The Nebula Awards

Of Myth and Memory

Guest Blog by Sheila Finch on August 04 2008

Recently, I picked up a copy of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, replacing my original copy lost many moves ago. I looked forward to reacquainting myself with a classic example of his work. I wasn’t disappointed.

Bradbury’s prose sings –- it really is best when read aloud. I was introduced to Bradbury’s work by a twelve-year-old boy long ago; his parents and my husband were musicians, and the boy and I were left out of the conversation to talk about books. When our guests left, the boy gave me his copy of The Illustrated Man I quickly fell in love with Bradbury’s voice, saturating myself in his music.  In fact, I realized, as I re-read these stories of life in a vanished time and place in America, that it’s not the story itself that grabs me and never was. Most of the stories have tiny plots that would sound ho-hum when summarized in a sentence or two. And the characters, the innocent children and wise old adults that populate the pages, probably had few counterparts even in Bradbury’s own childhood in Illinois. But that’s not really the point.

The magic of these stories lies in the way they translate memory into myth. I’m not the first to remark that so many Bradbury lines enchant the ear out of all proportion to the information they actually carry. Consider the opening paragraph of the first “chapter” (Bradbury doesn’t name or number them as such) in Dandelion Wine:

“It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.”

Here’s another opening, from a chapter in the middle of the book:

“And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until all the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you see the last apple on the tree, and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky and drop you down and down....”

A lesser writer might have written, “It was an early summer morning,” for the first, and “In Autumn, when apples fall from the trees” for the second – and would’ve missed the dreamlike world that Bradbury’s words create, a world we immediately recognize as true to our own mythic childhood. My childhood passed in wartime London, crowded, grubby and certainly lacking apple trees, but that
image is emotionally more real to me than broken paving stones and dusty privet bushes. Bradbury’s Spring and Autumn are the way the seasons should be in childhood.

I re-read the book with a great deal of pleasure, recognizing the parts I’d admired before when I knew so much less about the skill that lies behind the apparently effortless ability of simple words to stir emotion. And that realization brought me to remember the work of another poet whose prose work was a rhapsody about simple places and simple people: Dylan Thomas.

I hadn’t read Under Milk Wood, a play for voices, in a very long time (though I re-read Thomas’s collected poems at least once a year). The date I’d inscribed on the inside front cover was the year I went to college, the year after Thomas died. I remember hating “modern poetry” while I was in high school – until I encountered Richard Burton reading Thomas’ poem, “Fern Hill.” For the first time, I had the experience of being swept away by the emotional torrent of images, with only the slightest understanding of what the poem meant. Like Bradbury, Thomas loved childhood and small towns, though his are in his native Wales:

“...herring gulls heckling down to the harbour where the fishermen spit and prop the morning up and eye the fishy sea smooth to the sea’s end as it lulls in blue. Green and gold money, tobacco, tinned salmon, hats with feathers, pots of fish-paste, warmth for the winter-to-be, weave and leap in it rich and slippery in the flash and shapes of fishes through the cold sea-streets.”

I’ve never lived in towns anything like either poet describes, yet I seem to remember them; the music of the words conjures them in my imagination. How real those men propping up the morning! How vivid the smell of the herring flashing under the cold waves! I have no memory of growing up in a place like that – how could I? Yet I know its seasons intimately:

“It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the slowblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishing-boat bobbing sea.”

The thing is, these aren’t the places where Bradbury and Thomas spent their childhoods either; this isn’t journalism. They’re myths they’ve constructed about those places, truer than bricks and stones. And thus they remake our own memories into something richer and more meaningful. That to my mind is High Art.

Ah, Miss Warner, dragon of high school English classes, you told us that sentences ought not to run away with images but cower timidly behind their periods and semicolons, and that words ought not to be strung together with “and” like beads on a chain. How lucky you didn’t teach Ray Bradbury or Dylan Thomas!

The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, SHEILA FINCH has received several awards, including the Nebula Award, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in the Field, and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at
writers’ conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College, California.  She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds.
To learn more about Sheila, see her website or read her blog.

7 comments so far.

Leave a comment:

Name:

Email:

URL:

Please enter the word you see in the image below:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

All Guest Blogs

You can view all guest blogs here.

RSS Feed

Subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Email Updates

You can also subscribe to receive new guest blog posts via email.