The Letters of Ray Bradbury Reveal a Man Drinking In All That Life Had to Offer

Remembrance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury, Jonathan R. Eller, ed., (Simon & Schuster, 509 pp., $35)

Out of this fabulous trash, I have built my life. Quasimodo, dinosaurs, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, the Chicago World’s Fair, the New York World’s Fair, the history of architecture, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, ten thousand motion pictures . . . Prince Valiant (I corresponded with Hal Foster who drew it, for 30 years!), old time radio, Burns and Allen, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Bernard Bevington. . . you all go with me everywhere. I have left none behind on the road. Good company, high, low, in between, lots of laughs, grand jokes, serious faces on occasion, but mostly the fun of being alive one time and knowing I will never come again, all of which prompts me, each morn to step on me, my own landmine, and watch my limbs fly off and around the room. (Ray Bradbury to Helen Bevington, March 21, 1986).

T hroughout his long life (1920–2012), author Ray Bradbury absorbed everything around him. Deeply, it seems, and with unlimited and unbounded imagination. Everything became a part of him, and he allowed it all to penetrate and shape his entire being. As he notes in the letter just quoted, his influences were the high as well as the low, and the in-between, everything from his family to his comics collections.

As openly as Bradbury professed his love of all things low, one should not dismiss the importance of the high, either. In a letter to Samuel Sackett, Bradbury listed the high:

Authors who have greatly affected me are John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Hawthorne, Irving, Thomas Wolfe, Ellen Glasgow, Edith Wharton, and Thoreau. I rarely read fantasy fiction any more, believing that the source of originality in any field is found by refreshing one’s self in distant meadows and leas. Of the above authors, I believe I would name Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway as my greatest influences, with Poe, Hawthorne and Irving lurking in the background of my childhood as deep and unforgettable influences. (Ray Bradbury to Samuel Sackett, July 5, 1949)

Again, it must be noted, Bradbury took it all in. It all became a part of him and his understanding of the human person.

Then, in works such as Dark Carnival, Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Golden Apples of the Sun, October Country, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, all of these influences came to a head and poured themselves out in Bradbury’s prolific writing. Yet, despite all of this multivariate input, Bradbury’s voice was always uniquely Bradbury.

Both of these letters just quoted — along with many others — appear in a new collection, Remembrance: The Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury, expertly edited by biographer and Bradbury scholar Jonathan Eller. Eller, it must be noted, is not only the leading living Bradbury scholar, but he is also the author of the definitive and beautiful three-volume biography of Bradbury’s life: Becoming Ray Bradbury, Bradbury Unbound, and Beyond Apollo. Even apart from these three volumes, Eller has written extensively as a literary critic of Bradbury as well as having textually edited several of the great man’s short stories and books. His introduction to Remembrance, his contexts for each letter, and his notes greatly add to the value of the book. Frankly, Eller has given us a treasure. Certainly, one cannot fault his selection of letters.

As productive as Bradbury was — having written thousands of short stories and publishing close to 600 of them during his professional career as well as his many novels — he, Remembrance proves, was also a serious “man of letters” writing to innumerable correspondents. He wrote to figures as diverse as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Russell Kirk, Federico Fellini and Bertrand Russell.

While most of the letters come from the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s — Bradbury’s golden age of writing — several come from the post-1960s as well. They reveal the man as author as well as human person. In his letters, Bradbury explains the writing process, the meaning of imagination, the joys of life, his politics, and his view of the world. Almost always, and this is not surprising given his personality, Bradbury writes with gratitude and joy. His letters exude intelligence and enthusiasm, even when he’s criticizing the work of another.

In one of the most moving letters — again, it must be noted, Bradbury wrote with a confident pen — he explained that Dandelion Wine can be summed up by one critical word: love.

This book is nothing else if it is not a book about love. Every story touches upon and illuminates the problem of love as the nucleus of life. Even the Lonely One, poor unhappy bastard, is a symbol of love gone wrong. My boy asks, why grow up, why become an adult, to face only war, disease, depression, and death? Is it worth it? My answer is not a manufactured one, it does not falsify the facts. Yes, life is worth the effort, maturity is worth taking a crack at—if you have love. Without it, you might as well go off and dig your own pit. Love is the great lubrication that keeps the machinery of friendship and business and marriage going. Without it you get Hitlers, Stalins, McCarthys, gangsters, insane asylums, and so on down the list. (Ray Bradbury to Walter Bradbury, March 13, 1952)

Some of the most fascinating letters in Remembrance deal with politics. In the early 1950s, Bradbury openly revealed his righteous anger at Hitler, Stalin, and McCarthy. Though he was a stout Democrat at the time, the best label for the idiosyncratic Bradbury might be “civil libertarian.” Indeed, he was so anti-McCarthy, the FBI even opened a file on him, noting bizarrely that Bradbury might love the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution a little too much.

In 1952, the young author (he was only 32) even took out a full-page advertisement in Daily Variety, addressed to the Republican Party, and later reprinted in the Nation.

I remind you now that the two-party system exists and will continue to exist for the next four years. Every attempt that you make to identify the Republican Party as the American Party, I will resist. Every attempt that you make to identify the Democratic Party as the party of Communism, as the ‘left-wing’ or ‘subversive’ party, I will attack with all my heart and soul. . . . Leave the system alone, then, leave our individual rights alone; protect our Constitution, find us a way to Peace, and we will be friends. But God help you if you lay a hand on any one of us again, or try to twist the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to your own purposes. (Ray Bradbury, open letter to the Republican Party, November 6, 1952)

As the letters reveal, Bradbury was especially enamored with John F. Kennedy, and he reluctantly accepted the president’s assassination with utmost dread.

Only a month after his Letter to the Republican Party, though, an editor tried to soften Bradbury’s equally strident anti-Russian stance in a short story. Bradbury not only pulled his submission, but he canceled his subscription to the quarterly and wrote a scathing letter to the editor.

I happen to believe we exist in a world where at any moment either Russia or the U.S. could blow the top off, I happen to believe that both are equally responsible for this mess. I happen to believe we could get into a war very easily and that L.A. could be bombed by Russia, even as we could bomb Moscow. . . . I suppose this will surprise you somewhat. But I insist upon my own thoughts and beliefs and philosophy and I don’t think an editor has any goddam business tinkering with me or anyone else that way. I shall continue to fight for the things I believe right, I shall oppose war, support the UN, work for peace, despise the reactionary bastard like McCarthy, Peron, Franco, etc., and I shall work as an independent thinker, voter, and actor. (Ray Bradbury to Leslie Edgely, December 30, 1952)

Though Remembrance gives the reader only a glimpse of this, Bradbury moved steadily toward conservatism and civil libertarianism as he grew older. By the mid 1960s, he had become disillusioned with Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democratic Party over the Vietnam War, and, by the 1980s, he was extremely pro-Reagan, even offering his changed political sentiments at science-fiction conventions. By the early 1990s, he was especially disgusted with political correctness and feared censorship coming from the left. As Remembrance shows, however, both Presidents Bush — and especially Laura Bush — valued Bradbury as an American icon.

Yet Bradbury had a good reminder for one of his British admirers. “There are no true conservatives, liberals, etc., in the world. Only people.” (Ray Bradbury to Brian Sibley, June 10, 1974)

Bradbury truly is an American icon, one of the great writers of the 20th century. I have since childhood believed that Bradbury’s writing exists to make us all better human beings. Eller’s excellent edited collection affirms all that I already believed.