Becoming Ray Bradbury

8. Living in Two Worlds

| 53| 5 8 Living in Two Worlds Bradbury’s first journey to a far metaphor may be an unpublished story title from his high-school days. “The Road to Autumn’s House” is a schoolboy’s vampire tale, but the title and opening lines provide a glimpse of the October Country that would emerge from his own childhood fears and desires as he created some of his most enduring stories of the mid-1940s. The title may also be perceived as a metaphor that invites an examination of his path to achieving a fully realized narrative voice of his own. His early activities with the Science Fiction League did not provide the breakthrough, nor did his twoyear period of enthusiasm for the Technocracy movement. When it surfaced, his voice emerged first in his weird tales, written as he commuted between two very different neighborhoods of metropolitan Los Angeles. In the spring of 1942 he moved with his family to Venice Beach where his father’s employer, the local Bureau of Power and Light, settled them in a rental house attached to a power substation. Bradbury set up a work area in the garage, adjacent to the humming power equipment that reduced the high voltages to residential levels, and worked there off and on until his marriage in 1947. He had a variable arrangement for paying room and board to his parents right up to the time he left the double bed he shared with his brother Skip until he was twenty-seven years old. But throughout the war years he maintained a parallel writing regimen at a day-office he set up in the downtown Los Angeles tenement owned by the mother of his new friend Grant Beach. He would work there up to eight hours a day, and he sometimes spent the night there or at his Aunt Neva’s home in Hollywood. Bradbury was medically disqualified for military service due to his poor eyesight; he wrote Red Cross blood drive copy for local media and settled himselfintoawriter’sworldofobservation and composition. He soon set up a nearly invariable pattern of writing and revising a story each week and then sending it back East for Julie to circulate to the various New York pulp editors. Thetenementat413NorthFigueroa,situatedjustoffthecornerofTempleand Figueroa,waspartofseveraldowntownworldsthatconvergednearthatintersection .ThiswastheapproximatewesternedgeoftheoriginalHispanicpueblo,and the area still contained the plaza and other elements of the Sonoratown district that existed well into the twentieth century. But the Mexican Revolution of 1911 i-xvi_1-328_Elle.indd 53 6/27/11 2:51 PM 54 | the road to autumn’s house and the years of unrest that followed led to the Great Migration, and this small area of downtown Los Angeles received thousands of immigrant families. By the 1920s the new wave of settlement became known as México de Afuera, or Outer Mexico. Bradbury was about the same age as most of the children of these immigrants, and in 1942 he found himself living in the midst of their culture. It was a culture in transition, largely English-speaking yet still concentrated within thecircumscribedroadsthatdiscouraged movement out and reflected the continuing segregation of the times. Downtown Los Angeles opened out south of Temple and east of Figueroa, and the Beach family’s various properties were part of the older Victorian architecture of that area.1 The rich white Angelinos had left this district generations earlier, but small businesses, clubs, and theaters attracted a wide range of customers from various cultures. Bradbury’s family had livedafewmilessouthandwestoftheseneighborhoodsthroughhishigh-school years, in generally white working-class neighborhoods. Now he was writing and sometimes living above streets where a largely Mexican-American population also included Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asians. The poorer neighborhoods were north along Figueroa and on beyond the city limits in the Chavez Ravine area. In 1940 parts of Chavez Ravine gave way to the Naval Reserve Armory, and the rich cultural mosaic of downtown Los Angeles faced yet another challenge as friction built between the sailors training at the ArmoryandsomeoftheyoungerMexican-Americans.Transientmilitarypersonnel , now passing through in large numbers on their way to duty in the Pacific, were attracted to the business establishments and entertainment venues south of Temple Street, and Figueroa Boulevard provided the primary route across the Hispanic neighborhoods. The younger generation, already unwilling to accept the segregation imposed even on the native-born Mexican-Americans, resisted the new social pressure created by the military personnel who were constantly moving back and forth through the old neighborhoods. Bradbury was by nature one who could not abide...