People and Destinies. Ray Bradbury

I still remember that warm sunny summer morning (I think it was the beginning of vacation), when my mother quietly came into my room, holding something behind her back. That's how my introduction to the work of this amazing man took place. I think Bradbury would have smiled, because this is just in his spirit:-))))))

Ray Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920 in a hospital at 11 St. James Street in Waukegan, Illinois. The boy received his middle name Douglas in honor of the famous actor Douglas Fairbanks. The full name of Ray Bradbury is Ray (Ray), not Raymond (Raymond), as many believe. Such a name is recorded in his birth certificate. By the way, the writer himself claimed that at first it was written Rae in honor of a great-uncle, but on the advice of the school teacher to change the writing to the traditional Ray, so that the boy was not teased for too feminine name. This fact, however, is not confirmed by any documents. Along with Bradbury's older brother Leonard, his twin brother Sam was born, but he died at the age of two. In 1926 Bradbury has a sister - Elizabeth, she also died as a child. These two deaths and the death of his grandfather put a grim imprint on an impressionable child with an amazing memory. The theme of death and escape from it into fantasy worlds is one of the main themes in his books.

His mother is Marie Esther Moberg, of Swedish descent, who comes from the large Swedish clan of Moberg. Ray's paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were descendants of the original settlers, Englishmen who came to America in 1630, publishing two Illinois newspapers in the late 19th century. His father, Leonard Spalding Bradbury, was a rugged man tormented by a lifelong passion for travel. Following his father, he made repeated attempts to “conquer the West,” running away from home as a child to join his father on his journey. Eventually, Leonard Bradbury's family moved from Illinois to California.
Ray Bradbury - blond, unsporting, short-sighted dreamer and bookworm - bore little resemblance to his father and older brother. As a result, their relationship left much to be desired. Bradbury's mother, who lost two children, patronized her youngest son Ray beyond measure, up to the fact that the cold served as an excuse for prolonged bed rest. Until the age of six, little Ray was bottle-fed, until an ugly episode when his father took the bottle away from him at dinner and smashed it in the sink. This, of course, traumatized the boy.

P/s: I am a linguist, As a result, although the whole family of the writer - by and large is brought out in his books in the images of fictional characters - fantastic and quite real (in ‘Dandelion Wine’), the writer's father almost nowhere appears. But later, in the book ‘A Cure for Melancholy’ (1960) can be found the following dedication: ‘To his father with love, awakened so late and even surprised his son’. However, Leonard Sr. could not read it, he died two years before, at the age of 66. A vivid reflection of this unexpressed love found in the story ‘Desire’ (1973).

Ray Bradbury had a unique memory. Here is how he told about it himself: ‘I have always had what I would call “almost complete mental return” to the hour of birth. I remember the cutting of the umbilical cord, I remember suckling at my mother's breast for the first time. The nightmares that commonly plague a newborn have been on my mental cheat sheet since the first few weeks of life. I know, I know it's impossible, most people don't remember any of this. And psychologists say that children are born not fully developed, only after a few days or even weeks they acquire the ability to see, to hear, to know. But I - saw, heard, knew...’ (remember the story ‘The Little Killer’). There is a theory that such vivid childhood memories are associated with the fact that Bradbury was born overdrawn: he was in the womb for ten months. In the last month he may have developed sight and hearing.

He distinctly remembered the first snowfall of his life. A more recent memory is of the first time his parents took him to the cinema when he was still three years old. Went sensational silent film ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ starring Lon Chaney, and the image of the unfortunate freak struck little Ray to the core. The writer does not hide that almost all the images from his books are his childhood and adult memories, artistically stated. The images of the ‘strawberry window’, a small American town, his grandfather's big house and the ravine next to the house from ‘Dandelion Wine’ - came from his childhood. The town of ‘Greentown’ is the town of Waukegan where the writer grew up.

‘My earliest impressions are usually connected with a picture that still stands before my eyes: a spooky night journey up the stairs..... It always seemed to me that I should step on the last step, as I immediately find myself face to face with a nasty monster waiting for me at the top. I would roll down the stairs and run crying to my mother, and then the two of us would climb the stairs again. Usually the monster had run away by then. It remains unclear to me why Mum was completely devoid of imagination: she never saw the monster. In the Bradbury family there was a legend of a witch in their own family tree - great-great-great... great-great-great-grandmother, who was burned at the famous Seyllam witch trials in 1692.

There, however, the condemned were hanged, and the name of Mary Bradbury in the list of those on trial could be a mere coincidence. Nevertheless, the fact remains that since childhood, the writer considered himself the great-grandson of a witch. It is worth noting that in his stories, the evil force as good, and otherworldly creatures are much more human than their pursuers - Puritans, prudes and ‘clean’ - lawmen. The Bradbury family moved to Los Angeles in the 30s, at the height of the Great Depression. When Ray graduated from high school, he could not buy a new jacket. He had to go to the graduation party in the suit of his late Uncle Lester, who died at the hands of a robber. The bullet holes in the jacket's belly and back were neatly stitched up.


