every morning early to take my usual walk, ten minutes this way, ten minutes that, and ten minutes back. I circumscribed a graveyard back to my house. I went along its west wall, past its south gates and fragile fernpattern iron fences, and then back along the low hedge to the east, walking at a good pace, looking at the sky, the trees, the birds, and the names of the people on the marble stones as I went by. Now it so happened that on a day in April, coming back along the east hedge, looking over at the stones, I saw two gravediggers busy with their mournful task, opening the sod carefully in two foot checkerboard squares, laying it aside, and beginning to chunk in their spades, going down. At first, from some distance, I paid little attention. There was not a day, going by, the diggers were not bringing up fresh earth somewhere. This day, perhaps, was fresher and greener and smelled of spring blossoms and therefore the task seemed somehow sadder to me. And then as I drew near, for the diggers were working right up next to the hedge, I saw an unusual thing. The headstone, fresh and newly chiseled, had already been placed near the top of the grave. Since I knew this was not the general practice, I could not help deciphering the name when the movements of the men allowed. I could not make it entirely out at first, until one of the diggers stopped to wipe a kerchief across his face. Then I saw the name. Edmond Hawks, Born 1920, Died 1956. It was, of course, my name. SOMETHING TO TELL AND NO WAY TO TELL IT What I want to tell is a thing cannot be told for no one will listen or those who listen will want to laugh and those who laugh will put out the lights and silence me so I cannot go on with the rest. Doubly hard to begin then. Perhaps there will never be a day or an age to say what I must say, man being what he is, nature what it is, history what it has been. To say what I must say invites destruction. My best reason for saying it, my rationale is my happiness. It is simply very hard for me to imagine a wrongness where so much joy is involved.

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I must begin with hunger and end with that same hunger, as if I am to make myself understood at all. THE DAY EVERYTHING BEGAN TO HAPPEN Bradbury “Well,” said Willie Bersinger, wheeling his old car, raining rust, along a curve and watching the big bloom of smoke tailing out the rear, “it’ll be good to get to town. You and me, Sam, been too long back in the hills with the gila monsters and dust-dervishes. I’m all full up on philosophy; I got enough mountains and sky and time in me to last a weekend anyway. There’s Rock Junction and here come Willie and Sam; look out!” “Yes, siree,” said Sam, his partner. And the jalopy with a great tin whistling and a hellfire steaming, crossed the city limit and took them into awe and wonder. “Hold on,” gasped Sam. “Wait a minute,” said Willie to the car, and tromped the brake. The car obediently shook itself to a halt and stood there trembling in the road. Sam and Willie rose up in their seat, there was no top to their car, and stared at the town. “Something’s happened,” said Willie. “The town,” whispered Sam, as if he didn’t want it to hear, “Something’s wrong with that town.” “I know now,” said Willie. “I know what it is!” “The town’s painted!” cried Sam. “That’s it! The whole town, every bit of it, look there, will you! Every house, every fence, every building, every signpost!” And it was true. The town lay under their gaze, and THE NET The room was hot and bare, a brass bed stark in the center of it, green shades bundled up on the tall windows letting the yellow sunlight in to heat the floor. In the dust, someone had drawn huge letters, HELL and DAMN and some others, long ago. The door opening set the letters adrift on the hot air. “Come in,” said Louie. The woman proceeded him, he shut the door. “This is the room,” said Louie.



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“And that’s the window,” she said. “That’s it. You jump from there at midnight.” “And there’s a net waiting for me down there like you said.” “How many times do I have to tell you, yes, a net!” “Look, it’s my neck,” she said. “I want to keep it.” “And here’s the money,” he said. He handed her ten old one hundred dollar bills. She stood by the window, with her thin hand on the dirty glass. “What’s it all about?” she wanted to know. “Who you throwing a scare into?” .

[“Shut up, you!”] “Shut up, you!” He gave the boy a cuff. And almost instantly the Time Machine hummed and whisked away toward the future, toward the clean box cities and hives, the cars and metal buildings and metal flowers and metal lawns. “Goodbye, Janet, Bob!” A great cold October wind arose and blew through the town like water roaring in the an empty river bottom channel. It blew leaves and papers and ugly masks before it. It blew out candles and tumbled corn shocks and tore the smoke from chimneys into ravels and bits. And when it ceased at last blowing it had blown all the children like leaves and the leaves like children, all masked, all invited or uninvited to houses, to shut doors, to parties. Suddenly the streets were empty. Not one child was on the street anywhere. The wind whined away in the empty tree tops. Inside the warm windows of the house, in the candle-light, someone was pouring cold apple cider all round, to everyone, no matter who they were.

THE END

Ray Bradbury 670 Venice Blvd., Venice, Calif. THE ALTAR by Ray Bradbury THE rickety elevator came down with a slapping of naked wires and a creak of ungreased drums and the choking pop of the engine that activated it. The

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elevator sank to the level and the last of the laborers shuffled out, struggling into dirty coats, tugging wearily at grimy caps, to take their directions toward their homes, toward their cars and their subways. Out of the mutter of their alien, European voices a few stood clear, “No accidents today, Antonio.” “No accidents any day. Is strange. This job, she is blessed. We are the lucky dogs, yes?” “Guiseppe E Marie—Blessed Blue Virgin—no accidents.” Behind them rose the girders, the skeleton of the thing they were heaving up into the sky. Another days work done, and the girders left to the whine of the winds, to the mizzle of rain, and to the rising light of the moon. The man who tinkered with the elevator engine, stopped its choking functions, turned out an orange lantern in a coffin-shaped shack, and went out across the yard to the fence. He scraped a wooden door shut, attached a bronze lock, snapped it with a click. Then he walked off into the dusk, whistling. THE LONG WAY HOME Chapter One. In the beginnings, the end of it all could be seen. I looked and saw but did not see, knew but did not know, was warned but did not turn back. So all that followed went like one stone after another down the long mountain to lay waste a life. And the avalanche started and led by a blind man, settled to a silence and left him wandering and knowing that the end was there all the time, and in his blindness he had seen it clear but looked not and listened not at all. And this is how it was. When it all began in April of that year. ************* THE GARGOYLE At the very top of the church on the northwest corner facing the colder portion of the sunset was the gargoyle. Just one? Just one. The others, if others there had been, had been knocked off one by one in various times and ages for various uses in the town or the cities beyond, and now only the one grotesque remained, a fine head as cruel as a lion’s, as handsome as a Caesar’s, as wild as some Martian dream, as beautiful as Helen. Who had made the gargoyle, no



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one knew. For that matter, who had built the church was long since forgot, for it was at least three hundred years old and various wars had erased the records... But anyway, on a day in late autumn, a boy no more than ten, named Philippe, climbed up around to the tower and leaned out in the gently falling rain and said to the gargoyle “What’s your name?” And was somewhat surprised to hear come out of the dripping windpiped mouth: the following reply: I am Conant, the architect of the church. WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR MY STORY? If you can finish before sunset, said the boy. Which will be in one hour. Can you do it? I will, whispered the voice in the stone flue, and did. HOBNAILS RETREAT - Bradbury Coming out into the sunlight, Zukor blinked and sneezed. With a great outcry he also gasped in dread alarm. My God, he thought, there it goes! For he had seen his soul sneezed forth upon the air. Like a ghost, a tissue of immaterial things, it had come half from one nostril, half from the other. Much like those ectoplasmic photographs displayed in old seance books when he was a boy. His soul, visible! Quick, quick! he thought, before someone sees. He tried to snuff the gauzy stuff. But a wind was blowing. People were rushing by. Cars loomed at the curb, threatening to destroy his very flesh. He pulled back. The moment was over. His soul, snuffed in by a passing child of some ten years and the male sex, was hustled off into the city. Jesus, no Moses! thought Zukor, how do I get it back from the dreadful child? And not knowing, pursued. The child, after running ten blocks, which is what all mean boys do every day of their life, and no pause, turned in at a brownstone and went upstairs like lightning ricocheted off the earth and through a door. Zukor stood panting below, having run in imitation, and failed as fifty year old boy.

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ANOTHER LOVE STORY [MAY 17, 1953] Bradbury She woke when the clock in the court house square downtown struck one, two, three in the morning. The echoes faded and she sat up in bed, her face the color of the moonlight streaming through the white curtains. She heard and felt her heart in her ears, in her throat, in her wrists. She held her breath and listened. “Luise.” Someone was in the yard, below. And again, her name, called by that someone down there in the middle of the night. “Luise...” She moved to the window and looked down. Nothing. No, there in the shadows under the elm tree, someone raising their hand to her. APOLLO/ADONIS TRANSCENDENT Some twenty years ago on the beach in Santa Monica I saw a mob of boys coming along the broadwalk. No, not coming along, being taken, being pulled along by a force they could not know, reckon with, or speak of. The boys, seven or eight in number, surrounded an older young man of some 20 years. The young man was beautiful. Beautiful, god, he was Apollo walking on the shore. He was tall and sunbronzed and blonde with clear blue eyes and he was, again, beautiful and again, as Shakespeare once put it, beautiful. The boys knew this but did not know it. They bathed in his light. They ran before and after him They crowded about him like dogs to lunchtime snacks. They ran at an eternal party, as men must run before a very great event, a very fine beauty. And, of course, the touching thing about all this was that the boys did not even know what they were doing. They were in love, but if you had dared to say such things, they would have, shocked, tossed you aside, insulted you, and gone on along the shore with their beloved.



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DEAD BUT NOT BURIED ______________________________ a novel by Ray Bradbury It was October again. It must be October, always. And it must be twilight, if not night. There is no other fun. When the sun comes out the fun leaves. Sunrise disperses the ghosts. Noon keeps everything at bay. People may die in July, but it is improper. To die in autumn is best, at five in the afternoon as the sun sets and just before the morning papers go to bed so you can be headlined, at least in obit miniature. People are away for the summer. They won’t find out that you died for months or years or never. If you leave on vacation July 1st and don’t come back for eight weeks, the dead are waiting for you in droves, anxious to explain how they fell downstairs, devoured the wrong pudding, bedded with a secretly sick friend, or cut themselves while shaving........

THE ATTIC _______________ A STORY BY RAY BRADBURY _______________ APRIL, [illeg strike out]

Sometimes, very late at night, he would hear something turn over in the attic. Turn over? Something? Yes, it was like the turning of a vast leaf in a huge book opened by the wind and laid out in the moonlight on the attic floor. It was that kind of turning whisper, the faintest batwing sound, the blowing of a gossamer web, the scuttle of a leaf blown in off an autumn tree and spidering the floor. Whatever it was, once a week, perhaps, all through autumn, he would be seized awake. Something pulled at his ears. His ears in turn pulled him upright in bed where he lay, panting, then, controlling his breath, listening. Perhaps the thing had already turned over. No....there! There it went. Whisper. Rustle. Sift. Sigh. Gone.

Figure Three—Coming up the road

Part Three Fragments: Extended Story Openings

A BREATH OF AIR February 2, 1951 by Ray Bradbury 1. No air. 2. His father. 3. A priest. 4. A politician. 5. The chase. 6. The reverie. 7. The businessman who owns Oxygen Inc. and doesn’t want to give up profits. 8. They turn off his air in the helmet. 9. He finds that there IS air in the tunnel. A BREATH OF AIR by Ray Bradbury “Beecher?” “Here.” “Allotted.” “Baumen?” “Here.” “Allotted.” Silver packets were handed over. “Clark?” A man stepped up^forward^. “Here.” “Allotted.”

