Zen in the Art of Writing Page 6

  "Once-" Montag hesitates, then continues, "Once you must have loved books very much."

  "Touche!" the Fire Chief responds. "Below the belt. On the chin. Through the heart. Ripping the gut. Oh, look at me, Montag. The man who loved books, no, the boy who was wild for them, insane for them, who climbed the stacks like a chimpanzee gone mad for them.

  "I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em. And then… and then…" The Fire Chiefs voice fades.

  Montag prompts: "And then?"

  "Why, life happened to me." The Fire Chief shuts his eyes to remember. "Life. The usual. The same. The love that wasn't quite right, the dream that went sour, the sex that fell apart, the deaths that came swiftly to friends not deserving, the murder of someone or another, the insanity of someone close, the slow death of a mother, the abrupt suicide of a father-a stampede of elephants, an onslaught of disease. And nowhere, nowhere the right book for the right time to stuff in the crumbling wall of the breaking dam to hold back the deluge, give or take a metaphor, lose or find a simile. And by the far edge of thirty, and the near rim of thirty-one, I picked myself up, every bone broken, every centimeter of flesh abraded, bruised, or scarred. I looked in the mirror and found an old man lost behind the frightened face of a young man, saw a hatred there for everything and anything, you name it, I'd damn it, and opened the pages of my fine library books and found what, what, what!?"

  Montag guesses. "The pages were empty?"

  "Bull's eye! Blank! Oh, the words were there, allright, but they ran over my eyes like hot oil, signifying nothing. Offering no help, no solace, no peace, no harbor, no true love, no bed, no light."

  Montag thinks back: "Thirty years ago… the final library burnings…"

  "On target." Beatty nods. "And having no job, and being a failed Romantic, or whatever in hell, I put in for Fireman First Class. First up the steps, first into the library, first in the burning furnace heart of his ever-blazing countrymen, douse me with kerosene, hand me my torch!

  "End of lecture. There you go, Montag. Out the door!"

  Montag leaves, with more curiosity than ever about books, well on his way to becoming an outcast, soon to be pursued and almost destroyed by the Mechanical Hound, my robot clone of A. Conan Doyle's great Baskerville beast.

  In my play, old man Faber, the teacher-not-quite-in-residence, speaking to Montag through the long night (via the seashell tamp-in ear radio) is victimized by the Fire Chief. How? Beatty suspects Montag is being instructed by such a secret device, knocks it out of his ear, and shouts at the far-removed teacher:

  "We're coming to get you! We're at the door! We're up the stairs! Gotcha!"

  Which so terrifies Faber, his heart destroys him.

  All good stuff. Tempting, this late in time. I've had to fight not to stuff it into the novel.

  Finally, many readers have written protesting Clarisse's disappearance, wondering what happened to her. Francois Truffaut felt the same curiosity, and in his film version of my novel, rescued Clarisse from oblivion and located her with the Book People wandering in the forest, reciting their litany of books to themselves.

  I felt the same need to save her, for after all, she, verging on silly star-struck chatter, was in many ways responsible for Montag's beginning to wonder about books and what was in them. In my play, therefore, Clarisse emerges to welcome Montag, and give a somewhat happier ending to what was, in essence, pretty grim stuff.

  The novel, however, remains true to its former self. I don't believe in tampering with any young writer's material, especially when that young writer was once myself. Montag, Beatty, Mildred, Faber, Clarisse, all stand, move, enter and exit as they did thirty-two years ago when I first wrote them down, at a dime a half hour, in the basement of the UCLA library. I have changed not one thought or word.

  A last discovery. I write all of my novels and stories, as you have seen, in a great surge of delightful passion. Only recently, glancing at the novel, I realized that Montag is named after a paper manufacturing company. And Faber, of course, is a maker of pencils! What a sly thing my subconscious was, to name them thus.

  And not tell me!

  1982

  JUST THIS SIDE OF BYZANTIUM: DANDELION WINE

  Dandelion Wine, like most of my books and stories, was a surprise. I began to learn the nature of such surprises, thank God, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.

  It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head.

  I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my amazement, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely. I soon found that I would have to work this way for the rest of my life.

  First I rummaged my mind for words that could describe my personal nightmares, fears of night and time from my childhood, and shaped stories from these.

  Then I took a long look at the green apple trees and the old house I was born in and the house next door where lived my grandparents, and all the lawns of the summers I grew up in, and I began to try words for all that.

