LORD RUSSELL AND THE PIPSQUEAK (UNDATED)

In the spring of 1954, when the screenplay of Moby Dick was almost finished, a letter arrived at my London publishers. Addressed to my editor, Rupert Hart-Davis, it was from Bertrand Russell, the world-famous philosopher whose History of Western Philosophy I had read some years before, discovering it to be then, and still now, the finest all-around analysis of the great thinkers of modern times. The letter indicated the pleasure that Lord Russell had taken in my recently published novel Fahrenheit 451 and added that if it were convenient, Russell would be happy to welcome me for a visit.

There was enclosed a remarkable photograph of the lord in his study, pipe in hand, Fahrenheit 451 at his elbow.

I was stunned by this message and his photo and in my numb response did not telephone for days. When finally I called through, Lord Russell answered most kindly and heard me out on my problems: I had accomplished Melville two falls out of three but now must hasten south to Sicily to meet my wife and daughters after three months’ absence. Would it be possible, on short notice, to train out that evening for a few hours? Amazingly, it would!

So promptly at 7:00 P.M., I left Victoria Station and was hurled forward much too quickly for my rendezvous with the world’s greatest living mind. On the way I was struck a tremendous blow: What, my God, would I say to Lord Bertrand Russell? Hello? How’s things? What’s new? Good Gravy and Great Grief! My soul melted to caterpillar size and refused the gift of wings. And J.C.! Look! the train was stopping at my destination! My teeth did not chatter, because I had bitten my tongue. Hailing a taxi, I left my brain somewhere on the road, and as the townscapes flashed by and my intellectual collision with the grand mind loomed, my panics increased to the third power. What to ask him? What cross-references to parade in an attempt to jog elbow to elbow through mutual libraries? If he mentioned Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, would I collapse in ignorant ruins? What if he loved Sartre? I didn’t, having tried to scan his Nausea that year, only to wind up with feelings befitting the title.

What if he had known Freud? The closest I had come to Analysis was Edgar Guest.

The panics continued as I taxied a last mile to ring the lord’s bell and rock from foot to foot on his sill.

He himself opened the door and steered me in by my trembling elbow, though he seemed a foot shorter than myself.

Gathering my breath, I exploded with what became inspiration. As he introduced me to his wife, who was knitting quietly in the parlor, I more shouted than spoke:

“Lord Russell,” I said, “I predicted to friends, years ago, that if you ever turned your talent to short fiction, it would be in the fantastic and science-fictional manner of H. G. Wells. How else could a thinker write,” I finished, lost for air, “than in a scientifically philosophical mode?!” I fell silent, having used up all my idiocy for the day.

But Bertrand Russell’s nod and smile saved me.

“Yes, yes, of course,” he laughed. “You were absolutely correct!”

Inspired, I moved swiftly to describe the stories in his two volumes of fiction. Since I was one of the few in the entire United States who had bought his tales, I was now the rare expert and expounded on their qualities.

They were works from the mind of an idea visionary, each idea vividly conceived but moderately executed. His genius was in the essay, grand and minute, not in character portrayal or the delineation of master scenes. Bertrand Russell was, in sum, a bright amateur seeking but rarely finding the dramatic effect, accomplished only in jump-starting brilliant fancies but failing to breathe them into satisfactory lives.

He was much like a holder of a poker-game royal flush, unable to know how to win in the midst of plenty.

I had devoured his stories, then, for his concepts, not his ability. I could not admit this, watching his smile, so I ignored his final effects to focus on his pomegranate seeds. Was I duplicitous? No, simply young and eager to please the master. Whatever my motives, now Lady Russell put aside her philosophical knitting and laid out the ubiquitous tea. I managed to suck the stuff through my teeth with half-hidden distaste, having learned to consume the dreadful brew in the company of Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, and Aldous Huxley.

In any event, having lit Lord Russell’s fuse without confessing his failure to write dramas commensurate with his fancies, we now moved to my peculiar talents.

How was it that I was hired to screenplay Melville? More, how could anyone, possessed of a modicum of insight, render nine hundred pages of tryworks, St. Elmo’s fires, chases, and lowerings into a sardine-can-size script? Was I mad to have attempted this? Or had I driven myself lunatic, later, during its accomplishment? I admitted to both. Lady Russell knitted on and on.

I described the process whereby I had displaced my molecules, my writing genes and chromosomes by the thousands, during half a year. By osmosis old Herman had risen in my blood with wild shouts to vanquish me and enthrone himself at my screenplay’s heart. I told Lord Russell of the metaphors I had re-created, to encircle each other, stolen from far islands in Melville’s novel to be reestablished as first cousins, brothers and sisters, sharing a center stage where I had stuck them to behave. Lord Russell, impressed by this, to my delight said so, which left us with the question, How could I have swallowed an ambiguity to deliver forth a visual sermon as vast as Father Mapple’s?

Naïveté was my answer. I had dared because I hadn’t known better. If I had guessed at the start of my chase that I risked lightning slaughter by the livid fist of God, I would have refused the pursuit.

But, because I was a teenage thirty-three, lured by the symphonic passage of the Whale and seeking words to fit the grand cantatas’ flow, I had pitched a wild harpoon to fasten that whiteness and jumped after. Naïveté, I finished, pure and simple. Mindless naïveté. A fool protected by his foolishness, winding up wise.

At which point Lady Russell paused from her soundless knitting, fixed me with a steady and unrelenting stare, and said, “Let us not be too naïve, shall we?”

And was silent for the rest of my stay.

Blushed with shame, and realizing that in my pretense at modesty I had revealed an overweening ego, I sluiced down another draft of terrible tea and waited for Lord Russell’s rescue, which he promptly deployed. Accepting my naïveté for what it was—a blind mask hiding my young needs—he plied me with more queries about the mysteries of film creation. He nodded approvingly when I revealed that my true genius, if that is what it was, was differentiating a metaphor from a dim-bulb cliché twist when they up and bit me. I was covered with tooth marks from Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Tarzan, H. G. Wells, and Alexander Pope. Cornered, I swiftly scanned my bite-mark wounds to find quick solutions. I had not only drowned in the great poets’ images but had assimilated Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Prince Valiant, and Joe Strong, Boy Magician. I was, unknowingly, my own Illustrated Man, my skin swarmed with pictures from Gustave Doré, Grandville, and Arthur Rackham, all alert and waiting to flow from my retina down my arms to spurt from my fingertips. I was a teeming mass of interchangeable delights, harvested from two dozen arts and kindred sciences. I had devoured circuses to upchuck carnivals. One being Melville’s Shakespearean shadow show and its haiku metaphors.

I had flung myself headlong into the book, I said, in total immersion, now listening to the chart flow of creatures gone ’round the world. I had heard a madman’s shanties and, finally, the tidal churn of Moby’s flukes giving as good as they got from phantom fires, ghost storms, and hurricanes that crucified men against the topsail ropes to bleach their souls.

Give or take a symbol or aside, I laughed.

In the midst of this welter, I played deadman’s drift, a loose-limbed soul sponging in every Brit-filled surge day after day until, waterlogged, I staggered ashore to scribble messages on sand until some few remained as images that named themselves screenplay.

Er, give or take a few hot-air exclamations and senatorial outcries. The whole trick, I ended, lamely, ashamed of my lecture but forging on, was to pretend inattention while sinking for the third time.

Did that make any sense?

Russell, buffeted by my fustian, assured me that it did.

Encouraged by the lord, I raved on.

How different were my methods from the heavy Hollywood industrial attacks by Huston seeking to flense the Great Creature by repeated beatings until the beast was not only dead but buried by fruitless intellects.

The memory was all too recent of Huston pacing back and forth across the Royal Hibernian reception lobby late afternoons struggling to “solve” Melville while I ground my teeth and beat my pate in despair, and tried to force-feed problems to knock forth solutions. I had had to teach John how to leave things alone, walk away once your head was crammed with Spirit Spouts, 3:00 A.M. panics, Spanish gold doubloons, and the rolling of Queequeg’s bones, allowing room for the secret mind to move its pelvis and for the secret lungs to breathe, or else we prolong our labors to stillbirth nonelectric eels.

Huston was not convinced of this, having beaten the hell out of uncooperative screenplays for most of his life. He had long since forgotten that The Maltese Falcon had solved itself, being a novel in screenplay form that could be shot by using Peckinpah’s later advice: “rip the pages from the book and stuff them in the camera!” Bloody of teeth and claw had been Huston’s rapine behavior when film scripts repelled his advances. My life had always been turning my back on problems, wandering off to feed them without their knowing, and letting the problem beg to be solved. Two more different ways of creation had rarely met in a Hollywood used to boxing and wrestling matches and the loveless love affair that so many screenplays had forever been and still were. The major studios and their mechanics knew how to oil robots but circled in wonder around live births. They could nut and bolt tin lizzies but few fast sports cars. Being a writer with more than three hundred short stories under my belt, I knew that swiftness was all. Race the idea up to two hundred miles an hour, add wheels and, last, windshields, doors, and bumpers.

Hollywood producers, and their directors with them, thought you could win screenplay arguments with battering rams. I had long since discovered (change the metaphor!) I must jump off cliffs with a great substantial dream and build my wings on the way down. Passion, not intellect, won the day. Producers and their half-blind director friends believed that by being what they thought was intellectual, they could sum sums and equate equations. I knew that they were hammering up Tin Woodmen that, sing as they might, would always lack hearts.

Huston refused to try any of this, and in the midst of wandering without a compass, Moby stalled in a windless narrows, and John and I were becalmed and silent in late December 1953.

Unable to solve a major scene in the tideless water, John and I asked Peter Viertel, who was working on a similarly browbeaten puzzle called The Man Who Would Be King, to sit with us for three days of fruitless jawboning. Said jawbones, I could not help feeling, on loan from three asses. Finally, after three days of running on intellectual empty, I rebelled. “You guys can stay here and gab!” I cried. “I’m going back to the hotel! At midnight each of us must put a notepad by his pillow. During the night one of us will wake with the intuitive solution to a seemingly unsolvable crisis.”

“Gah!” cried Huston and Viertel. “Don’t laugh!” I shouted. “Don’t doubt! Go do!” To their laughter I stomped away, went to my hotel, put a pad on my bed, poised a pencil, and, sleeping, waited for my hidden well to fill the bucket.

At six the next morning, my phone rang. It was Huston, shouting, it almost seemed, in the next room. Not believing, he had nevertheless placed a pad and pencil on his pillow and had just awakened to a panic of pure revelation!

“Listen!” he shouted. I heard him out and cried, “Yes! You see! You son of a bitch, never doubt me again!”

The son of a bitch, sensing the lesson I had instructed his afterburner to teach him, rarely argued with me from then on. John stopped his endless pacing of the hotel carpet and let me go off to conniption-fit catnaps that solved problems forty times faster than a bad weather of brainstorms ever did.

Having learned something about passion, he never mentioned my calling him a son of a bitch.

All this I said to the lord.

Needless to say, the evening passed. Now and then I sent Lord Russell back to his seedbeds to see where he had found his most favored notions, whilst drinking yet another pot of heavily milked and sugared tea, and quite suddenly it was time for taxis and trains and to hand Lord Russell one of his essay books, hoping he would write a rare motto on the flyleaf. In a small, meticulous hand, he simply inscribed, “To Ray Bradbury, Russell, April 11, 1954.”

At the door I said good night to the knitting lady, who gave me her “remember, no more naïveté” stare and tended to her yarns as the taxi arrived and Lord Russell, treating me ever more like the tin-headed but fairly nice chap that I had always hoped I was, fetched me down the front steps and waved me off into the night.

On the train rushing back to London, I cursed everything I had dared to say, much as on those nights when, taking some young woman home from a cheap film, I had hesitated at her door and backed off without so much as pressing her hand, crushing her bosom, or kissing her nose, then cursing, damning my gutless will, walking home, alone, always alone, wordless and miserable.

Lord Russell and I never met again. His signature, stark and uncomplimentary, still resides in my library along with his two books of scientific and fantastic tales, which have never been reprinted or remembered. His solemn smile crosses the years, along with the mute regard of Lady Russell admonishing my behavior.

And so we behave from one age to another, from thirty to forty, forty to fifty, in successions like the chambered nautilus sealing a cell to move on to yet another, leaving one arrogance but to encompass its twin, blind to the new fatness about the ears until time allows a glance back to the abandoned cell to see an ego parboiled, babbling in a semblance of intelligence while friends roll their eyeballs and summon drinks.

“Let us not be too naïve, shall we!”

I have tried to behave. But even in writing this, suppressing my naïveté is one more act of pride to which Lady Russell is my ghost confessor.