out on the front lawn with my Fourth of July relatives gave me not only my Green Town, Illinois, stories, it also shoved me off toward Mars, following Edgar Rice Burroughs’ and John Carter’s advice, taking my childhood luggage, my uncles, aunts, my mom, dad, and brother with me. When I arrived on Mars I found them, in fact, waiting for me, or Martians who looked like them, pretending me into a grave. The Green Town stories that found their way into an accidental novel titled Dandelion Wine and the Red Planet stories that blundered into another accidental novel called The Martian Chronicles were written, alternately, during the same years that I ran to the rainbarrel outside my grandparents’ house to dip out all the memories, the myths, the word-associations of other years.
Along the way, I also re-created my relatives as vampires who inhabited a town similar to the one in Dandelion Wine, dark first cousin to the town on Mars where the Third Expedition expired. So, I had my life three ways, as town explorer, space-traveler, and wanderer with Count Dracula’s American cousins.
I realize I haven’t talked half enough, as yet, about one variety of creature you will find stalking this collection, rising here in nightmares to founder there in loneliness and despair: dinosaurs. From the time I was seventeen until I was thirty-two. I wrote some half-dozen dinosaur stories.
One night when my wife and I were walking along the beach in Venice. California, where we lived in a thirty-dollar-a-month newlyweds’ apartment, we came upon the bones of the Venice Pier and the struts, tracks, and ties of the ancient roller-coaster collapsed on the sand and being eaten by the sea.
‘What’s that dinosaur doing lying here on the beach?’ I said.
My wife, very wisely, had no answer.
The answer came the next night when, summoned from sleep by a voice calling, I rose up, listened, and heard the lonely voice of the Santa Monica bay fog horn blowing over and over and over again.
Of course! I thought. The dinosaur heard that lighthouse fog horn blowing, thought it was another dinosaur arisen from the deep past, came swimming in for a loving confrontation, discovered it was only a fog horn, and died of a broken heart there on the shore.
I leaped from bed, wrote the story, and sent it to the Saturday Evening Post that week, where it appeared soon after under the title ‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.’ That story, titled ‘The Fog Horn’ in this collection, became a film two years later.
The story was read by John Huston in 1953, who promptly called to ask if I would like to write the screenplay for his film Moby Dick. I accepted, and moved from one beast to the next.
Because of Moby Dick, I reexamined the life of Melville and Jules Verne, compared their mad captains in an essay written to reintroduce a new translation of 20,000 Leagues Benath the Sea, which, read by the 1964 New York World’s Fair people, put me in charge of conceptualizing the entire upper floor of the United States Pavilion.
Because of the Pavilion, the Disney organization hired me to help plan the dreams that went into Spaceship Earth, part of Epcot, a permanent world’s fair, now building to open in 1982. In that one building, I have crammed a history of mankind, coming and going back and forth in time, then plunging into our wild future in space.
Including dinosaurs.
All of my activities, all of my growing, all of my new jobs and new loves, caused and created by that original primitive love of the beasts I saw when I was five and dearly cherished when I was twenty and twentynine and thirty.
Look around among these stories and you will probably find only one or two that actually happened to me. I have resisted, most of my life, being given assignments to go somewhere and ‘sponge up’ the local color, the natives, the look and feel of the land. I learned long ago that I am not seeing directly, that my subconscious is doing most of the ‘sponging’ and it will be years before any usable impressions surface.
As a young man I lived in a tenement in the Chicano section of Los Angeles. Most of my Latino stories were written years after I had moved from the tenement, with one terrifying, on-the-spot, exception. In late 1945, with World War II freshly over, a friend of mine asked me to accompany him to Mexico City in an old beat-up Ford V-8. I reminded him of the vow of poverty that circumstances had forced on me. He rebutted by calling me a coward, wondering why I didn’t rev up my courage and send out three or four stories which I had hidden away. Reason for the hiding: the stories had been rejected once or twice by various magazines. Pummeled by my friend, I dusted the stories off and mailed them out, under the pseudonym William Elliott. Why the pseudonym? Because I feared that some Manhattan editors might have seen the name Bradbury on the covers of Weird Tales and would be prejudiced against this ‘pulp’ writer.
I mailed off three short stories to three different magazines, in the second week of August 1945. On August 20, I sold one story to Charm, on August 21, I sold a story to Mademoiselle, and on August 22, my twenty-fifth birthday, I sold a story to Collier’s. The total monies amounted to $1,000, which would be like having $10,000 arrive in the mail today.
I was rich. Or so close to it I was dumbfounded. It was a turning point in my life, of course, and I hastened to write to the editors of those three magazines confessing my true name.
All three stories were listed in The Best American Short Stories of 1946 by Martha Foley, and one of them was published in Herschel Brickell’s O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories the following year.
That money took me to Mexico, to Guanajuato, and the mummies in the catacombs. The experience so wounded and terrified me, I could hardly wait to flee Mexico. I had nightmares about dying and having to remain in the halls of the dead with those propped and wired bodies. In order to purge my terror, instantly, I wrote ‘The Next in Line.’ One of the few times that an experience yielded results almost on the spot.
Enough of Mexico. What about Ireland?
There is every kind of Irish story here because after living in Dublin for six months I saw that most of the Irish I met had a variety of ways of making do with that dreadful beast Reality. You can run into it head-on, which is a dire business, or you can skirt around it, give it a poke, dance for it, make up a song, write you a tale, prolong the gab, fill up the flask. Each partakes of Irish cliché, but each, in the foul weather and the foundered politics, is true.
I got to know every beggar in the streets of Dublin, the ones near O’Connell’s Bridge with maniac pianolas grinding more coffee than tunes and the ones who loaned out a single baby among a whole tribe of rain soaked mendicants, so you saw the babe one hour at the top of Grafton Street and the next by the Royal Hibernian Hotel, and at midnight down by the river, but I never thought I would write of them. Then the need to howl and give an angry weep made me rear up one night and write ‘McGillahee’s Brat’ out of terrible suspicions and the begging of a rainwalking ghost that had to be laid. I visited some of the old burnt-out estates of the great Irish landowners, and heard tales of one ‘burning’ that had not quite come off, and so wrote ‘The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place.’
‘The Anthem Sprinters,’ another Irish encounter, wrote itself down years later when, one rainy night, I recalled the countless times my wife and I had sprinted out of Dublin cinemas, dashing for the exit, knocking children and old folks to left and right, in order to make it to the exit before the National Anthem was played.
But how did I begin? Starting in Mr Electrico’s year, I wrote a thousand words a day. For ten years I wrote at least one short story a week, somehow guessing that a day would finally come when I truly got out of the way and let it happen.
The day
