SF Luminaries: Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

As various fans have already pointed out, Stephen King's latest novel Fairy Tale (2022) - despite being overtly dedicated to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and H. P. Lovecraft, also contains a number of covert references to another distinguished predecessor in the horror/fantasy genre: Ray Bradbury.

For one thing, it takes place in a small town called Sentry's Rest, Illinois - which seems like a nod to the mythical Green Town, Illinois, setting for Bradbury's classic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). The alternate universe of Empis which King's protagonist, Charlie Reade [get it? "Read"] explores also contains a magic carousel, one of the central features of the travelling carnival in Bradbury's own book.

Ray Bradbury: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)

Mind you, once you start looking for parallels with other fantasy writers, King's story threatens to fall apart under the sheer weight of allusion. Readers have postulated links with William Goldman's The Princess Bride; Lord Dunsany's realm of Elfland, "beyond the fields we know"; not to mention numerous echoes of King's own Dark Tower saga.

Bradbury is special for him, though. As he himself once put it: "without Ray Bradbury, there is no Stephen King." Or, as he wrote on hearing the news of Bradbury's death in 2012, at the age of 91:

Ray Bradbury wrote three great novels and three hundred great stories. One of the latter was called 'A Sound of Thunder.' The sound I hear today is the thunder of a giant's footsteps fading away. But the novels and stories remain, in all their resonance and strange beauty.

So who exactly was this starry-eyed visonary - this laureate of space and small-town life - and why has he left such a strangely equivocal and contradictory reputation behind him?

Library of America: The Ray Bradbury Collection (2022)

Novels & Story Cycles. Ed. Jonathan R. Eller. The Library of America, 347. [‘The Martian Chronicles’, 1950; ‘Fahrenheit 451’, 1953; ‘Dandelion Wine’, 1957; ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’, 1962]. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2021.

The Illustrated Man, The October Country & Other Stories. Ed. Jonathan R. Eller. The Library of America, 360. 1951, 1955. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2022.

You know that you've really arrived when they not only reprint your collected works in the canonical Library of America series, but even provide a specially designed slipcase to put them in!

Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles (1950)

You'll notice, though, that most of the work included in this set is comparatively early - dating roughly from the 1940s to the early 1960s. And even Stephen King claims only three great Bradbury novels among the dozen or so he actually published.

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

There's little doubt that two of the three must be Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). The third is more debatable: The Martian Chronicles (1950) would be most people's first choice for the honour, but it is technically a 'story-cycle' rather than a novel. That would leave us with Dandelion Wine (1957) - to me almost unbearably saccharine in its evocation of untroubled boyhood, but certainly a book which has its admirers.

Ray Bradbury: Dandelion Wine (1957)

Are there any other serious candidates? Not really. Ray Bradbury was a writer who peaked comparatively early, with a dazzling series of science fiction and horror short stories published throughout the 1940s and 50s, some of the strongest of which were reprinted in the early collection Dark Carnival, by H. P. Lovecraft's disciple and friend, August Derleth, at his legendary imprint Arkham House.

Ray Bradbury: Dark Carnival (1947)

Only 15 of the 27 stories in this unrelentingly dark and pitiless collection were reprinted, several in revised versions, in The October Country (1955). As Wikipedia tells it:

For many years, Bradbury did not permit Dark Carnival to be reprinted ... However, a limited edition ... with five extra stories and a new introduction by Bradbury, was printed by Gauntlet Press in 2001.

A new paperback edition of this seminal collection is promised for early 2024.

The fact is that it was horror stories such as "The Veldt" (in The Illustrated Man), "The Next in Line" (in Dark Carnival & The October Country), and "Mars is Heaven!" (in The Martian Chronicles) which were responsible for much of Bradbury's early vogue. Cannibalism, live burial, and homicidal children are just a few of his early themes.

So before you go writing him off as an old sentimentalist dreaming of some kind of Tom Sawyer-like childhood paradise in rural Illinois, never forget the dark, Lovecraftian roots behind much of his best work.

The Illustrated Man (2012)

A couple of his early Martian stories interested me particularly as I reread all the early collections reprinted in the Library of America boxset.

They're entitled (respectively) "Way in the Middle of the Air" [included in early editons of The Martian Chronicles, 1950] - which concerns a mass exodus of African American people to Mars; and "The Other Foot" [included in The Illustrated Man, 1951] - which tells us what happens when the news of the return to Mars of the last few white people left after their latest suicidal war reaches the now exclusively black population of the red planet.

By today's standards both stories sound rather naive and patronising. There's a lot of Huck Finn-style dialect, use of the "n"-word, and other now unacceptable linguistic usages. Both stories are also intensely well-meaning - it's worth noticing that they long predate such civil rights landmarks as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, let alone the compulsory integration of US schools.

And yet, both now read like museum exhibits: Liberal Northern White Attitudes (c.1950). By contrast, his more complex and haunting stories of the time: "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed" (1949), for instance - about the gradual possession of an all-American family by the haunting (and haunted?) landscapes and mores of Mars - have a mysterious resonance as powerful now as it was then.

John Huston, dir. Moby Dick (1956)

Perhaps the true turning point for Bradbury was the year he spent working on John Huston's adaptation of Moby Dick. It's not a terrible screenplay - there's a bit too much poetic language in the voice-overs, maybe, but the two of them did a competent enough job at transferring an almost unfilmable novel to the screen.

But Huston's habit of belitting and insulting his collaborators - allegedly (he claimed) to get the best out of them, but actually (it would appear) to indulge his own petty sadism - had a particularly bad effect on the ebullient Bradbury. He wrote a fictionalised version of their encounter in the novel Green Shadows, White Whale, which made it clear that he'd been brooding on the matter for quite some time.

John Huston, dir. Green Shadows, White Whale (1992)

It's not that there aren't gems among the later stories - "The Parrot Who Met Papa" (1972), about the search for a legendary parrot alleged to have memorised Hemingway's last novel as a result of his endless rambling monologues in its presence, for instance - but they're pretty few and far between.

Some terrible lapse in self-confidence - or, perhaps, reluctance to indulge the dark side of his nature any further than he'd already done (one of the most prominent themes in Something Wicked This Way Comes) - seems to have kept him largely on the sunny side of the street thereafter. There's a relentless verbosity in his work from the 1970s onwards - occasionally, mercifully, spiked by humour, but mostly a turbid stream of two-bit words and phrases.

He leaves behind, then, a divided legacy: the dark mysteries of his early stories and novels, and the wordy bathos of his later work. As the Library of America has already signalled, there's little doubt which will prevail in the eyes of posterity.

It does leave you wondering, though, just what did Huston (and, for that matter, Herman Melville) do to him in that windy old castle in Ireland? The novel he wrote about it - after, he claimed, having read Katharine Hepburn's account of her own mistreatment at Huston's hands during the making of "The African Queen" (1951): How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind (1987) - is just that: a novel. What really happened to him there we'll never know.

