... and when October comes, it’s time to head out to Bradbury country, a place of cold fogs and whispering winds that will send a shiver down your spine and make you wonder what ghost from your past has come to haunt your dreams.
And it was in that time, in one of those lonely years when the fogs never ended and the winds never stopped their laments, that riding the old red trolley, the high-bucketing thunder, one night I met up with Death’s friend and didn’t know it.
A crime story that Bradbury dedicated to the masters who shaped his young imagination and inspired him to follow in their art and become a writer: Chandler, Hammett, Cain, MacDonald. James Crumley, a more recent author, gave for the story the name of the detective who will try to solve a series of suspect deaths around the derelict Venice pier in California, in the year 1949: Elmo Crumley.
If there was a city back there, and people, or one man and his terrible sadness, I could not see, nor hear.
The train was headed for the ocean.
I had this awful feeling it would plunge in.
But it is not the detective who takes us on this dark merry-go-round, but a young writer without a dime in his pocket, a sad man who misses his fiancee, gone to Mexico to study. A young author who feels the pain of the world in his bones every night as he goes around the city collecting the stories of the people who have been marooned on this empty shore: lost souls who have reached the end of their line. Another writer I tried for the first time this year, Nathanael West in The Day of the Locust , noticed that California is the place where people come to die. Ray Bradbury concurs ...
There are some people who live to be thirty-five or forty, but because no one ever notices, their lives are candle-brief, invisible small.
The prologue was one of the best set-up pieces I have read in a very long time. Ominous, poetic, disturbing. You feel like you have fallen off the edge of the world and into another place, a place where monstrous spiders lurk in the night and are waiting for you to fall into their web.
... and then the first dead body is found in the half-submerged cage of an abandoned circus.
We looked like a mob of miserable clowns abandoned on the bridge, looking down at our drowned circus.
Venice in 1949 was completely different from the sunny, young and hip place we see in recent movies. It’s days of glory are long past, all the tourists and all the money have gone elsewhere. The old arcade pier with its amusement attractions is about to be demolished, the last survivors of that age are now old and forgotten and about to be evicted. For the young writer this is the only place he can afford.
For Ray Bradbury, as for his unnamed narrator, writing is a deeply personal endeavour. Feel first, write later he says to the detective Crumley when they finally meet and discover that they both have the writing bug.
Empathy is the name of the game – this dreamer’s ability to put himself in the skin of the people he meets: the trio of old-timers who spend their day on a bench in the sun, the worst barber in town who still remembers meeting Scott Joplin in his youth, an ancient spinster who used to sell parrots, a former Hollywood diva from the days of the silent movies, an overweight soprano who cannot even leave her tenement apartment and who consumes huge quantities of mayonnaise, the patron of the last cinema hall on the pier, a gay body-builder, a blind man who refuses to use a cane, a clairvoyant with a large library filled only with books about depression, and so on.
The writer collects their lives, trying to keep their memory alive through his typewritten pages, before they fade into nothingness. But it appears as if somebody is hunting down the very same people he meets every day, who are now dying in suspect accidents and suicides. Elmo Crumley asks for hard evidence from the young writer, but this is hard to find for these people who live alone and forgotten.
... the pier was a great Titanic on its way to meet an iceberg in the night, with people busy rearranging the deck chairs, and some singing ‘Nearer my God to Thee’ as he rammed the plunger on the TNT detonator.
This is not your typical crime novel, despite the style that emulates the masters of the pulp era. The pacing is very slow, the dialogues bizarre and filled with metaphors, the clues evident to the experienced reader: all the victims share in one trait: ‘There’s something broken about all those people.’. It’s right there in the title, even if the identity of the dark stranger who rides the tramway on a road to hell remains unclear until the very last pages.
‘You showed me the people you were collecting for your books. All the gravel on the path, chaff in the wind, empty shells on the shore, dice with no spots, cards with no pips. No past, no present. So I gave them no future.’
Even the border between reality and dream, between fiction and fact is lost in the fog. Could the young writer be the hand that cuts the story of these lonely people short? Are they all figments of his imagination? Can all this be a case of supernatural forces that were awakened by the end-of-the-world destruction of the whole Venice shoreline?
Meaningless malignity. Don’t that have a ring? It means someone running around doing lousy things, a bastard, for no reason. Or none we can figure.’
This is not my first Ray Bradbury book, so I could pinpoint some of his favorite imagery here: the circus, the rollercoaster, the old cinema on a boat, the shooting gallery, the magician’s booth, the darkness that whispers secrets in your ear. I know that he tries to use the elements of the classic gumshoe novel, but my own journey was more like an elegy to the lonely people [Eleanor Rigby?] he sees on his daily walks through the city. Because this story, like many others he has written, is anchored in auto-biographical elements, memories that are haunting him since childhood, friends he has lost, places that live now only in old, faded postcards.
It was the elephants’ graveyard, the pier at night, all dark bones and a lid of fog over it and the sea rushing in to bury, reveal, and bury again.
Now all that remained of the old parade had ended here. Some of the cage wagons stood upright in the deep waters of the canal, others were tilted flat over on their sides and buried in the tides that revealed them some dawns or covered them some midnights. Fish swam in and out of the bars. By day small boys came and danced about on the huge lost islands of steel and wood and sometimes popped inside and shook the bars and roared.
This sense of alienation may come directly from the young boy who left an enchanted childhood in Waukegan, Illinois and moved to Venice, California to become a writer. The book was published in 1985, so this pervasive nostalgia is understandable.
When I was fifteen one of them looked at me and said, ‘You going to grow up and change the world only for the best, boy?’
‘Yes, sir!’ I said.
‘I think you’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Won’t he, gents?’
You cannot really separate the author from his writing, at least in the case of Ray Bradbury, for whom honesty and hard work were the most important requirements for the artist.
Remember, Feel first, think later is what he tells Elmo Crumley, when the detective is complaining that inspiration fails to come when bidden.
As a side note, if I were to search for anything critical to say about the book, it would be the candor and the affectation of the dialogues, not only between the writer and the detective, but in all of the narrator’s interactions with the people on his death list. They are like actors reciting the lines of a script, and excellent script but an artificial, contrived one, nevertheless.
‘You’re not one of them, I can tell. You couldn’t rape a chorus line, or use your agent’s desk for a bed. You couldn’t knock your grandma downstairs to cadge the insurance. Maybe you’re a sap, I don’t know, or a fool, but I’ve come to prefer saps and fools, guys who don’t raise tarantulas or yank wings off hummingbirds. Silly writers who dream about going to Mars and never coming back to our stupid daytime world.’
Yet, when it clicks, the style is heartbreaking and powerful, some of the best passages I have read from Bradbury, filled with the bitter truths and the hopes he clings to in his effort to put to sleep the demons who haunt his nights.
The voice from the past, making you remember a familiar thought, a warm breath in the ear, a seizure of passion like a strike of lightning. Which of us is not vulnerable, I thought, when it comes to that three-in-the-morning voice. Or when you wake after midnight to find someone crying, and it’s you, and tears on the chin and you didn’t even know that during the night you had had a bad dream.
This is a story about an elephant’s graveyard in the last days of the Venice amusement pier. This is a story about a voice in the night, calling you with a promise of a shared memory, a respite from loneliness and despair, a dark presence waiting in the fog. It could happen to you, too.
It applied to anyone who had ever loved and lost, meaning every single soul in the whole damn city, state and universe.
Who, reading it, would not be tempted to lift a phone, dial, wait, and whisper at last, late at night:
Here I am am. Please – come find me.