Becoming Ray Bradbury

13. An Emerging Sense of Critical Judgment

| 81| 5 13 An Emerging Sense of Critical Judgment Evenashetookthefirststepstowarddefininghimselfmore broadly as a fantasy writer, Bradbury continued to read and study the great fiction writers of his time. In 1943, still not earning enough from his stories to owe income tax, he had purchased a copy of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. During July 1944, he began to work systematically through the short stories of Hemingway,andfoundittoughgoingattimes.HiscommentstoDerlethindicate that Bradbury, reading without the perspective of postsecondary literary studies, had trouble maintaining objectivity in assessing an author’s work. For Bradbury, the literary work and the author were always one inseparable entity, a conviction that went all the way back to his earliest association of love, security, creativity, and imagination with the libraries that preserve literature. This would always be the main point of distinction between Bradbury and the Modernist ideal of impersonality in fiction—for the High Modernists, the author was expected to disappear into the work. By contrast, Bradbury’s own view was that the literary work is the expression of the author. In terms of style, mood, character, and content,Bradburywouldalwaysdemandthetangiblepresenceoftheauthor,and therefore he was at his best in judging the hallmarks of the Romantic classics. Early in his career, this close association of author and work interfered with his ability tocompareorrankmorecontemporary writers effectively; he confided to Derleth that at times he preferred “the somewhat diluted brutalisms, sadisms and morbidities” of James M. Cain’s Serenade to the Hemingway stories. He was looking for a glimpse of the author’s soul in every word he read, a method that mightdrivelessimpassionedreaderstodistraction.Butthisapproachwasalready leading Bradbury to explore the inner workings of the author’s mind: “Hemingway strikes me as a man who has a steel grip on his mind and is afraid to let go, forfearoffindingoutthatheisnothingbutsomespeciesoflovable,sentimental, ordinaryjelly-fishunderneath.Heseemsalittletoopreoccupiedwithbeinghard, and that fairly well indicates a lot of secret goings-on in his mental life.” He was only guessing at the vulnerabilities beneath the stoic exterior of Hemingway’s prose, but he would soon realize that the fear of random violence, the unexpected wound or injury that negates all the strengths of character and experience,wasclosertothemark.Overtime,Bradburydevelopedamoremature i-xvi_1-328_Elle.indd 81 6/27/11 2:51 PM 82 | the road to autumn’s house sense of the complexities of Hemingway’s life, and understood better than most how physical pain from an accumulation of such injuries muted Hemingway’s creativity. But even in the mid-1940s, Bradbury was beginning to see the price that many of his new reading loves paid for the fame that they enjoyed. He read Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, The Moon Is Down, and The Pearl, sensing that one of his favorite prewar authors was in eclipse, if not decline. He knew of Steinbeck’s marital troubles and drinking, and he also knew that others paid a similar price for fame. Leigh Brackett, who worked with William Faulkner on the screenplay of The Big Sleep, had told Bradbury of the great writer’s extended and solitary drinking. Late in 1945, he would remark to Derleth, “God, are there no happy big-time writers?” Another one of his new reading passions had health problems of a different sort. Aldous Huxley was now in his mid-40s, but a corneal infection at the age of sixteen had led to keratitis punctata and permanently impaired eyesight. Bradbury was greatly interested in the British and European expatriate writers who settled in Southern California before and during the war, and he absorbed Huxley extensively; in the years after high school he read the principal works, including Antic Hay, Eyeless in Gaza, and Huxley’s first “American” novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. The last novel’s philosophical exploration of individualism would play into Bradbury’s own search for authorial identity, but Bradbury soon discovered an odd little book that Huxley published in the fall of 1942, The Art of Seeing. This slim volume offered a discussion of the Bates method of eye treatment framed within the context of Huxley’s own success with Bates exercises in improving his own damaged vision. Bradbury was instantly fascinated by the Bates premise, as explained by Huxley, that sight is linked to both the physiology of the body and the psychological processes of the mind. The exercises were promoted as relevant to most ocular impairments, and even though Huxley was by nature farsighted and Bradbury nearsighted, The Art of Seeing offered Bradbury a way to overcome one of his...