I first read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 at school, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, as part of my ‘O’ Level English Literature course. I was mesmerised by it – at that age dystopian SF was pretty much my literature of choice. I was in love with the rage it engendered in me, as well as the fear. I knew nothing about Ray Bradbury – he was just the bloke who wrote the book, the name on the cover. At around the same time I was similarly gripped by the BBC miniseries of The Martian Chronicles. I can’t remember if I connected the two experiences, if the name ‘Ray Bradbury’ clicked with me at that point. What I do know is that I loved those stories.
I find it difficult to read Bradbury these days. I dip in from time to time – those early stories in The October Country still mean a lot to me – but there’s an overexcitability to a lot of his prose, an overwritten quality that, for me at least, makes it seem dated. And yet.
I’ve been writing since I was six years old, but when I first started to take my writing seriously – when I decided that this was what I wanted to do, what I should, in fact, be doing – it was to other writers I instinctively turned. I was hungry for their advice. I read more ‘how to’ books than could ever have been good for me. Not all of them were good – or perhaps I should say not all of them felt relevant to me. But all of them had something, if I was prepared to wrest it free, and one of them had an essay by Ray Bradbury.
I’ve never forgotten it. He described with candour and good humour how he found and pursued his vocation. I was greatly taken by the method he had, of writing down endless lists of nouns – The Dwarf, The Baby, The Basement, The Mirror Maze, The Carnival – and then trusting that a story would come along to fit each such title. We know now that mostly it did. I even followed his method myself, for a while. I still love his essay, the honesty of it, and the passion. I’m still affected by the quality of his imagination: unquiet, baroque, almost rapacious in its intensity. The joy he felt in creation is obvious, and deeply honourable. Above all else, the man loved words, and cherished all the places a story could take him.
We lost someone important today.
I’m happy to say that even if I can’t remember when precisely I realised that Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles were written by the same person, I can remember, exactly, when I first became aware of Bradbury the writer, and his stature in the world of weird fiction. I remember because he bloody scared the shit out of me. In the mid-eighties there was a series of half-hour dramatisations of Bradbury stories broadcast late at night on Radio 4. I would lie in bed, reading with the radio on, waiting for the moment when Bradbury’s voice would come over the airwaves to introduce the next story. At that point I would lay down my book and switch out the light, and listen with rising horror as the tale unfolded.
It was something about being in the dark, with the radio on, just me and the story and nothing in between. I have to confess that there were several times when I found myself having to switch off the radio before the story ended. But nothing would stop me tuning in again for more the following week.
The worst – and best – was ‘Night Call, Collect’. I have no idea why this story, of a lone accidental survivor of a nuclear holocaust, trapped on Mars with nothing but his own recorded voice for company, terrified me quite so much, but I remember that by the end of the broadcast my whole body was rigid with tension and my palms were sweating.
Ray Bradbury did his job, and he did it good.
Reading some of the early tributes, I came across this quote, picked out by his grandson, Danny Karapetian, as his favourite:
“My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3am.
“So as not to be dead.'”
He will never leave us.
(You can listen to the recording of ‘Night Call, Collect’ here.)