It's time for another new episode of the Bradbury 100 podcast. This week, I'm joined by writer and Bradbury scholar Steve Gronert Ellerhoff.
We talk about Ray Bradbury - and also Kurt Vonnegut! Did you know that Bradbury and Vonnegut knew each other? Or that they both had a TV series at the same time, from the same production company?
Following on from the success of Ray Bradbury Theatre (1985-1992), production company Atlantis signed up with Vonnegut to do a similar series, adapting Vonnegut's short stories in a similar way to Bradbury's stories. Kurt Vonnegut's Monkey House ran for two very short seasons - a total of seven episodes altogether. This pales in comparison to Ray's sixty-five episodes.
Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, in a publicity still for Atlantis by leading photographer Karsh.
We also tackle the difficult issue of how race is portrayed in some Bradbury stories from the 1950s. Bradbury took a strong stand against racism in a number of stories, including two of his Mars tales. Ironically, because they use dated language, they are today sometimes accused of being raciststories. I generally defend these stories as bold and brave anti-racist works, but I admit to being uncomfortable with the language used.
This is the tenth in my series of Lockdown Choices, where I seek to entertain you while in coronavirus-isolation, and remind you of Ray Bradbury's great works in this, his centenary year.
In these posts, I cover each of Bradbury's books, say something about the contents, then pick the best stories and adaptations.
Lockdown Choices: The Small Assassin
First edition, paperback, Ace 1962. The Small Assassin is a British book with no direct US counterpart. Cover artist unknown.
The Book
The Small Assassin is, to us Brits, as essential a Bradbury volume as any other. But it is solely a British volume, with no equivalent in the US.It contains thirteen stories, all of them "leftovers" from the UK editions of Dark Carnival and The October Country. How this came about is bit difficult to explain...
Ray's usual British paperback publisher Corgi Books turned down the option to publish The October Country, as they didn't feel that a book of horror stories matched their usual style.
In 1961, Ace Books stepped in and bought The October Country, but decided to drop seven of the stories ("The Next in Line", "The Lake", "The Small Assassin", "The Crowd", "Jack-in-the-Box", "The Man Upstairs", and "The Cistern". Although they also decided to add "The Traveller", which had appeared in Dark Carnival, but not in The October Country.
(Are you with me so far? There will be a quiz later.)
In 1962, Ace took those seven deleted stories, put them together with the remaining six stories from Dark Carnival, and issued the result as The Small Assassin. The table of contents of the resulting volume is here.
Another way of looking at it is to say that if you have the UK paperback of The October Country and the UK paperback The Small Assassin, you have in your possession the complete contents of the outt-of-print UK edition of Dark Carnival. (But don't forget that the UK Dark Carnival is a cut-down version of the US edition!)
As far as I am aware, there has never been a hardcover edition of The Small Assassin; it has spent its entire existence in paperback. The last edition to see print was the Grafton edition of 1986. In its twenty-four years in print, it had just three more cover designs, all of them somewhat mismatched to the contents:
The three subsequent covers for The Small Assassin. The art for the middle one is by Richard Clifton-Dey. The others are uncredited. I have a particular dislike for the baby alien/robot on the right, who adorned the first edition I ever owned. He is so obviously a science-fictional creature, and yet this is so obviously not a science fiction book!
So, it's a book of leftovers. Or, alternatively, another one of those remixes which serve only to confuse the Bradbury collector.
The Stories
Now, I have covered some of the Small Assassin stories already, when I blogged about Dark Carnival and The October Country, so I will not repeat myself here - except to say that I heartily recommend "The Crowd" and "The Lake", which I discussed here. As for the others:
"The Small Assassin" - I've mentioned this tale a few times, and it is one of Ray's most anthologised stories - just look at its number of appreances as recorded on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. In case you've somehow managed to avoid being exposed to this classic tale, I'll summarise it by saying it's the one where a woman suspects that her new-born baby is out to kill her. As David Mogen points out (Ray Bradbury, Twayne 1986, p.57) this is a reverse of the monster/innocent victim scenario we would normally expect in a horror tale - and is an instance of "parent abuse" rather than child abuse!
It's classic Bradburyan paranoia of the type we have seen in "The Crowd", "The Wind", "Skeleton" and "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl". And as with most of those stories, the paranoid protagonist turns out to be justified in their paranoia. Bradbury, in his classic horror period, was never one to leave the reader to decide; he nearly always set things up to make you think the hero is crazy, then make you empathise with them, and then vindicate them.
Alice Leiber, the mother, is proof that Bradbury can write strong women characters. You will sometimes hear criticisms that most of his characters are male, especially in something like The Martian Chronicles. But he does have a number of memorable strong females. And if he adheres to the Hitchcockian motto of "torture the heroine", he can at least be defended on the grounds that, actually, he usually tortures his male heroes as well.
The unsung star of "The Small Assassin" is Dr Jeffers, the sceptical doctor whose role is to calm and placate Alice. Until he ends up convinced that she is right...
One last thing to say about "The Small Assassin": it may have its origins, in a sense, in Bradbury's own experience. One of Bradbury's oddest claims was that he remembered his own birth. "Preposterous", I hear you cry; and I cry the same thing. Nevertheless, Ray insisted that he could recall "the camera angle" as he emerged into this world, as well as the pain of being born, and his infant desire to return back to the womb. Whether you believe it or not (and I don't, not for one minute), it was this "memory" which provided the germ of the idea of a child which resents being born, and which desires to exact revenge on those responsible. Bradbury's account is given in countless interviews, but is most clearly explained in Sam Weller's biography, The Bradbury Chronicles (Wm. Morrow, 2005, p. 12).
