From The Wall Street Journal:
The first sentence of “Fahrenheit 451” is one of literature’s great opening lines: “It was a pleasure to burn.” In the 1953 novel, now a modern classic, author Ray Bradbury went on to describe a future in which books are banned and firemen burn them. So it comes as a mild surprise to read Bradbury’s letter from a dozen years earlier: “I just rifled my files and took one million words out and burned them up.”
Bradbury wrote this sentence when he was still unknown—shortly before he sold his first story and long before the publication of books such as “The Martian Chronicles,” “The Illustrated Man” and “Dandelion Wine.” Burning his pages, Bradbury believed, was a necessary annihilation: “Most of it was inane description, no plot, no idea. It hampered me, so I destroyed it.”
Bradbury’s admission appears in an illuminating volume of correspondence that provides fresh ways to understand and appreciate the author, who died in 2012. The contents of “Remembrance”—the title is the name of a nostalgic free-verse poem by Bradbury—have been “largely unseen until now,” writes editor Jonathan R. Eller, who is Bradbury’s biographer and a co-founder of the Ray Bradbury Center in Indianapolis.
The book’s first letter, from 1937, reveals a 17-year-old with the gumption to invite the world-famous creator of Tarzan to attend a gathering of his science-fiction club: “We have often wished to have a chance to meet you and talk things over with you.” Although Edgar Rice Burroughs politely declined, the exchange shows that the young Bradbury had big ambitions.
They didn’t include a diploma after high school, however. “College ruins more writers than it makes,” Bradbury wrote in 1965, when a 17-year-old sent him a fan letter in the way he once sent one to Burroughs. “You must educate yourself at your typewriter, every day.” This autodidactic approach paid off but involved a lot of failure. “My average is one sale out of every three stories,” he wrote in 1943. He later estimated having received more than 2,000 rejections.
Early on, Bradbury swapped advice and ideas with other pulp-fiction writers, such as Charles Beaumont and Robert A. Heinlein, as well as Henry Kuttner, an influential genre writer who died in 1958 and is little known today. He was a mentor to Bradbury—“my best and most consistent teacher.”
As Bradbury rose and left behind “all those years of obscurity and editorial neglect,” he traded letters with the likes of Federico Fellini, Graham Greene and Carl Sandburg. In 1992 President George H.W. Bush, as he campaigned for re-election, sent Bradbury a thank-you note for the gift of “Yestermorrow,” a collection of essays: “I shall read it; but that must wait till my deadly debate book begins to gather dust.” In 2004 Bush’s son awarded Bradbury the National Medal of Arts at a White House ceremony.
Much of “Remembrance” reveals the grind of authorship. Bradbury aimed “to turn out at least a thousand words a day,” he wrote in 1941. His most frequent correspondent in this volume is Don Congdon, his longtime agent—a reminder that, for all of Bradbury’s artistry, he was a commercial writer in search of his next sale or a blurb for his next book. The work never ceased: “It is the time away from the typewriter that counts most; idle thoughts at idle hours.”
The letters brim with writing advice. Bradbury recommends reducing stories “down to a sharp cutting, wonderful edge.” This honing, he argues, “is one of the great arts of writing.” Several letters, spanning decades, express faith in the mysterious fruits of subconscious thought: “It hasn’t failed me yet. It’s like feeding information into one of these new-fangled calculators, then going to bed; in the morning, there, on a crisp new white sheet of paper, is the answer.”
Bradbury was a happy man who loved his wife, took joy in his four daughters and felt grateful for his success: “I am one of God’s lucky children.” He reflected on his good fortune to Russell Kirk in 1967: “The thing that drives me most often is an immense gratitude that I was given this one chance to live, to be alive the one time round in a miraculous experience that never ceases to be glorious and dismaying.”
Yet he also needed to escape from what must have been a rambunctious family life: “I have taken refuge in the garage, where I do my writing now, oblivious to wails, screams and childish ululations.” In 1954 he boasted of writing six short stories in 40 hours. Mr. Eller says in his helpful endnotes that this frenzy included “The Day It Rained Forever,” regarded as one of Bradbury’s best.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal