Lockdown Choices - Issue #7: The October Country

This is the seventh in a new series of posts, my Lockdown Choices, where I seek to entertain you while in coronavirus-isolation, and remind you of Bradbury's great works in this, his centenary year.
In these posts, I cover each of Ray Bradbury's books, say something about the contents, then pick the best stories and adaptations.

Lockdown Choice #7: The October Country

First edition, Ballantine 1955. Cover art by Joe Mugnaini. Note the pseudo-gothic houses, the implied wind... and the inexplicable lizard creature...

The Book

The October Country was Ray Bradbury's seventh book, published by Ballantine in (appropriately enough) October of 1955. It contained nineteen stories, fifteen of them reprinted from his earlier book  Dark Carnival (1947). In fact, the project originated as a simple re-packaging and re-arrangement of Dark Carnival, once Arkham house had relinquished rights to the book. It was Bradbury's Ballantine editor Stanley Kaufmann who realised the revised contents of the book were drifting a long way from the original, and suggested a new title would be in order (see Eller & Touponce, Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction, pp. 77-79).

This was the first of many re-shuffled playlists of Bradbury's short-story-collection career, and so it's worth just spelling out how it compares to Dark Carnival:

The stories in black are carried over, and the ones in red are new to The October Country. Also new is the "the" in front of "Cistern", perhaps stolen from "The Homecoming", which no longer has a "the"!

And missing from the original Dark Carnival line-up are: "The Maiden", "The Tombstone", "The Smiling People", "The Traveler", "Reunion", "The Handler", "The Coffin", "Interim", "Let's Play Poison", "The Night", "The Dead Man", and "The Night Sets". But most of these would re-surface in future collections, so Bradbury was presumably still happy with them. (Four of them would never re-appear in a Bradbury collection, though: "The Maiden", "Reunion", "Interim", and "The Night Sets". My thanks to Piet Nel for pointing this out.)

As with his earlier book The Ilustrated Man, Bradbury initially considered something of a framing narrative to tie the disparate short stories together, but went instead for a two-page scene presenting a dialogue between a grandfather and grandson. He later trimmed this down to his simple "definition" of the concept as it appears in the finished book:

...that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain...

This passage reminds me very much of an introduction to a TV anthology series, and it's surprising in a way that nobody ever developed such a concept from the book - especially since The October Country contains some of Bradbury's most frequently-adapted stories.

Mugnaini illustration for "Skeleton", helping to define the story before the reader even begins to read. Note the man's shadow...

As with another earlier book The Golden Apples of the Sun, Bradbury wanted to include illustrations by Joe Mugnaini, and so some (but not all of the stories) appeared with Mugnaini's by now familiar line drawings. In Golden Apples, the drawings were half-page images at the head of each story, and became inextricably linked to the story for the reader. In The October Country, however, the illustrations were allowed a full page each, sometimes before the story, and sometimes within the story; almost randomly distributed, and with some stories remaining completely unillustrated.

Mugnaini illustration for "The Scythe", planted within the story.

 

 

 

The October Country picked up some good reviews. The UK edition won approval from The Guardian reviewer Norman Shrapnel, who declared that Bradbury's stories had "the subtlety of a hypodermic syringe". (I'm still trying to figure out whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.) Meanwhile another British reviewer for The Observer lamented that Bradbury had been "classed with the science fiction writers". Because, you know, he was good, unlike those sci-fi fellows...

Mugnaini illustration for "The Wind", again preceding the story. Note the echo of the tree shown on the book's cover.

I made a Bradbury 101 video about The October Country, in which I give an overview of how Dark Carnival was re-worked, demonstrating that part of Bradbury's method was his tendency to re-write:

 

   

 

The Stories

When I covered Dark Carnival, I singled out a few stories which re-appear here - namely "Skeleton", "The Crowd", "The Scythe", "The Lake". So here I will pick just from those which are new to The October Country.


"The Dwarf" - this was one of my early favourite Bradbury stories, The October Country being only the second Bradbury book I ever read. The story is simultaneously funny, sad and frightening. The basic premise is about a little man (the dwarf of the title) who goes into a hall of mirrors to see himself distorted to full stature. It's not exactly politically correct when stated like that, and in truth the story might find difficulty getting published today. But what makes the story so terrific is that the dwarf is also a writer who has written a story about being both a dwarf and a murderer; and he is effectively tortured by the main characters in the story. I'm not doing it justice here - you really need to read it. But it's an effective series of twists and distortions, and through Bradbury's skill you will by turns be horrified by the dwarf and feel sorry for him.