"The Next in Line" - again, one that I've mentioned before. Again, it's a story with its roots in Bradbury's personal experience, this time based on his visit to Guanajuato in Mexico, where he saw the mummies in the catacombs. The story is what Sam Weller describes as "one of the most powerful stories [...], a psychologically complex creation, dripping with gothic atmosphere [...] Bradbury at his poetic best."
Here's the first view we get as our protagonists enter the graveyard on their way to the mummies:
It was several mornings after the celebratory fiesta of El Dia de Muerte, the Day of the Dead, and ribbons and ravels of tissue and sparkle-tape still clung like insane hair to the raised stones, to the hand-carved, love-polished crucifixes, and to the above-ground tombs which resembled marble jewel-cases. There were statues frozen in angelic postures over gravel mounds, and intricately carved stones tall as men with angels spilling all down their rims, and tombs as big and ridiculous as beds put out to dry in the sun after some nocturnal accident. And within the four walls of the yard, inserted into square mouths and slots, were coffins, walled in, plated in by marble plates and plaster, upon which names were struck and upon which hung tin pictures, cheap peso portraits of the inserted dead. Thumb-tacked to the different pictures were trinkets they'd loved in life, silver charms, silver arms, legs, bodies, silver cups, silver dogs, silver church medallions, bits of red crape and blue ribbon. On some places were painted slats of tin showing the dead rising to heaven in oil-tinted angels' arms.
And the mummies themselves:
They resembled nothing more than those preliminary erections of a
sculptor, the wire frame, the first tendons of clay, the muscles, and a
thin lacquer of skin. They were unfinished, all one hundred and fifteen
of them.
They were parchment-colored and the skin was stretched as
if to dry, from bone to bone. The bodies were intact, only the watery
humors had evaporated from them.
"The climate," said the caretaker. "It preserves them. Very dry."
"How long have they been here?" asked Joseph.
"Some one year, some five, senor, some ten, some seventy."
Such precise language in those descriptions - poetic, yes, but with a photographic clarity.
One of the strengths of the story is the way it gradually shifts away from the twin protagonists of Joseph and Marie - they're both together, and Joseph seems to have made their plans for them - to the focus on Marie alone, but with a final shift at the end to Joseph alone (the final shift being for reasons which you will discover when you read the story).
As with "The Small Assassin", there is a strong focus on a central female character here, albeit another "tortured heroine".
The Adaptations
"The Small Assassin" has been adapted for visual media a couple of times, and has turned out well each time. The story has a lot of visual suspense built in, such as the baby's carefully placed toy, intended to cause the mother to trip. Bradbury himself adapted it in 1988 for The Ray Bradbury Theater, and director Chris Charles oversaw a short film version released in 2006.
Dr Jeffers, as played by Cyril Cusack (of Fahrenheit 451 fame) in the RBT production of "The Small Assassin".
The chief suspect in the RBT production of "The Small Assassin".
A troubled mother from the 2006 short film...
...and the dastardly deed committed by the evil child.
"The Next in Line", on the other hand, has worked well on radio. While the story could work well on the screen, it also lends itself to the "better pictures" you often get in the sound-only medium, as evidenced by the BBC Fear on Four series, with a 1992 script by Brian Sibley.
Many of the other stories from The Small Assassin have also been adapted: "The Lake", "The Crowd", "The Man Upstairs", "The Tombstone", "The Handler", "Let's Play Poison" and "The Dead Man" all turned up on The Ray Bradbury Theater, all (of course) dramatised by Bradbury himself. In all, eight stories out of the thirteeen in the book were adapted for that series, probably something of a record.
This is the ninth in my series of 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 #9: A Medicine for Melancholy orThe Day It Rained Forever
First US edition, Doubleday 1959; and first UK edition, Hart-Davis 1959. The US version came out a couple of weeks before the UK version.
The Book
A Medicine for Melancholy was never on my radar. As a Brit, growing up in the UK, we had a similar-but-not-really-the-same book instead: The Day it Rained Forever. To this day I consider the UK title much more poetic than the US one, and the book itself more definitive than the American version. This, of course, wouldn't be the first time that A Bradbury book was renamed for the UK market or had a change of contents when crossing the Atlantic. The Martian Chronicles had gone by the name The Silver Locusts over here, and with some small changes in content; and Dark Carnival had been somewhat truncated in the UK due (we are told) to post-war paper shortages.
A Medicine for Melancholy/The Day it Rained Forever is another short story collection, and like Golden Apples of the Sun it mixes genres quite freely. The stories had nearly all been published before, in various magazines, during the period 1948-1958. Note that by now Bradbury had mopped up nearly all of his science fiction stories in The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man; nearly all of his horror stories in The October Country; and nearly all of his small-town Illinois stories in Dandelion Wine. And this means that what remains to be collected here is mostly not-science-fiction, not-horror, and not-Green-Town.This doesn't bother me at all. But it makes the book difficult to pin down, which inevitably confuses critics and book reviewers who wonder "why is this sci-fi guy not putting much sci-fi in his books?"
