Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1. Ray Bradbury

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СКАЧАТЬ the right characters, the right day, the right creative time. I wrote the story sitting outside, with my typewriter, on the lawn. At the end of an hour the story was finished, the hair on the back of my neck was standing up, and I was in tears. I knew I had written the first really good story of my life.

      All during my early twenties I had the following schedule. On Monday morning I wrote the first draft of a new story. On Tuesday I did a second draft. On Wednesday a third. On Thursday a fourth. On Friday a fifth. And on Saturday at noon I mailed out the sixth and final draft to New York. Sunday? I thought about all the wild ideas scrambling for my attention, waiting under the attic lid, confident at last that, because of ‘The Lake,’ I would soon let them out.

      If this all sounds mechanical, it wasn’t. My ideas drove me to it, you see. The more I did, the more I wanted to do. You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can’t sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

      There was another reason to write so much: I was being paid twenty to forty dollars a story, by the pulp magazines. High on the hog was hardly my way of life. I had to sell at least one story, or better two, each month in order to survive my hot-dog, hamburger, trolley-car-fare life.

      In 1944 I sold some forty stories, but my total income for the year was only $800.

      It suddenly strikes me that there is much in this collection I haven’t commented on yet. ‘The Black Ferris’ is of interest here because early one autumn twenty-three years ago it changed itself from a short short story into a screenplay and then into a novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

      ‘The Day It Rained Forever’ was another word-association I handed myself one afternoon, thinking about hot suns, deserts, and harps that could change the weather.

      ‘The Leave-Taking’ is the true story of my great-grandmother who nailed shingles on rooftops well into her seventies, then took herself up to bed when I was three and said farewell to everyone and went to sleep.

      ‘Calling Mexico’ sprang into being because I visited a friend of mine one afternoon in the summer of 1946 and, as I entered the room, he handed me the telephone and said, ‘Listen.’ I listened and heard the sounds of Mexico City coming from two thousand miles away. I went home and wrote about my telephone experience to a friend in Paris. Halfway through my letter, the letter turned into the story, which went off in the mail that day.

      ‘Skeleton’ happened because I went to my doctor when I was twentytwo, complaining that my neck, my throat, felt strange. I touched all around the tendons and muscles of my neck. The doctor did likewise and said, ‘You know what you’re suffering from?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘A bad case,’ he said, ‘of discovery of the larynx. We all discover, at one time or another, various tendons, various bones, in our bodies we never noticed before. That’s you. Take an aspirin and go home.’

      I went home, feeling my elbows, my ankles, my ribs, my throat, and my medulla oblongata.

      ‘Skeleton,’ a contest between a man and his hidden bones, wrote itself that night.

      ‘The Picasso Summer’ was the result of my walking on the shoreline with friends and my wife one late afternoon. I picked up a Popsicle stick, drew pictures in the sand and said: ‘Wouldn’t it be awful, if you’d wanted to own a Picasso all your life, and suddenly bumped into him here, drawing mythological beasts in the sand … your very own Picasso “etching” right in front of you …’

      I finished the story, about Picasso on the beach, at two in the morning.

      Hemingway. ‘The Parrot Who Met Papa.’ One night in 1952 I drove across Los Angeles with friends to invade the printing plant where Life was publishing their issue with Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea in it. We grabbed copies, hot off the press, sat in the nearest bar, and talked about Papa, Finca Vigía, Cuba, and, somehow, a parrot who had lived in that bar and talked to Hemingway every night. I went home, made a notation about the parrot, and put it away for sixteen years. Prowling my file folders in 1968 I came upon just the note for a title: ‘The Parrot Who Met Papa.’

      My God, I thought, Papa’s been dead eight years. If that parrot is still around, remembers Hemingway, can speak with his voice, he’s worth millions. And what if someone kidnapped the parrot, held it for ransom?

      ‘The Haunting of the New’ happened because John Godley, Lord Kilbracken, wrote me from Ireland describing his visit to a house that had burned and been replaced, stone by stone, brick by brick, in imitation of the original. Within half a day of reading Kilbracken’s postcard, I had firstdrafted the tale.

      Enough now. There you have it. Here are one hundred stories from almost forty years of my life, containing half the damning truths I suspected at midnight, and half of the saving truths I re-found next noon. If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere – and went. I have not so much thought my way through life as done things and found what it was and who I was after the doing. Each tale was a way of finding selves. Each self found each day slightly different from the one found twenty-four hours earlier.

      It all started that autumn day in 1932 when Mr Electrico gave me the two gifts. I don’t know if I believe in previous lives, I’m not sure I can live forever. But that young boy believed in both and I have let him have his head. He has written my stories and books for me. He runs the Ouija Board and says Aye or Nay to submerged truths or half-truths. He is the skin through which, by osmosis, all the stuffs pass and put themselves on paper. I have trusted his passions, his fears, and his joys. He has, as a result, rarely failed me. When it is a long damp November in my soul, and I think too much and perceive too little, I know it is high time to get back to that boy with the tennis shoes, the high fevers, the multitudinous joys, and the terrible nightmares. I’m not sure where he leaves off and I start. But I’m proud of the tandem team. What else can I do but wish him well, and at the same time acknowledge and wish two other people well? In the same month that I married my wife Marguerite, I became affiliated with my literary representative and closest friend, Don Congdon. Maggie typed and criticized my stories. Don criticized and sold the results. With the two of them as teammates these past thirty-three years, how could I have failed? We are the Connemara Lightfoots, the Queen’s Own Evaders. And we’re still sprinting for that exit.

      Here are the stories. Turn the page.

       The Night

      You are a child in a small town. You are, to be exact, eight years old, and it is growing late at night. Late for you, accustomed to bedding in at nine or nine-thirty: once in a while perhaps begging Mom or Dad to let you stay up later to hear Sam and Henry on that strange radio that is popular in this year of 1927. But most of the time you are in bed and snug at this time of night.

      It is a warm summer evening. You live in a small house on a small street in the outer part of town where there are few street lights. There is only one store open, about a block away: Mrs Singer’s. In the hot evening Mother has been ironing the Monday wash and you have been intermittently begging for ice cream and staring into the dark.

      You and your mother are all alone at home in the warm darkness of summer. Finally, just before it is time for Mrs Singer to close her store, Mother relents and tells you:

      ‘Run get a pint of ice cream and be sure she packs it tight.’

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