"Touched with Fire" - this story has a simple premise: "More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than at any other temperature." Any warmer, and it's too hot to move; any cooler, and cooler heads prevail. What makes this story so charming is the way it's framed. The main action involves the hotheaded Mrs Shrike:

The woman [...] stood at a wall phone, saliva flying from her mouth at an incredible rate. She showed off all of her large white teeth, chunking off her monologue, nostrils flared, a vein in her wet forehead ridged up, pumping, her free hand flexing and unflexing itself. Her eyes were clenched shut as she yelled [...]

But the story is told through the frame of Mr Foxe and Mr Shaw, who set out to verify the hypothesis of 92-degree murders. They have targeted Mrs Shrike as she seems a likely murderer...

"Touched with Fire" originally appeared in Maclean's magazine as "Shopping for Death" in June 1954. Bruce Johnson's illustration masterfully captures the key scenes from the story, and with an effective colour scheme for Mrs Shrike.

I decided when I started this series of blog posts that I would talk about my favourite stories. And of the four new stories in this volume, these are the only two that I could count as favourites. There are some elements of "Dudley Stone" which impress me, but overall I have little time for that story. And I'm afraid "The Watchful Poker Chip" remains one of my least favourite Bradbury stories. So I'll say no more about them.

The Adaptations

The October Country, being just a collection of short stories with no linking narrative, doesn't lend itself to being adapted as a whole book. But it has been done - as radio drama - twice. Sort of.

ABC Radio's Halloween 1984: The October Country was a ninety-minute live broadcast from the Directors' Guild Theater in Los Angeles, performed before an audience. It wove together four of the book's stories ("Emissary", "There Was An Old Woman", "The Next in Line" and "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone") into a, er, strange assemblage. Most of the individual stories were told reasonably well, and with a decent cast which included June Lockhart, Lynn Redgrave, and voice-acting legends Casey Kasem and Gary Owens. But "The Next in Line" - set by Bradbury in the Mexican town of Guanajuato, famous for its mummies and catacombs - is inexplicably relocated to Jamaica. And "Dudley Stone" for some reason becomes the author of all these stories, as the production makes "solving the mystery of Dudley Stone" into the overarching plot of the whole thing. I feel sorry for Bradbury, who had to sit in the audience through this whole production, and was then hurried into an unplanned interview when the show ran short. Bradbury explains the origin of each of the stories, politely pointing out that "The Next in Line" was based on a real experience he had in Mexico, not Jamaica...

In 2009, Peggy Webber's California Artists Radio Theatre did a better job, with a cast including Beverley Garland and William Windom. No framing or linking story, just a single ninety-minute production which tackled several of the best stories from the book: "Skeleton", "There Was an Old Woman" (again), "Uncle Einar", and "The Man Upstairs". The adaptation here was straightforward, with the narration of the stories turned directly into voice narration, and the dialogue brought to life by performers and sound effects.

Better work was done on adapting individual stories from The October Country. "The Dwarf" turned up on The Ray Bradbury Theater, in an episode which Ray considered to be one of the worst, but that was one of the few week adaptations of October Country stories. "The Next in Line" has been done well for radio on several occasions, perhaps the best being Brian Sibley's Tales of the Bizarre adaptation for the BBC. And then there is a whole string of stories which, in adaptational terms, are among Bradbury's star turns, all of them having been adapted multiple times: "Skeleton", "The Jar", "The Lake", "Emissary", "Touched With Fire", "The Small Assassin", "The Crowd".

Find Out More...

You can read "Touched with Fire" (in its original magazine form "Shopping for Death") at the Maclean's archive, here.

Watch...

Watch part of Ray's own 1956 TV adaptation of "Touched with Fire" ("Shopping for Death") for Alfred Hitchcock Presents here.

Listen...

Listen to ABC Radio's Halloween 1984: The October Country, here.

Better still, listen to how "The Next in Line" should be done, in Brian Sibley's dramatisation for BBC Radio's Tales of the Bizarre, here.

Next Up...

The next of my Lockdown Choices will be Bradbury's eighth book: Dandelion Wine.

The Bradbury Centenary

Well, we're finally here. 2020. Cue all those jokes about 2020 vision, and people drawing parallels with (19)20s flappers. For Bradbury fans, 2020 is a nice big round number: one hundred years since the birth of Ray Bradbury.

When I first became aware of Ray Bradbury's fiction, he must have been in his fifties. The first time I saw his photo, probably on a book cover, he would have been about 58 - which was quite old to me at the time; much older than my parents, for example. I saw Ray a lot in magazine interviews and on TV when he was in his sixties. And I finally met him when he was 87, and again when he was 90. Old, quite old. And yet...