According to Eller & Touponce's Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction, there was a lot of back-and-forth between Ray Bradbury and his Doubleday editor Walter Bradbury (no relation) over the contents of this collection. A number of older stories (originally published in pulp magazines) were rejected for this volume by Walt, partly because of their pulp origins, but partly because of their age. The rejected tales included "Referent" (from Thrilling Wonder Stories, 1948), "Asleep in Armageddon" (Planet Stories, 1948), "The One Who Waits" (Arkham Sampler, 1949), and "Here There Be Tygers" (from the anthology New Tales of Space and Time, 1951).
British editor Rupert Hart-Davis, on the other hand, was happy with these earlier tales, and with the exception of "The One Who Waits" included them all in the UK book. But Hart-Davis had problems with two stories which didn't trouble Walt Bradbury: the two Irish stories, "The First Night of Lent" and "The Great Collision of Monday Last". According to Eller & Touponce, his objection was that the stories were realist tales which sat uncomfortably in what was otherwise a collection of fantasy tales. I suspect, however, that he may also have considered these to be quite flimsy stories, little more than tall tales.
Probably the most confusing re-mix of contents in going from a US edition to a British edition: mapping the contents of Melancholy (US book) to Forever (UK book). Titles in red are unique to their repective editions. And crucially the story called "A Medicine for Melancholy" didn't make it across to the UK edition, perhaps prompting the change of title for the book as a whole. (Click to embiggen if you can't read the small print!)
As with a number of other Bradbury collections, A Medicine for Melancholy/The Day it Rained Forever suffered the problem of reshuffled contents in the years that followed. Beware of Twice 22 (1966) which slams together the contents of Melancholy and Golden Apples. And of Classic Stories 2 (1990), which merges Melancholy with S is for Space. And be especially aware of A Medicine for Melancholy AND OTHER STORIES (1998),which is nothing more than a re-badging of Classic Stories 2, while giving the false impression that it is the original Medicine for Melancholy.
Both the US and UK books have cover art by Joe Mugnaini, but there is alas no interior art in either volume.
The Stories
Although I don't particularly care for the Irish stories "The First Night of Lent" and "The Great Collision of Monday Last", I should mention them briefly here since they mark the first appearance (or not, as far as the British version of the book is concerned) of a wealth of stories which Bradbury came to generate as a result of his time spent in Ireland working with John Huston on the screenplay for Moby Dick (1953-54; the film was released in 1956). There would be plenty more of these over the following decades, as short stories, stage plays, and - eventually - the autobiographical novel Green Shadows, White Whale.
Now, onto my picks of the best stories in the book(s):
"The Day it Rained Forever" - this story was selected for The Best American Short Stories for 1958, the last time that Ray received that particular honour. It's Bradbury at his evocative best. Not only does he make you feel the persistent heat of the drought-stricken ghost of a town, he lets you feel the relief of the eventual rain. And to cap it off, the literal rain is brought by the metaphorical, musical rain of a harp being played:
All night the memory of the sun stirred in every room like the ghost of an old forest fire [...]
Miss Hillgood played.
She played and it wasn't a tune they knew at all, but it was a tune they had heard a thousand times in their long lives, words or not, melody or not. She played and each time her fingers moved, the rain fell pattering through the dark hotel. The rain fell cool at the open windows and the rain rinsed down the baked floorboards of the porch. The rain fell on the rooftop and fell on hissing sand, it fell on rusted car and empty stable and dead cactus in the yard.
I'm pretty sure that I didn't "get" this story the first time I encountered it. Oh, I understood what was happening all right, but I didn't appreciate what Bradbury was doing linguistically. But after many years of reading everything he ever wrote, I have come to admire the ease with which he creates such a powerful impact.
"In a Season of Calm Weather" - a story which is also sometimes known by the alternative title "The Picasso Summer" (or just "Picasso Summer"). It's a very slight tale indeed: man obsessed with the artist Picasso visits region associated with Picasso; spies the artist on the beach effortlessly making pictures in the sand; sees the pictures washed away by the waves. What's beautiful here is the understated meditation on ephemeral art. Our hero, for a brief moment, considers grabbing a bucket and scooping up the sand before he realises that the value lies in the images, not in the artist's "canvas".
"Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed" - one of Ray's best Martian stories, necessarily dropped out of consideration for The Martian Chronicles because its plot would somewhat pre-empt that book's ending. In "Dark They Were", earth people gradually, literally turn into Martians - so that when a future batch of Earthlings arrive on the red planet, they find what they think are native Martians. If you remember The Martian Chronicles, you'll know that the punchline of the final story is essentially that "we are the Martians now".
One of the older stories in the book, "Dark They Were" was originally published under the title "The Naming of Names" in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1949. Illustration by Rafael Astarita.
"The End of the Beginning" - this one tells of the parents of the first astronaut, and their excitement, elation and fear on the night of their son’s launch into space. It begins with the father mowing the lawn one summer night, a scene straight out of Bradbury’s own Dandelion Wine. Mother declares she never understood the ‘because it’s there’ argument for climbing Mount Everest; Father posits the first space launch as part of a critical turning point in the history of humankind:
"Don’t know where they’ll divide the Ages, at the Persians who dreamt of flying-carpets, or the Chinese who all unknowing celebrated birthdays and New Years with strung ladyfingers and high skyrockets […] But we’re in at the end of a billion years’ trying, the end of something long and to us humans, anyway, honourable".
