A LETTER FROM MARS

 

Fifty years ago, today, RAY BRADBURY, visionary American writer of fantasy and sci-fi classics – think The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 – sat down at his typewriter in Beverly Hills and replied to a fan-letter from a 25-year-old guy in Britain who had sent him some provoking questions about a mutual idol – Walt Disney...

 

 

 

 

 

This remarkable letter was to be the beginning of a wonderful friendship that would last for almost 40 years and only ended with Ray’s death in 2012. 

 

Only a few days before he died, I received – by email, via his daughter, Zee, who latterly served as his amanuensis – a final missive…

 

 

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Dear Brian,

 

Thanks for your wonderful note; it's always great to hear from you.

 

Zee read your email to me and I cannot believe what you and David have to go through. [We had to vacate our flat for a year during repairs to the building] 

 

Of course, now that you've had to dig through all your treasures, perhaps we should get you two here to take care of this out-of-control homestead of mine!!!! I love this old house of mine and even if I didn't, I think I'd be stuck here because there's just so much stuff.

 

I'm glad to hear of your new book and I do hope you'll send me a copy of it when it comes out.

 

I think Zee told you that I had been in the hospital, but this old Martian is doing fine, so don't you worry.

 

I send you and David much love,

 

Ray

 

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My discovery, in my early teens, of the extraordinary worlds of Ray Bradbury was a fiery baptism in the waters of metaphor and simile, in the rip-tide of allusions and illusions, in the great wave of allegory and analogy. 

 

His books were like gathering the Golden Apples of the Sun; getting drunk on Dandelion Wine in the shade of the Halloween Tree in the October Country; or finding a prescription for a Medicine for Melancholy whenever Something Wicked This Way Comes.

 

Our correspondence and, later, our meetings in London, California and Florida, were treasured like the rarest and richest gifts stolen from a dragon-horde or from seemingly commonplace pebbles and shells found shimmering along new-washed shoreline in the first light of dawn.

 

To engage with Ray on any topic of conversation was nothing short of thrilling: invigorating, enlightening, challenging and inspiring. Never more so than when talk turned to shared passions and obsessions. 

 

Cue a topic; any one: Disney (especially Fantasia and the wonders of Disneyland); dinosaurs and robots; Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol; comic books (Flash Gordon, John Carter of Mars and the ‘pulp poets’ of the ‘fifties); cinematic classics (The Phantom of the Opera, Citizen Kane and La Strada); the monsters of moviedom (from King Kong to the beasts of Ray Harryhausen); Hollywood’s funny men (Stan and Ollie, Buster Keaton and Chaplin); artists (especially Piranesi, Eyvind Earle and, his own frequent illustrator, Joe Mugnani) and then more Disney and so much more of anything and everything.

 

Ray became my mentor and critic, my goad and guide, source of inspiration and spur to my imagination; but he was also ever the challenger to my preconceptions and debunker of my hypocrisies. We talked about joys and sorrows, origins and destinations, risings and fallings, dreams and nightmare, realities and masquerades, every shade of love, hate and whatever lay between. 

 

Our thirty-eight years of friendship was, as I grew up and he grew older, a love-affair of ponderings and speculations. I miss him as much today, as I did twelve years ago, when that ‘Old Martian’ (as he called himself in his last email) set off on his last great exploration of the Great Unknown that, again and again, he celebrated throughout his life…

LETERS FROM THE MARTIAN CHRONICLER

 

I am very honoured to be among recipients of letters included in Remembrance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury, edited by Jonathan R. Eller; recipients such as Grahame Greene, Arthur C. Clark, Federico Fellini, Gore Vidal, Carl Sandburg, Francois Truffaut and Bertrand Russell.

 

I first exchanged letters with Ray in 1974 and we continued to write to one another and, later meet up in London and L.A., until his death 38 years later. That first letter of Ray's, in response to an enquiry from a supremely confident 25-year-old admirer, was a small but exquisite masterpiece: a fireworks display of words, thoughts and images: an explosion of stimulating ideas, questions and challenges. Over twice my age and an international literary superstar, he replied as if to an equal with such vigorous engagement and indulgent charm that, however unlikely it seems to me now, could only ever be read as an invitation to begin a friendship...

 

What I couldn't have known was that it would be a friendship would bring me, across nearly four decades, letters, notes, postcards and doodles, an annual Christmas poem (and, no surprise, zany Halloween greetings); articles, cuttings and clippings; play-scripts and hand-bills; signed books and an endorsement for the cover one of my books – and an opportunity to dramatise The Illustrated Man and more than half-a-dozen of his short stories for radio.

 

The letter itself and two of my mine to Ray (which I hadn't seen since I wrote them!) are chiefly concerned with a conversation about Walt Disney's use in his theme-parks of 'Audio-Animatronic' technology – or, to put it in non-Disney speak, 'robots'! It seems that, half-a-century ago, we were already debating the pros and cons of what we would now refer to as 'AI': Ray, obviously and unashamedly 'pro'; me anxiously, 'con'. 

 

In a few months time it will be fifty years since that wonderful letter arrived and almost twelve years since Ray's death and yet I remain as moved and eternally grateful to have received it, not just for the content, but for all the memories of which it was but the first...