His fiction was always so young and lively. What I didn't know when I first read Bradbury was that his amazing stories of dinosaurs, time machines, rockets, youth and death were mostly written when he was young and lively. His peak years, measured in terms of "best stories" were in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was aged between 20 and 40. And yet...

His amazing peak of productivity which produced The Martian Chronicles in 1950 (age 30), The Illustrated Man in 1951 (age 31), and Fahrenheit 451 in 1953 (age 33) was followed by a long tail of work which would never quite gain the same recognition. Bradbury continued writing right up to his final days, which means that there is nearly sixty years' worth of material out there (or hidden away) which most people are unfamiliar with.

A lot of books and essays about Bradbury talk of his career somehow petering out after those classic works of the 1950s. He stopped writing fiction, they say. He turned to poetry and plays, they say. He went to Hollywood, but didn't have much success.

Well, all of that has some grain of truth. His early success in Hollywood - It Came From Outer Space (he created it, but someone else did the final screenplay), Moby Dick (he adapted it, but John Huston nabbed half the screenplay credit), scripts for the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents - must have given him a taste of an alternative career, not to mention a significant alternative income stream. It can be argued that the alternative income enabled him to indulge in poetry, and to produce his own plays. Bradbury himself said that his income from Hollywood options is what put his children through college.

Ironically, Bradbury was a far better poet when writing short stories than he ever was when writing poetry. And yet he still managed to get books of poetry put out by major publishers. These things sold. They may not have been bestsellers, but they did the business.

As for his plays, they tended to fall into two camps. There were the original plays, mostly "Irish" stories which had been inspired by his time in Ireland writing Moby Dick, and most of which eventually also came out as short stories. And then there were the adaptations, of numerous short stories and his major novels. Some of these worked, and some didn't. If you ever get the chance to see his stage version of "The Veldt", see it. It's great, and in its reliance on the imagination of the audience, it works far better than any of the screen adaptations of it created so far. Similarly, if you get the chance to see Bradbury's stage version of Fahrenheit 451, grab it - but beware that Bradbury couldn't resist rewriting the story somewhat, so that it has some twists and turns which differ from the original novel.

As Jon Eller's biographies of Ray have pointed out, Bradbury's career was split into two halves. In the first half, he was an extraordinary short story writer and novelist. And in the second half, he might have run dry of original ideas, or he may have been distracted by those other media (poetry, plays, films). And also in that second half he must surely have been distracted by being a figure in the public eye, especially as the space age evolved and he became something of a spokesman for science fiction and an advocate of space exploration. I have always been amazed that he was able to get any real work done at all during this period.

By the 1980s, with Ray now into his sixties, he finally had his own TV series, the excruciatingly low-budget Ray Bradbury Theater. This show was a pioneer of original programming on cable TV, being one of HBO's first original productions, but with none of the investment that HBO today puts into original programming. At times the show was an embarrassment of poor production quality, but at other times it was able to produce some gems. Sixty-odd episodes were made, shot all over the world, with every one scripted by Bradbury himself. In the seven or so years that the show was in production, it is again hard to imagine how he found time for any other work. And yet...

The 1980s and 1990s saw a new burst of activity from Bradbury. Now in his 60s and 70s, he turned out a series of remarkable new novels and short story collections. The best of these were among his best (and the worst were among his worst). And in his final years, in his 80s and 90s, Bradbury put the finishing touches to a number of works-in-progress. A sequel to Dandelion Wine. A new patchwork novel tying a set of short stories together in From The Dust Return. Long-delayed novellas "Leviathan '99" and "Somewhere a Band is Playing".

One hell of a life of writing!

And now, so soon, we reach 2020. The Bradbury Centenary. There will be celebrations, that's for sure. Bradbury's home town of Waukegan, Illinois, has some plans. So does the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, based in Indianapolis.

And if anyone out there wants me to talk about Bradbury, just ask. I'm available for conferences, lectures, podcasts, possibly even barmitzvahs!

Watch this space for news and further developments...

