Farewell, Ray's Summer

On Tuesday of the week just passed, Ray Bradbury died at age 91. Being one of my favourite authors and one of the most significant writers of the last century, I feel that he deserves something to be said about him. Much has, I'm sure, been said already, the web being what it is, but perhaps a personal voice needs to be added, as someone who was touched and influenced deeply by his vision and his words.

I first heard of Bradbury when my brother watched Truffaut's film of Fahrenheit 451 in class. He was about 11 and I was about 8 at the time. It would not be until I was at University that I would actually read Bradbury, first picking up a copy of Dandelion Wine in the Carlton library in 2005 and being instantly entranced by its opening lines:

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

There was something intoxicating about Bradbury's description that I had never expected of a man I had, admittedly, boxed into my mind as a writer of mere "genre fiction". How wrong I was. There was an inventiveness about Bradbury's way with words that came closest, I think, to echoing Dylan Thomas of any other late-twentieth century writer. In an authorial note to Dandelion Wine which my edition does not contain, I remember Bradbury commenting that the novel was written initially through a process of word association, and certainly its language has that magical quality to it that seems as if Bradbury has simply let all the floating impressions of a childhood summer waft and ferment in his mind, to produce something marvellously like the word equivalent of the wine the title alludes to.

Later, I would discover what a remarkable prophet of his and our age Bradbury also was. No-one reading Fahrenheit 451 today can, I think, avoid the prescience of Bradbury's predictions: teenagers wandering disaffectedly with shell-pieces in their ears providing constant stimulation and entertainment; wall-high screens allowing us to escape our lives and enter the sensory blast of television's virtual hyperreality. And then there is his more chilling work, found in stories like "The Veldt" or passages in The Martian Chronicles, visions of a human savagery which seem, at first, to have nothing to do with the writer who also so wonderfully chronicled the childish magic of summer. How could the Martian House of Usher have anything to do with Douglas Spaulding? But they are both sides to the same vision: the American Dream and its self-implosion through over-reaching itself and ignoring that which mattered most. There is something alarmingly similar between, say, the home-cooking genius of one of Dandelion Wine's episodes who, when forced by well-meaning intruders to cook in a more orderly manner, finds her inspired genius vanishing, and the destruction of Mars imposed on it by the American "colonisers" who want nothing other than to recreate the magic of their lost America in this seemingly virgin planet. Both are impositions on that which is perfect and beautiful; both are attempts to make it better through "ordering it"; both are misguided and destructive.

Then there is Bradbury's remarkable comedy. Sometimes it feels a bit like laughing at the gallows, but at other times the laughter he provokes seems almost to make the gallows flee, a little like Clarisse of Fahrenheit 451 who can escape, for a moment, the oppressiveness of her world through such simple acts as blowing on dandelions or dancing in the rain. Bradbury clearly knew it all, the pain of the world he depicted and the simple acts which, in their simplicity, can go some way towards, if not transforming it, at least making it for a moment more beautiful.

I doubt that Bradbury ever arrived at Christian belief, and, while some may not view this as a weakness, I must admit that I do. Perhaps his bleakest moments could have been alleviated had he relied on something other than the goodness of humanity to transform the world he depicted. Yet there were clear flourishes of some definite understanding of grace and the transforming love of God. One of his early stories, "The Man", was both a remarkable portrait of Christ's humanity and how our world has failed to understand Him. Bradbury noted elsewhere in Fahrenheit 451 that "Christ is one of the 'family' now.

I often wonder if God recognizes his own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He's regular peppermint stick now, all sugar crystal and saccharine - when he isn't making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshiper absolutely needs.

Perhaps Bradbury's reluctance to truly embrace the Christianity he was so often drawn to was the sheer fact that, growing up in a society that had done to the son of God precisely what he described above, he struggled to see another way to approach Jesus except outside the church. But I do not really know enough of his heart to comment on these things. What I do know is that his work had definite glimpses of the hope that Jesus offers, and that hope gave life and wings to work that might otherwise have become bogged down in the despair it quite rightly felt.

And now, having kept on writing until remarkably close to the end (he published a sequel to Dandelion Wine, entitled Farewell Summer, just a few years ago), Bradbury has left us. What can I say here that would conclude this memoir of him without being pat or saccharine, something he himself would have decried? I cannot say anything, in the end, that does justice to the complexity of the man or that avoids glorifying him beyond what he deserves. But I can say this: that every time I return to his work I am amazed at his sight, amazed at the way he drew words together like dancing puppets on magisterial strings, and I am grateful that he lived and wrote the words he wrote. That, in the end, is a wonderful thing to say of any writer, and Bradbury was, at the end of it all, a truly wonderful writer. Bookshelves will hold his books all the more tightly now for the knowledge that there will never be another one to add to them.