Soft Rains

It's been the oddest of weeks.

Ray Bradbury's former house, located on Cheviot Drive in Los Angeles, has been recreated along with Ray in a graphic treatment of a Bradburyesque fiction - and in real life has been pulled down.

Ray passed away in 2012, and in 2014 his house was finally put up for sale. It was bought by an architect who, apparently, has the intention of using the land for building a new family home. It was only a matter of time before the Bradbury house, a curious yellow bungalow built into a hillside, would be redeveloped. I don't think anyone close to Bradbury was quite prepared for how devastating this would seem.

Ray and his family moved into the house over fifty years ago, and countless newpaper interviews, magazine profiles, news reports and documentary films have shown the house, so much so that the house and Bradbury became synonymous. His basement office, overloaded with books, toys and exotic masks, was for many years a particular focus of published profiles of Ray; and in the last years of his life, it was his "den" that became the focus, where he would entertain visitors surrounded by sculptures of dinosaurs, an Ice-Cream Suit, Halloween paraphernalia and original artworks.

In 2014, not only was the house sold off, but many of Ray's possessions also went up for auction. And this week, the demolition team moved in. There are pictures of the remains of the house in this report on Mike Glyer's File770 website, accompanying an article written by Ray's longtime friend and helper John King Tarpinian.

By coincidence, this week also saw the publication of the third issue of Shadow Show, the comic book based on the Bradbury tribute book of the same name. Issue 3 includes a graphic adaptation of Bradbury biographer Sam Weller's short story "Live Forever!" - a story which includes Ray as a character, and uses the house as the arena in which this Bradburyesque tale unfolds. Sam tells me that the comic's producers went to great lengths to achieve accuracy in depicting the house. The result is very successful. Here's one page from the comic, and you can see more in this preview.

Note that even the artworks hanging on the walls are reproduced with accuracy in Mark Sexton's comic strip - in the page above, the final frame shows the classic cover art for Bradbury's The Illustrated Man.

It is a great irony that these two events should have coincided: the celebration of Bradbury's house as one source of his literary strength, and the destruction of that same house. Friends of Bradbury who were present around the time of the demolition have reported a further irony. The day they knocked the roof off the Bradbury house, it rained. Not exactly a common occurrence in Los Angeles. Inevitably, it brings to mind Bradbury's classic short story "There Will Come Soft Rains", which poignantly depicts an empty house after a nuclear war:

The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air. [...]

The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.[...]

Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:

"Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is . . ."

And Yet The Books

I stumbled on a poem by the Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) and was struck by a couple of resonances with Ray Bradbury.

Miłosz was born in Lithuania, lived and worked in Poland for several years, and in the 1950s defected to the US. He wrote poetry and prose, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. The New York Times obituary for Miłosz characterises him as "a poet of memory and a poet of witness".

His poem "And Yet The Books" (1986) considers how books can survive long after individuals or civilisations have passed on:

I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

The whole poem is online at Poemhunter.
 
"And Yet The Books" reminds me of two Bradbury stories. Most obviously, I suppose, it recalls Fahrenheit 451, which is about books somehow surviving a cultural dark ages - although, of course, in Bradbury's novel it's not the physical books that survive, but the content of the books, the memorised texts.

The other Bradbury echo is of "And There Will Come Soft Rains", the poignant short story which describes a an electromechanical house which continues to serve its human owners after the human race has been wiped out by its own atomic bombs. In that story, even the house eventually must crumble into ruin, so Bradbury's story doesn't quite have the optimism implied by "And Yet The Books".

Fortunately for us, history has (so far) supported Miłosz's scenario. Despite great losses like the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, and the collapse of major civilisations, somehow great texts have survived down the ages.When books were physical objects, that is...

Apocalypse Then

Bradbury has written a handful of short stories set in a time after the collapse of civilsation as we know it, but we don't usually think of his novels as being apocalyptic - although The Martian Chronicles includes a global atomic war that seems to effectively destroy the Earth, and Fahrenheit 451 ends with the self-destruction of the unnamed city that Montag has just escaped from.

In both cases, the atomic wars are happening in the background or, to use a filmic metaphor, off-screen. The closest we get to seeing the physical effects of an atomic bomb is in the story/chapter "There Will Come Soft Rains" in The Martian Chronicles. One of Bradbury's most re-printed stories, it describes an automated house which carries on functioning (as best it can) even after its owners have been destroyed. There are distinct references to Hiroshima, most memorably in Bradbury's description of the shadows of people burned onto a wall by the heat of the bomb blast.

I'm currently doing some research into Bradbury's handling of apocalypses, and in my casting around for materials relating to how atomic warfare was presented to the public in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I came across an article on Paleofuture, a beautiful blog which explores how the future was depicted in the past (if you know what I mean). This particular item reproduces images from a 1950 issue of Colliers magazine which shows what might happen if New York became the victim of an atomic bomb attack.

1950, of course, was the year The Martian Chronicles was first published. And Collier's was a magazine Bradbury's fiction had been appearing in since 1946 (starting with the short story "One Timeless Spring"). In 1950 Collier's published a couple of new Bradbury stories, and this A-bomb issue - dated 5 August 1950 - contained one of them, "The Window". It seems certain, then, that Bradbury would have seen the bomb article.

One of the artists contributing to the bomb story was Chesley Bonestell, who the year before had illustrated The Conquest of Space, the remarkable book written by rocket scientist Willy Ley which presented the wonders of the space age. In 1952 Collier's published a series of articles inspired by The Conquest of Space, again illustrated by Bonestell (scans of these articles can be seen on the Dreams of Space blog). This, in turn, inspired Walt Disney to produce a series of TV shows about space travel, featuring Ley and Wernher von Braun. It is remarkable that Colliers, and the US, was able to shift so rapidly from the doom and gloom of atomic war to the bright future offered by the space age. Of course, when the space age arrived it would be intimately entwined with the cold war, something that Collier's, Bonestell, Ley and Disney somehow managed not to foresee...

Fahrenheit 451, Soft Rains

Looking for a good, quick, no-nonsense review of Truffaut's 1966 film of Fahrenheit 451? Look no further than this post from Classic Sci-Fi Movies blog. I might even forgive the typo in the post's title!

Looking for a brief overview of Sara Teasdale, author of "There Will Come Soft Rains", the poem that inspired a Bradbury short story? Try here.