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Pandemonium in Paradise
| Article
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19845 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
4,311 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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Ray Bradbury greets me from the cellar office of his Westwood home. This is a legendary place, a kind of fabulous Ali Baba cave--a spill of toys, movie posters, books, and boxes of manuscripts. He never throws anything away. "You should keep a record of everything you've ever done, good and bad," he says. He shakes his great mane of white hair. Behind his thick black-rimmed glasses, his eyes wander to a stack of un-cataloged early stories--debunking the oft-repeated myth that years ago he made a huge bonfire of his early manuscripts. It is morning here in Los Angeles--a good time to talk, to look back as well as forward: 1991 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Bradbury's first story sale.
Space-travel writer Ray Bradbury began his own travels modestly enough. In 1932 when Ray was twelve, his father, a power lineman, moved the family from Waukegan, Illinois, to Tucson, Arizona, and then to Los Angeles. In those days, young Ray was reading the fantasy adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan and devouring horror movies like Phantom of the Opera and King Kong.
"I began to write when I was twelve," Bradbury says. "Of course, you go through a long period where you're really dreadful." He recalls Jennet Johnson, his short-story teacher at his high school in Los Angeles. She must have been taken aback by this gangling kid in spectacles, always whizzing about the streets on roller skates, never still. "At the top of one of the first stories I gave her, she wrote in red pencil, 'I don't understand what you're doing, but continue.'" He laughs. "I was writing science fiction, and at that time most English teachers didn't comprehend what we were up to."
"We" refers to a group of young men in Los Angeles called the Science Fiction League. They were a part of what nowadays is called "First Fandom," that first bunch of science fiction enthusiasts working for the cause of professional speculative fiction. "That was during my last year in high school. We met every Thursday down in the Little Brown Room in Clifton's Cafeteria. We were all poor--maybe a malted milk for a dime would be dinner. Mr. Clifton, who ran the cafeteria, said if anyone came in the restaurant and didn't have money to pay for food, he could eat free. So he gave away tens of thousands of lunches and dinners over the years. That's where I met Robert Heinlein, when I was nineteen and he was thirty-one years old. He became a friend and teacher. There were Henry Kuttner and Arthur K. Barnes and Leigh Brackett and Edmund Hamilton and Jack Williamson. And every time I mention certain stores to Jack, he winces with pain because they were so dreadful. I was a sap. It's a
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