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The line dwindled. The clock moved toward four in the ‘afternoon’. The men came and went in the dirt cavern, slowly, moving their heads slowly, their hands slowly, their feet, slowly. No one raised their voices. No one rushed. “William Thomas?” Thomas stepped forward with slow precision. He had been waiting for an hour. “Here.” “No allotment, Thomas.” “What!” Thomas cried out. The others looked up. “Save your air, Thomas, you’ll need it.” “There must be some mistake!” “Don’t shout. Talk low.” The man checked the silver case and showed the big purple stamp on it: DENIED. “No mistake, Thomas, sorry.” “But I’ve got to have my oxygen!” “Check your dial, Thomas, you’ve got an hour’s supply left in your packet, take it easy. Talk to Superior 17 if you have a complaint.” “Complaint, my God, complaint!” said Thomas, beginning to pale and shiver. His face was numbed and his lips were turn blue. He was already gasping. “If I don’t get a re-newed oxygen parcel in an hour I’ll be dead.” “That’s not news to us, Thomas. See 17. It’s not our problem.” “But it’s mine, you damned idiot! You can’t kill me off, you can’t smother me out this way, what’ve I done?” The man glanced at the tag on the precious cell of oxygen which he was withholding. “It’s stamped A-1 P1. That means Political Interference of the Prime Sort. You should know more about it than me. Move on now. Next in line? Burns.” “Here.” “Allotted.” The silver packet came across the Oxygen Comissary desk. Thomas made an instinctive grab for it. The man named Burns shouted and beat at him. “Get away, you bastard! I’ll crack your helmet!” Several men held Thomas off. He watched Burns walk away with the oxygen. He was beginning to perspire inside his glassite helmet. He saw the needle of his oxygen-record drop lower. “You can’t do this to me!” “Rogers?” “Here.” “Allotted.” The line moved up. It was a very precious and a very special and a beautiful thing. You could spend a day or a night or a series of days and nights thinking of it, working



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on it, testing and experimenting and always returning to the basic simplicity, the primal need: air. Or oxygen if you wanted a specific. And oxygen, after all was what you wanted. Air meant a combination of pollens and dusts and vapors, of moistures and carbon-dioxides, which the lungs could siphon, the nostrils could sluice hungrily through the screen of tiny filamentary hairs, but which, once in the body would be of no use to the red blood or the white bones, to move you or better your position in life. It was oxygen, pure and simply, about which your life revolved, and while others, in other days and in far sunnier climates, had never considered the stuff that came and went in their mouths and noses, you, of all people appreciated it. William Thomas lay on his bed of straw and sucked at the tiny feeding flame of oxygen in his air-helmet. He saw the tiny needle dancing almost below his vision, toward its weekly zero. In the morning he would have to fill out the customary forms, pass the customary taxes, be allotted the customary box of oxygen to last him through another seven days of living with oxygen, thinking of oxygen, making oxygen the greatest part of a life which was nothing more now than watching a dial and watching your actions. “I’ll watch my actions tomorrow,” said William Thomas aloud, and stopped, for that had taken an extra portion of the precious gas, the needle sucked and quivered warningly, and he held his breath for ten seconds to compensate for his personal sin. “You fool,” he thought. “Think. Think. Don’t talk.” He looked at the motto over his pallet, put there by his father: THINK, DON’T TALK. SIT, DON’T WALK. SLEEP, DON’T SIT. Thinking didn’t use oxygen, not unless you worked yourself into a white iron rage and got your heart to thundering and your fingers clenching in at your sweaty palms. Then you could hear the oxygen purl and hiss away from you, gone forever. Then you had to sleep an extra hour the next day to make up the loss. Or you imposed an extra four hours of silence on yourself so that the vital little coffin of gas on your back would live you through the remaining days. Oxygen had become, he realized, a luxury and a wealth in itself, a form of entertainment, a food. Anyone who had ever heard the throttle of his canister giving out and felt the blackness rush like a cape thrown over the eye and the spirit, knew enough to worship and adore and handle with religious fervor the instruments of survival, the little pipes and jets and silvery tubes that led to the helmet. Breathing was an art, oxygen was a rare wine, an exquisite allday candy which must be approached with temperate concern. “Once upon a time,” said his Father, once, “there was a man who fell unconscious an hour before his next oxygen was due to be supplied to him. At the end of the hour they managed to revive him and give him his new supply. He was so glad to be alive, to be breathing again, that he said all sorts of fantastic prayers,

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babbled them, yelled them, he sucked and pulled on the oxygen supply with his nose and mouth, he went crazy over oxygen, he drank it, he was drunk with it. The poor man. By the middle of the week he had used up his entire new supply. Three days away from replenishment, with no help in sight, he expired. Learn from that. Remember, keep your mouth shut. Think. Walk, don’t run. Sit, don’t stand. Conserve. Conserve.” William Thomas opened his eyes and looked at the cave. Outside he heard the sounds of people going to work in the great Deep City. They moved like dreamers, slowly. “Once upon a time there was all the air you could breathe.” said his father. “No.” “Yes! Up on the surface of the world. But wars drove us underground and we had to take oxygen with us. So now we fight each other underground with poison gasses. In order to survive, each man had to have separate oxygen supplies. Our machinery is old, there’s only so much oxygen to be had, and it’s doled out with not a little political privilege. There used to be a joke that one day they would even tax the air we breathe. Well, that day has come. No, don’t laugh. Think. Save your oxygen. Think. Learn to laugh inside.” “Do you mean to say that once Air was taken for granted?” “Yes, no one ever gave it a thought. It was as common as, well, dirt. It had no significance. No books were written on it as they are today. People simply ignored it.” “That sounds almost blasphemous.” The father grinned a silent grin. “Someday you’ll understand. Rest now. We’ve talked enough. We can talk about it again tomorrow.” A bell rang. William Thomas arose slowly and stood watching the needle move toward zero. If nothing untoward happened, he would have more than enough, and an hour left over, oxygen to last until his new allotment. “I’ll go down and get it now,” he said. A BREATH OF FIRE by Ray Bradbury April 11th, 1960

“...inhales.” “What?” Father Riley had just come out on the lawn where Father Goodleigh, alone, was contemplating the same stars he had contemplated as a boy.



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“I was saying, Father Riley,” said the other. “God inhales.” “I don’t quite understand.” The look on Father Riley’s face showed he was beyond misunderstanding and well into dismay. “The latest theory, father,” said Father Goodleigh. “There is always a latest theory. If there weren’t one, what would people talk about?” “True, true. But this theory, well, it’s the first I’ve seen of it, one of the astronomers—” Father Riley snorted. “Anyway,” Father Goodleigh went on. “The idea runs.” “They always run, they never walk.” “The idea runs that the suns are condensations of dust. That at a given time in prehistory, matter began to collect in space. Gravitation is the clockwork behind it all, they say. And when the matter got big enough, gained mass, as they say, then it burst into flame, like a great match struck down space.” “It sounds like a good deal too much collecting and saving to me.” “Oh, it was, father. Billions of tons, you can well imagine. But it all ran together and burst asunder, and there the stars are, trillions of them across space. Which led me to think to myself, it’s like sand running back up the hour-glass. All those particles drawn to each other and igniting. And what is gravitation, I asked myself. And the answer was: God inhales. A great inhalation here, a great one there, with every breath, the dust collects, rubs molecules, heats, sparks, and burns. God moves in space, a grand snuff in one territory, a smaller sniff in another, and so on across all his endless Place, drawing in vacuum, breathing out fire.” “That’s a grand picture you’re drawn with a calligraphic hand all bones and wit,” said Father Riley. “But it’s only rubbing kerosene in the wounds the scientists have already made raw with salt.” “I was not aware of a wound, father.” “Ah God, they started shooting the arrows into the sainted church 500 years back, and every year their archery better and every year the Church, her head held high, sustained but hard put to to sew up the lips of the punctures in her sides and back. When you start tiptoeing along in the slothful groundling steps of the materialistic boys and their microscopes and macroscopes, you but work new cloth over the bare bones of the skeleton they hang out to dry once a day, every day a new set of bones, a new theory. Last year it was cosmic collisions ripping hunks of brimstone free which cooled to Earth. The year before it was one grand super-nova Sun, pulsing to beat the band, off somewhere around the corner and down the street past Alpha Centauri, and bang! it flew apart seventeen quadrillion moons ago and the universe is still fleeing that original bass-drum sound, running as before a plague, streaming meteors and

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fiery furnace comets. If you’re not careful, those fools will have you changing your clothes twice a day, Father Goodleigh, to keep in fashion.” “A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY” SHORT STORY-OCT. 28, 1959 A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY Bradbury What am I? Who am I? I don’t think I’ve ever had a name. I will never have one. And I have always had many, though only one at a time. What is my work? Come along and you’ll see. Here we are. It is night. I am walking along the street of a little town in the midst of the dark continental spaces of America. The trees shadow me with elm shadow. The crickets fill my ears. I am glad of the cool autumn wind in my nostrils which I warm and send back out in dissolving feathers of steam. I think a boy’s thoughts, seeing this: look, I am smoking! Then I feel a loneliness behind the wall of a house. Quietly I cross the lawn and listen. Yes, it sounds lonely in there. The curtains mute the breathing there. The rugs are too thick, also, you can hear no walking and certainly no dancing. I smell too many flowers there and that is bad. It means one of three things: someone is sick there, someone has died there, or someone has been dead there a long time. Flowers, too many of them, can be substitutes for the pink-cream faces of children absent or never there to begin with. The air inside this house is fathoms deep and cold and someone swims in that darkness alone. I feel the warmness as they approach the window. A face looks out. If it were raining I would make myself rain and fall away to earth in a thousand diamond bits. But it is a clear night. I can assume only what lies trembling about me, the cloak of leaf-shadows. So, tremoring, I become the shadows sifting in the wind. She does not see me. For that matter, she sees nothing. So many things have happened to this face, and these eyes in the last year or two, that the mind has carefully grown a whiteness over the eyeballs so she will see no more. This face resembles the face of those deer whose pictures, flashed in the dead of night, show them with uplifted heads, staring at the camera which has panicked but to freeze them forever, colorless and stricken. A terrible event, like the flash-powder exploding, has drained them of blood,



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forever filled them with ice, and set them walking in mechanical patterns once the echoes of the explosion have died. Her face drifts away from the window. I know what I must do. The shadows fall together and make one shadow. At the front door, I tap, wait, then tap again, wait, then ring the bell. AS FRIEND REMEMBERED NOT a story by Ray Bradbury from AS YOU LIKE IT. Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, That dost not bite so nigh As benefits forgot: Though thou the waters warp, Then^y^ sting is not so sharp As friend remembered not. Heigh ho! sing, heigh ho! unto the green holly: Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly: Then, heigh ho, the holly! This life is most jolly. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

“Oh, I could tell you of friendships that late into life lasted for what you’d consider a real Age. From summer into winter, you might say, and then, like the ice, creaked, cracked, and by morning was melted so you couldn’t find the snow man in the grass. God, how delicate. Together, friends etch their loving kindnesses, like old Jack Frost, on a window pane. It’s beautiful, all crystals of sugary delight, with things said and done in tandem, of fish fries, picnics, launchings, christenings, promotions, setbacks savored for their bitter marrows, but if suffered again together, all the spicier, tastier. And there it all is in the wintry glass, fern leaf on white rimed fern leaf, a lovely picture. Then? Then? “Then one hot breath. “And melting, running, gone, there goes your lovely pattern of crystals. The window pane is nothing but water, or if you wish, tears dripping off and soaking the rug.

