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| 21| 5 3 Hannes Bok and the Lorelei For the next four years Bradbury sold the afternoon edition of the Los Angeles Herald and Express out of a stand at Olympic and Norton from about 3:30 to 6:00 p.m. on weekdays. After graduation he had tried out as a delivery boy for the women who made costumes and dresses downtown at the Orpheum Building, but the unbearably hot working environment and the strong odors of muslins and silks outweighed the dollar-a-day wage. Later in the summer, he lasted only a single twelve-hour shift with a lawn-cutting crew.1 But selling newspapers was different; he found that the required salesmanship was similar to the sense of showmanship he had developed in his final year at L.A. High. The newsstand offered a small but steady income of roughly ten dollars a week and provided open hours in the morning and early afternoon to write. His evenings and weekends were also free and his status sheet for July 1938 lists eleven unpublished stories with first drafts completed. He wrote at least five more that summer, and this level of production may have promptedhimtowritetoJackWoodford, whose writing guide Trial and Error had, if nothing else, at least boosted his confidence as a writer. Woodford was now a New York publisher and gently declined Bradbury’s premature request for representation.Butthissetbackwascounteredbyaninformalshort-storywriting group organized by some of his fellow “Ink Beast” alums with the blessing of Jennet Johnson. During the summer, and on into the fall of 1938, Bradbury and others met in the evenings at the homes of various members.2 His creativity was also enriched by his developing friendship with a unique artist from Seattle. In the middleofhissenioryearBradburyhadmet Hans (later Hannes) Bok at one of the LASFL meetings and was particularly taken by Bok’s tempura compositions. Bradbury’s love of Abe Merritt’s fantasies burned even more brightly in Bok, who wouldeventually completetwo ofhis idol’s unfinished novels after Merritt’s untimely death in 1943. This shared passion deepened Bradbury’s appreciation for the “lost race” novels of Haggard, Merritt, Burroughs, and others who wrote their best work in the days before the golden age magazines were founded. Bok also strengthened Bradbury’s romantic aesthetic through his mad love for the dynamic movie scores of Miklos Rozsa and Max Steiner and his slightly more measured appreciation of Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius, and Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite. i-xvi_1-328_Elle.indd 21 6/27/11 2:51 PM 22 | awakenings Two decades later, Lin Carter’s late-life friendship with Bok found these passions still alive, along with a love of fairy tales, Russian music, the masks of W. T. Benda, and mysticism of all kinds.3 In the late 1930s Bradbury certainly responded to Bok’s love of fairy tales, and his own interest in mask-making as an art form also grew along with this friendship. HequicklydevelopedahighpassionfortheelementofsubtlewhimsyinBok’s work, and found that his friend was one of the very few artists who had studied with Maxfield Parrish.4 Bok’s fantasy compositions led him into contact with science fiction fandom even before he met Bradbury, but he was especially glad to find someone who shared his fondness for fantasy literature and fairy tales. In January 1938 he presented Bradbury with a tempura painting of a strange Bokian creature as a New Year’s gift. The painting inspired an idea for a short novel in Bradbury’s last weeks of school, prompting Bok to toss off a few companion sketches based on the story line. He would not have to wait long to read a draft of what his art had inspired in Bradbury’s mind. The 10,000-word novella “Lorelei” is clearly the most interesting of the four unpublished tales he wrote during July 1938. It bears the strong imprint of Hannes Bok’s creative encouragement and also offers a long-suppressed glimpse of Bradbury’s creative hopes and fears just before his eighteenth birthday . “Lorelei” draws on Bradbury’s earliest childhood reading, the fairy tale narrative form, but in setting and tone it echoes Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt as much as it does Hans Christian Andersen. The protagonist, Leif, comes from Swedish seafaring stock, and in the middle of the nineteenth century he sets out along the coast of Norway on a great voyage of discovery alone in a small sailboat. He travels many weeks north...

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