The Novel That Launched a Thousand Childhoods: Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (and what it means to grow up)
Note: all passages from the Bantam/Doubleday edition of the book (1976)
In his loosely autobiographical novel, Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury re-imagined the myth of American childhood as a haunted fairy tale that exists at the intersection of Norman Rockwell and EC Comics. The pull of his fictional landscape has become so influential to generations of readers that it is difficult to imagine how we lived — or dreamed — without it. For behind every story of preteen kids stumbling upon a mutilated body in the woods (Stand By Me) or secretly raising an extra-terrestrial while hiding from zealous FBI agents (E.T.), are the wild, affectionate tales that comprise this miraculous ode to childhood. While the book draws on Bradbury’s own experiences growing up in Waukegan, Illinois, the book’s true provenance is in the imagination of adolescence, where monsters lurk at the edge of town and a new pair of tennis shoes can make you fly like a superhero.
Though not ostensibly a work of horror or science-fiction (the two genres which Bradbury mined most profitably in his early career), it draws on both, creating a nostalgic, if somewhat Gothic depiction of golden age Americana. The story is set in Bradbury’s own childhood of 1928, yet there are few period details beyond long-lost products and advertisements; otherwise, it could take place at any point in the 20th century in any small town from Maine to California. The novel unfolds in a collection of vignettes, many of them stand-alone stories that were published in various magazines from 1947 onwards. Each story is connected by the loose perspective of Douglas Spaulding, a twelve-year old boy and resident of Green Town, and his brother Tom, with whom he shares his observations and adventures.
Several stories venture beyond his immediate perspective, looking into the lives of his neighbors, young and old, as they confront the presence of death in the garden (as Green Town is Douglas’ own Garden of Eden). In general, however, Bradbury strikes a bittersweet and nostalgic tone, and even in the most horror adjacent stories, there is no danger of encountering the undead of ‘Salem’s Lot (though Stephen King would buy real estate in Green Town soon enough). This is all in keeping with the Douglas’ perspective, since each story is either witnessed by him or recorded second-hand in his journal, so he can ‘bottle up’ the summer of 1928 like a batch of dandelion wine.
Not surprisingly, some critics have found his work a bit too precious and out of touch with the more realistic bent of American fiction of the mid-to-late 20th century. In particular, they find his fictional depiction of Waukegan (Green Town) problematic, as he ignores the rust belt mentality of a town littered with rails and dockyards. Bradbury responds to this criticism in his essay, “Just This Side of Byzantium” (1974), writing,
I had noticed them and, gentle 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…[they] happily count and cry the names of the various cars as they pass from far places” (ix-x).
As adults, we can never look back at childhood with unstained eyes. We see and remember as adults, even while longing for the simplicity and innocence of youth. But what we see is not the world as it is; it is the world as we make it, and it is made useful to us. A child is a creature of Nature, seeing everything as a potential playground, trees and box cars alike. Bradbury’s genius is to capture the moment when these visions begin to fade, and a young boy is forced to see himself as apart from the world, rather than one of its innumerable roots and branches.
We first see this when Douglas is on a hike with his father and brother in the opening pages. Suddenly, like the Wanderer in a Sea of Fog (see Friedrich’s painting), he realizes that “everything, absolutely everything, was there. The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him. And he knew what it was that had leaped upon him to stay and would not run away now. I’m alive, he thought” (9). For the first time in his life, Douglas stares at the world staring back at him, having become an object, apart, alive.
That word, “alive,” is the beginning of his adult life, where he suddenly has a past and a future, and every moment is a potential memory that will return to haunt him. He can never again just be, or exist without realizing that he is being watched by that gigantic eye, at once Nature and his own nature. Douglas wonders if he always knew he was alive, or if he just forgot, unconsciously echoing Wordsworth’s Ode, “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” Though born in the garden of Green Town, his fate is to ultimately leave it behind, where memory will bar the gates against a future return.
Bradbury also shares with Wordsworth a love of metaphor which often becomes as prominent (or more so) than characterization in Dandelion Wine. As Willis E. McNelly noted in an early discussion of the book, ““Metaphor” is an important word to Bradbury. He uses it generically to describe a method of comprehending one reality and then expressing that same reality so that the reader will see it with the same intensity as the writer” (4). We see this in the “giant iris” passage above, as well as his description of Green Town itself as “a large ship filled with constantly moving survivors, bailing out the grass, chipping away the rust” (17).
Rather than writing the book from the “reality” of an adult (and thus seeing the rusted train tracks, etc.), he uses metaphor to experience it as a child might have felt it, full of adventure and wonder. For Douglas, even a trip across town at night is fraught with danger, as the ravine and the edge of town becomes a Cthulu-like entity, “a great moving hum, a bumbling and murmuring of creature, insect, or plant life…of secret vapors and ancient, washed shales and quicksands” (159).
Of course, children lack the vocabulary to express the world so poetically, which is where the adult Bradbury steps in. However, instead of explaining everything through his ‘adult’ vision, he merely translates the experience of childhood reality into words that evoke a memory of what everyone, in every small town or city, has experienced in a similar garden of childhood. When Douglass tries to explain to his father why he needs a new pair of sneakers, the narrator makes his longing palpable:
It was because [new sneakers] felt the way it feels every summer when you take off your shoes for the first time and run in the grass…The tennis shoes felt like it always feels the first time every year wading in the slow waters of the creek and seeing your feet below, half an inch further downstream, with refraction, than the real part of you above water. (20)
In the moment, of course, all Douglas can think to say is “Dad, it’s hard to explain” (20). Yet the metaphors ring true for all of us, since we instinctively remember that last year’s shoes “were dead inside” (20). The magic is lost, the wonder dispelled, and only a new pair of sneakers can evoke the feeling of being young again. After all, growing old is accepting routine and disappointment, as well as seeing the shoes for what they are, and how much they cost.
