My Ray Bradbury itinerary: Reading into the dark

The October Country by Ray Bradbury (1955)

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (1962)

The Halloween Tree (1972)

Jay

5 October 2022

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (1962)

Every October I think I can finally start reading (and appreciating) the fictions of Ray Bradbury.

A couple of years ago I finally read The October Country. I thought the gates had opened. 

For decades I dismissed Bradbury as too cute by half, a writer who became, over time, his admirers. Color-blind, tin-eared. This-is-how-a-Serious-Writer-writes.

*   *   *

I have had a rendezvous with Bradbury for about forty years. My mother once brought me an armload of deaccessioned library books from the school where she taught. This was the only time she ever brought me books; happily, her usual method was to ignore what I read. In the bag were novels by Thomas Wolfe and Ralph Ellison. And half a dozen Bradburys, the old red and white and black Bantam editions. They were read to tatters, enticing with their images of rockets, dinosaurs, and Bradbury himself.

*   *   *

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) will soon be six decades old. A tale too flippant and poetically sugary for young readers, it is best enjoyed (if that is the word) by dads who know they came at parenthood too late.

It is an old man's book, autumnal, deeply melancholy. In 1945 men who'd spent adult lives without a name, without money to afford marriage and family, came home to picket lines and made fo themselves a fighting chance. My father and father-in-law started their families in their thirtes, much like Bradbury's Charles William Halloway. Something Wicked This Way Comes takes place during Charles Holloway's fifty-fourth year.

Today I finished reading it in my fifty-fourth year.

Jay

13 October 2020

*   *   *

....while they should have gone upstairs, they could not depart this moment that promised others on not so distant nights when man and boy-becoming-man might almost sing. So Will at last said, carefully:

     'Dad? Am I a good person?'

     'I think so. I know so, yes.'

     'Will - will that help when things get really rough?'

     'It'll help.'

     'Will it save me if I need saving? I mean, if I'm around bad people and there's no one else good around for miles, what then?'

     'It'll help.'

     'That's not good enough, Dad!'

     'Good is no guarantee for your body. It's mainly for peace of mind - '

     'But sometimes, Dad, aren't you so scared that even - '

     ' - the mind isn't peaceful?' His father nodded, his face uneasy.

     'Dad,' said Will, his voice very faint. 'Are you a good person?'

     'To you and your mother, yes, I try. But no man's a hero to himself. I've lived with me a lifetime, Will. I know everything worth knowing about myself - '

     'And, adding it all up…?'

     'The sum? As they come and go, and I mostly sit very still and tight, yes, I'm all right.'

     'Then, Dad,' asked Will, 'why aren't you happy?'

     'The front lawn at let's see…one-thirty in the morning…is no place to start a philosophical…'

     'I just wanted to know is all.'

     There was a long moment of silence. Dad sighed.

     Dad took his arm, walked him over and sat him down on the porch steps, relit his pipe. Puffing, he said, 'All right. Your mother's asleep. She doesn't know we're out here with our tomcat talk. We can go on. Now, look, since when did you think being good meant being happy?'

     'Since always.'

     'Since now learn otherwise. Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter half the time he's covering up. He's had his fun and he's guilty. And men do love sin. Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colours, and smells. Times come when troughs, not tables, suit our appetites. Hear a man too loudly praising others, and look to wonder if he didn't just get up from the sty. On the other hand, that unhappy, pale, put-upon man walking by, who looks all guilt and sin, why, often that's your good man with a capital G, Will. For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two. I've known a few. You work twice as hard to be a farmer as to be his hog. I suppose it's thinking about trying to be good makes the crack run up the wall one night. A man with high standards, too, the least hair falls on him sometimes wilts his spine. He can't let himself alone, won't lift himself off the hook if he falls just a breath from grace.

     'Oh, it would be lovely if you could just be fine, act fine, not think of it all the time. But it's hard, right? with the last piece of lemon cake waiting in the icebox, middle of the night, not yours, but you he awake in a hot sweat for it, eh? Do I need tell you? Or, a hot spring day, noon, and there you are chained to your school desk and away off there goes the river, cool and fresh over the rock-fall. Boys can hear clear water like that miles away. So, minute by minute, hour by hour, a lifetime, it never ends, never stops, you got the choice this second, now this next, and the next after that, be good, be bad, that's what the dock ticks, that's what it says in the ticks. Run swim, or stay hot, run eat or lie hungry. So you stay but once stayed, Will, you know the secret, don't you? don't think of the river again. Or the cake. Because if you do, you'll go crazy. Add up all the rivers never swum in, cakes never eaten, and by the time you get my age, Will, it's a lot missed out on. But then you console yourself, thinking, the more times in, the more times possibly drowned, or choken on lemon frosting. But then, through plain dumb cowardice, I guess, maybe you hold off from too much, wait, play it safe.