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“Heigh ho, as Shakespeare says.” “Did he say?” “He said allright, don’t you recall: how does it go...Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, that dost not bite so nigh, as benefits forgot...thy sting is not so sharp as friend remembered not...Heigh ho, sing heigh ho unto the green holly...most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.” “He didn’t believe that.” “He wrote it.” “Yes, but he didn’t believe it, really.” “Why do you say that?” “Well, writing’s one thing, life’s another.” “Lydia, what are you thinking? why are you crying?” “Because I love you, and because I know I shall never forget what you just said, never, never, never forget, and never forgive you, and go on loving you, that’s the terrible part, the terrible part, always to love you, always to hate you for just words, just words.” He held her in his arms and put his chin on top of her head and shut his eyes. “Yes, that’s the terrible part. Oh why must we prove it. Why why did I say it. If only I could take it back.” “But you can’t.” “No.” And he felt the scalding tears rush through his eyelids. Someone else was crying. And oh God, he thought, it’s me. AN EVIL MAN HAS AN EASY JOB by Ray Bradbury August 19, 1955 AN EVIL MAN HAS AN EASY JOB Bradbury “It’s so easy to be evil these days,” said Waley. “That one is in danger of being bored. Why is it easy to be evil? Well, no one believes in the truly evil man any more. Somehow it has bruited about that the poisoners and murderers, that kind that breathe and exhale mists and shadows, vanished with Machiavelli. Nonsense and balderdash. We have put on new masks and gowns. It’s easier now to poison and murder and thrive like a yeast in someone’s cupboard or a



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moldy toadstool in their cellar than ever in history. I go to a hated man’s house and take with me what? a little vial of botulist culture which I have prepared from meats and other cream foods left out in the summer heat. It is so simple to put this botulism in my host’s sandwich while he’s in telephoning. The next day he’s down with headaches strong enough to crack concrete and wrenchings of the stomach that would tear tendon from bone. The day after the day after that a marble-cutter is called in and given the precise spelling of his name plus the two dates which start and end his existence, flowers are profuse, and I move up one step toward the presidency of the company.” “Oh, now, Waley,” I said. “You like to talk evil, but it’s, nevertheless, talk.” “Go ahead thinking so,” he said. “How many company presidents and vice-president have died in the past ten years?” “Four, no, five.” “Five. One every two years. I believe in spacing them so no one suspects. I just don’t knock them off like ticking a row of dominoes. I do have common or uncommon sense. I’m willing to take fifteen years to get to the top. I’m still there in half the time it would take most young executives, waiting for depressions of stock-exchanges or death to push him a hoist up the ladder. Or waiting for nothing, of course, too, for he might never move up. There have been other deaths in our company, too. But no one notices the junior deaths, they are unimportant. Sad, people say, he might have turned in a good career next year or the year after that. But the grieving and the thinking die, with the snake, at sunset. Whenever anyone pushes in a little at my flanks or sides, whenever a man of superior vitality and vim suddenly shoots up to question my precedence, I give him an auto-accident to think of, or another bite of hot summer sandwich. That keeps them busy for eternity.” “My God,” I said. “We’ve talked long enough on this. Why are you telling this to me?” “Because you’re a writer and you won’t believe it. And even if you do, you can’t act on it, you can’t prove it. I like to observe horror in other people when they look and listen to and at me. It gives me a not unpleasant flush of power. My fists feel as if they are gloved in steel. Also, in case I should die some day, a remote possibility, I want someone to know my fiendishness and credit it for its worth.”

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AN OLD STORY BUT NEW a short novel by Ray Bradbury Take a man named Adam Wills. Turn him into his fortieth year with everyone well, in general good health, a writer both successful in the esteem of fellow writers, beloved of critics, and read by readers, let him be loved by his wife and a preposterous number of children, six, three boys and three girls, let his bank account in sum total to 5 good figures, let spring come with everyone as happy as happy can be, and this is the situation we find at the beginning of our tale of Adam Wills, or the end of Adam Wills perhaps and the start of something ^OR SOMEONE^ else. For in April of his fortieth year a strange thing happened to Adam Wills. Whereas in the 15 year period just previous he had managed to put on 25 solid pounds, now, quite unexpectedly, he began to lose 25 solid pounds. His cheeks took on a flush, his eyes brightened, his slimmer body gathered a brisker pace. He went to bed later every night but was up earlier, and with greater explosive energy. He was heard to sing about the house. He was kinder to the children. He was considerate of his wife. He gave money to beggars on the street. So it was that one night his wife, lying awake, and looking at him said: “Adam?” To which he said, eyes shut, “Yes.” To which she added, “Adam, something is happening.” He opened his eyes and did not flinch at her steady gaze. After a long moment he said, “Yes. Something is happening.” She sighed, as if almost glad he had answered this way. “Do you want to tell me about it?” He waited a long time. “Maybe I should ask you, instead, do you want to be hurt?” “It’s not a question,” she said, “of what I want right now. I’m a bystander, an onlooker, I’m an audience and seem to have been for some time. Hurt or not, I must hear. Hurt me or not, you must say.” He sat up in bed, lit a cigarette, puffed on it, got up, walked around the room, peered down the hall at the children’s rooms where all was peaceful. “This is going to take time, we may be up the rest of the night.” “I know that.” She was putting on her robe now. They went down through the house. She took time to make coffee. While the water boiled and went through the Silex, they both smoked and crushed out their cigarettes. When he coffee was poured and he had taken one sip, he said: “May I say one thing first, and will you promise to believe it?”



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“I promise. Say it.” He reached out and took her hand and pressed it between his two hands. “Believe me when I say this is all a surprise, life has surprised me, I never thought it could, I did not intend any of this, I never intended an hour like this late at night with you talking this way. It could never happen to me. I was above such events in my lifetime. But now, here we are. And I’m not sure how we got here. Do you believe?” She nodded. “Yes.” He drank the rest of his coffee and settled back, eyes closed. “Now,” she said, quietly, her hands in her lap. “Tell me about this other person you love.” THE ARMS OF THE VENUS DE MILO a short story by ray bradbury THE ARMS OF THE VENUS DE MILO Bradbury The little man had come to the Louvre on several other days that week, but always Monsieur Dombasle was out or very busy. But at last, this afternoon, Monsieur Dombasle, peering into the outer office for a long moment, sighed, shrugged and said, “Let him in. Call me in three minutes with some urgent business.” “Yes, Monsieur Dombasle.” And his secretary opened the door wider and nodded the little man in. The little man presented his card, very old and dirty, which read: Aristide Buffe, but did not relinquish it, he merely fanned it once beneath Monsieur Dombasle’s nose, then pocketed it and sat quietly on the large chair before the desk. “Monsieur Dombasle, I come on a matter of honesty,” he said. This was an unusual beginning. Dombasle became somewhat more alert. “Oh, not your honesty, monsieur,” said Buffe. “My honesty. My look. By my face, no by my eyes and my mouth, by the lines about my mouth, those descending from either side of the nose, do I seem honest to you?” Domabasle looked closely at the man to see if there was humor in all this. There was not. The man was speaking very calmly and easily about a thing that seemed of importance. “Honesty, Monsieur Buffe,” he replied. “Is it lodged in the muscles of the face, does it shine within the well of the eye? If so, this is fresh and entertaining information for me to receive in my fortieth year.”

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“But the fact is, monsieur,” said M. Buffe, “you nevertheless, on the moment, consider those very things. This instant you study my mouth, my eyes, the flare of the nostril. Your intuition, like a cat, is on its feet. At any moment it may ruff its coat, arch its back, flex its tail, and spit.” “All very well,” said M. Dombasle, and did just what had been described. “Well,” said the little man at last. “Well?” asked Dombasle. “The cat, what of it?” “So far,” admitted Dombasle, “its hair does not stand on end. But I do not completely trust my intuition. My relationship with my subconscious is like that with my wife.” “What a pity it is not like that with your mistress.” Monsieur Dombasle pulled back and glared. The little man did not flinch. He sat there in all his simplicity, as if to say, one does not let the truth swamp him. If necessary, at the proper time, I will swim for the shore—that door, the outer office, the street. For now— “Now,” said Dombasle. “that we have both adjudged you an honest man.” “I detect boredom, and boredom is the enemy of art, and my art is the art of conversation and conversation well done is the avenue to diverting salesmanship. Immediately, then, I have with me, outside a truck.” He arose and moved to the window as if expecting Dombasle to follow. “And on the back of the truck is a large box like a coffin—” He stopped and looked around. “Monsieur, if you please.” Dombasle moved quickly to the window. “Yes, yes. There is the truck. I see your name painted on the door. I see the box. And what is in the box?” “Monsieur allow me my moment of drama. One does not rush into the climax. One lets it evolve.” Before M. Dombasle could move from the window, the little man cleverly moved away himself. And in turning his back smugly on his own goods, he but drew more attention to them. For some reason, Mr. Dombasle still remained standing there, looking down at the truck and the box. Mr. Buffe sat down again. He put his hands on his knees. “M. Dombasle, if you were to make a list of those gifts you would most want to bring to the Louvre, long missing items, some half-mythical, other absolutely real or long lost either in wars or the changing of the guards over the years, what would you ask for? Ah, ah. No. The question is not rhetorical. The quickest list, please, an I’ll continue.” “All right.” M. Dombasle snorted. “Off hand, more of Cellini’s silver work. Few of his pieces exist over into our day. I’ve heard of fabulous things he did—”



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“Truly excellent. Go on.” “There are several paintings burnt in great fires—” “Or supposedly burnt.” “Yes, yes, I’ll admit that. Supposedly. Perhaps stolen and hoarded by mad artistic hermits since. A Tintoretto of Christ Descended, for instance that was lost in the fire in ___ ____ _____. A Titian torn up by a mad man in _____.” “Most excellent. Good end of list. Or almost. But what thing in the Louve is a jigsaw with a missing piece.” Dombasle laughed. “The Venus De Milo, of course! Not one but two!” “The Venus De Milo, of course,” said the little man, quietly, and smiled. And the smile was like the bursting of a bomb in the room. Dombasle almost ducked from the shrapnel that gave glancing blows here there, all about. The effect was such that he swiveled his head back to look down at the trunk, the box on the back of the truck. “But surely, monsieur—” “But surely, monsieur—” repeated the little man. “You do not mean—” “I do not mean—” “That on that truck—” “That truck—” “In that crate—?” “That crate—” “Are the arms—” “The arms.” “The missing arms.” “Of the Venus De Milo.” “The Venus De Milo.” This last was a calm quiet firm irrevocable statement. There was a long moment of silence. A rap on the door. The secretary entered. “Monsieur Dombasle—” Dombasle did not hear her. He looked out the window. Then he glanced at Buffe. Then he looked at his watch and at the secretary. He looked back at Buffe again. Buffe did not even blink. “Give me,” said Dombasle, “one more minute, Miss Pourflourot.” “One minute.” The door shut. “One minute?” said Buffe. “To decide the most serious matter of your lifetime as an aesthete?”

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[BACKWARD O BACKWARD TURN TIME IN THY FLIGHT (1)] I cannot tell you what a lovely world it is we live in, for it is a triumphant world where always out of death we return to life. Tomorrow for instance, we go to the cemetery to give birth to my mother. “We shall be taking the box out of the earth, weeping for her old cold life in the earth where she has stayed for a billion years waiting. And we shall take her to the mortuary and there take from her veins the dread polar stuffs which freeze and prepare instill therein warm blood and then by magics all strange and uncertain wait for her eyes to open, only of course after we have transferred her, still weeping, to the hospital. ‘Joe,’ said my wife. ‘Yes,’ said I. ‘Joe’ said my wife, ‘a strange thing is happening.’ ‘What.’ said I. ‘Today they took down the Safety Food Store at Ninth and Grand.’ ‘What’s so unusual about tearing down a building.’ ‘They didn’t tear it down, the simply unbuilt it.’ [BACKWARD -- (8)] ‘My God,’ I cried, ‘oh Meg, you’ve gone mad.’ ‘You’ll kill yourself with this. You will’ ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘wait watch.’ And no matter what I said she took the box out of the cemetery. And my son came alive. And it is true. Time has begun to roll itself up, turn back upon itself, we know not how or why, but roll it does. We should not be happy, you say, but No? [But] I have my son returned. All the days of my life return. My mother will be born in five years. My father again in 10. My dearest friend, Will Arno will come back from the grave in 12 years. We can hardly wait. And when it is over, we shall all grow young again, be swaddled babes, and for our sweet death go back and be buried in the living wombs of our mothers. Oh strange world, which finally, in reverse, is a celebration of fecundity, where things go from dark into light from death to life rather than from life to death.

