BRADBURY, Ray by Zen in the Art of Writing (pdf)

Author:Zen in the Art of Writing (pdf) [Writing, Zen in the Art of]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

the trees to seed the blood.

I was amused and somewhat astonished at a critic a few years

back who wrote an article analyzing Dandelion Wine plus the

more realistic works of Sinclair Lewis, wondering how I could

have been born and raised in Waukegan, which I renamed Green

Town for my novel, and not noticed how ugly the harbor was and

how depressing the coal docks and railyards down below the

town.

But, of course, I had noticed them and, genetic enchanter that

I was, was fascinated by their beauty. Trains and boxcars and

the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a

concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.

Counting boxcars is a prime activity of boys. Their elders fret and

fume and jeer at the train that holds them up, but boys happily

count and cry the names of the cars as they pass from far places.

And again, that supposedly ugly railyard was where carnivals

and circuses arrived with elephants who washed the brick pave-

ments with mighty steaming acid waters at five in the dark

morning.

As for the coal from the docks, I went down in my basement

8 2

J U S T T H I S S I D E O F B Y Z A N T I U M : D A N D E L I O N W I N E

every autumn to await the arrival of the truck and its metal chute,

which clanged down and released a ton of beauteous meteors that

fell out of far space into my cellar and threatened to bury me

beneath dark treasures.

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only

mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure

has always been about.

Perhaps a new poem of mine will explain more than this

introduction about the germination of all the summers of my life

into one book.

Here's the start of the poem:

Byzantium, I come not from,

But from another time and place

Whose race was simple, tried and true;

As boy

I dropped me forth in Illinois.

A name with neither love nor grace

Was Waukegan, there I came from

And not, good friends, Byzantium.

The poem continues, describing my lifelong relationship to my

birthplace:

And yet in looking back I see

From topmost part of farthest tree

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Z E N I N T H E A R T O F W R I T I N G

A land as bright, beloved and

blue

As any Yeats found to be true.

Waukegan, visited by me often since, is neither homelier nor

more beautiful than any other small midwestern town. Much of

it is green. The trees do touch in the middle of streets. The street in front of my old home is still paved with red bricks. In what

way then was the town special? Why, I was born there. It was my

life. I had to write of it as I saw fit:

So we grew up with mythic dead

To spoon upon midwestern bread

And spread old gods' bright marmalade

To slake in peanut-butter shade,

Pretending there beneath our sky

That it was Aphrodite's thigh . . .

While by the porch-rail calm and bold

His words pure

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