Not long ago, in a moment of minor personal crisis, I found myself hungering after the literary equivalent of comfort food. Something familiar, but not too familiar—not familiar to the point of boredom. Yet something that would give me a predictably pleasant lift.Wandering our basement library (which contains some 3000 of those bulky pre-Kindle items earlier generations called “books”), I came across the perfect thing: a copy of “Long After Midnight” by the late Ray Bradbury.But not just any copy. My “Long After Midnight” is the first edition, published by Knopf, and in fact, it’s the first brand-new hardcover I ever bought. The book is in very good condition, and the dust jacket is nearly perfect, having had a Brodart jacket protector applied to it a few years later, when I was in college and began doing such things.The price indicated on the front jacket flap, $7.95, raises a smile with me today. The back flap reads “9/76,” and that’s about right: I have a feeling that I purchased the volume shortly after my fourteenth birthday, around the time I entered high school. Most likely I did so with some birthday money (I’m an August baby). I can remember being in the bookstore, which was on State Street in downtown Santa Barbara, though the name of the shop has vanished from my memory. I recall how special I felt, picking up from the display table such an expensive item, a brand-new hardcover book, and taking it to the counter to pay for it. My dad was with me, which is further evidence that this must have been birthday-related: my father wouldn’t have been caught dead in a bookstore otherwise.I owned hardcover books already, of course, but they were of two varieties: 1) thrift-store purchases, a quarter for, say, a beat-up old Perry Mason novel; or, 2) book-club reprints, received in the mail and, I’d begun to recognize by comparing them to the editions found in the local library, distinctly cheap in their paper and bindings. By the time I was thirteen or so I understood the difference between a cruddy book-club job and a real publisher’s edition.I no longer recall how I discovered the work of Ray Bradbury but, like many young kids with a burgeoning love for the “dark fantastic,” I went through a major phase of reading him—he was one of the main conduits in my transitioning from reading mostly books my mother liked (primarily mysteries, Ed McBain and Dell Shannon) and striking out on my own, into unknown territories. Childhood is, of course, the ideal time to discover Bradbury’s work (and science fiction/fantasy in general), and I fell thoroughly in love with this master of plot and prose through the usual channels: “The Martian Chronicles,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Illustrated Man,” “S is for Space,” “R is for Rocket.”“Long After Midnight,” then, has retained a special place in my collection, and it has another significance as well—it was also the first book I ever got signed by its author. This happened in 1983, at Santa Barbara’s Andromeda Bookstore. I remember little of the event except that the line was long, customers were limited to one book each, and I was surprised when I finally made my way to the front to see how puffy and red-faced Mr. Bradbury looked. It was suddenly obvious to me that the author photos on his books were some years out of date.I would love to be able to report that this one-time meeting between a present literary titan and a future one was a memorable exchange of witticisms or profound philosophical ideas, but in fact what it amounted to was a nervous young fellow who simply pushed his book toward The Great Man and said, “Hi,” to which said Great Man responded memorably, “Hi.” He signed the book with a big purple marker, adding the date: “6/18/83.”He handed the book back to me. I said, “Thank you.”And that was it. Oh, well.Still, though the book has had a proud place on my shelves for decades, I realized something as I pulled it down recently, searching for that literary comfort food.I had not actually read this book since I bought it way back in 1976.Read it all the way through, I mean. It has certainly come off the shelf now and then over the years, and I’ve poked around in it. One or two of the stories therein are among my favorites by Bradbury; I’ve read them many times, even taught them. But I’d never revisited the vast majority of the tales in “Long After Midnight.” I had no memory of what most of them were about.My search for literary comfort food was over.In the next couple of days I re-read “Long After Midnight” straight through. It proved to be an odd experience—exhilarating at times, exciting, amusing, sometimes disappointing, and occasionally downright baffling.For “Long After Midnight” is later Bradbury, not the Bradbury of the early classics. This often seems to be something considered almost unmentionable, but the truth is, like many first-rank artists, Ray Bradbury had a finite period of greatness. It began in the mid-1940s, as he commenced writing his initial series of peerless horror tales (“The Small Assassin,” “The Emissary,” countless others), and ended in the mid-1950s—say the late 1950s, if one wants to be generous. Everything that followed proved to be mere postscript.If that sounds unnecessarily harsh, it isn’t meant to be; I’m in no way saying that Bradbury wrote nothing of quality in the past half-century. But literary genius does tend to have an expiration date. Yes, Henry James managed to have an early, middle, and late