[IT IS THE POINT OF TURN ABOUT—THE GREAT CLOCK OF THE UNIVERSE HAVING RUN ITS SPIRAL NOW TURNS TO COUNTERCLOCK ITSELF BACK INTO ITS WARM WOMB]



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BEEK’S MOTHER-IN-LAW a story from 1951 from by RAY BRADBURY [WOMAN BECOMES HER DREADFUL DEAD MOTHER OVER THE YEARS!] What a hideous old baggage she had been, that mother-in-law, now so safely casketed and buried in the dark earth of winter. As Gerald Beek came into his library, whistling softly between his horse-like teeth, he thought with distinct and irrediable pleasure of the rainfall, the shovels turning in the earth, the parson’s words. Yes, mother-in-law was dead, dead as Marley, or Marley’s coffin-nail, for that matter. And happiness bubbled within him like water set to boil for tea. “Oh, hello,” he said, for his wife was sitting in the study by the fire, looking at th at it steadily. “You shouldn’t sit alone,” he said, repressing a smile. “I feel awfully about mother,” said his wife, a mouse of a girl, looking no more than eighteen really, for all her twenty-six years. “She so much wanted to live.” “I dare say,” said Gerald, putting his hand over his mouth to provide shelter for his good humor. “I think the best thing we can do is get away for a month or so. The south of France, don’t you think, or - don’t you?” “It was so sudden, her death.” “Death always is. But we must bear up under it.” “Her heart was always stout.” “Like the rest of her,” he thought, with idle humour. To her, “It comes to all of us. Come on now, let’s pack and leave. Not another minute.” “No, no, I can’t,” she cried, suddenly. “There’s so much to be done.” “What, for God’s sake?” he demanded. “Well, there’s that comforter Mama was knitting. I must finish it.” “Nonsense.” “And there’s that book she was writing. I must pencil in the remaining chapters.” “Ridiculous!” “And there was the Parent’s Meeting Chairmanship I’m to take over in her stead.” “Laughable!” “A million and one threads to be tied.” “I say, cut the threads.” He made a slicing motion with his hands. She whirled upon him. “We’re staying here, and no nonsense from you, Gerald, none at all!” They stayed.

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[MACHINE TO PUT MAN IN CHILDRENS BODY FOR A DAY TO ENJOY LIFE WITHOUT MORTALITY] BLESSED ARE THE CHILDREN by Ray Bradbury begun april 20th, 1955 BLESSED ARE THE CHILDREN Bradbury It was the children who woke him up and brought the dark thought again, but he put it away, most of it, and, sitting on the edge of the bed, watched them running on the lawn below. They bathed in the plum-colored pool of shadow for awhile and then went out on the emerald green lawn where the sun could dry them off, and so back and forth yelling and laughing. A shame, he thought, if we older ones should yell like that, laugh like that, they’d have the wagon here before noon to drive us away, talking softly to us and looking earnestly into our faces. But, there was no doubt of it, once out of the shower, once washed and shaved, with the crisp new pink shirt on his arms and chest, with the white buttons buttoned and the tie beautifully tied, and the pressed pants sliding on over his legs, it was going to be a perfect day. You could draw a great arc over the sky, preferably with mechanical drawing pencil, where the sun would go, just thus and so, and pause for a fiery breather at noon, and linger there longer than most suns, before heading down west. His wife looked fresh and rested at the morning table. “You look fresh and rested,” he said. “You’ll live forever.” “Day after tomorrow will do nicely thanks,” she said. “That’s all I have time to think about right now.” “Is that really all you have time for, just the day after tomorrow?” He buttered his toast. He felt safe talking about it because the day was so very bright, nothing dark could happen in it, not even in his head. “What about Eternity?” “Oh Lord,” said his wife. “As one of the Two Black Crows used to say on those old phonograph records, ‘Who cares about that?’” “Well, me for one,” he said. “Do you really care that much?” his wife said, looking at him as if here were a traveler from some far place who had just come to share her breakfast coffee with her. “Either that or I’m punishing myself for some imaginary crime,” he said. “I’m the old man of the sea carrying the heavy load, hunchbacked.”



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“Well, don’t carry the whole thing at once,” said his wife, smiling. “Consider: it’s all broken down into little packs, into bits and pieces. We all carry a little share. It’s like the ants moving a mountain, a crumb to every ant and one day you come back and the mountain’s gone. That’s time and Eternity, too, or this isn’t corn-flakes I’m eating, it’s my new straw hat. Look out there, the girls are doing their bit, too.” “Ah,” he said, “but they don’t know they’re carrying part of the load. Nor, at times, I think, do you. You’re so like the girls.” “There’s a girl scout motto fits here,” said his wife. “Don’t lift more than you can carry. Get on with you now, go ride a horse, go jump in the ocean, go fly a kite. Go add DON’T to that THINK sign in your office!” He watched her go out on the front lawn and there she and the two girls knocked the croquet balls, blurring bright, through the clicking wickets at the red, yellow, blue, green, white, black, brown poles at either end of the blinding lawn. “Hey!” he heard her cry. “Hey!” the girls replied. “Hey,” he whispered, sitting there like a man in a bright museum, come on a masterpiece, all framed in golden light, not wishing to go away but only to stay forever and look, to see, to hear, to smell the summer grass, to almost taste the texture of the day. But at last he rose and went away.

“Except ye be as little children,” he said. “What does that mean?” His secretary looked up in surprise. She had been waiting for him to go on with the dictation of a letter to Glading-Beanwell in Schenectady. “I beg pardon?” “Miss Evans,” he said. “What is it in children we envy so much? The one thing above all that makes them really rich and better off than we?” His secretary relaxed. She put her pencil down for a moment. “Well, they’ve no responsibility, for one thing...” “No, that’s not it, I mean something bigger than that. Responsibility doesn’t make man miserable, not the right kind of responsibility, toward himself and others, as long as you keep your payments up, and don’t get in debt to others you love, and who love you. A penny or a dollar a day, affection all around, and your books are balanced. Not responsibility, surely.” “Well, children are new anyway, they look new, they don’t look tired or shabby,” his secretary said. “That’s not it, either,” he said. “But it comes closer.” “They look like they’ll never be old or sick—”

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“Closer yet. What about death?” “They don’t even know what it is,” said Miss Evans. “That’s it,” he nodded. “That’s it. Now we have it.” That’s why we envy them, really. In all their troubles and nightmares, their eternal cat-fighting from dawn to dusk, troubles they may have, revolts and rebellions, murders and near-murders in the mind, but it drains away by sundown. And what’s over is over. Nothing stays, nothing lingers. They get it all out. But the one thing we envy them most for, admit it or not, is the fact of their innocence.” “I’d never thought about it—” “No, nor do most of us. But it’s true! We’d all like to be like them for a few hours. Not to know or understand death for one single day, to be as sublimely ignorant of that one great fact, wouldn’t that be a vacation for us? Well, that’s my problem, nutshell size. With all my heart, I’d like to be able to go through a single day, from start to finish, doing things and seeing beautiful things at the heart of which I would find not so much as a single dust-speck of mortality. Where can I buy a day like that on the present market?” CAMERA OBSCURA a short story by Ray Bradbury October 22, 1960 Other titles possible: A SMALL BRIGHT ROOM EN CAMERA CAMERA OBSCURA Bradbury They were ten minutes out from Venice, finishing their veal and the last of their wine, when Ludgate looked up at his wife and said: “At this moment, my camera is being stolen.” Lydia looked at him and her face fell apart in the slight way it had when faced by one of his failures to observe the traveling rule, which was, criminals are like children, do not tempt them. He started to rise, but his wife’s gaze said: Why did you leave the camera? If it’s gone, it’s gone. You might as well finish dinner.



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His two daughters and their nurse, Regina, were watching him, also, so, as if weighted, he sat down, smallest of the family lot quite suddenly. When they walked back through the train, one of the girls darted ahead and he called her back much too harshly, regretting it. Then he stepped ahead and looked through the compartment glass. The hook from which the three-dimensional camera had hung on its leather strap, was empty. His wife, reading his back as if it were the palm of his hand, said, “I told you so.” “You told me what? You told me nothing!” And they both flushed. She had meant to say: I thought you so. Both realized nothing had been said. He leapt into the room, searched furiously, then propelled himself out into the aisle again, shouting for the porter. “Don’t get excited,” said Lydia. “That’s the very thing I want to get!” he said. “Oh dammit all, dammit all. I had half a dozen great pictures of Florence in the camera. And we’re not going back there! Porter!” The porter came, shrugging. The porter, shrugging, listened. A kind of inspector came and the two men shrugged together. It was explained that there were 500 people on the train? Were all to be searched? Were all suspected? Quite impossible. For see, for look! The two men gestured. The train swept into the terminal station at Venice. Already the porters were shouting along the platform, windows were being flung up to let baggage be thrust, pushed, thrown out. Quite impossible. Robert Ludgate was the last man off the finally silent, steaming and inhospitable train. He would not leave until he had walked the length of it, glaring through every coffin glass at every abandoned room. ********** CAPTAIN NEMO, TO YOU. a story by Ray Bradbury ----------------------June 2nd, 1983 9:20 to 9:26 a.m. first pages.

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CAPTAIN NEMO, TO YOU! a story by Ray Bradbury The fire was bad enough. It was mostly smoke, but then everyone knows what smoke can do to you. Fire burns, but smoke gets you in your sleep, and you never know what happened. Anyway, with the firemen arrived and more water than people in the building, and windows broken, and still a few flames to be stomped or wet down, the landlady, out of her coop, and clucking and blundering with tears streaming her mascara like a Greek tragedian, down her riverbed cheeks, the landlady banged on Bill Leyman’s door. “My God,” she cried. ‘I know he’s in there. Bill! Get out. He can’t be dead, can he? Why doesn’t he answer?” She began to kick the door, and then use both fists. “Knock it down!” she cried to the fireman. “there’s a wonderful brilliant young man in there. I know he is. My God, save him! The firemen raised their hatchers. Which was the signal for the door to open and a young man to stand forth, dressed in a mariner’s dark outfit, with a black captain on his head. The cap was embroidered with shiny gold and was obviously of museum quality. “Bill!” shrieked the landlady, and then stared at his costume, his dark coat with golden buttons, the service stripes on the left coat arm, the medals over the breast pocket. “You’ve grown a beard!” the landlady cried. “Bill—” “Nemo,” corrected the young man, softly. He turned and regarded the firemen’s gaped mouths and startled eyes. His gaze was tender and all-encompassing. His voice was gentle. “Captain Nemo,” he said, “to you.” “Sir,” said one of the firemen, and almost saluted. **** The moving van was loaded. The young artist appeared in the doorway of the apartment house. The landlady was waiting at the bottom of the steps, her amplitude gathered and held by her clutching hands where her bathrobe constantly threatened revelations but would probably deliver forth Apocalypse. “Bill!” cried the landlady. He looked at her quietly. Her voice fell at this look.



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“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean—” He shut his eyes to shut her up. This down with a calm demeanor, nothing harsh about it. He was accepting his fate, now she must accept her part in it. “Bill—” she murmured. Sh! said his forefinger placed to his rosebud mouth under his fine moustache, over his trimmed goatee. He opened his eyes, which was a signal from the moving man driver to step up on his running board and place a silver -------’s whistle to his lips. THE young man standing at the top of the apartment house steps, nodded. And the moving van driver blew and blew again. Blew the whistle to pipe him down the steps, across the sidewalk. “Bill—” she murmured. “Nemo,” he said. “Captain Nemo, to you.” The moving van driver had obviously been in the navy. [* * * *] [...] he blew the whistle neatly, cleanly, and continued to pipe his captain until the young man had climbed up into the back of the van and stood proudly there, commander of his vessel, his parquetry-veloured chair at hand, his great organ immediately beyond, and all the brass undersea exploration equipments above his head or at his feet. The color of the brass was a gold tinted reflection on his ruddy cheeks, a spark in his eyes, a glisten on his goatee. He saluted his landlady, who almost saluted back. Her hand, instead, wandered over the monstrous coils, the watchworks on her head. “You really must,” said Captain Nemo, “do something about those curlers.” The whistle was still blowing, as the van driver ran around, the silver thing in his mouth, to fasten up the hatch in back, give a final blast, salute, and run back around to leap into his seat. “Weigh anchor!” cried the captain. “Full sped. Off. Off, and around the world!” Around the world, the tenement facades echoed. And Nemo and his submarine and his organ and his brass undersea dreams, sailed away down the street. He was still standing, saluting, as the great craft rounded the corner and vanished into night. “My God,” whispered the landlady, gazing at the empty street, “I bet he will!” THE END

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ATTIC ray bradbury monday & tuesday april 23rd, 24th, 1984 ______________ p.s. ATTIC “Is it true,” asked Abigail, over her morning cereal, “that when you die you go up to the attic?” Her mother and father glanced up, gave her a look, gave each other a look and laughed gently. “Well, in a way—” said her mother. “Yes and no,” said her father. ‘There’s heaven, of course, that’s a kind of attic,” the mother went on. “That’s what you mean, of course,” the father added. “No, I mean, really,” said Abigail, sugaring her cereal until it resembled a snow hill. “Tom, you know Tom, down the street, the little redhead, Tom said that his folks said, if he was good, really good, he’d get to go to the attic when he died, lots of years from now, of course.” “They were joshing him,” said mother. “He didn’t sound joshing. And the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Everything else gets put up in the attic, you don’t want to throw away. Why not people? Heaven? I don’t know. But attics I know. And it would be real convenient.” “They were up there all the time, or they came because I called them.” “Where?” asked mother. “Attic.” Abigail pointed at the ceiling. Then she poured milk on three dishes of cereal placed before the three corn-flake dry visitors, and sat back to smile at them. “Attic,” she said, shutting her eyes with great warm satisfaction. And when the time comes that the attic is full and the people there are more numerous and more fun than those downstairs, it will be time, will it not, to straighten the mantel, dust the table, rearrange the fresh flowers, un-lock the front door to let the summer breeze in comb your hair, realign your lipstick, make sure you have your purse under your arm and...



