(From the what-might-have-been file: the songwriter Jimmy Webb worked on a musical of Dandelion Wine that, alas, seems never to have flowered. Imagine the craftsman who wrote “Wichita Lineman,” which Creem justly called “one of the most perfect pop records ever made,” and “Galveston,” among the most effective of all antiwar songs, scoring Green Town. Oh, the things that never were!)
I cannot think of another writer whose work is so redolent of a season and a month. Not June and summer, contra Dandelion Wine, for Ray Bradbury is October’s storyteller; in his epigraph to the collection The October Country (1955), he describes his land as “ . . . the 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, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, subcellars, 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 is where he sets the second novel of his Green Town trilogy, the “dark carnival” fable Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), the story of an Illinois town of the 1920s visited one October by a mysterious circus whose owner and ringmaster promises maturity to callow boys, eternal life to worn-out men, youth and beauty to gnarled old maids. “Unconnected folks, that’s the harvest the carnival comes smiling after with its threshing machine,” says Charles Halloway, the wistful and exhausted library janitor who finds, in his son, the means to resist the tempter and accept mortality, limits, and the homely pleasures of life in Green Town, Illinois. (Bradbury scripted an underrated film of this novel, released in 1983.)
The final piece of the Green Town triptych is the long-awaited Farewell Summer (2006), set in the summerlike October of 1928, the year of Dandelion Wine. Though not as bad as its pans would indicate, Farewell Summer was the Godfather III in the trilogy. It is no Dandelion Wine, but nor does it detract from that work, which Bradbury, in his characteristically lyrical (my view) or overwritten (the view of his critics) style, has described as “the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood.” The characters and character of Green Town feed each other, grow strong and individuated in their commingling; Dandelion Wine is, I think, his most beautifully realized book.
The Green Town novels established Bradbury as a Midwestern pastoralist of tremendous skill and one of the best novelists of American boyhood. His reputation as a science fiction master rests on two novels, Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and The Martian Chronicles (1950), and a passel of stories.
The prophetic quality of Fahrenheit 451 resides not so much in the image of burning books. Who today would even bother to incinerate the works of Sean Hannity or Al Franken? They probably read better in ash anyway. Rather, it is in the way that technology and bureaucracy vitiate the family, deprive it of essential functions. Fire Captain Beatty explains to the late-blooming rebel Montag: “Heredity and environment are funny things. You can’t rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That’s why we’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle.” (Not that the well-meaning advocates of mandatory preschool have any such thing in mind . . . )
As the foregoing quote suggests, Bradbury has a libertarian streak, which flared especially in his work in the 1950s. As he explained at that time, “Science fiction is a wonderful hammer; I intend to use it when and if necessary, to bark a few shins or knock a few heads, in order to make people leave people alone.”
Since his earliest stories Ray Bradbury has warned of the potential of technology to replace its makers, to substitute the artificial and the efficient for the clumsy and human. (See his masterpiece “The Veldt,” a story, in Kirk’s description, “of children abandoned by modern parents to the desolation of the Screen.”) The forlorn Professor Faber tells Montag in Fahrenheit 451, “It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but they are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.”
As this passage indicates, Bradbury is not a technophobe. He rather likes gadgetry, in the manner of a bright Green Town boy reading Popular Mechanics and fussing with radio tubes. Though sometimes disparaged by science-fiction hardware buffs as a Luddite, he is an effervescent optimist, confident that we needn’t choose (as he put it in one poem) “Einstein or Christ” but can have “both.”
Thus in The Martin Chronicles, as American expansion plays out on our planetary neighbor, Bradbury’s poetic appreciation of the frontier virtues vies with his melancholic awareness of the omnipresence of cupidity and the lust to dominate. He later explained to an interviewer, “You don’t have to give in to the wilderness, and you don’t have to kill it. You can work with it.” Well, maybe.
Ray Bradbury has never given in to cheap despair or the illusion that air conditioning and moondoggles signal the inexorable march of Progress and Light. He is Waukegan in its Golden Age, between the wars, the Waukegan of grandfathers sitting on porches with grandsons, telling family legends and transmitting winemaking secrets, and while those grandsons may grow up to design rocketships and even fly to Mars, they will, in the world and wishes of Ray Bradbury, bring Waukegan with them. Of course Waukegan/Green Town is dirt and earth, not just memories, and it can never be transplanted. Something is lost and something is gained in such moves, and Ray Bradbury—more than any other American writer—has taken the measure.
Waukegan, Bradbury knows, is as mythopoeic as any place on earth or in time, if its sons and daughters will just remember. He remembers. In a lovely passage from a 1974 introduction to Dandelion Wine, Bradbury writes that:
[O]ne of the last memories I have of my grandfather is the last hour of a Fourth of July night forty-eight years ago when Grandpa and I walked out on the lawn and lit a small fire and filled the pear-shaped red-white-and-blue-striped paper balloon with hot air, and held the flickering bright-angel presence in our hands a final moment in front of a porch lined with uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and fathers, and then, very softly, let the thing that was life and light and mystery go out of our fingers up on the summer air and away over the beginning-to-sleep houses, among the stars, as fragile, as wondrous, as vulnerable, as lovely as life itself.
I see my grandfather there looking up at that strange drifting light, thinking his own still thoughts. I see me, eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, I knew there would never be another night like this.
No one said anything. We all just looked up at the sky and we breathed out and in and we all thought the same things, but nobody said. Someone finally had to say, though, didn’t they? And that one is me.
The wine still waits in the cellars below.
My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark.
The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer.
Why and how?
Because I say it is so.
That, my friends, is the voice of a beautiful soul.
Wilson’s Picket
The American Conservative, 2011
Edmund Wilson was so securely American that he didn’t bother with vapid assertions that he lived in a “free country.” Instead, he acted as if he lived in such a place and as if the proper course for an independent insubordinate American writer was to walk his own path, no matter how poorly marked or overgrown, and then write up his journey. That is why this exemplary American man of letters spent his final years as an exile at home.
In 1962, a year into the observance of the Civil War centennial, Wilson