     'Look at me: married at thirty-nine, Will thirty-nine! But I was so busy wrestling myself two falls out of three, I figured I couldn't marry until I had licked myself good and forever. Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else. So at last I looked up from my great self-wrestling match one night when your mother came to the library for a book, and got me, instead. And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a women half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. That's you, Will, for my money. And the strange thing is, son, and sad, too, though you're always racing out there on the rim of the lawn, and me on the roof using books for shingles, comparing life to libraries, I soon saw you were wiser, sooner and better, than I will ever be…'

     Dad's pipe was dead. He paused to tap it out and reload it.

     'No, sir,' Will said.

     'Yes,' said his father, 'I'd be a fool not to know I'm a fool. My one wisdom is: you're wise.'

     'Funny' Will said, after a long pause. 'You've told me more, tonight, than I've told you. I'll think some more. Maybe I'll tell you everything, at breakfast. Okay?'

     'I'll be ready, if you are.'

     'Because…I want you to be happy, Dad.'

     He hated the tears that sprang to his eyes.

     'I'll be all right, Will.'

     'Anything I could say or do to make you happy, I would.'

     'Willy, William.' Dad lit his pipe again and watched the smoke blow away in sweet dissolvings. 'Just tell me I'll live forever. That would do nicely.'

     His voice, Will thought, I never noticed. It's the same colour as his hair.

     'Pa,' he said, 'don't sound so sad.'

     'Me? I'm the original sad man. I read a book and it makes me sad. See a film: sad. Plays? they really work me over.'

     'Is there anything,' said Will, 'doesn't make you sad?'

     'One thing. Death.'

     'Boy!' Will started. 'I should think that would!'

     'No' said the man with the voice to match his hair. 'Death makes everything else sad. But death itself only scares. If there wasn't death, all the other things wouldn't get tainted.'

     And, Will thought, here comes the carnival, Death like a rattle in one hand, Life like candy in the other; shake one to scare you, offer one to make your mouth water. Here comes the side-show, both hands full!

     He jumped to his feet.

     'Dad oh, listen! You'll live forever! Believe me, or you're sunk! Sure, you were sick a few years ago - but that's over. Sure, you're fifty-four, but that's young! And another thing - '

     'Yes, Willy?'

     His father waited for him. He swayed. He bit his lips, then blurted out:

     'Don't go near the carnival.'

     'Strange,' his father said, 'that's what I was going to tell you.'

     'I wouldn't go back to that place for a billion dollars!'

     But, Will thought, that won't stop the carnival searching through town to visit me.

     'Promise, Dad?'

     'Why don't you want me to go there, Will?'

     'That's one of the things I'll tell tomorrow or next week or next year. You just got to trust me, Dad.'

     'I do, son.' Dad took his hand. 'It's a promise.'

     As if at a signal, both turned to the house. The time was up, the hour was late, enough had been said, they properly sensed they must go.

     'The way you came out,' said Dad, 'is the way you go in.'

     Will walked silently to touch the iron rungs hidden under the rustling ivy.

     'Dad. You won't pull these off…?'

     Dad probed one with his fingers.

     'Some day, when you're tired of them, you'll take them off yourself.'

     'I'll never be tired of them.'

     'Is that how it seems? Yes, to someone your age, you figure you'll never get tired of anything. All right, son, up you go.'

     He saw how his father looked up along the ivy and the hidden path.

     'You want to come up this way, too?'

     'No, no,' his father said, quickly.

     'Because,' said Will, 'you're welcome.'

     'That's all right. Go on.'

     But he still looked at the ivy stirring in the dark morning light.

     Will sprang up, grabbed the first, the second, the third rungs and looked down.

     From just this distance, Dad looked as if he were shrinking, there on the ground. Somehow he didn't want to leave him behind there in the night, like someone ditched by someone else, one hand up to move, but not moving.

     'Dad!' he whispered. 'You ain't got the stuff!'

     Who says!? cried Dad's mouth, silently.

     And he jumped.

     And laughing without sound, the boy, the man swung up the side of the house, unceasingly, hand over hand, foot after foot.

     He heard Dad slip, scrabble, grab.

