New Ray Bradbury Review Number 4 (2015)

Jonathan Eller

Description

Each previous The New Ray Bradbury Review, prepared and edited by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, examines the impact of Bradbury's writings on American culture and his legacy as one of the master storytellers of his time. The late Ray Bradbury's metaphorrich imagination led to a prolific and highly influential career spanning seven decades, but it also left a decades-long field of deferred fragmentary fictions and story ideas that would remain unfulfilled creations. For Number 4, William F. Touponce, founding editor emeritus of the Review, has gathered and introduced fascinating examples of story ideas, brief story openings and endings, and extended story openings that will forever remain dreams deferred. The fragments presented in this issue illustrate Bradbury's progressive stages of creativity during story composition, and to that end some of the physical elements of presentation are preserved in layout. The selections are followed by a list of recent discoveries that supplement the comprehensive checklist of known fragments included in previous editions of the Review. Number 4 concludes with Jonathan Eller's "Fragmentary Futures," a survey of Bradbury's surviving preliminary outlines and projected timetables for future books-tenuous documents that convey a sense of the instability lurking beneath Bradbury's solid and enduring achievements as a masterful teller of tales. Number 4 of the Review completes the all-archival presentation begun with Number 3, which focused on the thematic range of the surviving fragments. The story openings presented in Number 4 reveal the hidden tension between Bradbury's subconscious inspirations and the stifling effects of his own self-conscious thoughts- the more logical thought patterns that he desperately tried to hold at bay during the few hours it would take him to complete an initial draft. Time and again, rational thought extinguished the initial subconscious upwelling of character and scene, causing him to set these fragments aside for a day that never came. The New Ray Bradbury Review and the multivolume Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury are the primary publications of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, the major archive of Bradbury's writings located at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI).

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• USA
• English
• États-Unis
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 22 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781631011665
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE NEW RAY BRADBURY REVIEW
Number 4 (2015) Edited by Jonathan R. Eller