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Ascend the stairs into the attic. This Emily did one late summer after when she was 82 and the house empty and only sunlight in the chairs and a languid wind in the porch swing, and the kitchen fresh out of coffee and the store suddenly too far. She ascended the stairs. On her way, she began to smile, for she heard sounds of music and hilarity from above. When she swung the attic door open wide, a veritable niagara of sweet sound, laughter and flower scent drenched her. She lifted her face up, eyes shut, to take in the eternal shower. They were all there, they were all there. She stepped up and in, mixed tears of laughter and sad welcome in her eyes. And the attic, oh the attic ...was heaven. THE ATTIC by Ray Bradbury March 29, 1955 “But there’s no reason in the world to be afraid of the attic.” “Plenty of reason, because it is what it is; there’s too much of other people up there, the things they used, the furniture, the books, the clothes. It’s full of ghosts. If you want to clear it out, clean it out by yourself. It’s blasphemy to rummage in graveyards. You’ll pay for your desecration.” “My God, the fancy talk!” cried Robert Williams. “Come off it, Sam!” “That’s how I feel, take it or leave it; sorry.” “But it’s childish!” “No, instinctive. I’m on good terms with my animal self. My animal self ’s hairs quill up on the neck when I think of two places, the attic where Time is placed in storage, or the Cellar, where the Night goes to hide during the day. I wouldn’t dream of going down-cellar to shout and yell and knock around, disturbing the night; it’s got to have some place to hide from the sun. Well, then, don’t ask me to go upstairs either and interfere with Yesterday. It’s in my bones, the way I feel; don’t try and get it out of my bones, Bob.” Robert Williams only shook his head. “If you put it that elaborately.” “The simple is elaborate, the elaborate simple. No.” Robert Williams went upstairs. “Of all the damn fool things...” He opened the attic door and peered in. The attic, with its family of tobacco-brown, broken-harped wicker furniture,

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looked back at him with dusty eyes. A spider-web, like a smashed window, hung in the silent gloom. A window, with its broken glass like a spider-web, let in the faint rays of the late afternoon sun. The place smelled like a baked strand of desert, like a shore down which a sea departed a million years before leaving only silt, bone, and a strewn toy. THE BIRDS by Ray Bradbury Started Sept. 16, 1958 THE BIRDS Bradbury He did not even know what kind of birds they were. Who in the world knows what kind of birds live in various trees about his house? Beyond a certain age, one’s vision fails, anyway, so a blackbird or a raven, a tanager and a robin all look the same. Sometimes, early morning or sometimes early evenings you hear a racket from this bush, a stir from that, a chorus overhead, but who stops to say, “Hark the lark!” or “there’s the yellow-bellied gutcheon!” No one. Not Robert Snell, anyway. He knew the birds only as creatures who took advantage of the top of his car if he parked it under a tree. If he forgot and drew his car up at night or during the day on weekends under the maple tree under his house he would call to his wife as he left for an errand, “I think I’ll go drive the birdcage to the store!” Cursing, later, he would wash the car down with sponge and hose. That was all and everything of Robert Snell’s life with the creatures. Otherwise he was employed by a university nearby where he could be seen surreptitiously feeling books, blowing dust off old latin grammars, fumbling about in dark stacks like a man twice his age. He was given to talking to his children in Greek, when angry, and would never reveal what he had just cried out, and to his wife, at night, in silver Latin, which she translated, with a smile, as she went to sleep. Theirs was a life of sweet sound and little furies. They had a hi-fi which he tuned up and she tuned down, a radio which the children, aged ten and 12 tuned to jazz and he tuned to the Beethoven quartet, a dog which he trained three hours a week to be lean and alert, and to which, 90 hours a week, the children fed candy and breadcrusts to make him a slob. Television had only



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lately come to their lives, when all four had had mumps together and on the third day having stared fixedly at each other, for some hours, everyone was for abandoning ship when the boy suggested a rental shop that might install one of those charming little boxes in the house for a minimum sum. When the box had been in the house 48 hours, the family reached the point of no return. “It’s like a visit from the Jukes and Kallikacks all in one,” said Mr. Snell. “There is a dreadful fascination in studying the idiot, the malformed, the sick, and the unsure. Besides, I rather like the old Sherlock Holmes movies. Wasn’t Rathbone wonderful?” Well, there is the scene. And there are the birds in the trees outside the open window where, all summer long, the Jukes and the Kallikaxes stayed on, in a spanking fresh new box with whirly knobs and clearer sound, gibbering and humming away like a Greek chorus flock of magpies somehow got into the Oracle’s Cave. Enter Philip Dickie, advertising art executive. [* * * * *] Time, late august. The blue hour, the cocktail hour. The children off somewhere on their flashing bicycles. The parents gently collapsed in the midget patio in the rear of the house, eyeing their guests with a kind of foolish love, and the guests eyeing them back convivially, everyone nursing their second martini, the talking bumbling beautifully on. At which point, the birds in the apple tree nearby began to sing. “I say,” said Philip Dickie, who saw too many British movies, himself. “I say,” he said. “Listen to those birds of yours.” “Those are not my birds, Philip,” said Mr. Snell. “Those are God’s birds nesting in Bobby’s tree. He planted an apple core there ten years ago.” “God’s birds then, but they’re singing.” “So they are.” Everybody listened. The clear chorus rose and fell upon the soft late summer air. “And do you know what they are singing?” asked Philip Dickie, after a moment, blinking. “Tell us,” said Snell. “They are singing WALDROP’S BEER IS THE BETTER NOT THE BITTER BEER!” “How charming,” said Mrs. Dickie.

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CHIMNEY SWEEP. Ray Bradbury Monday night 8:00 p.m. to 8;30 pm. idea plus 4 pages ____________________________

Feb. 21st, 1983

CHIMNEY-SWEEP. Bradbury Chimney-sweep. My God, he thought, I haven’t seen one of those since I was a child. Haven’t even thought of one since I was thirty or so. Chimney-sweep. The sign was on the front and sides of a huge tricycle that was passing on the sidewalk, pumped by an old young woman dressed in white linens that color of baked white summer bread, wearing spanking bright new white tennis shoes, and wearing a white flower blossom cap over her snowy curls. The sound of her tinkling bell had brought Joseph Grimes to the window. It was a sound out of childhood, also, the sort of chime you heard from scissors grinders or vegetable sellers or— Chimney sweeps. He saw her lips move, chanting, and knew she was saying those very words and so he must hear. He opened the french windows on the side of his house and stepped out. She heard, stopped her tricycle, planted her neat white shoes, and yelled up at him. “Your chimney need sweeping?!” “I don’t know,” he said, foolishly. “What?” I mean,” he said and had to laugh. “ I don’t know.” He walked down the steps and stood on the lawn looking up at his chimney. It hadn’t been checked in years. They didn’t burn wood in the fireplace more than ten times every winter. Then the unpredictable weather yanked the windows up and let the premature summers in for weeks at a time. “Damned if I know,!” he said, quietly. By that time the woman had crossed the lawn and stood with him, looking up at the chimney, up there with the tv antennae. He glanced down at her—she was small, not more that five feet give or shave an inch. But she was perfect. Perfect round blue eyes in a perfect suntanned round face. No makeup. No need, she was health’s companion and eternal representative. She could have sold cherry juice and apricot pie door to door, cut and made from those lips, those cheeks.



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“How in hell do you clean chimneys dressed like that?” asked Joseph Grimes. “Begging your pardon.” “How in hell is it you don’t know if your bricks need sooting?” she replied, eyeing him and then the house. “This is California and I’m a Californian.” “Ah, yes,” she nodded. “They never know. I should have guessed. Well!” She marched toward the porch and stopped. “You want me to take a look and give you the honest truth?” Her face was lit with such pure honesty, he could not resist. “Be my guest.” She held the door for him, going in, and then headed straight for the fireplace where she swung the brass screen away and ducked under. She could almost stand erect without bumping her head. She stared blinking up into the darkness and said, “Needs a bit, not much. One hour, at 8 bucks should do it.” When she ducked out, he said, “You’re the first woman chimney sweep I’ve ever met. And again, how do you work in those whites?” “When the heart is pure,” she laughed, “the clothes stay clean. That’s a lie, of course, but it sounds good. You’ll see. I wonder, could I have a glass of water. It’s a hot day and I’d whet my whistle please before my chores.” He brought the glass and she drank it like a small and quietly grateful dog, peering into his face. “Mind if I ask you a question?” “Please.” “It’s been a bad year?” “No.” He hesitated, then changed it to, “Yes.” She nodded. “It shows. Wife died?” “Six months ago. How did you—” “It’s there.” She pointed at his mouth. “Lost your job?” she went on. “Last month. What—” “It’s there—” This time she indicated his eyes. “Lost some friends lately?” “Yes.” “So I noted.” She was checking the merest tremble in his hands. “Well, maybe I can be some help. Just let me finish knocking the hell out of your chimney and—what was the name?” “Grimes,” he said. “It fits.” And she was out on the lawn and back with her equipments. “Now why don’t you just go out on the lawn in back and relax and let old L. B. Summers clean up.” “Was does L.B. stand for?” “Nothing. My mother figured Summers was such a great name, a season

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all year round, people would call me that and no need for anything else but initials.” “Allright, Summers,” he said, vaguely disquieted, strangely comforted, now this, now that. “Work away.” “There is no one remedy. We all think there’s one. For some there’s women, some there’s men, some there’s children, other’s there’s books, yet other’s drink, or take your various dopes. None works all or even part time. Some are pretty nice. But, finally—the soot collects. And then—” “Then?” “I come along.” “Have I sold my soul to you?” “Only as much as gratitude can pay.” “I don’t have to hand it over later and suffer a billion years in a pyre or up my gills in elephants slops?” “You do not.” “Where’s the pay in all this for you?” “Why,” she said, smiling at him, reaching out to touch his face, look at his calm eyes, examine his bright teeth, notice his even brighter and younger cheeks. “You,” she said. And again, “You,” she said, “you are my pay.” She kissed him on the lips and it was the kiss of a young woman exhaling one cognac breath of pure flame. “I will be back in 20 years,” she said, striding across the lawn. “When the soot collects again?” “Again.” At her bike she straddled and found the pedals with her marshmallow heels. “Be happy.” “I am. Thanks.” “Don’t. You are my thanks. So long.” WITH A DOOR LIKE A SUMMER SKY... a short story by Ray Bradbury ________________________________ Two a.m. Monday, March 12, ’62 thought of this. Began writing story 10:00 a. m. same day.



