The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller Page B

cultures is diverse and widespread and the names for it are legion. Only our contemporary psychology and psychiatry omit it from their textbooks.” Ray Bradbury would caution readers not to look at his creative evolution too “metaphysically,” but as one examines his artistic development, three factors cannot be ignored—the great amalgam, as it were: Neva, Waukegan, and an inner calling, an autopilot program that even Ray has coined. He wrote of this creative encoding in the essay “My Demon, Not Afraid of Happiness.”
    â€œI have a strange and incredible Muse that, unseen, has engulfed me during my lifetime,” wrote Ray. “I have renamed my Muse. In a Fredrick Seidel poem I found a perfect replacement, where he tells of ‘A Demon not afraid of happiness.’
    â€œThat perfectly describes that Demon that sits now on one shoulder, now on the other, and whispers things no one else hears.”
    As the Bradburys readied to move back east, Ray was returning to Neva and Waukegan. And while he wasn’t aware of it, after his brief tenure living in Arizona, his demon was now more awake, more perceptive, more impressionable than ever before.

3. THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION
    When I was first learning my way around science fiction as a writer, I didn’t find many contemporaries who made me think, “I’d like to write something like that.” Sometimes Theodore Sturgeon did—almost always Cordwainer Smith did—and, in Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles , Ray Bradbury certainly did. I saw how his humane concern, the exactness of his writing, his fierce but controlled imagination, all worked together to create beauty, and those vivid scenes you remember from a story decades later as if you’d lived them. So, when my mother was curious why I was writing stuff about space ships, I gave her The Martian Chronicles, and said, “Because in science fiction you can do things like this.” She read the book, and I didn’t have to explain any further.
    â€” URSULA K. LE GUIN , author
    I N LATE spring of 1927, the Bradbury family moved back to Illinois, returning as they had left—by passenger train to Chicago’s Union Station. They moved back into their old house on St. James Street, which they rented from Ray’s grandmother. For Ray, it was a mixed blessing. While he would miss the adventurous Marscape of Arizona, he was coming home to his aunt Neva.
    Leo Bradbury returned to work as a lineman with the Bureau of Power and Light. His wanderlust had momentarily been satisfied. Back in “Green Town,” Ray followed Neva like an impish shadow, consuming the Oz books under her tutelage. That year Neva graduated from Waukegan’s Central School and enrolled at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute and took classes in drawing, design, art history, and composition. She spent a few days with friends in the city each week, then took the train north to Waukegan for long weekends. In the St. James house, Neva converted the attic space into an art studio. On the pitched ceiling, she painted faux windows with images of cityscapes, trees, and green pastures behind the false panes; these painted windows, of course, captivated little Ray. In this new art space, Neva housed all her colorful fabrics for sewing, art easel, sculpting clay, and painting supplies. The Bradbury family could often smell the oils and turpentine when she painted. “When mother and father and I were seated at our various tasks of sewing, smoking, and lolling, we could hear the footsteps of all the marvelous people up in Auntie’s studio,” Ray said. “The dark people who came and went, the phonograph whining, the tinkling of glasses and the gush of wine. It was the Great Gatsby era, but Neva’s world was half-Gatsby, half-Dracula. The people who unlatched her door were writers and painters and absinthe drinkers, or at least I tried to imagine this.”
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