  What you have in Dandelion Wine then is a gathering of dandelions from all those years. The wine metaphor which appears again and again in these pages is wonderfully apt. I was gathering images all of my life, storing them away, and forgetting them. Somehow I had to send myself back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out and see what they had to offer.

  So from the age of twenty-four to thirty-six hardly a day passed when I didn't stroll myself across a recollection of my grandparents' northern Illinois grass, hoping to come across some old half-burnt firecracker, a rusted toy, or a fragment of letter written to myself in some young year hoping to contact the older person I became to remind him of his past, his life, his people, his joys, and his drenching sorrows.

  It became a game that I took to with immense gusto: to see how much I could remember about dandelions themselves, or picking wild grapes with my father and brother, rediscovering the mosquito-breeding ground rain barrel by the side bay window, or searching out the smell of the gold-fuzzed bees that hung around our back porch grape arbor. Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

  And then I wanted to call back what the ravine was like, especially on those nights when walking home late across town, after seeing Lon Chaney's delicious fright The Phantom of the Opera, my brother Skip would run ahead and hide under the ravine-creek bridge like the Lonely One and leap out and grab me, shrieking, so I ran, fell, and ran again, gibbering all the way home. That was great stuff.

  Along the way, I came upon and collided, through wordassociation, with old and true friendships. I borrowed my friend John Huff from my childhood in Arizona and shipped him East to Green Town so that I could say goodbye to him properly.

  Along the way, I sat me down to breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with the long dead and much loved. For I was a boy who did indeed love his parents and grandparents and his brother, even when that brother "ditched" him.

  Along the way, I found myself in the basement working the wine-press for my father, or on the front porch Independence night helping my Uncle Bion load and fire his homemade brass cannon.


  Thus I fell into surprise. No one told me to surprise myself, I might add. I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of bushes like quail before gunshot. I blundered into creativity as blindly as any child learning to walk and see. I learned to let my senses and my Past tell me all that was somehow true.

  So, I turned myself into a boy running to bring a dipper of clear rainwater out of that barrel by the side of the house. And, of course, the more water you dip out the more flows in. The flow has never ceased. Once I learned to keep going back and back again to those times, I had plenty of memories and sense impressions to play with, not work with, no, play with. Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood.

  I was amused and somewhat astonished at a critic a few years back who wrote an article analyzing Dandelion Wine plus the more realistic works of Sinclair Lewis, wondering how I could have been born and raised in Waukegan, which I renamed Green Town for my novel, and not noticed how ugly the harbor was and how depressing the coal docks and railyards down below the town.

  But, of course, I had noticed them and, genetic enchanter that I was, was fascinated by their beauty. Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about. Counting boxcars is a prime activity of boys. Their elders fret and fume and jeer at the train that holds them up, but boys happily count and cry the names of the cars as they pass from far places.

  And again, that supposedly ugly railyard was where carnivals and circuses arrived with elephants who washed the brick pavements with mighty steaming acid waters at five in the dark morning.

  As for the coal from the docks, I went down in my basement every autumn to await the arrival of the truck and its metal chute, which clanged down and released a ton of beauteous meteors that fell out of far space into my cellar and threatened to bury me beneath dark treasures.

  In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

  Perhaps a new poem of mine will explain more than this introduction about the germination of all the summers of my life into one book.

  Here's the start of the poem:

  Byzantium, I come not from,

  But from another time and place

  Whose race was simple, tried and true;

  As boy

  I dropped me forth in Illinois.

  A name with neither love nor grace

  Was Waukegan, there I came from

  And not, good friends, Byzantium.

  The poem continues, describing my lifelong relationship to my birthplace:

  And yet in looking back I see

  From topmost part of farthest tree

  A land as bright, beloved and blue

  As any Yeats found to be true.

  Waukegan, visited by me often since, is neither homelier nor more beautiful than any other small midwestern town. Much of it is green. The trees do touch in the middle of streets. The street in front of my old home is still paved with red bricks. In what way then was the town special? Why, I was born there. It was my life. I had to write of it as I saw fit:

  So we grew up with mythic dead

  To spoon upon midwestern bread

  And spread old gods' bright marmalade

  To slake in peanut-butter shade,

  Pretending there beneath our sky

  That it was Aphrodite's thigh…

  While by the porch-rail calm and bold

  His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold

  My grandfather, a myth indeed,

  Did all of Plato supersede

  While Grandmama in rockingchair

  Sewed up the raveled sleeve of care

  Crocheted cool snowflakes rare and bright

  To winter us on summer night.