Ray Bradbury Postage Stamp (2012)

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Charley Gallay: Ray Bradbury (2007)

Ray Douglas Bradbury
(1920-2012)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Novels:


1. The Martian Chronicles [aka The Silver Locusts] (1950)
   • The Silver Locusts. 1950. London: Corgi Books, 1969.
2. Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
   • Fahrenheit 451. 1953. London: Corgi Books, 1963.
3. Dandelion Wine (1957)
   • Dandelion Wine. 1957. London: Corgi Books, 1972.
4. Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)
   • Something Wicked This Way Comes. 1962. London: Corgi Books, 1969.
5. The Halloween Tree (1972)
   • The Halloween Tree. 1972. Illustrated by Joseph Mugnaini. London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1973.
6. The Novels of Ray Bradbury (1984)
   • The Novels of Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes. 1953, 1957, 1962. London: Book Club Associates, by arrangement with Granada Publishing Limited, 1984.
7. Death is a Lonely Business (1985)
8. A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990)
   • A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities. Grafton Books. London: Collins Publishing Group, 1990.
9. Green Shadows, White Whale (1992)
10. From the Dust Returned (2001)
11. Let's All Kill Constance (2002)
12. Farewell Summer (2006)
13. Novels & Story Cycles. Library of America (2021)
    • Novels & Story Cycles. Ed. Jonathan R. Eller. The Library of America, 347. [‘The Martian Chronicles’, 1950; ‘Fahrenheit 451’, 1953; ‘Dandelion Wine’, 1957; ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’, 1962]. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2021.

Collections:


14. Dark Carnival (1947)
    1. The Homecoming
    2. Skeleton
    3. The Jar
    4. The Lake
    5. The Maiden
    6. The Tombstone
    7. The Smiling People
    8. The Emissary
    9. The Traveler
    10. The Small Assassin
    11. The Crowd
    12. Reunion
    13. The Handler
    14. The Coffin
    15. Interim
    16. Jack-in-the-Box
    17. The Scythe
    18. Let's Play 'Poison'
    19. Uncle Einar
    20. The Wind
    21. The Night
    22. There Was An Old Woman
    23. The Dead Man
    24. The Man Upstairs
    25. The Night Sets
    26. Cistern
    27. The Next In Line
    • Dark Carnival. 1947. HarperVoyager. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2024.
15. The Illustrated Man (1951)
    1. The Veldt
    2. Kaleidoscope
    3. The Other Foot
    4. The Highway
    5. The Man
    6. The Long Rain
    7. The Rocket Man
    8. The Fire Balloons
    9. The Last Night of the World
    10. The Exiles
    11. No Particular Night or Morning
    12. The Fox and the Forest
    13. The Visitor
    14. The Concrete Mixer
    15. Marionettes, Inc.
    16. The City
    17. Zero Hour
    18. The Rocket
    • The Illustrated Man. 1951. Corgi SF Collector’s Library. London: Corgi Books, 1972.
16. The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)
    • The Golden Apples of the Sun. 1953. Corgi SF Collector’s Library. London: Corgi Books, 1973.
17. The October Country (1955)
    1. The Dwarf
    2. The Next in Line
    3. The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse
    4. Skeleton
    5. The Jar
    6. The Lake
    7. The Emissary
    8. Touched With Fire
    9. The Small Assassin
    10. The Crowd
    11. Jack-in-the-Box
    12. The Scythe
    13. Uncle Einar
    14. The Wind
    15. The Man Upstairs
    16. There Was an Old Woman
    17. The Cistern
    18. Homecoming
    19. The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone
    • The October Country. 1955. London: New English Library, 1973.
18. A Medicine for Melancholy (1959)
19. The Day It Rained Forever (1959)
    • The Day It Rained Forever. 1959. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
20. The Small Assassin (1962)
    • The Small Assassin. 1962. London: New English Library, 1970.
21. R is for Rocket (1962)
    • R is for Rocket. 1962. London: Pan Books, 1972.
22. The Machineries of Joy (1964)
    • The Machineries of Joy. 1964. London: Panther Books, 1977.
23. The Autumn People (1965)
24. The Vintage Bradbury (1965)
25. Tomorrow Midnight (1966)
26. S is for Space (1966)
    • S is for Space. 1966. New York: Bantam Books, 1978.
27. Twice 22 (1966)
28. I Sing The Body Electric (1969)
    • I Sing The Body Electric! 1969. London: Corgi Books, 1972.
29. Ray Bradbury (1975)
30. Long After Midnight (1976)
    • Long After Midnight. 1976. London: Panther Books, 1978.
31. The Mummies of Guanajuato (1978)
32. The Fog Horn & Other Stories (1979)
33. One Timeless Spring (1980)
34. The Last Circus and the Electrocution (1980)
35. The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980)
    1. The Night [Dandelion Wine] (1946)
    2. Homecoming [The Elliott Family] (1946)
    3. Uncle Einar [The Elliott Family] (1947)
    4. The Traveler [The Elliott Family] (1946)
    5. The Lake (1944)
    6. The Coffin (1947)
    7. The Crowd (1943)
    8. The Scythe (1943)
    9. There Was an Old Woman (1944)
    10. There Will Come Soft Rains [The Martian Chronicles] (1950)
    11. Mars Is Heaven! [The Martian Chronicles] (1948)
    12. The Silent Towns [The Martian Chronicles] (1949)
    13. The Earth Men [The Martian Chronicles] (1948)
    14. The Off Season [The Martian Chronicles] (1948)
    15. The Million-Year Picnic [The Martian Chronicles] (1946)
    16. The Fox and the Forest (1950)
    17. Kaleidoscope (1949)
    18. The Rocket Man (1951)
    19. Marionettes, Inc. (1949)
    20. No Particular Night or Morning (1951)
    21. The City (1950)
    22. The Fire Balloons [The Martian Chronicles] (1951)
    23. The Last Night of the World (1951)
    24. The Veldt (1950)
    25. The Long Rain (1950)
    26. The Great Fire (1949)
    27. The Wilderness [The Martian Chronicles] (1952)
    28. A Sound of Thunder (1952)
    29. The Murderer (1953)
    30. The April Witch [The Elliott Family] (1952)
    31. Invisible Boy (1945)
    32. The Golden Kite, The Silver Wind (1953)
    33. The Fog Horn (1951)
    34. The Big Black and White Game (1945)
    35. Embroidery (1951)
    36. The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)
    37. Powerhouse (1948)
    38. Hail and Farewell (1948)
    39. The Great Wide World over There (1952)
    40. The Playground (1953)
    41. Skeleton (1943)
    42. The Man Upstairs (1947)
    43. Touched by Fire (1954)
    44. The Emissary (1947)
    45. The Jar (1944)
    46. The Small Assassin (1946)
    47. The Next in Line (1947)
    48. Jack-in-the-Box (1947)
    49. The Leave-Taking [Dandelion Wine] (1957)
    50. Exorcism [Dandelion Wine] (1957)
    51. The Happiness Machine [Dandelion Wine] (1957)
    52. Calling Mexico [Dandelion Wine] (1950)
    53. The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1958)
    54. Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed (1949)
    55. The Strawberry Window (1954)
    56. A Scent of Sarsaparilla (1953)
    57. The Picasso Summer (1957)
    58. The Day It Rained Forever (1957)
    59. A Medicine for Melancholy (1959)
    60. The Shoreline at Sunset (1959)
    61. Fever Dream (1959)
    62. The Town Where No One Got Off (1958)
    63. All Summer in a Day (1954)
    64. Frost and Fire (1946)
    65. The Anthem Sprinters (1963)
    66. And So Died Riabouchinska (1953)
    67. Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar! (1962)
    68. The Vacation (1963)
    69. The Illustrated Woman (1961)
    70. Some Live Like Lazarus (1960)
    71. The Best of All Possible Worlds (1960)
    72. The One Who Waits (1949)
    73. Tyrannosaurus Rex (1962)
    74. The Screaming Woman (1951)
    75. The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place (1969)
    76. Night Call, Collect (1949)
    77. The Tombling Day (1952)
    78. The Haunting of the New (1969)
    79. Tomorrow's Child (1948)
    80. I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
    81. The Women (1948)
    82. The Inspired Chicken Motel (1969)
    83. Yes, We'll Gather at the River (1969)
    84. Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You! (1976)
    85. A Story of Love (1951)
    86. The Parrot Who Met Papa (1972)
    87. The October Game (1948)
    88. Punishment Without Crime (1950)
    89. A Piece of Wood (1952)
    90. The Blue Bottle (1950)
    91. Long After Midnight (1962)
    92. The Utterly Perfect Murder (1971)
    93. The Better Part of Wisdom (1976)
    94. Interval in Sunlight (1954)
    95. The Black Ferris (1948)
    96. Farewell Summer (1980)
    97. McGillahee's Brat (1970)
    98. The Aqueduct (1979)
    99. Gotcha! (1978)
    100. The End of the Beginning (1956)
    • The Stories of Ray Bradbury. London: Granada, 1981.
36. The Fog Horn and Other Stories (1981)
37. Dinosaur Tales (1983)
38. A Memory of Murder (1984)
39. The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone (1985)
40. The Toynbee Convector (1988)
41. Classic Stories 1 (1990)
42. Classic Stories 2 (1990)
43. The Parrot Who Met Papa (1991)
44. Selected from Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed (1991)
45. Quicker Than The Eye (1996)
46. Driving Blind (1997)
47. Ray Bradbury Collected Short Stories (2001)
48. The Playground (2001)
49. Dark Carnival: Limited Edition with Supplemental Materials (2001)
50. One More for the Road (2002)
51. Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003)
    1. The Whole Town's Sleeping [Dandelion Wine] (1950)
    2. The Rocket (1950)
    3. Season of Disbelief [Dandelion Wine] (1950)
    4. And the Rock Cried Out (1953)
    5. The Drummer Boy of Shiloh (1960)
    6. The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge (1961)
    7. The Flying Machine (1953)
    8. Heavy-Set (1964)
    9. The First Night of Lent (1956)
    10. Lafayette, Farewell (1988)
    11. Remember Sascha? (1996)
    12. Junior (1988)
    13. That Woman on the Lawn (1996)
    14. February 1999: Ylla [The Martian Chronicles] (1951)
    15. Banshee (1984)
    16. One for His Lordship, and One for the Road! (1985)
    17. The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair (1987)
    18. Unterderseaboat Doktor (1996)
    19. Another Fine Mess (1995)
    20. The Dwarf (1954)
    21. A Wild Night in Galway (1959)
    22. The Wind (1943)
    23. No News, or What Killed the Dog? (1994)
    24. A Little Journey (1951)
    25. Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine (1966)
    26. The Garbage Collector (1953)
    27. The Visitor (1948)
    28. The Man (1949)
    29. Henry the Ninth (1969)
    30. The Messiah (1971)
    31. Bang! You're Dead! (1944)
    32. Darling Adolf (1976)
    33. The Beautiful Shave (1979)
    34. Colonel Stonesteel's Genuine Home-Made Truly Egyptian Mummy (1981)
    35. I See You Never (1947)
    36. The Exiles (1949)
    37. At Midnight, in the Month of June (1954)
    38. The Witch Door (1995)
    39. The Watchers (1945)
    40. 2004-05: The Naming of Names [The Martian Chronicles] (1951)
    41. Hopscotch (1996)
    42. The Illustrated Man (1950)
    43. The Dead Man (1945)
    44. June 2001: And the Moon Be Still As Bright [The Martian Chronicles] (1948)
    45. The Burning Man (1975)
    46. G. B. S. — Mark V? (1976)
    47. A Blade of Grass (1949)
    48. The Sound of Summer Running [Dandelion Wine] (1956)
    49. And the Sailor, Home from the Sea (1960)
    50. The Lonely Ones (1949)
    51. The Finnegan (1996)
    52. On the Orient, North [The Elliott Family] (1988)
    53. The Smiling People (1946)
    54. The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl (1948)
    55. Bug (1996)
    56. Downwind from Gettysburg (1969)
    57. Time in Thy Flight (1953)
    58. Changeling (1949)
    59. The Dragon (1955)
    60. Let's Play "Poison" (1946)
    61. The Cold Wind and the Warm (1964)
    62. The Meadow (1953)
    63. The Kilimanjaro Device (1965)
    64. The Man in the Rorschach Shirt (1966)
    65. Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned (1984)
    66. The Pedestrian (1951)
    67. Trapdoor (1985)
    68. The Swan [Dandelion Wine] (1954)
    69. The Sea Shell (1944)
    70. Once More, Legato (1995)
    71. June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air [The Martian Chronicles] (1951)
    72. The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone (1954)
    73. By the Numbers! (1988)
    74. April 2005: Usher II [The Martian Chronicles] (1951)
    75. The Square Pegs (1948)
    76. The Trolley [Dandelion Wine] (1955)
    77. The Smile (1952)
    78. The Miracles of Jamie (1946)
    79. A Far-Away Guitar (1952)
    80. The Cistern (1947)
    81. The Machineries of Joy (1962)
    82. Bright Phoenix (1963)
    83. The Wish (1973)
    84. The Lifework of Juan Díaz (1965)
    85. Time Intervening/Interim (1947)
    86. Almost the End of the World (1957)
    87. The Great Collision of Monday Last (1958)
    88. The Poems (1945)
    89. April 2026: The Long Years [The Martian Chronicles] (1951)
    90. Icarus Montgolfier Wright (1956)
    91. Death and the Maiden (1960)
    92. Zero Hour (1947)
    93. The Toynbee Convector (1984)
    94. Forever and the Earth (1950)
    95. The Handler (1947)
    96. Getting Through Sunday Somehow (1962)
    97. The Pumpernickel (1951)
    98. Last Rites (1994)
    99. The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse (1954)
    100. All on a Summer's Night (1950)
    • Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. 2003. William Morrow. Perennial. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.
52. Is That You, Herb? (2003)
53. The Cat's Pajamas: Stories (2004)
54. A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (2005)
55. The Dragon Who Ate His Tail (2007)
56. Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band Is Playing & Leviathan '99 (2007)
57. Somewhere a Band is Playing: Early Drafts and Final Novella (2007)
58. Summer Morning, Summer Night (2007)
59. Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2 (2009)
60. We'll Always Have Paris: Stories (2009)
61. A Pleasure To Burn (2010)
62. The Lost Bradbury: Forgotten Tales of Ray Bradbury (2010)
63. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition – Volume 1, 1938–1943 (2011)
64. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition – Volume 2, 1943–1944 (2014)
65. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition – Volume 3, 1944–1945 (2017)
66. Killer, Come Back to Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury (2020)
67. The Illustrated Man, The October Country & Other Stories. Library of America (2022)
    • The Illustrated Man, The October Country & Other Stories. Ed. Jonathan R. Eller. The Library of America, 360. 1951, 1955. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2022.