     Hold tight! he thought.

     'Ah…!'

     The man breathed hard.

     Eyes tight, Will prayed: hold…there…now…!!

     The old man gusted out, sucked in, swore in a fierce whisper, then climbed again.

     Will opened his eyes and climbed and the rest was smooth, high, higher, fine, sweet, wondrous, done! They swung in and sat upon the sill, same size, same weight, coloured same by the stars, and sat embraced once more with grand fine exhaustion, gasping on huge ingulped laughs which swept their bones together, and for fear of waking God, country, wife, Mom, and hell, they snug-clapped hands to each other's mouths, felt the vibrant warm hilarity fountained there and sat one instant longer, eyes bright with each other and wet with love.

     Then, with a last strong clasp, Dad was gone, the bedroom door shut.

     Drunk on the long night's doings, lolled away from fear toward better, grander things found in Dad, Will slung off limp-falling clothes with tipsy arms and delightfully aching legs, and like a fall of timber chopped himself to bed…

Bradbury's The Halloween Tree (1972)

The Halloween Tree, once its history lesson begins, becomes a didactic puppet theater. Bradbury's axe-grinding focuses on the social and intellectual backwardness of Europe's Catholic and Protestant churches. 

All of which amounts to caricature. In Bradbury's handling the history of millenia is reduced to undifferentiated humanity yoked to backwardness.

The section on Greece is modest and sharply poses what a Marxist would describe as warring ruling class ideas about the world, one competing to superced the other.

....There falls Phoebus Apollo all Grecian light. Sun and flame, boys. Look and blink. Turn that crystal spyglass. Swing it down the Mediterranean Coast a thousand miles. See the Greek Isles?"

      "Sure," said plain George Smith, dressed up as fancy pale ghost. "Cities, towns, streets, houses. People jumping out on porches to bring food!"

      "Yes." Moundshroud beamed. "Their Festival of the Dead: the Feast of Pots. Trick-or-Treat old style. But tricks from the dead if you don't feed them. So treats are laid out in fine banquets on the sill!"

      Far away, in the sweet dusk, smells of cooked meats steamed, dishes were dealt out for spirits that smoked across the land of the living. The women and children of the Grecian homes came and went with multitudinous quantities of spiced and delectable victuals.

      Then, all through the Grecian Isles, doors slammed. The vast slamming echoed along the dark wind.

      "The temples shutting tight," said Moundshroud. "Every holy place in Greece will be double-locked this night."

      "And look!" Ralph-who-was-a-Mummy swung the crystal lens. The light flared over the boys' masks. "Those people, why are they painting black molasses on their front door posts?"

      "Pitch," corrected Moundshroud. "Black tar to glue the ghosts, stick them fast, so they can't get inside."

      "Why," said Tom, "didn't we think of that!?"

      Darkness moved down the Mediterranean shores. From the tombs, like mist, the dead spirits wavered in soot and black plumes along the streets to be caught in the dark tar that smeared the porch sills. The wind mourned, as if telling the anguish of the trapped dead.

      "Now, Italy. Rome." Moundshroud turned the lens to see Roman cemeteries where people placed food on graves and hurried off.

      The wind whipped Moundshroud's cape. It hollowed his mouth:

     

      "O autumn winds that bake and burn

      And all the world to darkness turn,

      Now storm and seize and make of me…

      A swarm of leaves from Autumn's Tree!"

     

      He kick-jumped straight up in the air. The boys yelled delight, even as his clothes, cape, hair, skin, body, corn-candy bones tore apart before their eyes.

     

      "… leaves … burn …

      … change … turn … !"

     

      The wind ribboned him to confetti; a million autumn leaves, gold, brown, red as blood, rust, all wild, rustling, simmering, a clutch of oak and maple leaf, a hickory leaf downfall, a toss of flaking whisper, murmur, rustle to the dark river-creek sky. Not one kite, but ten thousand thousand tiny mummy-flake, kites, Moundshroud exploded apart:

     

      "World turn! Leaves burn!

      Grass die! Trees …fly!"

     

      And from a billion other trees in autumn lands, leaves rushed to join with the upflung battalions of dry bits that were Moundshroud dispersed in whirlwinds from which his voice stormed:

      "Boys, see the fires along the Mediterranean coast? Fires burning north through Europe? Fires of fear. Flames of celebration. Would you spy, boys? Up, now, fly!"

      And the leaves in avalanche fell upon each boy like terrible flapping moths and carried them away. Over Egyptian sands they sang and laughed and giggled. Over the strange sea, rapturous and hysterical, they soared.