The father declares that the species will move on out to the planets and the stars, echoing the long American tradition of expansion, and giving a view of space travel that would, over succeeding decades, become distinctively Bradbury’s, not only in fiction but in his personal pontifications in interviews and lectures:
"We’ll just keep on going until the big words like immortal and for ever take on meaning […] Gifted with life, the least we can do is preserve and pass on the gift to infinity […]"
Although the story is quite slight (I've been using that word a lot in connection with the stories in this book), it somewhat haunted Bradbury. When he wrote his 1961 screenplay for The Martian Chronicles (which was never filmed), he incorporated this story, taking advantage of its double-whammy: the oh-so-domestic setting, and its rich philosophising.
"The End of the Beginning" was also a re-titling: it had first appeared as "Next Stop: the Stars" in Macleans, October 1956. Illustration by Bruce Johnson.
"The Town Where No One Got Off" - this one I like just for it's simple premise: that when crossing the US by train, you see town after town where no one ever gets off. Except that in this story, the protagonist decides that he will. The consequences of this choice are interesting, too. But I'll leave you to explore that for yourself...
"The Gift" - one of Bradbury's shortest short stories. This is the one where a child is taken into space at Christmas, as a gift. It's his first trip, and he is shown the stars. And if the story itself isn't short and sweet enough, just see how it was perfectly illustrated when it was first published:
"The Gift" first appeared in Esquire in 1952, with this perfect reaction-shot illustration by Ren Wickes.
The Adaptations
Melancholy/Forever has spun off some of the oddest adaptations of Bradbury's work. He re-worked "The Gift" into an episode of the TV series Steve Canyon - replacing the trip-into-space with a night flight in an aircraft. It's a decent episode, but a very unexpected transposition of the story.
And then there's The Picasso Summer, the bizarre (in a bad way) expansion of a very short story into a long and meandering film. Ray wrote the original script himself, hoping to talk some French luminary director into making the film. He approached Jean Renoir and Francois Truffaut, both of whom declined the invitation. In the end it was shot by Serge Bourguignon, who did once win an Oscar - but Picasso Summer turned out to be Bourguignon's fourth and last film. Oh, and Bourguignon was dumped after turning in his rough cut; he was replaced by Robert Sallin, who shot a new ending. There's a clue in the screenwriting credits as to how bad it is: the script is by "Douglas Spaulding", an alias for Ray Bradbury, who wanted to distance himself from the disaster that the film became. Even the producer Wes Herschensohn knew what a train-wreck this film was: he wrote a book about the whole sorry affair, Resurrection in Cannes.
Producer Herschensohn tried to persuade the real Pablo Picasso to appear in Picasso Summer - the photo on the left shows them meeting in a restaurant. But the film settled for a stand-in lookey-likey, Deke Fishman. Photos from Herschensohn's book Resurrection in Cannes (A.S.Barnes, 1979).
But there are some good adaptations out there:
Ray himself turned "The Day it Rained Forever" (the short story) into a stage play and, later, a script for The Ray Bradbury Theater TV series. Both are decent pieces of writing, and the TV episode isn't a bad filming of the script. However, at last half of the impact of the short story comes from the evocative, descriptive language - and this can't be directly captured on film.
Ray also did a decent job on "The Town Where No One Got Off" for The Ray Bradbury Theater, one of the early batch of episodes. It starred Jeff Goldblum in a fairly decent recreation of the original story. In these early days of RBT, Ray would introduce each story. For this episode, he acts out a little scene - with legendary Disney animator Ward Kimball! (See "Adaptations" below for a link.)
Ray also adapted "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" for stage and for screen. The film version, given a limited DVD-only release by Disney in 1998, was directed by horror-meister Stuart Gordon. It sounds an unlikely combination, but Gordon had previously directed a successful theatrical production of the play. Ray would have been 77 when the film was released. Not a bad age to be still receiving a "screenplay by" credit from a major Hollywood studio.
Joe Mantegna and Edward James Olmos were among the stars of Stuart Gordon's 1998 film version of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, scripted by Ray Bradbury.
Find Out More...
Read more about Ray's adaptation of "The Gift" for Steve Canyon in my review, here.
Read "The End of the Beginning" in its first magazine appearance (Macleans), here.
Listen and Watch...
Listen to a full-cast dramatisation of "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed" from the radio series Bradbury 13, here.
Watch Ray Bradbury act (with animator Ward Kimball) in the introductory scenes to "The Town Where No One Got Off" from The Ray Bradbury Theater, here.
Next Up...
The next of my Lockdown Choices will be a British book which has no direct US counterpart: The Small Assassin!
This is the fourth in my series of 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 #4: The Golden Apples of the Sun
First edition. Doubleday, 1953.
The Book
The Golden Apples of the Sun was Ray Bradbury's fourth book, a collection of science-fictional, fantasy, and "realistic" tales. With Bradbury, of course, "realism" can be very far from our everyday reality, but what I mean here is the type of story which does not hinge upon a science-fictional or fantastical premise.
The book collected twenty-two stories, most of which had previously been published in various magazines between 1944 and 1953. Like Bradbury's first book, Dark Carnival, the stories are presented as is, without any attempt to connect them through a linking narrative. It is therefore the first of Bradbury's Doubleday books to be allowed the luxury of being an undisguised short story collection. (Remember that editor Walter Bradbury (no relation) had asked of Ray, "We've disguised The Martian Chronicles as a novel, do you think we can somehow do the same thing with The Illustrated Man?")
