RAY BRADBURY’S WARNING
Wife Sherry Talbot Martini wrote this paper a decade ago for a writing class in college. It’s prescient.
November 21, 2014
Bradbury’s Warning
Ray Bradbury wrote the short story The Pedestrian in 1950. Sixteen years earlier he had moved from his home town of Waukegan, Illinois to Los Angeles with his family. It was a life-changing event.
The small town boy from the Depression vexed mid-west was immediately immersed and enthralled with all things Hollywood. Bradbury recalls those first years in Los Angeles as being “magical.” Yet, as with most people who come to Los Angeles, he later began to see the dark side of the city (biography.com).
The booming television industry took center stage in a city driven by the entertainment industry and filled with inhabitants who seemed more interested in engaging in distractions than pursuing intellectual activities. His beloved books seemed to have become second class citizens.
He also lived in a city where no one walked and cars, all cold metal and electronics, were like gods. For a man who detested cars and did not drive, the city’s infatuation with cars more than alarming.
Some may think The Pedestrian is simply Bradbury’s take on how no one walks in Los Angeles, or how barren and alienating the City can feel. These viewpoints diminish the importance of the story. The Pedestrian is Ray Bradbury’s semi-autobiographical tale of his possible future — a writer and non-driver in Los Angles, 2052 — where reading has become obsolete and his basic freedoms are gone. The Pedestrian is a warning to Bradbury himself and to the people of the city he loved.
In The Pedestrian, Bradbury’s protagonist Leonard Mead is a writer, harassed by a robot-like police car while on a harmless night-walk. “Books [do not] sell anymore” and, instead of reading, people sit “like the dead” watching their television screens (372)[now their phones].
Throughout Bradbury’s life, he spoke of and wrote at great length about his disdain for cars, television and technology, and his love of books. One of his greatest fears was that people would stop reading because of television and other technological distractions.
His fear of cars and his love of books made up a big part of who he was. When Bradbury died in 2012, Lynell George of the Los Angeles Times wrote: “Ray Bradbury didn’t drive a car, but he was often out and about in Los Angeles, browsing bookstores, his bicycle propped outside.” Of books Bradbury once said, “Libraries raised me” (biography.com).
He spent hours at various libraries throughout Los Angeles, his favorite being one on the campus of U.C.L.A. He wrote Fahrenheit 451 there. As for cars, the story is that he came upon a terrible accident shortly after moving to Los Angeles and it so terrified him that he vowed never to drive a car (and he never did) (ibid biographies.com).
It may seem that this fear of driving may have influenced The Pedestrian, but according to John Wilson, in a 2012 web exclusive on firstthings.com, based on his reading of Becoming Ray Bradbury by Jonathan R. Eller, the real fear was the inability to walk freely without being harassed:
“[The Pedestrian]… was triggered by two incidents over a span of years in which, while walking late at night with a friend in Los Angeles Bradbury was hassled by the LAPD. ‘Through these experiences,’ Eller writes … ‘[Bradbury] had come to see the pedestrian as a threshold or indicator species among urban dwellers’ [and] if the rights of the pedestrian were threatened, this would represent an early indicator that basic freedoms would soon be at risk.”
Eller, whom Wilson says knew Bradbury “better than any human being” looks past the often-told story of the terrible accident Bradbury witnessed and sees that walking to Bradbury represented freedom. To take that right away, to be judged for being a pedestrian and not a “driver” of those “insect” like cars (372) would be devastating to Bradbury.
In The Pedestrian a lone police car, with no human being in it, is able to control his ability to walk freely and therefore control his humanity and freedom.
That Bradbury was harassed by the police “in real life” means it wasn’t just an imagined future. Something frightening had happened to him involving the LAPD and he foresaw the future when technology would allow it to happen in a much more sinister manner through technology (the robot-like police car). (Of course, this was long before the new Google cars that drive themselves had been invented or even imagined.)
As much as Bradbury’s distain for cars seemed to occupy a lot of his time, his love for books and walking was all-consuming. In Wilson’s firsthings.com article, he states: “[W]hen Eller speaks of Bradbury’s ‘need to read’ ‘an almost visceral need that was only slightly less of a reflex than breath itself’ he’s not indulging in hyperbole. Reading is breathing, and thinking is walking.”
When Bradbury walks he thinks, and when he thinks he writes, and then others can read what he writes. Therefore, again, to take away the ability to walk freely is to take away his purpose in life — his writing.
In fact, Bradbury has good reason to be concerned about authorities following him, even if that fear was veiled in a futuristic story. In 1959, a few years after he wrote The Pedestrian, the FBI investigated Bradbury for supposed “communist leanings” (vault.fbi.gov). The FBI conducted stake outs in front of his home and concerns were also expressed about his writings.