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WITH A DOOR LIKE A SUMMER SKY Bradbury Do you know what Ireland is? It’s this. It’s filling a room with the smoke of a million cigars. That’s the fog. It’s opening the window for a wind to come in of itself and bring along the snow. Then it’s off to the bath with you and fully clothed jumping in the shower and turning it on loud and cold. That gives you a rather summer mild idea of the weather that blinds the windows, washes the gutters, and laces your shoulders on nights when you walk and it’s snow instead of rain that follows you down empty Dublin streets. The weather is always at you, like a pack of hounds, no matter where you’re at. It lies by your welcome mat and waits, a great white beast. It whispers and chuckles down your midnight drain. Stuff up your ears, it rains in your sleep, it washes the dream away to the raw stuff BONES of nightmare. It smokes and curls in great fog banks lurking over hills and emptying itself in landfalls of shadow and half-substance into dales. After about a thousand years of this dire stuffs, the weather has quite bleached out the stones, the roads, the walls, the very timbre-beams of houses, leaving but one great color green in the mattress of grass that spreads jouncy to the step from the Irish sea to the storm walls of Galway. The trouble with this mattress is, most nights, and nine days out of ten, you cannot lie on it. Women, like cats, hate to rouse up wet. So you have the weather, and you have the Green, and the other beauty is the language, which was made up to lift, lower, rise, fall, jaunt, flirt, pipe and warmly insinuate in order to fend off the weather above, below, and all around these people with the sweet pipe caught in their throats. That’s Ireland for you. It’s coming out of the door each day to the practical joke of a ten thousand ton bucket of ice-water on your heads. It’s wet-smoke from the bogs. Its clay-cold feet and portwine cheeks. Its grey roads through grey towns made of grey sod and grey rock. Almost. Thank God for that ‘almost.” And what do I mean by that?

Figure Four—Colored windows

Figure Five—Conscience!

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The Albright Collection: Supplementary Fragments List Compiled by Joseph D. Kaposta

These entries represent fragments discovered since the publication of “The Albright Collection: Bradbury Story Fragments” in The New Ray Bradbury Review 3 (2012): 85–131. This addendum, like the main compilation in issue 3, remains a work-in-progress; further fragments may be discovered within the private holdings of the Albright Collection, or within the Bradbury–Albright Collection gifted to the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies by Donn Albright in 2013. Most of the fragments date from the 1940s and 1950s; occasional pages are more recent. Genre (story, verse, play, essay) is noted where known. Most of the new entries are undated, but dates provided by Bradbury on the folders, title pages, or opening pages are listed. Handwritten (holograph) comments are so noted; typescript is indicated by the standard abbreviation “TS.” “Basement, The.” Title page only. “Blind Man, The.” 2 pp. plus title page. “Boredom Factor, The. Divorce Without Reason.” 2 pp. plus title page. “Fellini and Me.” Essay. See “Time Between, The. “Gift Remains.” 1 p.; 2 pp. holograph notes (folder). “Humor and Forgiveness.” See “Time Between, The.” “In the Attic World.” 2 pp. TS (possibly part of From the Dust Returned). “It Was a Town.” 1 p. TS. “It Was Only a Matter of Time.” 1 p. / 3 pp. as “The Off Guard” / 1 p. as “The Ravine” / 1 p. as “The Minstrels.” “Losers / Choosers Ltd.” / “Headless Hunters” (folder). Note: Mis-titled Martian Chronicles 1 p. as Square, Round Hole / 1 p. as The Bureau of Occupational Hazards / 1 p. holograph as Losers, Inc. (Can Be Choosers). “Montgomery Clift—Ishmael June, 06 (folder). Odds and ends including complete “I Get the Blues When It Rains” / TP as Monty Clift: Call Me Ishmael” By Ray Bradbury.

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“Never Tell Your Dreams.” 6 pp. (based on Something Wicked This Way Comes). “Next in Line, The.” 1 p. play fragment. “O It Was Horrible.” 1 p. “O Squirrely Was the Yorty Bird.” 1 p. “Opera: The Next in Line.” Rosenberg & Bradbury. 1 p. (folder). “Psychoanalyst Who Found He Was Deaf, The.” 1 p. as “The Discovery” / 1 p. as “The Dust Heap.” “Surprise” S–Story 8–15–81 (folder). TP plus 2 pp. “Tain’t No Sin.” 1 p. “That Stranger, Looking Out.” 1 p. “Theatre of Morning, Showers, Grabbing Kids, All That, The.” 1 p. “Time Between, The.” The Time Between concept (folder). 2 pp. plus title page. Also contains “Humor and Forgiveness” 1 p. plus title page; “Fellini and Me” January 23rd 1996. “To Follow Summer, Round the World.” 1 p. “Trolley, The” (folder). 3 pp. incomplete; distinct from the published story “The Trolley.” “Tut Revivere” story-poem. “Tut Reborn” S.S. idea.” Oct. 1990 (folder). 1 p. short story “2,195 Feet of Film.” (folder); short story, 2 July 1953; “Two Thousand One Hundred and Ninety-Five Feet of Film” 2 July 1953, 4 pp. plus title page.

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Fragmentary Futures: Bradbury’s Illustrated Man Outlines—and Beyond jonathan r. eller

“I believe first drafts, like life and living, must be immediate, quick, passionate. By writing a draft in a day I have a story with a skin around it.” Ray Bradbury’s creative coda originated long before he fashioned this concise version of it for his December 1964 Show magazine interview. His daily writing habit had become a quotidian fever by the early 1940s, and he soon learned to avoid interruptions from any other voices—including his own rational judgments. Each day became a race between subconscious inspiration and the stifling effects of his own self-conscious thoughts—the more logical thought patterns that he desperately tried to hold at bay during the few hours it would take him to complete an initial draft. Bradbury was convinced that the magic would dissolve away if he failed to carry through on a story idea or an opening page at first sitting, and it’s not surprising that his Show interview coda came with a cautionary corollary: “If one waits overnight to finish a story, quite often the texture one gets the next day is different. You wind up with two kinds of flesh, one of which will not graft onto the other.” By the mid-1960s, the densely packed creative seedlings of his pomegranate mind had yielded more than 270 published stories, hundreds of unpublished tales, and thousands of deferred fragment fictions that would, unfortunately, remain unfulfilled creations. The process of fragmentation radiated out far beyond his stories, and the Albright Collection contains many fragment poems, fragment essays, fragment novels, and even fragments of sea chanteys that Bradbury composed in 1953–54 as he transformed Moby Dick from novel to screenplay under the demanding eye of director John Huston. This fractured, elusive, and highly complex background to Bradbury’s published work also impacted the way he charted his creative futures in proposed book outlines and the sequences of future books he hoped to publish throughout the early decades of his career. The recoverable record of these alternative futures is fascinating, and reveals a 70



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great deal about the instability lurking beneath Bradbury’s solid and enduring achievements as a masterful teller of tales. ***** The Illustrated Man outlines (1947–1950) serve as a significant example of this unpredictable process. On one level, the many surviving content outlines for his future books communicate a sense of completeness as stand-alone documents, but one soon discovers that this is a transitory and often fleeting completeness. Bradbury, who so often revised and even rewrote his stories, also moved them in and out of story collection concepts in ways that prevented any degree of stability until a given volume (if it were fortunate enough to reach print at all) was locked into galleys or page proofs. Even here, however, Bradbury demonstrated a propensity to destabilize these forms of presswork; for Dark Carnival (1947), his first book and first story collection, he revised, deleted, and added stories in the galley sheets, and even cut two stories from the page proofs. His publisher, Arkham House founder August Derleth, finally forbade major revisions to three of the best tales. Not surprisingly, his Doubleday editors faced similar challenges at various times throughout the long publishing history of The Martian Chronicles (1950), as Bradbury moved various story-chapters in and out of this modern classic; by the late 1990s, six different American and British versions were in print.1 Many developmental outlines survive for both of these works; for the most part, these are tentative, fragmentary, or heavily overwritten. Most of the Dark Carnival and Martian Chronicles outlines have been fully discussed elsewhere,2 but his third book, Doubleday’s The Illustrated Man (1951), has an equally fascinating legacy of content outlines that has languished far too long in the shadows of literary studies. Establishing the sequence of these largely undated outlines eventually yields a whole cloth of creative development, a patchwork tapestry through which we can document Bradbury’s evolving intentions and vision for one of his best-known story collections. From the beginning, the Illustrated Man outlines exhibit creativity far beyond mere bricolage; they tell us a great deal about how Bradbury was conceiving larger configurations of his stories during the late 1940s, a crucial point in his early career. By the fall of 1947, the 27-year-old author had published more than a hundred professional stories in a wide range of genre pulps and a growing number of major market magazines, but so far his only book credit was centered on Arkham House and its niche market of weird fiction writers and readers. The first known outline for a story collection titled The Illustrated Man, datable by content to 1947, contains much internal evidence that Bradbury was ready to showcase a broader range of work. In various outline forms, The Illustrated Man collection remained at the center of this impulse for the next four years.

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First Outline Figure 1 presents the seven known outlines for The Illustrated Man in tabular form, beginning (in the far left column) with the 1947 outline. The twenty-three story titles include six of the best stories from Dark Carnival, leading off with two of the most enduring: “The Next in Line,” the first and best-known of his Mexican tales, and “The Homecoming,” which earned a place in the O. Henry Prize Stories volume of 1947. He included “Dark Carnival,” the original title story that he held out of Dark Carnival for further development (it would eventually provide the opening plot and characters for Something Wicked This Way Comes). But this new collection was intended to showcase his full range of subject and genre; here too were some of his newer major market magazine stories, including “Invisible Boy” (Mademoiselle), “The Big Black and White Game” (American Mercury), which had earned a Best American Short Stories anthology selection in 1946, and “Powerhouse,” scheduled for the March 1948 issue of Charm and destined to place third in the O. Henry Prize Stories annual for 1948. The 1947 outline also held intimations of significant Bradbury volumes that were just beginning to surface in other more or less fragmentary outlines. These included two titles destined for The Martian Chronicles, “We’ll Go No More A’Roving” (published as “And the Moon Be Still as Bright”) and “The Million Year Picnic,” and three that he would soon weave into his concept for a nostalgic Illinois novel—“The Night,” “The Lonely One” (already adapted for CBS Radio as “Summer Night”), and “The Death of So and So.” The first two eventually provided some of the best moments of suspense in Dandelion Wine, the novelized story cycle that emerged from the larger Illinois novel’s fabric in 1957. This tantalizing mix of realism, science fiction, and dark fantasy, which included award-winning stories, first surfaces in this early Illustrated Man outline. But only one tale from this strong group of twenty-three, “Children’s Hour” (published as “Zero Hour”), would remain when Bradbury finally published his Illustrated Man collection in 1951; the broader concept of fiction represented in this first outline would instead be transferred to another of his best-known collections, The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953). Second and Third Outlines The title story itself, placed sixth in the 1947 outline, was often on his mind. Bradbury and his New York agent, Don Congdon, had found strong interest for “The Illustrated Man” among the major slick magazine editors, but the general consensus was that it had too many effects and relied too much on magical elements to tell the tragic story of fear, isolation, and murder at the heart of this



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circus tale. Bradbury continued to improve the tale in successive drafts, and in all likelihood it was still in play as the title story in 1948, the probable time period of the next surviving outline for The Illustrated Man. But this second outline is fragmentary, written (in Bradbury’s hand) down the right margin of a heavily canceled intermediate typed outline that had become a creative dead end.3 The new fragment contains fourteen story titles that form the basis for the third surviving outline, dated December 1948 and containing twenty-one stories that, in aggregate, continued to yield a sum greater than the individual parts. Here again was a rich mix that crossed genre barriers, devised by Bradbury to affirm, at least between the lines, that he had never observed genre boundaries or conventions during the uncontrolled creative bursts that he depended on to shape the first drafts of each story. He was also beginning to put some distance between his book outlines and the weird tales that represented his earliest success as a writer. None of his early weirds remained in the third outline of December 1948; they were replaced by edgier Bradbury terrors such as “Marionettes, Inc.,” “The Screaming Woman,” and “Riabouchinska.” These last two had not yet reached print, but a radio adaptation of “Ria” had aired on a 1947 CBS Radio episode of Suspense. The O. Henry Prize anthology story “Homecoming” was gone, but Bradbury retained his O. Henry award winner “Powerhouse” and added “I See You Never,” which earned a place in the Best American Short Stories anthology of 1948. This was also a time when he polished and published many of the Martian stories he had been writing in Venice Beach, southwest of Los Angeles, feeling the electrical inspiration of the adjacent power station humming just a few feet away from his typewriter. Seven of these tales of Martian contact, settlement, and abandonment appear in the third Illustrated Man outline, and six would eventually appear in The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury had now gathered the full harvest promised by the original outline of 1947, and during the winter of 1948–49 this third outline and its stories, complete with a cover page dated December 8, 1948, was under review with the major trade house of Farrar, Straus in New York. In March 1949 he added “The Golden Window,” a beautiful fantasy-allegory that he had written during the war, but in the end it made no difference; Farrar, Straus may have found The Illustrated Man contents “a little bit of everything, and not enough of one thing” (as Bradbury feared), or they may have simply relied on the publishing history of the individual stories as house editors designated each one “pulp” or “quality.” Bradbury resented this reductionist rationale, but there was little he could do about the underlying pressures facing all the trade houses; rising publishing costs, and the fact that story collections were hard to sell, offered little consolation for a writer whose rapid rise to prominence was still limited to the short story form.