ADDENDUM:  I thought I should use this post to keep a record of planned centenary events. I will add to the list as more events come to light. Here goes:

Feb 9, Pasadena: http://cabookfair.com/features.php#bradbury

Feb 21-23, 28-9, March 1, Pasadena: https://www.facebook.com/events/208921433571387/


March 5-8, San Diego: https://www.sdcomicfest.org/

March 11, Gurnee, Illinois: https://www.facebook.com/events/1421663071366314/

May 17, Bath, UK: https://bathfestivals.org.uk/the-bath-festival/event/neil-gaiman-ray-bradbury-at-100/

May 20, New York: https://www.symphonyspace.org/events/selected-shorts-ray-bradbury-centennial-celebration

July 24-25, Bicknell, Utah: https://www.facebook.com/BicknellInternationalFilmFestival/

For more events, please also keep an eye on this web page: https://raybradbury.com/centennial/

Bradbury on TV

Jack Seabrook, author of Martians and Misplaced Clues: The Life and Work of Fredric Brown (1993) and Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney (2003) has begun reviewing Ray Bradbury's contributions to TV. His first article in this vein gives a detailed analysis of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "Shopping for Death", based on the Bradbury short story better known under the title "Touched With Fire". You can read the article on the excellent bare.bones blog.

My thanks to Jack for bringing his review to my attention. I look forward to seeing future instalments.

My own brief coverage of the Bradbury Hitchcock episodes can be found here; somehow I never quite got round to reviewing the half-hours in depth. I did a bit better with the Alfred Hitchcock Hour episodes, though, as you can see here.

Critical Judgement

Do you sometimes read a TV or film review and wonder whether the critic has been watching the same thing as you?

I had this (familiar) thought when I recently read a contemporary review of the 1964 Alfred Hitchcock Hour production of Bradbury's "The Jar". The review was written by critic Derek Malcolm in The Guardian (13 March 1964).

Malcolm is generally dismissive of the series as a whole, saying "by the end of the show one generally feels a little cheated".

Of "The Jar" in particular, he writes

The story, which may have been a good one as written by Ray Bradbury, collapsed in a sea of cliches about half way through and drowned without trace long before the end. It revolved around a simpleton who buys a mysterious bottle from a carnival sideshow [...] The jar, reckoned to hold the secret of life and death, is wrecked by his baby-doll wife, so he ups and puts her in another one to regale the natives even further. Mock not that ye be not mocked appeared to be the moral of the piece. But it needed better handling than it got to drive the point home past the numbing tedium which spread like glue across the screen.

[...] Even old stagers like Slim Pickens and Jane Darwell were unable to retrieve the situation for more than a couple of seconds. However, one has seen better Hitchcock Hours than this. But even the best look like Hitchcock at his most glib and facile, so there seems little point in connecting him with such goggle-box ephemera at all. Maybe he needs the money.

While the Hitchcock Hours were generally not as good as the half-hour format used in Alfred Hitchcock Presents - and while I would tend to agree with Malcolm that any artistic correlation between Alfred Hitchcock, film director, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour was somewhat tenuous - I can't help thinking that he has almost entirely missed the point of "The Jar". First, the show hinges on the visceral and visual fascination of the jar's mysterious contents, which drives people to do strange things. Second, the direction of the episode by Norman Lloyd is deliberately contrived to mirror the way people sit around the TV, entranced by its vague and flickering movements.

Perhaps Malcolm, being best known as a film critic, was unable to appreciate this as a particularly televisual production. Or perhaps this is a reading of the show which is more evident today than it would have been in 1964.

My own review of "The Jar" can be found here. I also have reviews of the Ray Bradbury Theatre version, and the weak 1980s Alfred Hitchcock Presents version.

Darkness

I'm currently reading around the edges of Fahrenheit 451, as part of a study of both Bradbury's work and Francois Truffaut's 1966 film adaptation.

I just finished Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon, which is a fascinating inside look at post-revolutionary Russia - although Koestler, writing in 1940, carefully avoids specifying any of the countries where the events of the novel take place. I found the novel quite chilling and atmospheric, but was constantly reminded of George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) AND Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). I understand that Orwell was familiar with Koestler's work, and even wrote an essay about him. I will have to track this down.

Immediately after finishing the novel, I moved on to Sidney Kingsley's 1951 play based on Koestler's novel. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the hardcover edition of the play includes photographs from the original Broadway production. The original cast of the play included Claude Rains (in the lead role as Rubashov), and Kim Hunter.

All of which brings me back to Bradbury. We know that Bradbury knew Koestler's novel and that he saw Kingsley's play. In fact, he was once quoted as saying that he thought Koestler captured aspects of totalitarianism more accurately than did either Orwell or Aldous Huxley.

Bradbury was also an admirer of Claude Rains, although the only professional connection between them (that I can think of) is the Alfred Hitchcock Presents adaptation of Bradbury's "And So Died Riabouchinska". Bradbury's admiration of Rains is referred to in this account of Terry Pace's 2009 production Claude Rains: An Actor's Voice.