Lockdown Choices - Issue #6: Switch on the Night

This is the sixth 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 #6: Switch on the Night

First edition, illustrated by Madeleine Gekiere. Pantheon, 1955.

The Book

Switch on the Night (1955) was Ray Bradbury's shortest book to date. It contains just a single story, and runs to about fifty pages. This is because it is an illustrated book for children. Yes, the author who started out in Weird Tales scaring the bejeezus out of us with visceral horrors such as "Skeleton" and existential angst in "The Crowd" and "The Wind", has by now turned into a children's author! Well, if it's good enough for Roald Dahl...

From a biographical point of view, there is a clue as to how this shift occurred, right there on the dedication page:

Dedication to Switch on the Night.

Susan and Ramona were Ray's first two daughters, and Susan happened to be scared of the dark. And so Bradbury devised a story to counter this fear. According to Sam Weller's The Bradbury Chronicles (p.236), Bradbury shipped the book around various publishers for six years before, finally, Pantheon (Random House) picked it up. And I have seen a colour photocopy of the original 1949 manuscript (in the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, Indianapolis) which shows that Ray always intended it to be an illustrated book. The manuscript has primitive colour images, presumably created by Bradbury himself.

The book was illustrated throughout by Madeleine Gekiere, the Swiss-born American artist, writer and filmmaker, whose previous work for children's books had been recognised by the New York Times. According to an obituary in the New York Post (July 2, 2014), Bradbury shared the royalties from the book with Gekiere - something that she said was unheard of: "I never got any royalties on my other books [...b]ut Ray Bradbury, no problem, he shared the profits . . . Just a very nice man.” Gekiere alas commited suicide in 2014.

The Gekiere version of the book stayed in print for a number of years, with the last reissue being a library edition issued in 1963.

Perhaps more familiar today, though, is the version first published in 1993, with illustrations by the phenomenal Diane and Leo Dillon. 

Bradbury/Dillons version. Knopf, 1993.

What's curious about this is to see two different visual interpretations of the same text - although Bradbury's text has also been published a number of times with minimal illustration, such as in the 1990 Oxford Book of Story Poems.

Last page of the story/poem's appearance in the Oxford Book of Story Poems, with illustrations (just three of them) by Robina Green. Oxford University Press, 1990.

The Stories

There's just a single story here: of a little boy who likes light and hates darkness. He dislikes switches, we are told, because they turn off the light. He won't go out in the dark, but stays lonely in his room surrounded by candles and torches.

One night, wandering around the house, the boy spies a curious figure: a little girl who introduces herself as "Dark". She explains the wonders of darkness, and how switches actually work differently to how the boy sees it. When you flick a lightswitch off, you are turning on the night; you can switch on the stars, the crickets, and the frogs.

With this new understanding, the boy can now marvel at the darkness.

Naturally, this is a very slight tale, and designed to be read to (or with) a small child. But we can still see some Bradbury hallmarks here. The most obvious, perhaps, is the poetic way with words. From the layout of the words on the page, you may even wonder if this is a story or a poem. (Who can say? Which is why it was included in the Oxford Book of Story Poems, I imagine...)

Then there is the twist: that reversal of point of view, which allows the boy (and the reader) to see a single phenomenon from a totally different angle. This is characteristic of early and middle Bradbury. Remember "The Million-Year Picnic", where the humans are the Martians now?

And finally there is "Dark". She reminds me of Clarisse in Fahrenheit 451: a young but worldly-wise catalyst who brings about a change in another character. (Except for her name, dark hair, dark eyes, dark clothes and dark shoes. All of those remind me of Mr Dark from Something Wicked This Way Comes - but oh look, I've jumped the timeline; that book hasn't been written yet...)

The Adaptations

As far as I'm aware (and believe me, I do a lot of digging for this sort of thing), there has only ever been one official media adaptation of Switch on the Night. And that was simply a reading with some atmospheric sounds and music, as part of a BBC radio series called White Nights (July 2006).

Find Out More...

Read about the remarkable career of artist Madeleine Gekiere, here.

Learn about the extraordinary range of titles illustrated by the Dillons, here.

Listen...

