Farewell Summer ~ Ray Bradbury - Marimarister

Afterword: The Importance of Being Startled
The way I write my novels can best be described as imagining that I‘m going into the
kitchen to fry a couple of eggs and then find myself cooking up a banquet. Starting with very
simple things, they then word-associate themselves with further things until I‘m up and running
and eager to find out the next surprise, the next hour, the next day or the next week.
Farewell Summer began roughly fifty-five years ago when I was very young and had no
knowledge of novels and no hope of creating a novel that was sensible. I had to wait for years for
material to accumulate and take me, unaware, so that as I sat at my typewriter quite suddenly
there would be bursts of surprise, resulting in short stories or longer narratives that I then
connected together.
The main action of the novel takes place in a ravine that cut across my life. I lived on a
short street in Waukegan, Illinois, and the ravine was immediately east of my home and ran on
for several miles in two directions and then circled around to the north and to the south, and
finally to the west. So, in effect, I lived on an island where I could, at any time, plunge into the
ravine and have adventures.
There I imagined myself in Africa or on the planet Mars. That being so, and my going
through the ravine every day on my way to school, and skating and sledding there in winter, this
ravine remained central to my life and so it was natural that it would become the center of this
novel, with all of my friends on both sides of the ravine and the old people who were curious
time-pieces in my life.
I‘ve always been fascinated by elderly people. They came and went in my life and I
followed them and questioned them and learned from them, and that is primarily true in this
novel because it is a novel about children and old people who are peculiar Time Machines.
Many of the greatest friendships in my lifetime have been with men or women who were
in their eighties or nineties and I welcomed the chance to ask them questions and then to sit, very
quietly, saying nothing and learning from their responses.
In a way, Farewell Summer is a novel about learning by encountering old people and
daring to ask them certain questions and then sitting back and listening to their answers. The
questions posed by Doug, and the answers given by Mr. Quartermain, provide the organization
of the action of the chapters and the final resolution of the book.
The bottom line here is that I am not the one in control. I do not try to steer my
characters; I let them live their lives and speak their truths as quickly as possible. I listen, and
write them down.
Farewell Summer is actually an extension of my book Dandelion Wine, which I
completed fifty-five years ago. When I delivered it to my publishers they said, ―My God, this is
much too long. Why don‘t we publish the first 90,000 words as a novel and keep the second part
for some future year when you feel it is ready to be published.‖ At the time, I called the full,