The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller Read Free Book Online Page A

and her young son would play them continually. Ray distinctly recalled listening to a scratchy version of the song “The Lady Picking Mulberries” over and over. While Neva directly introduced Ray to her creative interests, Ray’s mother left her own indirect impression; she loved movies and she loved music and young Ray picked up on these passions.
    In the little house on St. James Street, there was a staircase off the living room leading upstairs to the attic, and the only bathroom in the house. Ray wrote about his fear of waking in the middle of the night and having to venture upstairs into the darkness to use the lavatory in the story “The Thing at the Top of the Stairs” from the collection The Toynbee Convector . The Bradbury family was so thrifty that Leo Bradbury kept the light off at the top of the stairs to save on the electric bill. This meant that little Ray, terrified of the dark, had to climb into the unknown. He was convinced that a monster lurked in the attic, so he would rather hold it or urinate on the staircase. Frustrated, Ray’s father placed a chamberpot under Ray and Skip’s sofa bed.
    Ray Bradbury turned this boyhood fear, as he did with other childhood memories, into a metaphor in his work. The question Ray is asked most frequently, as are most writers, is where he finds his ideas. His response? He often took life events and imbued them with the dark fantastic. Bradbury scholar David Mogen, author of the critical work Ray Bradbury, called these particular stories, numerous throughout Ray’s oeuvre, “autobiographical fantasy.” “Bradbury discovered early in his career that his best prose symbolically interprets personal experiences, that he could bring exotic subjects to life as metaphors for things we know.... Transforming fact into fiction, Bradbury weaves myth and fantasy out of both commonplace and bizarre experiences in his own life,” wrote Mogen.
    By the spring of 1926, thanks to Neva and his own proclivities, Ray was sodden with the power of fantasy. But tragedy struck his family: Samuel Hinkston Bradbury, Ray’s beloved grandfather, fell ill. This quiet man, long troubled by the financial failure of his gold-mining endeavors, had contracted meningitis. He spent weeks in his upstairs bedroom; Ray recalled visiting him one late-spring afternoon and talking to his grandfather as he lay dying. On the morning of Friday, June 4, 1926, after lying in a coma for six days, Ray’s grandfather Samuel died. Gone was the cornerstone of evening porch rituals; gone was the man who quietly smoked his cigar into the hushed hours. Gone, too, was the voice of primitive radio, that baritone heard through the floorboards.
    The last Fourth of July that Ray spent with his grandfather—nearly a year before Sam Bradbury’s passing—remained Ray’s fondest memory of him. On that warm summer evening, the family had gathered on the porch and on the front lawn. Ray’s uncle Bion had brought his small homemade brass cannon, which he fired off, thunderclapping the still night to the children’s delight and to the adults’ dismay. Ray spoke of this memory in an unpublished 1971 interview with his agent, Don Congdon.
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    â€¦ when all the fireworks were gone and my Uncle Bion had cracked a few windows with a last blast of his home-made cannon, it was finally the end of Fourth of July Night, and the special time, the sad time, the time of beauty, the time of rare philosophy exemplified in my helping my Grandpa carry out the last box in which lay, like a gossamer spirit, the paper-tissue ghost of a fire balloon waiting to be breathed into, filled, and set adrift on the midnight sky.
    My grandfather was the high priest and I his altar-boy at such moments.... I helped take the lovely red, white, and blue paper ghost out of the box and Grandpa lit the little cup of dry straw which hung beneath the balloon. Once the fire got going the balloon