Edited:


68. Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow (1952)
69. The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories (1956)

Children's Books:


70. Switch on the Night (1955)
71. The Other Foot (1982)
72. The Veldt (1982)
73. The April Witch (1987)
74. The Fog Horn (1987)
75. Fever Dream (1987)
76. The Smile (1991)
77. The Toynbee Convector (1992)
78. With Cat for Comforter (1997)
79. Dogs Think That Every Day Is Christmas (1997)
80. Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines: A Fable (1998)
81. The Homecoming (2006)

Non-fiction:


82. No Man Is an Island (1952)
83. The Essence of Creative Writing: Letters to a Young Aspiring Author (1962)
84. Creative Man Among His Servant Machines (1967)
85. Mars and the Mind of Man (1971)
86. Zen in the Art of Writing (1973)
    • Zen in the Art of Writing. 1973. In The Capra Chapbook Anthology. Ed. Noel Young. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1979.
87. The God in Science Fiction (1978)
88. About Norman Corwin (1979)
89. There is Life on Mars (1981)
90. The Art of Playboy (1985)
91. Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity (1990)
92. Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures (1991)
93. Conversations with Ray Bradbury. Ed. Steven L. Aggelis) (2004)
94. Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars (2005)
95. Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451 (2007)

Poetry:


96. Where Robot Mice & Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns (1977)
97. To Sing Strange Songs (1979)
98. Beyond 1984: Remembrance of Things Future (1979)
99. The Ghosts of Forever (1980)
100. The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury (1982)
101. The Love Affair (1982)
102. I Live By the Invisible: New & Selected Poems (2002)

Screenplays:


103. The Best of The Ray Bradbury Chronicles (2003)
104. It Came from Outer Space: Screenplay (2003)
105. The Halloween Tree: Screenplay (2005)

Miscellaneous:


106. Long After Ecclesiastes: New Biblical Texts (1985)
107. Christus Apollo: Cantata Celebrating the Eighth Day of Creation and the Promise of the Ninth (1998)
108. Witness and Celebrate (2000)
109. A Chapbook for Burnt-Out Priests, Rabbis and Ministers (2001)
110. The Best of Ray Bradbury: The Graphic Novel (2003)
111. Futuria Fantasia: SF Fanzine (2007)

Secondary:


112. Weller, Sam. The Bradbury Chronicles. Harper Perennial. 2005. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.
113. Eller, Jonathan R. Becoming Ray Bradbury. Vol. 1 of 3. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
114. Eller, Jonathan R. Ray Bradbury Unbound. Vol. 2 of 3. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2014.
115. Eller, Jonathan R. Bradbury Beyond Apollo. Vol. 3 of 3. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2020.

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Jonathan Eller: The Bradbury Trilogy (2011-2020)

Sam Weller: The Bradbury Chronicles (2005)

SF Luminaries: Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Walter M. Miller, Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

Ever since I first picked up a scruffy secondhand paperback copy in a local bookshop, I've been entranced by A Canticle for Leibowitz. As you can see from the montage below, there's been no shortage of editions and reprints of this 'famous and prophetic best seller of the new dark age of man". What of its author, though? Who was this strange man Walter M. Miller, Jr.?

Walter M. Miller, Jr.: Leibowitz covers

Well, as W. H. Auden states so succinctly in his sonnet Who's Who: "A shilling life will give you all the facts" - or, as in this case, a brief consultation of the relevant wikipedia entry:

Miller was born on January 23, 1923, in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Educated at the University of Tennessee and the University of Texas, he worked as an engineer. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Forces as a radioman and tail gunner, flying more than fifty bombing missions over Italy. He took part in the bombing of the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino, which proved a traumatic experience for him. Joe Haldeman reported that Miller "had post-traumatic stress disorder for 30 years before it had a name"

Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)

Joe Haldeman is, of course, the author of the classic Vietnam-cum-SF novel The Forever War, still in print after almost fifty years.

After the war, Miller converted to Catholicism ... Between 1951 and 1957, [he] published over three dozen science fiction short stories, winning a Hugo Award in 1955 for the story "The Darfsteller".

Late in the 1950s, Miller assembled a novel from three closely related novellas he had published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1955, 1956 and 1957. The novel, entitled A Canticle for Leibowitz, was published in 1959. It is a post-apocalyptic novel revolving around the canonisation of Saint Leibowitz, and is considered a masterpiece of the genre. It won the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

After the success of A Canticle for Leibowitz, Miller ceased publishing, although several compilations of Miller's earlier stories were issued in the 1960s and 1970s.

In Miller's later years, he became a recluse, avoiding contact with nearly everyone, including family members; he never allowed his literary agent, Don Congdon, to meet him. According to science fiction writer Terry Bisson, Miller struggled with depression, but had managed to nearly complete a 600-page manuscript for the sequel to Canticle before taking his own life with a firearm on January 9, 1996, shortly after his wife's death.

The sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, was completed by Bisson at Miller's request and published in 1997.

Walter M. Miller, Jr.: Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (1997)

I wish I could say that this last, posthumous work of fiction was a triumphant vindication of his decades in the wilderness. Alas, it is not. Various of the commentators on his Goodreads page do their best to defend it:

[Dropping Out]: Miller's "problem" was that he hit a grand-slam home-run in Canticle, and he spent the remainder of what must have been a sad and frustrating life trying to get out from under Canticle's shadow. ...

[Jason]: Saint Leibowitz reminded me very much of Herbert's Dune. They are both sprawling novels dealing with the political machinations of both Church and State, and they both center on the manipulations of the mysterious, isolated, less-civilized nomadic peoples whose loyalties will tip the balance of power.

[Doreen]: Oddly enough, I seem to be one of the few people here who enjoyed the sequel much more than its predecessor. I found A Canticle... devoid of much of the human suffering that pervades this book, which questions the conflict between faith and tradition, desire and happiness, and what it means to be a good human being.

