At last I've felt up to the re-reading of a randomly selected story. Random story #8 is "McGillahee's Brat".

Fifteen years after visiting Ireland to work on a screenplay, the protagonist (clearly a stand-in for Ray himself), finds himself back in the country. On his way to the Royal Hibernian hotel, he is accosted by a beggar holding a wailing baby, and with a shock he realizes that this is exactly the same baby he encountered on his previous visit!

Obsessed, the narrator follows the woman and the baby until he corners them and finally learns the baby's secret: the baby (who is happy to talk if someone else is picking up the bar tab) is forty years old and decided in infancy never to grow up. The woman who totes him around is his sister, their mother having passed away long since. He chose this life after his father suggested it was the only way to circumvent an adult life of poverty and deprivation.

The story doesn't make much sense (the brat's life is hardly more attractive as a perpetual infant than as an adult), but on this re-reading I found that it worked a lot better for me than previously, being quite effectively sad and poignant.

"McGillahee's Brat" was collected only in The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980), although a reworked version also forms Chapter 23 of Green Shadows, White Whale (1992).

quote:

Originally posted by douglasSP:
At last I've felt up to the re-reading of a randomly selected story. Random story #8 is "McGillahee's Brat".

I participated in a performance reading of this screenplay in Ray's home with three of his Fahrenheit 451 actors a few months ago. One of the last things I read for him.

It was better than I remembered. The brat's dad's speech, his despair at the family's circumstances, and his mother's fate make this an effective indictment of poverty and social marginalization. So it's quite a serious story - leavened a bit by the brat himself, of course, who certainly raises a chortle or two.

quote:

Originally posted by douglasSP:
It was better than I remembered. The brat's dad's speech, his despair at the family's circumstances, and his mother's fate make this an effective indictment of poverty and social marginalization. So it's quite a serious story - leavened a bit by the brat himself, of course, who certainly raises a chortle or two.

Exactly so. I started seeing that during the rehearsal, but as we were doing the reading, I realised it more so. And the great Michael Prichard as The Brat!

Random story #9 is "And the Rock Cried Out".

I drew the number this past weekend, but as luck would have it, this is one of the few Ray Bradbury stories to exceed short story length (it's a novelette in terms of Hugo and Nebula Award rules). I'll probably get to it only next weekend, but since I've made the draw, I'm putting it up here in case anyone else wants to comment.

I ran through Sam Weller's blog (Listen to the Echoes), but as far as I can tell he hasn't yet featured this story in his brilliant "Essential Bradbury" posts.

Which is a pity, because it's one of the finest pieces of Bradbury there is (Eller and Touponce say so in The Life of Fiction, and in the best academic tradition, they make very few outright value judgements in that book).

"And the Rock Cried Out" has a relatively complicated publishing history in Bradbury's collections. It first appeared in the first edition of Fahrenheit 451, but generations of later editions of the novel have appeared without any supporting stories. Then it was featured in The Day It Rained Forever, which is where I first encountered it, but most American readers would presumably not have seen that one. Then it was in The Vintage Bradbury, an excellent collection which is still available today - but still, many readers would probably have given it a miss because the contents looked so familiar. The next logical opportunity for the story to be collected, was in the first super-collection, The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980), but it was unaccountably left out. Only in 2003 was the story given a well deserved new publication in the second super-collection, Bradbury Stories.

I think I shall be reading the story with you, douglasSP, as it is one that I haven't given much time to in the past. The length of it is one of the factors that has put me off it. Like you, I know it (knew it) from THE DAY IT RAINED FOREVER, which is similar to (but not identical with) the American volume A MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY.

Jon Eller has also said that "And the Rock..." in its (unpublished) screenplay form is Ray's best piece of film writing.

I think I've read it two or three times, and the story seemed stronger in the more recent readings.

It's not that long, Phil. About 25 pages in my old Penguin UK edition.

The Day It Rained Forever is essential for two stories, "Perchance to Dream" (originally "Asleep in Armageddon") and "Referent", neither of which is collected anywhere else.

“And the Rock Cried Out”, like all three of Bradbury’s long Mexican tales, is a tale of deep unease. In “The Next in Line” and “Interval in Sunlight” he depicts disintegrating relationships against the backdrop of a culture that is in a unique dialog with the subject of death, from the upright mummies of Guanajuato to the exotically sinister Day of the Dead festivities. There is no explicit violence in any of these stories (as far as I remember), but the raw sides of fly-encrusted meat that book-end this story are a clear warning that things will not turn out well.

Here, the relationship of the trapped American couple remains strong, but they are stranded and increasingly besieged by hostile locals in a scenario where the First World societies of the US and Europe have been destroyed (by war, one assumes, though Bradbury doesn’t linger on the subject). The Webbs are scapegoats for the (perceived) smug, paternalistic attitudes of powerful societies who lord it over their impoverished neighbors. But Ray maintains a moral balance in the story by presenting two decent characters who, at considerable risk to themselves, extend helping hands to the beleaguered couple.

The setting, by the way, is not explicitly identified as Mexico. A few place names are given, but they were obscure to me, possibly made up, and it didn’t seem material enough to look them up. But whether Mexico or not, the three “Mexican nightmares” are all clearly inspired by Bradbury’s 1945 road trip south of the border with his friend Grant Beach, which he once described as the worst experience of his life.

Oddly enough, though I still think this is nothing less than an outstanding story, I’m marking it down slightly. On this reading, I thought the cautionary theme was made too explicit, too early in the story. And of course, it’s very uncomfortable reading for those like me, who live in societies with particularly acute socio-economic divisions.

Random Story #10 is "Un-Pillow Talk", which is collected only in We'll Always Have Paris(2009).

A couple who have just made love, suddenly realise that what was previously a perfect friendship, has now been ruined - or so they see it, anyway. They decide to talk their way back through the year of their friendship, in order to try to get back where they were. The results are, of course, inconclusive. The idea that playing tennis as a doubles team, smoothes the way to love, whereas playing on opposite sides of the net keeps things at a distance, occurs in the story "Doubles" (from the same collection) as well.

This is quite representative of Bradbury's late career relationship-based stories. It's talky, whimsical, and insubstantial. Not great, but not terrible, either.