Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

THE RENAISSANCE PRINCE AND THE BAPTIST MARTIAN

The whole affair had its ridiculous side, especially for the year 1953 when it occurred. Why should the world’s foremost authority on the Italian Renaissance start a correspondence with a fairly suspicious and relatively unknown writer of Martian gobbledygook and science-fictional claptrap?

It was, after all, not the Space Age—that was light-years off in some impossible year. When I dared leave fruit-and-nut country, as California was referred to by some, to invade New York, I often found myself at literary parties introduced as good old Buck Rogers or Flash in the flesh.

Very uneasy times indeed. My books, as with most science fiction in those years, went mostly unreviewed, or popped up among the obits in the back of the New York Times.

All the more incredible then, in the midst of those low-profile years, that the Italian Renaissance authority did indeed write to Jules Verne’s bastard son, and here run the facts:

In early May of that year, I had written an article in The Nation defending my strange preoccupation with technologies and space travel.

On June first I opened my mailbox to find a letter on which in a spidery hand these words were inked: B. Berenson, I Tatti, Settignano, Firenze.

I turned to my wife, saying, “Good Lord, this can’t be from the Berenson, can it?”

“For God’s sake,” said Maggie. “Open it!”

I did and read:

I stared at the letter and almost wept.

Come see me.

I was making $90 a week at the time, writing mostly for the small magazines.

Six months earlier I had attended a first screening of the Cinerama process and sat with tears streaming down my cheeks as images of Italy and France and England poured across the screen.

“When, when, oh when,” I said to myself, “will we ever have money to travel?”

Never, was my own silent response. The market for Martians and people who wrote about them was low or nonexistent.

The letter from Berenson terrified me. I put off answering it, afraid to make a fool of myself. Also, there was the question of travel: an impossibility. We would never meet the old man face to face!

Salvation arrived in the guise of film-director John Huston.

On Saint Valentine’s night in 1951 I had dined with Huston and given him copies of my first three books, containing more than 60 of my short stories. I told him very simply and directly that if he liked my books as much as I loved his films, one day we must work together. From Africa, a month later, Huston wrote: “You’re right. Someday we will work together.”

Two years had passed, with only an occasional note from Huston. Now in the late summer of 1953, Huston telephoned, invited me to his hotel, put a drink in my hand and asked: “How would you like to come live in Ireland and write the screenplay of Moby Dick?”

Years later, Huston was to imitate my response, for the benefit of his friends. My jaw, it seemed, fell literally to my chest, as my skeleton collapsed. When I had put myself back together, I stammered that, very honestly, I had never read the book!

“Well, kid,” said Huston, “get yourself home, read as much as you can tonight, come for lunch tomorrow, tell me if it’s right.”

I stayed up until three in the morning and found old friends leaping from Melville’s text to welcome me—the Bible, and Shakespeare. I prowled the book wildly, plunging in here, wandering there, and at last going back to read that glorious first sentence: Call me Ishmael.

And I was in love.

My family and I shipped for Ireland three weeks later. In the midst of wrestling with “that damned Whale,” I wrote to Berenson, who responded on March 14, 1954:

Good Grief, I thought, do I head south for one more intellectual free-for-all, to be beat up and bested by a bantamweight Boston exile? But, I had to admit, Berenson hadn’t wasted any time. In this his second letter, he seemed to me anyway, to be measuring my shadow for a possible fall, even though he sugared his gentle half-criticisms with gracious compliments.

With vague misgivings, we headed south.

In Florence, we telephoned I Tatti, and B.B. sent his car for us. Delivered to the villa, we were greeted by Nicky Mariano, Berenson’s personal secretary for some 50 years, an intelligent, warm, and lovely human being. We were escorted to Berenson’s library to await his arrival from a morning’s work on a new book.

Then, suddenly, he was there in the doorway, looking intently at us, a very small man indeed, very frail looking, but energetic in the moment of his speaking. What he said was:

“My Bradbury, I am going to ask you a question. Depending on how you answer it, we shall be friends or not friends.”

I heard my own voice, half trembling, say: “Ask the question.”

“Well now,” said Berenson, advancing slowly upon me, “you didn’t answer my first letter to you for many months. Why? Was it because you had never heard of this man Berenson, and only found out later, and then hurried to write?”

“Mr. Berenson,” I cried. “Your letter scared the hell out of me! I wasn’t prepared for it. I didn’t think I could find the words to respond intelligently, on top of which I had no money, no way to travel, no chance of ever seeing you. It was hopeless. But now, suddenly, here we are! What else can I say?”

“Nothing.” Berenson moved forward more swiftly now, smiling. “Accepted. We shall be friends.”

I think we laughed then, all of us; the room became warmer, we sat down to a splendid lunch and fine wine.

My apprehensions fled. The bantamweight never attacked, never measured me for an intellectual box, never called me the names the bright Manhattan people had once called me. B.B. was simply curious to find out how a hothouse Martian happened to grow that way. I explained as best I could how I had dieted on Popular Mechanics, Science and Invention, with equal parts of Wonder Stories, when I was eight, nine, and ten.

“Well, now we shall diet you on da Vinci,” said B.B., “some of whose sketches could easily inhabit one of your technical fancies. How much do you know of the Renaissance?”

I had learned honestly from my encounter with Huston and the Whale.

Very little, I admitted.

“Splendid!” cried Berenson. “I shall be your guide and teacher!”

As indeed he was. He ran us forth to encounters with churches and galleries and pictures, then called us back for lunch or dinner to watch our faces and listen to our babble. He seemed truly delighted with our naïveté and the prospect of filling up these two young and impossibly empty new friends of his.

I don’t believe his delight would have lasted, however, if we hadn’t proved out as intuitive students.

Our friendship with B.B. was cemented by sheerest accident.

One morning I hailed a horsecab and gave instructions, in my truly abominable Italian, to take us to the Piazza Michelangelo. We wound up, instead, before the Church of the Carmine. Hell, I thought, since we’re here anyway, let’s go in.

In an innocence that would shame a gang of saints, my wife and I wandered the church aisles, stared at the murals, gasped, turned, and hurried back to lunch with B.B.

“Well children,” he said, pouring the wine, “what have we seen today?”

“Someone new to us. Someone we’d never heard of before,” I said.

“And who was this?”

“A painter named Masaccio,” I said, mispronouncing the name three different ways.

“Ah.” B.B.’s eyes twinkled. “And—mm—what did you think of this—Masaccio?”

“His murals looked—” I searched for the proper words “—as fresh as tomorrow morning. That open, that beautiful. Whatever year he painted in, it must have been a turning point. Was it?”

“Was it, indeed!” Berenson laughed and lifted his glass. “To Masaccio, and his new discoverers!”

“But now,” he said, at lunch. “Let me discover some of you. I’ve read your Fahrenheit 451, which you brought along to give me, and I’m fascinated with your Book People in your finale. The idea of having people become books, memorize them, so as to save them from the Burners—superb. But, I’ve been thinking—”

I drank my wine a trifle too fast. “Yes?”

“You could do a sequel to your novel, in which the Book People, at a later date and time, when the Burners vanish and the world is safe from fire—when the Book People are called in to recite their memorized books and remember them all wrong.”

“My God,” I said. “I never thought of that.”

“Think of it!” cried Berenson, eyes flashing. “War and Peace told by an idiot. Crime and Punishment remembered by a fool. Machiavelli’s The Prince mouthed by a numskull. Moby Dick recited by an alcoholic cripple. Oh, the variations are many! You could do a chapter on each book and how it was boned, marrowed, broken, collapsed in ruins and put back together by morons or well-meaning pedants who remember their own interpretation of the soaring lines. Hamlet run to earth by a harebrain. Othello bleached into boredom by a retired librarian, long gone in senility. What fun, what variations, what satire. Write it down!”

I did. It was a superb idea. But it has lain in my files for some 25 years now. I didn’t dare say to Berenson, or perhaps even to myself, then, that it would take a genius who had read, digested, and completely understood the entire body of American and English literature to plow into and create a book like that. Envy the idea? God, yes. But do it? The ghosts of Moliere, Pope, Swift, and Chesterton, plus Shaw, just might bring it off.

Meanwhile, our gentle disagreements continued. I wanted to hold onto my Martians with a tight fist. B.B. oiled his wit with Burgundy and pried my fingers, one by one. “Surely,” he pursued, “you have some stories, some novels in progress about, well, just people. I mean, minus machines, minus the ballet scrims and backdrops of your Mars?”

“I’ve been working on a book called Dandelion Wine for ten years,” I said. “About my childhood, my folks, my friends in upper Illinois in 1929.”

“Finish it!” said Berenson. “Let me see it. Now, later this afternoon—have you been to the Duomo yet? No? Out you go.”

And out we went and the days passed and it was time to leave for Venice. Not a sad leaving, we discovered, for B.B. was heading for Venice the same week. Whether he came along to be with us, or whether he had planned the trip for himself months before, we never knew, and were too timid to ask. The great thing was—B.B. would be there, wandering the canals and streets, to welcome us!

B.B. wasn’t there.

Well, he was there, said the voice on the hotel phone, but he was gone. Gone where? Out. Out like a small child, unable to wait for one more encounter with Raphael, one more collision with Tintoretto!

No one, not even Nicky, knew where he was. He would come wandering back soon, of course, and then we would lunch.

We went out, hoping to find B.B., but found, instead, to his later delight, the special Veroneses he loved, plus the Bellinis, plus, plus, the list was endless, as was the after-lunch, high-tea, before-dinner, early bedtime talk, for our time was running out. We’d been away from America for eight months. Our families were waiting a long way off; it was time to go home.

Meanwhile I had fallen in love with the theatrics of Tintoretto. I used the term in ignorance and found that it was absolutely center-target, on-the-nose. Berenson showed me some sketches of miniature theaters Tintoretto had built and lit so as to study and duplicate his experiments in chiaroscuro.

Toward the end of our last drink together, B.B. let his eyes flash and his mouth work over a tidbit that he soon let forth: “You mustn’t mind me when I sometimes quietly insinuate you might grow better without all that machinery to hold you up.”

“Mr. Berenson,” I said. “I—”

“No, no, let me finish.” He waved his small hand and leaned forward. “For I suddenly remember a device whereby the Boy David was created. Ask me now: how was the Boy David hammered out of his rock, eh? Where does the mighty Michelangelo begin to cut such an incredible figure out of marble?”

“How?” I asked.

“Well, now—” B.B. leaned to refill my glass and sketch out the grand details. “Michelangelo built himself an inkwell twenty inches high and filled it to the brim with ink. In that inkwell he suspended an eighteen-inch-tall model miniature of the David. Each day he drained an eighth of an inch of ink from the well. The sides of the well were marked in measures corresponding to inches on the huge slab of marble from which the David would be summoned. Measuring in from the sides of the inkwell to the crown of the miniature of David’s head, Michelangelo then climbed up on the great stone and struck his first blow! Day-by-day, the ink was lowered, day-by-day the marble David emerged from the living rock!”

I was tremendously excited by the concept, having never heard of it. The more I thought on it, the more excited I became.

“I have always loved world’s fairs and the arts and sciences exhibitions there,” I said. “Someday, by God, someone will give me a chance to help design an Art Gallery of the Future. At the center of it, I want to act out the very process you’ve described, using three-dimensional models and film. Let a visitor press a button at the front of the exhibit and watch the ink go down an eighth of an inch in the inkwell, revealing the miniature David. Then, to one side show a twenty-foot-tall projected image of the waiting marble. As the ink lowers in the real well, the film moves, the rock shatters under an invisible hammer, and the top of David’s head thrusts high up out of the stone. In 60 seconds flat, your curious gallery-ite would watch head, torso, arms, legs, cut from the rock, even as he touched the button to drain the ink.”

“Bravo!” said B.B. “Write it down. Someday—do it!”

One day, I did. The idea has been fed into the concepts for a technological art museum to be built somewhere in the United States in the next few years.

But meanwhile, the last wineglass was emptied, the last good-byes said. “And you’re not to call me Mr. Berenson anymore. It’s B.B. And you must write often and come back soon. Good-bye children, good-bye.”

The next day, in the hour before leaving Venice on the train, I wandered a last time in the Academy, and, on impulse, hurried to B.B.’s hotel and sent twenty dozen flowers up to his room.

Marguerites, they were, and I would have sent more, but I had bought out the supply.

We sailed for home, thinking we would never see him again, But, as he said later, he had books to read and books to write and pictures to look at and honorary sons like myself to tend to.

We began a tennis-match correspondence, which lasted, with Nicky’s help, to within a few weeks before his death.

I cannot convince the reader how important these letters were. Remember, those were still lonely times for me. The Space Age, I repeat, was only a rumor beyond a horizon so far off it was ridiculous to contemplate. Science fiction was hidden away with the dust in the libraries. None of it, absolutely none, was taught in the schools. We writers of speculative nonsense were the lost tribe of literature, wandering the earth, begging for a crumb of attention. I got my precious crumb from B.B. when, in letters like this, waiting for me when I reached home, he spoke the needful words that made me want to go on writing and living for him:

Did ever such a son have such a father?

What an army we made, he to lead, me to follow, he promising to read any damn thing I dared to write, and me storming my typewriter because of that promise.

More letters followed, and I sent B.B. not only books but individual stories, one of which he responded to as follows:

Again and again in our writing back and forth, B.B. and I circled ’round the touchstone that was our constant center: the joy of creation, the passion with which I tried to do things born of pure love or pure hate (when something was truly worth hating), and the fact that I threw up, as I put it, every morning, and cleaned up after lunch. The creative explosion first, then the critical clearing of the concussion area. I told B.B. that I had had a sign by my typewriter for years that read: Don’t Think, Do!

Plenty of time to think after your love is accomplished.

B.B. approved.

The praise he ladled on me, with intimations of his own mortality, could not but have caused a crisis in my life:

This last did it. Tears sprang to my eyes. I took one look at my wife, as she read the letter. She nodded, reading my thoughts. I picked up the phone and called my film agent. “Get me a job, any job, anywhere in Europe,” I said. “We’ve got to make it to Italy this summer!”

My agent called back an hour later with incredible news: “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “How would you like to go straight to Florence, Italy, and settle in to write a film based on the life of Lorenzo de’ Medici?”

I was stunned, and gave a great shout. My agent filled in the details. It seemed that Tyrone Power was behind the project. He was working with a number of people whom my agent named. The more he talked, the quieter I became. With all the details given, I knew these were simply the wrong people to go live and work with.

I thanked my agent, said no, and cabled B.B. to hang on, live! until we could make it over. I followed it with a letter. B.B. wrote back in July:

In January 1957 a note came from B.B.

I cabled B.B. telling him that cards had been sent, but that the Italian mail service had a way of dumping mail off Capri if it suited them. A long letter to him followed. Then, a few months later I was able to write and tell him better news. Graham Greene had given a story of mine to Sir Carol Reed, the director of Odd Man Out and The Third Man. Reed had flown to Los Angeles to meet with me, and we were to return for a summer of screenplay writing in London.

The summer was perfection with Sir Carol. The screenplay finished, we headed south to B.B., who, with his sister and Nicky, was avoiding the hot Italian weather in his retreat at Vallombrosa.

We were reunited in joy, as if three years had not passed since our last fireworks. B.B. was, of course, even more the trembling grey moth now; the bones had thinned within the mother-of-pearl, crushed-flower flesh, but his spirits were good and his mind clean. The old testings, the gentle arguments bombarded me before, during, and after lunch, and took up again after a very long siesta, at late-afternoon tea.

B.B. was harboring his strength even more now. He slept later, napped longer, and saved his energy for the various articles, not just one, that he wrote each afternoon before bedding down long before nine. Awake only a few hours a day, he made those hours burn and count.

I had been a good son, of course, listening and doing over the years. I brought B.B. a copy of the first edition of my Dandelion Wine.

“No Martians this time? Good, good. Not that your Martians aren’t fine company, good metaphor. But this, now—this—”

He had come by happy accident on a chapter about an old man named Colonel Freeleigh. His eyes lingered and flashed.

“You’ve caught some of me here, yes?”

“Yes.”

It was the story of an old, old man so packed with years and history that he was, to the town children, a Time Machine. But the Time Machine was in disrepair. The colonel, unable to travel, telephoned far places and had friends hang their telephones out windows in Mexico City, so he could hear the bright trolleys pass, or London as Big Ben struck midnight, or Paris to catch the maniac traffic coursing the Place de la Concorde.

“The difference being,” observed B.B., “Time Machine that I am, I am still running, traveling, in spite of, did I tell you, falling over a precipice. Well, a small cliff. Well, again, into a small ditch. I was out of the car, bending over to examine some flowers, when the car backed up and the open door caught and tossed me head-over-heels!”

“It terrified me to hear a cry,” said Nicky, “and turn and see B.B.—vanished!”

“What a tumble. Nothing broken. Did we have a good laugh, Nicky?!”

“We did!”

“Now, listen,” said B.B. putting aside his teacup with hands that never stopped trembling now. “What else are you up to? Poetry?”

“Very bad stuff,” I said.

“Keep at it, it’ll go well one day. Plays?”

“Mediocre one-acts.”

“That will change! You have a good ear. More films?”

“I’ve promised myself to do only one every four years.”

“Fine. Keep it that way. I’m out of reading matter. Do me another novel!”

“I will,” I said. And I did.

Now there was the last hour of our last day with B.B. to finish out as the sun began to set. We played a game we had started years before of: “Who Owns What And Which and Why?” which has since become a small poem that I have just published.

Who owns October, for instance? Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Wolfe. Among artists? Goya and Gustave Dore.

Name your own writers, artists, reasons, and start the fight.

Who owns Don Quixote? Dore, again. Think of the mad battler of windmills and his illustrations snap instantly in place. For that matter, Dore owns Dante and Milton and the Bible, too. And London, if you recall the scores of etchings he did in those teeming streets.

Who owns the Beauty of Women in the world? B.B. opted for certain Raphaels, to be argumentative. I had just fallen in love with Botticelli’s creatures of autumn or the birthing seas. We compromised on da Vinci’s cartoon for The Virgin of the Rocks.

Who owns winter? Whittier, perhaps. Perhaps Edith Sitwell.

Christmas, Easter, summer, spring, old people, children, fairies, ghosts, kings, the list can be long and various and the nominations incredibly on-the-nose lovely or unacceptably ridiculous or grotesque.

The last of the sun was gone. Wrapped in great blankets against a sudden chill, we said our good-byes. “And remember,” said B.B. “when you go to museums, only stay for an hour at a time! Don’t exhaust the body so as to exhaust the eye and tire the mind! Good-bye, young lady. Good-bye, dear boy. Remember this tired old man!”

“Oh, B.B.,” I said. I embraced him and felt the trembling that was half age and half unspent ideas so much wanting to burst forth. “Oh, B.B., I always will.”

His death was still two incredible years away. He had many journeys to go before his sleep, and he made as many as he could, dropping me cards along the way, glad for a son who was glad to receive them—the best of sons because I didn’t try to out-best papa or kill him for mom, or embarrass him before his peers. I professed my love to him and Nicky whenever I could. A last card came from them in October 1959, and a few days later the news broke that Mario Lanza, the singer, had died in Italy and, oh, yes, the same day, the art historian, Bernard Berenson. Long articles followed, of course, in every major newspaper and magazine. B.B. did not go quietly to join his friends in another century.

In the late desert afternoon it came to me to think of him in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins: “What I do is me, for that I came.”

If ever a man entered the world to become himself and know a time and declare its virtues and delineate its boundaries in terms of his own insatiable love and curiosity and light, it was this old man I had described as a Time Machine for us all. The machine had stopped now, but the territory it had mapped was still there, waiting to enhance our lives.

I telegraphed Nicky the same dumb and inadequate words we always telegraph anyone at such a time. I wrote her a week later, recalling the good fact of my last day in Venice when I had bought and brought to his hotel twenty dozen flowers, twenty dozen white marguerites for the living while they lived.

All for B.B. All sent with joy and love from his now and everlasting son.