      "Happy New Year!" a voice cried, far below.

      "Happy what?" asked Tom.

      "Happy New Year!" Moundshroud, a flock of rusty leaves, rustled his voice. "In old times, the first of November was New Year's Day. The true end of summer, the cold start of winter. Not exactly happy, but, well, Happy New Year!"

Jay 

13 October 2020

First and second thoughts: The October Country by Ray Bradbury (1955).

....probably Bradbury is best thought of as a fabulist, a teller of moral tales. His morals tend to extrude, but doubtless he has done his audience much good, here and abroad. Like many other
science fantasists, he is a belated apostle of the Enlightenment.

     -Harold Bloom

The October Country by Ray Bradbury (1955).

I've avoided reading Bradbury for four decades. Not for want of opportunity, either. One day my mother came home from the school where she taught with a bunch of ragged 1960s-era Bantam paperbacks. I read the first few paragraphs of most stories, but could not push forward. (Such a body of work seemed unsavory and unserious to my 14 year old self in 1980.)

Bradbury always struck me as being inauthentic (whatever I thought that word meant at the time) and a little too fey by half. Bradbury seemed to embrace his own P.R. The maudlin and soapy sentimentality of tales like "Uncle Einar" was too much to an adolescent reader deep in Lovecraft and Stephen King.

The jejune fabulism looked like a commercial angle that had taken over an individual aesthetic consciousness and smothered it.

Is cultivation of a prepubescent appraisal of the world mere saccharine for the palate of readers frantically craving retreat and emotional shelter under the propaganda onslaught of Cold War and political witch-hunting?

Bradbury's post-war career amalgamates the above trends of rightward and depoliticizing shifts in U.S. popular culture. The hungry writer in 1940s Los Angeles by 1960 could present his aesthetic as unquestionably authentic because "child-like."

(Of course another word for child-like is immature.)

After reading The October County for the first time this week, I found my long-standing apprehensions were out of proportion to the tales themselves.

A few story notes:

The Dwarf
The biter bit (or smooshed).

The Next in Line
A superior story, probably the strongest in the book in terms of scene-building and characterization. A potent depiction of psychological disintegration.

The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse
A respectable bourgeois gentleman finds himself the goat of a bunch of bohemians. But his everyday philistinism is more than a matcher for these hipsters as they come to embrace (ironically) his banal lifestyle. But, as Trotsky once wrote about this milieu in another context, jumping over one's own head is harder than one think.

Skeleton
A droll story about a hypochondriac obsessed by the discovery of his own skeleton. Fine portrait of young married life, too.

The Jar
A superior weird tale about a pickled something in a jar that is all things to all people.

The Lake
"The Kingdom By the Sea." Beautiful.

The Emissary
Middle age men be warned: I wept like a child while finishing this one. There is real narrative power here, free of sentimentality, but not emotion.

Touched with Fire
Recalls the "folk" fables of L.P. Hartley. Metaphors turn within themselves. A little too much grasping after art? Perhaps, but what else is ambition for?

The Small Assassin
A plot reminiscent of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" or "Tales of the Unexpected." Except no hint of the sardonic distancing, no Biercean rancor or misanthropy. Bradbury creates a compelling young married couple, and then pulls them apart. Piece by piece.

The Crowd
The dead hate the living.

Jack-in-the-Box
Another tightly would mechanism, a cut-up that falls short.

The Scythe
A stunning story. Glossing the plot does not approach really confronting its narrative power.

Uncle Einar
A relapse into mere Bradburyism. The so-called Elliott Family saga must have seemed to the author like a sure thing: an uncanny Indiana Yoknapatawpha County, filled with drama and glossy magazine cleverness. It certainly personifies writerly self-satisfaction that in lesser hands might degenerate into narcissism.

The Wind
A powerful horror story with a striking conceit. The tension between male friendship and married life is well-handled.

The Man Upstairs
Reverse of the medal of "The Emissary."

There Was an Old Woman
A writer's-writer outing: a tour de force of dialogue, indirection, and understatement. Aunt Tildy is not easily forgotten.

The Cistern
"It just came to me. There's actually a city under a city. A dead city, right here, right under our feet."

Homecoming
Another Elliott Family tale. Every adolescent writer falls in love with their own adolescent protagonist/stand-in. This story is how Holden Caulfield would see himself after reading too much Charles Addams. Self-pity turned up to 11.

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone
Writers... get a real job!


Jay
10 October 2018