  And uncles, gathered with their smokes

  Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,

  And aunts as wise as Delphic maids

  Dispensed prophetic lemonades

  To boys knelt there as acolytes

  To Grecian porch on summer nights;

  Then went to bed, there to repent

  The evils of the innocent;

  The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears

  Said, through the nights and through the years

  Not Illinois nor Waukegan

  But blither sky and blither sun.

  Though mediocre all our Fates

  And Mayor not as bright as Yeats

  Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?

  Byzantium.

  Byzantium.

  Waukegan/Green Town/Byzantium.

  Green Town did exist, then?

  Yes, and again, yes.

  Was there a real boy named John Huff?

  There was. And that was truly his name. But he didn't go away from me, I went away from him. But, happy ending, he is still alive, forty-two years later, and remembers our love.

  Was there a Lonely One?

  There was, and that was his name. And he moved around at night in my home town when I was six years old and he frightened everyone and was never captured.

  Most importantly, did the big house itself, with Grandpa and Grandma and the boarders and uncles and aunts in it exist? I have already answered that.

  Is the ravine real and deep and dark at night? It was, it is. I took my daughters there a few years back, fearful that the ravine might have gone shallow with time. I am relieved and happy to report that the ravine is deeper, darker, and more mysterious than ever. I would not, even now, go home through there after seeing The Phantom of the Opera.

  So there you have it. Waukegan was Green Town was Byzantium, with all the happiness that that means, with all the sadness that these names imply. The people there were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home. And, after all, isn't that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people's heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that's how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.

  Here is my celebration, then, of death as well as life, dark as well as light, old as well as young, smart and dumb combined, sheer joy as well as complete terror written by a boy who once hung upside down in trees, dressed in his bat costume with candy fangs in his mouth, who finally fell out of the trees when he was twelve and went and found a toy-dial typewriter and wrote his first "novel."

  A final memory.

  Fire balloons.

  You rarely see them these days, though in some countries, I hear, they are still made and filled with warm breath from a small straw fire hung beneath.

  But in 1925 Illinois, we still had them, and one of the last memories I have of my grandfather is the last hour of a Fourth of July night forty-eight years ago when Grandpa and I walked out on the lawn and lit a small fire and filled the pear-shaped red-white-and-blue-striped paper balloon with hot air, and held the flickering bright-angel presence in our hands a final moment in front of a porch lined with uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and fathers, and then, very softly, let the thing that was life and light and mystery go out of our fingers up on the summer air and away over the beginning-to-sleep houses, among the stars, as fragile, as wondrous, as vulnerable, as lovely as life itself.

  I see my grandfather there looking up at that strange drifting light, thinking his own still thoughts. I see me, my eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, I knew there would never be another night like this.

  No one said anything. We all just looked up at the sky and we breathed out and in and we all thought the same things, but nobody said. Someone finally had to say, though, didn't
they? And that one is me.

  The wine still waits in the cellars below.

  My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark.

  The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer.

  Why and how?

  Because I say it is so.

  1974

  THE LONG ROAD TO MARS

  How did I get from Waukegan, Illinois, to Red Planet, Mars?

  Perhaps two men could tell you.

  Their names appear on the dedication page of the Fortieth Anniversary Edition of The Martian Chronicles.

  For it was my friend Norman Corwin who first listened to me tell my Martian stories, and my future editor Walter I. Bradbury (no relation) who saw what I was up to, even though I was unaware of what I was doing, and persuaded me to finish a novel I didn't know I had written.

  How I traveled to that spring night in 1949 when Walter Bradbury surprised me with myself is an unguided pathway of What Ifs.

  What if I had never heard and fallen in love with Norman Corwin's radio dramas when I was nineteen?

  What if I had never sent my first book of stories to Corwin, who then became a lifetime friend?

  And what if I hadn't taken his advice to go to New York City in June 1949?

  Then, very simply, The Martian Chronicles might never have existed.

  But Norman argued again and again that I should be underfoot in the publishing houses of Manhattan and that he and his wife Katie would be there to lead and protect me in and around the Big Town. Because of his persuasion, I traveled across the country, four long days and nights on a Greyhound Bus, fermenting into a large ball of fungus, with a pregnant wife left behind in Los Angeles with $40 in the bank, and the YMCA ($5 a week) waiting for me on Forty-second Street.

  The Corwins, good to their promise, toured and introduced me to a clutch of editors who asked: "Did you bring a novel?"

  I confessed that I was a sprinter and had brought only fifty short stories and an ancient, battered portable typewriter. Were they in need of fifty superimaginative tales, mostly brilliant? They were not.