period, and created masterpieces in all of them; but far more common is the writer who burns brightly for a few years and then sinks back into lesser work. Ernest Hemingway is a classic example of the phenomenon. So is my favorite playwright in the world, Tennessee Williams, whose great period exactly coincided with Bradbury’s. Arthur Miller, too. In fact, most writers with major reputations and long careers build those reputations in relatively brief periods when they create the works by which they will be remembered.Ray Bradbury will not be remembered by the material in “Long After Midnight,” but the strengths and weaknesses of the volume seem to me to reveal much about Bradbury as a writer.There are twenty-two stories in “Long After Midnight.” Here is the Table of Contents:The Blue BottleOne Timeless SpringThe Parrot Who Met PapaThe Burning ManA Piece of WoodThe MessiahG.B.S.—Mark VThe Utterly Perfect MurderPunishment Without CrimeGetting Through Sunday SomehowDrink Entire: Against the Madness of CrowdsInterval in SunlightA Story of LoveThe WishForever and the EarthThe Better Part of WisdomDarling AdolfThe Miracles of JamieThe October GameThe PumpernickelLong After MidnightHave I Got a Chocolate Bar For You!When reading through this collection it’s frequently obvious, even without looking up the copyright dates, which stories were new to this mid-’70s volume and which were leftover tales from his earlier period. “Long After Midnight” begins with “The Blue Bottle,” a curious choice, since it’s clearly an old one (from 1950, in fact), and not especially strong. The main appeal of the tale is that it reads almost like a story cut from “The Martian Chronicles.” On the dead Mars of the future two Earthmen, Craig and Beck, search for the possibly mythological “blue bottle,” made by Martians of Martian glass, and said to have the ability to grant its holder any wish. The story’s setting is not quite that of “The Martian Chronicles”—mention is made of how, after the First Industrial Invasion of Mars, the human race “moved on toward the stars.” But the description of the fragile glass cities and the ancient Martian civilization can’t help but toss anyone familiar with the “Chronicles” back to that world:“Under the cool double moons of Mars the midnight cities were bone and dust. Along the scattered highway the landcar bumped and rattled, past cities where the fountains, the gyrostats, the furniture, the metal-singing books, the painting lay powdered over with mortar and insect wings. Past cities that were cities no longer, but only things rubbed to a fine silt that flowed senselessly back and forth on the wine winds between one land and another, like the sand in a gigantic hourglass, endlessly pyramiding and repyramiding.”The narrative voice is unmistakable, and “The Blue Bottle” is beautifully written; but in the end it’s clear enough why Bradbury didn’t make a few simple adjustments to the tale and retrofit it into “The Martian Chronicles.” It just isn’t that memorable. As a result, “Long After Midnight” kicks off on an odd note, a nostalgic one, but not one all that lasting. (This is doubly puzzling because for some reason, later in the book appears one of Bradbury’s best-known horror tales, “The October Game”—it would have made a far more powerful opening. But it’s strange that this oft-anthologized tale is there at all; it’s the only well-known story in the collection, and even in 1976 was available in many other places.)But it’s when we get to the current stories, those written in the latter ’60s and early ’70s, that “Long After Midnight” gets into some of its deepest trouble.Mind you, there are certainly some good stories among the later ones here. “The Utterly Perfect Murder” is a gem, a tale of a middle-aged man who returns to his home town to settle an old score and is horrified by what he finds there. “Punishment Without Crime” is also very good, a virtual sequel to Bradbury’s famous “Marionettes, Inc.,” in which a man “murders” a perfect replica of his wife—a replica created for exactly that purpose—and then discovers things working out quite differently from what he’d expected. “Interval in Sunlight,” the longest story in the book, is an incisive and disturbing psychological study of what today would be called a codependent relationship—a marriage in which abuser and abused seem hopelessly locked together for all time.But many of the later efforts suffer from the usual problems of Bradbury’s post-1950s writing—slight story concepts, sloppy sentimentality, overworked metaphors, overwrought prose. Nowhere are these difficulties more obvious than in “A Story of Love” (a tale whose bad title tells you something important about what’s to follow). This effort is set in Bradbury’s legendary Green Town, and details the burgeoning love of schoolboy Bob Spaulding for his new teacher, Ann Taylor—and, perhaps, her love for him. (Don’t worry; this being Bradbury in his sentimental mode, nothing icky will happen.) The story opens with…well, allow me to simply quote the second paragraph:“Everyone remembered Ann Taylor, for she was that teacher for whom all the children wanted to bring huge oranges or pink flowers, and for whom they rolled up the rustling green and yellow maps of the world without being asked. She was that woman who always seemed to be passing by on days when the shade was green under the tunnel of oaks and elms in the old town, her face shifting with the bright shadows as she walked, until it