Zen in the Art of Writing

and filled the pear-shaped red-white-and-blue-striped paper balloon with hot air, and held the flickering bright-angel presence in our hands a final moment in front of a porch lined with uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and fathers, and then, very softly, let the thing that was life and light and mystery go out of our fingers up on the summer air and away over the beginning-to-sleep houses, among the stars, as fragile, as wondrous, as vulnerable, as lovely as life itself.

I see my grandfather there looking up at that strange drifting light, thinking his own still thoughts. I see me, my eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, I knew there would never be another night like this.

No one said anything. We all just looked up at the sky and we breathed out and in and we all thought the same things, but nobody said. Someone finally had to say, though, didn't they? And that one is me.

The wine still waits in the cellars below.

My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark.

The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer.

Why and how?

Because I say it is so.

1974

THE LONG ROAD TO MARS

How did I get from Waukegan, Illinois, to Red Planet, Mars?

Perhaps two men could tell you.

Their names appear on the dedication page of the Fortieth Anniversary Edition of The Martian Chronicles.

For it was my friend Norman Corwin who first listened to me tell my Martian stories, and my future editor Walter I. Bradbury (no relation) who saw what I was up to, even though I was unaware of what I was doing, and persuaded me to finish a novel I didn't know I had written.

How I traveled to that spring night in 1949 when Walter Bradbury surprised me with myself is an unguided pathway of What Ifs.

What if I had never heard and fallen in love with Norman Corwin's radio dramas when I was nineteen?

What if I had never sent my first book of stories to Corwin, who then became a lifetime friend?

And what if I hadn't taken his advice to go to New York City in June 1949?

Then, very simply, The Martian Chronicles might never have existed.

But Norman argued again and again that I should be underfoot in the publishing houses of Manhattan and that he and his wife Katie would be there to lead and protect me in and around the Big Town. Because of his persuasion, I traveled across the country, four long days and nights on a Greyhound Bus, fermenting into a large ball of fungus, with a pregnant wife left behind in Los Angeles with $40 in the bank, and the YMCA ($5 a week) waiting for me on Forty-second Street.

The Corwins, good to their promise, toured and introduced me to a clutch of editors who asked: 'Did you bring a novel?'

I confessed that I was a sprinter and had brought only fifty short stories and an ancient, battered portable typewriter. Were they in need of fifty superimaginative tales, mostly brilliant? They were not.

Which brings me to my final, most important What If.

What if I had never dined with the last editor I met, Walter I. Bradbury from Doubleday, who asked the old depressing question-'Is there a novel in you somewhere?'-only to hear me describe the four-minute mile I paced each day, stepping on a land mine idea at breakfast, picking up the pieces, and fusing them to cool by lunch.

Walter Bradbury shook his head, finished his desert, mused, and then said:

'I think you've already written a novel.'

'What?' I said, 'and when?'

'What about all those Martian stories you've published in the past four years?' Brad replied. 'Isn't there a common thread buried there? Couldn't you sew them together, make some sort of tapestry, half-cousin to a novel?'

'My god!' I said.

'Yes?'

'My god,' I said. 'Back in 1944, I was so impressed by Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, that I told myself I must try to write something half as good, and set it on Mars. I sketched out an outline of characters and events on the Red Planet, but soon lost it in my files!'

'Looks as if we've found it,' said Brad.

'Have we?'

'We have,' said Brad. 'Go back to the YMCA and type me an outline of those two or three dozen Martian stories. Bring it in tomorrow. If I like what I see, I'll give you a contract and an advance.'

Don Congdon, my best friend and literary agent, seated across the table, nodded.

'I'll be at your office by noon!' I said to Brad.

To celebrate I ordered a second desert. Brad and Don each had a beer.

It was a typical hot June night in New York. Air conditioning was still a luxury of some future year. I typed until 3 A.M., perspiring in my underwear as I weighted and balanced my Martians in their strange cities in the last hours before arrivals and departures of my astronauts.

At noon, exhausted but elated, I delivered the outline to Walter I. Bradbury.

'You've done it!' he said. 'You'll get a contract and a check tomorrow.'

I must have made a lot of noise. When I calmed down, I asked him about my other stories.

'Now that we're publishing your first 'novel,'' Brad said, 'we can take a chance on your stories, even though such collections rarely sell. Can you think of a title that would sort of put a skin around two dozen different tales-?'

'Skin?' I said. 'Why not The Illustrated Man, my story about a carnival barker whose tattoos sweat themselves alive, one by one, and act out their futures on his chest and legs and arms?'

'Looks as if I'll have to make out two advance checks,' said Walter I. Bradbury.

I left New York three days later with two contracts and two checks totaling $1,500. Enough money to pay our $30-a-month rent for a year, finance our baby, and help with the down payment on a small tract house inland from Venice, California. By the time our first daughter was born in the autumn of 1949, I had fitted and fused all of my lost but now found Martian objects. It turned out to be not a book of eccentric characters as in Winesburg, Ohio, but a series of strange ideas, notions, fancies, and dreams that I had begun to sleep on and waken to when I was twelve.

The Martian Chronicles was published the next year, in the late spring of 1950.

Traveling east that spring, I did not know what I had done. Between trains in Chicago, I walked to the Art Institute to have lunch with a friend. I saw a crowd at the top of the Institute stairs and thought they were tourists. But as I started walking up, the crowd came down and surrounded me. They were not art lovers, but readers who had gotten early copies of The Martian Chronicles and had come to tell me just exactly what I had all-toounkowningly done. That noon encounter changed my life forever. Nothing was the same after that.

The list of What Ifs could go on forever. What if I hadn't met Maggie, who took a vow of poverty to marry me? What if Don Congdon had never written to become and remain my agent for forty-three years, starting in the same week that I married Marguerite?

And what if, soon after the publication of the Chronicles, I had missed being in a small Santa Monica bookshop when Christopher Isherwood stopped by.