Becoming Ray Bradbury

12. A New World of Reading

| 75| 5 12 A New World of Reading Once Bradbury began to tap into his reservoir of life experiences , he had the basis to sustain and advance his own evolving style and vivid metaphors. He had always had a gift for metaphor, a gift enhanced from the beginning of his career by his fascination with sensate experience. During those years Bradbury accumulated scientific books that helped him convey sensation: “Books on the olfactory sense, books on the construction of the eye and the phenomena of seeing, books on the ear, books on the tactile sense. So I educated myself to all of my senses, and that’s one of the reasons why my books are memorable, because I make you reach out with your hand, and with your nose, and with your ears, and with your eye, and with your tongue.”1 Theroadtoallhismaturefictionwaspavedtoalargeextentbyagreatwartime shift in his personal reading agenda. The most surprising transition in his reading is also the least known—his sudden and permanent shift away from reading new science fiction sometime in 1944. Within the genre he continued to read only work by Brackett, Hamilton, Ted Sturgeon, Nelson Bond, the now almost inseparable blend of Kuttner-Moore, and Fritz Leiber, whose early fantasies for Unknown and his novel Gather, Darkness!, featured in the May 1943 Astounding, had alreadybecomeBradburyfavorites.Hedevelopedanenthusiasticfriendshipwith Leiber at war’s end, finding in Leiber’s fiction the same blurring of distinctions between fantasy and science fiction that he admired in the work of Brackett, Kuttner, and Moore. Even these very selective readings in the work of his peers diminished in a few more years; there was no arrogance in this, only a need to find his own way as his unique approach to writing fiction continued to mature. Bradbury maintained an abiding enthusiasm for light horror and dark fantasy, but for the most part he concentrated on extending his reading of mainstream modern and contemporary British and American authors in all genres during the final years of World War II and beyond. Henavigatedfromdiscoverytodiscoverybybrowsingbookstoresandbyreading the prize story annuals published by Martha Foley and other editors. By 1944 he was also reading books and anthologies recommended by Arkham House editor August Derleth, who was now following Bradbury’s career in Weird Tales with great interest. Over the next several years Derleth would solicit and publish i-xvi_1-328_Elle.indd 75 6/27/11 2:51 PM 76 | the road to autumn’s house Dark Carnival, Bradbury’s first story collection, and although Bradbury would quickly grow beyond Derleth’s world, his early letters to his newfound publisher reveal much about his broadening reading and maturing tastes in literature. As heworkedmoredeeplyintothecanonofcertainauthors,hedevelopedtheability to make comparative judgments. He had spent precious earnings to purchase Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green two years earlier, but by the summer of 1944 he found her next collection, The Wide Net, to be “bewildering and confusing.” For the first time, he turned to a literary journal—The Kenyon Review—to validate his opinions of contemporary fiction, and he gained confidence in finding that experienced reviewers came to similar conclusions about Welty’s latest work. He began to read the Saturday Review of Literature with great regularity during his bookstore evenings and began to learn more about the enduring qualities of literature from the SRL essays of Clifton Fadiman. In July Bradbury bought and read a secondhand copy of Roundup: The Stories of Ring Lardner. He also read the stories of Jesse Stuart, finding them “immensely human, amusing, and vital,” and later that summer he consumed two volumes of stories by Katherine Anne Porter, Flowering Judas and The Leaning Tower. He found her stories incredibly stimulating and felt that Porter’s advantage over the still-developing Eudora Welty was the result of a “surer, finer, more polished approach and style resulting from her long, leisurely years at the craft.” Both Derleth and Henry Kuttner had recommended Porter, but Kuttner remained the stronger influence when it came to recommending mainstream novels and stories. In addition to Porter and Welty, Kuttner had recommended Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson. As the summer of 1944 progressed, Bradbury continued to read these major authors as well as the work of Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. For some of the American masters, he went to the significant expense of purchasing older works that had stood the test of time. In August he bought two early Steinbeck novels, To a God Unknown and Tortilla Flat. In September...