As well as being "just" a collection of short stories, Golden Apples has the distinction of collecting a number of stories which had won awards or had been published in venues of some prestige. "Power House", for example, had won an O. Henry Prize; "The Big Black and White Game" had been selected for Best American Short Stories 1946; and "I See You Never" for Best American Short Stories 1948. And by now, Bradbury's short stories were being collected not just from pulp magazines, but from major-market publications such as American Mercury, Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker. Appearing in these majors brought more than just prestige: they brought better income.
Another distinctive feature of Golden Apples is the art direction. For the first time, Bradbury's work was surrounded by the work of artist Joe Mugnaini. Mugnaini provided both the cover art (see above) and a uniform series of line drawings, one for each story. Mugnaini and Bradbury became good friends, and collaborated repeatedly over the year, to the extent that many readers find the two inextricably linked. Where else might you recognise that Mugnaini style from? For a start, there's that iconic newspaper-fireman from the cover of Fahrenheit 451.
For some reason, the first UK edition of Golden Apples deleted one story, "The Big Black and White Game" - perhaps on the grounds that the baseball theme might be meaningless to British readers. Subsequent UK editions restored the full table of contents, however.
Unfortunately, Golden Apples has become somewhat confusing in more recent times. Somewhere along the line, it became part of a set of editorial mash-ups which resulted in The Golden Apples of the Sun disappearing, and being effectively supplanted by The Golden Apples of the Sun AND OTHER STORIES. This latter title (which usually has "and other stories" written as a whispering footnote) scrambles the order of the stories and mixes in others from elsewhere. And - blasphemy! - removes the Mugnaini illustrations.
For some readers, there's no problem here. It's just a collection of short stories. But to others (i.e. me), the art direction and the running order is all part of "the book". If you're a person who puts their MP3s on shuffle, you probably don't care about this. But if you like to hear, say, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with all the tracks in the right order, then this is a very big deal indeed.
In fact, according to Eller and Touponce, the visual theme of the original book was Bradbury's concept, and was his alternative way of having a consistent authorial thread running throughout the book (Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction, p. 367). So taking away the Mugnaini artwork would be the equivalent of removing the linking material from The Martian Chronicles.
Check the small print to see whether you have an actual Golden Apples, or an ...and other stories edition. Current paperback, HarperCollins.
Find out how The Golden Apples of the Sun finally allowed Bradbury to break out of the fantasy/science fiction "ghetto" and gain respect in the mainstream in myBradbury 101 video below. And scroll further down the page for my pick of the best stories from the book.
The Stories
Because of its eclectic nature, pulling in science fiction, fantasy and realistic stories, Golden Apples feels less coherent than any of Bradbury's previous books. But that does set a pattern which would continue through most of his subsequent short-story collections. Here are my personal story picks, perhaps heavily influenced by the fact that this is the first Bradbury book I ever read.
"The Pedestrian" - a really simple concept, and strangely appropriate for the COVID-19 lockdown: in some unspecified future, it is illegal to walk anywhere. Instead, everyone is supposed to stay home and watch TV. Mr Leonard Mead, however, breaks the rules. He goes out (gasp!) for a solitary stroll. Of course, it being the future and everything, he is stopped by what turns out to be... Well, read it for yourself.
According to Bradbury, one day he took his pedestrian out for another stroll - and found himself writing a new story, "The Fireman", which he would later expand into Fahrenheit 451.
Mugnaini illustration for "The Pedestrian".
"The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" - I think this is truly the first piece of fiction I ever read which amazed me, and convinced me that words on a page could be magical and insightful. This when I was, I suppose, twelve years old. It's a simple story of a murder, except that the murderer becomes obsessed with the fingerprints he has left behind. Or probably left behind. Or must have, or possibly left behind. His gradual descent into obsession is masterfullywritten, and is another fine example of Bradbury constructing a character, even though that's something he is alleged not to be able to do. It's also full of beautifully poetic writing which is also narratively purposeful.
He has forgotten to wash the fourth wall of the room! And while he was gone the little spiders had popped from the fourth unwashed wall and swarmed over the already clean walls, dirtying them again! On the ceilings, from the chandelier, in the corners, on the floor, a million little whorled webs hung billowing at his scream! Tiny, tiny little webs, no bigger than, ironically, your - finger!
As he watched, the webs were woven over the picture frame, the fruit bowl, the body, the floor. Prints wielded the paper knife, pulled out drawers, touched the table top, touched, touched, touched everything everywhere.
"The Fruit..." was originally published with Bradbury's punning title "Touch and Go!", but he wisely switched to the title the story is now better known by. The significance of the fruit? Our murderous protagonist becomes so obsessed with fingerprints that he cleans even things he knows he didn't ever touch...
"The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" first appeared as "Touch and Go" in Detective Book Magazine, November 1948.
" A Sound of Thunder" - how could I not pick this story? It's one of the most anthologised short stories of all time, and one of the best known science fiction shorts. In case you don't recall this one, it's the one where people go back in time to hunt dinosaurs. Bradbury didn't originate that concept of course, and there are numerous other variations on the theme from other authors. But what Bradbury does so much better than, say, L. Sprague de Camp's "A Gun for Dinosaur", is create a clear connection and contrast between small, selfish actions, and large-scale consequences. And this is why I could also have said, "in case you don't recall this one, it's the one with the butterfly".
