If we consider memory as a representation of our past, a reconstruction, then we understand Freud’s passing remark that our memories often take shape “almost like works of fiction” (Screen Memories). Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (1957) is a great work of fiction that can also be read as the author’s own extended memory work in relation to his childhood.
It would be many years before I learned that Bradbury had been moved from his hometown at roughly the same age I was moved from mine. When I was fifteen, my family moved from a small, brick bungalow in one Detroit suburb to a much larger, faux Cape Cod in another. In the new home, I immediately began honing the sullen misery of a teenager into a critique of our displacement.
Even this half-century later, I can recall the feel of the wound. It was political and emotional. Not only did I see the move to the wealthier suburb as some sort of class betrayal, but I missed my friends terribly. In truth, I had already experienced a malaise relating to the first suburb, one I would later develop into a scholarly critique. But I could not foresee this at the time of the move. I longed for the old suburb with the ferocity of Dorothy’s desire for Kansas after her landing in Oz. At fifteen, despite all the comforts of our new dream home, I succumbed to a serious bout of home-sickness.
Bradbury was thirteen when his family moved from Waukegan, Illinois to Los Angeles. “I left at just the right moment,” he later remarked, “so that nostalgia set in almost immediately.” (see Henry Stewart, “Childhood’s End: Death and Growing Up in the Books of Ray Bradbury,” Electric Literature, 2015.) Knowing this now, it seems fortuitous that I first read Bradbury soon after moving, and that the book I chose was Dandelion Wine, his great semi-autobiographical novel of Midwestern boyhood.
Set in Bradbury’s fictional Green Town, the novel recounts the adventures and perceptions of twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding over the summer of 1928. It opens with an epiphany – “I’m alive” – that occurs while foraging in the forest with his father and brother. Douglas insists that he carry the pails that are heavy with gathered fruit:
“He stood swaying slightly, the forest collected, full-weighted and heavy with syrup, clenched hard in his down-slung hands. I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn’t forget, I’m alive, I know I’m alive, I mustn’t forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.”
In a “yellow nickel tablet” and using a yellow Ticonderoga pencil, Douglas undertakes to record the summer. The town and its people. Summer rituals – new pair of tennis shoes, running through the ravine with friends, harvesting the dandelions for wine, the penny arcade. The surprises, losses, and dangers – a cross-generational love affair, the death of old people, the ravine made frightening by night, and most menacing of all – a serial killer. Douglas determines to write down his observations concerning all of these.
Soon, the intense realization of ‘being alive’ is followed by its correlative. Douglas tells his brother,
“Tom, a couple of weeks ago, I found out I was alive. Boy, did I hop around. And then, just last week at the movies I found out I’d have to die someday. I never thought of that, really…it was like… all the peach trees outside town shrivelling up and the ravine being filled in and no place to play ever again and me sick in bed for as long as I could think and everything dark…”
Death stalks Bradbury’s characters as much here as in his science fiction work, and in ways not unlike its stalking of Freud. “The goal of all life is death,” Freud wrote in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Bradbury learned the lesson early. He was five when a grandfather died. An older brother, Sam, died during the 1918 flu pandemic, two years before Ray’s birth. A baby sister died from pneumonia in 1927.
Finally, Bradbury’s 1943 short story, “The Lake”, the piece he considered to be his first work of literary merit, draws on “a disturbing incident from his childhood, when he built sand castles with a little girl on the shore of a lake. She went for a swim and never returned.” (See Steven L. Aggelis, Conversations with Ray Bradbury, 2004). In an interpretation reminiscent of popular readings of Freud, Aggelis notes that the story helped Bradbury “to purge from his system a demon that had long haunted him, the memory of her death.”
Bradbury echoes this account, recalling the story’s creation as follows:
“When I finished it my hair was standing on end and I was cold all over. I almost wept with joy. For I knew I had trusted my subconscious and allowed my emotions to write the story for me.” (Conversations with Ray Bradbury, 2004)
In Bradbury’s life and fiction then, death strikes the old, as we may expect, but it strikes the young too. More importantly, it comes to the young as a fact. A realization. His fictional children ruminate on death. A father in The Illustrated Man stories says of his ten-year-old children, “They were awfully young…for death thoughts. Or, no, you were never too young, really.”
Late in Dandelion Wine (and late at night, writing by the glow of fireflies in a Mason jar) and with a child’s love of capital letters for important things, Douglas records the following in his notebook:
“YOU CAN’T DEPEND ON PEOPLE BECAUSE…
…they go away.
…strangers die.
…people you know fairly well die.
…friends die.
…people murder people, like in books.
…your own folks can die.
So…!
IF ALL THIS IS TRUE…THEN…I, DOUGLAS SPAULDING, SOMEDAY… But the fireflies, as if extinguished by his sombre thoughts, had softly turned themselves off.”
With its lyrical prose and love of place, its hometown familiar and disturbing by turns, its sombre mélange of childhood adventure and fears, and finally its explorations of aging and death, Dandelion Wine reached a long, bony hand into my heart and twisted it until I wept for my own lost places and times. I loved the book obsessively, vehemently, reading it over and over during the hours of loneliness in the new suburb. Then, slowly, over many months, I relented. I began to adjust to the outer circumstances of the move, a new school, and the need to seek new friends there. But I am not sure I would have managed it without Dandelion Wine.
I kept the book by my bedside until I left home for college. Before leaving, I wrote and posted a letter to Ray Bradbury’s publisher. My words are lost. But I know that I thanked him for helping me through a difficult time, showing me a language for these changes, and for being unafraid to speak of dark things to young people. And finally, for making those dark things beautiful because they are how we live. Many weeks later, I received a reply. I keep it on my desk, a card (now framed) with a front cover featuring one of his paintings titled The Pumpkin Tree. A different season. Bradbury, like me, was a lover of October. As for his generous message inside the card, that remains for me alone. Those were the days of private letter writing.
As for his wonderful book: to this day, when I catch a glimpse of Dandelion Wine on my shelf, its cover worn and faded, I am transported back to that lonely time when my only friend in the new place was a boy in a novel. It’s a painful memory, but it is also a memory of overcoming pain.
My favorite book of all time.