Dandelion Wine
Ray Bradbury
For Walter I. Bradbury
neither uncle nor cousin
but most decidedly
editor and friend.
JUST THIS SIDE OFBYZANTIUM
an introduction
This book like most of my books and stories, was a surprise. I began to learn the nature of such
surprises, thank God, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like every beginner, I
thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of
course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.
It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association
process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any
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word or series of words that happened along in my head.
I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of characters to
weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my
amazement, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely. I soon
found that I would have to work this way for the rest of my life.
First I rummaged my mind for words that could describe my personal nightmares, fears of
night and time from my childhood, and shaped stories from these.
Then I took a long look at the green apple trees and the old house I was born in and the house
next door where lived my grandparents, and all the lawns of the summers I grew up in, and I
began to try words for all that.
What you have here in this book then is a gathering of dandelions from all those years. The
wine metaphor which appears again and again in these pages is wonderfully apt. I was gathering
images all of my life, storing them away, and forgetting them. Somehow I had to send myself
back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out and see what they had to offer.
So from the age of twenty-four to thirty-six hardly a day passed when I didn't stroll myself
across a recollection of my grandparents' northernIllinois grass, hoping to come across some old
half-burnt firecracker, a rusted toy, or a fragment of letter written to myself in some young year
hoping to contact the older person I became to remind him of his past, his life, his people, his
joys, and his drenching sorrows.
It became a game that I took to with immense gusto: to see how much I could remember about
dandelions themselves, or picking wild grapes with my father and brother, rediscovering the
mosquito-breeding ground rain barrel by the side bay window, or searching out the smell of the
goldfuzzed bees that hung around our back porch grape arbor. Bees do have a smell, you know,
and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
And then I wanted to call back what the ravine was like, especially on those nights when
walking home late across town, after seeing Lon Chaney's delicious fright The Phantom of the
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Opera, my brother Skip would run ahead and hide under the ravine-creek bridge like the Lonely
One and leap out and grab me, shrieking, so I ran, fell, and ran again, gibbering all the way
home. That was great stuff.
Along the way I came upon and collided, through word-association, with old and true
friendships. I borrowed my friend John Huff from my childhood inArizona and shipped him
East toGreenTown so that I could say good-bye to him properly.
Along the way, I sat me down to breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with the long dead and much
loved. For I was a boy who did indeed love his parents and grandparents and his brother, even
when that brother "ditched" him.
Along the way, I found myself in the basement working the wine-press for my father, or on the
front porchIndependence night helping my Uncle Bion load and fire his homemade brass
cannon.
Thus I fell into surprise. No one told me to surprise myself, I might add. I came on the old and
best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out
of bushes like quail before gunshot. I blundered into creativity as blindly as any child learning to
walk and see. I learned to let my senses and my Past tell me all that was somehow true.
So, I turned myself into a boy running to bring a dipper of clear rainwater out of that barrel by
the side of the house. And, of course, the more water you dip out the more flows in. The flow has
never ceased. Once I learned to keep going back and back again to those times, I had plenty of
memories and sense impressions to play with, not work with, no, play with. Dandelion Wine is
nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of
other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under 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
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how I could have been born and raised inWaukegan , which I renamedGreenTown 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 selfconscious 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 pavements with mighty steaming acid waters at five in the dark
morning.
As for the coal from the docks, I went down in my basement 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 inIllinois .
A name with neither love nor grace
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WasWaukegan , 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
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 wisdom, stare pure gold
My grandfather, a myth indeed,
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