I ’ve long been of two minds about Ray Bradbury. On the one hand, he is a Los Angeles original, who moved with his family from Illinois to Southern California in 1934, when he was 13. Thirty-eight years later, he would publish an essay in Esquire called “Los Angeles Is the Best Place in America.” Here’s how it begins:
This will not be an article describing the acne, carbuncles, dandruff, sexual gymnastics, racial difficulties, political ineptitudes, hairy freak-outs, or the non-rapid transits of Los Angeles. Others have already spat on us, bit, pummeled, stoned, kicked, and despised us over the years. A thousand articles describing our fall, even before we have risen, a patent impossibility, have appeared in quasi-intellectual journals in the last year alone. As yet unborn, our enemies mound us with flowers and spade our burial ground.
I love this because it is not the Bradbury of our cultural imagination: an avuncular elder statesman talking to school groups, warning about the dangers of groupthink and complacency. “If you don’t want a man unhappy politically,” he wrote in Fahrenheit 451, “don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.” Although that novel, published in 1953 and widely regarded as his signature work, is often considered a cautionary tale about censorship, Bradbury understood that restricting information would be unnecessary if people were unwilling to think for themselves. Without critical intelligence, in other words, the battle—political or otherwise—was already lost.
Despite the acuity of this idea, however, Bradbury’s prose, sentence by sentence, mostly leaves me underwhelmed. His narratives are often blocky and schematic, the language unexceptional. “Six months ago,” a character explains in “The Earth Men,” the third story or chapter in The Martian Chronicles, “another rocket came to Mars. There was a man named York in it, and his assistant. Whatever happened to them, we don’t know. Maybe they crashed. They came in a rocket. So did we.” This is dialogue as exposition, as flat and expressionless as an empty eye.
That’s why I’m drawn to his essay on Los Angeles: for its righteous edge.
The Martian Chronicles appeared in 1950, although many of its component parts were previously published in periodicals. It is, in that sense—despite being labeled a novel—more a mash-up book. Now, to commemorate its 75th anniversary, the Bradbury estate has authorized a “deluxe collector’s edition,” which mostly involves the inclusion of some atmospheric illustrations and the presence, as an introduction, of a contemporaneous essay titled “How I Wrote My Book.” There, Bradbury frames planetary exploration through the lens of manifest destiny. “I decided first of all,” he writes, “that there would be certain elements of similarity between the invasion of Mars and the invasion of the Wild West in the years from 1840 until 1900.… I decided that Mars would be nothing more nor less than a mirror in which Earth man would be reflected, twice as large as life, with all of his wonders, beauties and terrors, his petty politics, his ravening greed, and simple faiths.”
This is the aesthetic I recall from The Martian Chronicles, which I read in middle school, around the time I encountered Fahrenheit 451, as well as two additional composite novels: The Illustrated Man and Dandelion Wine. To this day, these remain the only Bradbury books I’ve read in their entirety, which may influence the way I see his work. Middle school, after all, was a long time ago, and much of what I came across then I’ve come to think of as a kind of starter’s kit.
At the same time, what about “The Third Expedition,” originally published as “Mars Is Heaven!,” which I discovered in a reprint of the 1953 comic adapted for the EC Comics magazine Weird Science? In it, an expedition from Earth lands on Mars only to find itself in what appears to be an idyllic Midwestern community, populated by dead friends and relatives. “Don’t question,” one of these beloveds tells the rocket’s captain. “God’s good to us. Let’s be happy.” After the astronauts let down their guards, they are massacred.
As with the take on Los Angeles, there’s something to this story—an existential toughness—that lingers with me. So, how to make sense of the author? I decided to reread The Martian Chronicles and see.
Rereading, of course, can be a complicated process. Or, more accurately, it can cut both ways. I’ve lost books by rereading them (Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood is one), books that on second sight reveal their scaffolding or, conversely, my own youthful naïveté. The Martian Chronicles is not exactly such a case, since it was never quite a treasured book for me. Still, I was curious. I had lived for many years in Bradbury’s Los Angeles. I had interviewed him, seen him speak. After his death, I had written an appreciation—focusing, admittedly, more on the life than on the output—in my role as book critic of the Los Angeles Times.
Now, I wondered if his ubiquity had led me to take him for granted. Now, I wondered if I’d missed the point. Was he more than I remembered? The answer, it turns out, is no, yes, maybe. Like everything, it’s more complicated than I thought. That’s true of The Martian Chronicles, as well.
When I refer to The Martian Chronicles as a mash-up, I mean it was not constructed as a novel. In 1949, Bradbury brought his stories to a New York editor who advised him to add interstitial material connecting them into a larger narrative. Hence, the many short chapters, or installments, that run throughout: “The Shore,” for instance, a single page about “first men” and “first women,” who “came and made things a little less empty, so that others would find courage to follow.”
It is one of the frustrations of the project.
Why? Because reading The Martian Chronicles is a bit like watching an anthology TV series, in which the players do not carry over from episode to episode. There are certain kaleidoscopic pleasures to such an enterprise, but it also sacrifices depth for breadth. Yes, we get a broad overview, one that, in Bradbury’s case, stretches nearly 30 years. Still, the lack of character continuity makes it difficult to find a center of gravity. We move from fuller stories—such as “—And the Moon Be Still As Bright,” in which a renegade astronaut named Jeff Spender goes on a rampage against his own crewmates to protect the Indigenous Martian culture he understands they will destroy—to more vestigial ones. To his credit, Bradbury understands this; as the book progresses, he brings back certain riffs and references, including to Spender. But these are mostly glosses in the larger text. The arc here reads as a contrivance, imposed by the author. Not enough seems to stick.
And yet, what I took away from this reading is something I wouldn’t have recognized when I was younger: The Martian Chronicles as critique of colonialism. Manifest destiny again, albeit through the necessary filter of its discontents, which affect not only the colonized but also the colonizer. In Bradbury’s conception, humanity is a destructive force, first ravaging Earth (which during the course of the book suffers nuclear cataclysm), then doing the same to the red planet, which we remake in our own shoddily constructed image, relying on “fifteen thousand lumber feet of Oregon pine” and “seventy-nine thousand feet of California redwood” to erect Midwestern-style communities “by the edge of the stone canals,” only to lay waste, in the end, to these settlements as well. “It was the twentieth year after the Great War,” Bradbury writes late in the sequence. “Mars was a tomb planet. Whether or not Earth was the same was a matter for much silent debate.”
This silent debate, of course, sits at the center of what it means to read, the long line of it, from book to book, year to year. It represents the most essential continuity available to us, that of our characters as we pursue the only lasting question: What does it mean to be human, for good or ill? That there is no answer to this is only as it should be, for literature is not a didactic art. Instead, it remains a conversation, which is to say, when it comes to Bradbury, I continue to be of two minds.•