As The Illustrated Man, (fragment), c. 1948

Power House

The Earth Men

El Dia De Muerte

And the Moon Be Still as Bright

I See You Never

Invisible Boy

The Long Years

En La Noche

The Screaming Woman

The Meadow

Zero Hour

Riabouchinska

As The Illustrated Man, c. 1947

The Next in Line

The Homecoming

Invisible Boy

Skeleton

Power House

The Illustrated Man

The October Game

Dark Carnival

Mr. Saturday

Benjy Don’t You Die

The Finnegan

Cistern

The Meadow

The Screaming Woman

In the Night [En La Noche]

The Illustrated Man

Invisible Boy

I See You Never

And the Moon Be Still as Bright

El Dia De Muerte

The Earth Men

Way in the Middle of the Air

Ylla

Power House

As The Illustrated Man, December 1948

The Other Foot

The Vacation

The Man With the Key in His Back

The Space Man

The City

The Veldt

Zero Hour

Usher II

The Visitor

Pillar of Fire

Kaleidoscope

Forever and the Earth

As Forever and the Earth, c. fall 1949

Marionettes, Inc.

Forever and the Earth

Death by Rain

The Visitor

[illegible cancel]

The Rocket Man

Long Before Dawn

The Fox and the Forest (To the Future)

The Veldt

Kaleidoscope

The Concrete Mixer

The Playground

As Frost and Fire, May 1950

The Man

The Man

The Rocket

No Particular Night or Morning

The Exiles

The Exiles

No Particular Night or Morning

The Exiles

The Last Night of the World

The Fire Balloons

The Fathers Fire Balloons The Last Night of the World

The Rocket Man

The Long Rain

The Man

The Highway

The Other Foot

Kaleidoscope

The Veldt

Prologue: The Illustrated Man

Published Contents, February 1951

The Rocket Man

The Last Night of the World

The Fathers

The Rocket Man

The Long Rain

The Highway

The Highway

The Long Rain

The Other Foot

Kaleidoscope

The Veldt

Prologue: The Illustrated Man

As The Illustrated Man, late summer 1950

The Other Foot

Kaleidoscope

The Veldt

Prologue

Untitled, mid-summer 1950

Evolving Outlines for The Illustrated Man, 1947–1950

The Other Foot Pillar of Fire The Golden Window

The Coffin

Benjy Don’t You Die

The Lonely One (Summer Night)

The Highway The Fire Man

The Vacation

People That Time Forgot

The Other Foot

The Rocket

The Rocket

Epilogue

The Rocket No Particular Night or Morning] Epilogue

Epilogue

Zero Hour

The City

Marionettes, Inc.

The Concrete Mixer

The Visitor

The Fox and the Forest

Zero Hour

Zero Hour

The City

Marionettes, Inc.

Marionettes, Inc. The City

The Visitor The Concrete Mixer

The Fox and the Forest

The Fox and the Forest The Concrete Mixer

The Visitor

The Visitor

Figure 1. The original story “The Illustrated Man,” which was the initial inspiration for the collection, was added to the Avon (Morrow) hardbound edition in 1997, but appears in no other edition of The Illustrated Man.

The Pedestrian

The Last Night of the World

Miracles of Jamie

The Big Black and White Game

The Fathers

Great Grandma 2000 Years Old

The Silent Towns

Million Year Picnic

Threshold to Outcasts of the Stars (The Rocket)

The Exiles Payment in Full

Riabouchinska

We’ll Go No More A’Roving

The One Who Waits

The City (Purpose)

Zero Hour Pillar of Fire

The Man

The Death of So and So

Marionettes, Inc.

The Sign (Free Dirt)

An Interval in Sunlight Zero Hour

Pillar of Fire

Children’s Hour

The Long Years

Pillar of Fire (short)

Miracles of Jamie

The Night

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Between April and May 1949, Bradbury took counsel from Don Congdon and radio producer Norman Corwin and, with the prospect of some good meals at Corwin’s New York apartment, made plans to promote his outlines in person. Congdon felt that Bradbury’s congeniality and ability to sell the virtues of his fiction, evident during his earlier 1946 trip to the East Coast, might win over publishers and editors. Thanks to Congdon’s connections and Bradbury’s popularity in the mainstream magazine market, many house editors already knew Bradbury or were familiar with his unique and poetic prose style. Even one sale would make the trip worthwhile, but Doubleday’s Walter Bradbury (no relation) offered a two-book contract based on the promise that Ray Bradbury could turn his Martian stories and one of his short science fiction novellas into two books that could somehow make the creative leap from story collections to novels. Bradbury had taken a remix of his Illustrated Man story collection along under the title of his 1948 story “Pillar of Fire,” a nearnovella length science fantasy that took on the “death of the imagination” issues of censorship that were beginning to confront postwar American literary publishing. In early June, while still in New York, Bradbury gutted the Pillar of Fire collection outline to shape the foundation for The Martian Chronicles. For the second book he offered up his 1946 short novella “The Creatures That Time Forgot,” which he intended to extend into a novel titled Frost and Fire. Fourth Outline Bradbury returned home with his story collection portfolio in complete disarray; what remained of the Illustrated Man collection concept, which until just a few months earlier had represented the full range of his best stories, was temporarily buried within other outline options.4 As he began to bridge many of his Martian stories into the new Chronicles concept, he also began to consider how he might be able to advance his new relationship with Doubleday into a third book that would showcase some of the better science fiction stories that remained. That category continued to expand, for he was now in demand across the entire range of science fiction pulps and had broken into the slicks with his science fiction as well. It was only natural that his next outline on the trail to The Illustrated Man took shape around that genre focus. The fourth outline is subtitled, all in a tentative lower case, as “a book of tales by r.b. for doubleday?” The question mark suggests a date of fall 1949, a time when Bradbury had just submitted his fully bridged and integrated Martian Chronicles typescript and was trying to figure out how to expand his “Creatures That Time Forgot” novella into Frost and Fire for Doubleday. For the moment, his title story shifted to “Forever and the Earth,” a new com-



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position that imagined Thomas Wolfe, rescued by a time traveler from his premature deathbed, writing emotionally charged tales of a far future Earth and cosmos. In spite of the shift in title story, the twelve stories listed confirm this long-overlooked page as the missing bridge between the earlier and later Illustrated Man outlines—for the first time, a large component of the listed stories (six of twelve) began to define the contents of the actual book. “Kaleidoscope,” “The Visitor,” “Zero Hour,” “The Veldt,” “The City,” and “The Other Foot” would all carry through into the final published version of The Illustrated Man. Two more titles could easily make a total of eight: “The Space Man” may be a variant title for either “The Man” or “The Rocket Man,” and “The Man With the Key in His Back” could represent “Marionettes, Inc.,” which had first appeared back in the third outline. In spite of the fact that only twelve stories appear in this somewhat tentative fourth outline—written at a time when all of his collection concepts were constantly shifting—every one of the stories fits the science fiction focus of the final product. Even the loss of “The Illustrated Man,” the original title story, is consistent with the evolution of the collection. Bradbury no longer needed a fully articulated horror story to open what had now become a science fiction collection. His illustrated man was on the way to becoming a metaphor for storytelling; when he resurfaced, very late in the process, it would be as a bridging character whose tattoos opened out into various stories of the future. Fifth Outline By the spring of 1950, the need to develop this new story collection suddenly became an immediate concern. Bradbury now realized that expanding “The Creatures That Time Forgot,” a story much better than its pulp title, into Frost and Fire might not be the best way to reach the level of sustained long fiction that had so far eluded him. By May 1950, he had developed a fifth outline, intending to incorporate “The Creatures That Time Forgot” (as the title story “Frost and Fire”) without expanding it from its original short novella form. This is the longest and most carefully revised of all the surviving outlines, and it has the most to tell about the long and complicated road to The Illustrated Man. The twenty-eight titles that moved in and out of the Frost and Fire outline underscore the merits of the published stories that existed beyond the Martian Chronicles group. The special Bradbury brand of science fiction or science fantasy, privileging the human factor over technology, was now dominating his Muse. His early and mid-1940s successes with weird fiction, paralleled for a time with success as an off-trail writer in the detective fiction magazines, had

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now given way to equally distinctive science fiction that editors and readers alike had come to expect and enjoy. He had two short novellas already in hand and published—“Pillar of Fire” and the retitled “Frost and Fire”—and he was in the midst of composing an even longer one, “The Fire Man,” destined to evolve into Fahrenheit 451 three years later. But that was a far and uncharted future for a writer who still concentrated on drafting a story a week; for the moment, all three of these novellas were gathered into the fifth outline. Between May 20 and August 19, 1950, Ray Bradbury reworked this outline in close consultation with Doubleday editor Walt Bradbury, who approved the contractual change from novel to story collection in early July. Beneath all the revisions, the original typed layer shows twenty-four titles (including the three novellas) and a word count of 131,000. Doubleday needed a more manageable collection to stay within their $2.75 price point, and in mid-July Walt Bradbury recommended cutting all three of the novellas along with “Forever and the Earth,” which was already scheduled for a multi-author anthology. This layer of revision is clearly discernible, and includes the addition of “Zero Hour” and “The Playground,” stories that both author and editor felt would strengthen the collection. The fifth outline’s final layer of revision reveals Bradbury’s last cuts: “Payment in Full,” “The Playground,” “The Vacation,” and “The Pedestrian.” The first was perhaps the weakest of his published Martian tales; the other three remained unsold and in any event would not clear serial publication before the February 1951 release date of the story collection. The addition of “The Highway” and “The Exiles” brought the revised outline word count in at 78,000. In spite of the multiple layers of revision, the final book contents had finally taken form—seventeen of the eighteen titles published in The Illustrated Man were now featured. Bradbury added the eighteenth and final story, “No Particular Night or Morning,” in his August 19th letter to Doubleday, raising his final estimated word count to 84,000. Frost and Fire remained as the volume title, but none of the title stories from any of the first five outlines (including “Frost and Fire”) remained when he was done revising this fifth outline. Sixth and Seventh Outlines Not surprisingly, the sixth outline, probably prepared during early August 1950, bears no title story at all. Esquire’s July 1950 publication of “The Illustrated Man” persuaded Bradbury to reconsider restoring this much-traveled tale as the volume’s title story, but Walt Bradbury reminded him that its deep roots in the horror tradition had little in common with the book’s emerging science fiction focus. In late July he briefly considered the title Perhaps We



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Are Going Away, but it had no direct relevance (in either content or theme) to the volume (the title was subsequently bestowed on a 1962 story). There is, however, some evidence that Bradbury was working his way through this impasse over the volume’s title concept. The contents of the sixth outline are framed, top and bottom, by references to the “Prologue” and “Epilogue” that eventually became as famous as any of the actual stories in the collection. The seventh outline, prepared after July 1950, locks in The Illustrated Man as volume title and expands the framing title into “Prologue: The Illustrated Man.” Bradbury now envisioned an itinerant tattooed man, sharing a campfire with the prologue’s narrator. This illustrated man is an outcast from the world of carnivals, for the witch who inked his body empowered each image with movement; they tell their tales, and even foresee the future. The narrator tries to sleep, but his gaze focuses on one of the illustrated man’s tattoos. This image begins to open out into the volume’s first story. The narrator’s enchantment soon extends to the reader—a single bridging sentence is all that’s required to take the reader on into the second story. No more bridges are necessary; these science fiction tales run their course, leading up to a chilling epilogue that gives the entire range of stories a sense of continuity and closure. With the Prologue/Epilogue frames in place, Bradbury had no need to provide further structure to a strong collection of stories. But the internal evidence in outlines six and seven show that he took some care to re-arrange the stories that eventually settled into the middle section of the book. In outline six, the movement of “The Rocket,” full of the child-focused wonderment of space travel, from the middle to the end of the collection resulted in the temporary deletion of “No Particular Night or Morning,” a dark tale of isolation in space that drives a freighter crewman to insanity and suicide. That dark tale moved into the middle of the seventh outline, where Bradbury considered deleting it yet again, along with three other mid-book stories—“The Exiles,” “The Visitor,” and “The Concrete Mixer.” These are tales of illusion and reality, stories that also touch on the death of the imagination. Literary masters of dark fiction (“The Exiles”), illusionists (“The Visitor”), and even Martian poets (“The Concrete Mixer”) come to dark and disturbing ends. His marginal calculations indicate a potential savings of 20,000 words, but as he went to press he kept them all in a slightly rearranged order. The final volume order of stories shows a careful pacing through the volume as Bradbury offered a varying progression of dark and ironic, edgy and terrifying. The strongest stories—“The Veldt,” “The Rocket Man,” “The Fire Balloons,” “The Fox and the Forest,” and “Zero Hour”—are sequenced in ways that sustain an emotional intensity and uneasiness across the entire volume. His postwar science fiction stories reflected the unimaginable terrors of an increasingly uncertain atomic age, and the often unspoken wariness and hopelessness that

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came to characterize his view of the early Cold War years was even more apparent when the better stories were gathered together. On July 30, 1950, he offered his Doubleday editor a telling comment: “In reading over the book I have been somewhat appalled by the overwhelming pessimism in a good many of the stories. . . .” The themes of antirealism and antimaterialism may be overworked in The Illustrated Man, but Bradbury’s deep exploration of human values in a technological age provides a quality common to most of the stories. The process by which he brought these stories together in an enduring collection is documented to some degree in his professional correspondence, but the surviving outlines, studied in their most likely sequence of composition, bring us into the very center of his larger literary judgments and visions at a crucial time in his career. Given the textual history of Dark Carnival and The Martian Chronicles, it should come as no surprise that Bradbury continued to refashion The Illustrated Man even after it was released in February 1951. He lobbied hard for Doubleday to drop what he considered the weakest stories—“The Visitor” and “No Particular Night or Morning”— but Doubleday’s Walt Bradbury was able to convince him that variations from both the first hardbound printings and the ever-popular Bantam paperback edition would confuse library catalogers and upset readers who would expect to find what earlier readers had found between the covers of this popular Bradbury collection. As one might expect, Doubleday did not have the last word. To this day, most (but not all) British editions contain variant contents, and by 1997, with the Doubleday hardbound editions long out of print, Bradbury was able add “The Illustrated Man,” the anchoring tale for the original multiple-genre collection concept, to the Avon (later Morrow) hardbound edition. These outlines, seven variations on a story collection concept, offer valuable evidence for those who wish to study Bradbury’s evolving creativity and the intriguing ways he perceived his stories in various combinations across time. At least a hundred pages of such volume outlines, defining dozens of his books and book ideas, survive today; they span his career, but most are concentrated on the richly creative decades from the 1940s to the early 1970s. Though often complete in the sense of being self-contained dreams of imagined futures, many of these outlines portray or predict works that never coalesced, or that metamorphosed, like the chrysalis image that was central to Bradbury’s concept of creativity, into far different forms than their beginnings seemed to promise. ***** From time to time, Bradbury would pause and feed his imagination with alternate world glimpses of an even broader universe—future volume timelines. At least seven such glimpses survive, and each one can be roughly dated



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from the point where the list of actual publications trails off into year-by-year speculations or dreams of future works. Figure 2 displays the future timelines he devised between 1949 and 1964, a fifteen-year stretch that also saw the publication of some of his most significant books. The shaded areas across these timelines represent reality—the past and forthcoming books that he listed in order to prime the pump for imagining the future works in each list. The unshaded areas across the table forecast the future as he saw it shaping up from particular moments in time. In this way the various timelines together form an intriguing pattern of documentation and imagination. The unshaded titles projected from the 1949 list (left), the earliest known timeline, was composed before Bradbury abandoned the Frost and Fire companion to The Martian Chronicles. The Masks, an intense exploration of the identities that people are often forced to assume to survive in the modern world, appears next in the timeline, followed by Interval in Sunlight, a study of Americans in Mexico based on his extensive threemonth journey throughout Mexico in 1945. Several title variations for The Masks would carry through six of the eight timelines, but only fragments of it would ever reach print. The Mexican novel yielded two of his best examples of subjective realism (“The Next in Line” and “Interval in Sunlight”) before evolving into both a stage play and an unproduced screenplay. “The Blue Remembered Hills” was an early title for his Illinois novel, the source for both the Dandelion Wine novelized story cycle (1957) and Farewell Summer (2005), crafted from the remaining chapters of the original novel concept. Other milestones can also be decoded across these timelines. Long After Midnight and The Illustrated Man (already separated from the actual science fiction collection of that name) each offered possible title stories for a collection of weird tales, but the publication of The October Country (as well as his lessening interest in writing such stories) eclipsed both of these titles over time (in 1976, Long After Midnight would eventually resurface as a far broader collection of old and new stories). The Vampire Family, a gathering of his off-trail Elliot family stories from the 1940s and early 1950s, traveled through many title iterations before publication as the late-life novel From the Dust Returned (2000). One can also trace the cascading sequence of title stories for various mid-career story collections: The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit became A Medicine for Melancholy (1959), I Sing the Body Electric became The Machineries of Joy (1964); and Dusk in the Electric Cities, a well-traveled title also considered for his first poetry collection, appears in the 1964 timeline as a tentative title for I Sing the Body Electric! (1969). Jamie and Me, an interim title for Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), reflected the first-person narrative (modeled on Huckleberry Finn) of Bradbury’s initial draft of the novel. The Hallowe’en Book eventually became The

1947

1959

1958

1957

1956

1955

1954

1953

1952

1951

1950

1948 1949

Many Long Years Ago

The Illustrated Man Just a Short One

The Golden Ravine

Blue Remembered Hills

Clash by Night

Interval in Sunlight

The Masks

The Martian Chronicles Frost and Fire

Projected c. 1949 Dark Carnival

The Vampire Family

Long After Midnight

The Space War

Pillar of Fire

The Martian Chronicles The Illustrated Man Summer Mornings, Nights The Masks

Projected c. 1950 Dark Carnival

The Mask Behind the Mask

The Golden Apples of the Sun

The Martian Chronicles The Illustrated Man

Projected c. 1952 Dark Carnival

The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit Jamie and Me

Dandelion Wine

The October Country Moby Dick (Release)

Switch on the Night

A Medicine for Melancholy

Dandelion Wine

The October Country Switch on the Night

Fahrenheit 451 Moby Dick (screenplay)

The Martian Chronicles The Illustrated Man

Projected c. 1964 Dark Carnival

Fahrenheit 451

Projected c. 1963

The Golden Apples of the Sun

Projected c. 1960

The Golden Apples of the Sun

The Martian Chronicles The Illustrated Man

Projected c. 1956–57 Dark Carnival

Bradbury’s Projected Book Publication Schedule, 1949–1970

A Medicine for Melancholy

Dandelion Wine

The October Country Moby Dick (Release)

Switch on the Night

Fahrenheit 451

The Golden Apples of the Sun

The Martian Chronicles The Illustrated Man

Actual Publications Dark Carnival

1970

1969

1968

1967

1966

1965

1964

1963

1962

1961

1960

The Masks

The Long Journey

In the Eye of the Beholder

The Watchful Wakers By Time Forgotten

The Next in Line

Masquerade

Summer Morning Summer Night

Pius the Wanderer

The Pandemonium Theatre Co Presents!

I Sing the Body Electric

Something Wicked This Way Comes A Clear View of the Rising Mist

The Vintage Bradbury Nemo! The Hallowe’en Book Dusk in the Electric Cities

The Dogs That Eat Sweet Grass Leviathan ’99 The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit Farewell Summer

Broadside! Pius the Wanderer Screenplays

Leviathan ’99

S Is for Space

Dusk in the Electric Cities Nemo!

Back Up Around Over Masquerade

The Machineries of Joy

I Sing the Body Electric!

Twice 22

S Is for Space

The Vintage Bradbury

The Machineries of Joy

R Is for Rocket The Anthem Sprinters

R Is for Rocket The Anthem Sprinters

The Machineries of Joy

The Anthem Sprinters

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Figure 2. Shading designates Bradbury’s actual publication history; the unshaded titles project possible futures on each timeline.

Weather and War

The Green Rain

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the new ray bradbury review

Halloween Tree (1972), while Nemo! settled into obscurity as his unfinished attempt to resurrect Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo as a twenty-first century explorer-scientist. The Irish story collection A Clear View of the Rising Mist never appealed to his various publishers; the title would find more traction within his growing stable of Irish stage plays instead, and the stories themselves would be woven into the larger fabric of his autobiographical novel, Green Shadows, White Whale (1991). Just a Short One, his earliest attempt at shaping his Irish one-act plays into a larger publishable structure, culminated in The Anthem Sprinters and Other Antics (1963). The elusiveness of these various timeline projects is complicated by the surrounding field of largely unknown works—projects that never had a chance to fully form within the fast-paced creative world of Ray Bradbury. Designated story collections such as The Golden Ravine and In the Eye of the Beholder, as well as the “tales for children” planned for Many Years Ago, never coalesced in any recognizable way. The Green Rain, a novel of Venus projected on the scale of The Martian Chronicles, remained a dream deferred. Other large-scale projects of the early 1950s reflect the looming specter of global nuclear war. These include Weather and War, also known as The Appointed Round, a darkly inverted allusion to the postman’s oath to deliver the mail through all weather: through cataclysmic flood, famine, and pestilence, mankind “struggles to survive just so he can—conduct WAR!” During those years Bradbury was equally certain that humanity would take war to the high frontier as well; his timelines include The Space War, outlined on a separate page as a dark novel of interplanetary war told from multiple points of view by those who must endure it. As unstable as they are, these lists are by no means representations of ephemeral daydreams. In 1986, Bradbury sent his 1956 timeline to Donn Albright, with this reflective commentary: “One of those lists I often make to promise or obligate myself to possible futures!” Those words are gentle compared to earlier self-assessments of his motivation; Bradbury typed this far more strident epilogue at the end of his 1952 timeline: When people say that I am prolific, I say to them, what is a writer if he doesn’t write, what is a painter who does not paint, what is a human being who does not live. I live as much as I can and I write as much as I can. That means that I live every day and I write every day, without fail, to the fullest. I have no patience with the people who talk about writing but never write. What good are theories without practice? If it takes eight or ten hours a day to make a good pianist, then shouldn’t it take eight or ten hours a day to become a writer? And with the passage of time, shouldn’t one become more proficient, and more easily be able to say what one has to say when one wants to say it. From finger exercises to etudes, to



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fugues, to chamber music, to symphonies, be it in music or writing, the progression is nothing if not normal. Don’t say I am prolific, say only that I am natural. In the closing lines of this analogy, Bradbury returned to the essential race against time that he always felt as a writer: “Don’t say I write an immense amount each year, say only that I have a short while to live and want to say my say before the curtain comes down.” His many story fragments and his constantly shifting book outlines are the inevitable by-products of this unrelenting writing passion. In turn, the evolving outlines for The Illustrated Man and many other books compelled him to chart even more distant futures through the pages of his projected publishing timelines. “You never know what waits beyond the next page,” he wrote on a worn and battered clipboard during the 1950s. “Go look, come back, and report!” And so he did. Endnotes 1. Eller and Touponce, Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (Kent, OH: Kent State Univ. Press, 2004), 62–66 (Dark Carnival) and 124–133 (The Martian Chronicles); Eller, Becoming Ray Bradbury (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2011), 146. 2. Eller and Touponce, The Life of Fiction, chapters 1–2 and inclusive figures 3–4, 6–7, tables 2–6. 3. The underlying typed outline was divided into two purely chronological categories (“The Old Ones” and “The New Ones”); this list is buried beneath handwritten deletions and sequence adjustments that soon became unworkable. 4. See Eller and Touponce, The Life of Fiction, xx.