By the late 1960s, Ray Bradbury had channeled most of his creative energy away from his fiction and into his promotion of American space exploration and into his often-frustrated Hollywood dreams. When delving into fiction, he would return time and again to the safe harbors of his early successes.
Jonathan R. Eller, Bradbury Beyond Apollo (348 pages, University of Illinois Press, 2020)
Ray Bradbury’s life was endlessly fascinating, and in his three-volume biography—Becoming Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Unbound, and Bradbury Beyond Apollo—Jonathan Eller has brilliantly captured that life. To be sure, this is one of the finest biographical achievements I’ve encountered, and I consider myself quite critical on the subject. This final volume deals with 1969 (when Bradbury was in late 40s) through his death on June 5, 2012, the same day on which Ronald Reagan had passed away in 2004, and the Catholic Feast of St. Boniface, patron of beer drinkers. Somehow, it seems fitting that Bradbury died on such a day. He was 91.
Just who was Ray Bradbury? Every American knows him, of course, as almost all are introduced to his writings in junior high and high school. Many go beyond these initial academic introductions and delve into his nearly 600 short stories and his several novels—often reworked short stories—such as The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. For quite some time, Bradbury wrote so much, that it can become somewhat overwhelming to absorb, let alone catalogue, it all.
From the standpoint of creativity, however, Bradbury’s trajectory was not easy to follow. As Mr. Eller explains:
To follow the creative trail from mid-career on to the end of his life, one has to regard his celebrated past as prologue. This is a difficult proposition, as his forward progress was masked by countless ghosts of the past. In spite of the significant things to come, the stories and fables that define Ray Bradbury’s twenty-first-century legacy was almost all written during the first two decades of his seventy-year career. Between 1941 and 1962, a fraction of his amazing output during those early years gave life to the nine story collections, novels, and novelized story cycles that define his role as one of the best-known and best-loved storytellers of our time: the dark and sometimes enchanting fantasies that populated first Dark Carnival and then The October Country with the chilling Otherness of the autumn people; the edgy and emotionally powerful science fiction that shaped The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man; the antiauthoritarian brilliance of Fahrenheit 451; the fantasies and magical realism that emerged from The Golden Apples of the Sun and fairly exploded out of A Medicine for Melancholy; the mixed terrors and joys of childhood summers vividly recalled in Dandelion Wine; and Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury’s first true novel and his first sustained exploration of the uncertain boundaries between good and evil, life and death.
By the late 1960s, Bradbury had channeled most of this creative energy away from his fiction and into his promotion of American space exploration and into his often-frustrated Hollywood dreams. When delving into fiction, “he would return time and again to the safe harbors of his early successes.”
Exceptions abound, however, though Bradbury is rarely remembered for them. In this last phase of his life, he published The Halloween Tree, a fantastic journey through all Halloweens; three quasi-autobiographical murder mysteries—Death is a Lonely Business, From the Graveyard Returned, and Let’s All Kill Constance; the genius From the Dust Returned, a story that follows a normal boy living with a family of vampires and fairies; as well as Farewell Summer, Leviathan 99, and Somewhere a Band is Playing.
Yet, if Bradbury is remembered in this last phase, it is generally as a proponent of American space exploration. Beginning in the 1950s, even before Sputnik, Bradbury had been calling for missions to the Moon, and he mightily defended expenditures on NASA throughout the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs of the 1960s as well as the unmanned probes that the United States was sending into the solar system. As Mr. Eller proclaims, Bradbury “would always consider Apollo 11”—the first expedition to land on the Moon—“to be the greatest single event in the history of Mankind—indeed, in the deep-time history of all terrestrial creation.” That year, 1969, Bradbury would even date as “Apollo Year 1” on his personal correspondence. “The special day when, after three billion years of genetic waiting, genetic dreaming, Man reached up to Touch Space, Touch Moon, Touch Eternity?” When the Nixon Administration ended the Apollo program, Bradbury responded with an article entitled “Apollo Murdered: The Sun Goes Out.” As Mr. Eller explains, Bradbury “went on to rehearse the common-sense-based generalizations he would use for years: the money isn’t thrown into a crater on the Moon, it employs scientists and technicians and manufacturers on Earth; the money we spend on Space exploration is a fraction of the money spent on foreign wars.”
Throughout the rest of his life, Bradbury—in a variety of capacities, both private and official—promoted exploration of space. As he said of himself in an interview: “I can service the cause by trying to find metaphors to fit what we are doing…. That’s my business—to find the metaphor that explains the Space Age, and along the way write stories.”
When Challenger exploded, a hopeful Bradbury told Ted Koppel: “We have a responsibility. We only live once, each of us, and we must give back something for this gift. So space travel is the gift we give to ourselves, to ensure our children’s children’s children immortality.”
It must also be noted, that though Bradbury disagreed with Nixon’s NASA policies, he had become a staunch Republican by 1968. Though he had been an equally staunch Democrat in the 1950s, he had become disillusioned with, first, Adlai Stevenson, and, then, especially, with Lyndon Johnson. Bradbury adamantly opposed America’s brutality in Vietnam, for which he blamed the Democrats. By 1981, Bradbury was a firm Reaganite, defending Reagan even at science-fiction conventions. Amazingly, Ray Bradbury even simply walked into the White House on April 26, 1982, and announced not only his presence but his desire to support Reagan in anyway possible. Reagan’s press secretary, Larry Speakes, gave him a tour that day. As Bradbury understood Reagan, he was renewing “traditional values… turning back the clock backward is the way forward.”
When Bradbury had a private meeting with Mikael and Raisa Gorbachev, Bradbury asked the Soviet leader what he thought of President Reagan. “Your greatest president…. None of your other presidents ever said, ‘Tear down the Wall.’”
Though Mr. Eller does not go into details, Bradbury became even more libertarian-conservative in the 1990s, especially in his reaction to the then-relatively new political correctness movement. He also greatly admired President George W. Bush.
To my great sadness, I have now completed Jonathan Eller’s magnificent three-volume biography of Ray Bradbury. I could have kept reading and reading and reading….
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