‘On the trains ... in the late evening hours I enjoyed the company of Bernard Shaw, J.K. Chesterton and Charles Dickens - my old pals, following me everywhere, invisible but tangible; silent but constantly stirring.... Sometimes Aldous Huxley would sit down with us, blind but inquisitive and wise. Often Richard III rode with me; he ranted about murder, elevating it to a virtue. Somewhere in the middle of Kansas at midnight, I buried Caesar, and Mark Antony shone with his eloquence as we rode out of Eldebury Springs...’

Ray Bradbury never went to college, he formally completed his education at the high school level. In 1971, his article titled ‘How Instead of College I Ended Up in Libraries, or Thoughts of a Teenager Who Went to the Moon in 1932’ was published. Many of his short stories and novellas are titled with quotes from other authors: ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ is from Shakespeare; “Outlandish Divine” is from Coleridge's unfinished poem “Kubla(y) Khan”; “Golden Apples of the Sun” is a line from Yeats; “The Electric Body I Sing” is by Whitman; ’And still with rays the moon silvers the expanse...’ - Byron; the story ‘Asleep at Armageddon’ has a second title: ‘And to dream may be’ - a line from Hamlet's monologue; the beginning of Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘Requiem’ - ‘Home came the sailor, home came he from the sea!’ also gave the title to the story; the story and the collection of short stories ‘The Happiness Machines’ are named with a quote from William Blake - the list is far from complete.

‘Jules Verne was my father. H.G. Wells was a wise uncle. Edgar Allan Poe was my cousin; he was like a bat, always in our dark attic.
Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers - [American children's comic book heroes that little Ray fanatically collected] my brothers and mates. That's my whole family. I should also add that my mother was probably Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein. Well, who else was I going to be but a fiction writer with a family like that.’

Bradbury cries very often: both with joy and sadness. To tears can bring him to tears and the news, and said the reader a kind word, and memories. Bradbury as a rule is not ashamed of tears. Despite the fact that Bradbury's books are full of quite strong expressions, Bradbury in life and in his texts avoids really coarse words: the effect of a strict upbringing. In his family for a foul word could put a bar of soap in his mouth. There is, however, evidence of a case (given in the biography by Sam Weller), when Bradbury swore in public: at the local university students explained to the writer, what his book ‘451 degrees Fahrenheit’. Bradbury tried several times to tell them why they were wrong and what he really meant, then left the room in anger, throwing the students a ‘f-off’.

All his life Bradbury lived with one woman, Margaret (Marguerite McClure Bradbury). Together they had 4 daughters (Bettina, Ramona, Susan and Alexandra). They were married on 27 September 1947. From that day on, for several years, she worked all day so that Ray could stay home and work on books. The first copy of The Martian Chronicles was typed by her hands. This book was dedicated to her. Margaret learned four languages in her life and was also known as an expert in literature (her favourite writers included Marcel Proust, Agatha Christie and... Ray Bradbury). She was also a wine connoisseur and cat lover. Everyone who knew her personally described her as a person of rare charm and a remarkable sense of humour. She died on 24 November 2003.

At the age of twelve Bradbury realised that he wanted to become a writer, and seriously engaged in only this one thing. When he was eighteen, he worked part-time as a newspaper salesman - America was in the Great Depression at the time - and later lived off his wife, but continued to write every day with incredible tenacity. In his early experiments he copied Edgar Poe's style of bombastic Victorian prose, until Henry Kuttner, one of the writers Bradbury was besieged by in his quest to show work, told him, ‘Write another story like that and I'll kill you.’

Little by little, and his stories began to sell in ‘pall magazines’ - cheap paperback editions that printed vast quantities of fantasy and sci-fi prose of varying quality. Against this background, Bradbury's stories stood out for their lyricism and psychological depth, for which he was nicknamed ‘the poet of paperbacks’. His collection of ‘Martian’ stories, which was published under the guise of the story ‘The Martian Chronicles’ Bradbury took across the country - from Los Angeles to New York to litagent Don Congdon by bus, because the train was not money. It became his first big commercial success. After getting paid to publish, he travelled a second time to New York and, stopping in Chicago, he met a crowd of young people with books in their hands - these were his first fans who wanted his autograph on the first edition of The Martian Chronicles.

Bradbury grew up in Hollywood in the literal sense of the word: as a teenager he settled in Los Angeles and often visited film studios, hunting for autographs. And figuratively: he was brought up on classic Hollywood films. He calls his prose cinematic: ‘tear out the pages and stick them in the camera: there will be a film.’ He wrote many screenplays during his lifetime, the largest and most successful of which is considered to be the screenplay for Moby Dick. Many of his works have been screened around the world and many times. The biggest film project was the series ‘Ray Bradbury's Theatre’.