Bradbury Beyond Apollo by Jonathan Eller
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Bradbury Beyond Apollo
By Jonathan R. Eller
University of Illinois Press, 2020
The late science fiction writer Ray Bradbury was more interesting than this final volume of his biographical trilogy would have you believe—which isn’t entirely the fault of its author, Jonathan R. Eller, because the book is definitely fastidious in the sense that Bradbury’s correspondence and daybook have been thumbed and studied with care. We know exactly where he was on this or that particular day in 1974. We know that he and Katherine Hepburn enjoyed their lunch quite a bit. But the book is also incredibly boring and upsetting in a way that’s mostly the biographer’s fault but also partially Bradbury’s.
It’s Bradbury’s fault in the sense that he squandered what might have been several decades of fertile and developing literary output by writing, instead, for the screen and the stage, writing scripts for museum and planetarium exhibits, theme park rides, the lecture circuit. He also spent his entire career obsessively revisiting two of his own texts, his beautiful and monolithic story collection The Martian Chronicles and his dystopic novel Fahrenheit 451, trying to get them adapted here and there for the big screen or small. A reader is likely to be exhausted just by the frequency with which, Oh hey!, we’re talking about Chronicles again.
Another meeting.
Another treatment.
I almost broke my Kindle when Bradbury gets to work on a new Fahrenheit screenplay in his 80s.
What’s worse: almost none of Bradbury’s extra-literary projects over the last forty years of his life ever came to fruition.
If the issue here were simply that Bradbury’d swapped his story-writing cap for screenwriting, fine, his biography could explore the differences between those industries and there’d be drama and insight and we’d have a good story. The typical tragicomedy of a fiction writer who goes from being a king in one industry to a squire in the next.
But what we have here in Eller’s account of Bradbury’s Hollywood years is a grocery list of meetings. Pitches. Lunches. Revisions. Some producer or actor or director is interested in working with Bradbury, so they go and discuss the project over lunch, the gears turn for a while and then nothing comes of it.
This happens about forty times and then he dies.
Animosity is rare and sex is non-existent and we hear almost nothing, nothing, about money. If you’re reading Eller’s biography on a device that allows you to scan the text for certain phrases, I invite you to type “$” or “dollars” into the search bar and behold the nothing.
What’s missing, in other words, is conflict, the essence of good storytelling—and of course Eller’s walking into this milieu of the “Hollywood story” at a considerable disadvantage because, if you’re taking as your subject a literary workhorse who’s also a dedicated father and husband, there probably won’t be much drama to report on.
That’s to be expected.
But to depict the man as being virtually devoid of internal conflict attests not just the biographer’s betrayal of his subject but his sheer exhaustion with it—a boredom that manifests most sharply in the final chapters when, for instance, we read this about a pivotal moment in Bradbury’s life:
“These plans [for an appearance at a book fair], and many others, were altered forever when Bradbury suffered a stroke in the fall of 1999. All of his faculties returned quickly, but he never fully overcame the physical damage.”
That’s it.
The subject of his biography has a stroke, we’re told that the consequences haunted him for the rest of his life, and the whole event is accorded two sentences. The stroke is made to seem inconsequential, but its description is ominous, and the consequences of that stroke pop up again over the final pages.
An even more devastating trauma followed the stroke. Bradbury’s wife Maggie, whom he met in 1946, dies in 2003. After a mournful paragraph recounting their courtship, Eller gives us this:
She was the center of the household, managing six complicated lives with wisdom and discipline. But she was also inward-turning, and there was nothing she liked better than to curl up with a good book…She read and critiqued [Bradbury’s] books, and he valued her opinion in ways that the public would never know. There were tensions and sometimes long silences, but love was never questioned. He missed her dearly.
End of paragraph.
End of section.
What does “inward-turning” mean? Is it a euphemism for “cold” or “shy”? Or both? “[N]othing she liked better than to curl up with a good book” is a cliché so exhausted it’s been banished from even online dating profiles, and to say that Bradbury “valued her opinion in ways the public would never know” is just as lazy a turn of phrase, except it’s contemptibly lazy, because it is precisely Jonathan R. Eller’s job, as Bradbury’s biographer, to let the public know how much he valued her opinion. And what were these “long silences”? How long were they? Why weren’t they discussed? How could prolonged marital tension, particularly in the form of contemptuous silence, be overlooked as a contributing factor to Bradbury’s artistic output—and yet, when Bradbury goes out for lunch with director Federico Fellini, we hear about everything but the dessert?
Such a vague and fleeting eulogy for Maggie, though frustrating in concept, is befitting of the role she plays in Eller’s book. She might appear in the narrative eight or nine times, over hundreds of pages, which is about twice as often as Bradbury’s children appear (it wasn’t until I Googled him, halfway into the biography, that I realized he had more than one). We’re made to think that Bradbury was more upset by the death of his dearly beloved but seldom-seen friend, Federico Fellini, than he was by the death of his wife—which invites at least two interesting questions, neither of which need to be spelled out, and neither of which Eller deigns to raise.
We see Bradbury darting around among so many tasks in the 1970s and ‘80s, we get the impression he wasn’t home very often. Why is that? Did he hate his family? Probably not, but how are we to know? Did he take all these jobs because he needed money? If so, why did he need money? Was he a spendthrift? Was his wife? Then again, Bradbury was born in 1920 and might have fostered a Depression Era sensibility about money. Is it possible he hoarded cash, paranoid about falling back into the poverty of his youth?
Eller doesn’t say a single word about it.
This paucity of detail or insight feels at least partly like the portrait of a biographer just trying to be finished with his book, struggling not to end every chapter with “yadda yadda” or “screw Flanders.” But, every now and then, there’s a cutting remark that seems to suggest contempt for his subject.
Some context: One thing you’ll know if you’ve ever perused Ray Bradbury interviews and lectures on YouTube (which I strongly encourage, particularly this one) is that he was charismatic and sweet and energetic and loud, but he didn’t speak about science or space travel (his chief subjects) with anything like technological authority. He was, as Eller charitably puts it, a “motivational” speaker on the subject of space exploration. And there’s a strange relationship, throughout the book, concerning Eller’s willingness to talk about the fact that, as concerned science, Bradbury didn’t really know what he was talking about.
Consider this passage toward the end:
In early 1994, Bradbury was able to revisit the search for other worlds in ways that he was not free to do when he wrote his first speculative article for Life magazine in 1960. In the earlier article, ‘A Serious Search for Weird Worlds,’ he was lumbered by research involving radio telescopes and astronomical measurements that he couldn’t even pretend to understand.
Those last six words are kinda spicy compared to his other appraisals of Bradbury’s shortcomings—which are always couched with apology, or a deferral of responsibility. Also, why invoke the 1960 article out of nowhere? It sounds like the spiteful dredging-up of past embarrassments that you hear among miserable spouses, contractually shackled over a dinner table, eager for release. If the book is emotionally evocative it’s in the way that we can feel Eller’s contractual bracelets cutting into our own wrists too.
When discussing Bradbury’s “compulsion to orchestrate” all of his stories’ film adaptations, a compulsion that compels him to shoot off petulant letters about script changes, Eller describes it as an “understandable lack of perspective” (italics mine).
Earlier, he addresses Bradbury’s false claim that, in order to save the film adaptation of Something Wicked This Way Comes, he ordered Disney to do away with the final reel and then he himself stepped in as director, re-hired the actors, fired the composer, and re-shot the final scenes singlehandedly.
Of these false claims, Eller writes that “Bradbury’s…revisionist memory may have been due in large part to his almost visceral desire to downplay any friction in his relationship with Disney.”
No it wasn’t. He lied. He lied the way that a child lies. A lie so huge and obvious it would be embarrassing for his listener to call him out on it.
When Bradbury is hired to write a science-based monologue about the origins of the universe, he delivers flowery prose about the cosmos “birthing itself”. It’s poetic, and it’s nice, but his employers want something science-based. When they ask him to please omit such language, as it risks fostering pseudo-scientific or spiritual ideas about the creation of the world, Bradbury quits the gig, and Eller says that people should know better than to hire a best-selling science fiction personality to write about science (because Bradbury was, at this point, more than just a writer of science fiction; he was a mascot, a figurehead, a delightful and winning TV personality and public speaker; he was, professionally, Ray Bradbury, a personality).
The idea is that people should know better than to ask Mr. Bradbury to write about something that, presumably, “he couldn’t even pretend to understand.”
This book is extremely frustrating for a fan of Bradbury’s work who sees in his life the markers of internal conflict. Or at least a multifaceted personality. Bradbury was whimsical, he loved children and childhood and imagination, and one would think this is an element in his stubbornness, an obstinance that seems at times to border on tantrums when he doesn’t get his way. A vocabulary whose four-letter barbs are seldom sharper than “darn/damn” and “heck/hell”, yet who apparently harbored a capacity for furious outrage.
Eller’s approach here is that of the reporter. He seldom draws thematic connections and seems to take as his responsibility nothing more than the reporting of innocent facts: what Bradbury was working on at a given time, where he was, the germination of certain projects. It’s hard to quarrel about the job he does in that respect. The book is studious, and if it were a grad student’s thesis you might give a thumbs up. But literary biography isn’t about giving an author an alibi to prove he was nowhere near Oakland at the time of the assault; it’s to peel back layers about the person behind the texts so that we might, by extension, discover new layers to the text. In some heroic instances, it can have a Lazarus effect..
Eller, unfortunately, does neither for Bradbury.
This concluding biography will be of no interest to anybody who isn’t already on board with Bradbury’s work, and therein resides the tragedy of such a huge project. This could have been a call to reexamine Bradbury’s work in light of new discoveries about his character. It feels, instead, like another nail in his coffin. A suggestion that his life, internal and otherwise, was just as dry and dusty as the curricula on which his name is still featured.
For now, at least.
—Alex Sorondo is a writer and film critic living in Miami and the host of the Thousand Movie Project. His fiction has been published in First Inkling Magazine and Jai-Alai Magazine.