The Kent State University Press
KENT, OHIO
EDITORIAL STAFF J ONATHAN R. E LLER Editor R OBIN C ONDON Associate Editor J OSEPH D. K APOSTA Associate Editor D AVID S PIECH Production Editor M ATTIE H ENSLEY Research Associate
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD D ONN A LBRIGHT Pratt Institute J EFFREY K AHAN University of La Verne S ARAH L AWALL University of Massachusetts P HIL N ICHOLS University of Wolverhampton
THE NEW RAY BRADBURY REVIEW
Number 4 (2015)
CONTENTS
Editor’s Preface: Blind Vitality
J ONATHAN R. E LLER
Introduction: Editing Bradbury’s Story Openings
W ILLIAM F. T OUPONCE
Figure One—Twaddle
From the Archives: A Selection of Ray Bradbury’s Fragments
E DITED BY W ILLIAM F. T OUPONCE
Part One: Story Ideas
1 MY DAUGHTERS’ LIVES
2 THE MOUNTING PINS
3 THE BALANCING MACHINE
4 RICHARD THE CHICKEN-HEARTED
5 THE SOUND OF WINGS
6 THE MAN WHO RETURNED EACH DAY
7 THE EXPERIMENT
8 SPACE COLLISION
9 THE WOMAN OF A THOUSAND LIVES or THE TRAVELLER
10 THE MINSTRELS
11 MOORL
12 There Was a Castle Upon
13 THE BUTCHER, THE BAKER, THE CANDLESTICK MAKER
14 THE CHOCOLATE PARTY
15 THE EARTHEN CYCLE
16 DARK IS THE NAME
17 THE DARK YEARS
Figure Two—The Chocolate Party
Part Two: Fragments: Story Openings and Endings
1 ADDRESSEE DECEASED
2 THE DIGGERS
3 SOMETHING TO TELL AND NO WAY TO TELL IT
4 THE DAY EVERYTHING BEGAN TO HAPPEN
5 THE NET
6 [“Shut up, you!”]
7 THE ALTAR
8 THE LONG WAY HOME
9 THE GARGOYLE
10 HOBNAILS RETREAT
11 ANOTHER LOVE STORY
12 APOLLO/ADONIS TRANSCENDENT
13 DEAD BUT NOT BURIED
14 THE ATTIC
Figure Three—Coming up the road
Part Three: Fragments: Extended Story Openings
1 A BREATH OF AIR
2 A BREATH OF FIRE
3 “A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY”
4 AS FRIEND REMEMBERED NOT
5 AN EVIL MAN HAS AN EASY JOB
6 AN OLD STORY BUT NEW
7 THE ARMS OF THE VENUS DE MILO
8 BACKWARD O BACKWARD TURN TIME IN THY FLIGHT
9 BEEK’S MOTHER-IN-LAW
10 BLESSED ARE THE CHILDREN
11 CAMERA OBSCURA
12 CAPTAIN NEMO, TO YOU !
13 ATTIC
14 THE ATTIC
15 THE BIRDS
16 CHIMNEY SWEEP
17 WITH A DOOR LIKE A SUMMER SKY
Figure Four—Colored windows
Figure Five—Conscience!
The Albright Collection: Supplementary Fragments List
J OSEPH D. K APOSTA
Fragmentary Futures: Bradbury’s Illustrated Man Outlines—and Beyond
J ONATHAN R. E LLER
Copyright © 2015 by The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Address permissions requests to: The Kent State University Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions, PO Box 5190, Kent, OH 44242-0001.
Story fragments and illustrations are copyright © 2015 by The Ray Bradbury Living Trust and are reprinted with the permission of the Ray Bradbury Living Trust and Don Congdon Associates, Inc. These fragments and illustrations may not be quoted, reproduced, used or adapted in any way without the permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. and the Ray Bradbury Living Trust.
ISBN 978-1-60635-253-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
To order call 800-247-6553 or order online at www.kentstateuniversitypress.com .
The New Ray Bradbury Review is edited by Jonathan R. Eller at The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, Institute for American Thought, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, 902 E. New York Street, ES 0010, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202, and published periodically by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242. The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies accepts no responsibility for statements of fact or opinion made by contributors.
Send inquiries and submissions to Jonathan Eller, Director, The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at [e-mail] . Submissions to The New Ray Bradbury Review should be typed and double-spaced in 12-point Times on letter-sized paper. Electronic submissions on disk or via e-mail must be in Microsoft Word. If photographs, diagrams, or other graphic material accompany the document, include each in a file separate from the text or send them as individual e-mail attachments. Scanned greyscale images must be in TIFF format at 300 dpi or higher resolution; line images should be in TIFF format at 1200 dpi or higher resolution. Any material owned by third parties must be accompanied by complete copyright information for proper acknowledgment. Authors are required to obtain written permission from the rights holder(s) of such material submitted for inclusion in The New Ray Bradbury Review.
The cover illustration, Ray Bradbury’s “Mixed Metaphors” (1997), is used with permission of the estate of Ray Bradbury and Don Congdon Associates, Inc. This drawing may not be adapted, copied, stored, or published in any format without the permission of the author’s agents and Executor.
Editor’s Preface
BLIND VITALITY
“No memory wishes to be lost. These special children of the senses merely wait to be born.” This observation, taken from Bradbury’s unpublished 1993 essay “Dry Spell, Arizona,” frames his gentle reminder that all writers must be patient. He would always be patient with his own Muse, relying on mysterious upwellings from what he sometimes called “the old Subcon” to spark an unexpected blaze of creativity. His chipped and battered 1950s clipboard, bearing a series of self-directed admonitions typed on torn paper labels, includes a template for the method he devised early in his career to sustain each blaze. “Remember Every Week: To Throw things on Paper with Great Vigor and Blind Vitality, to See what Will happen In the Explosions That Follow! To Hell With Thinking! Do!”
Bradbury’s Blind Vitality resulted in a prolific and highly influential seven-decade career, but it also left a decades-long debris field of fragmentary works and unfulfilled idea notes that Donn Albright, Ray Bradbury’s longtime friend and principal bibliographer, painstakingly pulled together and preserved. William F. Touponce, founding editor of The New Ray Bradbury Review , traced the development of many themes across a wide range of these fragments, and presented a groundbreaking thematic sequence of Bradbury fragments in the third issue of the Review. Dr. Touponce, now professor emeritus, has made my job as his successor infinitely easier by bringing together—and writing an introduction for—another group of fragments that further extends our understanding of Bradbury’s creativity and his process of composition.
It’s well worth noting in this preface that Bill Touponce’s contributions to Bradbury studies (and to the comparative study of authorship and literary genres in general) extend well beyond the pages of the Review; since retiring, he has authored Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys (Scarecrow, 2013). I’m also deeply grateful to Bill for his service and vision as cofounder and first director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, and as founding general editor for The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury , a multivolume critical edition published, like the Review , by The Kent State University Press. I look forward to Bill’s continuing good counsel and friendship in the coming years.
The fragments that he has gathered and introduced for this fourth issue of The New Ray Bradbury Review are presented in three categories: (1) story ideas, (2) story openings and endings, and (3) extended story openings. Because this issue is a companion to the third, the fragments are followed by associate editor Joseph D. Kaposta’s listing of new fragments added to the Albright Collection since the comprehensive fragments compilation published in issue three. Ray Bradbury’s bequest of his remaining papers to Donn Albright, and Donn’s subsequent gift of many of these papers and books to the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies following Mr. Bradbury’s passing, has resulted in the discovery of the pages described in the new fragments listing. The issue concludes with my essay “Fragmentary Futures,” a survey of the evolving book outlines and future book timelines that share much of the Blind Vitality evident in the story fragments themselves.
The fragments presented in this issue illustrate Bradbury’s progressive stages of creativity during story composition, and to that end some of the physical elements of presentation are preserved in layout. Bradbury’s in-line or interlineated revisions are indicated by carets inserted before and after the revision, and his cancellations are presented as strikethrough text. Spelling and capitalization are silently regularized unless they represent the author’s intent or preferred usage. Bradbury composed almost exclusively in typescript, but his fragments contain occasional titles, comments, or brief textual passages in his hand; these holograph passages are presented in italic type. Typed words that Bradbury underscored to show emphasis or to indicate a title are presented in their original underlined form. This convention prevents confusion with the presentation of Bradbury’s handwritten passages, but it also combines with the other conventions described above to preserve the “work-in-progress” quality of these unfinished stories. The overall effect is not intended as facsimile or even quasi-facsimile presentation, but is intended to impart the preliminary flavor of the fragments as Bradbury left them, so many years ago.
“Better to try for a swift and exciting first draft in one day, than to dawdle along the way and risk being intellectual about a process as simple and basic as a heartbeat.” This core reflection on his composing process, buried within his lengthy 1964 Show magazine interview, barely hints at the hidden consequences for a writer like Bradbury—literally thousands of pages of story ideas and story openings where self-conscious rational thought extinguished the subcons