The 40-page FBI report states:
“[I]t has been [the informant’s] observation that some of the writers suspected of having Communist backgrounds have been writing in the field of science fiction and it appears that science fiction may be a lucrative field for the introduction of Communist ideologies. He noted that some of BRADBURY’s stories have been definitely slanted against the United States…” (8).
The FBI report goes on:
“Informant advised that individuals such as BRADBURY are in a position to spread poison concerning political institutions in general and American institutions in particular…. He noted that the general aim of these science fiction writers is to frighten the people into paralysis or psychological incompetence bordering on hysteria which would make it very possible to conduct a Third World War in which the American people would seriously believe could not be won since their morale had been seriously destroyed” (9).
(As a side note, the FBI report also acknowledges that: “Ray Douglas Bradbury was arrested on December 31, 1943 by the LAPD on suspicion of violation of a Selective Service and Training Act” — the draft (40). It was found that Bradbury had the appropriate papers dismissing him from the draft and he was released.)
Bradbury was no communist, but as fantastical as the FBI report sounds, the “informant” was right about the power of science fiction writing and Bradbury knew it. In a 1997 Ken Kelly interview with Bradbury for Playboy (republished on Bradbury.com), Bradbury stated:
“Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can’t imagine you are writing about them.”
To Bradbury the “clear and present danger” was the threat technologies, like television [cell phones, etc.], would have on reading. In The Pedestrian protagonist Mead speaks of the souls fixated on their television sets, the neighborhood like a “graveyard” and the homes “tomb-like” (372).
In Annie Johnston’s 2007 LA Weekly article entitled “Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted” Johnston accurately stated: “Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says [Fahrenheit 451] is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.”
Bradbury was putting forth the same message in The Pedestrian. Bradbury did not mince words, or try to cloak his thoughts on this subject, when he said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” (goodreads.com).
Ted Kreider got Bradbury’s message loud and clear. In his New York Times article entitled, Uncle Ray’s Dystopia, Kreider wrote:
“It is thanks to Ray Bradbury that I understand this world I grew into for what it is: a dystopian future. And it is thanks to him that we know how to conduct ourselves in such a world: arm yourself with books. Assassinate your television. Go for walks, and talk with your neighbors. Cherish beauty; defend it with your life. Become a Martian.”
Bradbury would be pleased that Kreider heeded his warnings.
Bradbury once said, “People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it” (goodreads.com), further proof that in writing The Pedestrian, he specifically tries to warn and “prevent” a dystopian future for the very city he resides in.
That the protagonist Leonard Mead of The Pedestrian is a writer, who likes to take long walks, avoids television and is being harassed by the police, tells us that Bradbury has indeed placed a huge part of himself in this story as a warning to self. When Mead tells the rider-less police car that he is a writer and the police car responds that Mead therefore has “no profession” Bradbury is trying to convey that if television and technology win, he becomes almost a non-entity.
Writing will cease to exist and so will he.
Not only will television [cell phones/computers], like a drug, seduce the people away from reading, the inability to walk without interrogation will make writing impossible.
The combination of cars (now robot-like) and “viewing screens” will take away the very essence of his life. As he rides in the police car, he passes the one house still illuminated. It is his house. The light represents his knowing, his holding on to the old ways of books, writing and long strolls. And he fears that soon that light will be extinguished.
All of these “clues” make it clear that The Pedestrian was set in Los Angeles because it was Bradbury’s adopted city and he wanted to “prevent” its demise.
Bradbury did not just love Los Angeles. He embodied it. He was full of contradictions, just like the city. He met his hero Aldous Huxley here.
He followed his dreams here, like so many others. He haunted the city’s libraries. He met his wife (in a book store of course) and raised his daughters here (biography.com).
Though The Pedestrian was partially Bradbury’s story, and his warning to self, it was also our story and our warning, to the people of the city he loved.
Works Cited
Biography.com. Web. (http://www.biography.com/people/ray-bradbury-9223240) 20 Nov. 2014. Bradbury, Ray, The Pedestrian, from Writing Los Angeles, A Literary Anthology, David L. Ulin, Ed.: Library of America (2002) FBI.gov.
(http://vault.fbi.gov/ray-douglas-bradbury-1/ray-douglas-bradbury-part-01-of-01/view).
Web. 20 Nov. 2014. George, Lynell. “Ray Bradbury dies at 91; author lifted fantasy to literary heights.” Los Angeles Times. 6 June 2012. Web.
(http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-ray-bradbury-20120607)
20 Nov. 2014. Goodreads.com. Web. (Ray Bradbury Quotes (Author of Fahrenheit 451))
Read the short story THE PEDESTRIAN here: