Ah, Ray Bradbury. Has there ever been a writer so capacious? You don’t finish Bradbury, you live within him. I’ve been reading him for decades, and I still come across stories I’ve never read before, or perhaps had forgotten reading. Wikipedia reckons he wrote 600 short stories, and 11 novels, some of which were ‘fix-up’ novels, stringing together short stories into a narrative whole. The stories run the gamut from those collected in The Martian Chronicles, as fine a set of colonial parables as I know, to those in From the Dust Returned, based on a family of ghouls and ghosts, who live in Illinois, and are called the Elliotts.
The story I’ve picked is ‘The Day It Rained Forever’, which gave its name to a collection of stories published by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1959. It tells the tale of three old men living in a hotel in an America desert, waiting for the rain that always comes on January 29th. But this year, the rain doesn’t come – something else does, driving a car and carrying a harp. It’s classic Bradbury – warm-hearted, human, off-to-the-left-of-things, and thrumming with mystery. It’s also full of quite beautiful lines and images, many of which would read like poems if they were to be laid out in the right way: “The rain fell on the rooftop and fell on hissing sand, it fell on rustling car and empty stable and dead cactus in the yard.” A sentence made all the more remarkable by the fact that he isn’t actually talking about rain.
The collection is dedicated to Rupert Hart-Davis himself. In a nice piece of symmetry Hart-Davis also published the collected tales of Henry James.
First published in Harper’s, July 1957, and collected in The Day It Rained Forever, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959; also in The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Knopf, 1980; Everyman Library, 2010
A Personal Anthology 