Photo of Ray Bradbury and Martin Landau at the Fairmont Santa Monica
by Bob Hershon
Bob
It’s funny how parents, and schools, discouraged fantasizing and daydreaming among children when it might often be put to a constructive use.
Ray
Yes, I’ve often wondered about that, where it got started. I don’t understand not respecting imagination and fantasy, but I’ve seen it in a lot of librarians and a lot of teachers over the years. Not as much as recently. I think when I was younger; it was looked down upon more. When I used to travel across the country from Illinois to Tucson or to California; I’d rush into the nearest library as soon as the car stopped each night in the local “bungalow court.” (That ‘s what they were called, not motels, “bungalow courts”—a dollar a night for four people) I’d rush to the nearest library to see if John Carter was there, or Tarzan was there, or the Oz books were there and they never were. They weren’t allowed on the library shelves. That’ s a variety of book burning, isn’t it, when you don’t buy a book? That’s not true for the whole country, but in most of the libraries that I went in the librarian would say, “Oh, no that ‘s bad for you, that’s make-believe, that’s very bad, it will turn your brain to mush .” And a lot of intellectuals still believe that, I find. Among a lot of modern so-called liberal parents who are afraid of those subjects, they want their kids to be keyed into nothing but fact.
“Facts are good for you”. Well, that’s not true. It’s what you do with the facts. There’s a lot of facts in me, but it’s the way I handle them that makes me special.
Bob:
Yes, if you could ever look at the real facts of life, everything would be upside-down and what seems solid would consist of spaces separating molecules.
Ray:
Yeah ….which facts are we talking about? We all have to die someday and we all do it differently .Some people do it bravely, some people do it in a cowardly fashion, other people are bored. There are different kinds of ways of taking age and sickness and death. So the facts are the same. You give the same fact to one person, and they will turn it into a silk purse.
Bob:
You also have had a lot of your books or stories turned into films or into the theater. Were you satisfied with Fahrenheit 451 and did you have any part in putting that on the screen?
Ray:
He wanted me to do the screenplay and I had just done a stage version of it and I was exhausted with the topic and I just couldn’t do it. And I told him, “If I try to do this for you, I will do a bad job. So, I trust you, you do it with your adapter and we’ll see what happens. “Well, it turned out very well. It’s one of my favorite films, and it’s gotten better over the years. It’s in most of the colleges now, constantly, it comes back. It’s a very touching, haunting, sad strange movie about a man who falls in love with books instead of with Julie Christie.
:Bob
What a bad choice.
:Ray
It would be nice to have a combination, wouldn’t it? Use her as a bookmark.
:Bob
Absolutely. I always liked meeting women in book stores rather than bars.
:Ray
I’m so glad to hear that. That’s the story of my life. All the women in my life, starting as a child, were librarians, booksellers, English teachers . My first love was my English teacher when I was in the fourth or fifth grade, the English teacher I had in L.A.High School, Jeannette Johnson. I stayed in touch with her until she died at the age of ninety-two about two years ago . And my wife is a teacher and a lover of language. She tutors technical French at U.S.C. Before that she did various kinds of tutoring and teaching in English, years and years ago. But I met her when she was a seller of books in a bookstore. So that’s the proper place to meet a woman and make her a wife.
Ray:
Well, my wife on the way up here today, we were talking, and she said, “Aren’t you glad you have a bright wife?” I said, “Yes! I am glad! ” Cause, we have to talk, don’t we? Wouldn’t it_be awful to be in love with someone you couldn’t talk to and couldn’t read books and go to movies and plays with, and have all this wonderful chatter when it’s over. If you don’t have that, I just don’t think you have a love affair or a marriage.
Bob:
There’s only, in the greatest lust, a couple of hours a day you’re going to make love to the person you’re with, and then you’re left with twenty-two hours to deal with.
Ray:
Ray Bradbury: Indeed. Yeah. And with most people you’re gonna have 23 and a half hours, how do you make two hours? Hmm, I think I have a new how-to book to write now.
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