was all things to all people. She was the fine peaches of summer in the snow of winter, and she was cool milk for cereal on a hot early-June morning. Whenever you needed an opposite, Ann Taylor was there. And those rare few days in the world when the climate was balanced as fine as a maple leaf between winds that blew just right, those were the days like Ann Taylor, and should have been so named on the calendar.”Whoo, boy.There are several words I can think of to describe this kind of prose. One would be “purple.” Another: “fey.” A third: “Please-stop-writing-like-this-or-I-will-start-screaming.”Okay, I cheated on that last one.Alas, this kind of flowery, pseudo-lyrical balderdash mars many of the stories in “Long After Midnight,” and reminds me why I stopped reading Bradbury’s newer work many years ago. The Bradbury of the early 1950s would never have allowed many of these stories into print, or at least he would have excised much of the windy emptiness of the prose.I don’t know what I thought of such prose then, in 1976, when I took the volume home and read it cover to cover. I remember that I was disappointed with the book as a whole, even as I liked some of the individual stories: overall, it didn’t seem a waste of my $7.95-plus-tax, even as I recognized that it was a far cry from the great Bradbury books I’d previously encountered. A few of the stories, like the aforementioned “Interval in Sunlight,” must have gone over my head—I doubt I understood much of what Bradbury was writing about. Others contained references I couldn’t possibly have grasped, as with “G.B.S.—Mark V,” about a robot George Bernard Shaw, or “Forever and the Earth,” about a space-age resurrection of Thomas Wolfe. I’m quite sure I’d never heard of those people then, and as a result Bradbury’s tributes to them couldn’t have meant anything to me.But other stories, many of them, failed for me then for the same reasons they fail today: Slightness, soppiness, overwriting to the point of absurdity. One more painful example will suffice, this from “The Better Part of Wisdom”—and keep in mind as you read it that this is actually appears in the dialogue. Yes, a human being is supposed to be saying these words, in which an old man remembers a brief childhood friendship:“We walked the shore, and that’s all there was, the simple thing of us upon the shore, and building castles or climbing hills to fight wars among the mounds. We found an old round tower and yelled up and down from it. But mostly it was walking, our arms around each other like twins born in a tangle, never cut free by knife or lightning. I inhaled, he exhaled. Then he breathed and I was the sweet chorus…We found ourselves laid out with sweet hilarity, eyes tight, gripped to each other’s shaking, and the laugh jumped free like one silver trout following another. God, I bathed in his laughter as he bathed in mine, until we were weak as if love had put us to the slaughter and exhaustions. We panted then like pups in hot summer, empty of laughing, and sleepy with friendship. And the weather for that week was blue and gold, no clouds, no rain, and a wind that smelled of apples, but no, only that boy’s wild breath."I read somewhere that when W.H. Auden was unhappy with something he read, he would tell the author: “I’m sorry, my dear, but it won’t do.”This writing won’t do.Then, to be perfectly honest—and I know this will be sacrilege to some—I have never liked or responded to Bradbury’s writings about children. Again and again when reading books like “Dandelion Wine” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes” I find myself shaking my head in disbelief at how the children are portrayed. (For a quick refresher course in the weird unreality of Bradbury’s child characters, take a gander at the 1980s movie adaptation of “Something Wicked,” which he scripted. One cannot envy the lot of the kids in the film who were made to utter that dialogue.) No, it won’t do. Children don’t think like that, they don’t talk like that, they don’t act like that. The children in Bradbury’s stories aren’t children, they are a grown man’s gauzy and rose-colored recollection of what it is to be a child. It rings false every time, just as those lines from “The Better Part of Wisdom” do.Other stories in “Long After Midnight,” while not filled with the kind of wild rhetorical buzzkill I’ve just quoted, are poor simply because they’re so slight, so trivial. “Darling Adolf,” “The Miracles of Jamie,” and “Have I Got a Chocolate Bar For You!” fit into this camp, tales so flimsy that one wonders why Bradbury bothered to write them and, having written them, why he bothered to publish them.And yet there are also moments in “Long After Midnight” which amaze and exhilarate.“The Burning Man” is another gem, a brief story which asks “if there is such a thing as genetic evil in the world,” and delivers a memorably ghastly answer. (This story was adapted, and quite well, into one of the few worthwhile segments of the 1980s “Twilight Zone” revival series.)