Damning with fulsome praise
In a profile of Ray Bradbury this month in Verdugo Monthly we find this sentence:
Just turned a youthful 87 years, Bradbury continues to pour on the creative steam, most recently publishing a pair of new novellas and receiving the Lifetime Literary Achievement Pulitzer Prize.
The photo, you’ll note, shows Bradbury wheelchair-bound and with a drooped-to-closing left eyelid, looking every bit of 87. If this is “youthful,” then middle age is preschool.
Could the writer have meant youthful in mind or spirit rather than in body? Perhaps, but she doesn’t say that. And given several encounters myself with Mr. Bradbury during the last five years, I don’t think he has aged in a way that one could say has left him young for his age.
I’m glad he’s still with us, and I wish him continued health. But Bradbury is a writer, and for writing to be worth anything, then individual words have to retain their core meaning. And “youthful” he isn’t.
November 9th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Ray Bradbury was one of the first ‘adult’ authors I read as a kid, thanks to a used copy of “The October Country” purchased for me by my father. The fantastic cover and interior illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini were largely what caught my attention. Even after the years I had spent visually devouring the work of comic books artists like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Carmine Infantino, Will Eisner and Jack Cole, these pen and inks were heady stuff. In fact, I just pulled my copy of “Ray Bradbury, An Illustrated Life” off the shelf and there, on page 83, are a trio of stark haunting illos from that story collection. They’re still as strikingly powerful as they were all those decades ago. Once I owned the book the fiction cast its mesmerizing spell over me. In the years since I have never tired of reading the author’s works. I too wish Ray Bradbury all the best.