"Thunder" was rejected by The Magazine of Fantasy of Science Fiction, whose editor declared it was unbelievable because of the way it handles the time-travel paradox. But Bradbury stuck with his story, believing that the powerful imagery far outweighed any appeal to logic. The story was published instead by the mainstream magazine Collier's.
"A Sound of Thunder" first appearance. Collier's, 1952.
"The Great Wide World Over There" - proof if it were needed that Bradbury can write stories without a science-fictional or fantastical premise. This tale is of Cora, who longs to be like her neighbour and receive letters from far and wide - except that Cora can't read or write. She gets Benjy to send off for things for her. All sorts of things: a free muscle chart, a free health map, information from a detective school, anything that she can eagerly anticipate arriving.
There's a neat little plot within the story, and again a demonstration that Bradbury can craft characters who are tightly bound to his narrative and theme.
Mugnaini illustration for "The Great Wide World Over There".
"Hail and Farewell" - an often overlooked story of a boy who cannot grow up, this is an exquisite example of Bradbury taking a simple fantasy concept (Peter Pan anyone?) and finding the tragedy within it, just as he had done with the earlier story "The Martian" in The Martian Chronicles. The tragedy here comes from the fact that every time the boy (outwardly stuck at the age of twelve, but actually born forty-three years ago) finds himself a family to adopt, he must eventually walk away from them. The reason: they will eventually discover his secret, and will no longer be able to love him: "after three years, or five years, they guessed, or a travelling man came through, or a carnival man saw me, and it was over. It always had to end."
Mugnaini illustration for "Hail and Farewell".
The Adaptations
"The Pedestrian" was adapted for the stage, and later for TV, by Bradbury himself. In both of these adaptations, he was faced with a slight problem: Mr Leonard Mead does most of his walking alone among empty streets, and therefore doesn't have much to say or anyone to interact with; not exactly the most riveting of stories to perform with actors on a stage or on screen. His solution? He gives Mead a walking companion. It's not a bad piece of theatre - see for yourself in the Ray Bradbury Theatre adaptation, here - but it really turns it into a very different story, and I think I prefer the original tale.
"The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" was adapted by Ilona Ference for a British series, Television Playhouse, in 1963 with Leonard Rossiter in the role of the nervous killer, and adapted by Bradbury himself for an early episode of Ray Bradbury Theater, with Michael Ironside and Robert Vaughn.
"The Meadow" is something of a reverse adaptation: Bradbury wrote the short story first, then adapted it for radio for World Security Workshop. But the radio adaptation appeared in 1947, and the short story in 1953, giving the impression that the story is an adaptation of the play.
"Hail and Farewell" was also adapted for Ray Bradbury Theatre, albeit as a rather non-memorable instalment.
But Golden Apples' biggest stories are the two creature features. Both "The Fog Horn" and "A Sound of Thunder" feature prehistoric creatures, and both have had a long afterlife in media adaptation. "The Fog Horn" was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post under the title "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms", and served as the inspiration for Ray Harryhausen's first solo animation feature under that name, and arguably inspired the similarly themed original Godzilla. "Thunder" was not quite so lucky.
"A Sound of Thunder" has been adapted for radio quite successfully, as in the NPR series Bradbury Thirteen, and even the Ray Bradbury Theater version scripted by Ray was OK (apart from the pre-Jurassic Park rubber monster). But it was also the basis of a dodgy feature film directed by Peter Hyams in 2005; Hyams got the job after Bradbury allegedly had an earlier director fired from the project for trying to remove the butterfly from the story. The story also inspired a segment of The Simpsons!
With the whole world in COVID-19 lockdown, and with it being the centenary year of Ray Bradbury, I toyed with the idea of starting a podcast to give Bradbury fans something to listen to. And then I started recording one, unscripted, and decided it might be too painful for human ears to listen to...
Instead, I thought, I could just get back into the habit of blogging regularly. Now, there's a novelty.
So welcome to the first in a new series of posts, my Lockdown Choices. In these posts, I will cover each of Ray Bradbury's books, say something about the contents, then pick the best stories: some will be chosen because they're damned good stories; and others will be chosen because they resulted in a damned fine adaptation.
(Note to self: there's going to be a Bradbury book which contains not a single adapted story. Deal with that issue when it arises.)
Lockdown Choice #1: Dark Carnival
First edition, Arkham House 1947.
The Book
Dark Carnival was Ray Bradbury's first book, a collection of dark fantasy tales published by the legendary Arkham House in 1947. It collected twenty-seven stories, most of which had appeared earlier in Weird Tales magazine. There were also six previously unpublished stories. Any one of those "new" stories would have made the book worth buying.
It's worth pausing for a moment to reflect on Bradbury's success in Weird Tales. In 1943, when he was twenty-three years old, Bradbury appeared three times in that magazine. In 1944, five times. Three times in 1945 and 1946, and twice in 1947. That's a remarkable track record, in what was undoubtedly Bradbury's most prolific period.
The excited reader (of this blog) might at this point go running off to the interwebs to find where they can buy a copy of this wonderful book, which collects so much of Bradbury's early writing. But hold your horses. You'll need big money. First editions of Dark Carnival sell for upwards of $350, and the truncated UK edition published by Hamish Hamilton in 1948 isn't much cheaper.
Why should this be? Well, partly because it's an old book from a relatively minor publisher. But partly, too, because there never was a second edition. The Arkham edition, the UK edition, and that's it. Until fifty years later, when a limited edition came out - but more on that below.