Others seem more inclined to tell it like it is:

[Bryn Hammond]: There’s almost no science fiction left. It was much more like reading a (burlesque) historical fiction on the medieval church, muddled up with the American West. Canticle’s concerns with science aren’t pursued, and the post-nuclear-war setting becomes accidental.

[Jon]: The sequel to A Canticle for Leibowitz was thirty years in the making, but unfortunately, Miller seems to have forgotten how to write a novel in those decades. Many of the moral and ethical arguments that made Canticle so brilliant are still present, as is the occasional bit of dry humor, but these are overshadowed by long and drawn-out passages, poor plotting, and a conclusion that seems to have been hastily written the night before the book went to press (the "Wild Horse Woman" from the title, for example, virtually never appears in the novel; I'm still confused as to why her name appears so prominently on the book's spine)

Perhaps the best overall summary comes from Zoe's Human:

Life is too short for books you don't enjoy.

Maybe the fault is mine for trying to read this right after A Canticle for Leibowitz which would be a tough act to follow for anyone (including, apparently, the author who wrote it). Perhaps my expectations were just too high. This started off well enough with a nice premise about loss of faith, but it kind of fizzled after the first two or three chapters.

Or perhaps the fact that the author was suicidally depressed and took his own life before he finished it was a factor. Another author finished it from a reportedly almost complete manuscript, but how complete was it really? And how much did the original author's struggle with mental illness factor in?

The Year's Best Science Fiction Novels (1953)

One of Miller's rarer stories, not included in any of the various collections of his short fiction, is "Izzard and the Membrane." An extra level of confusion is added by the fact that the book above, which I inherited from my father's science fiction collection, is the 1953 UK edition of a book which originally appeared in the USA in 1952. Despite its publication date, then, it actually constitutes The Year's Best Science Fiction Novels 1952, not 1953:

The Year's Best Science Fiction Novels (1952)

The American edition also included an extra story, Arthur C. Clarke's "Seeker of the Sphinx", presumably omitted from the British reprint for copyright reasons.

The reason this bibliographical minutiae seems worth stressing is because "Izzard and the Membrane" is quite a remarkable story, every bit the equal of most of the novellas included in his officially sanctioned collections. Its cold war stereotypes may be a little dated now, but Miller's astonishing intuitions about the possibilities of computer artificial intelligence and the creation of alternate realities are worthy of the creators of Westworld or the Metaverse itself.

So good is it, in fact, that it makes one feel rather curious about some of the other stories I've tried to list below as comprehensively as possible. By my count he wrote 43 stories in all (at least two of which were not SF). Of these 41, a mere fourteen were collected in his final selection The Best of Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1980) - subsequently reprinted under other titles, but without any expansion of the contents.

That leaves at least 26 other stories to read (not counting the two romance stories and a co-authored crime story) from that incredibly productive period of writing between 1951 and 1957. There may well be some duds among them, but it seems hard to believe that only "Izzard" is worthy of resurrection among such a number of pieces published - for the most part - in the top SF journals of the day.

That's the new Walter M. Miller book I'm holding out for: not the last, incomplete, rather depressing Saint Leibowitz. After all, his short stories and short novels were always his strongest work. From the much-anthologised "Crucifixus Etiam," with its unforgettable image of the purgatorial plains of Mars, to ,"Big Joe and the Nth Generation" (aka "It Takes a Thief"), he showed a flair for memorable characterisation and arresting plotlines second to none - not even such celebrated contemporaries as Philip K. Dick and Robert A. Heinlein.

James Blish: A Case of Conscience (1958)

That's not to say that there was anything unprecedented about Miller's trajectory from slam-bang Sci-fi to the subtleties of religious dogma in the apocalypse-haunted 1950s. It wasn't just mainstream fiction which had become obsessed with the ethical dilemmas associated with (mainly Catholic) Christianity. Authors such as Graham Greene, François Mauriac and Evelyn Waugh dominated the bestseller lists, and it seemed for a while there as if the twin blows of Hiroshima and Auschwitz had discredited scientific reductionism for good.

James Blish's A Case of Conscience is a good example - within the strict genre-boundaries of SF - of this type of writing. It could apparently then be taken for granted that monastic orders would accompany any future space-faring expeditions, and that the local religious concerns of this world were bound to find echoes out in the great beyond.

C. S. Lewis: The Cosmic Trilogy (1938-45)

C. S. Lewis's interplanetary trilogy undoubtedly helped to demonstrate the viability of such themes in a genre still dominated by the rationalist assumptions of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Ray Bradbury got in on the act, too, in his story "The Fire Balloons" [aka "In This Sign ..."] included in some editions of his classic Martian Chronicles.

C. S. Lewis: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength (1938, 1943, 1945)

In a way, though, despite his obvious affinity with other such earnest Catholic strivers in the 1950s, the sheer philosophical scope of Miller's Canticle seems to me to have more in common with Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game (1943) than with the likes of Blish, Bradbury or Lewis.

Ray Bradbury: The Fire Balloons (1951)

Its popularity then and since has undoubtedly depended to some extent on its links with other SF apocalypses of the 1950s: George Stewart's Earth Abides (1949), or Philip K. Dick's zany Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965). A Canticle for Leibowitz continues to evade us, though. It has elements of all of these things - Catholic apologia, SF Apocalypse, Dystopian satire - and yet it can't be said to be subsumed entirely by any of them.

George R. Stewart: Earth Abides (1949)

I do hope one day to be able to purchase at least some of the uncollected stories of Walter M. Miller in convenient book form, but there's certainly a strong case for believing that everything significant he had to say was contained in this one, stand-alone masterpiece. His mistake, then - if mistake it was - lay in thinking he could emulate or even surpass it in his final few years.

Walter M. Miller, Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

•


Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1923-1996)

Walter Michael Miller, Jr.
(1923-1996)

Novels:


1. A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
   1. Fiat Homo [aka 'A Canticle for Leibowitz'] (1955)
   2. Fiat Lux [aka 'And the Light is Risen'] (1956)
   3. Fiat Voluntas Tua [aka 'The Last Canticle'] (1957)
   • A Canticle for Leibowitz: A Novel. 1959. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960.
   • A Canticle for Leibowitz. 1959. Corgi Science-Fiction. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1970.
2. [with Terry Bisson] Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (1997)
   • Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. Ed. Terry Bisson. 1997. An Orbit Book. London: Little, Brown and Company (UK), 1998.