Switch on the Night is a lovely piece of writing to be read aloud, and so you will find some (usually unauthorised) readings online. There's a charming one here.

Next Up...

The next of my Lockdown Choices will be Bradbury's seventh book: The October Country.

Good news and bad news

I've been way to busy to blog just lately, but had to break the silence to comment on two events of this past week.

The good news is that The New Yorker has just published a special science fiction issue. After decades of ignoring the genre, it has now decided that there is something worth investigating. There are items in there from Ray Bradbury, Ursula LeGuin, China Mieville and Margaret Atwood, which in a way suggests a fairly good sensibility about the genre: a couple of classic writers from within, but whose reputations have spread beyond genre boundaries; and a couple of more recent writers who have figured in a lot of debate about those boundaries.

Except...

Then they go and spoil it all, by saying something stupid like "sci-fi".

I haven't actually laid hands on the issue yet, but the table of contents (and some sample content) is available on the New Yorker website. Incidentally, the last time The New Yorker published an item with the byline "Ray Bradbury" was in 1947, when they premiered Bradbury's short story "I See You Never". The story was later selected for Best American Short Stories, and is these days familiar as a tale from The Golden Apples of the Sun.



The second event I want to comment on is the sad news of the passing of the artist Leo Dillon. Leo and his wife and collaborator Diane are best known for their illustrations for children's books and for science fiction and fantasy stories. For Bradbury, they illustrated his children's story Switch on the Night, and a number of other projects. There is a collection of Dillons/Bradbury images at the Art of Leo and Diane Dillon blog.

The Dillons are also, for me, inextricably linked to the work of Harlan Ellison: they illustrated the covers of his books quite extensively, as you can see from this collection of images on the Art of Leo and Diane Dillon blog. Leo's most recent work for an Ellison story was on the Dillons' illustration for Ellison's Nebula Award-winning short story "How Interesting, A Tiny Man":

I had often wondered about how Leo and Diane approached their collaborations, and indeed what motivated them to collaborate in the first place. Some answers are given in the New York Times obituary for Leo, which tells a fascinating story of two artists who started out as rivals, only to later find that their combined talent was greater than the sum of its parts.

Found on the Web

The blog Panel Patter has an interesting short review of the comic book collection series Ray Bradbury Chronicles. These are largely re-collected and re-assembled adaptations of Bradbury stories from the Topps comics, which in turn were a mixture of new material from comic artists such as Richard Corben, and old material taken from the 1950s EC Comics.







The blog Book Aunt reviews the Leo & Diane Dillon-illustrated edition of Bradbury's Switch on the Night, along with other illustrated children's books that might be considered "thoughtful".




It's not often that I would bother to post a link to a religious website, but ironicschmozzer's weblog has an interesting sermon built around Dandelion Wine!



Bradbury is listed at number 3 in this top ten of writers who have published fiction in Playboy.



Finally, Canadian-Armenian actor Garen Boyajian, best known for a role in Ararat, has announced that he is developing a film based on Bradbury's Death is a Lonely Business.

Bradbury for Christmas

BBC radio broadcast a little piece of Bradbury for Christmas. Late on Christmas night they broadcast a radio programme called White Nights, featuring readings of stories and poetry "to reflect the moments between waking and sleeping". One of the readings was of Bradbury's Switch on the Night. You can listen to the entire show by clicking here. To get to the Bradbury section, you may wish to fast-forward approximately 15 minutes. (BBC radio shows are usually only available online for seven days - if that link is dead, you're too late!)

Switch on the Night (1955) was written for children, as an antidote to children's fear of the dark. According to Sam Weller's biography The Bradbury Chronicles, Ray wrote it a week after the birth of his daughter Susan. The baby slept fitfully and tearfully, and reminded Ray of his own childhood fear of the dark. His original manuscript for this work was in the form of a storyboard, with Ray's own sketches to illustrate the text. The published version is professionally illustrated, originally by Madeleine Gekiere. The 1993 edition was illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon.

Some of the Dillons' superb work can be seen by using the 'Look inside this book' feature at Amazon.com.




I was delighted to hear from Gene Beley, the author of the unauthorised biography of Ray Bradbury. Gene had seen my review comments on his book, and posted a comment on this blog. You can view our exchange of comments here.