Not coincidentally, the book also begins with Douglas deciding to keep a journal where he can record the events of the summer methodically, allowing him to slip them on, over and over, like a new pair of shoes. If a child simply lives and feels, the adult writes and remembers. It is this very act of writing that helps Douglas appreciate the beauty and fragility of the world around him, while also taking him further and further away from its joys. Indeed, the miraculous discovery of being alive goes hand in hand with the terror of approaching death. While watching a Western at a local theater, with dozens of his peers cheering on the downfall of this and that villain, Douglas can only see men who will “never walk, run, sit, laugh, cry, [and] won’t do anything, ever” (189).
And despite what movies will have us believe, villains die just as readily as heroes, or even the day-to-day residents of Green Town. Douglas suddenly sees this reality in the movie screen, and says, “Me! No, they can’t kill me! Yes, said a voice, yes, any time they want to they can, no matter how you kick or scream, they just put a big hand over you and you’re still” (189). Does this voice belong to the same “giant iris” which marked him out for life? Or is the voice of Douglas himself, speaking from the future to his childhood past, much closer to death now, waiting for the inevitable hand? Either way, the book was born with the first entry of Douglas’ journal, which kills to create, since every memory preserved on the page is no longer alive on earth.
A variation on this theme appears in one of the middle chapters, when the old widow, Mrs. Bentley, entertains three children (including Douglas’ brother, Tom) on her front porch. She accidentally lets slip that her first name is Helen, which draws Tom’s astonished reply, “I didn’t know old ladies had first names” (69). As she explains to them that she not only has a name, but a childhood, the children grow more and more skeptical. After all, old people were never young, never children, like them; people are always the same age, and no one ever changes (and only old people die!). Mrs. Bentley is horrified to see herself as they see her, as someone frozen in old age, without the youth and beauty she remembers. As she reflects, “I don’t mind being old — not really — but I do resent having my childhood taken away from me” (71). Like so many adults, she still sees through the eyes of her youth, having never glimpsed the slow passage of time in the mirror.
Not surprisingly, Mrs. Bentley, like Douglas, has methodically hoarded all the raw material of her youth, from photographs, theater tickets, clothing, and toys. She decides to bring these out in endless boxes to prove she was once a provincial Helen of Troy. But the children laugh this off, assuming she has merely borrowed them from another child. They will only believe her if she can show them someone who saw her as a child, such as her parents, or one of her neighbors. Of course, at her age, the list of witnesses has grown pitifully thin, all the more so as she grew up in another town, in another time. The children then steal her photos and toys, since they were never hers to begin with, leaving Mrs. Bentley alone and abandoned on the porch.
In real life, Mrs. Bentley would pursue these children to their homes and scold their parents for raising such insolent offspring, threatening to press charges with the local police. Bradbury, however, is more interested in the metaphor: every Mrs. Bentley is the world is ultimately robbed of her childhood treasures, left with the startling realization that they were merely borrowed from other children long ago. And so she invites the children back to her home to distribute the rest of her spoils. Still wary of her, they quiz Mrs. Bentley about her age and past and she finally admits the truth: that no, she was never young, her name was never Helen, and that yes, she has always lived in the house. The children are delighted by this information, and in a final confirmation, they ask her, “And [you] never were pretty?” to which she responds, “Never” (77).
This seems like a cruel lie to tell children, who swallow it down eagerly, since it confirms what they have always believed about themselves: that they will frolic on the face of the Grecian Urn forever, in the service of youth and beauty (to paraphrase Keats’ Ode). Yet Mrs. Bentley says it not to be cruel, but because the children have yet to see the true face of Nature within themselves. They are still roots and branches, still in embryo, without the ability to record their own lives and memories.
We see this moment over and over in the stories: Clara Goodwater (the neighborhood ‘witch’) assures her rival, Elmira, that she will stop casting spells if only she will recover from her injury; Lavinia convinces her friend Francine to go to the movies so she can forget seeing a dead body; and Lena Auffman tells her husband, inventor of the Happiness Machine, that such devices are worthless because they make you dream of unattainable bliss. Isn’t it better to assume life begins and ends in Green Town, a town devoid of death where even the ghouls and witches attend the local Elks Lodge?
In short, each story ends at a crossroads, and each resident of Green Town is asked to make a choice between life and death. The path toward knowledge and growth leads inevitably to death, just as the path towards ignorance and deceit promises another glorious summer in the best of all possible worlds. Yet the more we try to deny that a world (for the better or worse) exists outside of Green Town, the less we can create a meaningful life of our own. Life is precious not because it goes on forever, but because we choose what stories to tell about it, shaping otherwise random events into history and tradition.
Seen in this light, Bradbury’s readers can either be fauns on the Grecian Urn or the artists behind the antique. The characters he celebrates in these stories are always among the artists, men and women such as Douglas, Mrs. Bentley, Leo Auffman, Clara Goodwater, among others. It is a prescient message for a young nation like America, who could all-too-easily cocoon itself in a mythology of youth and beauty at the expense of a fruitful middle age. For summer — even the summer of 1928 — has to end at some point, and we need more than tennis shoes to wade through the snows of an Illinois winter.