Collections:


3. The Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels. Ed. Everett F. Bleiler & T. E. Dikty. London: Grayson & Grayson, 1953.
   1. Izzard and the Membrane, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
   2. … And Then There Were None, by Eric Frank Russell
   3. Flight to Forever, by Poul Anderson
   4. The Hunting Season, by Frank M. Robinson
4. Conditionally Human (1962)
   1. Conditionally Human (1952)
   2. The Darfsteller (1955)
   3. Dark Benediction (1951)
5. The View from the Stars (1965)
   1. Blood Bank (1952)
   2. Dumb Waiter (1952)
   3. Anybody Else Like Me? (1952)
   4. The Big Hunger (1952)
   5. The Will (1954)
   6. Crucifixus Etiam (1953)
   7. I, Dreamer (1953)
   8. Big Joe and the Nth Generation (1952)
   9. You Triflin' Skunk! (1955)
6. The Science Fiction Stories of Walter M. Miller Jr. (1977)
   1. Conditionally Human (1952)
   2. Blood Bank (1952)
   3. Dark Benediction (1951)
   4. Dumb Waiter (1952)
   5. Anybody Else Like Me? (1952)
   6. The Big Hunger (1952)
   7. The Darfsteller (1955)
   8. The Will (1954)
   9. Crucifixus Etiam (1953)
   10. I, Dreamer (1953)
   11. Big Joe and the Nth Generation (1952)
   12. You Triflin' Skunk! (1955)
7. Conditionally Human and Other Stories. 1980. Corgi Science-Fiction. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1982.
   1. Conditionally Human (1952)
   2. Blood Bank (1952)
   3. Dark Benediction (1951)
   4. Dumb Waiter (1952)
   5. Anybody Else Like Me? (1952)
   6. The Big Hunger (1952)
8. The Darfsteller and Other Stories. 1980. Corgi Science-Fiction. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1982.
   1. The Darfsteller (1955)
   2. The Will (1954)
   3. Vengeance for Nikolai (1957)
   4. Crucifixus Etiam (1953)
   5. I, Dreamer (1953)
   6. The Lineman (1957)
   7. Big Joe and the Nth Generation (1952)
   8. You Triflin' Skunk! (1955)
9. Dark Benediction. [aka 'The Best of Walter M. Miller, Jr.', 1980]. SF Masterworks. Gollancz. London: Orion Publishing Group, 2007.
   1. Conditionally Human (1952)
   2. Blood Bank (1952)
   3. Dark Benediction (1951)
   4. Dumb Waiter (1952)
   5. Anybody Else Like Me? (1952)
   6. The Big Hunger (1952)
   7. The Darfsteller (1955)
   8. The Will (1954)
   9. Vengeance for Nikolai (1957)
   10. Crucifixus Etiam (1953)
   11. I, Dreamer (1953)
   12. The Lineman (1957)
   13. Big Joe and the Nth Generation (1952)
   14. You Triflin' Skunk! (1955)
10. Two Worlds of Walter M. Miller (2010)
    1. The Hoofer (1955)
    2. Death of a Spaceman (1954)

Chapbooks:


11. The Hoofer [1955] (2009)
12. Death of a Spaceman [1954] (2009)
13. Way of a Rebel [1954] (2010)
14. Check and Checkmate [1953] (2010)
15. The Ties That Bind [1954] (2010)
16. Conditionally Human [1952] (2016)
17. It Takes a Thief [1952] (2019)

Short Stories & Novellas:

[Included in The Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels (1952);
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959);
Conditionally Human (1962);
The View from the Stars (1965);
The Best of Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1980);
Two Worlds of Walter M. Miller (2010)]


1. MacDoughal's Wife [not SF] (1950)
2. Month of Mary [not SF] (1950)
3. Secret of the Death Dome [novella] (1951)
4. Izzard and the Membrane [novella] (1951)
5. The Soul-Empty Ones [novella] (1951)
6. Dark Benediction [novella] (1951)
7. The Space Witch [novella] (1951)
8. The Song of Vorhu ... for Trumpet and Kettledrum [novella] (1951)
9. The Little Creeps [novella] (1951)
10. The Reluctant Traitor [novella] (1952)
11. Conditionally Human [novella] (1952)
12. Bitter Victory (1952)
13. Dumb Waiter [novella] (1952)
14. Big Joe and the Nth Generation {aka "It Takes a Thief"} (1952)
15. Blood Bank [novella] (1952)
16. Six and Ten Are Johnny [novella] (1952)
17. Let My People Go [novella] (1952)
18. Cold Awakening [novella] (1952)
19. Please Me Plus Three [novella] (1952)
20. No Moon for Me (1952)
21. The Big Hunger (1952)
22. Gravesong (1952)
23. Anybody Else Like Me? {aka "Command Performance"} [novella] (1952)
24. A Family Matter (1952)
25. Check and Checkmate [novella] (1953)
26. Crucifixus Etiam {aka "The Sower Does Not Reap"} (1953)
27. I, Dreamer (1953)
28. The Yokel [novella] (1953)
29. Wolf Pack (1953)
30. The Will (1954)
31. Death of a Spaceman {aka "Memento Homo"} (1954)
32. I Made You (1954)
33. Way of a Rebel (1954)
34. The Ties that Bind [novella] (1954)
35. The Darfsteller [novella] (1955)
36. You Triflin' Skunk! {aka "The Triflin' Man"} (1955)
37. A Canticle for Leibowitz {aka "The First Canticle"} [novella] (1955)
38. The Hoofer (1955)
39. And the Light is Risen [novella] (1956)
40. The Last Canticle [novella] (1957)
41. Vengeance for Nikolai {aka "The Song of Marya"} (1957)
42. [with Lincoln Boone] The Corpse in Your Bed is Me (1957)
43. The Lineman [novella] (1957)

Secondary:


18. David N. Samuelson, "The Lost Canticles of Walter M. Miller, Jr." Science Fiction Studies #8 (Vol 3, part 1) (March 1976) - "Appendix: The Books and Stories of Walter M. Miller, Jr.":
    1. "Secret of the Death Dome," novelette, Amazing (January, 1951; reprinted in Amazing (June, 1966).
    2. "Izzard and the Membrane," novelette, Astounding (May, 1951); anthologized in Everett Bleiler and T.E. Dikty, eds., Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels: 1952 (New York: Frederick Fell, 1952).
    3. "The Soul-Empty Ones," novelette, Astounding (August, 1951).
    4. "Dark Benediction," short novel, Fantastic Adventures (September, 1951); collected in Conditionally Human (1962).
    5. "The Space Witch," novelette, Amazing (November, 1951); reprinted in Amazing (October, 1966).
    6. "The Song of Vorhu ... for Trumpet and Kettledrum," novelette, Thrilling Wonder Stories (December, 1951).
    7. "The Little Creeps," novelette, Amazing (December, 1951); reprinted in Fantastic (May, 1968); anthologized in Milton Lesser, ed., Looking Forward (New York: Beechhurst, 1953).
    8. "The Reluctant Traitor," short novel, Amazing (January, 1952).
    9. "Conditionally Human," novelette, Galaxy (February, 1952); revised and collected in Conditionally Human (1962); anthologized in Everett Bleiler and T.E. Dikty, eds., Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels: 1953 (New York: Frederick Fell, 1953).
    10. "Bitter Victory," short story, IF (March, 1952).
    11. "Dumb Waiter," novelette, Astounding (April, 1952); collected in The View from the Stars (1965); anthologized in Groff Conklin, ed., Science Fiction Thinking Machines (New York: Vanguard, 1954) and Damon Knight, Cities of Wonder (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966).
    12. "It Takes a Thief," short story, IF (May, 1952); collected, as "Big Joe and the Nth Generation," in The View from the Stars (1965).
    13. "Blood Bank," novelette, Astounding (June, 1952); collected in The View from the Stars (1965); anthologized in Martin Greenberg, ed., All About the Future (New York: Gnome Press, 1953).
    14. "Six and Ten are Johnny," novelette, Fantastic (Summer, 1952); reprinted in Fantastic (January, 1966).
    15. "Let My People Go," short novel, IF (July, 1952).
    16. "Cold Awakening," novelette, Astounding (August, 1952).
    17. "Please Me Plus Three," novelette, Other Worlds (August, 1952).
    18. "No Moon for Me," short story, Astounding (September, 1952); anthologized in William Sloane, ed., Space, Space, Space (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1953).
    19. "The Big Hunger," short story, Astounding (October, 1952); collected in The View from the Stars (1965); anthologized in Donald A Wollheim, ed., Prize Science Fiction (New York: McBride, 1953).
    20. "Gravesong," short story, Startling (October, 1952).
    21. "Command Performance," novelette, Galaxy (November, 1952); collected, as "Anybody Else Like Me?" in The View from the Stars (1965); anthologized in Everett Bleiler and T.E. Dikty, eds., The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1953 (New York: Frederick Fell, 1953); Horace Gold, ed., The Second Galaxy Reader (New York: Crown, 1954); and Brian W. Aldiss, ed., Penguin Science Fiction (London: Penguin, 1961).
    22. "A Family Matter," short story, Fantastic Story Magazine (November, 1952).
    23. "Check and Checkmate," novelette, IF (January, 1953).
    24. "Crucifixus Etiam," short story, Astounding (February, 1953); collected in The View from the Stars (1965); anthologized in Everett Bleiler and T.E. Dikty, eds., The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1954 (New York: Frederick Fell, 1954); Judith Merril, ed., Human? (New York: Lion, 1954); Michael Sissons, ed., Asleep in Armageddon (London: Panther, 1962); Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, eds., Spectrum V (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966); and Robert Silverberg, ed., Tomorrow’s Worlds (New York: Meredith, 1969).
    25. "I, Dreamer," short story, Amazing (July, 1953); collected in The View from the Stars (1965).
    26. "The Yokel," novelette, Amazing (September, 1953).
    27. "The Wolf Pack," short story, Fantastic (Oct., 1953); reprinted in Fantastic (May, 1966); anthologized in Judith Merril, ed., Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time (New York: Random House, 1954).
    28. "The Will," short story, Fantastic (February, 1954); reprinted in Fantastic (April, 1969); collected in The View from the Stars (1965); anthologized in T.E. Dikty, ed., The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 1955 (New York: Frederick Fell, 1955).
    29. "Death of a Spaceman," short story, Amazing (March, 1954); reprinted in Amazing (March, 1969); anthologized in William F. Nolan, ed., A Wilderness of Stars (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1971); anthologized as "Memento Homo" in T.E. Dikty, ed., The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 1955 (New York: Frederick Fell, 1955); Robert P. Mills, ed., The Worlds of Science Fiction (New York: Dial Press, 1963); and Laurence M. Janifer, ed., Masters’ Choice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966).
    30. "I Made You," short story, Astounding (March, 1954).
    31. "Way of a Rebel," short story, IF (April, 1954).
    32. "The Ties that Bind," novelette, IF (May, 1954); anthologized in William F. Nolan, ed., A Sea of Space (New York: Bantam, 1970).
    33. "The Darfsteller," short novel, Astounding (January, 1955); collected in Conditionally Human (1962); anthologized in Isaac Asimov, ed., The Hugo Winners (Garden City: Doubleday, 1962).
    34. "The Triflin’ Man," short story, Fantastic Universe (January, 1955); collected as "You Triflin’ Skunk" in The View from the Stars (1965); anthologized in Judith Merril, ed., Galaxy of Ghouls (New York: Lion, 1955).
    35. "A Canticle for Leibowitz," short novel, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F & SF) (April, 1955); revised as part of A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959); anthologized in T.E. Dikty, ed., Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956 (New York: Frederick Fell, 1956); Anthony Boucher, ed., The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, fifth series (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956); and Christopher Cerf, ed., The Vintage Anthology of Science Fantasy (New York: Vintage, 1966).
    36. "The Hoofer," short story, Fantastic Universe (September, 1955); anthologized in Judith Merril, ed., S_F: The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy (New York: Dell, 1956), and S-F: The Best of the Best (New York: Dell, 1968).
    37. "And the Light is Risen," short novel, F & SF (August, 1956); revised as part of A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959).
    38. "The Last Canticle," short novel, F & SF (February, 1957); revised as part of A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959).
    39. "Vengeance for Nikolai," short story, Venture (March, 1957); anthologized in Joseph Ferman, ed., No Limits (New York: Ballantine, 1958).
    40. "The Corpse in Your Bed is Me," short story co-authored by Lincoln Boone, Venture (May, 1957).
    41. "The Lineman," short novel, F & SF (August, 1957); anthologized in William F. Nolan, ed., A Wilderness of Stars (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1971).

Walter M. Miller, Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

•

Doubting Thomases (3): R. S. Thomas

R. S. Thomas (1913-2000)

When I was in the third form at school - I guess that would be Year 9 in the new nomenclature - we used to have our French lessons in a classroom shared with an English teacher.

There were a series of posters around the wall which had been created by that 'other' class (whom we never met, though I came to envy them intensely). What with one thing and another, I spent an awful lot of time in class staring at these posters. They contained a series of short pithy statements, written out with bright crayon illustrations. I never consciously memorised any of them, but I can still recall some of those inscriptions, as well as the pictures that accompanied them:

They said:
Take hold of the nettle
seize it with both hands
and I did
and it stung me.

I don't know where that comes from, and Google has provided me with no assistance. Perhaps it was the poster-maker's own inspiration. A bit dark, maybe, but certainly memorable. Then there was:

And I thought about books.
And for the first time I realized
that a man was behind each one of the books.
A man had to think them up.
A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper.
And I'd never even thought that thought before.

That one seemed a bit banal to me at the time (not to mention, now, a bit sexist). It wasn't till some time afterwards that I ran across it while reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and suddenly realised that it'd had been a quote from him all along. All at once that made it sound much more pithy to me, little snob that I was.

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

The other wonderful thing I discovered in that first reading of Bradbury's masterpiece was the page where the narrator reads out the last two stanzas of "Dover Beach" to his depressed, suicidal wife and a couple of her friends:

"Dover Beach.” His mouth was numb.

“Now read in a nice clear voice and go slow.”

