Red Planet, Flaming Phoenix, Green Town
Some Early Bradbury Revisited
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So why the present book? Why another volume of criticism on Bradbury? Hasn’t everything pretty much been said that needed to be said? Obviously I don’t think so. Despite the fact that much valuable critical work has been done, an important part of the Bradbury picture is still missing. For one thing, even though many of Bradbury’s most important thematic concerns have been identified and discussed, no one as yet has seriously wrestled with the question of why Bradbury has been so deeply involved with certain themes, or why he takes the particular stances that he does in relation to these themes. For example, because of the insights of critics like Willis McNelly and Gary Wolfe we know that Bradbury was very interested in the concepts of American frontier expansion and the American Dream of Success, and that, as David Mogen points out (Ray Bradbury, Twayne, l986), in his works he often exhibits an ambivalent, sometimes ironic attitude toward these concepts. But why Bradbury has been so interested in these concepts, and why he has sometimes been ambivalent and ironic are questions still waiting for adequate answers.
I also believe that Bradbury’s works have too often suffered from interpretive oversimplification, for which both his admirers and detractors are responsible. For example, too many readers early accepted and have entertained too long the inaccurate notion that Bradbury has nothing but nostalgic and sentimental feelings about his boyhood in Waukegan, Illinois. Then, in accepting and extending this inaccuracy, too many readers assumed that nostalgia and sentimentality about the past must permeate even his works about the future, which in turn gave rise to the oversimplification that Bradbury fears technology and the future it portends, that he really longs to escape into some womblike Edenic dream of an innocent and carefree childhood in the Midwest of the 1920s. In fact, and as I point out at some length in my article "The Machineries of Joy and Despair: Bradbury’s Attitudes Toward Science and Technology" (Ray Bradbury, Olander and Greenberg, eds.,Taplinger, l980), Bradbury’s views about technology and science are quite ambivalent and complex, and his attitude toward the past is hardly sentimental.
Another missing piece of the picture involves the autobiographical nature of much of Bradbury’s work. Most readers and critics readily agree that Bradbury’s works are often autobiographical in one way or another (he has said so himself), but aside from warnings about the dangers of assuming one-to-one relationships between a writer’s life and work there has been relatively little exploration of the ways or degree to which self-reflective texts and sub-texts appear in his works. I will genially argue that on a self-reflective, perhaps even subconscious psychological level, The Martian Chronicles (l950), Fahrenheit 45l (l953), Dandelion Wine (l957), and Something Wicked This Way Comes (l962), form a cyclical tetralogy of escape, denial, return, and reconciliation in terms of Bradbury’s relationship to his father, Leonard Spaulding Bradbury. I also submit that this father-son relationship, more than any other single factor, informed Bradbury’s very strong views about concepts and themes treated repeatedly in his works, such as censorship, individual freedom, and the acceptance of diversity, as well as his attitudes concerning the nuclear family, the responsibilities of one generation to the next, and the terrible ramifications of loneliness.
Although Red Planet, Flaming Phoenix, Green Town is not intended to be a psychological biography, I have considered those biographical and psychological factors, including some pertinent ancestral history, that appear to have influenced the creation of the four books that are my focus; I also discuss other Bradbury short stories, poems, plays and essays insofar as they help throw additional light upon these four works. Only through a better understanding of the rather complicated psychological dynamics involved in Bradbury’s self-perceived place in his family and family history can we properly appreciate the complex, multi-leveled nature of some of his most important works and the relationship of the Mars canon about the future to the Green Town canon about the past.
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About the Book
At last, a book for the general reader on one of America's perennially popular and important writers, Ray Bradbury. Literary critics, English teachers and students may find much of value in Mengeling's analysis of The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, but be warned, he avoids the technical literary jargon and convoluted writing style so common in literary criticism. Making use of research into Bradbury's family history and his boyhood in Waukegan, Illinois (Green Town in his works), and drawing on his taped interviews with Bradbury, Mengeling proposes that Bradbury's complex relationship with his father Leonard, more than any other factor energized the writing of his first four novels and helped determine Bradbury's strong interest in such subjects as ethnic diversity and the American Dream of Success. Mengeling believes that only through a better understanding of the psychological dynamics involved in Bradbury's self-perceived place in his family and its history can one properly appreciate the multi-leveled nature of some of his most important early work and the relationship of the Mars stories about the future to the Green Town stories about the past.
About the Author
Marvin Edwin Mengeling grew up in Hampshire, Illinois, attended Elgin Community College, graduated from Rockford College with a BA in English, and received a master’s and Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Wisconsin Madison. From 1966 to 1999, he taught American Literature and Science Fiction at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and was Director of the Liberal Studies Bachelor's Degree Program. In addition to three publications on Ray Bradbury, Mengeling has published articles on Irving, Melville, Poe, Capote, Ellison, Ginsberg, and others, in critical journals and edited books. Now happily retired, Mengeling resides in Oshkosh with wife Frankie, son Tom, and two cats, Rip and Katrina. He is writing a book of creative nonfiction essays.