It's not that Dark Carnival didn't sell enough for there to be any other editions. It's all down to Bradbury himself. He decided to re-write some of the stories; to refine the whole package; and his preferred versions of the stories came out in 1955 as The October Country. You can still get The October Country today, and it's never been out of print. But Dark Carnival was allowed by Bradbury to slip into relative obscurity.
Until 2001, that is, and the aforementioned limited edition. This came from Gauntlet Press, and came with Ray's blessing. Gauntlet also issued a CD of an interview with Ray, where he talked about some of the stories. But Ray was never interested in having any kind of mass-market reissue of Dark Carnival.
Find out how Dark Carnival became Bradbury's great "lost book" in my Bradbury 101 video below. And scroll further down the page for my pick of the best stories from the book.
The Stories
There's no question, some of Bradbury's finest stories are found in this collection. The acclaimed "Homecoming", which established Ray's "family". The much adapted and endlessly fascinating "The Jar". The much imitated but seldom bettered "The Small Assassin", in which a paranoid mother who thinks her baby is out to get her - turns out... to be right. And "The Next in Line", one of Ray's Mexican stories, set amid the mummy-filled catacombs of Guanajuato.
My personal picks from Dark Carnival are these:
"Skeleton" - part horrifying, part humorous, this is the story of a man who one day realises that inside him is... a skeleton. As with so many of the Dark Carnival stories, this is about paranoia. And as with "The Small Assassin" (and "The Wind" and "The Crowd") the paranoid central character is vindicated: there really is something out to get them. In the case of "Skeleton", it's the mysterious figure of M.Munigant, the bone specialist whose interest in bones is not quite what you might expect.
Bradbury said that this story was inspired by something that actually happened to him:
I went to my doctor with a sore throat, and I said, “Would you look in there? It feels kind of funny all around.”
He looked at my throat, and he says, “Oh, it’s a little red. It’s normal.” He says, “You know what you’re suffering from?”
And I said, “No. What?”
He says, “You’re suffering from a bad case of discovery of the
larynx.”
And I said, “What he’s saying, in other words…he’s saying it’s all normal.” And I went out of there feeling all of my bones.
And he said, “Well, you’ve got all kinds of bones in your body you’ve never noticed. Maybe you haven’t felt the medulla, or the bone on the end of your knee, here, the knee cap, that moves around if you get it in a certain position.”
From "Sum and Substance: With Ray Bradbury and Herman Harvey", 1962. Quoted in Steven Aggelis, Conversations with Ray Bradbury.
"The Crowd" - one of Ray's finest compositions, in my humble opinion. It hinges on a character who becomes intrigued by the crowd that gathers around a car crash. Later, he witnesses another crash - and sees the same crowd. Not just the same type of crowd, but the exact same one - and: "There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn't put his finger on it." Investigating, he finds that this crowd has been around for a very, very long time. Eventually, our hero himself is in a car crash...
"The Crowd" is one of the stories which Bradbury revised for Dark Carnival, and the revised version is all the stronger for it. Jon Eller and Bill Touponce's book Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction reproduces a short passage of the revised version side-by-side with the original text, and you can see here how Ray adds a vivid metaphor of an explosion happening in reverse, coupled directly to Spallner, the centrally character. And note also how he italicises the last word of the last sentence in the passage, making so much difference to how we read both the sentence and the passage.
Excerpt from "The Crowd": original Weird Tales text (left) and revised Dark Carnival text (right). From Eller & Touponce, Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction (Kent State University Press, 2004, p.72).
"The Scythe" - I found this story both creepy and unnerving when I first read it in my teens, and it still packs a powerful wallop today. A family takes over a farm; the man goes out to cut the wheat; his family die. And he keeps on doing it. He is the grim reaper, if you like. Bradbury wrote this story during wartime (it was first published in July 1943), and in the view of Bradbury scholar Bill Touponce he "expands the traditional figure [the grim reaper] to include all the horrors of modern mechanised warfare".
Bradbury's friend Leigh Brackett - herself a successful writer of science fiction, fantasy and Hollywood screenplays (The Big Sleep, The Empire Strikes Back to name but two) - wrote the opening five hundred words of "The Scythe", apparently because Bradbury was struggling to provide the appropriate narrative frame for the story. But bear in mind that the story was revised by Bradbury for Dark Carnival, and so it is difficult in the currently-available version of the story to see the "join".
"The Lake" - my final pick from Dark Carnival is the story which Bradbury said really established him as a writer. In his own mind, that is. It's a really haunting story of a man who returns to a lake familiar from his childhood, where one of his closest friends lost her life. Now, after many years, her body washes ashore. It's frightening and heartbreaking, and I'll say no more about it. If you haven't read it yet: go! Read it now!
The Adaptations
For a book that is out of print, there is an astonishing amount of proven source material for media adaptation here. More than half of these stories (fourteen to be exact) were adapted by Bradbury himself for his TV series The Ray Bradbury Theater. Other adaptations appeared on TV in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and the 1980s revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. And on radio, multiple stories were turned into episodes of Bradbury Thirteen and the BBC series Tales of the Bizarre.
The clear winner in terms of number of adaptations is "The Jar". This one story has been dramatised at least four times, and it works both on TV and on radio. The concept is simple: a man acquires a jar from a carnival sideshow, and inside is... Well, no one can quite tell. The waters in the jar are somewhat murky. Clearly there's something in there, and it might even be moving around, but...
The best adaptation to date has to be the 1964 Hitchcock Hour version, adapted by James Bridges and directed by Norman Lloyd. In this one, the family in possession of the jar sit around it and stare - just as we can imagine the TV viewers of the time would have been doing when it first aired.
Find Out More...
Find out more about Dark Carnival on my page about the book, here.
Learn more about "The Jar" on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour on my page about that show, here.
Listen...
The first of the Dark Carnival stories to be adapted to another medium was "The Crowd". Click here to listen to Suspense from 1950, with Dana Andrews in the lead role.
And if you really, really want to hear me in a podcast, you can find my guest appearances on other people's pods here!
Bradburymedia has been quiet of late, as life has been far too hectic. But I will be posting a bit more frequently now that my PhD is well and truly out of the way.
The Cinema of Lost Films: Ray Bradbury and the Screen is the title of my thesis, which I handed in back in January. Then, in October, I was finally notified that my PhD was complete.
Call me Dr Phil!
As I write this, I'm sitting in the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies in Indianapolis. I'm on a three-week research visit, gathering material for a proposed book on Ray Bradbury Theatre, Ray's TV series from the 1980s and 1990s. I've just spent an hour Skyping with the good people of the Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation for an episode of their podcast which should be released soon. Watch this space for more detail.
Last night I joined the regular team of the podcast Take Me To Your Reader to record an episode devoted to Ray Bradbury's short story "A Sound of Thunder" and two media adaptations of the story.
The idea behind Take Me To Your Reader
is that the presenters will read a science-fiction book or short story,
and then watch the film(s) based on the story. Previous topics have
included Planet of the Apes (in all its filmic incarnations), Carl Sagan's Contact, and Jurassic Park -
and many, many others. I've listed to maybe six or seven episodes
previously, and always found them enjoyable for their careful but
accessible analysis of how stories adapt from one medium to another.
"A
Sound of Thunder" is unusual in being a quite short story which has
been adapted into a full-length feature film, necessarily entailing the
invention of a lot of new material. The film,
directed by Peter Hyams and released in 2005, went out into the world
almost unnoticed: it had a limited release, and then went quietly to DVD
with a minimum of publicity. It didn't help that the company behind it
went bust, and it almost never got finished.
The earlier screen adaptation was from Bradbury's own script, for Ray Bradbury Theater. I've always quite liked this version, although it has its flaws - you can read my review of the episode here.
I won't pre-empt the conclusions of the Take Me To Your Reader
episode, but let's just say that all of us involved in the recording
found the movie to be hilarious in places... but it is, alas, not
intended to be a comedy...
We spoke via Skype, with one
end of the conversation being recorded in Oregon and my end being
recorded in the UK, so the episode now needs to be edited to make a
seamless whole. It should be ready by the end of the month. I'll post a
link as soon as it goes live.
Meanwhile, if you're interested in SF adaptations, why not check out some of the earlier episodes, here.
During the recording, I recommended that newcomers to Bradbury's fiction should start with one of the compendium volumes, either The Stories of Ray Bradbury or Bradbury Stories. The two books are completely complementary, with no overlap at all in their contents. Each book contains a wide range of story types, and each one makes a perfect introduction to Bradbury.
Below is an Amazon link. If you click on this link, any Amazon purchase you make will generate a small donation to the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies.
Ray Douglas Bradbury was born ninety-four years ago today.
Even now, two years after he passed away, the fascination with his life and work continues. In a few weeks' time, a second volume of literary biography will be published: Ray Bradbury Unbound by Jon Eller. Shortly after, the second volume of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: a Critical Edition will appear. The successful tribute volume Shadow Show is being developed into a comic-book series. Film composer John Massari has developed his Ray Bradbury Theater music into a symphonic suite. Dramatic Publishing is expanding its list of Bradbury-authored theatre plays with Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Illustrated Bradbury. And this week, the Indianapolis Public Library inaugurated an annual Ray Bradbury Lecture in conjunction with Indiana University's Center for Ray Bradbury Studies.
Here's a little-known interview, taken from a 1988 issue of Atlantis Rising, a PR publication from Atlantis Productions, co-producers of Ray Bradbury Theatre. Bradbury talks about the episodes of the series then in production, including "Gotcha", an unusual episode in which Bradbury created new material set in a fancy-dress party; this new material would evolve into the short story "The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair".
Remember VHS? When collecting a series would require a significant investment in shelving?
Here is an Australian set of sleeves for a VHS release of Ray Bradbury Theatre. Note the appalling number of typos, and the rather free-and-easy way the episode titles have been altered, presumably to save some space (for example "The Haunting of the New" becomes just "The Haunting"). Note also the privileging of familiar names and faces, so that supporting player Leslie Neilsen gets star billing, even though James Coco is the actual star.
The Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Desert will screen episodes of the anthology series The Ray Bradbury Theater in conjunction with the upcoming exhibition Across Dimensions: Graphics and Sculpture from the Permanent Collection. Just
as the artists in the gallery investigate concepts in two-dimensional
and three dimensional artworks, beloved science-fiction author Ray
Bradbury seized an opportunity to adapt some of his short stories to the
small screen exploring new dimensions of storytelling.
Sounds like a slightly tenuous connection to me... Anyway, it gives Palm Springs residents and visitors an opportunity to see the episodes "A Sound of Thunder" and "A Touch of Petulance" on 27th June at 5pm. More details here.