The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and him waiting for Mrs. Phelps to stop straightening her dress hem and Mrs. Bowles to take her fingers away from her hair. Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line, and his voice went out across the desert, into the whiteness, and around the three sitting women there in the great hot emptiness.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

The chairs creaked under the three women, Montag finished it out:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

That poem completely transfixed me at the time. I didn't know it was by Matthew Arnold, or even who Matthew Arnold was. I took good care to find out after that, though.

Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach (1851)

The last of the three sets of poster texts which have stayed with me from that classroom is the only one that was clearly attributed to an author: R. S. Thomas. Just a few phrases stayed with me from that rather fierce poem until I looked it up again just now. To give you an idea of the tricks memory plays, here are the few bits I remembered:

And he said I will make the poem and I will make it now ... so he took paper and pen, the mind's cartridge ... while the spent hearts smoked in its wake ...

And here's the poem itself, from the volume Tares (1961). I don't know if the title was included on the poster. I suspect not:

The Maker

So he said then: I will make the poem,
I will make it now. He took pencil,
The mind's cartridge, and blank paper,
And drilled his thoughts to the slow beat

Of the blood's drum, and there it formed,
On the white surface and went marching
Onward through time while the spent cities
And dry hearts smoked in its wake.

R. S Thomas: Collected Poems 1945-1990 (1993): 122.

I can't tell you how satisfying it is to see that poem again after all these years, and to correct all the mistakes my memory made in recalling it.

I didn't particularly care for the poem at the time, mind you. It didn't rhyme, which was a big deal to me then. The arrogance of it repelled me, as well as what seemed the impossible self-confidence of those opening lines: claiming to know what your poem will be before you've even written it down.

None of that really mattered, though. That was just mind-chatter. What mattered was the fact that I'd finally seen that a poem could repel you and transfix you at the same time: that it could work on you whether you wanted it to or not. I assumed its author, this 'R. S. Thomas' I knew nothing else about, must be a most fearsome person, and it wasn't till years afterwards that I ventured to read any more of his work.

What I read bore no resemblance to the poem I remembered from the classroom, though. To be honest, in its violence and single-mindedness, it sounded more like Ted Hughes than the mild-mannered Welsh clergyman R. S. Thomas turned out to be. Until I read his autobiography, that is.

R. S. Thomas: Autobiographies (1997)

Perhaps I should say "Autobiographies": there are four such works collected in the volume above, all of them written in the Welsh he so painstakingly learned as an adult, but was - much to his chagrin - never able to compose poems in:

For me, being a poet is a full-time job, and although the muse may languish as one grows older, there is a kind of duty upon you to persevere in perfecting your craft, and to secure an answer, though poetry, to some of the great questions of life. Some are still surprised that I write my poems in English, as if it were a matter of choice. I have said many times that I was thirty before I started learning Welsh in earnest. English (my mother tongue, remember) was long since rooted in me, and it is from the depth of his being that poet draws his poetry. If I believed that I could satisfy myself by composing poetry in Welsh, I would so so. But I learned many years ago, with sorrow, that it was not possible. ... But be that as it may, Llŷn is not an escape, but a peninsula where I can be inward with all the tension of our age.
[Blwyddyn yn Llŷn / A Year in Llyn (1990): 151]

I hadn't really thought about that experience of staring at those texts and wishing that I was in that class, where you might be encouraged to create your own poster for your own quotation for quite a few years. A couple of months ago I was talking to Graham Lindsay, though, and he told me about an experience he had as a schoolboy when a relieving teacher gave their class Dylan Thomas's "Poem in October" (plus, I think, "Fern Hill" - which was also extensively excerpted from in the wall texts in my own classroom).

Reading Thomas for the first time was an extraordinary experience for him, and yet he was far too tongue-tied to tell the teacher about it when back at school. No doubt that teacher presumed that his little poetry experiment had been a complete failure. You never know, though. I'm sure that the teacher who got his or her class to create all those posters had no idea that anyone besides them actually read them, let alone was moved, intrigued, provoked by them to such a degree.

It must have been shortly after that that I started to write my own first painfully derivative, clumsily rhymed poems, full of archaic diction and mythological references, just like the nineteenth-century poets who were my models.

There are a lot of striking passages in R. S. Thomas's autobiography:

Today, when I was out in Pen-y-cil and Parwyd, as I was looking down the precipice, there came the old urge to leap down. Almost everyone has experienced it. There is a psychological explanation most probably, but not everyone has a steady enough head to be able to look down, let alone climb down.
[Blwyddyn yn Llŷn / A Year in Llyn (1990): 123]

That one certainly struck a chord. Someone once asked me why I wrote poetry, and I replied: 'To come up with reasons for wanting to stay alive." That must have sounded like a piece of pretentious posing to her, but I'm afraid it was nothing but the strictest truth. It runs in the family, I'm sorry to say.

Then there's this bit:

In 1938 came the awakening .. to a boy with ideals to uphold, the situation was clear enough: Christ was a pacifist, but not so the Church established in his name ... Meanwhile ... under the influence of the beautiful and exciting country to the west he continued to write poetry - tender, innocent lyrics in the manner of the Georgian poets, because that was the background to his reading among the poets. Edward Thomas was one of his favourites and because the latter had written about the countryside, the budding poet tried to imitate him. The more 'modern ' English poets had not yet broken though to his inner world to shatter the unreal dreams that dwelled there. And, alas, the Welsh poets did not exist for him. Who was to blame? The desire to write was within him, but because of the nature of his education and his background, he could only think in terms of the English language.
[Neb /No-one (1985): 44-45].

Those early religious struggles were more quickly resolved in my case, but those problems with 'modernity' took a long time to filter through into my writing, too. For his 1938, put my 1975. I can now see that that poem of his was one of the vehicles of transformation, but I wasn't really aware of it until just now.

Here's a list of the books of his I own:

R. S. Thomas: Collected Later Poems: 1988-2000 (2003)

Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-2000)

Poetry:

Thomas, R. S. Selected Poems, 1946-1968. 1973. Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd. London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1974.

Thomas, R. S. Between Here and Now: Poems. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1981.

Thomas, R. S. Collected Poems 1945-1990. 1993. London: Phoenix Giant, 1996.

Thomas, R. S. Collected Later Poems 1988-2000. 2003. Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2004.

Thomas, R. S. Uncollected Poems. Ed. Tony Brown & Jason Walford Davies. Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2013.

Prose:

Thomas, R. S. Autobiographies: Former Paths / The Creative Writer's Suicide / No-one / A Year in Llŷn. 1972, 1977, 1985, 1990. Trans. Jason Walford Davies. 1997. A Phoenix Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd., 1998.

R. S. Thomas: Uncollected Poems (2013)

Few possessions: a chair,
a table, a bed
to say my prayers by,
and, gathered from the shore,
the bone-like, crossed sticks
proving that nature
acknowledges the Crucifixion.
All night I am at
a window not too small
to be frame to the stars
that are no further off
than the city lights
I have rejected. ...

"At the End"

R. S Thomas