“The Pumpernickel” is a lovely, low-key tale about a man’s memories which reminds me of some of Bernard Malamud’s classic short works.And then there is the title story, which is both grim and unforgettable. “Long After Midnight” opens with several policemen and paramedics at a cliff, where they make a grisly discovery:“The slender weight was a girl, no more than nineteen, in a light green gossamer party frock, coat and shoes lost somewhere in the cool night, who had brought a rope up to these cliffs and found a tree with a branch half over the cliff and tied the rope in place and made a loop for her neck and let herself out on the wind to hang there swinging. The rope made a dry scraping whine on the branch, until the police came, and the ambulance, to take her down out of space and place her on the ground.”These grizzled professionals speculate a bit about the girl as they cut her down, load her dead body into the ambulance, and drive off into the night toward the morgue. Little else happens in the story.…Little else, that is, except a final sudden revelation which changes—or possibly does not change—the men’s entire perspective, and ours, on what has happened, and what it means.When I got to the end of this powerful and indescribably moving tale back in 1976, when I was all of fourteen, I knew I’d read something I would never forget. And I never have. “Long After Midnight,” the story, made me think differently about some very important things in life and society.What things?Well, you’ll have to read the story for yourself.And so in “Long After Midnight,” the collection, Bradbury’s magic still works, if only sputteringly, sporadically. Thirty-five years later, I’ve discovered that I was both very wrong about these stories and very right: the worst are worse than I remembered, the best better than I’d dared hope.In any event, this volume of literary comfort food—my first new hardcover, my first signed book—will, barring fire or flood, retain its place of honor in the basement library until, I suppose, my dying day. I don’t know if I’ll ever read it straight through again. But from time to time I’ll bring it down from the shelves and find my way to the pages, and there are many of them, that let me remember Bradbury as he once was—and, by 1976, still occasionally could be.
"My hands blurred. They made motions that caused an illusion of a dozen hands. Like those pictures of Eastern goddesses they worship in temples. One hand with a tomato in it. One hand grasping a banana. A third hand seizing strawberries! A fourth, fifth, sixth hand caught in midmotion, each with a bit of cheese, olive, or radish!""I knew it was all over. I was lost. From this moment on, it would be a touching, an eating of foods, a learning of language and algebra and logic, a movement and an emotion, a kissing and a holding, a whirl of feeling that caught and sucked me drowning under. I knew I was lost forever now, and I didn't care. But I did care, and I was laughing and crying all in one, and there was nothing to do about it, but hold her and love her with all my decided and rioting body and mind.""The sum of us? Pandemonium spread on biscuits and devoured at high tea.""Could I mention the hill of beauty that has risen to fill my soul through a lifetime, and myself with a toy sand-shovel doling it back to the world in dribs and drabs?""And the ice melts, the fog lifts, the wind burns with June, and ten years shuck off your life."“A thing had not begun, but already I sorrowed after its death.”“And the weather for that week was blue and gold, no clouds, no rain, and a wind that smelled of apples, but no, only that boy’s wild breath.”"Why do I see us fall again and the earth reach up to take the wild young horses driven mad by too much sweet grass in a line of days that never end?"“Ah, damn it to hell, Frank, Tom’s friend, so young you’re destruction to the eyes. Get away!”
What do You think about Long After Midnight (2000)?
I was lucky to find a first edition of this one. Although sometimes Bradbury seems a little tame and dreamy, some of these stories have a very contemporary bite. The title story, "Long After Midnight", would do well to be re-published in the New Yorker today.I also really liked "Interval in Sunlight", which I have not seen anywhere else and which was first published here. It's painfully modern and more in the field of human nature's ability to terrorize the self. I'd love to see if it could be adapted to short film. Some of the stories, particularly the SF ones, feel a little outdated and even heavy-handed as they make their points, but the more subtle ones more than compensate. This is heavy reading, but appropriate for young adults.
—Chrystal Hays
This is a compellation of 22 short stories filled with he imagination of its author. He carries us from small-town America to the frozen dessert and double moon that have been part of our interior landscape in The Martian Chronicle . Fantastic or conventional, suspenseful or nostalgic, each of the stories has that aura of unexpected combined with the special ring of absolute rightness that is uniquely Bradbury.If you like Bradbury you will love all these delicious morsels of creative literature. Personally he is one of my favorites.
—Suzanne Skelly
During elementary school a couple of authors so impressed me that I resolved to read everything they had ever written. One was Mark Twain, another H.G. Wells, a third was Ray Bradbury. Ignorant, I thought that covering the paperback book racks at the drugstore and the selections in the local library did the job. It didn't; not by a long shot.Since those exciting days of ignorance I've found innumerable volumes by all three authors which I'd never heard of before. To make things better, Bradbury was still producing and might be producing still. Thus, I come back, and back again to old loves. I may have been ignorant, but I wasn't entirely stupid. I like all of them still.
—Erik Graff
